Not philosophers (although I encountered it on a philosophy friend's FB page), but amusingly damning:
Power writes in her introduction that, “We make sense of our lives through stories.” It is a revealing moment. ...[N]ot all of the stories we tell ourselves are true, and in Power’s case the stories she tells herself and now retails to her readers more often than not are prophylactics against understanding. Repeating that the United States is the world’s greatest nation when it has the lowest social mobility of any developed country, or that it is a leader in human dignity when it has the highest incarceration rates in the world and is the only OECD country besides Japan and South Korea to have the death penalty, not to mention an undemocratic system for electing presidents and politics hopelessly corrupted by money—all phenomena that long predate Donald Trump’s presidency (Power belongs proudly to the “Trump is an aberration” school)—is absurd. And saying that America has nothing to apologize for is to enter the realm of fantasy....
Power’s good intentions are not at issue. But like so many well-meaning servants of the Pax Americana before her, Power profoundly misunderstands her own role. Cicero wrote of Cato that he “gives his opinion as if he were in Plato’s Republic, not in Romulus’ cesspool,” and that is Power’s error as well. For when she writes extensively about America’s successes and failures but never of America’s crimes and complicity in crimes, she is engaged in an exercise in idolatry, and idolatry of a particularly exasperating and mediocre kind: self-idolatry. Power is well aware of the dangers of imperial overreach, but she writes as though she remains insensible to the dangers of imperialism itself. This, it seems, is what passes for idealism in the Washington policy establishment these days.
Recent Comments