 The view of democracy as producing a peace-loving and stable regime has become a settled opinion of our time. The Olin Fellow, I suppose, of global democracy or something like that, Walter Burns, has insisted that democracies have never engaged in war with each other. This assertion has recently been changed to, I think, an equally suspect one, that democracies have not engaged in war with each other for about 150 years. A problematic statement at best, unfortunately by now this has acquired the status of a truism. Just about every day one reads in the newspaper admonitions that the United States is holding back the process of peace by not making the rest of the world democratic. A January 19th column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I had the misfortune of reading by columnist Trudy Rubin explained that America's choice at this point is either in creating a peaceful Russia or passively assisting in the triumph of neo-fascism throughout the world. Peace, or Ms. Rubin explains, requires a vigorous interventionist foreign policy on the part of our government. There are a number of problems with such a statement. In fact, it would probably take me several hours to go into all of them. One of them, of course, is the idea that a self-described democracy is by definition peaceful. This is because self-described democracies declare themselves to be peaceful and insist that any measure that they take is either peaceful or intended to produce world peace. If one engages in circular definitions, then democracies obviously can never fight wars against each other. And any measure that they take is intended to be peaceful in the long run. This same kind of argument, of course, was used, I think in some cases, with success in the case of the Soviet Union, which for many years argued that socialism or Marxist socialism was by definition peaceful, and that whenever the Soviet Union engaged in war with Baltic states or wherever else that would care to send its armies, that was done as a way of ensuring peace within the Soviet Union and spreading the penumbra of peace beyond the Soviet Union to other countries that it would choose to liberate. In any case, the insistence by militant democrats, and in Germany there are, I discovered, people who, like Jürgen Habermas, describe themselves as Einsatzbereite demokraten, militant democrats that the entire world be made to flatter their political conceits, is not exactly a pacifist stance. Last year, for example, self-proclaimed defenders of human rights and democracy in France formed the Appeal to Vigilance Committee to marginalize their opposition. This committee, which includes such progressive celebrities as Bernard-André Levy, Jacques Derrida, and Umberto Eco, complains that on the anniversary of the Jacobin ascendancy in revolutionary France, the extreme right was being allowed to make fun of the left support of increased immigration into France from Africa and elsewhere in the third world. According to the 40 intellectuals who signed on to this Appeal to Vigilance published in Le Monde on July 13, 1993, quote, writers, publishers, and those responsible for the written in audio-visual press are not sufficiently suspicious of these maneuvers to re-legitimate the right. The media we are told now provide a forum, at least in France, certainly not in the United States, for the critics of human rights and of anti-racist public education. And by, quote, this involuntary complicity threatened democracy, peace, and human lives everywhere, unquote. On July 13, 1993, Le Monde published its own editorial support for this appeal, noting the danger created, quote, by a world of ideas still under the sway of laissez-deir, by which they mean intellectual freedom. The alliance, quote, between militant communists and neo-fascists throughout Europe, Le Monde goes on, quote, benefits the chaos that reigns in Russia, the racist murders that are proliferating everywhere, and the unforeseeable consequences of the war in the form of Yugoslavia. In reading these calls to democratic vigilance, one should keep in mind that there is nothing undemocratic about them. The Jacobins of the French Revolution muzzled and threatened French citizens while asserting the iron necessity for emergency measures against the enemies at their gates as well as against traitors within. The doctrine of human rights to which concerned French intellectuals are appealing has never been viewed as a purely national patrimony. Its exponents in 1789 have affirmed their universal proselytizing mission. Edmund Burke was correct to perceive a vast gulf between the historical chartered liberties of Englishmen, unquote, the armed doctrines of the French Revolution. Note well that the terror in revolutionary France killed far more than the 30,000 or so who died on the scaffold. Between March 1793 and July 1795, over 100,000 peasants from the Vendee and Brittany were massacred by revolutionary armies for counter-revolutionary activities, ranging from reluctance to be conscripted into the Republican army to alleged support for priests who refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the revolutionary state. The French historians, Pierre Chenoux and Pierre Secher, have documented these massacres which involve the wholesale drowning in the Loire River of women and children. While these acts of ideological intolerance were not unprecedented in Western history, certainly one can point back to the sad examples of the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, and the sacking of Jewish and Byzantine settlements in the other Crusades. What stands out in the revolution is the killing of people on a truly mass scale in the name of democratic ideals. This democratic potential for destruction was already known in the 18th century. The Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume cited it in making a case against democracy as the most sanguinary of all forms of government and in favor of the British constitutional monarchy. Hume alleged all the bloody adventures of ancient self-described democracies. And in this argument might have been following another anti-democratic skeptic, Thomas Hobbes. For neither Hume nor Hobbes was impressed by the Greek democratic experience, obviously they had not read Edith Hamilton on Athenian democracy, and Hobbes, who translated Thucydides' histories of the Peloponnesian War, attributed the defeat of Athens in that struggle to its democratic defect, combining instability with relentless imperialism. Certainly, the Federalist founders of the American Republic were deeply suspicious of a highly centralized