[Vision2020] Bush's Freedom: We will have it our way!

[Nick Gier]

January 22, 2005, The New York Times
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Speech Misheard Round the World
By ORLANDO PATTERSON, Harvard University

Cambridge, Mass. — SINCE 9/11, President Bush and his advisers have engaged 
in a series of arguments concerning the relation between freedom, tyranny 
and terrorism. The president's inaugural paean to freedom was the 
culmination of these arguments.

The stratagem began immediately after 9/11 with the president's claims that 
the terrorist attacks were a deliberate assault on America's freedom. The 
next stage of the argument came after no weapons of mass destruction were 
found in Iraq, thus eliminating the reason for the war, and it took the 
form of a bogus syllogism: all terrorists are tyrants who hate freedom. 
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who hates freedom. Therefore Saddam Hussein is a 
terrorist whose downfall was a victory in the war against terrorism.

When this bogus syllogism began to lose public appeal, it was shored up 
with another flawed argument that was repeated during the campaign: tyranny 
breeds terrorism. Freedom is opposed to tyranny. Therefore the promotion of 
freedom is the best means of fighting terrorism.

Promoting freedom, of course, is a noble and highly desirable pursuit. If 
America were to make the global diffusion of freedom a central pillar of 
its foreign policy, it would be cause for joy. The way the present 
administration has gone about this task, however, is likely to have the 
opposite effect. Moreover, what the president means by freedom may get lost 
in translation to the rest of the world.

The administration's notion of freedom has been especially convenient, and 
its promotion of it especially cynical. In the first place, there is no 
evidence to support, and no good reason to believe, that Al Qaeda's attack 
on America was primarily motivated by a hatred of freedom. Osama bin Laden 
is clearly no lover of freedom, but this is an irrelevance. The attack on 
America was motivated by religious and cultural fanaticism.

Second, while it may be implicitly true that all terrorists are tyrants, it 
does not follow that all tyrants are terrorists. The United States, of all 
nations, should know this. Over the past century it has supported a 
succession of tyrannical states with murderous records of oppression 
against their own people, none of which were terrorist states - Argentina 
and Brazil under military rule, Augusto Pinochet's Chile, South Africa 
under apartheid, to list but a few. Today, one of America's closest allies 
in the fight against tyranny is tyrannical Pakistan, and one of its biggest 
trading partners is the authoritarian Communist regime of China.

Third, while the goal of promoting democracy is laudable, there is no 
evidence that free states are less likely to breed terrorists. Sadly, the 
very freedoms guaranteed under the rule of law are likely to shelter 
terrorists, especially within states making the transition from 
authoritarian to democratic rule. Transitional democratic states, like 
Russia today, are more violent than the authoritarian ones they replaced.

And even advanced democratic regimes have been known to breed terrorists, 
the best example being the United States itself. For more than half a 
century a terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, flourished in this 
country. According to the F.B.I., three of every four terrorist acts in the 
United States from 1980 to 2000 were committed by Americans.

The president speaks eloquently and no doubt sincerely of freedom both 
abroad and at home. But it is plain for the world to see that there is a 
discrepancy between his words and his actions.

He claims that freedom must be chosen and defended by citizens, yet his 
administration is in the process of imposing democracy at the point of a 
gun in Iraq. At home, he seeks to "make our society more prosperous and 
just and equal," yet during his first term there has been a great 
redistribution of income from working people to the wealthy as well as 
declining real income and job security for many Americans. Furthermore, he 
has presided over the erosion of civil liberties stemming from the Patriot Act.

Is this pure hypocrisy - or is there another explanation for the 
discrepancy, and for Mr. Bush's perplexing sincerity? There is no 
gainsaying an element of hypocrisy here. But it is perhaps no greater than 
usual in speeches of this nature. The problem is that what the president 
means by freedom, and what the world hears when he says it, are not the same.

In the 20th century two versions of freedom emerged in America. The modern 
liberal version emphasizes civil liberties, political participation and 
social justice. It is the version formally extolled by the federal 
government, debated by philosophers and taught in schools; it still informs 
the American judicial system. And it is the version most treasured by 
foreigners who struggle for freedom in their own countries.

But most ordinary Americans view freedom in quite different terms. In their 
minds, freedom has been radically privatized. Its most striking feature is 
what is left out: politics, civic participation and the celebration of 
traditional rights, for instance. Freedom is largely a personal matter 
having to do with relations with others and success in the world.

Freedom, in this conception, means doing what one wants and getting one's 
way. It is measured in terms of one's independence and autonomy, on the one 
hand, and one's influence and power, on the other. It is experienced most 
powerfully in mobility - both socioeconomic and geographic.

In many ways this is the triumph of the classic 19th-century version of 
freedom, the version that philosophers and historians preached but society 
never quite achieved. This 19th-century freedom must now coexist with the 
more modern version of freedom. It does so by acknowledging the latter but 
not necessarily including it.

It is not that Americans have rejected the formal model of freedom - ask 
any American if he believes in democracy and a free press and he will 
genuinely endorse both. Rather it is that such abstract notions of freedom 
are far removed from their notion of what freedom means and how it is 
experienced.

The genius of President Bush is that he has acquired an exquisite grasp of 
this development in American political culture, and he can play both 
versions of freedom to his advantage. Because he so easily empathizes with 
the ordinary American's privatized view of freedom, the president was 
relatively immune from criticism that he disregarded more traditional 
measures of freedom like civil liberties. In the privatized conception of 
freedom that he and his followers share, the abuses of the Patriot Act play 
little or no part. (There are times, of course, when the president must 
voice support for the modern liberal version of freedom. The inaugural is 
such a day, "prescribed by law and marked by ceremony," as he ruefully noted.)

Yet while these inconsistencies may not bother the president's followers or 
harm his standing in America, they matter to the rest of the world. Few 
foreigners are even aware of America's hybrid conception of freedom, much 
less accepting of it. In most of the rest of the world, the president's 
inaugural address was heard merely as hypocrisy.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is the author of 
"Freedom in the Making of Western Culture" and a forthcoming book on the 
meaning of freedom in the United States.


"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the 
interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and 
art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." 
--Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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