Overvaluing American Values (American Prospect)

Overvaluing American Values

The trouble with making "values" the lodestar of our foreign policy.

Ezra Klein | June 28, 2007 | web only



I have a confession to make: I am not a values voter. I do not want a foreign policy based upon "the idea that is America." I do not think we should be guided in all things by such glittering concepts as liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith.

In fact, I'm fed up with values. Entirely. They've failed this country. As a lodestar, there is none worse. And so I must take issue with Anne-Marie Slaughter's new book, The Idea That is America. Slaughter is the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and an oft-mentioned name whenever Washingtonians gather in groups of three or more and their talk inevitably turns to an idle fantasy draft for the next Democratic administration. She is very much the sort who will be involved in creating the Democrats' post-Bush foreign policy, and so her book, which offers an accessible, readable, and even inspiring framework to guide America's global behavior, is an important one. But it is hobbled by one essential weakness: It is based on American "values."

Save for the introduction and the conclusion, each chapter is devoted to the explication and application of a particular American value. Liberty leads off, followed by democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith. "These values," Slaughter writes, "are not abstract concepts." Oh, but they are!

The problem with Slaughter's vision, which I generally found myself in enthusiastic agreement with, is that the only one I trust to carry it out is, well, Slaughter. And possibly me. It is not a durable framework that could withstand the ascension of another Bush administration. Indeed, while her interpretation of the values that guide America would lead to a very different foreign policy than that carried out by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, her focus on the ideals animating our foreign policy, rather than the consequences of our actions abroad, leaves a vessel that could easily be filled with noxious policies.

Run a word search through Bush's second inaugural speech. "Democracy" (and its attendant conjugations) appears thrice. "Liberty" shows up 15 times. Liberty's close cousin "freedom" makes 27 appearances. Equality stops by about midway through (as "equal), and "justice" gets five mentions. "Tolerance" is mentioned twice, as is "faith." Indeed, the only Slaughter-approved term left out by the Bush administration -- the administration of Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib, and democracy-by-gun -- is "humility." And his speech is only a bit over 2,000 words.

To convince the country that we need a foreign policy that serves those concepts is to cede the ground to those with the most compellingly idealistic narrative. Those concepts do not, themselves, suggest a foreign policy. While Slaughter states that democratization by force is a "contradiction in terms," it is the acceptance of idealism as a viable rhetorical basis for foreign policy that will allow the next set of overconfident liberalizers to wrap their wars in an agreeably gauzy cloud of paeans to democracy and calls for liberty. When the conversation rests on who is more faithful to liberty, and democracy, and tolerance, those cautioning restraint will always be at a disadvantage to those dreamily promising utopias.

We have seen this before: The language of idealism enabled what my friend Chris Hayes refers to as the "moral blackmail" of the Iraq war: How could anyone who professes to believe in freedom and democracy refuse to devote a couple of tax dollars to freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny? And many of the after-the-fact apologetics for the disaster are no better. We get Roger Cohen explaining that "otalitarian hell -- malign stability -- holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless." Hope may not be a plan, but it is a value. And are you really against hope for the oppressed? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=overvaluing_american_values

it's our greed, rapacity, vulgarity, crassness, crudeness, gluttony, brutality, bellicosity, should I go on?