ABSTRACT
The desire of the new Jacobins to spread "democracy" has been illustrated and analyzed with considerable care. Neo-Jacobins like to cite the formula that democracies are never warlike, but sometimes democracies are precisely that. In 1914, for instance, all male electorates in Europe greeted what would become the First World War with great enthusiasm. The blending of democratism with the desire to turn the United States into a great missionary power dissolves the line between nationalism and universalistic ideology. The idea that lay implicit in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought—that the new virtue must sweep the world and form a single collective whole— has become central to the new Jacobinism. Max Lerner gave the idea explicit expression in 1988: American freedoms, he asserted, "are the freedoms for which the outside world yearns". The neo-Jacobin calls upon the United States to take charge of the world may have disastrous consequences, internationally and domestically.
