Maggie's Farm

A quote from Ledeen on War and Democracy at Pajamas, and man's endless capacity for evil:

The American Founders knew it: recognizing man’s innate capacity for evil, they designed a system of checks and balances to thwart the accumulation of power by any group, lest the entire enterprise fall into wicked hands.  They knew the battle for liberty would never end, Benjamin Franklin famously warned we would have to fight to keep our republic.

All of this wisdom has been dangerously undermined by the foolish notion that man is basically good, that all men are basically the same,  and that all we need do is to permit history to take its preordained course.  Are these not the tenets of contemporary education?  Are our children not forbidden to criticize “others,” whether of different pigmentation or religion?  Has debate on our university campuses not turned into the moral equivalent of the Inquisition?  And it rests on the sands of a demonstrably false vision of man.  We are not naturally inclined to do good.  Quite the contrary... 

Well, I might quibble with that. Mankind is naturally inclined to do both good and evil, but it is surely naive to expect morality in power politics.