The New Democratic Review: On Staying the Course

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October 23, 2006

On Staying the Course

So, we’re to stay the course. There’ll be no “cutting and running” as long as Bush is at the helm.

What tragic nonsense.

One of the exasperating—no, depressing—things about Bush’s fiasco in Iraq is that he’s given a bad name to two, very important ideas: “spreading democracy” and “just warfare.”

Besmirching the notion of justified warfare will be an especially difficult problem for democrats, I fear. Vietnam left multiple scars on American political culture—but one of them was that made too many liberal Democrats reflexively hostile to any argument for using American military muscle—no matter how necessary or appropriate. I cheered, then, when Clinton (pretty much alone among world leaders and castigated by Republicans) took out Milosivic. Surely, here was a case where the use of military power to advance a foreign policy goal was not only right, but (dare I say it?) righteous. If I were a conspiracy theorist, and believed that Bush had seventy times the brains I know he has, I might speculate that the whole Iraq business was an attempt to bomb the Democrats back to 1972.

But how the Iraq war has poisoned the notion of spreading democracy is something that I almost take as a personal injury. I have always been a Wilsonian democrat (small “d”) in both temperament and philosophy. It’s something of a religion for me. I published a book on democratic theory; a meditation on America’s most important poet, Walt Whitman, that I hoped would teach me something about the metaphysics of democratic life. And it has. I am, finally, one of democracy’s true believers. I don’t happen to believe that it is morally equivalent to other forms of human social organization. Rather, I believe it is something of a moral absolute, however vague in theory or imperfect in practice it may in the real world.

But believing that democracy is a moral imperative is not the same thing as believing that political or electoral democracy, in isolation of any other cultural support, is some sort of magical force powerful enough to transform a whole people and their traditional way of life. Political democracy is always the product of historical change, a cultural evolution. Democratic ideas are always woven into a nation’s cultural fabric before democratic rights are taken at gunpoint or secured by ballot. Democracy never comes top down. And it is never the gift of an enlightened occupation force.

Thinking otherwise is foolish and dangerous.

And foolish and dangerous are perfect synonyms for that delusional fantasy called the Bush doctrine. AIE, the neoconservative think tank that provided much of the theoretical underpinnings of the Bush Administration (much of its personnel, as well), argued for that doctrine’s central feature back in 2003—when their golden “Pax Americana” seemed to them just beyond the horizon:

A third reality that argues for assertive U.S. power is that the opportunities to extend a "balance of power that favors freedom"--or, more precisely, a preponderance of American power that favors freedom--outlined in the Bush Doctrine are genuine. The collapse of the Soviet Union is clearly making for a Europe "whole and free." Democratic practices are taking firmer root in cultures previously thought to be inhospitable, particularly in Asia, where Lee Kwan Yew's assertion of an authoritarian streak in "Confucian culture" looks increasingly suspect; Taiwan has spawned an almost raucous multiparty system and seen a peaceful transfer of power within it. In such a context, the Bush Doctrine's promise to liberalize the Islamic world--especially as it remains itself politically fractured--cannot be lightly dismissed, even if it may take many years to fulfill.

This formulation only works, of course, when you conveniently forget that Taiwanese political democracy was incubated within a raucous free market system—and that fostered by an American-backed military government led for some twenty-five years by Chiang Kai-shek (or, as Truman called him, “Cash-My-Check”). In Taiwan, a hunger for political liberty pretty much began as a hunger for economic liberty. But then again, what the hell was the Boston Tea party all about? Or for that matter, the Magna Carta?

A culture based on freedom and democracy come to people when they find those things essential for advancing their “material” life. That’s not cynicism, it’s history. That doesn’t mean that democracy is only a philosophical fig leaf covering greed. A mature democratic culture is a rich tapestry of beliefs and values—about what it means to be human, about the obligations of social life, about our connections to the rest of nature. But those beliefs and values don’t take hold in a society until its people, as individuals, claim ownership of their own destiny. And nothing about recent Iraqi history suggests its people are anywhere close to that point. Those blue fingers that seemed so inspiring did not belong to citizens in any real sense of the word—just combatants in the civil war using the best weapon at hand. Or, perhaps as Brendan O'Neill puts it, it's something way beyond civil war.

To be sure, a little foreign intervention can be quite helpful when a people are struggling to realize their democratic ambitions. Our own revolution is example enough. But France did not unilaterally decide to liberate us—then occupy us—so we might learn from them the fundamentals of an enlightened politics. When the hunger for democracy builds to a critical mass in a nation, and its people need and want our help in their fight for liberty, we won’t need to argue the case to them or the world. They will be making the case to us.

And that’s when you don’t cut and run.

Posted by stevemack at October 23, 2006 03:13 PM

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