On the ‘Freedom Agenda’ and the George W. Bush Legacy: A Philosophical Inquiry Shane J. Ralston Pennsylvania State University Hazleton sjr21@psu.edu Published in Perspectives on the Legacy of George W. Bush Edited by M.O. Grossman and R.E. Matthews Cambridge Scholars Press Abstract The legacy of George W. Bush will probably be associated with the President’s infallibly certain style of visionary leadership and his specific vision of a ‘Freedom Agenda’. According to this vision, the United States must spread democracy to all people who desire liberty and vanquish those tyrants and terrorists who despise it. Freedom is universally valued, and the United States is everywhere perceived as freedom’s protector and purveyor. So, the mission of the Freedom Agenda is to guard existing freedoms as well as spread the democratic political system to those countries lacking comparable freedoms. Recent analyses of the Bush Freedom Agenda examine its roots in realist foreign policy and neoconservative political thought. In this paper, I take a different approach, connecting the Freedom Agenda to the ideas of two philosophers: (i) Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive-negative liberty and (ii) John Dewey’s concept of freedom as a function of culture. My central claim is that when compared with the ideas of Berlin and Dewey, the Freedom Agenda is a faulty construct, both conceptually and practically, for understanding America’s role in global affairs. The Freedom Agenda proves to be neither conservative nor universal. Nevertheless, it constitutes an essential element of George W. Bush’s legacy, a vision of American purpose in a threatening and divisive world. Key Words: George W. Bush, John Dewey, Isaiah Berlin, liberalism, foreign policy, international relations. On the ‘Freedom Agenda’ and the George W. Bush Legacy: A Philosophical Inquiry At heart, Bush is a revolutionary. [ . . . ] In his actions as well as his doctrines, he has changed the course of American foreign policy. -I.H. Daalder and J.M. Lindsay (2003:376) Freedom is certainly never far from the lips of an American President, but it has rarely been so invoked so often and with such intensity. It is a central motif in virtually every speech that Bush makes, and its appearance at the locus of key events and discourses . . . suggest that something is afoot. -A. Burke (2005:318) The legacy of George W. Bush will probably be associated with the President’s infallibly certain style of visionary leadership and his specific vision of a ‘Freedom Agenda’.1 According to this vision, the United States must spread democracy to all people who desire liberty and vanquish those tyrants and terrorists who despise it. Freedom is universally valued, and the United States is everywhere perceived as freedom’s protector and purveyor. So, the mission of the Freedom Agenda is to guard existing freedoms as well as spread the democratic political system to those countries lacking comparable freedoms. Recent analyses of the Bush Freedom Agenda, both friendly and critical, examine its roots in realist foreign policy and neoconservative political thought.2 For example, on Edward Rhodes’s (2003:141) evaluation, Bush’s Freedom Agenda reveals “a deeply troubling vision of America and America’s role in the world.” Likewise, Daalder and Lindsay (2003:374) argue that, “[t]he Bush philosophy turns John Quincy Adams on his head and argues that the United States should aggressively go abroad to search for monsters to destroy.” Anthony Burke (2005:317) sees the Freedom Agenda as “tainted by the neo-conservative agenda for which ‘freedom’ now stands as a potent signifier.” Such criticisms of the Freedom Agenda tend to be 1 directed from the outside, that is, motivated by rival ideological views and based upon otherwise incompatible assumptions. In contrast, I deploy an internal critique, one starting from the Bush administration’s own assumptions. My central claim is that the Freedom Agenda is a faulty construct, both conceptually and practically, for envisioning America’s role in global affairs. In his critique of Bush’s moralistic rhetoric, Australian ethicist Peter Singer (2004:225) presumes that the president “is sincere.” Furthermore, he writes, “we should take his ethic seriously, assessing it on its own terms, and asking how well he has done by his own standards” (Ibid). In a similar spirit, I evaluate the Freedom Agenda in terms of its two standard assumptions, and with the assistance of two well-known philosophers’ ideas: (i) the distinction between positive and negative liberty offered by the Latvian-born Oxford don Isaiah Berlin and (ii) the concept of freedom as a function of culture articulated by the American Pragmatist John Dewey. Two Assumptions of Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ At least two assumptions are integral to, though by no means exhaustive of, the Freedom Agenda: (i) its universalism and (ii) its conservatism.3 1. Universalism. According to the Freedom Agenda, the scope of human liberty is nothing less than universal. In his speeches, Bush (2006, 2002b, 2003) regularly appeals to the “universality of freedom,” to “[t]he requirements of freedom [that] apply fully” to people around the world, to “freedom [that] is the right of every person and the future of every nation,” and to “liberty we prize [that] is not America’s