Chosen People?

 

Prolific author Robert Kagan’s latest elevation of Americans to God’s new chosen people leaps from the 688 pages of his new book, The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941.

Kagan, like hundreds of millions of other Americans, has deluded himself into believing that we are a chosen, exceptional people tasked by God to expand good in the world and to contract evil – by force of arms if necessary. We will succeed if we only try hard enough.

How Empires Die

Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana captured the essence of Kagan’s thinking about the United States as a white knight in a Jan. 9, 1900, speech defending the American conquest of the Philippines:

“God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”

Senator Beveridge’s chosen people orthodoxies, echoed by Kagan albeit in lower octaves, remains ascendent in contemporary America. In President George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, for example, bugled, “The great objective of ending tyranny [in the world] is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.”

All Empires, including the American strain, die from an insatiable craving for power, like Napoleon’s fatal blunder in marching to Moscow in winter and torching the city. The epitaphs of Empires are alike: “Here lies a chosen people.” 

 

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