WILSONIANISM FOR NON-RACISTS:

True Believers (Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, Spring 2006, Wilson Quarterly)

As the president who led the United States while it was becoming a world power, Wilson casts an especially long shadow. He learned from his father, a prominent Presbyterian minister, and his mother, whose father was also a Presbyterian minister, that he was one of God’s special people. This Presbyterian elect was predestined to achieve salvation in the next world and to show signs of that saved state in this world. Its responsibilities were apparent to Wilson. The Bible, he wrote, “reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral agent, responsible not to men, not even to those men whom he has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own conscience to his Lord and Maker.” Wilson believed that he was called to carry his private, saved state into his public, political life. His understanding of Christianity gave him a strong sense of selection, even a destiny he perceived as prophetic.

Imbibing the Social Gospel of the late 19th century, Wilson came to trust in the promise of redemption in politics, especially foreign policy. In 1911, a year before he won the White House, he declared that America was born a Christian nation “to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” The administrative hand of modern social science would bring about needed political reform at home and, eventually, abroad. In Wilson’s eyes, World War I was a crusade in which the New World would redeem the Old World, first in battle and then in the Covenant—a biblical word Wilson quite deliberately chose—of the League of Nations. While only the elect could be saved for eternity, he thought it his Christian duty to save the world temporally.

Though Bush has sometimes been compared to Wilson, the religious sentiments he expresses have a different ring. He appears to have rejected the patrician faith of his father in favor of that old-time religion, which is precisely what the Social Gospel meant to overcome by stripping away earlier Christianity’s concern with individual sin and traditional morality.

As integral as Bush’s faith is to his domestic agenda of compassionate conservatism, faith-based initiatives, and an ownership society, it is even more central to his foreign policy, and he has said as much in media interviews. As with Wilson, this influence has generally been misread—misunderestimated, to use the president’s own telling neologism.

When he first campaigned for the presidency, Bush argued that America had failed to articulate a coherent post–Cold War foreign policy; the humanitarian internationalism of the Clinton era had spread the United States too thin. Such views led some to say that Bush was a hard-eyed foreign-policy “realist” and others to call him a nationalist. What these arguments missed is that Bush, in fact, had a powerful worldview built on his evangelical beliefs that God is loving and compassionate, that every person is a child of God and thus endowed with equal dignity, that everyone should love his neighbor as himself, and that the hand of God is at work in good government. For Bush, the principles of freedom, democracy, and self-government should protect individuals, allowing them to enjoy their God-given freedom in this world, including the free will to strive for salvation in the next world.

Many of Bush’s subsequent public statements set forth this worldview. In his second inaugural address, which some regard as the speech that marks his “Wilsonization,” Bush said that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” and the rhetoric continued in that vein. “Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.” He concluded that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. . . . History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.” Bush aimed to link America’s first principles and most Americans’ faith in God to the nation’s purpose in the world. Had he been transformed into a Wilsonian idealist?

In Bush’s mind, he had not, in fact, changed—international circumstances had. “We have a place, all of us, in a long story,” he proclaimed in his first inaugural address, “a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, the story of a slaveholding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.” In that same speech, delivered the better part of a year before September 11, he also spoke of America remaining engaged in the world by history and by choice, “shaping a balance of power that favors freedom.” After the terrorist attacks, Bush depicted the new conflict as a battle between good and evil, memorably remarking at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, that “three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

In speeches and statements throughout his presidency, Bush has defined a relationship between freedom and peace that is distinctly un-Wilsonian. His 2005 State of the Union address encapsulates his reasoning: The peace that freedom-loving peoples seek will be achieved only by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder and tying U.S. efforts to specific regimes and allies, rather than to an international organization and collective security as Wilson did. “The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom,” he said, and then repeated the main policy goal of his second inaugural. “Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the ‘evil principle’ of democracy. And we’ve declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Bush has also been likened in some respects to Ronald Reagan. Think of the presidential rhetoric of the two—Reagan’s “evil empire” and Bush’s “axis of evil” immediately come to mind—or their status as political leaders with Western sensibilities (both cowboy and civilizational) who rejuvenated the Republican Party. When it comes to faith and foreign policy, however, it is more fruitful to compare the Methodist Republican Bush with the Baptist Democrat Harry Truman.

As it is for Bush, the touchstone for Truman was Jesus’ life and teachings. Before, during, and after his presidency, he frequently referred to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and he would trace the biblical connections between the Ten Commandments and the sermon, with special attention to Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Micah, and Joel. All of this led him to conclude that people should live by the Great Commandment as imparted by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “If you will read this tenth chapter of Luke,” said Truman, “you will find out exactly what a good neighbor means. It means to treat your neighbor as you yourself would like to be treated. Makes no difference whether he is of another race or another creed or another color. He is still your neighbor.” Truman thought that the restatement of the Great Commandment and Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan applied to both domestic and foreign policy, teachings that Bush has clearly internalized as well.

Woodrow Wilson may have been the only truly racist president we've had in the post-Civil War era, so it was only natural for him to toss his original demands for self-determination aside in favor of his quest for a transnational governing body. Both his racism and his faith in an elite bureaucracy are unAmerican.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 26, 2006 8:02 AM