Humanity at the Crossroads: The Future Will Be Leftist, Islamist, or American
THERE ARE THREE IDEOLOGIES competing for the allegiance of mankind. This competition shapes much of the present world, and the outcome will shape humanity’s future.
They are Islamist, Leftist, and American.
“Islamist” does not refer to the 1.3 billion people around the world who identify as Muslims. I am referring to those within the Muslim world who wish to see as much of the world as possible governed by Sharia, Islamic law. The word Islam means “submission” (to Allah), and that submission is manifested by adherence to Islamic law in a state that is governed by Sharia and whose leaders are Muslim clerics (though, strictly speaking, there are no clergy in Islam).
“Left” refers to the values associated with the Western welfare state, secularism, and the vast array of attitudes and positions identified as Left from Karl Marx to contemporary socialist democrat parties and today’s Democratic Party in the United States. Identifying Leftist values and explaining why people adopt them is far more difficult than identifying and explaining American values or Islam and its values. That is one reason more space is devoted in this book to the Left than to Islam or Americanism.
American values, or Americanism, refers to what I call the “American Trinity”: “Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”), the three values that appear on all American coins.
“Liberty” represents personal freedom, which according to Americanism is dependent upon small government, a free economy, and a God-based (which until now has meant a Judeo-Christian) society.
“In God We Trust” represents a society that regards its liberty, its human rights, and its moral values as ultimately emanating from God. It was axiomatic to those who founded America—including the so-called deists Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—that America would fail if it ever became godless.
“E Pluribus Unum” originally meant out of thirteen colonies one nation, but came to represent the American value of a society based on neither ethnicity nor race. In effect, as many of the American Founders themselves said, America is producing something new, people defined by an (American) identity that transcends blood, ethnicity, nationality, class, and race (though the latter took much longer to transcend). Obviously, Americans did not always live up to this or any of its noblest values. This proves that Americans are flawed, not that American values are not better than other value systems. If one judges values by their fruit, Americans, along with their values, will come out ahead. As we shall see, Americans have done more good for more people than any other society in history.
There Are Good People in Each Group
IT IS VITAL TO RECOGNIZE that there are good people who adhere to all three ideologies. There are good people who advocate Leftist values, there are good people who practice fundamentalist Islam, and there are good people who adhere to American values. There are also bad individuals within each group.
This is critical to note because my advocacy of Americanism as opposed to Islam or Leftism is not an attack on all people who adhere to Leftism or Islam. Nor is it a claim that all those who espouse American values are good people.
Nevertheless the existence of both good and bad people within each group says little about the ideologies of each group. There were surely many good people who believed in Zeus. But it would be very difficult to argue plausibly that belief in Zeus caused their goodness, or that Zeus-belief is the best ideology for creating a good society.
The question, therefore, is not whether there are good Leftists and good believing Muslims as well as good Americans; it is which of the three ideologies is more likely to produce better people and a better society.
The Three Ideologies Are Incompatible
THE THREE IDEOLOGIES are not compatible. This does not mean that a Leftist or a practicing Muslim cannot be a good American citizen, let alone a good person. Though it sounds paradoxical, there are many good and loyal American citizens who hold values that are not American. That one’s values may be in conflict with American values does not make the holder of those values a bad or unpatriotic American. There are many Americans who have held Leftist values who have risked or given their lives fighting for America. That is why it would take a deliberate mischaracterization of this book to claim that I read American Muslims (the great majority of whom, in any case, are not Islamists) or American Leftists out of the American nation, or that I claim that they are un-American, or disloyal to America, or do not love America. I neither imply nor believe any of those things.
Nevertheless, the fact is that the three ideologies are incompatible. Any one of them succeeds at the expense of the other two. All Islamists know this, and many Leftists know this, but most of those holding American values do not. This book explains why they are incompatible, but I will cite some examples here. The American value of “Liberty” is at odds with a Sharia-based society and with the Leftist commitment to material equality; “E Pluribus Unum” is at odds with the Leftist commitment to multiculturalism; and “In God We Trust” conflicts with both the Leftist commitment to secularism and the Islamic ideal of a Sharia-based state (since the God in “In God We Trust” does not want a theocracy).
