Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It

Chapter 1
THE GOOD AND THE GREAT
Its military supremacy greater than that of the rest of the world combined, its economy the envy of even its enemies, its culture irresistible, the United States entered the twenty-first century as powerful as any nation in the history of the human race. Powerful did not mean invulnerable, as the world learned on September 11, 2001. But the willingness of George W. Bush to use military force in response to that horror evoked for some the era of Theodore Roosevelt, a president who, as William Kristol and Robert Kagan put it, "implored Americans to look beyond the immediate needs of their daily lives" and, in so doing, "aspired to greatness for America."1
Although Kristol and other "national greatness conservatives" originally hoped that Senator John McCain of Arizona would carry out their program of strengthening American power, President Bush's ambitious foreign policy objectives in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq quickly won their support. They were not the only ones who felt that way; former White House speech-writer David Frum and former chairman of the Defense Policy Review Board Richard Perle wrote a book urging Mr. Bush to apply his big stick in places other than Iraq, such as Syria, Lebanon, and North Korea, making, along the way, explicit comparisons between TR and GWB.2 The president, as it happened, liked the comparison; Mr. Bush keeps a copy of TR's speeches on the coffee table of his ranch in Texas and fills his remarks justifying his foreign policies with Rooseveltian words such as "resolve," "courage," and "sticking the course."3 Little doubt exists over whom George W. Bush would like to be compared to when historians ultimately make their comparisons.
Theodore Roosevelt was not quite the hero that Americans often make him out to be; ever conscious of his image and his place in history, he stage-managed his claims to greatness as much as he actually accomplished them. Still there is enough achievement in his case--his recognition that regulation of business had become essential; his commitments to a form of meritocracy that, in the context of his time, enabled him to appreciate the contributions of immigrants; his understanding that divisions by class undermined American ideals; his appointment of Gifford Pinchot to manage the nation's forests; and his willingness to use American power on behalf of peace as well as war--that conservatives have reason to identify him in the camp of national greatness.
What is less clear is whether Mr. Bush should be viewed as following in his footsteps. At first glance the comparison seems to make sense: both men were children of the East Coast who discovered their true selves by moving to or spending considerable time in the western portions of the United States; became adults who never tired of demonstrating their masculinity to all and sundry; were not above heaping furious scorn on the enemies each of them all too easily made; showed little hesitation in convincing themselves of the inherent rightness of their views; once in office discovered that people in the countries to which they were so quick to bring the presumed benefits of American power were not, in the end, especially grateful for their actions; and, despite their political achievements, left divisions in the body politic behind them that fueled the wrath of their opponents. As correspondences go in history, this appears to be a fairly close one.
Yet Roosevelt and Bush can be also distinguished in a number of crucially important ways. Appalled by the greed of the wealthy, Roosevelt became an avid reformer willing to use government to create conditions of fairness for all, turning his back on the Republican Party's inclination to reinforce the privileges and power of the already well off. Conservation--today we call it environmentalism--was, as TR once put it, "the great fundamental question of morality,"4 not a question of increasing the profit incentives for drilling and logging. Roosevelt's vision of war, however imperialistic, included compulsory military service, which President Bush opposes, and the former president, unlike the latter one, put himself all too frequently in harm's way. Roosevelt's allegiance to the Republican Party was always a bit shaky and he bolted from it in the end, while George W. Bush has been among the most partisan Republicans in modern memory. From time to time in the course of his career, TR would look back with a skeptical eye toward some of the imperialistic ambitions he supported earlier in his life, while GWB has shown no propensity to question any of the decisions, but especially the foreign policy decisions, he made during his presidency. We know, in short, that Mr. Bush claimed the mantle of TR, but we have reason to doubt whether TR would be pleased to see his ideas appropriated by Mr. Bush. He would likely admire President Bush's firmness, just as he would be appalled by the fact that Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's closest political advisor, models himself on Mark Hanna, who played the same role for arch Republican William McKinley, hardly TR's favorite politician.
Despite the gulf that separates Theodore Roosevelt from George W. Bush, neoconservative intellectuals were correct to insist that the time had come to take ideas of American greatness seriously; September 11 made clear to the world how central the United States is to its hopes and fears, and after September 11, whether or not one agrees with the decision to go to war in Iraq, the United States has no choice but to engage directly, using military force if need be, enemies prepared to fight a war against it. Like other transformative events in our history such as the American revolution, the firing on Fort Sumter, the 1929 stock market crash, and the attack on Pearl Harbor, September 11 will be remembered as having stimulated a wide-ranging inquiry into the question of whether America's traditional ways of carrying out its public affairs are sufficient for dealing with the new realities imposed upon it. We live in Shakespearian times, in which evil stalks the globe, matters of statecraft, high and low, take center stage, and all too many people die.
