Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (25 page)

As we have seen, in the conservative view, the unfettered free market is the mechanism that permits moral discipline to result in prosperity. So large corporations, wealthy stockholders, and landholders rightfully assume governing power. The free-market freedom theory says that free trade (the introduction of “free markets” globally) will necessarily result in the spread of democracy. Here is an outline of that theory.

Large corporations and wealthy investors and landholders need to protect themselves, their profits, and their property. To do so, they will insist on certain protections, and because of the influence of their wealth, they can get them instituted:

• Relatively free elections: protect their property from dictators and corrupt politicians
  

• Civilian control of the military: protects them and their property from military coups
  

• Balance of power among branches of government: protects their property from dangerous concentrations of political power
  

• Civil liberties: protects them and their property from police power
  

• Free press: unearths abuses of power in government and provides access to information needed for business
  

A necessary assumption of this view of democracy is the benevolent influence of large corporations and the wealthy. It is a kind of trickle-down democracy—democracy for large corporations and the wealthy eventually means democracy for everyone else.

President Bush often equates free markets and political freedom:

Bush is invoking the economic freedom of the economic liberty myth together with the political freedom of the free-market freedom theory.

Here is Colin Powell, speaking at the Heritage Foundation on December 12, 2002, building support for the invasion of Iraq and proposing a “U.S.–Middle East Partnership Initiative.”

Powell is presenting classic free-market freedom: Strict father economics leads to democracy.

Free-market freedom explains the attitude of the Bush administration toward recent political developments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile, where leaders have been elected who openly oppose laissez-faire free markets as not benefiting large impoverished segments of their populations. As you might expect, the Bush administration does not see these democratically
elected governments in a positive light. Rather, it sees these changes as movements away from freedom and democracy, movements that threaten freedom—that is, free-market freedom—in the world.

But beyond free-market freedom, there is an even stronger neoconservative vision. We can see this in the Bush administration’s inaccurate predictions about the Iraq War, predictions born of ideology, not evidence.

Why did the neoconservatives predict that simply toppling Saddam would bring democracy? Why did they think that American troops would be greeted with rose petals? Why did they stage Bush’s now-embarrassing “Mission Accomplished” landing on the aircraft carrier as the troops marched into Baghdad?

General Eric Shinseki had estimated that several hundred thousand American troops would be necessary to bring order to Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld overruled him—and fired him as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—sending only one-fourth to one-third as many troops. Shinseki was right. Why was Rumsfeld so wrong?

Reasoning within the strict father model leads to a preference for thinking in terms of direct causation, not systemic causation. Direct causal reasoning says you free a country by removing the tyrant. That all that’s necessary: simple direct causation. “Regime change” is all that’s needed. The troops march in, the statue of Saddam comes down, and it’s all over. The fall of one person will automatically lead to freedom, democracy, an ordered civil society, and economic prosperity.

In addition, there was a second, implicit neoconservative theory of democracy—a natural accompaniment to free-market freedom. Let’s call it self-interest democracy. If it sounds familiar, it should. Radical conservatives see big government as tyranny, and they view the removal of tyrants as similar to shrinking big government and drowning it in a bathtub. Here is self-interest democracy:

• Everyone is, and should be, motivated primarily by self-interest.
  

• If everyone is free to pursue his or her self-interest, then the interests of all will be maximized, as a law of nature, by the invisible hand.
  

• Democracy is the system of government that permits this.
  

• Tyranny keeps people from pursuing their own interests; the tyrant’s interests prevail.
  

• All you have to do is remove the tyrant, and democracy is inevitable. Just as all you have to do is shrink government—eliminate regulation, taxes, class action suits, and social programs—and economic prosperity will prevail.
  

You don’t need several hundred thousand troops. One-quarter of that was enough to remove Saddam. After that, everything should have been hunky-dory, if not right away, then not long afterward.

The idea of self-interest democracy makes some sense of Donald Rumsfeld’s classic comment on the lawlessness, chaos, and looting that accompanied the “liberation” of Iraq: “Stuff happens, and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” Freedom from the tyrant produces an immediate stew of self-interest, including looting and lawbreaking, but when it settles down—to self-interest driven by discipline—democracy will prevail.

Perhaps not enough time has passed, but so far the predictions have not been met. What has gone wrong?

On the whole, strict father reasoning has failed.

