…don’t really have time to track down or escape, or track down and destroy and thus make possible the escape from these latest undead contentions.
If any serious attempt to define the American national interest leads us to an overdetermining or geographically, political-economically, and ideologically mutually conditioning internationalism or transnational impetus, borne out in the great events and ideas and seemingly inexorable material processes of the last two centuries, resulting in the state of the world as we know it, then nation-state Realism in relationship to America turns itself inside out or upside down.
The United State of America, by process of geographical and historical election, and by related ideological pre-disposition, plays a unique role in the administration of the global state interest, a role seemingly little understood by many whose occupations and pre-occupations are explaining, arguing about, and, in some places, denying it.
In the libertarian imagination or, as Professor Hanley prefers, the libertarian psyche, the reduction in the power of government (or “government”) means an increase in power for each libertarian or for the individual, which latter, as individuality, is presented as an ideal, but which each individual knows exclusively and therefore universally only through and as him- or herself. The libertarians do not recognize popularly sovereign liberal-democratic government as an extension of themselves, or, put more precisely, of this self. They may exploit or even admire democratic impulses and particular constitutional traditions, but their views are in this sense profoundly anti-democratic and constitutionally anti-constitutional.
If we agree that we want a world in which nation-states do not use chemical weapons against their peoples, or a world in which chemical and other WMD use does not spread in interstate or other conflict situations, and the only way to ensure that worthy goal is to assert and enforce a transnational imperative, then we are neo-imperialists, and the only reason we do not confess as much is that we have inherited an ideological-terminological allergy.
Precisely because you are deafened, however, you cannot hear anyone explaining the fact to you, or trying to direct you to shelter: Philosophy says to you, “You can’t hear me – let’s go somewhere quiet,” but you of course cannot make out the words, nor will you read its lips (perhaps you are also blinded by the lightning flashes).
To go much further would require a willingness to suspend judgment and start as though at a beginning, yet from closer to an end, on the part of all participants. Yet that requirement, even if the one thing needful, will always be too much to demand of the citizens of a democratic republic, CKM included.