Flawed liberator: what's right and wrong in President Bush's freedom crusade.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S confidence in the worldwide appeal of free institutions is now all but universally regarded as naive. The president's detractors ridicule as "Bush babble" the rhetoric of his Second Inaugural Address, the high-water mark of his Freevangelical policy; and, as distressing news pours forth from Iraq, they point to his claim that "eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul" as evidence that he suffers acutely from a Messiah complex.

The criticism misses the mark. America was founded on a messianic idea; and whether John Winthrop was right or wrong when he crossed the ocean to build a city on a hill, it is too late now to abandon the visionary business. Nor is it evident that we need, or ought to. The convictions the president expressed in his Second Inaugural Address, utopian though they may be, have often, by a paradox that deserves but has never received careful study, inspired sound and pragmatic diplomacy. No, if Mr. Bush has gone wrong, his error lies, not in his adherence to a Freevangelical faith that Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and Reagan all shared, but rather in the methods by which he has tried to implement that faith--methods strikingly similar to those that brought two of his less happy predecessors, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson, to grief.

I.

The error of President Wilson was to exalt the technical machinery of democracy--the plebiscite and the ballot box--and to overlook the demos itself, its hopes and its hatreds, all those apparently primitive, pathological impulses that do not fit neatly into a chart of Homo sapiens progress, but that are abundantly evident wherever actual human beings are gathered. Wilson, who had been bred a Calvinist, ought to have had a less pedantic idea of human nature. But he was also a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and he had been influenced by the 19th-century faith in social science, a positivist vision whose adepts regarded man's moral imponderables as reptilian vestiges that would melt away in the sunshine of the dawning administrative state. The technocrats, abjuring older vocabularies of right and wrong, good and evil, looked forward to the "scientific" solution of man's problems; social scientists would discover the "laws" that govern human nature, much as biologists and physicists deduce such laws within their own realms of study. Wilson's closest adviser, Edward Mandell House, was a specimen of the technocratic type in its purest form: His 1912 novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, envisioned the emergence, in the United States, of a technocratic utopia. In the theory of the technocrats, the promoter of free institutions had simply to compile a mass of statistics concerning the "social development" of a formerly oppressed people, sponsor an election or two, and a free state would rise from the ashes of a fallen despotism.

Such was the intellectual equipment Wilson brought with him when, in December 1918, he sailed to Europe on the George Washington to preside over the greatest failure of American foreign policy in the 20th century, the unsuccessful effort to create durable free states in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Germany, the largest and most powerful European nation. Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, warned Wilson that the central and eastern European peoples whom he hoped to save were "mostly untrained politically," and were "either incapable or deficient in the power of self-government." But Wilson failed to heed the warning. Winston Churchill spoke contemptuously of "the veneer of republican governments and democratic institutions" that Wilson, together with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, imposed upon the Germans. Churchill was right: The Weimar regime was an ineptly husbanded transplant. It put down no roots in the soil, and was soon swept away. Two decades after Wilson sought to make the world "safe for democracy," the free state was again in a death-grapple with the forces of coercion.

The mistakes Wilson made in Europe were repeated, four decades later, in Vietnam, where the U.S. endeavored to prop up a free state governed from Saigon. American policymakers, schooled, like Colonel House, in the assumptions of social science, sought to foist upon a largely uncomprehending people institutions that found no nourishment in the native soil. President Johnson, who had learned his trade from the technocratic artisans of the New Deal, promised in April 1965 to turn the "vast Mekong River" into a power plant to "provide food and water and power on a scale to dwarf even our own TVA." Descending into technobabble, Johnson asserted that a Vietnamese New Deal would "train people in the skills that are needed to manage the process of development." Neither LBJ, who never outgrew his youthful infatuation with Roosevelt's administrative millennium, nor the Saigon politicians themselves, products of the French colonial system, were able to make the case for the free state in a way that spoke to the indigenous population's deepest ideas of right and wrong, good and evil. "Processes of development" meant nothing to the peasants laboring in the rice paddies; constitutional government, the rule of law, and bills of rights meant as little. The result was another papier-mache free state, one that was sustained largely by American will, and that collapsed as soon as the last American troops were withdrawn.

