It's not that I didn't know it, or even that I had forgotten, but rather obviously this is something that we as country seem not to realize, from Brad DeLong, in a piece about Obama's infamous deficit commission:
Four centuries ago, the consensus, in Western Europe at least, was that good and even adequate government in this fallen world was inevitably a rarity. Democracy always degenerated into mob rule, monarchy into tyranny, and aristocracy into oligarchy. Even when well run, democracy took little interest in the distant future, aristocracy took little interest in the well-being of those whom Simpson calls the "little people," and monarchy took little interest in anything other than legitimate succession.
Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, the founders of the United States of America and their intellectual successors claimed that this pessimism about government was unwarranted. "The science of politics...like most other sciences," claimed Alexander Hamilton, "has received great improvement....The regular distribution of power into distinct departments...legislative balances and checks...judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election...are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided..."
Perhaps Hamilton was too much the optimist. When I look at Barack Obama's deficit commission - indeed, look at governance worldwide - I see many imperfections, but few or no examples of excellence.
One of the great accomplishments of America is that it showed the possibility of good government at more than local scale, which in turn helped to show that some misfortunes taken to be beyond human reach are in fact avoidable. This, in turn, was directly a product of the development of modern liberalism, which provided both a philosophical foundation and an institutional architecture for the blending of classical and Renaissance republicanism with a new conceptual framework of individual rights, checks and balances and democratic self-governance. Once the possibility of good governance was proven possible, the doors were open to explore different ways of achieving it.
As DeLong properly notes, we're faced with rather grim prospects just now, but given the history of the past 200+ years, the grim prospects now facing us no longer appear as inevitable necessities of nature. If we are headed toward a massive return of evil governance--a distinct possibility, let's not kid ourselves--this is still just an historical/political development pressed forward by specific political/economic forces, and not a metaphysical necessity. The difference between the two is the difference between possibility and impossibility, between rational hope and irrational despair.
It is no small thing that political liberalism, for all its imperfections, has created the first framework for potentially viable good government on a more-than-local basis. Indeed, that accomplishment alone is sufficient foundation for all political optimism. And, indeed, the divide between optimism and pessimism is one of the fundamental divides that there is between left and right, not just in modern times, but in antiquity as well.
In ancient Greece, as Eric Alfred Havelock described in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, the traditional conservative mythology was reflected in Hesiod's Works and Days which described history in terms of five successive ages, each more debased than the one before. But this ideology was reversed by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers who argued from observation of both the human and the natural world that progress, not regress, was the most general state of affairs, and from this empirical foundation, both a general theory of evolution and the foundations of a liberal, democratic political philosophy were born. Of course, we only have fragmentary knowledge of this, but Havelock makes a powerfully compelling argument, not least because some of the arguments offered by Plato and Aristotle make little sense if they were not directed against such a liberal philosophy (for example, their arguments favoring slavery and denigrating democracy).
Indeed, Aristotle argued that some people were "natural slaves," and the belief that some groups are inherently superior to others remains stubbornly attached to political conservatism up to this very day. Even now they argue--with no empirical evidence, and indeed against a growing body of contrary evidence--that gays and lesbians are unfit for marriage. This is hardly surprising, since the belief in superior and inferior groups shows up in two different psychological constructs that are statistically associated with conservatism--social dominance orientation and rightwing authoritarianism.
Given the sorts of things that conservatives believe, it's not surprising that they don't think people are capable of self-governance. And thus it's not surprising that conservatives opposed the American Revolution, and supported the British monarchy instead. Nor is it surprising that conservative rulers across Europe fought against the spread of democratic ideas throughout the 19th Century, while those on the left, particularly socialists and social democrats pushed for the expansion of democracy. (Liberals were often split, as many feared that expanded democracy would imperil some liberal rights.) Nor is it surprising that conservatives sympathized with and supported fascist regimes in Italy, Germany and Spain beginning in the 1930s, and lasting until Franco's death in the 1970s, or that they supported military dictatorships all across the world, up to and including Saddam Hussein during the Reagan Administration, and virtually up to the moment that he invaded Kuwait, in part because of mixed messages sent by Bush I's ambassador at the time.
This same disdainful attitude toward self-government was clearly visible in the Bush v. Gore decision that stole the 2000 election. It's visible in a whole string of conservative activist judicial decisions, in which conservative judges and justices substitute their opinions for the fact-finding and political judgment of elected political officials. It's seen in the ongoing talk of secession and "Second Amendment solutions" we've heard since conservatives lost the 2008 elections, just as its seen in their baseless conspiratorial belief that ACORN somehow "stole" the election right under the nose of the Bush Administration.
Conservatives hate America because they can't control it. Because they can't run everything, and because it gives freedom and opportunity to people beyond their control. But they also hate America because it protects those that conservatives would otherwise prey upon. It protects those who once were slaves. It protects those who were spat upon as immigrants. It protects vulnerable women and children. It protects the handicapped. It institutionalizes the teaches of Jesus in Matthew 25, that whatsoever we do to the least of these, we do also unto Him.
And, finally, conservatives hate America because it doesn't stand still, and resists going backwards. They hate America because of its ongoing becoming what it was meant to be. As Langston Hughes so eloquently wrote:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!
Conservatives just hate that vision. They just hate America. All that stuff about "liberty and justice for all." It makes them want to pick a gun and shoot someone. It makes them want to commit mass treason, just like they did in 1861.
