People talk about the power of a good example a lot. Noam Chomsky says that anywhere on Earth that the US sees a good example, they try to snuff it out due tot what he calls “the threat of a good example.” This has been our policy in much of the world since WW2, given a fake veneer of moral authority at best and even realpolitik necessity at worst. Before the Cold War, this was our policy mostly only in Latin America.
Except now that the Cold War is over, we are still doing the exact same thing that we did in the Cold War. The Cold War was a fake war and the USSR was a fake enemy. The real enemy is progressive politics, real democracy and forms of socialist (democratic by nature) economics. A mask called “Cold War” was put on this agenda from 1946-1991, but after then, the policy stayed the same even though the Cold War mask came off.
We didn’t do all of those horrible things “because we had to due to the Cold War,” the typical lousy liberal excuse (a favorite of my liberal Democrat father). We did all those horrible things because that’s what we do.
Now we are continuing to do all of the same horrible things that we did in the Cold War, except there is no Cold War so we can’t use that as a fake excuse anymore. So why are we doing these things now? We are doing those horrible things now because that is what we do.
And if we did all of those terrible things due to the Cold War, why were we doing them in Latin America for 45 years before the Cold War even started? We did all those things in our backyard in the first half of that blighted century because that’s what we do.
The success of the American model exemplifies what I call “the power of a bad example.”
