See if you can guess when George W. Bush said this:
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. . . . The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy . . . which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.
Answer: he didn’t. It is from Ronald Reagan’s address to the British parliament on June 8, 1982, which was itself a deliberate echo of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech 36 years earlier, which had predicted that if the United States and England cooperated “all over the globe” by joining all their “moral and material forces and convictions,” the future would be clear “not only for our time, but for a century to come.”
The headline of the New York Times on June 9, 1982 reporting on Reagan’s speech was “President Urges Global Crusade for Democracy.”
The above quotation from Reagan’s speech is in Wilfred M. McClay’s interesting article in the January 2007 issue of COMMENTARY — “Is Conservatism Finished?” Professor McClay holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee (he will be the Fulbright lecturer in American history at the University of Rome next year) and he wrote the prescient article in the June 2005 issue of COMMENTARY entitled “Bush’s Calling.” That article ended as follows:
There is a reason why the Christian tradition distinguishes between hope, which is considered a theological virtue, and optimism, which is not.
Conservatism will be like the salt that has lost its savor if it abandons its mission to remind us of what Thomas Sowell has called “the constrained vision” of human existence — the vision that sees life as a struggle full of unintended consequences and tragic dilemmas, involving people whose noblest efforts often fail, sometimes miserably so.
As Abraham Lincoln reminded us in his own second inaugural address, the hand of Providence may be present in our reversals as well as in our triumphs. Hope can survive such reversals, even when optimism cannot. It strikes me that this remains a useful and important lesson, especially for a nation with, at the moment, so many charges to keep.
“A Charge to Keep” is the title of the campaign autobiography of the 43rd president of the United States, whose own Second Inaugural Address echoed Lincoln’s.
Today’s New York Times reported that:
When Mr. Bush met privately last week with a dozen rabbis and Jewish educators, they expected he might open the conversation by talking about Israel. Instead, the president greeted them in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with a discourse on Iraq, and why he still believes it can be a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.
“I got the sense of a man who feels very heavily the weight of history,” said Robert Wexler, president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, who attended the meeting . . . .
“I’m a judge of sincerity — I think rabbis are pretty good at that,” he said. “If you didn’t tell me this was the president of the United States, I would say this was a man with something on his mind who was very, very sincere about what he was saying.”
President George W. Bush meets with Jewish leaders from the higher education community in the Roosevelt Room Monday, Dec. 18, 2006. (White House photo by Eric Draper).