gift to the world” but “is God’s gift to humanity.” After characterizing the Freedom Agenda’s core values as “[f]reedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” the Bush (2002a) administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) goes on to describe freedom as the “birthright of every person,” the “values of freedom . . . [as] right and true for every 2 person, in every society,” and the “duty of protecting” these values as the “the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.” In Bush’s (2005) second inaugural address, his speech-writers borrowed heavily from Abraham Lincoln, universally proclaiming that “no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” Invocations of universal freedom draw their inspiration from the ideas of Enlightenment liberals, such as John Locke (1689), Immanuel Kant (1785), and Thomas Jefferson (1776), but come into conflict with contemporary liberal appeals to multiculturalism and pluralism.4 Each of these Enlightenment thinkers sought to ground the legitimacy of the state on a theory of rationalmoral political order reflecting universal truths about human nature—for instance, that humans are carriers of inalienable rights (Locke), autonomous agents (Kant), or fundamentally equal creations (Jefferson). However, many contemporary liberals fault Enlightenment liberalism, or classic liberal theories grounded on universal moral truths, for antagonizing, rather than harmonizing, the plurality of incompatible and equally reasonable religious, moral and philosophical doctrines held by citizens of multicultural societies.5 Why? Rather than offering a neutral framework, Enlightenment liberalism discloses a full-blooded doctrine that competes with alternative views of truth, the good life, and human nature.6 In spite of this objection, Bush’s Freedom Agenda resuscitates Enlightenment liberalism, albeit in a slightly altered and updated form. According to Burke (2005:316), “freedom exists in a frame without questions: it is a profound form of social truth that animates an enlightenment we understand and know how to live.” Preserved is the strong claim to universal moral truth.7 Discarded is the thick conception of human nature. In its place, Bush (2002b) offers a comparatively thinner and more pluralism-friendly portrait of human nature than Enlightenment liberals, one in which humans universally desire liberty understood as a schedule of “want[s]” or “values of freedom,” namely, to “be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship 3 as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor.” Also, implicit in the Freedom Agenda is the idea that no nation is by nature subject to another nation’s authority. However, if that authority reflects a state’s exceptional status—say, its high moral standing (consider Benjamin Franklin’s claim that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom”8) or its historical calling (think of Pericles’s appeal to the Athenians during the Funeral Oration), then the consent of freedom-wanting nations and their peoples will be forthcoming. So, America’s moral authority must be employed for good purposes, namely, to lead other nations toward accepting free markets and free institutions—or, in two words: democracy promotion.9 Thus, the special calling of the United States, according to the Bush (2002a) administration’s NSS, is “to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe . . . [to] actively bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.” 2. Conservatism. Although ‘conservative’ and ‘conservatism’ have a bundle of connotations in contemporary politics, the terms are usually employed by political philosophers and theorists to designate a worldview favoring the status quo, traditional mores and slow, incremental change. According to Edmund Burke (1770; 1790), conservatism means that inherited institutions, such as the state and Church, should guide the gradual and organic development of society, its customs and practices; not demagogues and revolutionaries who initiate sharp breaks with the past that threaten social stability and collective security.10 Of course, conservatives come in many colors. Social-cultural conservatives wish to preserve timehonored beliefs and customs tied to cultural roots and national heritage; religious conservatives conserve traditional values imparted through religious texts and teachings; and fiscal conservatives defend individual property rights and condemn the government’s power to tax and spend. 4 Despite the varieties of conservatism, what conservatives generally share in common is resistance to transformative change, not in virtue of it being change per se, but because it is the wrong kind of change, namely, stability-threatening change. In four compact paragraphs of his 2002 address to the graduating class at West Point, Bush (2002b) spells out the Freedom Agenda in mostly conservative terms. To summarize: (i) the “gravest danger to freedom” is the threat that rogue groups and states will acquire technology (e.g., ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons) to harm large states; (ii) the strategies of deterrence and containment are no longer suited to defusing these “new threats”; (iii) if the United States adopts a “wait-and-see” attitude towards these dangers then its security will surely be undermined; and (iv) a new