Swelling Ranks for ‘New Order of the Ages’

The “New Order of the Ages” began on July 4, 1776. That is the date imprinted on the book held by Lady Liberty, and on the Seal of the United States: MDCCLXXVI.

There are 166 nations in the world. Nearly 140, tyrannies of one kind or another, belong to “the Old Order.” So there are only a couple of dozen nations that rest on “the consent of the governed”; that retain the sovereignty of the people through regular elections; that recognize civil, political and property rights; that maintain the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers, and that offer institutional protections for rights of association and individual conscience.

All the genuine democracies have free-market economies. All respect rights of conscience and genuine spiritual pluralism. These are the nations in the vanguard of “the New Order.”

The United States is first among them, not only in representing the oldest written constitution among the nations but also in providing the main shield of power beneath which liberty is everywhere defended.

The “New Order of the Ages” represents an order of political economy that has three parts. Look at the Seal of the United States (on the back of a dollar bill). Above the Latin inscription Novus Ordo Seclorum (The New Order of the Ages) appears a three-sided pyramid. The three corners suggest the three systems of the New Order: a political system (democratic), an economic system (capitalist) and--at the top, symbolized by the eye of conscience, candor, Providence--a free moral-cultural system (pluralist). In short, three interpendent systems in “one nation, under God.”

The transcendence of conscience is protected. The sense of a common order, a common good, a common set of visible institutions is clearly established. Through these three independent, interdependent systems rights are protected.

Governments are established “to secure these rights.” Not to swallow them up, to oppress them or to control them, but to secure them. Government--in this New Order--is the servant of the people. Particular administrations come and go. It is the New Order that is deeply cherished.

This New Order sprang from new ideas, never achieved before in history. It was wrested into existence by blood and daring. It was launched by our forebears as an “experiment”--which, even in 1863, Abraham Lincoln described as a proposition that our people were “testing”--”whether a nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” Perhaps it can’t. It is still an “experiment.”

The 1980s have been especially promising for the New Order. The great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa writes that an unprecedented revolution has occurred in Latin America, not among the elites but among the ordinary people. On every occasion in which they have had a chance, the people of Latin America have chosen democracy. They have supported parties of the center-left or center-right, but in all cases democracies.

Democracy is on the march in Latin America: in Brazil and in Argentina, the largest nations of the continent, but also in Peru, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela; in El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras in Central America, and in virtually every nation of the Caribbean. The only major holdouts in all of Latin America are Chile, Paraguay, Cuba and Nicaragua.

The dictatorial practice of Chile and Paraguay contradicts the ideology that their peoples and institutions cherish. Only in Cuba and Nicaragua are democratic liberties ideologically scorned as “bourgeois liberties.” Only Cuban and Nicaraguan elites cherish ideologies hostile to democratic ideals.

In Asia, the largest of all democracies, India, along with Japan, still blazes a trail, and the Philippines has inspired new hopes in democrats elsewhere. Several East Asian countries have proved to be far more advanced than the nations of Latin America in generating economic liberties and astounding economic growth. But they are less advanced than Latin America in their commitment to democracy.

The Reagan Administration has accumulated many faults during the seven years in which it has led our celebrations of July 4, MDCCLXXVI. To its credit, though, it has presided over one of the greatest expansions in the number of democracies in human history: nearly a dozen since 1981.

Let us hope that during the next seven years at least an equal number of the peoples of the Earth enter the New Order as during the past seven years.