Introduction

Delusions kill. Misinformed or ill-conceived ideas can cause tragedy in individual lives and can bring down civilizations. As the philosopher Richard Weaver once wrote, “Ideas have consequences.”

Not long ago, I had occasion to study the history of Mexico. One of the more amazing things I discovered was that the Aztecs turned over their entire civilization, which was at once magnificent and terrifying, by a series of events following their initially allowing Cortes and his small band of men in without resistance—why? because the Aztecs thought he was a returning god, as prophesied. Oddly enough, an idea—a delusion, if you will—was highly instrumental in bringing down the Aztec empire.

Sensing this, I have spent most of my adult life chasing down quixotic ideas. That is why the monograph that preceded this one was subtitled “Illusions that Guide Contemporary America.” As is true in virtually all times and places, what Americans believe they know about many things consists of partial truths and half-thought-out notions. This isn’t because Americans, and other peoples everywhere, aren’t intelligent. It is because reality, particularly social reality, is inherently difficult to grasp, and requires much selection and large systems of mental integration to comprehend. It is also because that selection and integration is necessarily done by human beings, and thus must be understood in sociological and psychological terms as producing very much a mental artifact. What we know, or think we know, are man-made constructs.

It is vitally important that these constructs be subject to on-going criticism and analysis. This is especially evident when we descend from such generalizations as we have just made and look at specifics. Neutral observers contemplating the predicament the United States is in today can readily see that its very existence, at least in any form recognizable as a continuation of its past, is challenged, and that the challenges come not from without nearly so much as from the ideas Americans embrace so wholeheartedly.

This monograph consists of a collection of recently-published essays and book reviews centering on three sources of existential danger, each intimately tied up with ideas. One of these has to do with the extraordinary risks, and what Samuel Huntington has called the cultural, moral presumptuousness, of Americans’ desire to spread their ideals messianically throughout the world, becoming the policeman and social worker to a world that is so complex and torn that Americans can hardly pretend to grasp its realities. At almost all times in their history, the American people have had a messianic streak. It focused almost entirely on domestic matters until 1898, but since that time has reached out to encompass the world. Thus, the United States today finds itself at the center of almost everybody’s hatreds and problems. To be so situated is arguably for it to be in great danger, both externally and internally. Readers who want to explore these implications will take particular interest in chapters 1, 3, 4 and 6. The first is a book review of Thomas Fleming’s analysis of the United States’ intervention into World War I and of the ideas upon which President Woodrow Wilson predicated his crusade to “save the world for democracy” and to fight “a war to end all wars.”

Chapter 3 relates closely to this. It is a review of Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s book critiquing the current neo-conservative extension of Wilsonianism. Although Halper and Clarke see “conceptual overreach” and a “lack of pragmatism” in the aspiration for worldwide American hegemony, they do so from their own internationalist and Wilsonian perspective. The review here necessarily allows, then, an analysis of both forms of Wilsonianism.

Chapter 4 gives us much information about the world’s complexity. It reviews Amy Chua’s book World on Fire, which tells us that many countries are dominated by small ethnic minorities while the native majorities live in destitution. This poses, as readers will see, an appreciable dilemma for anyone’s world-improving crusade: whether to support the tiny minority that provides the innovation and dynamism of each such society, or to support the indigenous mass in keeping with the ideals of democracy.

The fourth chapter on this theme is Chapter 6, a review of Martin Meredith’s book The Fate of Africa, which recounts in detail the steady decline of Africa since the end of European colonialism shortly after World War II. As with Chua’s book, it shows how there is no magic wand that an outsider can wave to put Africa onto a constructive track.

Chapters 2, 7 and 8 deal with a second and equally serious challenge to the continued existence of America and of the West. This is the burgeoning invasion by tens of millions of immigrants from the Third World. Historians far in the future will no doubt look back and note that this demographic revolution promised, in what in historical terms was quite a short time, to flush out the content of the United States and of the West by replacing them with different peoples, religions and cultures. Chapter 2 is an essay on “multiculturalism,” the regnant ideology overseeing this change. I had thought I had written all that I had to say on this subject, but found I had not—which means the chapter is by no means a rehash of what has been said before by myself and many others (however important that has been). Chapter 7 is an essay that extends this in a way that is both novel and important, sounding the surprising prediction that Americans, given their ideological propensities, will soon be damning their present acceptance of cheap immigrant labor precisely for its “exploitive racism.” A review of Cesar Chavez’s career fits into this by providing a case in point—and is worth perusing for its own sake. And finally, Chapter 8 is a review of Patrick Buchanan’s recent book State of Emergency, which deals exclusively with the immigration issue.

Only one chapter is devoted to a third challenge—the hollowing out of the American economy by deindustrialization, outsourcing and offshoring. Chapter 5 is a review of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a remarkable account of global economic developments in just so recent a period as since the turn of the 21^st century. We will see what those developments have been, as he recounts them, and will have occasion to reflect critically about Friedman’s acceptance of the various concepts that underlie globalization and the stripping of the American economy.

The purpose of this Introduction is to invite readers into the volume in the spirit of intellectual adventure. There is little stridency in these pages, but there is a lot of ideologically non-conformist analysis. We hope that that is enough to give the book sustained interest.

Dwight D. Murphey

January 2007