Jonah Goldberg: Liberty, 21st Century–Style
[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute]
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV-news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing.
That skepticism was hard-earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naïvely optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naïvely optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush’s freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip....
The notion that we all crave personal liberty is a fairly new one, historically. Most of the calls for freedom over the centuries have been in the context of national, not personal, liberation. The 20th century began with an atrocious war allegedly fought over something called “self-determination,” but the “self” in question wasn’t the id, ego, or super ego, or the individual soul. The “self” in “self-determination” referred to the captive nations of Europe.
Freedom fighters have generally battled for the collective right to fly a national flag, not the individual right to burn one. Conservatives loved the movie Braveheart, with all of its beautiful language about freedom, but it’s worth remembering that the freedom the Scots fought for was the freedom to replace the authoritarian traditionalism of the English with the authoritarian traditionalism of the Scots.
The great change, as Francis Fukuyama chronicled in his book The End of History and the Last Man, has been the evolution of individual self-determination. Fukuyama borrows a term, thumos, from the ancient Greeks to explain the transformation. Thumos, or “spiritedness,” encompasses the instinct for justice, respect, and integrity....
Read entire article at National Review
Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV-news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing.
That skepticism was hard-earned. The last decade provided painful lessons for everyone, on both sides of the ideological aisle. Liberals, who were once naïvely optimistic about democracy promotion, turned dour when President Bush became naïvely optimistic about it. And then supporters of Bush’s freedom agenda learned a tough lesson from, among other things, the disastrous-but-democratic elections that put a terrorist junta in charge of the Gaza Strip....
The notion that we all crave personal liberty is a fairly new one, historically. Most of the calls for freedom over the centuries have been in the context of national, not personal, liberation. The 20th century began with an atrocious war allegedly fought over something called “self-determination,” but the “self” in question wasn’t the id, ego, or super ego, or the individual soul. The “self” in “self-determination” referred to the captive nations of Europe.
Freedom fighters have generally battled for the collective right to fly a national flag, not the individual right to burn one. Conservatives loved the movie Braveheart, with all of its beautiful language about freedom, but it’s worth remembering that the freedom the Scots fought for was the freedom to replace the authoritarian traditionalism of the English with the authoritarian traditionalism of the Scots.
The great change, as Francis Fukuyama chronicled in his book The End of History and the Last Man, has been the evolution of individual self-determination. Fukuyama borrows a term, thumos, from the ancient Greeks to explain the transformation. Thumos, or “spiritedness,” encompasses the instinct for justice, respect, and integrity....