The Eternal Latin American Crisis

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear realizes that ever since its “liberation” 160 years ago, Latin America has been in a perpetual state of turmoil that has prevented it from producing truly stable, free, and democratic governments. Except for Brazil, which enjoyed a highly successful period of monarchy between 1822 and 1889, the emerging independent nations of Latin America adopted versions of the United States Constitution and struggled to imitate the form of government exemplified by the American and French republics. The cult of the French Revolution was especially strong; many of the new states even included the Phrygian cap, symbol of the French Revolution, in their coats of arms.

But the cultural presuppositions that ensured the success of the presidential republic in the U.S. are noticeably absent in Latin America: in country after country, an American-styled constitution would barely have been adopted before it was undermined and perverted. Latin Americans have no understanding of compromise as the term is used by Anglo-Saxons. The Spanish word compromise means a fixed arrangement, a false cognate if ever there was one. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind deplores the absence of strong values in American higher education and, by extension, in American culture. There is no such absence in Latin America. But we must remember that a value can be either good or evil: there are not only the values of Aristotle, Pascal, and Solzhenitsyn, but also those of Marx, Hitler, and Mao.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear realizes that ever since its “liberation” 160 years ago, Latin America has been in a perpetual state of turmoil that has prevented it from producing truly stable, free, and democratic governments. Except for Brazil, which enjoyed a highly successful period of monarchy between 1822 and 1889, the emerging independent nations of Latin America adopted versions of the United States Constitution and struggled to imitate the form of government exemplified by the American and French republics. The cult of the French Revolution was especially strong; many of the new states even included the Phrygian cap, symbol of the French Revolution, in their coats of arms.

But the cultural presuppositions that ensured the success of the presidential republic in the U.S. are noticeably absent in Latin America: in country after country, an American-styled constitution would barely have been adopted before it was undermined and perverted. Latin Americans have no understanding of compromise as the term is used by Anglo-Saxons. The Spanish word compromise means a fixed arrangement, a false cognate if ever there was one. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind deplores the absence of strong values in American higher education and, by extension, in American culture. There is no such absence in Latin America. But we must remember that a value can be either good or evil: there are not only the values of Aristotle, Pascal, and Solzhenitsyn, but also those of Marx, Hitler, and Mao.