 | January 22, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Speech Misheard Round the World
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
ambridge, 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.
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