That Guy from "The Matrix?"

Brian Chapin forwarded this to me from his Realpolitik site.

Lee Harris has the answer to transnational progressivism. He calls it “Neo-Sovereignty,” and it’s certainly worth a look.

In neo-sovereignty, there would be a clearly and concisely defined threshold of violence below which the neo-sovereign power would pay no notice-and this threshold would be drawn precisely at weapons of mass destruction. Anything less than this would simply not be the responsibility of the neo-sovereign power-just as, in the USA, the Federal government does not concern itself with the implementation of the monopoly of force at the state and local levels. And what better choice could history have made than America, a country that has had more experience with the federal form of sovereignty than any other society in man’s history, and which is, in terms of the population, a representative micro-cosmism of the whole world. Then, too, there is the well-known American power to organize the unorganizable. We are simply the best at such things.

The main principle that neo-sovereignty simultaneously modifies and preserves is the right of unlimited self-determination by a nation state or by a people or by a sect. But this is not because this concept is being rejected out of hand-far from it. Rather it is because the advent of mass destruction technologies simply shattered the old concept of self-determination, in the same way that the consequence of pollution requires a radical readjustment of property rights, and a new and dialectically higher concept must be put in its place. And this is what neo-sovereignty achieves.

The essay is rather long, but no longer than it needs to be. Check it out.

That’s much heavier stuff than I usually post here on Fridays, which are usually limited to food, humor, and breasts. So I make it up to you by presenting Brian with the following suggestion: After an essay like that, you need to subtitle your blog, “Kicking Westphalia in the Groin since 2002.”