strategy of preemption, or anticipating threats before they actualize, is justified given the substantial threat that tyrants, terrorists and technology (the three t’s) pose to liberty. At first blush, the preemption strategy radically departs from precedent—whether the Cold War strategies of containment and deterrence or Bush’s own pre-9/11 promise to institute a “humble” foreign policy.11 Nevertheless, its warrant is essentially conservative. In an international arena that resembles Hobbes’s (1651) state of nature, a “war of all against all” where non-state actors threaten to make the lives of free citizens “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” the hegemon’s rationale for preemption is to maintain, in the terminology of the Bush (2002a) administration’s NSS, “a balance of power that favors freedom.”12 Also integral to the Bush doctrine is a plan to rebuild failed states as “free and open societies” and to encourage the development of democratic institutions in weak states ruled by tyrants (Ibid). Although harkening back to the idealistic Wilsonian vision of “making the world safe for democracy,” democracy promotion under the Freedom Agenda aims to conserve global order and stability, to combat terrorism and tyranny, all in order to ensure American security—in other words, for the sake of conservative, not radical, ends.13 5 Isaiah Berlin on Two Kinds of Liberty In his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin formulates a distinction between negative and positive freedom that is especially germane to an evaluation of Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Expressing the idea of liberty in its negative form, Berlin (1969:122) writes, “I am said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity.” In other words, my fellows and my government must abstain from intervening in my private affairs, preventing me from pursuing my chosen interests, desires, and projects, or otherwise coercing me into doing what they believe, however genuinely, is in my best interest. This is what Berlin calls “freedom from” (124). For the libertarian, taking negative liberty seriously means not only “warding off interference”, but also shrinking the scope of state power to that of “a night-watchman or traffic policeman” (127).14 Yet there is no need to go as far as the libertarian, so long as it is possible to maintain “a certain minimum area of personal freedom,” a zone of unfettered individual activity, such as to speak, to assemble, to worship, and to bear arms (124). Next, Berlin turns to consider positive liberty. He notes that “conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self, a person, a man” (134). If one wishes to be more than a solitary or hermit-like individual, isolated from one’s fellows and one’s government, then one might think that human flourishing requires a different, more positive, conception of liberty. Positive freedom permits us to exercise not merely freedom from interference, but more directly and potently, freedom for pursuing a higher goal or purpose. In exercising positive liberty, agents sublimate their personal desires to a single comprehensive vision of excellence offered by “some super-personal entity—a state, a class, a nation, or the march of history itself” (Ibid). In return, the super-personal entity—for instance, the state—provides more primary goods (e.g., housing, jobs, and healthcare) in order to facilitate the citizen’s self-realization consistent with a state-sanctioned conception of the good life.15 Unfortunately, affording too much positive 6 liberty tends to strangle negative liberty.16 It gives the state license to paternalistically impose ends on citizens that they would not otherwise choose, “to coerce men in the name of some goal . . . which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves, pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt” (132-3). So, which of Berlin’s two kinds of liberty does the Bush Freedom Agenda endorse? In some ways, both and neither; rather, the agenda appears to equivocate between the two. Negative liberty emerges in Bush’s (2002b) schedule of wants and freedoms, especially the freedoms to speak, to worship, to be a property-owner and to enjoy the fruits of property-ownership. All of these liberties generate a protected sphere of individual activity in which there is a presumption against government intrusion, except when necessary to referee a dispute between individuals (e.g., a case of breach of contract demands a legal system and courts of law in order to adjudicate the conflict, so as to prevent self-enforcement). More debatable candidates for negative liberties are the freedoms to select one’s political leaders and to provide one’s children with education. Their exercise entails more than freedom from. They also require freedom to, in the sense of positive enablement and intervention in the lives of ordinary citizens by the state (e.g., the design and operation of an electoral system or a public education system). Still, exercising these freedoms, however tainted they are by state involvement, does not force people to subordinate their individual life plans, interests and desires to a state-sanctioned vision of the good life. Still, with regard to education, as well as many other policy areas, conservative policy-makers remain wary of solutions that enlarge