Before we can evoke ideas of American greatness, however, we need to ask some questions about it. What exactly is national greatness? Should the United States aspire to it? What are the costs of doing so? Does the fact that George W. Bush's decision to go it alone in Iraq backfired so spectacularly mean that all dreams of a Rooseveltian foreign policy should be discouraged? Can the United States develop an ambitious agenda for reconstructing the world, as at least some contemporary conservatives insist it should, while retreating, as many contemporary conservatives also advocate, from ambition in its domestic life? Conversely, can liberals, generally fearful of war and suspicious of foreign entanglements, be true to their commitments to freedom and equality of opportunity at home if they refrain from fighting for them abroad? If American greatness is so important, why have so many presidents stood for what the decidedly un-Rooseveltian Warren G. Harding called "normalcy"?
Something valuable will have been lost if, having begun to discuss whether America should aspire to greatness, we stopped the discussion because a president who claimed the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt did such an imperfect job of bringing into contemporary politics some of the ideals for which Roosevelt, as well as many other politicians and thinkers in American history, stood. In their fantastically evil way, America's enemies perceive a greatness in America that Americans themselves had somehow overlooked; denouncing us, as the Ayatollah Khomeini so frequently did, as the "great Satan" gets at least half of the equation right. Because of September 11, we now know that we are larger than life to nearly everyone in the world. We have not put the question of American greatness back on the table; it has been put there for us. It is up to us whether we take our country and its potential as seriously as everyone else in the world does.
-- If by the phrase American greatness we include patriotic sentiments fashioned for ceremonial events, then all presidents aspire to it. Willing greatness into existence, however, is a far more difficult proposition. It is not the invasion of a small and defenseless country--Ronald Reagan's intervention in Grenada offers perhaps the best example--that contributes to a sense of greatness, for victories achieved in such one-sided fashion seem tawdry in retrospect, even to those who celebrate them at the time they occur. Nor, shifting to domestic concerns, can greatness be given pride of place when a president decides, as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 elections, to substitute for ambitious reforms such small-scale steps as encouraging school uniforms or discouraging teenage smoking, however important each of them may be. Both Reagan's actions and Clinton's were popular, but popular does not mean great. Greatness is made of sterner stuff than successfully facing the exigencies of the electoral cycle. It takes leadership of a particularly tenacious sort to overcome the inclination of entrenched institutions to place self-interest before the common good, the desires of ordinary people not to be disturbed for purposes larger than those of family and friends, the need, on occasion, to disappoint one's closest allies, and the tendency of public officials to find enemies among their immediate competitors rather than among distant threats.
Achieving national greatness involves three tasks: articulating a meaningful vision of the American purpose; assembling the political capacity to transform that vision into reality; and demonstrating a willingness to use force if necessary to protect that vision and that reality from international enemies and, on occasion, to spread it around the world. Oddly enough for a society that so frequently proclaims itself great, all of these requirements have proven difficult to realize throughout the American experience.
When Americans reflect on what their vision of national purpose may be, the two most frequently cited qualities are liberty and equality. Yet there has never been widespread agreement in the United States on what those terms are supposed to mean. Whatever the founders meant by liberty, it obviously did not extend to those held in bondage; if anything, liberty in the first half-century of our existence became the rallying cry of Southern politicians determined to protect their distinct way of life against those who would extend freedom to all. By finally ridding the country of slavery, the Reconstruction amendments opened the door to a recommitment to liberty, but--again this is well-trod territory--American courts were more likely to apply those amendments to freedom of contract than to effective freedom for former slaves and their descendents. So confused remains our understanding of liberty that to this day we are unsure whether, in its name, we are powerless to regulate the influence over politicians sought by wealthy campaign contributors or able to protect children from the handguns easily obtainable by their parents.
Still, there can be no doubt of the importance of liberty to greatness. One can argue, as Americans have throughout the course of their history, whether an unregulated free market best achieves liberty by allowing for an entrepreneurial spirit to flourish or stands in liberty's way by denying to individuals the capacities needed for self-development. Along the same lines, debates have taken place in the United States for longer than a century over whether such liberties as free speech or the right to privacy come at the cost of insufficient appreciation of the needs of national security or of insufficient recognition of one's obligations to others. There are no easy answers to these questions, and we will no doubt continue to be preoccupied with them indefinitely.
