Last evening the outgoing American president declared the United States an "idea."
Is the United States merely an idea?
Both left and right divides of the political spectrum despite their exterior antagonisms believe it is an idea.
This belief fevers them.
The United States is the "shining city on the hill." It is the "indispensable nation."
Its central purpose is to dispense democracy wholesale and globally.
As we have written before:
Ideologues are dizzied, wobbled, staggered by a higher American vision. Their eyes roll perpetually heavenward.
To these fellows, America must always be up to something big in this world.
She must be forever charging up San Juan Hill, going over the top, storming Omaha beach, bearing any burden, paying any price...
She must be beating the Russians to the moon, beating the world at basketball, beating democracy into someone's head.
She must be the "indispensable nation."
If not indispensable... then dispensable.
If dispensable, then unworthy.
In the ideologue's telling the United States is defined not by its people, its customs, its traditions but its ideas.
The rock of their claims is Tommy Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.
They will tell you the revolutionaries were out to create the world anew.
Yet were they?
As we have also argued previously:
The American revolutionists were largely out to reclaim the ancient rights of Englishmen. It was these rights that George III was chewing into and molesting... as the American colonists saw it.
The American revolutionists were not out for revolution but a sort of reset, as a man resets an erring grandfather clock, or a wayward thermostat.
They did not seek change, that is but to stay largely the same.
Enlightenment statesman Edmund Burke labeled England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 "a revolution not made but prevented."
The same may be said the same has been said of the American Revolution.
It was in many respects a revolution not made but a revolution prevented.
The American revolutionists pursued reform, it is true. Yet reform has no existence without preexisting form.
The form is first. It is there in its three dimensions. It has bulk. It enjoys substance.
Reform chisels it, sands it, paints it, renews it.
Yet reform does not wreck it. It is true to the underlying form.
The Americans had their preexisting form: their British cultural and political heritage.
They clung to the Magna Carta and the ancient rights of Englishmen. They modified, updated and molded the existing form into a new American shape.
That is, they kept the old and good. They cut away the old and diseased.
That is, they reformed. They did not revolt.
In contrast to the under-ideological American Revolution stands the hyper-ideological French Revolution...
The French revolutionists did not reform. They proceeded with axes, hacksaws, sledgehammers, wrecking balls...
They razed all prior social, cultural, religious and political structures. All came down, all bridges to the past with them.
Little form remained to reform.
They deformed society... rather than reforming society.
Churches were reconfigured as "temples of reason."
All traces of religion and the Church were cleared out, all holy days stricken out. Libertarian writer, Mr. Lew Rockwell:
Streets named after saints were given new names, and statues of saints were actually guillotined... The calendar itself, rich with religious feasts, was replaced by a more "rational" calendar with 30 days per month, divided into three ten-day weeks, thereby doing away with Sunday.
The remaining five days of the year were devoted to secular observances: celebrations of labor, opinion, genius, virtue, and rewards... People were sentenced to death for owning a Rosary, giving shelter to a priest, or indeed refusing to abjure the priesthood.
These are the lunacies of ideology amok.
And a mighty nation consecrated to ideas is a fearful and frightful thing.
In 2001 the United States crusaded to fan democracy across the Middle East's autocratic tyrannies.
Trillions and trillions of dollars and multiple thousands of lives later... these autocratic tyrannies remain autocratic tyrannies.
They are less democratic than before the crusading commenced.
Meantime the United States has ladled out nearly $200 billion to "defend democracy" in Ukraine.
It has also depleted its own arsenals in defense of this "democracy" that has suspended democratic elections.
If the United States is not careful it may ultimately find itself exchanging nuclear fires with the snarling Russian bear.
The United States is an ocean and then some from the bleak Ukrainian steppes.
Who presides over these grassy wastes should not concern it. It is no concern to a Peruvian or a Moroccan or an Argentine for example.
Yet it is the concern of the United States. That is because the United States is in service to abstractions and ideas.
The cynic will retort that it does not concern ideas but power. Russia is a rival power and the United States is simply out to hobble it.
There is justice here. Yet you cannot look past ideology. Too many people believe in it.
Let us strip the thing to its essentials: An ideological nation is a dangerous nation.
It is too often out for a fight.
The late Joseph Sobran:
The nationalist, who identifies America with abstractions like freedom and democracy, may think it's precisely America's mission to spread those abstractions around the world to impose them by force, if necessary. In his mind, those abstractions are universal ideals... the world must be made "safe for democracy" by "a war to end all wars"... Any country that refuses to Americanize is "anti-American" or a "rogue nation." For the nationalist, war is a welcome opportunity to change the world.
We are against this fellow.
We are against world improvers, sob mongers, tear-squeezers, meddlers... and humanitarians with guillotines.
They are forever scratching what the great individualist Albert Jay Nock labeled the "monstrous itch for changing people."
We would leave people be, in peace... taking them as we find them.
The only action a man can take to improve the world Nock argued is to present it with one improved unit.
Thus the world can improve but only one improved unit at a time...
The Daily Reckoning