Sobran: From Republic to Hegemon.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)

Joe Sobran is right again, as usual. America is not much of a republic anymore, and the constitution is meaningless. He suggests hunkering down.

I still think we should kill the bad guys, though.

None of these erstwhile superpowers looms very large today, but the United States has since then managed to keep itself busy abroad, all the way to the Far East. In 1898 war with Spain took us to the Philippines, where we remained in charge until, historically speaking, the other day. By 1941 we were openly at war with Japan, though clandestine hostilities had already begun, with secret (and illegal) funding from Franklin Roosevelt to Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers in China; naturally Roosevelt allowed the American public to blame the war on Japanese perfidy. Later came Korea, then Vietnam, after that the Balkans, and now we’re up to our necks in the Middle East.

Quite a change over the years for a modest republic that once sought an amicable divorce from Europe. By 1940 Roosevelt was stigmatizing the philosophy of the Founding Fathers, and Ernest Hemingway was quoting John Donne’s homiletic “No man is an island” as if it were a guiding principle of foreign policy. Today, it seems, every man is a tripwire, demanding U.S. intervention.

It’s odd to recall that President Bush, during the 2000 campaign, spoke sensibly about the limitations of what government can achieve, both at home and abroad. He expressed special scorn for the idea, chiefly associated with Democratic foreign policy in those days, that American political habits can be transplanted to other countries. The old European empires often held their subject peoples in contempt, but this attitude, deplorable as it might be, also saved them from trying to turn pygmies and aborigines into Englishmen and Frenchmen.

So it’s disconcerting to find Bush adopting “democracy” as the universal yardstick of progress. But today’s Democrats are tomorrow’s Republicans, and today’s Republicans are outdoing yesterday’s Democrats in carrying on Roosevelt’s dual legacy of domestic and foreign intervention.

Neoconservatives are touting these old ideas as a new inspiration of their own, but there is no need to dignify bad habits as a theory. Power tends to expand until something stops it, and so far nothing has stopped the expansion of the U.S. Government from modest republic to global hegemon. The dissenting individual can’t do much about this except to try to keep his own head.

Amen to that, brother Sobran.

The U.S. Constitution might almost as well be an officially classified document. Not much need for conspiracy theories when nearly all the mischief is committed right out in the open, if anybody cares to pay attention. Just read what the Founding Fathers said, then watch what our politicians do, and you’ll get the general picture.

Amen.