Maddens them? I guess I didn't see that in the cited article.

One could make the easily more compelling argument that Bush's cozying up to Putin has given Putin the prestige to have some kind of pull in the Ukraine.

Even more interesting, however, is the parallels between the election in the Ukraine and our own Presidential election, with the opposition playing the Blue states and the government supporters playing the Red states. The opposition has a pro-European affinity, whereas the government supporters are closer to Moscow. The analogy works on several more levels.

It comes down to a more basic question for both the Ukraine and the U.S. Does the future lie in isolating oneself from the rest of the world, or in intergrating into the rest of the world?

mk:

He spent tens of millions trying to defeat a president who shares most of his stated ideals--other than drug legalization--that's madness.

Roger Moran, a San Diego businessman and entrepreneur, wrote an interesting letter to George Soros. You can read it at www.educatingvoices.org

Excuse me. His name is Roger Morgan.

Distancing ourselves from Old Europe is not isolation, it is rational behavior. Let France, Belgium and Germany rot in their own juices.

We are changing our policies to reflect post-Cold War realities. We have become closer to India, which has a larger GDP than France. We have become closer with Japan, which has a larger GDP than Germany and France combined, and spends more on defense than Germany, France and Belgium combined.

What maddens me is that Bush is attempting to vindicate the ideals of the world. To the extent that George Bush is in agreement with George Soros (and I think you are right that there is significant overlap between them), the former is a Jacobin, and no Conservative if the word means anything anymore.

Paul:

You're right, Jacobin has no meaning anymore.

Roger Morgan's letter to George Soros can be more easily found here.

Paul: You long since convinced me that there were not conservatives any more.

If I read him right, Mr. Cohen is just more honest than OJ.

George Soros, Conservative.

Paul:

Jacobin is a term of art for paleos to use instead of an anti-Semitic term.

Soros probably regards Bush as competition.

OJ:

I'm not really concerned with whose "term of the art" it is. Burke (that is, the father of modern Conservatism) defines Jacobinism as the idea that "all government, not being a democracy, is a usurpation." Is that an inaccurate summation of the position of both Georges?

Lean for your terminology on Burke, and you become a paleo (and maybe an anti-Semite), huh?

Burke was talking about actual Jacobins. Paleos are talking about Jews.

Forget the paleos. I'm talking about people who hold (or at least appear to hold) the above-cited opinion. This group of people (I will not insist on the term Jacobin if it dismays you, though I rather like it: something old and fresh amidst this sea of ugly newness) includes George Soros and George Bush.

I think that (1) it is a foolish, narrow and -- what's worse -- quite false opinion; and (2) anyone who holds it and seeks to act on it, that is, implement it, is courting real peril.

George Bush, who lost the popular vote in 2000, is obviously not a democrat in the sense that Burke objected to. He is not seeking to impose democracies, in the sense that Burke objected to, in the Middle East. He, like Burke, is a republican, which means that some degree of democracy (consent of the governed) is required but it is usually a rather circumscribed sort of democracy, mixed with considerably less democratic institutions.

Where they differ is that Burke, on an inviolable island, was able to ignore the fact that few of his contemporaries lived in such republics. Burke would have no more known that the Shi'a were oppressed by the Sunni than he would have known about quarks. However, wherever England planted its flag Burke became a defender of the right of the peoples in these foreign lands to have a say in their own governance.

In the 21st Century no one is inviolable and information technology makes it impossible to ignore the plight of benighted lands and peoples, nor can they escape our ideas and culture. We may not like it but America's de facto Empire extends to every person on the planet, simply as a function of the time in which we live. Even if we withdrew into Fortress America our accidental influence would be enormous. It's all well and good to be dubious about whether the states of the Middle East have the organic structures in place to firmly support the kind of system that Burke idolized, but there's no longer an option of waiting around for a few hundred years to see if they develop the institutional props that we were fortunate enough to have in the Anglosphere.

All government, not being representative, is a usurpation and all men recognize it as such. Burke did his job too well. His ideas won. It falls to the George Bushs and Ronald Reagans to pick up the pieces.

That is an altogether more moderate statement than your implication above that Bush is vindicating Soros. Soros is precisely the kind of ideologue that Burke was inveighing against: the type of man who would insist that, say, Franco lift his yoke of tyranny off the poor, beleagured Spanish Communists, that Spain might become an open society, nevermind that in the process Spain might tear herself apart again. Democracy in Spain would have destroyed her, as Franco, corrupt those his administration was, knew*.

Replacing democracy with representative is certainly an improvement (and, as you note, an improvement in the Burkean direction), but the "ideals of the world," that Bush is supposedly vindicating, are emphatically not Burkean. They are, indeed, more nearly Jacobin. I do not think the term anachronistic, because Revolutionary France is still the fount and inspiration for the radicalism of the Left, that, as you have also pointed out, is the real enemy. Burke was a great man, and a teacher of mankind, but it is still an open question whether he or his philosophical adversary Rousseau** trimuphed. Irving Babbitt concluded that Rousseau was still regnant at the center of political modernity.

The machinations of the transnationalists (Left and Right) -- machinations always couched in the same Jacobin language of democracy that Bush is so fluent in -- seem to vindicate Babbitt's conclusion. When Conservatives like yourself write that Bush is vindicating Soros, I tend to get a little worried.

Anyway, it's nice to get you out in the open for once, OJ -- out here where the argument is really fun.
______
* Perhaps you will reply here that Franco was in fact representative. A fine retort, though hardly inarguable.
** I do not mean to imply that Rousseau has nothing to teach us. Emphatically not that.

Paul:

Soros seems rather impatient with Communists.