In the December 1 issue of Commonweal (a better magazine than I expected), Andrew Bacevich, writing about the sense many Americans (past and present) have had of America’s global mission to promote peace, prosperity and political liberty, makes the following point:
The hard-headed lawyers, merchants, farmers, and slaveholding plantation owners gathered in Philadelphia [in the summer of 1776] did not set out to create a church. They founded a republic. Their purpose was not to save mankind. It was to guarantee for people like themselves “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The neoconservative faith in America as liberator, also embraced by progressive internationalists (Democrats mostly) and muscular nationalists (Republicans mostly), is just one-more pre-millenialist religion. It is built on the idea that human beings can (by necessity using the state and state power) remake human society and recast individual human beings to create the perfect world. A world at eternal economic, political and social equilibrium.
That world is impossible, but this dream of a perfect world in which men can, through their own efforts, save themselves (with the help of coercive state power, of course) is a bad dream that has a lot of traction among those who are impatient and want to live in a tangible Kingdom of God right now.
12:52 pm on December 15, 2006
