Question (Moral) Authority (Updated)

Mark Kelly had an interesting take on a quote by Nancy Pelosi -

What intrigued me most … was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that America’s ability to lead the world depends on its morality, not military might. “We will begin to reassert that moral authority by attempting to override the president’s veto next week,” the AP quoted Pelosi as saying.

The Scripture does insist that we ought to trust God, not military might, for our security. I seriously doubt, however, that Pelosi came to her position by consulting the Bible.

Instead, she appeals to “moral authority.”

Moral authority? What “authority” do you suppose Pelosi refers to? A moral opinion she happens to hold? An ethical tradition of some society? The vote of a majority in some referendum? A law based on any of those things?

I could take the Speaker’s moralizing a lot more seriously if she could explain the foundation of her moral authority – how she knows what right and wrong are and why they are right and wrong.

Read the whole post because this is a digression from his point. But it’s something that just struck me – with so many people tossing the term “moral authority” around, why do so few of us ever question on what that authority is based?

Even if Ms. Pelosi doesn’t think much of America’s current quotient of moral authority, surely we have more in stock than repressive, Communist China. We must also be doing better – by anyone’s standards – than North Korea and Somalia. Yet somehow those nations haven’t voluntarily conformed to our political system.

I have a few questions for people who think America needs moral authority.

• What was the effect of the moral authority we evidently enjoyed before Bushitler started his illegal, warmongering, torturing regime?
• Exactly how many nations voluntarily changed their political systems to ones with greater freedom during the Clinton administration?
• Since we didn’t have enough moral authority to lead the world back then when Life Was Perfect, when will we? Or if we had enough then and were leading the world, where exactly did we lead them, since it obviously wasn’t to worldwide democracy and prosperity?

UPDATE: Engram is thinking along the same lines, with a great deal more about torture -

I have never encountered a liberal who speaks like this and who has also thought beyond the mere uttering of this thought (which sounds good but appears to lack substance). What’s the idea, exactly? That is, what does an enhanced “moral authority” buy us? Will the rest of the world suddenly join us in opposing Kyoto-like solutions to global warming? Will they help us to save the people of Iraq from the wolves of al Qaeda? Will they want to immigrate to the U.S. even more than they now want to do (God forbid)? Will they do even more business with us than they are already doing (with the weak dollar, they are already doing record amounts of that)? Will tourism in the U.S., which is now at record levels, increase even more? What, exactly, do we gain?

In truth, it seems to me that in order to regain our moral authority so that we can lead the world, then, in the eyes of Democrats, we have to stop leading and start following. That is, we have to ban all harsh interrogation methods, abolish the death penalty, sign the next version of the Kyoto Protocol, embrace the International Criminal Court, sacrifice the Iraqis by immediately withdrawing our troops, and on and on. From this perspective, there is apparently no difference between regaining our moral authority and adopting the liberal agenda (pretty much in its entirety). That being the case, Nancy Pelosi might have just as well had said “In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our adoption of exclusively liberal policies.”