Bush vs Kerry: what sort of people do we want to be?

The actions of the George W Bush administration might be described by adapting a term once applied to the Austro–Hungarian empire: Despotismus gemildert durch Schlamperei. The return of the Bush folks to the White House will bring more of the same – arrogance mitigated by incompetence; and perhaps by an angry, dazed acknowledgment that something has gone wrong, but they can’t figure out what it is, and can’t admit that it is their own fault.

But what if John Kerry wins?

There are two reasons why a Kerry victory in itself is likely to disappoint those who see the Democratic candidate as the hope of the world. First, even if the Democrats do recapture the White House, that alone would not ensure a swing to the left by the country’s leadership as a whole; it would take a political miracle for the Republicans to lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Second, while some Democrats hold opinions and attitudes recognisably similar to those of the centre–left in other democracies, many Democratic orthodoxies – especially over foreign affairs – are quite similar to those of Republicans.

If Republicans, led by the neo–conservatives with their project for a century of American dominance, are committed to spreading American political ideas, so too, in their way, are Democrats. The Clinton administration was committed to a “neo–Wilsonian” foreign policy, based on the assumption that American democracy is the only true democracy in the world, and that foreigners will be best served by adopting American ways.

The Democratic party, at least since the Roosevelt era, has been internationalist as opposed to isolationist. It is also the immigrant party, and it has been strongly influenced by two powerful groups, Irish Americans and Jewish Americans, who have no particular reason to think kindly of Europe in general and Britain in particular. Democratic intellectuals, perhaps even more than Republicans, think it should be an object of American foreign policy to share the benefits of the American way of life, and particularly the American social and economic system, with the rest of the world. They often do not understand that not everyone in the rest of the world is keen for that to happen.

How far has America travelled?

In many ways, the United States has never been more ideologically polarised than it is today.  The key point is the shift, over the past four decades, of the south, once solidly Democratic, into the Republican column. That has had dramatic effects on both the main parties.

The old Democratic party was an alliance between the northern left — unionised workers, non–Protestant ethnic groups and liberal intellectuals — and the conservative south, unforgiving of the party of Lincoln. Without the south, the centre of gravity of the Democratic party would move sharply to the left. Lyndon Johnson understood that this would happen. “There goes the south”, he is said to have predicted, when he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that allowed southern African Americans to vote.

The Republican party has changed too. Once, there were moderate and even liberal Republicans. Now the party is dominated by the right, or by several fractions of the right. In theory, this might suggest that foreign policy in a Democrat–controlled White House would move to the left. In reality, that is unlikely, for two reasons.

First, Democratic politicians – even those, like John Kerry, from relatively liberal states like Massachusetts – operate within the customs and assumptions of a Washington politics governed by the absolute need to spend huge sums on television advertising.

Money rules Washington politics. Even liberal Democrats have to raise money, and big league fundraising operates within establishment assumptions very far from those of celebrity liberals like George Soros and the Hollywood crowd, or of internet–driven efforts like MoveOn.org or Howard Dean’s primary campaign. As a result, Washington politicians are constrained from speaking freely over, for example, the actions of right–wing governments in Israel.

But second, the politics of American liberal Democrats are a matter of choice as well as constraint. Indeed, their attitude to the world outside the United States is very similar to that of conservatives in one vital respect; they are also “American exceptionalists” who believe in the ideology, the religion, of Americanism. The United States, in this view, is exceptional not only in its military strength, the size of its economy or its population and resources – it also morally exceptional and morally superior.

As long as the United States needed allies to resist and ultimately defeat communism, American administrations of all colours were tactful about expressing this conviction. Once the Soviet threat had disappeared, they were free to believe that they no longer needed allies, and indeed that the United States must spread the blessings of American democracy, and American capitalism, to the rest of the world.

In the early days of the Clinton administration, all four key shapers of its foreign policy proclaimed themselves to be “neo–Wilsonians”. Warren Christopher, secretary of state; Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador (and later successor to Christopher); Tony Lake, national security adviser; and President Clinton himself – all believed it was their duty to bring American democracy to as much of the rest of the world as they could.

Woodrow Wilson, and the American progressive tradition that he represented, had nothing but disdain for the politics of Europe, let alone the rest of the world. Even after America entered the first world war and a million American troops were fighting alongside the French and the British on the western front, Wilson refused to call the countries fighting on the same side “allies”; he insisted that they were mere “associated powers”.

Wilson’s justification was that these governments did not represent the will of their peoples – despite the fact that the British and French prime ministers, Lloyd George and George Clemenceau, had the support of large parliamentary majorities, while Wilson himself did not(he lost control of Congress after the 1918 mid–term elections). But for him and for most American liberals, just as much as for American conservatives, only American democracy is real democracy.

Yet in the 1950s and beyond, a substantial constituency around the world did welcome the export of American democracy. Those colonised by European imperialism, the “captive nations” of the Soviet bloc, and many people in newly–independent countries rightly saw the United States as a liberating force. This positive sentiment extended to centre–left people in every European country who admired the progressive currents in American society.

This started to change long before the 2003 Iraq war, with the ascendancy of a new, harsher American conservatism. The political hegemony of this trend was sealed less by 9/11 than by the end of the cold war, which bequeathed to many Americans the sensation of having won a cup–final victory over the Soviet Union, leaving them as champions, the “last superpower”.

One consequence is an expectation that the country’s “allies” will welcome the spread of the American version both of democracy and, crucially, of capitalism. There is little awareness in the United States that non–Americans, confronted with American power over which they have no democratic control, can see it as selfish and even invasive. Perhaps this will prove to be, after the end of the cold war and 9/11, the next momentous shift in the world’s coordinates.

How much does Kerry understand?

How will these tectonic political shifts in the United States and in its image in the world impact on a possible John Kerry presidency? Perhaps one of the hardest problems facing Kerry’s advisers – among them thoughtful people like Richard Holbrooke, Strobe Talbott and Joseph Nye – is how much damage the contemptuous style and self–interested conduct of people such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld has done to America’s reputation.

The Iraq war demonstrated the irresistible might of American arms. Its aftermath has shown the limitations of American power. A Kerry administration will have to confront what the pomposity and vanity of the Bush administration has denied: that America does not have the soldiers, the money or the political will to impose the American way of life on even a middle–sized, middle–eastern country.

Would a Kerry administration understand these limitations? Could it understand that the rest of the world does not identify democracy with American nationalism? Would it have the political strength to act accordingly? I hope so, though Kerry’s confused messages about Iraq do not inspire confidence.

One consideration, however, does give hope. All American presidential elections have a double function: political and psychological. First, they are a mechanism to choose who will hold the presidency, the vice–presidency and some thousands of other jobs (including this time around, several Supreme Court justices). But second, they are moments of national introspection that propose tentative answers to deeper questions lodged in the national psyche: “how are we doing?” and even “what sort of people are we?”

This second aspect is reflected in a number of past contests where the American people shifted the ground upon which they chose to walk. 1876, the closest election before 2000, decided for “reunion and reaction” and abandoned the reconstruction of the south. 1912, the “Bull Moose” election, addressed the consequences of unregulated industrialisation and mass immigration. 1968 rejected the attempt to build a “great society” of social and racial justice by government action.

It is just possible that 2004 will decide that the wise response to the infinitely challenges of a complex world – Islamic rage, grief and terrorism; nuclear proliferation; grotesque social inequality; rooted political injustice – require more than shallow minds, arrogant certitudes, technological fireworks, and cowboy politics. The evidence of the past four years is that a Bush victory will bring zero chance of a retreat from incompetent despotism. A Kerry win would offer a margin of hope for America and the world.