Of the Three, Only Americans Do Not Proselytize
TWO OF THE THREE IDEOLOGIES proselytize; one does not. Faithful Muslims and Leftists vigorously proselytize; adherents to American values once did but rarely do today. The major reason for this is that while most Leftists and Muslims know what they believe in, most Americans have forgotten or never learned what is distinctive about American values. And you cannot advocate what you cannot articulate.
One Is Being Promoted Violently
IT IS A FUNDAMENTAL tenet of Islam that all of mankind should be Muslim.
This, in and of itself, is not necessarily troubling. After all, most Christians would like the whole world to be Christian; most Leftists want the whole world to adhere to Leftist values; and I, among others, would like the whole world to adopt American values (which, it should be noted, allow, even encourage, people to keep their religious, ethnic, and cultural identities).
What is troubling in the Muslim case is that more than a few Muslims are prepared to spread Islam violently. Polls repeatedly indicate that at least 10 percent of Muslims support Islamic terror. That equals about 130 million people. And that number does not include those Muslims who, though not necessarily prepared to support terror, would nevertheless support the use of force to spread Islam. Historically, most countries that became Muslim did so via the sword.
Concerning contemporary Muslim violence, about one million black Sudanese Muslims and non-Muslims have been killed by Sudan’s Arab Islamist regime in large measure because of their race and/or because they have resisted the violent imposition of Islam. The latter is the primary reason for Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria as well: Christians there have resisted the violent imposition of Islam. And this is a major reason for Islamic terror—to enable Islamist groups to gain control of a terrorized society, such as Afghanistan, or to weaken countries, particularly the United States and Israel, that stand in the way of the spread of Islam.
Nor is the individual Islamist terrorist the primary problem. Islamist regimes are. The goal of Iran has been clearly enunciated by its Islamist leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” Ahmadinejad asked at “The World Without Zionism” Tehran conference in 2005. “You had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved,” adding that Iran has a “war preparation plan [for] the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.”1
That Muslims who push Islam through violence are in the minority of Muslims is true. That they may even be opposed (though almost always silently) by the majority of Muslims may also be true. But neither presumption negates the fact that Islam is, in some significant instances, being spread through violence.
Leftism as a Religion
MOST PEOPLE DO NOT REGARD Leftism as analogous to Christianity or Islam. They do not see it as the secular religion or as the all-embracing ideology that it is. Yet Leftism is not only a secular form of religion; in our time it is much more vigorous in its proselytizing than Christianity. In the Western world, there are many more organizations promoting Leftism than Christianity. Western readers of this book are more likely to have been asked to sign a petition for a Leftist cause than for a Christian one, and more likely to have been asked to join a Leftist cause than to embrace Jesus Christ. And, of course, students throughout the Western world are taught Leftist, not Christian, beliefs and values in their high schools and universities.
Most adherents to Leftist values fervently seek to spread Leftism. This is not some conspiracy, secret or otherwise; nor is it an indictment. Indeed, few Leftists would deny it. Wherever the Left exists, it seeks power for its adherents and for its ideas.
And it has been wildly successful. Its values and worldview have so taken over the non-Muslim world (not only the Western world) that the Leftist worldview is considered by many to be the one normal way to view the world.
This last point is vital. For the majority of people in the West, the Left’s view of life is not considered only the Left’s view, but in fact the only legitimate view of life. That is why it is so difficult for most people, including many who consider themselves Leftists, to acknowledge that Western news media and Western educational institutions are overwhelmingly Leftist. They just seem, well…normal.