state, bottomed upon the majority will, distributed national power, entrusting the franchise to property state legislators, dual federalism, and the making of the defense of life and property, the justification for the Constitution, all pointed not to a democratic, but to a conservative liberal worldview. Popular government would be allowed, but with suitable checks on its expression. None of the conditions that offended 18th century Democrats like Rousseau and Robespierre occasioned concern for the American founding fathers. Social inequality, rather social leveling, forceful administrative centralization, a politically enforced civic religion, all of these features, one might say of Jacobin democracy, did not belong to the American dispensation set up in the 1780s. For the radical elements among the founding generation, grouped around Thomas Jefferson, the term democracy did in fact have a positive connotation, but one suggesting liberty and localism. No matter how much Jefferson celebrated the French Revolution, no matter how foolishly eulogized the so-called reforms of the Revolution, it was not the centralized government of the Jacobins appealing to the general will, but communities of craftsmen and yeoman farmers on which the Virginia planter based his democratic hopes. As late as the 1830s, the French visitor to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, drew a critical distinction between American and European notions of democracy. It was in small towns run by local gentry and intrusive pecsniffs that one saw government in practice or rather one saw self-government in practice in the United States. In Europe, by contrast, it was the centralizing militaristic vision of Jacobin France that held sway among self-identified democratic enthusiasts and revolutionaries, particularly in Tocqueville's own country. If democracy would triumph as the inevitable wave that Tocqueville took it to be in the mid-1830s, the unanswered question became which form would prove stronger, American localism or French Jacobinism? By now, there is no question that the second form of democracy has prevailed as a globalist bellicose ideology representing the ambitions of a well-organized political class and its journalistic adjuncts. There are many reasons for this development, and this conference features scholars who have laid out and will lay out most of the reasons. Economic, administrative, and geopolitical causes have all played a role in turning Tocqueville's America as a hot house of local self-government into the aggressive behemoth, spouting therapeutic bromides that all of us have come to recognize as the perfected version of American democracy. In this PV, perfected version, real self-government has been supplanted by electoral inclusiveness so that every deadbeat is urged to vote as a testimony to the expansiveness of our system. Democracy is equated with the extension of special rights, like holding days of rage as evidence of a public commitment to egalitarianism. A class of public administrators, judges, and career officers decide how we live and die in a society that tax-paying citizens can do less and less to influence. We no longer even determine who should be allowed to enter the country and become a citizen, since the demand for such control is itself seen as undemocratic. Only neo-fascist, as our journalists now tell us, would try to restrict immigration or oppose open borders with third-world countries. A self-restricted political community, the classist Paul Venn, makes clear is the mark of ancient and medieval democracies in republics. A government's denial to its citizens of their right to limit citizenship on any grounds they see fit indicates, according to Venn, not a democratic but an imperial order. A supernational sovereignty in which the ruler or ruling class allows anyone born or found in that territory to become a subject, not a citizen but a subject. These remarks are not intended as an endorsement of a return to a racially homogeneous ancient politics. I shall leave it to Sam Francis to make that case. Rather, I'm trying to determine in what sense contemporary America is or is not democratic. The typical neo-conservative response to my unseemly questioning would be to say that we are democratic because we place neither gender nor racial nor ethnic restrictions on voting because we redistribute earnings and finally because in our truly inspired moments we work to make the entire world safe for democracy. In any case, the response would continue America is a liberal democracy and as such committed to parliamentary government, human rights and open citizenship, political features that were unknown and ancient bigoted collectivist democracies. This particular argument is basic to an 1,100 page study dealing with ancient and modern republics by the Straussian Paul Ray. I generally agree with the distinction that Ray he draws up to a point. That is too much has been made of the fascination of 18th century republicans with Greek and Roman popular government. Obviously, there were liberal individualist concerns in Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that were lacking in ancient republic rhetoric and practice. Madison's idea of an extended republic balanced by material interest suggests the application of the new science of politics. From recent studies of Mesian social thought, it seems to me that no word for Mesias or no words for Mesias were so disagreeable except for socialist as organic and communal. As a liberal asserts Mesias in Gemeinwirtschaft, one must be committed to a scientific approach to life that maximizes the prosperity of the individual. Societies that have focused on preserving the past or maintaining a cultural heritage, Mesias argued, have been unable to achieve that goal that this is a modernist liberal view. The defense of democracy made by Mesias is typically liberal. And by liberal, by the way, I do not mean in accord with the views of the New York Times, I mean 19th century liberal, I mean classical liberal. Democratic regimes can minimize internal tensions because we are led to believe, according to Mesias, that the majority is allowed to vote and elect political leaders. Once this electoral process occurs, Mesias hoped liberal norms and parliamentary procedures can be counted on to keep society tranquil and economically productive. Though Mesias knew, quote, that socialist demagogues draw instant crowds in today's democracies, unquote, he found nothing in the democratic principle that requires the situation. Democracy for Mesias and for Hayek means popular elections, but not the automatic right to