I thought this country was founded on the principles of enlightenment. And the same principles made it a world leader. Now that enlightenment values are actively being dismantled what next can we expect?
I don't think it's accidental; I think people have a plan to bring down institutions, and it's working so far.
If the whole world is governed by say 3 dictators they can easily make peace with each other and share the spoils. But they won't because wars will increase their domestic support. Orwell wrote about this.
That’s been happening from Leftist criticism for generations.
I'm talking about the principles: freedom, rights, and self-determination as self-evident, essential goods; progress as essential and good (real progress, not padding bank accounts); knowledge as the way humans can change their world; and knowledge provided by science and scholarship.
The left has criticized many things as lacking in knowledge and threats to freedom and rights, and the institutions, but not these principles.
> It wasn’t the MAGA movement that started dismantling Western culture in the US.
It was a branch of conservatives before them, but MAGA has fully embraced it. Look at the denial of freedom and human rights, replaced by a naked, aggressive embrace of oppression and cruelty. Look at the contempt for those things and progress, in the name of power. Look at replacing science with ideological disinformation - at even aggressively destroying science - even when it costs millions of lives, such as during a pandemic. How much blood is on their hands - how many needless deaths? Nobody talks about it.
Their impact outside of minor student circles has been 0. And for sure none of those are MAGA or Le Pen or AfD voters...
1. Short term: nothing major because it can't at the moment.
2. Long term: build up a military that is a credible military deterrent to the US, probably abandon NATO if the US doesn't, and form alliances with Canada and the UK.
Do you mean that "the" post-WWII peace settlement didn't last? It seems to have worked very well.
> It wasn’t America's principles that made it the world leader at the time—it was the fact that, unlike other major powers, it emerged from the world wars largely unscathed.
That certainly played a big role. Also, American principles that created a post-war order based on univeral human rights, the rule of law, and free-market capitalism (including free trade). Those principles led to treatment of the losing powers in that image, rather than in retribution, cruelty or oppression (compare to the USSR in Eastern Europe). In fact, Japan surrendered when they did mainly in order to surrender to the US and not to the USSR - those principles had very significant effects. They also led to the Marshall Plan in Europe.
The principles and the resulting actions created 'soft power' which may be unmatched in history. The general alliance with European powers has lasted over 80 years; the NATO military alliance, of mutual self-defense, has lasted almost as long - has there been anything like it?
People around the world fought and struggled for the vision of American freedom. I've spoken to people from different countries who, even in the first Trump administration, still had the American dream; they still saw the 'city on the hill'.
Beyond a doubt, the US also has done plenty of awful things. But what has distingiushed it, beyond every great power in history, are those principles.
To say that some war remains is to make perfection the only standard. Let's reduce it even more, but to claim the post-war order hasn't overseen extraordinary peace, freedom and prosperity is ridiculous.
I'm gonna be honest, the actual founding fathers as individuals aside, most of the people coming over where arguably running away from the Enlightenment rather than towards it, and a superstitious and fantastical isolationism was the norm, not the exception for most of America's history, while the post WWII leadership role was more of an accident. In some ways, this is old habits reasserting themselves
Towards the end of his book, Ricks notes the populist / religious backlash to enlightenment thinking that was already underway by the early 19th century.
It's strange to realize the post WWII America most of us have lived may really be exceptional, and how many either don't understand how big a part the liberal order has played in making America great since FDR, or have a different vision of greatness that requires tearing much of what we've enjoyed down.
That's a claim of its enemies, who look for any rationalization to destroy the greatest success of its kind in human history - when there isn't even a crisis.
Americans from the very beginning started playing on words - "all men are equal, but women aren't men, natives aren't citizens, and negros aren't even humans"
(Does this ring a bell -- as in Dark MAGA?)
2) The Interview Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...
3) The philosophy behind Trump’s Dark Enlightenment An English magus of anti-democratic neoreaction has become a touchstone for the alt-right https://archive.is/SWAFE