As a point of interest, the number of comments contained in this series of posts have been reduced to reflect the number of conservative blogs that no longer allow comments.
May 26
To W. Winston Elliot III and his blogpost on honoring the troops on Memorial Day. In doing so, he asks questions about whether our use of the military in our foreign policies is right and is in keeping with what the founding fathers believed. He also asked whether our current military approach to foreign policies can sabotage our democracy. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative.
What I like about this post is that it reminds us citizens of our responsibility to examine why, when, and where our gov't sends our troops into harms way. For it isn't truly honoring the troops to apriori accept every mission that the President sends them on. And yes, we, as citizens, need to hold our elected officials accountable for their decisions. That means we need to be vigilant to understand the conflicts that our troops are sent into.
However, one weak point of the article is found in questioning what is the role of the military in a Republic's foreign policies. The weak point is that Elliot only asks what the founding fathers would have thought. And that implies a certain omniscience on their part with no need to consult what other people have observed afterwards. After all, Elliot could have cited the late historian, Chalmers Johnson, who observed that nations cannot maintain an empire and remain a republic. According to Johnson, Rome could not do that and thus lost its republic. He also stated how Great Britain could not either but gave up its empire instead. Referencing Johnson might have helped answer his question on whether our foreign entanglements could sabotage our democracy. He could have referenced Johnson here because our military approach to foreign policy very much resembles an empire.
Or Elliot could have refered to the lessons we learned from the 20th Century's two World Wars along with their aftermath. If he had done that, he might have noticed that neither isolationism nor imperialism provide adequate answers to the questions he asked. But he didn’t. Nor did he ask who is our own nation accountable to, besides its voters, for its foreign policies..
Certainly Elliot's intentions in writing the article are noble and he makes some good points and asks some good questions. But perhaps his conservatism produces a self-limiting thinking. It isn't that conservatism has nothing to offer. It is that conservatism is not the only source of insights and lessons learned.
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To Jared Zimmerer as his blogpost reviews Christopher Dawson’s views of how religion interacts with culture and politics. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
Unfortunately, while commenting on the positive generalities of what Dawson said about religion, what is absent are a host of negative specifics. Kings acted as tyrants in the name of religion. People of one religion persecuted people of other religions even when their religions were very similar. And when it has come to heliocentrism vs geocentrism or parts of evolution vs parts of creationism, religion has sometimes claimed to champion truth when it is really defending ignorance.
Likewise, what are we to make of the role of religion in a multireligious society? American society has always been multireligious. At the same time American history shows that both deists and theists approved of some of the most torturous and even genocidal behavior to those who were not of the same European ancestry.
Unfortunately, as seen in the above article, religion here has always championed an authoritarian role for its own as ruling to varying degrees over the rest of society. But that escapes the notice of those who were favored by that authoritarianism vs those who were its victims. And that authoritarianism has been one of the reasons why democracy has never fully worked here.
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