Weigel’s article hardly contradicts Rich’s point. Freedom can be in an important sense fitted to human nature without everyone wanting it. And while Bush’s line about “the hope of humanity” can be interpreted to mean something other than that all people want freedom, as some of Rich’s correspondents have suggested, he has made plenty of statements that suggest that he believes just that.

Charles Kesler provides three quotes from Bush. “In our conflict with terror and tyranny, we have an unmatched advantage, a power that cannot be resisted, and that is the appeal of freedom to all mankind.” “People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture.” “All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated and live free from poverty and violence. No people on earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.”

Kesler goes on to write:

There is truth in the president’s words, but not the whole truth. No one may want to be oppressed, but from this it does not follow that no one yearns to oppress. The love that parents feel for their children does not necessarily transfer to benevolence, much less equal solicitude, for the children of others. This is why “do unto others” is not a moral rule automatically or easily observed. . . .
In other words, that “people everywhere” or “all fathers and mothers” have the same feelings for themselves and their own kind does not (at least not yet) make them believers in human equality, human rights, or democracy. President Bush, in effect, plants his account of democracy in common or shared human passions, particularly the tender passions of family love, not in reason’s recognition of a rule for the passions. He does not insist, as Lincoln and the founders did, that democracy depends on the mutual recognition of rights and duties, grounded in an objective, natural order that is independent of human will. Bush makes it easy to be a democrat, and thus makes it easier for the whole world to become democratic.