OTHER COMMENTARY / EXCERPTS : Selling the Human Spirit Short
One of the side benefits of democracy’s rolling resurgence--and now even in Nicaragua!--is that it leaves almost everyone, right or left, stumped for an explanation. And therefore in a posture of unprecedented humility.
Not that we wouldn’t like to take credit for foreseeing all this, but who really did? In Nicaragua, the Rea gan-Casey policy assumed that Marxist dictators are never thrown out, except perhaps by force. That ancient Cold War superstition has now fallen by the boards from Managua to Bucharest.
Watching this unfold in so many places and forms, one is driven back to the suspicion that freedom is, after all, the natural state of man. To the degree that coercive political systems repress that inclination, citing this or that historical or materialist rationale, they merely postpone the day of reckoning. The totalitarian enterprise, after 70 high-riding years, has suddenly been exposed as the creaky sham it always was. The only puzzle, we can safely pronounce with flawless hindsight, is that the exposure took so long and that we were sometimes tempted to sell the human spirit short.
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