America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire [Paperback]

Urged on by a powerful ideological and political movement, George W. Bush committed the United States to a quest for empire. American values and principles were universal, he asserted, and should guide the transformation of the world. Claes Ryn sees this drive for virtuous empire as the triumph of forces that in the last several decades acquired decisive influence in both the American parties, the foreign policy establishment, and the media.

Public intellectuals like William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz argued that the United States was an exceptional nation and should bring democracy, freedom, and capitalism to countries not yet enjoying them. Ryn finds the ideology of American empire strongly reminiscent of the French Jacobinism of the eighteenth century. He describes the drive for armed world hegemony as part of a larger ideological whole that both expresses and aggravates a crisis of democracy and, more generally, of American and Western civilization.

America the Virtuous sees the new Jacobinism as symptomatic of America shedding an older sense of the need for restraints on power. Checks provided by the US Constitution have been greatly weakened with the erosion of traditional moral and other culture.

Urged on by a powerful ideological and political movement, George WAcknowledgementsPrefaceAuthor's NotePrologue: War without End1. The Crisis of Western Civilization and the Rise of Jacobinism2. The New Jacobinism3. Creative Traditionalism or Radicalism?4. Democracy: Plebiscitary or Constitutional?5. Contrasting Forms of Morality and Society6. Aristocratic and Anti-Aristocratic Democracy7. The Father of Democratism8. Love of One's Own and Love of the Common9. Moral Universality: A Philosophical Interlude10. Pluralistic Political Morality11. Democracy in Peril12. The New Jacobins and American Democracy13. Democracy fol#Ê