One Ring, many expressions

Back in February I wrote a blog entry entitled “George and Condi and Danton and Emma,” in which I spoke of “President Bush’s ongoing transformation of American conservatism into global sentimental Jacobinism.” Today a reader asked me what I meant in that article by Jacobinism, and I replied:

What I’m referring to is the French Revolutionary idea of spreading a single political idea of liberty and equality to the whole world, making that one idea rule the whole world, which requires erasing all existing cultures and political forms.

With its ambition to impose a single idea, a single political form on the whole world (in the same way that the neocons dream of imposing American-style democracy on the whole world), Jacobinism, whether of the French Revolutionary type or the neoconservative type, can be seen as an expression of the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings:

“One Ring to rule them all …
“… and in the darkness (the Darkness of the Enlightenment) bind them.”

Am I being unfair? When we consider Bush’s arrogant assurance that his democratization policy is the single, “non-negotiable” answer for the whole world and that anyone who disagrees with it is motivated by racism and condescension, when we remember the mindless, simplistic slogans that have constituted the whole intellectual content of that policy, and when we remember the adolescent enthusiasm for changing the world combined with the refusal to think, the refusal to reply to rational criticisms of their position, that has characterized the neoconservative promoters of Bush’s policy, the image of One Ring binding everyone in the “darkness of the Enlightenment” does not seem out of order.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 31, 2005 07:44 PM | Send