The triumph of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is a reminder of the dangerous consequences of the Wilsonian idealism in the Bush Administration's foreign policy.
When Hamas won the parliamentary elections last year, I wrote a post on how this showed the weakness in the utopian idealism of the Bush neoconservatives. To assume that merely holding popular elections will promote liberty and good government shows a utopian view of human nature. The same mistake explains the debacle in Iraq, which has been the subject of some posts that can be found here and here.
At least now more and more people are questioning the utopian assumption of an "end of history" in which democracy and capitalism triumph inevitably through some teleological historical process. Patricia Cohen has a good article on this in The New York Times.
Darwinian conservatism would teach us that achieving ordered liberty is a complex evolutionary process that cannot be rationally designed or assumed to be historically inevitable. The evolution of liberty emerges through a hierarchy of three kinds of order--natural desires, customary traditions, and prudential judgments--that cannot be produced merely by rational design.
The evolution of liberty emerges through a hierarchy of three kinds of order--natural desires, customary traditions, and prudential judgments--that cannot be produced by rational design.
ReplyDeleteMore relevant to the Bush administration, it can't be produced by irrational design either.