The Democracts in the USA have had to deal with the problem that the President's cabinet is the most diverse ever. Since diversity that been a Democrat selling point for decades, this has been extremely troublesome for them. If the Democrats cannot continue to sell themselves as the party minorities can vote for to get their place at the trough of government spending, then they may never be a majority party again.

Recently we've been treated to the spectacle of old WASP-ish Democrat politicos trying to demonize the new secretery of state. Nothing brings forth the histrionics more than a member of the flagship minority refusing to stay on the Democrat plantation. As part of the concerted attack on Condaleeza Rice, we find one of the most bizarre uses of a philsopher in the media, when the New Republic accused Ms. Rice of being a Hegelian.

The future Secretary of State was indulging an understanding of politics favored by advocates of a Hegelian view of history--most of whom have, in the last century, been communists. In his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that history was a slaughter bench on which the happiness of individuals was sacrificed. (He also claimed that the course of history comprised the teleological unfolding of God's plan on earth at whose endpoint all human beings would be free, an idea that also appears to have some supporters in Washington.) The achievement of freedom, or in the case of the communists, the classless society, justified the sacrifices on the path to its perfection--as if such perfection could not, in the end, have come about without those sacrifices. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II, communist apologists, including sophisticated French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the victory of 1945 either justified or sent into oblivion the horrors and crimes of the Stalin years.

Leaving aside the matter that this is a problematic summation of Hegel (Start with folding "God's plan" into the fact Hegel was an atheust) and that it was the left that bent over backwards to rationalize communist tyranny, and continues to do so. All this came about because Ms. Rice said at her confirmation hearing:

I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment but in how it all adds up. And that's just strongly the way I feel about big historical changes.

So, to recap, because she believes historical events should judged by their consequences, and not necessarily by the decisions forced on individuals by events, then, according to the New Republic, she must be a Hegelian/Marxist/Stalinist?

Under any circumstances, we would deserve a Secretary of State who rejects this cynical doctrine that is fit for communism but not for a liberal democracy. But Rice's views are particularly problematic now. How can our diplomats win a war of ideas against Muslim totalitarianism when their boss flirts with a view of history that, for decades, was used to rationalize the worst injustices of totalitarian regimes? Hegel and the Hegelians of the twentieth century were wrong.

The administration didn't mention Hegel, instead the New Republic cynically conjured him up. Certainly the American voter deserves an opposition party that can engage in real criticism of the administration. Instead they get contrived fantasies imagining that the administration that aggressively replaces fascist regimes with democracy, is, in effect, totalitarian.
  ¶ 6:49 AM