PROVIDENCE OR PRUDENCE? (via Mike Daley):

A Lot of "Liberty," Not a Lot of "Prudence"?: President Bush and the Western Rhetorical Tradition (Terrence Moore, February 2005, Dialogues)

It is something of a paradox that a man who is regarded by many as our least articulate and least intellectual President in memory—the only President who speaks Spanish better than English, as Jay Leno would have it—has proven time and time again to be, except for President Reagan, our most rhetorical and, at times, our most profound President in half a century.

By rhetoric I mean not only the clever deployment of catchy words and phrases, the kind of fighting for soundbites of which we see so much during elections. Nor do I even mean the crafting of beautiful expressions that please the ear and tickle the fancy and yet do not say very much, the tradition of belles lettres that we inherit from the French. By rhetoric I mean the effective delivery of a profound truth whose moral imperative requires its audience to act. America’s rhetorical tradition, perhaps even more than its philosophical tradition, defines who we are as a people and a nation. This tradition defines our greatness and, at times, our fatal flaws.

As Americans, we have inherited our rhetorical tradition from two different sources, two cities that demand particular kinds of citizenship: Athens and Jerusalem. All great speeches or public utterances in American history have been inspired by one or both of these rhetorical traditions. President Bush’s Second Inaugural is arguably a great speech because he has combined these two traditions in order to define the American mission not only for his second term, but for this coming century. The question remains whether he has left unspoken a part of this tradition that would prevent us from a fatal overreaching. [...]

Prudence urges us to estimate our real power and to act accordingly. We know that the Revolutionaries, subsequently named the Founders, succeeded in their daring project. Ipso facto, they must have been prudent. Yet we are given no hard and fast rules for the exercise of prudence. When does prudence act as a cover for pusillanimity? When does caution really mean cowardice? And what is the appropriate rhetoric of prudence? Will not the speaker who urges careful deliberation or restraint not always appear weak and uninspiring next to the thoughtless advocate of daring and enterprise? Remember that the Athenians disregarded poor Nicias when he tried to dissuade them from undertaking the Sicilian expedition. He then tried to oppose Alcibiades again by proposing an enormous increase in the amount of men and ships the Athenians would send in hopes that this giant expense would scare them away from the idea. The Athenian people instead gloried in the size of the expedition, whose failure caused Athens ultimately to lose the war. The Athenians’ defeat flowed from their own hubris.

Once liberty is established in one nation, we might ask, what does the free nation owe to the universal cause of liberty? The success of the American Revolution owed in part to the help of the French. Do we owe similar help, whether monetary or military, to other oppressed peoples? Jefferson subsequently used an interesting phrase. He called America an "empire of liberty." Should we use our imperial might to harness, in Periclean terms, our adventurous spirit to force an entry "into every sea and into every land" and everywhere to leave behind "everlasting memorials of good done to our friends or suffering inflicted on our enemies," or rather to the enemies of freedom?

It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that all subsequent debates in American foreign policy have been set in terms of America’s helping the world to be free or exercising prudence in preserving her own self-interest and well-being. At times we have avoided "entangling alliances" as urged in Washington’s Farewell Address. At others we have sought to "make the world safe for democracy" in Wilson’s messianic rhetoric. We have drug our feet while fascist dictators have overrun Europe only to enter the fight later after millions have been killed. We have waged war in far-off lands, presumably for the cause of freedom, only to have our own people march in the streets and call our soldiers "baby-killers." At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the "last remaining super-power," not yet four years after the deadliest attack on our shores, where does our President say we find ourselves in the march of history? How does he use words to tell us who we are and what we must do in the world?

Now we turn to President Bush’s Second Inaugural. This speech has been watched, reprinted, and much quoted in the press, so I shall not rehearse the whole of it. Yet I do want to point out the extent to which it echoes some of the rhetorical themes and traditions we have been following. The President divides the world very sharply into both free and unfree (the political view) and good and evil (the religious view). Tyranny and evil threaten us, those on the side of freedom and good: "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat." Nonetheless, we can take comfort in the knowledge that "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and the tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom." Thus President Bush casts our situation as a perennial struggle between freedom and tyranny, good and evil, but elevates our side to a force of history whose purpose is bring hope and goodness into the world.

He then claims that we must not only recognize, must not only join, must not only lead this force of history because of the universal tendencies of our political and religious ideas, but because it is in our self-interest to do so: "We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America’s vital interests and deepest beliefs are now one." Thus, President Bush in a few sentences obliterates the old, international-relations distinction between the realists, who only pursue America’s interests abroad, and the idealists, who seek to remake the world according to American ideals of liberty.

There's something especially poetic in the way Dana Carvey's imitation of the elder Bush repeatedly employed the phrase: "Wouldn't be prudent."

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 16, 2005 6:34 AM