RAGE AGAINST THE REGIME:

Resolves: What Lincoln Knew About War (Paul Berman, 02.21.03, The New Republic)

Today, we are living through not just a military crisis but something of a political crisis within the larger liberal democratic world, trans-Atlantically. Robert Kagan has written a subtle and brilliant book on this theme called Of Paradise and Power, and I don't want to try to characterize his whole complicated argument here. I wish only to point to Kagan's view that, in the United States, people tend to suppose that we inhabit a "Hobbesian" world filled with nasty and brutish types who need to be stoutly clubbed from time to time, whereas, in Western Europe, people tend to picture themselves inhabiting a "Kantian" world, in which lions and lambs lay down in perpetual peace according to international law or can be lured into doing so.

This idea seems to me almost entirely wrong. The modern European idea does not seem to me Kantian. It seems to me Tocquevillean. It is a liberal democratic idea of a sort that cannot conceive of wielding power. It assumes that liberal democracy can only follow the path of a Sweden or a Switzerland or a Florentine Republic--the liberal democracy of virtuous and admirable countries that cannot possibly defend themselves, except by being inoffensive. In the European idea, power is imperial or nothing--the power of brutal empires, such as the Europeans themselves used to administer. Kagan writes that Europe has chosen to emphasize a nonviolent approach to world events today because the Europeans do not enjoy an option of doing otherwise. But the opposite is true. The Europeans (as Kagan acknowledges in a somewhat contradictory remark), with their 400 million people and their $9 trillion economy, could make themselves extremely powerful. They do not choose to do so. It is because they wish to be liberal democrats. And liberal democracy, in their concept, is a compromise, a mediocrity. It is, by definition, a negotiation--a good thing, but, as Tocqueville took pains to show, not entirely a good thing. And, because the Europeans cannot conceive or accept the notion of liberal democracy as a revolutionary project for universal liberation, they cannot imagine how to be liberal democrats and wield power at the same time. They simply cannot imagine how an exercise of force might bring about political revolutions in remote corners of the world--cannot imagine this, even though the experience of their largest country, Germany, offers a superb and vivid example.

In the United States, on the other hand, a great many people--not everyone, but many--naturally assume that every country, all over the world, will eventually embrace liberal democracy. In American eyes, the revolutions of 1989 were, at bottom, not at all surprising--they were the kind of revolutions that Americans have spent 200 years impatiently expecting to see. And, if the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 have not yet spread to still further regions of the world--if liberal democracy has not yet swept the Arab world and sundry zones within the larger Muslim world--why, that is only a matter of time, and we Americans ought meanwhile to show a little solidarity and do what we can to help, as we have done so effectively on behalf of the benighted Europe of yore. This view of world affairs is not Hobbesian. But neither is it Tocquevillean. It is Lincolnian.

In one respect Kagan seems to me on the mark. His idea about Hobbesian Americans and Kantian Europeans does express the way in which two specific groups of people see the Atlantic divide. The first of those groups includes a great many Europeans who picture the United States as Hobbesian precisely because, like Tocqueville, they cannot imagine how a liberal democracy could wield power; and, since the United States does wield power, its behavior must owe to a nasty brutishness that is not at all liberal and democratic. (And, to be sure, sometimes they are right.) The second group of people who share Kagan's perspective are the American partisans of foreign policy "realism," whose own doctrinal principles insist on a variation of the old Symbolist slogan about "art for art's sake," except this time in a political version: power for power's sake. These people know perfectly well that liberal democratic motives have driven U.S. foreign policies in moments of the past and that liberal democratic motives still drive portions of U.S. policy; but they cannot really integrate these two insights--their belief in power for power's sake with their observation about the idealist impulses of some of their fellow citizens. And so, the realists bow piously toward the liberal democratic idea; and then, once the services have concluded, they go on prattling about power for power's sake.

And here we stumble on a peculiar tragedy of our present moment. The United States has come under military attack, requiring military responses. But, as in the Civil War, the revolutionary responses of liberal democratic ideals are likewise required, and not in a small degree. For the ultimate goal of our present war--the only possible goal--must be to persuade tens of millions of people around the world to give up their paranoid and apocalyptic doctrines about American conspiracies and crimes, to give up those ideas in favor of a lucid and tolerant willingness to accept the modern world with its complexities and advantages. The only war aim that will actually bring us safety is, in short, the spread of liberal outlooks to places that refuse any such views today. That is not a small goal, nor a goal to be achieved in two weeks, nor something to be won through mere military feats, though military feats cannot be avoided.

In each of the greatest crises of its past, the United States has known how to summon its most radical ideals and to express them in ever deeper versions to ourselves and to our enemies--as Lincoln did; as Woodrow Wilson did; as Franklin Roosevelt did two times over, first against the fascists and then, at the end of his life, in sketching a few preliminary notions for the impending cold war. But, on these themes, our present White House has turned out to be incoherent.

Here's Mr. Berman again, echoing George W. Bush's argument but insisting that Mr. Bush is unfit to make it. This seems a weird theme that's developing as the better Left realizes it shares some common causes with conservatives but resists accepting Mr. Bush's leadership. We'd just reiterate that the radical American ideal is nowhere being expressed better today than it is by the President, State of the Union (George W. Bush, 1/28/03):

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2003 10:34 PM