There is no legitimate universal right for the West to insist on the freedom to attack Mohammed or for Islam to demand universal obedience to its values

A very important real “universal” is the affirmation of its opposite: exclusiveness, the particular. This means that radical Islam does not have the universal right to impose its religion on the whole world, but then the West does not have the universal right to impose its ideas on free expression and democracy on the whole world either. There is no legitimate universal right for the West to insist on the freedom to attack Mohammed or for Islam to demand universal obedience to its values, that is totalitarianism.

The separation of powers and states is one of the beauties of the United States Constitution, which is one of the few healthy political universals blocking totalitarianism. This we have to return to---it is a highly civilized worldview related to natural human nature, which is universally kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

The separation of powers and states allows human nature to flourish, totalitarianism obviously does not, whether it derives from Western neoconservatism/neoliberalism or from radical Islam.

Realism also tells us that the separation of powers and states, which brings healthy variety, needs to be defended or it is lost.