The philosophy of history that I was taught growing up could be best described as American Constitutional Hubris. That’s been the focus of history classrooms since World War 2. I was taught that there have been good ideas in history and bad ideas. Our ideas are the good ones, and that’s why we won. It’s never been that simple. There are strengths and weaknesses in Democracy, Republicanism, Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, and all the rest. Each is vulnerable to evil in different ways. Most of the movements we think of as Fascist or Communist or Socialist or Democratic were themselves conglomerations of different ideas, none of them as purely good or evil as we like to think. The evil aspects of these ideas can evolve. They latch on to more noble ideas and twist them. Our own Constitutional Democracy is not as immune to this type of corruption as we like to think. Our naivety on that point is dangerous. Evil ideas assaulted our democracy head-on during World War II and the Col
My blog with editorials about anything.