Dictatorships and American standards.

Dictatorships And American Standards

THE LAST FEW MONTHS, it is being widely said, not only swept aside two dictators--Jean-Claude Duvalier and Ferdinand Marcos--but swept aside a foreign-policy doctrine as well. The distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian states, outlined by Jeane Kirkpatrick in her 1979 Commentary article "Dictatorships and Double Standards," and subsequently adopted as a guiding policy by the Reagan Administration, supposedly has been abandoned. Leftists, encouraged by events, eagerly wonder what country will be next--South Korea? Chile? South Africa? The Reagan Administration shuffles its feet, now criticizing human-rights abuses in Chile, now trying to harness the new spirit for a push against the Sandinistas. Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, one of the bright young things at The New Republic, has proposed as a substitute for the Kirkpatrick doctrine a "third-force strategy": "tyring to help build and support a middle, democratic third way."

Let us begin by clearing away some terminological brushwood. Any so-called "third way" seeks to avoid rhetorical identification with the "Right"--as in "right-wing dictators," by which we mean such as Marcos and Duvalier. But what, really, was right wing about those two men? What did they even have in common? Apparently the only meaning of the phrase "right wing" in present-day political parlance is "anti-Communist." It may refer to populist democrats gone soft, like Marcos, or to voodoo tyrants like Duvalier; to free-markeeter Reagan or socialist Duarte; to John Paul II or Afghan Mujahedin; to the Sultan of Oman or P. W. Botha--to anyone, in short, who resists, for whatever reason, the vectors of Communist conquest and control. It will be slapped on Mrs. Aquino soon enough--or, if the Left thinks there is still hope for her, on "right way" seeks to avoid rhetorical identification with the "Right"--as in "right-wing dictators," by which we mean such as Marcos and Duvalier. But what, really, was right wing about those two men? What did they even have in common? Apparently the only meaning of the phrase "right wing" in present-day political parlance is "anti-Communist." It may refer to populist democrats gone soft, like Marcos, or to voodoo tyrants like Duvalier; to free-marketeer Reagan or socialist Duarte; to John Paul II or Afghan Mujahedin; to the Sultan of Oman or P. W. Botha--to anyone, in short, who resists, for whatever reason, the vectors of Communist conquest and control. It will be slapped of Communist conquest and control. It will be slapped on Mrs. Aquino soon enough--or, if the Left thinsk there is still hope for her, on "right-wing forces" in her government who restrict her "flexibility." It will be slapped on the "third force" wherever and whenever it genuinely opposes Communism.

The broad range of "right-wing" forces suggests the insatiability of Communism, its protean omnivorousness. This was one of the distinctions that Jeane Kirkpatrick drew between totalitarians and authoritarians, and it still holds up (Marcos's and Duvalier's brands of government--unlike Castro's--were not for export). So do the predictions she drew from her analysis. "Since many traditional autocracies permit limited contestation and participation, it is not impossible that U.S. policy could effectively encourage this process of liberalization and democratization." That is a fair forecast of what actually happened in the Philippines, and in Haiti. Marcos and Duvalier would not, or could not, crush their opposition; we encouraged it; and they fell.

Democracy, then, was always as much a touchstone of Mrs. Kirkpatrick's analysis as of Mr. Krauthammer's. But is democracy a desirable goal, or even a coherent one? We have been here before, it turns out, during the great (and, as it proved, brief) period of liberal anti-Communism in the late Forties and early Fifties. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Vital Center--another third way!--offered a credo for fighting democrats. And what a hollow credo it was. "The advocate of free society," Schlesinger admitted, "defines himself by telling what he is against: What he is for turns out to be certain means and he leaves other people to charge the means with content." Schlesinger spent much of the book thrashing around for a content--bits of Niebuhr, gobbets of Whitman; unsuccessfully. And so, a dozen years later, the vital-centrists grown up got us into a war in Vietnam they could neither explain nor defend, and which they ultimately abandoned.

Sensible American foreign policy has a content, and it is not democracy, but freedom: specifically, American freedom. The main threat to American freedom, now, as for the last forty years, is Communism. In pursuit of our interests, we collect all kinds of allies, from bosom companions to de facto auxiliaries. Some of the stablest of these--Britain, France, West Germany, Israel, Japan--are democracies. Some are not. Democracy can be a tranquilizing force in a nation's political life, and freedom, rightly understood, is always desirable; where totalitarianism is rebuffed, we can expect, as Jeane Kirkpatrick argued, that freedom and perhaps even democracy will flourish in the long run. But that is not our primary concern; we are, as John Quincy Adams said, the well-wishers of liberty everywhere, the champions only of our own. We can assess the state of liberty in the nations of the world, but these judgments should not determine our policy.

It's a safe bet, though, that the better human-rights records will be found among our friends. That's the right wing for you.