The perversion of exporting liberty

Yesterday I shared, without comment, a Bill Whittle video about the jobs boom going on in Dallas.  But it got me thinking.  If you go back to the Cold War, there was on both sides of the political aisle (for the most part) a fundamental belief that America's core values, America's system, and America's approach to things was the best approach ever conceived by man to providing liberty and prosperity for people.  And it was (and still is).  But accompanying that belief was also an approach to sharing that method with the rest of the world.  The idea was that others would see or be shown the American way and try to emulate it for themselves.  There was an idea that we did not need to force freedom on other countries just offer them a taste of it and they would want it because underlying human nature was the desire for independence, liberty and prosperity.

I recall as a youth people arguing that we The West should be flooding the Soviet Union with Pepsi, or Coca Cola and other products that they could not possibly produce within their communist system and they would yearn for it rather than lining up for hours to buy a pair of shoes that were not the right size because it was all they could get.

When the United States won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, it came about because of combination of factors.  Of course president Reagan's effort to spend them into submission militarily was the single biggest factor but it did not occur in isolation.  The U.S.S.R. in trying to match that spending was using so much of it's GDP on military spending that things only got worse for its citizens.  But the combination of Perestroika and Glasnost that allowed citizens to see a little more what was going on in the West, what was available, proved to the people that they were being oppressed.  They wanted the freedoms and abundances that capitalism and liberty offered.  

The exporting of ideals and liberty that Americans had, and truthfully could be had elsewhere if the people were willing, helped win the Cold War.

But somewhere along the way a perversion of that idea occurred, and it has been twisted into a horrible reality. Take a look at today's Left in America who argue that everyone wanting freedom should be granted unfettered access to America and granted all of her protections reserved for the weakest and most vulnerable among her citizens.  The notion that we should empower those from other countries to copy the American experiment for themselves into the notion that they can't do it and we should absorb them all into America.

How sinister.  Firstly it is a politi-centric or maybe ethnocentric notion that only Americans can do what Americans have done.  That is to suggest that no other nation has people who can be industrious, inventive, creative, productive or even open to freedom.  That is patently absurd.  Maybe not every nation can do it to the same extent as America because there are other factors like population, demographics and natural resources that have an impact.  But improvement is possible everywhere and using a proven method - the American experiment way - is the surest approach known to achieve that.

Secondly, the notion of exporting the American method of prosperity disappearing in favor of importing all of the downtrodden is a sure fire way to snuff out the flame that is the American way.  Insolvency is the opposite of prosperity and supporting unfettered immigration is a sure fire way to ensure insolvency.  So those behind that approach are either gullible, or socialists wanting to end the American experiment almost as if it were some sort of revenge last strike of the Soviet Union.

The contrast of the two approaches is stark.  While exporting liberty and capitalism has no guarantee of success, at least not quickly, the inverse, importing the impoverished does come with a guarantee - of complete and total failure for America, and therefore those it's proponents are claiming to want to help.

Why the perversion happened is no longer of consequence except in that it needs to be reversed and in order to reverse it completely, we need to understand why and how the perversion of the idea of exporting the American approach to liberty and prosperity occurred.  This coming weekend my Saturday Learning Series will feature some thoughts on the motivations of the socialist mindset by Ayn Rand with respect to the socialist thinkers (as opposed to those fooled by the socialist lies).  It's not the whole answer, but it is a truly good jumping off point to try to understand how to combat the lies that Americans have been taught about their system, and themselves.