First, direct causation failed. Iraq is a very complex system: twenty-five million people, three major religious and ethnic divisions, hatreds and blood feuds for generations, a history of violence,
and no experience of democracy. The country was cobbled together by the British from remnants of the Ottoman Empire. It never had a national identity. Systemic causation prevails. Saddam’s brutality was holding the country together. When that was removed, all hell broke loose—the old religious and ethnic hatreds were realized in violence, and without several hundred thousand troops, there could be no order.

Second, self-interest democracy makes the mistake of essentialism: It assumes everyone is the same and by nature motivated primarily by self-interest. One of the many problems with this assumption is that it does not take into account the existence of suicide bombers, who operate not from self-interest but from love for and utter devotion to God, as well as vengeance against an enemy that has, in their view, humiliated their culture and their faith.

Third, free-market freedom ignores the use of the common wealth for the common good through the building of the infrastructure. Iraq had virtually no functioning infrastructure. Saddam put his money elsewhere, allowing what there was to fall into disrepair, and between American bombing attacks and more than a decade of embargoes, the rest was destroyed and not replaced. So-called free markets cannot function without such infrastructure: roads, bridges, transportation systems, electric lines, communication systems, hospitals, sewage systems, a police force, and industrial infrastructure like functioning oil refineries. Three years after the invasion and occupation, two basics of common wealth infrastructure still have not been established: electricity and security.

Free-market freedom also requires jobs. No electricity, no security, no jobs! And the most lucrative rebuilding contracts went to American corporations like Halliburton. Partly for fear of sabotage and partly for the maximization of American corporate profits, jobs are being outsourced to Americans—not because Americans are paid less, but because Americans are paid more.

For President Bush, fundamentalist Christianity ultimately supports a moral foreign policy and economic policy:

Individual moral accountability is what is demanded of the child in the strict father family and by God in fundamentalist religion. Individual responsibility is the moral touchstone of right-wing politics. And it is the basis of strict father economics, in which government should provide nothing for the individual, who is on his own and completely responsible for himself, requiring no support from community or country. Free-market freedom leads inevitably to democracy and to right-wing “freedoms” in all domains of life. Religion, economics, family values, and foreign policy are one. Human rights in other countries—which the United States all too often has authority to impose—are taken to include unrestricted free markets, free trade, and the freedom of fundamentalist Christians to practice and proselytize, to be free to speak their “truth.”

Accordingly, Christian missionaries are seen as exercising a “human right” when they attempt to convert indigenous people to Christianity, and any restrictions on missionaries are seen as “antidemocratic” and an affront to human rights. Accordingly, it is taken as appropriate that fundamentalist Christian beliefs guide important aspects of American foreign policy. One of George Bush’s first acts in office was to stop American aid to all
reproductive health clinics that performed abortions or even counseled women on how to obtain safe abortions. The Bush administration agrees with the pope: The essence of woman is to bear children. Family planning and reproductive health clinics should therefore not be part of American foreign policy.

But this is the least of the commonality between fundamentalist religion and Bush’s foreign policy. Evangelical fundamentalism is about spreading the “good news,” about being a missionary and having a mission. That religious mission is about freedom, as we saw in
Chapter 10
: how to become free of sin and free of hell and suffering for all eternity. Strict father Christianity is the answer. First, take Jesus as Savior, and have all your previous sins washed away. Second, follow God’s commandments, following the path of Jesus, and you will be saved from eternal suffering in hell. Third, it is your mission to pass the word on.

Bush has a mission as well: to spread the radical conservative version of freedom and democracy, and its foundation, strict father morality, which is identical to the foundation of fundamentalist religion. The fundamentalist mission fits the neoconservative mission. Bush, as a thoroughgoing radical conservative—fundamentalist
and
neoconservative—has two missions at once. Both concern the spread of “freedom.”

In our discussion of the nation-as-person metaphor, we saw that just as it is in the interest of a person to be strong, healthy, and influential, so it is in the national interest for the nation as a whole to be militarily strong, economically healthy, and politically influential. That is what the national interest is about—not about individual people, who may be impoverished, in debt, disabled, aged, uneducated, sick, or discriminated against. If the
GDP and the stock market are up, the military is strong, and the country can intimidate other nations and twist arms around the world, the national interest is served.

From the time America broke free of England in the American Revolution, freedom has been a centerpiece in American foreign policy. The goals have been what we will call the democratic ideal:

• To protect our domestic freedoms
  

• To extend those freedoms to other nations