positive liberty—such as national or centrally-planned school systems—and more sympathetic to solutions that expand negative liberty by minimizing state intervention—such as free-market-based school voucher systems. On closer inspection, though, the Freedom Agenda resembles a vehicle for enlarging positive liberty through the ‘Trojan horse’ of negative liberty. In the newly-formed democracies 7 of Iraq and Afghanistan, two products of the preemption strategy, the U.S. distributes primary goods through the reconstruction of war-torn infrastructure, the improvement of economic and military capacity, and other state and community-building activities. In return, the U.S. expects the allegiance of their citizens and leaders to a single comprehensive vision of freedom and democracy, one that represents a sharp, radical, and thus un-conservative break with their existing political traditions and ways of life.17 Therefore, to the extent that the Bush Freedom Agenda enlarges positive liberty, it compromises its own conservative credentials. John Dewey on Freedom as a Function of Culture In the first two chapters of Freedom and Culture, John Dewey (1939:65) recasts the so-called “problem of freedom” in order to overcome a vicious dualism. Historically, the problem has been seen as a struggle to define liberty in terms of either the individual or the social, the “native tendencies” shared by individual human beings versus the rational-moral purposes served by collective agencies (82). Whereas in the Anglo-American liberal tradition, freedom is typically conceived as an individual entitlement or right, in the Continental-European republican tradition, it is more often understood as reason objectified in social, legal and political institutions—the difference between, for example, John Locke (1689) and G.W.F. Hegel (1807). Dewey (1939:83) argues that framing the freedom problem in this way proves woefully inadequate, for it presents a false dichotomy. Either way, the tendency is to make human liberty reliant on some ultimate factor, thereby pushing it in “what philosophers call a monistic direction,” whether toward a universal desire of humans to be free or rationally grounded state authority (72). Shifting to the exclusively American tradition, Dewey credits Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founders for establishing an “ideology” and a vision embodied in the Declaration of Independence, which “has taught us that attainment of freedom is the goal of history; that self- 8 government is the inherent right of free men and is that which, when it is achieved, men prize it above all else” (66). Even the Founders’ inspiring vision of a historical march toward freedom is flawed, though, for it “attempts to make some constituent of human nature the source of motivation of action,” namely, “inherent love of freedom,” and in so doing provides only a flimsy basis upon which to legitimate self-government (74).18 Why? As a monistic account , the universal desire for freedom cannot accommodate, in Dewey’s words, the “degree of plasticity in human nature,” the multiplicity of “occupations, interests, skills, [and] beliefs” that humans have and value, as well as the “complex conditions . . . the terms upon which human beings associate and live together” (67-8). Together, he terms this plurality of human ends, activities, and conditions ‘culture’, and insists that once we view the problem of freedom through the prism of culture, we begin to appreciate its complex contours and relations. According to Dewey, “[t]he problem of freedom and of democratic institutions is tied up with the kind of culture that exists” (72).19 In other words, the meaning of the concept ‘liberty’ (and one might add ‘democracy’) is contingent upon the specific culture within which any particular conception flourishes. Hence, the desire to be free cannot resemble a universal trait of human nature, despite what Enlightenment liberals and the American Founders claimed. What are the implications of Dewey’s ‘freedom as a function of culture’ thesis for the Bush Freedom Agenda? Some are quite obvious; while others are less so. Although leaders in a democracy might feel the need to justify their foreign policy agenda in terms of how it advances freedom, not every citizen—or in the language of political theorists, not every ‘conception of the good life’—will of necessity, or in every circumstance, give absolute priority to freedom over other values (e.g., security, recognition, quality of life). Of course, this is not to deny the efficacy of ‘freedom’ rhetoric or, for that matter, freedom-oriented issue-framing (perhaps, in a variant on Lakoff’s (2004:3) exercise, we could try “Don’t think of freedom!”).20 As already 9 mentioned, the Bush (2002a) Freedom Agenda’s thesis that freedom is universally valued, “right and true for every person,” invokes a cherished source of the American cultural and national heritage: Enlightenment liberalism. In this way, it is undeniably attractive to the social-cultural conservative. Moreover, if appeals to the Enlightenment notion of universal freedom inspire broad public support, then it should not be surprising that crafty rhetoricians and prudent policymakers would regularly make the notion front and center in their speeches and policy vehicles.21 This point is quite obvious Less obvious is that if those