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An End to Ideology?
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18418 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
1,475 Words |
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Lee Congdon
Lee Congdon writes regularly on modern literature. He teaches
eastern European history at James Madison University. |
The Cold War is over, but we have still to see the end of ideology. To be sure, one would have to look long and hard to uncover a single person in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union who believes a word that Lenin uttered. But a slightly modified version of Leninism lives on in the Third World as anticolonialism or anti-Americanism. More to the point, Lenin was not the only exponent of ideological politics to appear on the world's stage during World War I. His contemporary, President of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson, evangelized for a rival creed: democracy and the self-determination of all peoples. That creed has proved to be more lasting than Leninism; indeed, it exercises greater influence today, in the United States and around the globe, than it did in Wilson's time. Even in China, where a homegrown variety of Marxism-Leninism has enjoyed unchallenged ideological hegemony for over forty years, millions worship the “goddess” of democracy.
The history
It is the same deity that the cerebral American president served before, during, and after he went to Paris to make peace and to create a League of Nations. “President Wilson was an idealist,” Harold Nicolson later remembered. During the long months of the Peace Conference, the English diplomat and historian became convinced that Wilson regarded himself “not as a world statesman, but as a prophet designated to bring light to a dark world. It may have been for this reason that he forgot all about the American constitution and Senator [Henry Cabot] Lodge.” Thanks to Lodge and other sworn enemies of Wilson's messianic internationalism, the United States remained outside the League.
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