Paul Grenier — “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

The US is caught in one of the many paradoxes and contradictions of liberalism. Forcing others to be liberal is illiberal.

The West, and specifically the United States, has before it a fateful choice: should it seek a ‘live and let live’ co-existence of the liberal and non-liberal nations of the world, or should it try to make the rest of the world liberal at gunpoint, and in that way prove that history really has finally ended? Should we make the world safe for diversity, or should we make the world uniform for the safety of the United States?....

... is the United States willing to countenance the existence, on a permanent basis, of other great powers that do not accept liberal civilizational values as America defines them? I say other ‘great powers’ because in the long run only a great power, or a protectorate of a great power, can assure its own continued existence.....

Western civilization, which is now characterized by American liberalism, is not the only great civilization, and the other great civilizations do not have traditions of liberalism. They tend to be conservative instead. While Western liberalism is traced to Athenian democracy and the Roman republic, those were exceptions rather than the rule. Even much Western liberalism is liberal (Burkean) conservatism.

Johnson's Russia List
Paul Grenier: “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

Paul Grenier

See also

Paul Grenier, The Varieties of Russian Conservatism. at The American Conservative

First Principles
Burkean Conservatism
Peter J. Stanlis | Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Rockford College.

The author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, which appeared in 1955 and revolutionized the way Burke was viewed by scholars, Professor Stanlis promised Frost in 1944 that he would someday write the best book about Frost's art and thought that he had it in him to write. Stanlis's previous monograph on Frost is titled Robert Frost: The Individual and Society.