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President's New Serenity
I thought it
remarkable, as I watched President Bush announce the commencement
of air strikes in Afghanistan yesterday, to see how confident a
speaker he has grown into during the course of the present crisis.
The president, it is said, has always acted like a confident man
in his personal dealings with individuals; but he has not, with
one or two exceptions, seemed a serene or self-assured performer
in public settings. This, however, began to change in the aftermath
of the September attacks; the transformation was obvious to all
in the president's address to the joint session of Congress on September
20th; and the metamorphosis now appears to be complete.
Which is not,
perhaps, surprising; the president has ceased to be a self-conscious
public speaker in part, I suspect, because he knows that it is no
longer about him. The cause is big enough to throw into the shade,
for the time being, all the amusing diversions of political handicapping
and race-track gossip; we no longer critique the thoroughbreds,
or do so only in a most respectful way. The doubts which the president's
opponents — and even some of his supporters — harbored a month ago
have ceased to matter. Churchill, ever illuminating on matters of
war leadership, is instructive on this point. When, in 1940, he
became his country's war leader, Churchill knew there were many
who doubted, and some indeed who despised him. "To accept me
as Prime Minister," he wrote, "was to them very difficult."
It "caused pain to many honourable men." Then followed
his decisive assessment of the new reality of war. "None of
these considerations caused me the slightest anxiety. I knew they
were all drowned by the cannonade." For at such times there
are, he said, "great simplifications." The loyalties which
center "upon number one are enormous. If he trips, he must
be sustained. If he makes mistakes, they must be covered. If he
sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he
must be pole-axed. But this last extreme process cannot be carried
out every day; and certainly not in the days just after he has been
chosen."
It is, of course,
impossible to know whether President Bush will continue to be as
effective a chief as he has so far proved. He entered the presidential
race with a reputation for superior executive abilities and strong
habits of leadership; he proved these to be effective on the national
stage by directing an efficient, disciplined, and in many ways bold
campaign; he successfully defended his victory when it was challenged
in the courts and in the press, and he rapidly and successfully
implemented the strategies he had employed in the campaign in the
more complicated world of Washington. All of this, however, is of
little predictive value. For, as Clausewitz long ago observed, a
"remarkable, superior mind and strength of character"
are the only real qualifications for war leadership; all the merely
technical skills and abilities pale in comparison to these. The
president knows that his character will be tested in the coming
months; and he has so far given every indication that he will be
able to rise to the level of events. The steady assurance with which
he addressed the world yesterday — with the Jefferson Memorial in
the background and the traffic of a free society moving relentlessly
in the middle distance — suggests that Mr. Bush possesses the first
indispensable quality of strong leadership, a faith in himself.
The
Prime Minister's Unexpected Tenacity
Conservatives
do not, as a rule, love Tony Blair; but how can an American not
but be moved by the prime minister's performance in the present
crisis? There may be snickering in England about Tony's efforts
to save the world; but there are no grins on American faces. For
it is somehow fitting that the two most prominent English-speaking
peoples should stand with each other at this time; the particular
kind of freedom that is now being vindicated was, after all, pioneered
in Britain and America. It has since been exported to many countries
around the world; but Britons and Americans may be forgiven their
quiet pride in having gotten it first.
The
Sad School of Western Prophets — and Why They Are Wrong
The history
books teach us to call it Whig freedom. It is important to insist
on the label; for it is naïve to think that the characteristic
virtues of the Whig approach — its insistence on the importance
of the rule of law, private property, representative government,
and a degree of political, economic, and religious liberty — are
inherently Western or European in nature, or are the somehow inevitable
expression of the civilization of Western Christendom. Whig freedom
is the product but not the property of the West; given the right
conditions it can flourish anywhere.
It flourished
first in England. The characteristic qualities of the freedoms we
affirm today were given their mature form only after the Whigs came
to power at the end of the 17th century. The reactionary King James
fled his kingdom in 1688; and the Whigs promptly set about strengthening
"the rights and liberties of the subject" and undoing
barriers to trade, social advancement, capital formation, and dissenting
religious faiths. Through their Declaration of Right (1689; a bill
of rights that strengthened property rights and the rule of law),
their Toleration Act (1689; an early step in the direction of religious
freedom), their Triennial Act (1694; for the frequent calling and
meeting of Parliaments), and their Bank of England (it dates to
1694; for many years it kept English interest rates lower than those
which obtained on the Continent), the Whigs completed a revolution
they called "glorious." It was. In spite of those inhibiting
periwigs (in an age of ubiquitous lice actual male head-hair was
often shaved) the Whigs created the freest intellectual, spiritual,
and economic markets the world had yet seen. The makers of the American
Revolution admired the Whig successes; they thought of themselves
as Whigs and constructed the American Republic on Whig foundations.
President Bush
has taken pains to make clear that the freedoms whose pedigree we
trace to those 17th- and 18th-century characters, bewigged and bejeweled
in their velvet coats, pose no threat to Islam; those freedoms on
the contrary supply the only model yet devised that seems likely
to allow the various civilizations of the world to coexist in peace.
Professor Huntington has argued that the civilization of the West
is doomed to continue, inevitably, inexorably, to clash with the
civilization of Islam; but we must not acquiesce in the kind of
pessimism that makes such prophecies self-fulfilling. Though convincing
in many of its details, Professor Huntington's 1996 book, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
is unacceptably pessimistic in its thrust. The book belongs, with
Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West, to the sad school of Western oracular
literature: There is a stink of defeatism in it. Huntington sees
only obstacles to the spread of Whig (Western) liberty, just as
Spengler saw only obstacles to the continued vitality of Western
Kultur.
But is it not
still a good bet that the obstacles will eventually be overcome?
Two hundred years ago Britain and the United States were almost
alone in their embrace of the Whig approach to liberty; today much
of the planet enjoys or aspires to these freedoms. This trend towards
liberty, while not perhaps inexorable, will be difficult to reverse.
It is not, as President Bush has said, a matter of the triumph of
the West; it is the triumph of a certain kind of freedom which,
though its most efficient legal and constitutional machinery was
designed by men with pink cheeks and red noses in the north Atlantic,
has long been desired, not simply by Europeans, but by many other
peoples as well, including many professors of Islam.
High-brows
on both the Left and the Right have always made fun of ingenuous
Whigs, and there has always been some good sport to be had with
them. Swift and Pope mocked Sir Robert Walpole; Lord Macaulay and
Lord Melbourne were easy targets for later generations of Fabians,
Keynesians, and Bloomsburyians. American confessors of the Whig
credo, such as Lincoln and Jefferson, have been treated rather better;
but the high-brows who write of them with fawning respect would
never think of taking seriously their views concerning, for example,
a "perfect liberty of trade." The high-brows criticize
the facile optimism of the Whig mind, and loathe its philistinism.
Some of their criticisms may even be just; but where matters of
secular organization and constitutional mechanics are concerned
the Whigs have for three centuries been more right than wrong. Terrible
though the setbacks in the progress of freedom's march sometimes
are, they have so far always proved temporary. The president and
prime minister are quite right to try to inspire the world to defend
a set of ideas which is not the exclusive property of the West,
but is rather a precondition for a much larger and grander human
flourishing.
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