What we support and defend

[Sigaba]

Good input, but I find your own interpretations of history to be as off base as you believe mine to be.

Okay, then the next question to ask is: What are your sources and how do they fit in the ongoing historiographical debates?

As an example, the interpretation that slavery was "intentionally not debated, or even discussed" during the constitutional convention of 1787 has withered in the face of recent research by David Waldstreicher and George William Van Cleve (among others) who have demonstrated that, as ratified, the U.S. Constitution was a document that protected slave holders' interests. (FWIW, I never debate history with a QP without a few dozen bankers' boxes of books nearby and Google Desktop Search pointed at the 31k or so history-related files on my HDD. Sometimes, being an egghead has its advantages.)

As to peacetime armies, do you really think we needed a large army to impose our will on the people of the South?

It depends upon which people of the South matter. Those who wished to live by the rule of law or those who wished to supplant the rule of law with economic dominance, political exclusion, extralegal violence, and terror to advance notions of white supremacy. (Counterfactually speaking, where might America be today if the federal army had been used better during Reconstruction and the freedmen and their descendants had been allowed to integrate politically, economically, and legally into the mainstream of American society before the turn of the century? Would the First and Second Great Migrations have occurred? Would black Americans have left the Republican party? Would America have fought two world wars with segregated armies? Would Americans still be as focused on the politics of race and racial identity as they were during the 2008 national election cycle?)

As to wars, it is not who wins the first battles that matters, it is who wins the final battles. The American approach has served that end well without subjecting our populace to excessive burden of the wars of others.

I respectfully disagree with you on both of these points. For example, Central and Eastern Europe was a slaughterhouse in the last years of the Second World War in no small part because the Germans sought a racial war of annihilation.

As for your second point, the absence of a large enough standing professional army has proven remarkably disruptive to the way of life you want America to practice. The mobilization of American society for modern warfare and widespread use of propaganda stemmed from the need to raise, to equip, and to train an army of citizen soldiers during World War I.

Also I believe you confuse "Principles" and "Values." Principles are enduring and fundamental, but values evolve over time. We espoused principles, such as "all men are created equal" while clearly our values at the time were hardly equal, and certainly not fair. But they were in synch with the culture of the populace at that time.

I will accept your correction on the differentiation between principles and values. However, I respectfully reject your interpretation of the "culture of the populace at that time." That view is sustainable ONLY if one disregards significant cohorts who were systematically denied the opportunity to voice their views.

Much of our success is that we created a principle-based framework that allowed our values to evolve along with our cultural. But now [emphasis added] we seek to deny other cultures that same opportunity by pushing values designed for us upon cultures that are in a very different place in their own evolutionary journeys.

How is now any different from then?

I simply suggest that we are better served by holding ourselves to our espoused values better than we currently do, and save our evangelical efforts to simply promoting the much more universal principles we demanded for ourselves. Other cultures need time to evolve as well, and such evolution can not be forced by outsiders, but we can provide a better example (true leadership), and perhaps help hold off those who would work to prevent such evolution from being able to occur. In short, to help others to be more like themselves, rather than working to make them more like us.

I think a core difference between our viewpoints is that you see present day America's conduct in international affairs as markedly different from the best practices of a fixed interval in the past. By contrast, I am of the view that we're just living through another episode in an established narrative. That is, America has always struggled to balance its ideas with interests and has left a lot to be desired when it comes to matching ends to means.

I also think that debates over policy preferences should not be situated in historical interpretations of the early Republic. Saying we should adhere to our values is different than saying we should adhere to our values like we used to. That is, a 'more perfect union' lies in our future, not in our past.