Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (27 page)

Trade issues have been inhibiting our ability to extend our freedoms to others. Internet companies like Yahoo and AOL are helping the Chinese to censor Internet content and are even turning over the names of people engaged in “subversive” online activity. The cost of doing business is supporting the suppression of free speech. Our government should be supporting American companies in resisting such suppression, instead of using the same means to spy on our own citizens.

Terrorism should be seen in terms of crime, not war, and fought in the most positive and least violent way. The war in Iraq increased terrorism by creating new terrorists. To work against Islamic terrorism, we should be supporting extensive networks of moderate Islamic schools to replace madrasas. Indeed, there should be overwhelming support for the development and popularization of moderate Islam. The financial support coming
from Saudi Arabia should be cut off. The intelligence agencies need to hire more Arabic speakers. Arabic should be taught widely in this country and there should be cultural missions to Islamic countries.

Empathy and responsibility extend not just to other individuals, or just to human beings, but further to the earth itself as a biological system and all the living things on it. This means, among other things, recognizing the reality of global warming, perhaps the greatest threat to the earth as we know it. We should be working with other countries to cut down on the use of fossil fuels and should put in place a massive program to develop alternative energy sources. Such a program would have important foreign policy consequences. It would vastly reduce our dependence on Middle East oil. New energy technologies could be marketed, or given away, to developing countries; they would then not have to buy oil, or borrow the money to buy oil, or clean up the mess from using oil. Because clean energy is available everywhere, every country has the potential to be an energy producer, not a consumer.

The cost to our country of maintaining an oil-based economy has been enormous—not just the cost of the oil itself but also the cost in lives lost, in bodies maimed, and in money misspent. Dependence on oil must end.

Defending our freedoms requires real homeland security; under Bush, a vast amount has been spent with little effect. Our ports, railways, and chemical plants are not safe. Hurricane Katrina showed that we are not prepared for disasters, natural or otherwise. This lack of preparedness is a matter of radical conservative policy: Defund agencies like FEMA that function for the public good; hire private industry; use the military; ignore the needs of people impoverished by disaster, who, if they had been disciplined enough, would be okay and who have only themselves to blame if they’re not. This attitude is despicable. We must rethink homeland security seriously from a progressive perspective, correcting all the conservative defects in the policy.

We do not defend our freedoms by giving up our freedoms. At Bush’s directive, intelligence agencies have been spying on our citizens without warrants. We have been jailing people without charges or due process. This must end. The defense and spread of conservative freedom is the death of progressive, traditional American freedom.

Bush’s second inaugural address was a work of rhetorical art. More than half of the time, the use of “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” was in a context neutral enough to fit the simple, uncontested sense—or either the progressive or conservative senses. The words could mean whatever one wanted them to mean, depending on one’s political leanings. Many of Bush’s phrases could have been said by a Democrat with the opposite policies.

Sentence by sentence, they sounded like traditional patriotic language. Even a liberal as sophisticated as Elaine Kamarck was taken in. But Bush was speaking in the context of defending his controversial policies. This made it seem as if his policies fit the traditional sense of freedom—which, as we have seen, they clearly do not.

While much of the time Bush was using a vague idea of freedom, he also made specific references to right-wing freedom, evoking the frames of the radical conservatives. There is the reference to “the force of human freedom,” linking freedom to the use of force. He warns us that freedom faces a dangerous threat: The “survival of liberty” reinforces his claim that the Iraq War is part of a war for our survival. The use of “liberty” within the American context is an appeal to conservative populists and an inherent attack on liberals who criticize the war and, in Bush’s
view, threaten our survival. The “survival of liberty” also evokes the idea that liberals who oppose the war are enemies of America.

The association of democracy and freedom with fundamentalist Christianity and creationism is made by reference to “the Maker of Heaven and earth,” followed up by “the imperative of self-government,” where “imperative” suggests obedience to God’s commandments. The fundamentalist battle of good against evil is echoed in “life is fragile, and evil is real …”

Right-wing economic freedom and the economic liberty myth are evoked in the section implicitly attacking Social Security through reference to “the ownership society.” The curious phrase “preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society” suggests that we are now economic slaves to the government, implicitly echoes the right-wing cry for “economic freedom,” and touches on the theme that discipline is required for prosperity. The right-wing idea that only the disciplined deserve prosperity and the freedom it brings is reinforced by the use of the code word “character”: “the public interest depends on private character.” The suggestion is that liberal elites are destroying the fabric of morality in America. Then, the heart of strict father morality: “Self-government relies, in the end, on the government of the self,” as we discussed. Neoconservative missionary foreign policy is then telegraphed in the important sentence “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” And, nearing the end, creationism is tied to patriotism by invoking “the Author of Liberty.”

