A great past, but is it prologue?
From Walter Russell Mead, the author of God and Gold over at Powerline:
The main trend in world history has been the development and continuing growth of a global system of power, finance, culture, ideology and trade based first on the power of Britain and then on that of the United States. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain has only been defeated in one major great power war – the war of the American Revolution. To put that another way, since the seventeenth century, either Britain or the United States or both together have been on the winning side in every great power war in which they have participated.
God and Gold is a book about this Anglo-American world system. Why have the British and the Americans established the most powerful and influential international power system in the history of the world? What does history teach us about the dangers we now face from the conflicts in the Middle East and from other challenges of the 21st century such as the rise of Asia? Are the best days of Anglo-American power already behind us, or do we still have an important role to play in world history?
In God and Gold I argue that capitalist dynamism and the peculiarly individualistic and forward looking religious culture of the Anglo-American are the foundation of this system. The British and the Americans have liked capitalism more than other people, and they have had less trouble bridging the gap between capitalist change and religious tradition than other societies have done.
These characteristics make us strong, but they do not always make us loved. Catholic Spain, Jacobin France, Wilhelmine Germany, the Nazis, the communists, and Osama bin Laden all denounced the English-speaking peoples as cruel, greedy, hypocritical and vulgar. The Inquisition placed The Wealth of Nations on the Index of Forbidden Books. Napoleon denounced the British as a “nation of shopkeepers.” For over a century, hatred of capitalism, hatred of Jews and hatred of the Anglo-American world has been a powerful ideological force. Since the Boer War, significant elements in European opinion have seen the Anglo-Saxon powers as allied with Jewish plutocrats in a plot to control the world. Churchill and Roosevelt were denounced as puppets of the Jews; today figures like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez speak for a powerful tradition of hatred and suspicion of the Anglo-American world and its Jewish allies.
More than 300 years ago, Oliver Cromwell summoned the English to a war against Catholic Spain using arguments we still hear today. Who are our enemies, Cromwell asked in 1656. His answer: the league of evil men throughout the earth. And why do they hate us? Because the evil that is in them sees and hates the good that we do here in England. or in Cromwell’s own words, “through that enmity that is in him against all that is of God, that is in you…” What are we fighting for? The future of liberty all over the world. Why will we triumph? Because God is on our side.
These are essentially the arguments of Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘evil empire’ speech; they are the arguments that Tony Blair and George W. Bush made after 9/11. They are the arguments Churchill and Roosevelt made in World War II, the arguments Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson made in World War I, the arguments that British ministers and intellectuals made during the wars against Napoleon, the Jacobins, and against Louis XIV.
A world as rich, grand and complicated as the modern world has never existed before. So far America has dealt reasonably well with the cultural contradictions of modernity. But things continue to evolve, and not always to the good. A couple of generations ago every American knew farmers or soldiers; now few do. Some of the old verities currently seem obsolete, as Mead’s statement illustrates, and conditions in America have changed significantly in the last several generations. We agree with Mr. Mead about the greatness of the past, but will it be prologue for future generations of Americans?