Liberalism’s classical roots

28 Tuesday Dec 2004

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The Washington Times

New Republic editor Peter Beinart has written an essay that is causing a stir among Democrats busy rethinking policy and political strategy. In “A Fighting Faith” in the Dec. 13 edition, he argues that Democrats need to reclaim for liberalism the tough-mindedness on foreign affairs that characterized the emergence of liberal anti-communism in the late 1940s and ’50s. Without a clear sense of purpose and message in defense of America updated for the age of mass terror and “totalitarian Islam,” Democrats will find their electoral appeal foundering for lack of “moral purpose.”

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President decides who to honor

21 Tuesday Dec 2004

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The Washington Times

When George W. Bush presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month to three former officials intimately involved in his Iraq policy, the news was greeted by his political opponents with all the suave grace characteristic of Howard Dean and MoveOn.org. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the awards had been bestowed upon the three as part of a clever Karl Rove plot to keep the administration’s opponents in a permanent state of self-discrediting hyperventilation. On the other hand, Mr. Bush would probably provoke the same state of excitation merely by reading the first three names in the DC phone book.

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Freedom and democracy in Ukraine

14 Tuesday Dec 2004

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The Washington Times

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine is first and foremost the property of the people who are conducting it. They turned out in the streets of Kiev by the hundreds of thousands to protest fraudulent election results, and their persistence and numbers opened up enough cracks in the system to pave the way for a new vote on Dec. 26. Let’s not mistake this for anything but what it is: raw courage in support of freedom.

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The Illusion of “Either-Or” Politics

07 Tuesday Dec 2004

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The Wall Street Journal

The argument over whether Republicans won in 2004 by appealing to their base, by pumping up turnout especially among evangelical Christians, or by reaching to the middle, where they made gains among women, Catholics, and so on, continues apace. And the political consequences riding on the outcome are generally thought to be large for the future of the party. Although I agree that the way in which Republicans interpret what happened last November is crucial to the party’s future, an embrace of this either-or approach to describe how the GOP won will only cause confusion and create opportunities for Democrats.  

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Spending political capital

07 Tuesday Dec 2004

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The Washington Times

The post-re-election President Bush said he has acquired “political capital,” and he means to “spend” it – on a second-term policy agenda noteworthy for its ambition, including Social Security and tax reform. That’s an interesting little twist on the metaphor of “political capital.” Perhaps it was a slip and Mr. Bush’s intention in using the term was entirely conventional. But maybe not.

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“We”

01 Wednesday Dec 2004

Posted by in Policy Review

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Policy Review December 2004/January 2005

A slightly different version of this essay originally appeared in Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004), a collection of essays on transatlantic relationships.

There is no question that the aftermath of September 11, 2001, has laid bare a divergence in view between the United States and Europe over the question of the place of power in international affairs. Insofar as countering terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become a priority likely to dominate U.S. security policy for a generation or more, and insofar as the United States will likely seek recourse to military measures on occasion in this period, the divergence is likely to persist. Transatlantic relations may go through periods of relative warming in the years ahead, but they seem likely to be punctuated by occasions in which the differences reemerge starkly. We have, in all likelihood, doses of bitterness ahead of us every bit as unpleasant as the bitterness over the Iraq war. 

But what I want to do here is take a large step back from all the disagreement and see if it does not, after all, take place within a frame of broader agreement about fundamental issues — more fundamental, even, than the question of the proper role of the use of force internationally, which is itself a mischaracterization of what was at stake in the dispute over Iraq, as we shall see.  

To show how this is so, I would like to radicalize the discussion by proffering a thesis so contrarian in the current context that I should probably begin by asking readers’ indulgence. It is this: There are no fundamental disagreements or differences between the United States and Europe. Existing differences are often more apparent than real. When real, the differences are in all consequential cases actually agreements to disagree. And in any case, the views of Americans and Europeans have been converging for some time and will continue to do so.

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Election predictions and truisms

09 Tuesday Nov 2004

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The Washington Times

At the risk of being insufferable, I said George W. Bush would win “just over 50 percent of the popular vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent.” As of late Sunday’s tallies, Mr. Bush actually finished with 51.0 percent of the popular vote and Mr. Kerry with 48.0 percent. I thus underestimated Mr. Bush’s majority victory by a few tenths of a percentage point. Sorry about that.

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