Yet Leftism dominates just about every university in the non-Muslim world and just about every news source in the world—with the important exceptions of American conservative talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page (not news pages), conservative websites, one cable news network in America, and a handful of newspapers and magazines in the English-speaking world. Few of these Leftist universities or media call themselves liberal, let alone Leftist.
There are essentially no differences in outlook among the world’s leading newspapers and electronic news media. If you read Le Monde, France’s most prestigious newspaper, you have essentially read the New York Times in French, and vice versa. In terms of values, the editors of the New York Times have everything in common with the editors of Le Monde and little in common with at least half their fellow Americans. The editors of the Los Angeles Times would feel more comfortable at a meeting in Paris, where they had to converse with the editors of France’s leading newspapers using translators, than at a meeting of the Rotary or Kiwanis clubs of Los Angeles.
Most of all, Leftism is a religion because those who believe in its tenets often do so as fervently as religious Jews, Muslims, and Christians believe in their tenets. The Left believes in the welfare state with the same passion that a Muslim believes he should fast during Ramadan. A Leftist believes in the moral virtue of expanded government as deeply as a religious Christian believes in the moral virtue of stopping abortion. Western European Leftists and their American (and Canadian and Latin American) supporters are as passionate about secularism, economic equality, and the welfare state as believing Muslims are about Muhammad, the Koran, and Islam. And they want Leftist values to dominate the world as much as orthodox Muslims want Islam to.
That is religion.
America Is the Major Impediment to Leftist Success
BECAUSE THE LEFT’S WORLDVIEW is so different from the American worldview and because only America seems to stand in the way of the Left’s conquering of the non-Muslim mind, the worldwide Left is anti-American. America represents the last great holdout against Leftism in the non-Muslim world. In this sense, America represents the same thing to the Leftist as it does to the Islamist: the greatest barrier to its success. Islam and the Left are ideological enemies, but as long as America is strong and neither Muslim nor Leftist, both fundamentalist Islam and the Left are allied in one way—anti-Americanism.
That is why the Left around the world runs interference on behalf of Islamists. Criticism of Islam or Muslims, no matter how nuanced or free of malice, is attacked by the Left as “Islamophobic.” Sometimes the Left is so vigorous in its defense of Muslims that it acts more “Catholic than the pope.” This is what happened during the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy in 2010. The majority of Americans supported objections expressed by many relatives of those murdered on 9/11 to the building of a hundred-million-dollar mosque and Islamic center two blocks from the World Trade Center, where thousands of Americans had been murdered by Muslims in the name Islam. It was the Left, much more than Muslims, that excoriated the opponents: Around the world some leading Muslim authorities actually sided with the American objectors.
The Left understands on a visceral, if not always fully conscious, level that a strong and self-confident America is a threat to its ascendancy. Though a vigorous Islam is no friend of the Left, the Left (correctly) feels much more threatened at this time by Americanism than by Islamism.
Since 1980, the largest demonstrations in Western Europe—always involving people on the Left and/or led by groups on the Left—have often been against America, and, not coincidentally, have taken place when the American president was a conservative (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush). It is difficult to cite a single Leftist demonstration against any of the worst evils since World War II. Why? Because all those evils were committed by Leftist and Islamist regimes or groups, not by America.
Nor have Leftist peace activists demonstrated in any great numbers against war. It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore “world opinion,” which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.
Leftist university professors in Western Europe and the United States have also been agitated about one other country’s wars—Israel’s. Hence the numerous attempts by Leftist professors at Western universities to boycott Israeli professors and universities. But, of course, Chinese professors and universities are not only exempt from boycotts; they are enthusiastically sought after despite the lack of elementary freedoms in China, the Chinese government’s incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the decimation of much of Tibetan culture, and the increasing Chinese occupation of that ancient country.
Impediments to the Spreading of American Ideals
UNLIKE LEFTISM AND ISLAM, there are serious impediments to spreading American values.
