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Originally Posted by Lanny_MacDonald
Wonderfully stated, and still a load of hooey. If you think for a second that anyone in the real government thinks about anything but expansion of power and wealth you're kidding yourself. It's wonderful to quote the founding fathers, as their ideals were brilliant, but we have to understand context. In their time their "world" was "new" and the majority of it had not been discovered. Our "world" is substantially different and we know a lot more than we did then. The millenarianism belief had much more support during the time of Paine, but we have grown past that. Heck, even by Wilson's time millenarianism was on the wane, and things were pretty primative then. Those who believe in millenarianism are on the very fringe of society, and not trusted by those in positions of authority. Millenarianism and Wilsonian beliefs may have had a place in formulating American foreign policy in the past, but those days are dead and gone. Again, US actions internationally speak louder than all the rhetoric in the world.
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Lanny, one of the tenets of a small-c conservative political science is an emphasis on the continuity of ideas. Millenarian ideas influence what Edmund Burke called the social fabric. Cultural knowledge or mythos, which profoundly affects the very roots of world-views. The Founding Fathers, definitely not all of them, thought America was a new opportunity to fundamentally change the way human beings behaved. This sort of thinking does not bring with it pluralism or pragmatics, but a fanatical endeavour to progress or change, regardless of incremental reform.
I think you see this reflected in American foreign policy. The notion that American ideals are able to inject themselves into foreign countries, regardless of their own cultural traditions, and completely transform the people of that society into something "new". That's not to say American ideas are bad, America is better as a conservative nation. One that sees the value and beauty of the ideas that it helped coax along through the world's troubled times, but also respectful of the Western cultural tradition that brought them to us.