America seems to have come to a sad and dangerous point in its history.
What I mean by that is that in America, we seem to have lost a clear and even productive understanding of many of the ideals we once sought to base our society on.
This is bad enough. It has been this way for some time. But the truly dangerous part of this situation is that it seems that truly evil forces within our society have come to understand this fact, and have learned to how to manipulate us through the use of these perverted ideals.
In his recent piece at Opendemocracy, Anatol Lieven has an articulate treatment of this point.
Erosion
President Bush has opened his second presidential term with a sustained rhetorical effort to use the language of "freedom" as a way of reuniting the west under American leadership. His inaugural address at the start of his second presidential term on
20 January 2005 ostensibly made the spread of freedom and democracy the heart of America's political strategy in the "war on terror". His State of the Union
speech on 2 February continued the theme:
"The attack on freedom in our world has reaffirmed our confidence in freedom's power to change the world. We are all part of a great venture: to extend the promise of freedom in our country, to renew the values that sustain our liberty, and to spread the peace that freedom brings."
On the eve of his 21-24 February visit to Europe, his weekly radio talk declared:
"America and Europe are the pillars of the Free World...Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic understand that the hopes for peace in the world depend on the continued unity of free nations."
Now, in the major speech of his European tour - at Concert Noble, Brussels - President Bush has underlined the ideological importance of the theme of freedom to his political mission:
"This strategy is not American strategy, or European strategy, or Western strategy. Spreading liberty for the sake of peace is the cause of all mankind. This approach not only reduces a danger to free peoples; it honors the dignity of all peoples, by placing human rights and human freedom at the center of our agenda. And our alliance has the ability, and the duty, to tip the balance of history in favor of freedom."
As we all know, the President has taken his Pro-Democracy show on the road to Europe. This sort of rhetoric is, of course, very near and dear to the hearts of European Unionists. Indeed, much of the very basis of their grand project is predicated on the ideals the President is pushing. There is, however, a subtle distinction between how Bush and his EU counterparts handle this subject. Lieven writes:
All the same, a speech like Bush's inaugural address could only have been delivered in the United States. Blair may have said many of the same things, but he has accompanied them with proposals for concrete, verifiable action in key areas of world concern: climate change, mass misery and state collapse in parts of the global south and a real peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. The same tends to be true of European Union
rhetoric about spreading democracy.
Only in the US could "democracy" and "freedom" as such be advanced by a government not just as part of a non-military strategy but as the entire strategy and even as a way of avoiding doing some of the other things that Blair has called for. And above all, only in the US could a national leader identify the spread of democracy, and indeed ideal democracy itself, so absolutely with his own country and its power in the world. There is a nobility about this sentiment; but as Fareed Zakaria and Andrew Moravcsik argue, there is also a profoundly dangerous solipsism and arrogance.
Hypocrisy
What Lieven is getting at here is that there is a fundamental level of hypocrisy with in much of America's approach to foreign policy. And the truly sad part is that we, if we are aware of it at all, mostly don't understand why it exists. Zakara writes:
I often argue with an Indian businessman friend of mine that America is unfairly singled out for scrutiny abroad. "Why didn't anyone criticize the French or Chinese for their meager response to the tsunami?" I asked him recently. His response was simple. "America positions itself as the moral arbiter of the world, it pronounces on the virtues of all other regimes, it tells the rest of the world whether they are good or evil," he said. "No one else does that. America singles itself out. And so the gap between what it says and what it does is blindingly obvious--and for most of us, extremely annoying." That gap just grew a lot bigger.
While Bush says he is seeks the furtherance of democracy in the world, and the world applauds his idealism in return, there is little actual idealism at work here. What has truly occurred here is that the Bush administration, having lost most of its justifications for invading Iraq, was in desperate straights to find a new one. Doing that, however, required a wholly new foreign policy framework. Thus was born the Bush administration's adoption of Democratic Realism as its guiding principle: the idea that since democracies don't wage war on one another, a route to pursuing Realism in the world could be to cram Democracy down anyone's throat who gets in our way.
I'm not going to pull punches here. I'm not anti-American by any stretch of the imagination. I am anti-Republican. I sincerely believe that, though they may not be fully accountable for all the hypocrisy that exists in the American system, were it not for Conservatives, we would be far closer to having eliminating much of that hypocrisy. Lieven writes,
Indeed, much of the language about democratisation in America is not really about democratisation at all. It is about America itself, the nature of one powerful strand of American nationalism, and how the Bush administration has used that nationalism to strengthen its own position at home. Because of the power of this nationalism and the "American Creed" on which it is based (as I have called it in my
book America Right or Wrong: an anatomy of American nationalism), the rhetoric of spreading democracy and freedom has been all too successful in wrong-footing the Democratic party and in winning over some of their intellectual supporters to what is in effect a position of support for the
neo-conservative agenda.
Unfortunately, however, much of this rhetoric is completely irrelevant, in the short-to-medium term, to many of the challenges facing the middle east, and to the needs of the struggle against al-Qaida. Worse still, this whole democratisation strategy is being used, in some quarters at least, as a grand diversionary strategy to distract attention from what the US should be doing in other fields - but isn't.