The technocratic spirit that led to the miscarriage of Wilson's and Johnson's presidencies is not yet dead. Today's technocrats are the pale and bloodless heirs of the great social-scientific positivists of the past. The technocrat's spiritual ancestors--Comte, Marx, Lassalle, and, to drop a bit, Jaures--were driven by a fiery vision of social-scientific utopia. The vision was watered down in America: Its prophets in this country celebrated the administrative state championed by the Roosevelts, Wilson, Graham Wallas, Herbert Croly, and the young Walter Lippmann. The red-hot utopianism of the social-scientific technocrats has long since faded; but the habits of mind, the intellectual tics and reflexes, remain. So, too, does the social-scientific hostility to older moral and spiritual traditions, with their unambiguous grammar of good and evil: The intellectual heirs of the 19th-century positivists share their forefathers' contempt for what Marx called the "opium of the masses."

President Bush entered office promising to change the sterile, social-scientific culture of the technocratic bureaucracy through programs (among them the now forgotten faith-based initiatives) intended to emphasize the power of older moral and spiritual traditions, with their deeper roots in human nature. But he failed to make good his pledge to "change the tone" of the technocracy. Like Wilson, Bush never found a way to impose his own interior preacherliness on the bureaucratic mandarins charged with carrying out his policy, foreign and domestic. The president's fault is not that he has been too messianic: It is rather that he has not been messianic enough. He has failed to grasp the role the messianic temperament plays in the creation and preservation of free states, and in everything save sermon-making he has surrendered too easily to the technocratic impulses of the time.

The modern free state, Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, was midwifed by messianic figures driven by intense spiritual conviction. "The English people," Marx wrote, "borrowed speech, passions, and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois [i.e., free-state] revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk." In deciding to invade Iraq in 2003, President Bush overlooked the insight of Marx and made the same technocratic mistake Wilson and LBJ made before him: He attempted to give Locke to the people he intended to free without first having secured the services of Habakkuk, or the local equivalent thereof.

II.

The failures of Wilson, LBJ, and (to date) Bush to create free states abroad are almost enough to persuade one to embrace the thesis of Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington, who in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations argued that certain civilizations, by historic temperament and the habits of moral culture, are unsuited to the free institutions of the West. Disillusionment with the Freevangelical messianism of Wilson (or Johnson or Bush) leads naturally to Huntingtonism, perhaps to isolationism; Huntington himself has counseled American leaders to abandon the Truman Doctrine and "refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations," even, or perhaps especially, when such interventions are undertaken to promote the growth of free institutions. But American history supplies an alternative to the messianism that descends from Wilson. The principal source of the better tradition is the messianism that descends from another American president, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is quite definitely in the line of America's Winthropian prophets. American institutions, he asserted, contained the "germ" of freedom, which he believed would "grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind." Yet at the same time Lincoln had a delicate sense of the vagaries of human nature, and a tender feeling for the vulnerability of free institutions. He was the product of an intellectual culture very different from that which molded the mind of Wilson. When he was a young man, the poetry of romanticism was just beginning to reach a wide audience, and his romantic training gave him the keenest insight into the weakness of the constitutional machinery that the statesmen of the 17th and 18th centuries devised in their efforts to create the modern free state.

To remedy the deficiencies of their Enlightenment craftsmanship, the young Lincoln proposed the development, in America, of public myths and rituals, a "political religion of the nation." He here drew attention to the distinction Walter Bagehot was to make, in his 1867 book The English Constitution, between the "useful" and "serviceable" parts of a constitution (in the contrivance of which Enlightened statesmen like the American Founders have never been surpassed) and the "theatrical elements" that the Enlightened thinkers, for all their perspicacity, overlooked--those elements which, in Bagehot's words, are "mystic" in their claims, and "occult" in their "mode of action." Aconstitution lacking such elements, Lincoln and Bagehot believed, must eventually perish of its own boringness.

As a mature statesman, Lincoln refined his youthful intuition. To invest the American free state with those "mystic" and "occult" properties which the Enlightened positivists dismissed or ignored, he made his case for the American Union, not in the Enlightened patois of Comte or even Madison, but in the accents of an older moral and spiritual vocabulary--he gave Americans Habakkuk rather than Locke. Invoking the King James Bible, Lincoln asserted, in his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses, that the United States was a chosen nation, one that, in the world struggle between freedom and despotism, had a providential part to play. Paraphrasing the multiple-birth theory of John 3:3, he said that America, having expiated her sins in civil war, would experience a second nativity--a "new birth of freedom." Government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth: It might eventually flourish throughout the world.