change liberal rules. Clearly, Mesias did not understand the operation of modern liberal democracy, particularly as practiced in the US. The democratic principle has indeed led towards social democracy, with a fully bureaucratized society that Mesias feared. Democracy has not met mere electoral procedures combined with 19th century liberal safeguards of life and property, but a perpetual administrative intrusion into the lives of progressively disempowered citizens. One reason for this problem I would submit is that liberal democracy is a dangerous mixed regime, which upholds neither liberal freedom nor democratic self-rule. It is, if you will, the hegemonic ideology of the American political class, and as such invoke to justify the seizure of power by public administrators, privileged corporate interests, social therapists, and media crats. The dissociation of liberalism from property rights in a limited franchise, and the divorce between American democracy and any meaningful exercise of self-rule are not accidental. They belong to the strategy of manipulation practiced by those who have benefited from the reconstruction of liberalism and democracy. An essential to the liberal democratic regime that has enveloped America since the progressive era is an expansionist imperative fueled by what Edmund Burke called our doctrine. By this pan-interventionist doctrine, it is seen as insensitive or relativist for the US government in its subjects, not citizens but subjects, to concern themselves with everyone else's human rights. By now human rights have become the rhetorical pretext for governmental inroads at home and abroad. Not everyone is equally authorized to distill or apply these rights. Journalists, administrators, experts, and the sensitizing spokespersons for designated victims are presumed to have a privileged understanding of this arcane wisdom. Thus American intervention in Somalia took place after the media and black civil rights leaders stressed the urgent need for sending American forces into that troubled area. The president consulted, or at least I learned this from CBS News, with an undersecretary for human rights before dispatching to Somalia American lives and treasured. Even now, the media crats and journalists are belaboring the president with demands to expand NATO, to micromanage the internal politics of Russia, and to do something decisive, in the words of Peter Jennings, something decisive in Bosnia and Haiti. Human rights require all these entanglements and more, including the punishment of the Chinese government for not conforming to the democratic values of American journalists. Though many of the same journalists had gushed ecstatically over the murderous Chinese regime of Mao Zedong, they have now become newly sensitized to the restraints on intellectual freedom imposed by Mao's successors. These successors bear in mind are far less socialistic than Mao. And this may in fact be the problems we're now learning that the Chinese are suffering from the perils of an uncontrolled or an increasingly uncontrolled economy. And journalists expect this to do something about this. They want the American government to show the same displeasure that they feel. The Chinese government must be fundamentally reformed. In the words of A.M. Rosenthal and George Will, the Chinese government must be made civilized, presumably like the denizens of New York City. Allow me, however, to introduce one limiting situation to the pan-interventionist impulse that I have discussed in my paper. It is one that is clearly present, I think, in the conduct and perhaps thinking of the present administration. Despite the unremitting campaign by many of our syndicated journalists to push the United States into military and financial commitments abroad, and yes, even despite the Jacobin transformation of American democracy, it may be argued that American foreign entanglements have become fewer and less dramatic since the end of the Cold War. Despite journalistic and media pressures, Clinton has gone slow in committing American forces to the Bosnian conflict. He has also withdrawn armies from Somalia. And except for enforcing an embargo, he has done little so far to meddle in Haiti. It may even be suggested that the present administration bears a new left isolationist legacy. Though in Christopher Lecture's The Chinese on Democracy, our government takes no action, or I should say our government, his government takes no action against the regime that Rosenthal and Will and other human rights mavens have condemned as inhuman. Threats are made against North Korea for developing atomic weapons. But again, the Clinton administration does not deploy military forces or express its displeasure in an alarmist fashion. While moralizing and appeals to global democracy come natural to this administration, as it did, of course, the Republican administrations that preceded it, such gestures are usually not preludes to more interventionist effort. Nonetheless, all of this may change if a Republican administration gets back into power and chooses neoconservatives to guide its foreign policy. The major difference I would submit between left and right, if there is any major difference at all, and Tom Fleming and I were debating, we were discussing this last night, and working feverishly to come up with some difference between left and between the respectable left and the respectable right, but if there is one difference within the political class, I would argue that it is this, that the left wishes to extend Jacobin democracy at home while the right, in quotation, hopes to spread it everywhere else. Thus, the left accelerates the managerial therapeutic domination of American society through anti-discrimination, victimological redistributionist programs. The right, by contrast, considers domestic reform to have been already accomplished and seeks to export the PV, the perfected version of American democracy, everywhere else. Now, there is no reason to believe that this present division of interests will spare us permanently from new Jacobin crusades for democracy, but at least in the near term, the national government does seem to be resisting foreign adventure, and though it may eventually be pressured into overrunning Haiti, I believe that Clinton does not want to be seen any longer if you can avoid it as a commander-in-chief. There are too many problems about his own past that will begin to surface. For all of the reasons I have therefore given, I think that the end of the Cold War has brought a law, if not permanent end, to the military march of American global democracy. Thank you.