FREEDOM VS. SECURITY

A Clash of Personal Freedom and Common Good (Ronald Brownstein, May 5, 2003, LA Times)

[E]urope strikes a very different balance than the United States between individual freedom and the common good. In their domestic politics, Europeans have been more willing than Americans to accept limits on their individual choices to build a stronger common community. In direct extension, they are now more willing than President Bush to accept limits on national sovereignty to create a more cohesive international community.

The contrast is most vivid in the role of government. Europeans accept a welfare state that erects much greater barriers to the individual accumulation of wealth--through much higher top tax rates--but provides for a much more comprehensive social safety net than in America, through universal health care and generous subsidies for the unemployed. [...]

Yet this core philosophy seems the real source of the European conflict with Bush. At home and abroad, Bush's priority is the opposite: He consistently aims to reduce constraints on individual choice, even when that weakens collective institutions.

Bush's tax cuts, for instance, put more income back in individual pockets, but at the price of eviscerating government revenues that support activities society can undertake only collectively--from providing a social safety net to building roads and schools.

On Social Security and Medicare, Bush's vision is to give individuals increased choice--at the price of almost certainly diminishing the universal benefit guaranteed to all.

In health care, Bush strikes a similar balance. [...]

This, more than the imbalance of military power, may be the real difference between the sensitivities of Europe and the United States. In Europe, the dominant opinion sees a value in strengthening collective institutions--domestically and internationally--even when that constrains individual choices.

No U.S. president would strike the balance as far toward the collective as Europe; it's not in America's genes. But in his domestic and foreign policies, Bush seems especially distant from the European model; in many of his actions--from his emphasis on tax cuts to his rejection of a meaningful U.N. role even in postwar Iraq--he seems actively hostile to it.

After the war, Bush and European leaders may talk of reconciling. But the chasm between them--less on the use of force than on the value of collective action--virtually guarantees more storms across the Atlantic.

There is, of course, one flaw to Mr. Brownstein's analysis--which is correct as regards the Europpean urge to security vs. the American yen for freedom--and that is the nature of the collective institutions he's talking about. George Bush, and conservatism generally, do support collective institutions--private, community, religious institutions. The Europeans, and the Left, on the other hand, favor government institutions. That ours is the superior system was recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville one hundred and sevety years ago. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2003 11:03 PM