Comments on: Thinking like a Terrorist

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:13:00 +0000

in this sense, bin Laden won. And I am not sure he did not win by getting the Bush administration to bankrupt the country. He could not have called how they would do it— but we did wear ourselves out financially in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:10:00 +0000

The way the principles of equality and freedom have been sustained in American history is to have a strong and principled response to their transgression. Thus, for example, academic freedom was more strengthened by the response to McCarthyism than it was weakened by McCarthyism. Bush has fundamentally compromised American freedoms in the way he and his administration pursued “the war on terrorism.” A strong response is needed if American freedoms are to prevail in American life and as symbols of American strength.

As far as Tocqueville, I read him more like Rafael, less like Tim. Tocqueville saw the dangers of individualism, but thought that the American version of individualism rightly understood, i.e. connected to civic concern, would prevail. On race, Tocqueville was a fatalist, predicting race war or complete integration as the only possible outcomes. But yes, he took Jefferson’s racist explanations of black white relation too seriously.

By: Tim Rosenkranz

Tim Rosenkranz — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 06:08:00 +0000

As much as I would also like to label Bush as the gravedigger of American principles, it is not as if the same processes did not occur before in American history, when the liberties and the equality of whole groups of American society were ignored (slavery, Japanese-American prison camps in WWII, McCarthy era, racial segregation). I agree with Rafael Narvaez that Americas principles are its weakness, but one has to look further than George W Bush to grasp the systemic problem. The principles of equality and liberty in America are deeply flawed, as already Tocqueville should have noted. Both principles, liberty and equality, in the US are based purely on the individual and its utilitarian associations, but not on other possible options like societal solidarity. Tocqueville’s model of the great American democracy only works in a more or less homogenous society, where the majority and minority are closely related – like white protestants and white catholics (one just has to read his chapters on race in “Democracy in America,” where Tocqueville more or less gives in to slavery).