The only idea left standing...

Victor Davis Hanson on western liberalism.

Global communications now reveal hourly to people abroad how much better life is in Europe than in the Middle East and Asia — and how in America, Australia and Britain the standard of living is even better than in most of Europe.

The removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and their replacement with democracies proved that the United States after 9/11 was neither weak nor cynical. In fact, it was the utopian United Nations, with its oil-for-food, snoozing in Darfur and scandals about peacekeepers, that proved corrupt and unreliable.

The mass mourning of the pope's death revealed a renewed desire for spirituality. Two billion in India and China quietly keep copying the West. Car bombs, fist-shaking mobs and beheadings dispel all the old romance about the Third-World postcolonial "other."

What are we left with then?

Democracy, open markets, personal freedom, individual rights, pride in national traditions, worry about big government — about what we see in the United States, Britain, Australia and their allies in Japan and the breakaway countries in Europe. Elections in Ethiopia, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine all point to a desire for more freedom from central state control.

Embers of communism, fascism, theocracy and socialism, of course, will always flare up should we become complacent or arrogant. Wounded beasts like Iran, North Korea and bin Laden are most dangerous before they expire. Expect discredited E.U. bureaucrats to conjure up the specter of the American bogeyman before they pension out.

Still, the racket and clamor from all these anti-democratic ideas in 2005 are not birth pangs, but the bitter death throes of those whose time is about past.