Happy Fourth!

Having moved back recently to my homeland of Singapore (with my beautiful American wife and son!), I look back with fond memories to my years in the U.S.  I am grateful to America for giving me the opportunity to study within her borders, to enjoy for ten years a little of the American dream, and of course, to be blessed by the friendships I’ve made.  America never ceases to amaze me.  Such an open, generous, gracious, and justice-hungry land.  I continue to stand with her.  I continue to believe that she is a force for good in this world.  To whom will the other justice-hungry people of the world look for aid?  To whom will nations flock to taste freedom and learn how to live as free people?  America is not the Kingdom of God.  There is much in her that is dark, twisted, misshapened, and evil.  But at the same time, something of our Lord’s kingdom shines in that land, a flicker of the realm of sunlight and justice to come.  I hope that America never loses its sense of purpose.  She was made to set people free.  She was made for justice and liberty for all.

Not Fundamentally a Secular Country

“Some people cite the absence of religious language in the Constitution and the provisions of the First Amendment as evidence that America is fundamentally a secular country.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  At the end of the eighteenth century, religious establishments existed throughout European countries and in several American states.  State control of the church was a key element of state power, and the established church, in turn, provided legitimacy to the state.  The framers of the American Constitution prohibited an established national church in order to limit the power of government and to protect and strengthen religion.  The ’separation of church and state’ is the corollary to the identity of religion and society.  Its purpose, as William McLoughlin has said, was not to establish freedom from religion but to establish freedom for religion.”  – Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?, p.85.

On America’s Core Culture

“America’s core culture has been and, at the moment, is still primarily the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded American society.  The central elements of that culture can be defined in a variety of ways but include the Christian religion, Protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the English lanugage, British traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music.  Out of this culture the settlers developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the American Creed with its principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property.” — Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?, p.41

Twelve Reasons to Love the U.S.A., III

“3.  No other country has done a better job of establishing equal rights for all citizens.  Certainly there have been times when the United States has fallen tragically short of its founding principles.  But especially in recent decades, no country has worked harder to eliminate discrimination and protect the rights of minorities.   There are plenty of nations where people’s ethnicity, religion, or gender define them as second-class citizens.  In contrast, America has been a pioneer in striving toward the ideal that all are created equal.” — William J. Bennett, The American Patriot’s Almanac, p.34

Twelve Reasons to Love the U.S.A., II

“2.  America really is the land of the free.  There are large parts of the world where people can’t say what they think, learn what they’d like, or even dress the way they want.  There are places where people spend years in jail or disappear if they question their rulers.  Less than half of the world’s population lives in countries where people are truly free.  In this nation, as George Washington put it, the love of liberty is interwoven with every ligament of American hearts.” — William J. Bennett, The American Patriot’s Almanac, p.33.

Twelve Reasons to Love the U.S.A., I

“1.  The United States was the first nation in history created out of the belief that people should govern themselves.  As James Madison said, this country’s birth was ‘a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.’  The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written national constitution in operation.  It has been a model for country after country as democracy has spread across the continents.” — William J. Bennett, The American Patriot’s Almanac, p.33.

Not an Empire

“This argument that America is already an empire is deeply flawed.  For an empire to exist, you need both rulers and the ruled.  The American political system is inherently incapable of running an empire.  No empire, not even the relatively benign British Empire, was established without a heavy degree of brutality at the point of colonizing.  Most people do not like to be ruled by others.  They have to be cowed into submission.  The recent painful American experience in Iraq only reinforces this point.  With all the military power in the world, America appears incapable of subjugating one medium-sized country in the Middle East because it is incapable of administering the kind of brutal suppression the British applied when they conquered Iraq in 1917.  All it takes is for one story of sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners to surface.  It becomes front-page news.  The American defense secretaryand American generals have to spend time defending the behavior of their soldiers and consequently further restrain them.  In the good old days of empire, the generals who found innovative ways of subduing the natives by depriving them of their dignity and pride would have been rewarded, not punished.  The term ‘benign empire’ is an oxymoron.  It will be immensely difficult for America to become a true empire.” — Kishore Mahbubani, Beyond the Age of Innocence, p.10.

What is Democracy?

In his book, The Spirit of Democracy, Larry Diamond takes on this question.  He says that democracy can be defined in two ways–one thin and the other thick.  The thin or minimal definition states that a democracy exists in a country when political decisions are made by means of regular, “free and fair” elections.  But if you want to go with the thick or maximal definition, a system is not a real democracy unless it has the following attributes:

(1) “Substantial individual freedom of belief, opinion, discussion, speech, publication, broadcast, assembly, demonstration, petition, and (why not)the Internet.”
(2) “Freedom of ethnic, religious, racial, and other minority groups (as well as historically excluded majorities) to practice their religion and culture and to participate equally in political and social life.”
(3) “The right of all adult citizens to vote and to run for office (if they meet certain minimum age and competency requirements).”
(4) “Genuine openness and competition in the electoral arena, enabling any group that adheres to constitutional principles to form a party and contest for office.”
(5) “Legal equality of all citizens under a rule of law, in which the laws are ‘clear, publicly known, universal, stable, and nonretroactive.’”
(6) “An independent judiciary to neutrally and consistently apply the law and protect individual and group rights.”
(7) “Thus, due process of law and freedom of individuals from torture, terror, and justified detention, exile, or interference in their personal lives–by the state or nonstate actors.”
(8 ) “Institutional checks on the power of elected officials, by an independent legislature, court system, and other autonomous agencies.”
(9) “Real pluralism in sources of information and forms of organization independent of the state; and thus, a vibrant ‘civil society.’”
(10) “Control over the military and state security apparatus by civilians who are ultimately accountable to the people through elections.”

In view of these ten points, Diamond says that we should aspire to a fuller manifestation of democracy.  When these ten factors exist, “we can call a system a liberal democracy.  To the extent that these are greatly diminished, democracy–if it exists at all–is illiberal.”  But if “there are regular, multiparty elections and other formal institutions of democracy like a national assembly, court system, constitution, and so on, but the people are not able to vote their leaders out of power because the system is, in effect, rigged, then the country has what I call pseudodemocracy” (p.23).