The imperial history of the United States, for dumbguys

If the Left are decadent, degenerate, and demonic, the Right are dumbguys. Even the alleged intellectuals of the Right -- and I could name names -- are mediocrities and worse, average and conventional, ignorant and unlearning, and wrong at least as often as right. The intellectual and cultural degradation of the Right in America today is in its way as destructive as the satanic Left.  

 

When the Right are right, they're right instinctually, like an animal, and when they're wrong there's no saving them, like an animal whose instincts compel it to dash out into the road before an onrushing truck. 

Among the ugly ignorance of the intellectual poseurs of the Right today is the thesis that America is founded in war against imperialism, as though the Americans of the 1770s had grown up out of the ground in Massachusetts or Virginia, then some faraway foreign king presumed to yoke them in service to the riches and glory of his alien empire, so they fought and won a war to cast off his wicked imperialism -- hoo boy.  

The fact of history is that we were the imperialists, the empire was us: Americans were colonists. And "The British" weren't some foreign occupying power: we were at least as British as the British. Our Revolutionary War was as the English Civil War in the century prior, war of the people against the Crown. 

The fact of history is that there is an America at all because for our fledgling first century and a half our mother country had the imperial power and reach to defend and sustain an Anglo-Saxon civilization in the wilderness of the New World. And after the founding of the republic we carried on colonizing, and colonized more territory in the name of the republic than in the time of the empire. 

Every man and his dog today would judge that America has been imperialist at least since 1945 and especially since 1990. But America has been imperialist from the first and all along. What is the settlement of more than half the continental United States with the attendant, innumerable Indian wars, if not imperialism?

  

What is the Monroe Doctrine, if not imperialism? For two centuries it has been the settled foreign policy of the United States, and it insists on an American monopoly of dominion over the whole of the Western Hemisphere: are we to conceive of that as some pristine Early Republic republicanism, and not the most grandiose imperialism?   

What are the Mexican-American War and Spanish-American War and the annexation of Texas, if not imperialism? What are Liberia, Alaska and Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam, even Cuba before communism, if not imperialism? What are the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone, if not imperialism? 

 

American Civilization reaches back now just over four centuries, and in that time America has never not been objectively imperialist. America has been imperialist from the first and all along. That there even is an America, is the product of imperialism. 

Empire is neither bad nor good, empire is a fact. Some empires do more help than hurt, and some more hurt than help, and generally empires are like the individuals who build and keep them, there's good in them and bad both. There've been empires since there've been societies with any organization to speak of. And empire is like war, it will be with us always. To declare against imperialism itself, or war itself, is about as sensible as declaring against the rising and setting of the sun or the turning of the seasons.