First, while the other two ideologies—Islam and socialism/secularism—dominate many countries, the third ideology only dominates one: America. There is no other country that claims to be Judeo-Christian and has such strong support for free markets and small government.2 Therefore, while both militant Muslims and Leftists have a great number of supporters around the world, the American value system has few. That is why America goes it alone—with the partial exceptions of Israel, Britain, Canada, and Australia (especially when those countries have conservative governments).
Second, neither Judeo-Christian nor individual liberty nor free market values are secure in America. Many Americans, including most members of America’s intellectual class, are as hostile to Judeo-Christian and other conservative values as European socialists are.
Third, almost no one is teaching the next generation of Americans what constitutes the American value system, let alone what is superior, or even simply unique, about it. American children are overwhelmingly educated by people who believe in European, not American, values.
In sum, since no other culture or society is offering an ideology that can be embraced by all the world’s countries, the competition is among the Leftist, the Islamist, and the American.
The American way can only prevail if Americans believe in it. That is why, as important as the military battles against militant Islam and militant Leftism (Communism) have been, the most important battle is the ideological one within America. But with America’s universities, labor unions, mainstream news media, entertainment media, and one of its two major parties ideologically aligned with European socialist values, and with big businesses frequently aligning themselves with the cultural Left, the battle within America itself for America’s unique values is far from won.* And given that only America offers a viable alternative to both militant Islam and secularism-socialism, if American values do not prevail in America, humanity has a dark future.
The purpose of this book, therefore, is to explain American, Leftist, and Islamic values. If the explanations are convincing, the reader will understand why the world’s hope lies with the American value system.
Is There a Fourth—the Chinese—Alternative?
IN 2010, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:
[S]peaking of phrases I’ve never heard here before, another goes like this: “Is the ‘Beijing Consensus’ replacing the ‘Washington Consensus’?” Washington Consensus is a term coined after the cold war for the free-market, pro-trade and globalization policies promoted by America. As Katrin Bennhold reported in the International Herald Tribune this week, developing countries everywhere are looking “for a recipe for faster growth and greater stability than that offered by the now tattered ‘Washington Consensus’ of open markets, floating currencies and free elections.” And as they do, “there is growing talk about a ‘Beijing Consensus.’”
The Beijing Consensus, says Bennhold, is a “Confucian-Communist-Capitalist” hybrid under the umbrella of a one-party state, with a lot of government guidance, strictly controlled capital markets and an authoritarian decision-making process that is capable of making tough choices and long-term investments, without having to heed daily public polls.”3
Friedman and Bennhold are not alone among experts who contend that the Chinese model may prove appealing to various societies.
In the recent past, experts have predicted that any number of alternative political-economic models would surpass America. Many said that Japan’s government-business model—“Japan, Inc.”—was the future. Japan has been in recession for decades. The entire Left-wing world has pointed to the Western European welfare state as the only viable model of a humane and economically successful system. As this book goes to press, it is clear that the welfare state is economically (and for reasons explained in the section on Leftism, morally) unsustainable. And now, some see the Chinese model as overtaking the American way of life.
I do not. Either China will become a freer society or it, too, will fail. And along with liberty, it will still have to affirm values beyond material success in order to succeed as America has. Thus, I have not included the Chinese authoritarian-capitalism model as a fourth possibility for mankind because, among other factors, there is no ideology involved. Its appeal is largely restricted to would-be dictators. The Chinese model is based on the ability of a small group of people (the Chinese Communist Party in this case) to control a society. Confucianism, with its emphasis on stability and hierarchy, may play some role in the ability of many Chinese to give up most personal freedoms for economic gain and a largely conflict-free society. But the Chinese government does not offer Confucianism to its own people, let alone to others.
Having said this, if America were to weaken considerably—economically and militarily—dictatorships would most likely proliferate, and some of them would undoubtedly find the Chinese Communist model appealing.
But that, of course, only makes the case for America and its values all the more compelling.