The great challenge to liberty in the twentieth century, however, was posed, not by the welfare state, the sexual revolution, or the demands of national security, but from the powerful, if thankfully short-lived, experience of totalitarianism. And that experience teaches that while Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were correct to insist on the importance of free markets and free speech, Immanuel Kant was even more right to remind us that individuals--their needs, desires, decisions, and actions--cannot serve as means to someone else's ends. Liberty today, much as the American founders suggested in rhetoric if not, alas, always in deed, consists of the idea that human beings come attached with inalienable rights to personhood; to the greatest extent possible, they themselves, and not a coercive force speaking on their behalf, should be in command of their fate. Other societies might be able to achieve greatness without committing themselves to the protection and extension of a concept of human autonomy, both at home and abroad, but the United States cannot. Liberty is too much part of its tradition to be sacrificed for any other objective, and if such personal autonomy is so sacrificed, whatever is achieved as a result cannot be considered great.
At least we talk frequently about liberty, which we do not always do about equality; to take one striking example, the words "all men are created equal" have been cited only twenty-three times by the U.S. Supreme Court in its history, mostly in dissent.5 Forced to face the issue of equality because of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln attempted through his magnificent prose to flesh out the promise of equality at which the Declaration of Independence hinted. But as Robert Penn Warren realized when he said that the Confederacy was born on the day Lee handed his sword to Grant at Appomattox,6 the less attractive meaning of American purpose over which the war was fought--the decidedly inegalitarian one that held that the value of some human lives, based solely on race, was worth less than others--while losing the war, won the peace, and its victory has contributed to a society unwilling to apply the most elementary principals of equality until a century after the fighting stopped. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we speak more, as well as more favorably, about equality than we did a century ago, but our confusion about what it means persists; we cannot decide whether the equality promised by those landmark events mandates that we practice affirmative action or prohibits us from so doing.
Although Americans have disagreed about the meaning of equality, however, they have nonetheless consistently expanded the reach of equality with each passing generation. Individuals denied the most basic of human rights because of their race eventually won their freedom, then their formal right to vote, followed by their actual right to vote, and finally a national commitment to their inclusion in all institutions of importance in American life. Women once denied the suffrage now decide elections. No matter how divided Americans may be over gay marriage, the fact that the discussion is even taking place is remarkable given the fear and loathing not that long ago associated with sex between people of the same gender. American greatness can be neutral with respect to contentious ways of pursuing equality, such as affirmative action or gay marriage; making support for or opposition to such policies a precondition of greatness leads nowhere. But no vision of what the United States should be can be considered great if it carries with it a demand to return to a time when unearned status determined that some would be rewarded more than others. As liberty at its core means protecting an autonomous sphere of private life, equality above all else means denying to no one the capacity to realize their self-chosen goals for reasons so arbitrary that they cannot stand public scrutiny.
Whatever Americans mean by liberty and equality, realizing those ideals in practice has required far more political will than American leaders, hobbled by a habitual fear of concentrated political power, have usually been able to muster. Liberty and equality must exist within the framework of the nation before they can be expanded to the world, but in the United States, the creation of a nation did not come easily. Consider the case of James Madison, the greatest mind among our early nationalists. Madison will always be remembered as one of the two key authors of the Federalist Papers, a classic text in the development of the American nation. Yet he also saw fit to author the Virginia Resolution challenging national sovereignty on behalf of the states, and while Madison understood far better than his friend Jefferson the dangers of allowing the states too much room to challenge federal authority, his ambivalence about national sovereignty set the tone for the decades, if not centuries, to follow.