invocations of universal freedom are treated as more than hollow rhetoric, as “sincere” (to borrow Singer’s (2004:225) term), then Bush’s Freedom Agenda should be appraised on its own terms, by its own lights, and relative to its own assumptions. So, we must determine, in Singer’s words, “how well he [i.e., Bush] has done by his own standards” (Ibid). Even though Bush announces to the 2002 West Point graduating class that the desire for freedom is universal, freedom construed as an individual right or entitlement is intimately connected to the American political tradition. As Dewey (1939:81) acknowledges, “freedom has had its practical significance fixed in different ways in different cultural contexts.” Given that Bush’s conception of freedom is culturally contingent, exporting it to other nations with distinctly different cultures presents formidable obstacles, both conceptually and practically. Likewise, spreading American democracy, founded as it is on a culturally-specific set of beliefs (e.g., in freedom and individualism), is a difficult, if not impossible, task—as policy-makers have discovered in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Although large-scale social-cultural reengineering would achieve the desired end, the scope of paternalistic intervention required by this policy would surely infringe upon people’s negative liberty. Such an interventionist policy would also prove inconsistent with a key assumption of the Freedom Agenda: its conservativism.22 10 Conclusion The ‘Freedom Agenda’ is internally flawed when judged by the lights of its own core assumptions: (i) its conservatism and (ii) its universalism. When juxtaposed against Berlin’s negative-positive liberty distinction and Dewey’s thesis that freedom is a function of culture, cracks in the armor of the Freedom Agenda immediately reveal themselves. First, the agenda equivocates between the two types of freedom, surreptitiously enlarging positive liberty under the false banner of defending negative liberty. Second, it appeals to a culturally-specific tradition of freedom and democracy. So, despite what most will agree are its two core assumptions, the Freedom Agenda proves to be neither universal nor conservative. Nevertheless, it does constitute an essential element of George W. Bush’s legacy, a revolutionary vision of America’s purpose in a threatening and divisive world. Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the U.S., sought to articulate a similarly radical vision of America’s raison d’être, to “make the world safe for democracy”—a vision that the world and even the United States was not quite ready for (witness Wilson’s failed attempt to persuade the U.S. Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League of Nations). In a similar vein, George W. Bush and his administration have articulated a revolutionary and idealistic vision of universal freedom and democratic expansionism in the ‘Freedom Agenda’—a vision that because it is ahead of its time is surely to outlast the second Bush presidency. 11 Works Cited Belanger, Patrick W. 2005. “Language and War: The Rhetoric of George W. Bush.” Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric 3:24-9. 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January 28. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html>. --------------. 2005. “President Bush Sworn-In to Second Term.” Whitehouse.gov. January 20. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural/index.html>. --------------. 2006. “President Bush Visits Troops in Iraq.” Whitehouse.gov. June 13. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/06/20060613-2.html>. Bush, George W. and Al Gore. 2000. “Presidential Debate.” Newshour with Jim Lehrer. October 12. <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec00/for-policy_10-12.html>. Cannon, Lou and Carl M. Cannon. 2008. Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Legacy. New York: Public Affairs. Carothers, Thomas 2006. “The Backlash Against Democracy Promotion.” Foreign Affairs 85(55):55-68. CBO Report. 2007. “Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism.” October 24. <http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdoc.cfm?index=8690&type=0>. 12 Daalder, Ivo H. and James M. Lindsay. 2003. “Bush’s Revolution.” Current History (November):367-76. Dernhardt, Janet V. and Kelly B. Campbell. 2006. “The Role of Democratic Values in Transformational Leadership.” Administration and Society 35(5):556-72. Dewey, John. [1925] 1996. “The Development of American Pragmatism.” In The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Electronic Edition, edited by Larry A. Hickman. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corp. -----------. [1939] 1996. “Freedom and Culture.” In The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Electronic Edition, edited by L. A. Hickman. Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corp. Elkins, Jeremy. “Revolutionary Politics.” Theory and Event 9(4). Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest, 16 (Summer):3-18. Garrard, Graeme 1997. “The Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin.” Journal of Political Ideologies 2(3): 281-96. Gray, John. 2000. Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: New Press. Hayek, Friedrich. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, Georg W.F. [1807] 1979. