Vanquishing Spengler’s Ghost
The president, the prime minister, and the continued vitality of the West.

By Michael Knox Beran, author of The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy
October 8, 2001 8:40 a.m.

he 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.