- When the Soviet Union collapsed a decade ago, neoconservatives
proclaimed "the end of history," by which they meant the emergence
of an ecumenical world organized by liberal democracy.
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- Noting China's ambitions and the re-emergence of Islam,
skeptics regard the neoconservative thesis as little more than an expression
of hope. China and Islam aside, powerful developments within the West itself
are leading away from liberal democracy.
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- These developments are both intellectual and political.
For example, multiculturalism and the emergence of group rights based on
victim status are eroding equality in law, freedom of conscience and free
speech. As these are the historic achievements of liberal democracy, how
can the future belong to a system that is undergoing meltdown at its core?
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- Both the U.S. and Europe now have crimes of opinion,
a defining feature of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984. Americans and Europeans
are subject to arrest and imprisonment for words judged offensive by the
therapeutic state. This frightening departure from Western tradition is
justified in the name of curtailing hate and advancing human rights.
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- While the Western identity is melting down intellectually,
it is being dissolved politically. The historic identities of European
nationalities are being replaced by an abstraction. Briton, Frenchman,
German, Italian, Swede, Czech, Greek, Austrian, Dane, Spaniard, and Dutchman
are to become "European" citizens of a new bureaucratic state
created by edicts and without a history.
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- These are not promising developments for liberal democracy.
Differences of opinion within homogeneous nation states have often challenged
consensual government, with bitter divisions erupting in national strikes
and political violence. Imagine these differences multiplied by aggregating
many nationalities into one state.
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- The politics of the European Union will have to deal
not only with the differences of opinion within the separate nationalities
but also with the differences between the different nationalities that
comprise the new superstate. Will not consent be more difficult to obtain,
thus enhancing the scope for coercion? Will liberal democracy be the model,
or will the model be bureaucratic coercion ruling through the same unaccountable
edicts that are being used to create the European Union?
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- Large scale immigration of people from different cultures
is turning the United States as well into a multi-nationalities state.
The political emergence of disparate and hyphenated identities reduces
the range of issues that can be resolved by persuasion and consent. Coercive
regulations already exist to enforce victim-group rights and to regulate
speech.
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- Other developments are eating away at the foundations
of liberal democracy. Having lost its national identity to hyphenated populations,
the U.S. can only respond to terrorism with constitutionally suspect legislation,
which permits officials to set aside civil liberties, and by empowering
a Department of Homeland Security to keep a dossier on every citizen. Only
illegal immigrants will have privacy.
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- Multicultural populations do not possess the comity among
citizens that flows from a national identity. Having discarded national
identities, the U.S. and the European Union are multicultural empires.
Empires have poor records of self-government and tend to rely on coercion.
Liberal democracy is a creation of the nation state and is unlikely to
persist in the emerging multi-cultural empires.
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- It was America's unique achievement to create a national
identity out of European ethnicities. When immigration worked for America,
all the incentives were for an immigrant to make himself into an American.
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- Today the incentives are for immigrants to retain the
privileges of preferred minorityhood. A few states go so far as to grant
special advantages, such as instate tuition, to illegal immigrants. This
is not a policy that promotes comity. What is the meaning of citizenship
when the rewards to the illegal immigrant trump the penalties of his illegal
presence and give him financial advantages over citizens?
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- Western governments are undermining themselves by creating
populations of disparate peoples with disparate rights. The resulting antagonisms
are inconsistent with liberal democracy. The clash of civilizations is
upon us from within our own borders. If China and Islam only bide their
time, the world is theirs. It is not the end of history; it is the end
of the West.
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- Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M. Stratton
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are
Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter
Brimelow's Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic
of prosecutorial misconduct.
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- http://www.vdare.com/
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