Lincoln's was a three-step messianism. First, like all good seers, he took his seat on the tripod and uttered a Prophecy. The Italian patriot Mazzini said that those who would defend the free state "must act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity." Lincoln was an eschatological stockjobber with an eye on eternity, peddling shares in the great joint-stock company of the future. In making his Prophecy--here we come to messianic Step Two--he did not omit, as free-state do-gooders too often do, to give his people Scapegoats, viz., the evil, despotic slavedrivers. It is now the fashion to deplore the use of such Goats in politics; but as the advertisements of any election season demonstrate, one might as well deplore bad weather. Besides, as Machiavelli observed in the Discourses on Livy, Goats rightly used enable the statesman to channel popular energy constructively, and to prevent such energy from assuming more malignant forms. The Third Step of Lincoln's program was the most visionary: He promised that, after a purifying struggle with the Goats, his people would reach the Destination--the palm grove, the milk-and-honey millennium, the New Jerusalem. After this "new birth of freedom," even the Goats would be forgiven, and would be treated, not with malice, but with charity.

Lincoln's Prophecy, his Goats, and his Destination have deep roots in the spiritual soil of the West. Odysseus, after a struggle with sundry Goats, reaches Ithaca; Plato's adepts, after a similar process of expiatory strife, reach Virtue or God. Aeschylus and Virgil pressed the familiar pattern into the service of the state. In the Oresteia, a cathartic struggle with goatish passions terminates in the realization of a new ideal--Athens; in the Aeneid, the pious hero's clashes with an assortment of goatish villains lead to the founding of Rome. The Hebrew version was grander: Where the Hellenes were limited by their cyclical conception of time, the Jews made the story linear. The Destination became ultimate and apocalyptic--here was the "new heaven and new earth" that St. John the Divine glimpsed on Patmos. Protestantism revived these millennial hopes. In 17th-century England, the Protestant idea deposed the Stuarts and (as Marx observed) created the modern free state. In 19th-century America, it drew fresh strength from the Second Great Awakening. Lincoln saw its force, and laid his plans accordingly.

The savior of the American free state was, of course, working within the Western tradition; but the moral facts to which he appealed are universal. A Freevangelical diplomacy that succeeds begins with the recognition that what Lincoln did in this country can be done elsewhere.

III.

Lincoln is the font from which the most accomplished of his successors have drawn in their attempts to promote free institutions abroad. At the Democratic convention in 1936, Franklin Roosevelt spoke of an American "rendezvous with destiny," a mission "to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world." The gathering world-crisis put his rhetoric to the test. In 1940, when a resurgent Germany was subjugating Europe, Roosevelt confronted the question of whether to support Winston Churchill's effort to defend, in the face of Nazi aggression, the liberties of England. In retrospect, the decision to embrace Churchill appears to have been foreordained. It wasn't. Historian John Lukacs has shown that when, in May 1940, Churchill became prime minister, important figures in the English government--among them Sir Horace Wilson and R. A. "Rab" Butler--doubted the wisdom of resisting Hitler. Joseph P. Kennedy, the outgoing American ambassador, succumbed to this mood of defeatism. Democracy, Kennedy said, was "finished" in England. FDR disagreed. A leader, he saw, had emerged there, one who, like Lincoln, had painted the struggle between freedom and tyranny in a romantic, highly colored language, the very archaisms of which, Isaiah Berlin observed, had created a "heroic mood" by "interpreting the present in terms of a vision of the past," as a "battle between simple good and simple evil."

"I felt," Churchill said after King George VI asked him to form a government, "as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." Like Lincoln, Churchill uttered a Prophecy: After an interval of heroic suffering, the Goats, he said, would be vanquished, and the Destination would be reached. "We cannot see how deliverance will come or when it will come," Churchill declared in June 1941, "but nothing is more certain than that every trace of Hitler's footsteps, every stain of his infected, corroding fingers will be sponged and purged and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the earth."

