Wall Street Journal AT WAR Democrats Against Democracy How did the GOP become the party of Woodrow Wilson? BY LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN Wednesday, March 19, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
The ghost of Woodrow Wilson walks again. The president who pledged to adopt a more "humble" approach to the world now speaks of remaking the world in America's image, beginning with Iraq, where he has now committed us to building a "prosperous and free" state. But if President Bush's commitment to exporting democracy begins with Iraq, that is also where the commitment of others ends. A chorus of leading Democrats and liberal foreign policy types--that is, voices that once could be counted on to support the promotion of democracy abroad--has emerged to lampoon the president for his "Wilsonian" idealism. Far from being the result of doubts about President Bush's sincerity, their critique questions the broader wisdom of exporting democracy and even the desirability of democracy itself. Inveighing against the president's commitment to mounting "a massive democratic revolution throughout the Arab world," Gary Hart writes, "The extravagance, not to say arrogance, of this epic undertaking is sufficiently breathtaking in its hubris to make Woodrow Wilson blush." Ted Kennedy scoffs at the administration's "simplistic" vision of "democracy flourishing in Iraq," while Al Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth, is doubtful that the U.S. is capable of installing a "democratic government in a place that has never known one." According to these voices and their supporters in the liberal foreign-policy community, the inclination to "impose" democracy derives from a lethal mixture of chauvinism, naiveté, and hubris. Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann cannot fathom why the Bush team would wish to remove tyrannical regimes "even in countries that have no past experience of democracy and where repressive regimes face no experienced or cohesive opposition." For her part, former Clinton administration official Jessica Mathews warns that a "crusade on behalf of democracy is arrogant, blind to local realities, dangerous, and ignorant of history." History? If these doubts about democracy's ability to flourish in foreign soil and America's capacity to plant it there sound familiar, it's hardly because these skeptics have spent years peddling them. On the contrary, the Clinton administration, of which many of them were a part, offered us strategies of "Democratic Enlargement" and "neo-Wilsonianism." Its interventionist brand of idealism was duly applauded by liberals like Mr. Hoffmann, who even penned an essay-long defense of it, "In Defense of Mother Teresa: Morality in Foreign Policy." In fact, skepticism about democratization was until recently the signature of Kissingerian "realists"--and, as such, enjoyed far more traction among the ranks of the Republican Party than it did among Democrats. How to account for this transformation? At the simplest level, it derives less from opposition to President Bush's foreign policy than from opposition to its architect. But the looming war has also unearthed a contradiction at the heart of American liberalism. The contradiction pits the liberal ideal that no people ought to be governed without their consent--and its admonition to support the democratic aspirations of foreign peoples--against the liberal ideal that discourages impinging on the autonomy of others. The tension between the two manifests itself every time America goes to war, with liberals who heeded George McGovern's summons to "come home, America" arguing that we have no right to violate the sovereignty of a Yugoslavia or an Iraq, while the descendants of Woodrow Wilson argue that to do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of liberalism. IN HIS OWN WAY, Bill Clinton sought to reconcile these impulses, insisting that American power and ideals were not inherently incompatible. But the suspicion of U.S. might that still lingers on the left, coupled with the fact that President Bush wields that might so unapologetically, has pushed many liberals to the side of noninterference. This has left them making arguments that are not only morally questionable, but also recklessly ahistorical. One is the claim that "democracy cannot be imposed through force of arms," as the Brookings Institution's Shibley Telhami puts it. Never mind that millions of Germans, Japanese, Italians, Bosnians and Panamanians would argue otherwise. For democracy-skeptics awash in cultural relativism, this is beside the point. Thus, American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner indicts the president's democratic vision for embracing the premise that "most of the world, given the choice, really wants to be just like us." But is it really necessary to point out that citizens of nondemocratic states have never been "given the choice" and that liberty is not a uniquely American desire? Apparently so, for asked to choose between the cause of democracy, on the one hand, and faux anti-imperialism, on the other, not a few opinion-makers have proclaimed themselves liberals against liberalism, Democrats against democracy. And so the task of making the world safe for democracy falls to the democrat in the White House. Mr. Kaplan is a senior editor at The New Republic and co-author, with William Kristol, of "The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission," published last month by Encounter.
