(via Instapundit) Kenneth Silber has an article in TCS titled When Ideologies Bleed.  A few folks who read my previous posts on Romanticism & Power pointed at this article asking if Silber's view contradicted mine.    Silber writes:

Political ideologies can be divided, roughly, between those that believe "might makes right" and those that do not. Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism all were in the former category; each extolled its own military prowess and saw it as an indicator of racial or national superiority. Hence, losing World War II took away not only the institutions and resources of these might-makes-right ideologies but also their intellectual legitimacy. Their claims to superior power were refuted by Soviet tanks in Berlin, American planes over Japan, and so on.

The flip slide of ideologies that validate themselves via possession of power is that they crumble when their bluff is truly called in:

But the vulnerability of might-makes-right ideologies is that they have nothing to say when it turns out that they are not as mighty as their enemies. Saddam has no better claim than Hitler to be a champion of the oppressed or a defender of non-martial virtues. Osama's pretensions to religious purity make him a less clear-cut case, but he too is bound by an ideology that invites contempt upon displaying its own military weakness. Might-makes-right ideologies can be quite powerful and frightening—until they lose.

Well, given how many bits I've consumed discussing Power and Rightness, this seems like an interesting question.    For me, there are a couple core issues here:

• American Liberal Democracy + Capitalism wasn't initially formulated on a pursuit of Power;  it was instead formulated around Freedom.    It turns out that Freedom has led to massive productivity which in turn has provided us with "accidental power".    As the most free nation (along with several other, critical advantages like mass, geographic isolation, etc.) we've become the most powerful.   However, the American conception of Power isn't classically imperial in the sense of the Nazi's, Baathists, Stalinists, or Bushido, it's more of a measured response oriented towards maximizing American freedoms.   Freedom of the seas isn't pursued to rule colonies, it's there to maximize causeways for container ships
• TODAY, however, I do think that American notion of power is susceptible to paralysis if faced with an effective challenge.   The Post-Vietnam funk the entire country went through is a perfect example of this.   However, it didn't call into question the legitimacy of the entire American experiment (for most folks at least;   there are a lot of Vidal / Chomsky-insipired freaks who do call the whole darn plan into question).   For most folks, Vietnam was a sideshow and they spent most of their days/nights caught up in rapacious consumerism and worrying about their mortgages.  The crisis of confidence was nowhere near as deep as the comparative post-WWII German or Japanese ones.