The bet Roosevelt placed on Churchill paid off: By backing the English prime minister, FDR laid the groundwork for the redemption of Europe. Some will object that the bet was not bold: Churchill, after all, was practicing his statecraft in the birthplace of the modern free state, where the culture of liberty had been long established and could be expected to be strong. Yet American leaders applied the same principles with no less success in Japan and Germany after their defeat by the Allied powers. In the face of much criticism, Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman preserved, in Japan, the Chrysanthemum Throne and the Shinto tradition on which it rested--a moral and spiritual bedrock for the new Japanese free state. They had, indeed, no strong leader to back, such as Roosevelt found in Churchill; but the mystical prestige of his throne endowed the otherwise undistinguished Hirohito with all that mysterious authority with which nature had invested Churchill. The Americans bade the emperor revise his Goats, to bring them into line with free institutions; and in his 1946 New Year's Day Rescript, Hirohito rejected as a "false conception" the belief "that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world." The monarch was no longer divine, or even sovereign; according to the new constitution, he was instead the "symbol" of the reformed Japanese state--what Bagehot would have called its theatrical component, charged with tempering daylight with magic. Japan's Destination itself, however, was unaltered; the continuity of the dynasty ensured that the country remained, in the eyes of the people, "blessed by the gods."

In Germany, the constitution of liberty was less alien to the people; there was no need to sanctify it by reviving a castrated version of the Hohenzollern tradition. Liberal constitutional parties, products of the same Protestant traditions that inspired the freedom-fighters of 17th-century England and 18th-century America, had flourished in Germany before they were outmaneuvered and consigned to irrelevance by Bismarck in the 1860s. To give these free-state impulses a chance to grow, however, it was necessary to extirpate the competitor tradition, the romantic paganism Bismarck had invoked in order to consolidate the German Reich. Bismarck himself was taken aback by the power of the genie he had conjured; he devoted himself, after 1870, to restraining it. But the romantic ideals of conquest and Lebensraum had by then found a home on Helmuth von Moltke's General Staff. After Germany's defeat in 1918, Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George failed to dismantle the Staff; the locus of the romantic cult of power remained largely intact.

Truman and Churchill did not repeat the mistake of their predecessors: The Wehrmacht was broken up, and the National Socialists' Goats (the Slavs and Semites) and Destination (Valhalla and Lebensraum) were dropped from the national story. At the same time the victors resisted the temptation to which the peacemakers of 1919 had succumbed: They did not impose upon the defeated people a Carthaginian peace. Instead, the subsidies of the Marshall Plan did much to reconcile ordinary Germans to the new free state that grew up in western Germany.

Four decades later, Ronald Reagan came to power in America. The least technocratic of the modern presidents, Reagan likened himself to a mystic, and he was deeply committed to the Winthropian tradition of American messianism: In his January 1974 address to the first Conservative Political Action Conference, he revived Winthrop's signature line. "You can call it mysticism if you want to," Reagan said, "but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage."

Reagan belonged rather to the Lincoln-Roosevelt-Truman branch of the Freevangelical school than the Wilsonian: He understood that free states need Habakkuks as well as Lockes. In the early 1980s there was sentiment, within the administration, for challenging the Soviet empire in Cuba. Presidential aide Michael Deaver quoted Secretary of State Alexander Haig as telling the president, "Give me the word and I'll make that island a f****** parking lot." Reagan demurred. His instinct appears, in retrospect, to have been sound. However much ordinary Cubans might have yearned for a freer, better system, no leader had emerged, either in Cuba itself or in the diaspora, who had begun the work of reconciling the inchoate yearnings of the people with their traditional moral and spiritual vocabularies: None had translated Locke into the Cuban vernacular in a way that touched the people's deepest ideas of right and wrong, good and evil.

Turning from Cuba, Reagan made his principal thrust against Communism in Poland, where two leaders, Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II, had emerged who spoke of freedom in accents derived from the country's aboriginal Catholic tradition, a set of moral and spiritual ideals with deep roots in the Polish character. In his book The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, John O'Sullivan offers a glimpse of the Lincolnian wisdom that underlay Reagan's statesmanship. "I have had a feeling," Reagan said, "particularly in the Pope's visit to Poland, that religion may turn out be the Soviets 'Achilles' heel." Reagan did what he could to support the Polish free-state movement, and in doing so initiated the chain of events that led to the collapse of Communism.