In terms of consistency of nationalist endeavor, Madison must take second place to his fellow Virginian John Marshall, whose audacious U.S. Supreme Court decisions seemed to settle where ultimate authority lay in a society still given to the worship of the local and the immediate. "Marshall," writes the political theorist Robert Faulkner, "was in the long modern tradition of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and their followers in the way he believed one supreme government, state above church, with a superior or sovereign power to command all within its jurisdiction, the primary condition for a proper nation."7 Even more than in Marbury v. Madison and Gibbons v. Odgen, Marshall expressed his sweeping view of national sovereignty in Cohens v. Virginia (1821). Rejecting a claim by Virginia that its courts were the proper tribunal to hear a case involving the sale of a lottery ticket in the District of Columbia, Marshall held that "the United States form . . . a single nation." "[We] are one people," he continued, whose national existence is defined by a constitution that "is framed for ages to come." State governments have no independent sovereignty; they are instead "constituent parts of the United States" and "members of one great empire--for some purposes sovereign, for some purposes subordinate." When states rights advocates challenged his opinion, Marshall responded in an anonymous pamphlet by asking, "Have we no national existence?" "We were charged by the late emperor of France with having no national character, or actual existence as a nation," he pointed out. "But not even he denied our theoretical or constitutional existence."8
Ever the political realist, Marshall understood that local elites, threatened by a distant power they could not control, would use authority close at hand to protect their privileges, even at the cost of weakening the nation, and he would interpret the Constitution in ways that would seriously encumber their ability to do so. Yet Marshall, who lived into the era of Jacksonian democracy, would witness before his death the resurrection of a states' rights philosophy that owed more to the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions than it did to his own majority opinions. A great son of the South, Marshall worried, with considerable justification, that his own region would be the biggest stumbling block to the nation he did so much to bring into existence; as he wrote to Joseph Story in 1831, "I had supposed that north of the Potowmack a firm and solid government competent to the security of rational liberty might be preserved. Even that now seems doubtful. The case of the south seems to me to be desperate. Our opinions are incompatible with a united government even among ourselves. The union has been prolonged thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue."9
Marshall's insistence that Americans were one people did not imply that those people had the right to choose who governed them; like the other Federalists of his era, Marshall was no democrat. But having put the idea of the nation into play, Marshall introduced, even if against his own instincts, a political dynamic that would lead to the ideal of national citizenship. Federalists were fond of speaking of the need for "energy" in government, but in a democratic rather than aristocratic age that energy could only be furnished by the people themselves in the exercise of their rights, including their right to vote and to participate in the affairs that shaped their common destiny; when the idea of equality meets the drive for national sovereignty, citizenship for all is the inevitable outcome.
Thus it was that Abraham Lincoln took the ideals of American greatness associated with the more high-minded Federalists--as their support for the Alien and Sedition Acts and their threatened attempts at secession suggest, Federalists were quite capable of low-mindedness--and transformed them into a language compatible with democratic realities. No longer were we "the people" of the preamble to the Constitution or even the "union" so eloquently evoked by Daniel Webster; we were now a nation, even, as Lincoln put it, a "new" nation, a word that appears four times in the first four sentences of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's vision of American greatness was not without its flaws; if Marshall was no democrat, Lincoln was no civil libertarian. But it is to Lincoln that we owe the idea that a great nation is dependent upon a great people, its greatness lying in its capacity to look beyond recrimination and to redeem itself through ties of mutual obligation. Only after the Civil War did the United States begin to develop the holidays, monuments, rituals, pledges, and anthems that today symbolize for so many Americans their special sense of themselves as a united people with a common purpose. Indeed, according to one study of the language by which Americans describe themselves, it was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that talk of union faded, to be replaced by an idea of the American nation.10
In time, Lincoln's understanding of American greatness would become as contested as Marshall's, and it would eventually lose out to those as threatened by the idea of national citizenship as John C. Calhoun and other apologists for slavery. "This is no nation," said Kentucky Senator James B. Beck in 1875,11 the same year Congress passed its thus far most extensive Civil Rights Act (which would be declared unconstitutional by a very un-Marshall-like Supreme Court that used the word" nation" only once in its decision, and then in reference to France).12 If a nation is defined by the equal right of all its citizens to vote for those who lead it, surely a minimal definition that implies no commitment to the social rights that twentieth-century societies would later try to implement, Beck was right; the United States did not achieve formal national citizenship until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the federal government the authority to overrule the determined refusal of mostly Southern states to allow African Americans to vote.
Divided over the principles America is expected to embody, and unwilling to establish the instruments of American national government that would enable great leaders to realize those principles, is it any wonder that the third idea associated with American greatness--the need to sustain and use sufficient force to defend and extend liberty and equality--has also been more noteworthy by its absence than by its presence? On occasion, such force will be required at home, as President Eisenhower realized when he dispatched troops to enforce the law upon a reluctant South. But greatness implies as well a willingness to use force in defense of American ideals abroad, and this too has been the exception more than the rule. In the insightful typology developed by Walter Russell Mead, most of our foreign policy actions have been Jeffersonian and Jacksonian in nature, not Hamiltonian or Wilsonian.13 Rather than viewing the world as ripe for imposition of American principles, we have traditionally suspected the world of wanting to impose its alien principles on us. Our leaders did best when they kept America pure, not when they engaged its power in places we could barely understand. Our isolationists, if that is what they ought to be called, had no problem with the idea of America as a divine nation. But they stopped well short of accepting the idea of America as a great nation, especially if greatness meant, as it nearly always did, higher taxes, compulsory military service, and government-led reform.