Lieven's critique is of America as a whole, and he goes on to make some very salient and important points on this level. Still, I do not believe that everything here can be chalked up systemic contradictions. There is something very sinister about the way the Republican Party has leveraged the erosion of our country's ideals to serve their own purposes.
The American Legacy
The acknowledged influence of Israeli hardliner Natan Sharansky on Bush's "strategy" of democratisation should make it clear to everyone that, however noble its ideological and historical roots, American messianism - today, as in the Vietnam era - can take forms which are not only misguided but actively malignant. The contrast between Sharansky's own professed desire for Palestinian democracy and his utter contempt for the lives, property, wellbeing and indeed democratically-expressed views of the Palestinian people is evident: it was expressed most recently in his decision in 2004, as minister for Jerusalem, to allow Israeli authorities to confiscate Palestinian land by administrative decree.
Bush's reliance on Sharansky (whose book The Case for Democracy was one of the intellectual props of his inaugural speech), and the deep unwillingness even of the American liberal media to criticise the former Soviet dissident, demonstrate one facet of the Orwellian nature of the present US approach to democratisation and the war on terror. Not only is its language of democratisation accompanied by de facto support for a range of savagely authoritarian regimes, and its talk of the rule of law accompanied by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay; but key aspects of US strategy are based on an absolute and open contempt for the opinions of the great majority of ordinary Arabs and Muslims - in other words, the very people to whom the US administration professes to want to bring democracy!
This glaring contradiction is the product of an inevitable clash between American idealism and American Realpolitik. However, its roots also lie in a central feature of the messianic tradition in American civic nationalism. As reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of the Bush administration, the widespread American belief in America not as a democracy among others but as the very summit and model of democracy encourages contempt for the opinions of the rest of humanity - even when expressed by majorities in fellow democracies. The creation of a notion of "democracy" as a pure absolute discourages real study of all the conditions which are in fact needed for democracy to flourish.
This in turn encourages a belief that, in the words of the US general in Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket, "inside every gook there is an American waiting to get out"; in other words, that if you can get rid of a few Communist, Ba'athist or Iranian "bad guys", populations naturally will both adopt American-style democracy and capitalism and side with America geopolitically. And finally, the immense power in the American national discourse of words like "democracy" and "freedom" can lead to them being used in a way described acutely by WH Auden during the cold war:
"More deadly than the Idle Word is the use of words as Black Magic...For millions of people today, words like Communism, Capitalism, Imperialism, Peace, Freedom and Democracy have ceased to be words the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee reflex."
I have myself frequently observed how difficult it can be in the US to mount an argument that appears to criticise the universal, eternal and inevitable value of democracy, or to suggest that "freedom", far from being a natural absolute, has always been a complex, contingent, changing and contested term. In other words, these terms can be used, whether consciously or unconsciously, to shut down real debate.
Lieven believes that the reason average Americans are so susceptible to this sort of thinking is because there is something inherent to the place America holds in history. He writes,
The reason for this distinctive aspect of the United States lies in the nature of American civic nationalism. This nationalism, and much of the US national identity itself, is based on the American Creed: belief in the values of democracy, the law, free speech and the US constitution; and less formally, in social and economic individualism, in America as the supreme exemplar of democracy and successful modernity, and in American benevolence, innocence, goodness and inevitable triumph.
Many great American thinkers from across the political spectrum have remarked on the power of this Creed. In the words of Richard Hofstadter: "it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one." A century earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson described adherence to American governing principles as a form of religious conversion. In this sense, it bears a certain comparison to the role that Communism was supposed to play in the Soviet Union - with the crucial difference that the values of the American Creed have been both much more positive and much more successful historically. The strength of this Creed dates back even further than the foundation of the American colonies and 17th-century visions of America as the "city on a hill" to 16th-century English and Scottish Protestant beliefs in their countries as the "new Israel".
The power of the Creed also stems from its immense importance in holding together the huge and immensely varied American nation, and giving it the ability constantly to assimilate vast numbers of new immigrants from hugely diverse backgrounds. Belief in the principles of the Creed is perhaps the only thing (other than the English language) that the gays of San Francisco and the fundamentalist Baptists of Texas have in common.
No Time For Ambivilence
In the article, Lieven points out that the Bush Administration's rhetoric of Democratic Realism has been so successful, it has even drawn to it some of the Democratic Party's traditional supporters. I suppose by this he is referring to supporters of the Iraq War like Christopher Hitchens and The New Republic--both who to this writing still have not admitted their failure in judgment in supporting it.
I hope better of the rest of us. As I said in the beginning, this is a dangerous time. Our ideals are being eroded and used against us, to manipulate us. As much as it may seem un-American to oppose the language that is being thrown around by the President, it is not. It is not un-American to refuse to allow the deeply held ideals to which the world has looked to us for so long to be perverted into a rationalization for some sort Fascist attempt to remake the world as we like it, nor is it un-American to point out these hypocrisies in order to end the erosions. There is a war being waged against Democracy in America by its domestic oligarchy and we are all that is left to fight against it. There simply is not time for ambivalence.
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