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas [1651] 1994. The Leviathan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Jefferson, Thomas [1776] 2007. Declaration of Independence. New York: Verso Press. Kant, Immanuel [1785] 1989. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Prentice Hall. Kissinger, Henry 1995. Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lakoff, George 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing. Locke, John [1689] 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. MacCallum, G. 1993. “Negative and Positive Freedom.” In Liberty, edited by D. Miller, 100-22. New York: Oxford University Press. Nozick, Robert 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. 13 Pangle, Lorraine S. 2007. The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Putterman, Theodore L. 2006. “Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty: A Reassessment and Revision.” Polity 38(3): 416-46. Ralston, Shane J. 2001. “A Call for Rhetorical Responsibility in the Spirit of Karl Kraus’s ‘In These Great Times’.” Manufacturing Dissent. December. ------------. 2002. “The Double-barreled Meaning of Russian Democracy.” Manufacturing Dissent. September. Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rhodes, Edward. 2003. “The Imperial Logic of Bush’s Liberal Agenda.” Survival 45(1):131-54. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singer, Peter. 2004. The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush. New York: Dutton. Talisse, Robert. 2000a. “The Incoherence of Political Liberalism.” Aurora, 1:3-13. Talmon, Jacob L. 1968. Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase. New York: Praeger. ------------. 2000b. “Two-faced Liberalism: John Gray’s Pluralist Politics and the Reinstatement of Enlightenment Liberalism.” Critical Review 14 (4):441-58. Tamir, Yael. 1998. “A Strange Alliance: Isaiah Berlin and the Liberalism of the Fringes.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1:279-89. “U.S. Adapts Cold-War Idea to Fight Terrorists.” New York Times. March 18, 2008. Ware, James W. and Carolyn B. Thompson, C. 2002. The Leadership Genius of George Bush: 10 Common Sense Lessons from the Commander-in-chief. Indianapolis: Wiley. 14 Endnotes 1 It is not known whether G.W. Bush is or was familiar with the visionary and transformational leadership literature. His tenure as an MBA student at Harvard Business School lasted from 1973 to 1975, at least two years prior to the publication of the landmark work on transformational leadership by James MacGregor Burns (1978); see Denhardt and Campbell (2006). Nevertheless, some writers have offered accounts of Bush’s style of leadership in terms of visionary and transformational leadership; see Ware and Thompson (2002) and Nye (2006). More often, Bush is associated with the management theorist Peter Drucker and his approach of management-by-objective; see Cannon and Cannon (2008). 2 For example, on Edward Rhodes’s (2003:141) evaluation, Bush’s Freedom Agenda reveals “a deeply troubling vision of America and America’s role in the world.” Likewise, Daalder and Lindsay (2003:374) argue that, “[t]he Bush philosophy turns John Quincy Adams on his head and argues that the United States should aggressively go abroad to search for monsters to destroy.” 3 If the agenda were compared to an individual’s web of systematic beliefs, then these two assumptive beliefs would be situated at the center of the web or system, where credence is strongest, rather than at the periphery, where beliefs are weakest. While these commitments are necessary, since revising or discarding them would threaten the agenda’s core meaning and overall coherence, they are not—or at least I am not claiming that that they are—sufficient for defining the Freedom Agenda en toto. 4 By calling these figures Enlightenment liberals I am not claiming that all views associated with the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment were quintessentially liberal. It is typical for political philosophers to associate the rightsbased liberal tradition with the “Enlightenment” and particularly the ideas of Kant (1785). 5 It is important to note that the meaning of liberalism has not remained constant through time. According to Garrard (1997:282), “the meanings of words change over time, and this is as true of liberalism and its core values as it is of any ideology.” Many philosophers have contended that the non-neutral doctrine of Enlightenment liberalism cannot accommodate the fact of pluralism in modern multicultural states; see Berlin (1969), Rorty (1989), Rawls (1996), Gray (2000), and Talisse (2000a, 2000b). 6 Even when contemporary liberal governments try to accommodate pluralism or deep differences among their citizens, problems can ensue. Consider the recent ‘reasonable accommodation’ debate in Canada. When a law or norm is contrary to the Canadian Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, the government has a legal obligation to modify the law or norm accordingly. For instance, despite the legal requirement that voters show their face when casting a ballot, Elections Canada has permitted, in keeping with the enumerated freedom of religious practice, an exemption for Muslim women wearing the niqab (veil) or burka. Though these exemptions are well-intentioned, heated dispute has arisen at the margins, between those groups whose members have been granted exemptions and rival groups claiming that the exemptions violate norms of equal treatment. So, the question persists, under what circumstances does accommodation become unreasonable, and when does the failure to accommodate become intolerance? 