The strength of the United States, Barack Obama said during his Presidential campaign, lies neither in its arsenal nor in its banks, but in the ideas that have defined its history. Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville would have recognized this as no mere rhetorical gesture. To simplify, the institutional apparatus of the country rests on the concepts of equality and freedom. In the United States, equality and freedom are not simply ideas in a book, de Toqueville argues, but instead, are the root of everything. The judicial, economic, educational, and religious systems are largely governed by these ideas, which throughout history have been progressively institutionalized, internalized, always emphasized, and of course sometimes distorted. The country largely revolves around principles such as economic, religious, and cultural freedom and the principle of equality before the law. This leads me to wonder, might the U.S.’s greatest strengths also be its most significant vulnerabilities?
As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.
De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than the principles of equality and freedom.
My point is that Obama is right about the strength of this country. As Max Weber has demonstrated in his great comparative studies of the world religions and in his investigations of economy and society, ideas matter. The powerful Soviet empire collapsed not only under external forces, but primarily because its institutional order was based on unsustainable principles. The same can be said about right and left-wing dictatorships, which also tend toward instability and collapse. And also in the U.S, the basic political principles and ideas matter as they have proven to provide stable support for the institutional system, and thus underlie the country’s considerable strength.
With this in mind, let me follow Sherlock Holmes’s method and think like a terrorist. If it is true that ideas are the main strength of, arguably, the strongest country in the world, then, the terrorist’s primary targets should not be military, economic or infrastructural. They would have to be ideological. If de Tocqueville is correct, as most experts agree, the terrorist would focus his or her attacks on the principles of equality and liberty to erode the country’s institutional apparatus, to create unrest and systemic instability.
To accomplish this, the terrorist would have to target key decision-makers, beginning with the President and the members of Congress. The terrorist would try to encourage them to change the basic rules, t0 diminish the role of the judiciary, to suspend principles such as habeas corpus, to undermine the fair treatment of presumed criminals and the humane treatment of actual criminals, and to undermine the principle that the country has to wage wars according to established rules and conventions. A goal of such an extremist would be for the U.S. to wage war following undemocratic means, fostering a sense that legality can be dispensed with. Another front of attack would involve freedom of expression and the free circulation of ideas. The terrorist would hope to increase the degree of policing and surveillance of private information. Executive capacities should be transferred to specialized branches in the military and to intelligence agencies, as dictatorships do. Freedom of worship should be dealt with also, preventing religious groups from houses of worship, for example.
For all this, the terrorist would have to enlist, above all, his or her most radical opponents. With their help, the terrorist can weaken the foundations of democratic practice and social order of America, turning the country against the very principles that sustain its distinctive social order.
Years ago, I would have been convinced that such a plan would be impossible, even ridiculous. But after George Bush, I began to wonder. And even under Obama, I am concerned.
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).
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.
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.