There are mostly uncontested uses of “freedom” and “liberty” in support, via context, of a highly contested policy, sprinkled through with the full range of right-wing uses of “freedom” and “liberty.” The effect is to help commandeer both the word and the idea.

Here is the context. Bush has just been reelected, running on his post-9/11 record and the war in Iraq as the person most likely to defend the country against terrorist attack. But it has come
out, through leaks from former insiders, that he intended to attack Iraq from the first week he came into office. No weapons of mass destruction were found, and it appears that intelligence was doctored or twisted in order to marshal support for the war. Democrats have called the war one of “choice,” not “necessity.”

“The history we have seen together” is 9/11 and the events that followed. But the words he uses are intended to reframe the context: These events defined certain duties for us, which we ignore at our peril. His “duties” include assuming war powers (extraordinary authority given to this president) and going to war in Iraq. The claim is that those war powers are “duties” thrust upon him by external events beyond his control, rather than powers assumed by fiat. “The history we have seen together” suggests a common knowledge and understanding of events, while in fact the reverse is true—the account of events is considerably contested.

This ignores the Vietnam War, our experience closest to the Iraq War, where we were driven out of the country with huge losses.

The Clinton administration’s energetic shift toward the economic over the military, both at home and in diplomacy, is seen as inaction—”quiet,” “repose,” “sabbatical”—leaving behind
one’s duties and work, as if the country were asleep and nothing was happening during the greatest economic boom and period of optimism in our history. Clinton’s military containment of Saddam Hussein inside Iraq’s no-fly zones, which indeed succeeded in keeping Saddam Hussein from developing weapons of mass destruction, is ignored. The successful uses of the military in Bosnia and Kosovo are also ignored. The idea is that the country was ignoring a gathering military threat. “And then there came a day of fire” refers to 9/11 using the religious language and rhetoric of Revelation:

“Simmer” repeats “fire” and suggests that “whole regions of the world” might spark a conflagration. The image is apocalyptic! The ultimate causes are “tyranny” (the absence of democracy) and “resentment” (an echo of “they hate our freedoms” as Bush’s explanation of the 9/11 attack). There is no discussion of Osama bin Laden citing the American military bases in Saudi Arabia as a major cause for the attack, and protecting oil interests as a rationale for the Saudi bases. There is no discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”

The frame imposed is tyranny versus freedom “in all the world.” We are threatened from around the world. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands … the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

This is neoconservative foreign policy in missionary language, joined to the traditional “beacon of freedom” idea, although traditionally the “beacon” was planted on our shores and didn’t go out and preemptively attack other countries. This is an idealist foreign policy, contrasting with the old realist foreign policy that “contained” tyrants and minimized their effect until they could be internally overthrown.

Implicit here is the common claim that democracies don’t go to war with other democracies—that if there were democracy everywhere (“freedom in all the world”), then peace would be realized.

What is not mentioned explicitly is his view, which we have seen elsewhere, that freedom is free-market freedom, that free trade is the foothold of free-market freedom and the mechanism for “the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Not mentioned, but there in context, is his view that the United States has a vital interest in controlling the flow of oil.

That is why “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” In the neoconservative vision, the way to control the flow of oil in the Middle East and to profit from free trade is to spread democracy via free-market freedom, when necessary by the use of force. This is a mission, an evangelical mission.

Here we have religion intimately tied to democracy. The “Founding” of the country is analogized to the Creation; we are equal not because of the Enlightenment idea that we are equally rational, but rather because we are all made in the image of “the Maker of Heaven and earth”—a description of God that echoes creationism. Patriotism and creationism are one.

The religious overtones continue: “proclaimed the imperative … the mission that created our Nation … the calling …” Here is evangelical democracy, modeled on evangelical Christianity, with a mission, a calling. That evangelical mission—spreading democracy—”created our Nation.” In other words, it is God’s plan for America. But it is more than “advancing … ideals;” it is “the urgent requirement of our nation’s security.” Neoconservatism is evangelical.

At this point, the religious overtones end and language becomes neutral between progressivism and conservatism for several paragraphs. Indeed, it sounds like the progressive ideal of protecting our freedoms here and extending them abroad. Here’s a typical example:

Then the tone shifts: “Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens.” Here comes the conservative agenda, presented in terms of freedom.