7 In Bush’s (2002b) West Point Address, he claims that “[m]oral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.” 8 Franklin’s letter to the Abbés Chalut and Arnaud, April 17, 1787, cited by Pangle (2007:23). 9 One tendency among supporters of the Bush Freedom Agenda is to conflate democratic and free market institutions into the single concept of ‘democracy’ and their dual endorsement as ‘democracy promotion’. This conflation is likely a legacy of Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) manifesto declaring that the “end of history” or the ideological evolution of all political societies is toward liberal democracy coupled with a capitalist economy. 15 10 While Burke (1790) was a virulent critic of the French Revolution, he was sympathetic to the ideals and aims of the American Revolution. See Elkins (2006) for an internal critique of so-called ‘conservative’ forces in politics based on Burke’s patently conservative philosophy. 11 In the second presidential debate between Gore and Bush (2000), Bush declared: “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us; if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.” More recently, Bush’s war cabinet has decided to reconsider the possibility that deterrence might be an appropriate strategy for preventing terrorist cells from carrying out attacks; see “U.S. Adapts Cold-War Idea to Fight Terrorists” (2008). 12 The preemptive strategy is more accurately described as a preventative strategy. According to Daalder and Lindsay (2003:372), the usual description conflates the notions of preemptive and preventive wars: “Preemptive wars are initiated when another country is clearly about to attack. [. . .] Preventive wars are launched by states against others before the state being attacked poses a real or imminent threat.” 13 For an account of the development of Wilsonian idealism in American foreign policy, see Kissinger (1995). 14 For this libertarian perspective, see F. Hayek (1960), R. Nozick (1974), and J.L. Talmon (1968). 15 For instance, governing by faith-based initiatives permits acceptable religious organizations to provide vital services and proselytize those served too. 16 One possible objection is that in practice the line between positive and negative liberty is blurry or difficult to detect. For instance, MacCallum (1993:102) objects that, “[f]reedom is always both freedom from something and freedom to do something.” Berlin did not deny that this could be the case. Nevertheless, the harmful consequences of embracing one kind of liberty to the exclusion of another cannot be denied. In Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’s correspondence, Jefferson informed Adams, “mischief may be done negatively and positively.” Cited by T.L. Putterman (2006:422). 17 For information on spending levels for reconstruction, capacity-building, community-building and state-building activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, see the CBO Report (2007). A possible objection is that a long-term developmental view of the matter would suggest that eventually these new democracies will be capable of providing those goods for themselves. However, a central insight of contemporary conservative thought is that expansive entitlement programs create long-term expectations and breed long-term dependence, and there is no reason to believe that the citizens and leaders of new democracies—as compared to, for instance, welfare recipients in old democracies—will behave much differently. 18 Dewey (1939:68) writes: “The view that love of freedom is so inherent in man that, if it only has a chance given it by abolition of oppressions exercised by church and state, it will produce and maintain free institutions is no longer adequate.” Despite Dewey’s critique of the Founders’ position that the desire for freedom was a universal feature of human nature, he was not as critical of their Enlightenment sources. Indeed, Dewey (1925:20) compared the philosophy of Pragmatism to the French Enlightenment philosophy of Voltaire, Diderot and the other philosophes. 19 For instance, consider the raw individualism that emerges from America’s independent yeoman farmers, pioneers, and business entrepreneurs. Indeed, Dewey (1939:77) relies on the identical example: “The idea that human nature is inherently and exclusively individual is itself a product of a cultural individualistic movement.” 20 Lakoff (2004:4) defines framing as “getting language that fits your worldview. The ideas are primary—and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.” 21 See Ralston (2001) and Belanger (2005). 22 See Ralston (2002). The Bush Freedom Agenda has had undesirable consequences outside of Iraq and Afghanistan too. In reaction to the democracy-promotion agenda and the series of “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and 16 Kyrgyzstan, leaders in Russia, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia have repressed the democracy-building activities of Western NGOs—in what Thomas Carothers (2006:68) calls the “democracy backlash.” 17