IV.

Romanticism is the catalyst of all the potent political myths of the modern period; in reviving the ideas and symbols--the Goats and Destinations--that the Enlightenment had relegated to the ash-heap, the romantic poets supplied modern statesmen with the tools they needed to mold opinion in an age of mass communications. Bismarck, Marx, and Bakunin used romantic techniques to advance philosophies of paternalist coercion and terror that are not yet dead. Winthropian free-state messianism, revived by the romantic counter-conjuring of Lincoln during his struggle with the paternalist slaveholders, provides a salutary means of counteracting coercive romanticism--or so FDR, Truman, and Reagan believed.

The Freevangelical policy that descends from Lincoln preserves what is best in America's messianic tradition--the belief that the United States is a "city on a hill," the vindicator of principles that will in time "liberate the world"--while it at the same time prevents messianic overreach by supplying criteria for American intervention in the name of freedom. American efforts to promote free-state institutions abroad are most likely to succeed (1) where strong leaders have emerged capable of expressing the principles of liberty in the characteristic moral and spiritual idiom of the people and (2) where those leaders have made the case for the free state in a way that touches their people's deepest ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.

Iraq, when examined in the light of these criteria, was a poor candidate for free-state intervention. No leader had there emerged, either among the Sunnis or the Shiites, with the combination of will, imagination, and popular support that promised to vindicate the free-state ideal in Mesopotamia; and none had attempted to reconcile free institutions with the region's traditional Goats and Destinations. The strong leaders in Iraq are hostile to the free-state ideal and, like the German demagogues after World War I, they are intent on using the machinery of democracy to undermine the liberal regime the U.S. has put in place. Sunni leaders regard the American-inspired institutions of the nascent Iraqi free state much as embittered Germans regarded the Weimar regime, while Shiite leaders seek to frustrate America's efforts to promote freedom in the Middle East by drawing closer to the Iranian autocracy.

Iraq was scarcely an ideal candidate for Freevangelical renovation; yet, as a result of the sacrifices of American soldiers, the case is by no means hopeless, and it is therefore a mystery why President Bush, with his evident fondness for the Freevangelical school, has done so little toward a revision of regional Goats, and toward the encouragement of strong men who might persuade their people that the free state is compatible with their immemorial Destinations. It is true that a number of intellectuals in the Islamic world have worked to reconcile the constitution of liberty with the historic traditions of Islam--have tried to show that Islam's Habakkuks were crypto-Lockes, whose shades if summoned would bless the free state. But their work has so far been too academic, too bookish, to stir the blood of masses of men and women. We touch the limits of the Freevangelical school. The United States can encourage free-state leaders; it cannot create them. Roosevelt did not create Churchill, Reagan did not create Walesa or John Paul II. Truman and MacArthur, it is true, did to some extent create the free-state Hirohito; but they did not create the Chrysanthemum tradition from which Hirohito's moral authority derived.

Part of the difficulty, no doubt, lies in the neoconservative advice upon which the president leaned pretty hard in the days leading up to the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The neoconservative, in his purest form, is a refugee from a romance that didn't work. Having broken with Marx and the god that failed, the neoconservative is like a jilted lover, wary of ever again succumbing to the seductions that kill. The neoconservative's skepticism toward the romantic modes is in many ways salutary, but it leads him to overprize the merely technical. Apolitics that eschews romance altogether eventually becomes sterile and technocratic. The neoconservative seems to have hoped, when American troops marched into Baghdad, that reason and enlightened self-interest alone would persuade the citizenry to embrace the free-state ideals they brought with them. The neoconservative here overlooked all that romantic effort and spiritual travail that Lincoln and Churchill, Mazzini and Gandhi, the 17th-century Protestants and the 20th-century Zionists found indispensable in their efforts to vindicate the free-state ideal. In theory, the president's Bible Brigades, schooled in the most romantic poetry known to the West, ought to have enabled him to make good the psychological naivete of the neoconservative: ought to have supplied that element of romance and spiritual acuity that was missing in the neoconservative's analysis. But it didn't happen that way.

Mr. Beran is the author of Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, which will be published by the Free Press in the fall.