Taking liberty: liberals ignore and conservatives misunderstand America's guiding value: freedom.

• Author: Galston, William A.

George W. Bush's second inaugural address, with its sweeping rhetoric about the spread of freedom abroad and at home, sparked strong but varied reactions. Most of the president's conservative supporters ranked it with the greatest inaugural speeches, such as John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to bear any burden and pay any price in the service of human freedom and Lincoln's sermonic 1865 meditation on the inscrutable justice of God's judgment on those who deny freedom to others. The president's liberal critics were less laudatory, agreeing instead with former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan's surprising judgment that the speech fell "somewhere between dreamy and disturbing." Whether the speech was a display of visionary statesmanship, or an exercise in hubristic overreach, is something only history can determine. But it is not too early to say that the speech was both a wakeup call to liberals--from whose vocabulary the evocative term "freedom" has been mostly absent in recent years--and a guide to the deep flaws in the modern conservative understanding of freedom.

In declaring, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," President Bush picked up a rhetorical battle standard of freedom first carried by Woodrow Wilson and later lofted by Cold War liberals and Ronald Reagan. But he went his predecessors one better. In a grand rhetorical stroke, Bush sought to terminate the venerable debate between foreign policy "idealists" and "realists": Not only does the promotion of democracy reflect our values, it also advances our interests. It is the resentment stimulated by tyranny, he argued, that produces terrorism, and the only cure for tyranny is freedom. Thus, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

President Bush's language effectively taps a deep vein of the American psyche. It is the way we like to think of ourselves. Even more, it is the way we wish to understand the world--as an orderly cosmos where our ideals and our interests coincide. If only it were so. International conditions have almost always forced presidents, to one extent or another, to choose between protecting the nation's interests and advancing the borders of freedom--and an unswerving devotion to the latter has often led to disaster. Recall how Wilson's conception of national self-determination helped sow the seeds of an unstable, punitive peace and the most destructive war the world has ever known. Recall also the unsavory alliances Cold War presidents of both parties were forced to make. The hard truth is that it's not always possible to promote the ends of freedom with the means of freedom. To prosecute the global war on terror and to minimize the chances of an even more devastating strike on our homeland, we will often be forced to compromise with the Putins and Musharrafs of this world. We should not assume that democracy will always drain the swamps where terrorism breeds. Sometimes autocratic governments will do more to suppress terrorism than to stimulate it; sometimes elections will empower radically anti-American leaders and create more space in which terrorists can operate. And it is tunnel-visioned to believe, as the president does, that a democratic offense is always the best defense. Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, it is sobering to reflect on its opportunity costs--on the quantity of loose nuclear materials we could have secured around the world and the number of facilities we could have hardened at home with the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spilling in the sands of Mesopotamia.

Nonetheless, it was impossible not to be moved by the sight of 8.5 million Iraqis braving threats and violence to vote, or to be heartened by the signs of democratic self-determination in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. President Bush's faith in the transformative power of freedom may be extreme and un-nuanced, but it is not wholly misplaced.

Much the same may be said of freedom in the domestic sphere. The president's speech invoked the "broader definition of liberty" he saw at work in historic programs such as the Homestead Act, Social Security, and the GI Bill of Rights. Appealing to classic civic republicanism, he rooted citizenship in the "independence" that stems from "ownership." And he boldly appropriated Franklin Delano Roosevek's "Four Freedoms" for his own purposes: "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny," he declared, "we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear." Whatever may have been the case 70 years ago, he asserted, conservative individualist means are now better suited to serve classic liberal ends than are New Deal programs of social solidarity.

Here, as in the international arena, a vast gap exists between President Bush's abstract rhetoric of freedom and real world conditions. In the case of Social Security, for example, the problems are far less severe than the president has suggested. And his proposed cure--private accounts--does nothing to address the solvency of the system, even as it risks plunging millions of retirees into poverty while adding trillions of dollars in transition costs to the government's already mountainous debt. The more voters learn about the president's plan, the less they like it. Still, its core idea--freedom understood as increased individual choice and control over one's own destiny--has an undeniable appeal.

After all, the idea of freedom is at the heart of our nation's creed. Edmund Burke famously observed that Americans "sniff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." Even today, the extraordinary value Americans place on individual liberty is what most distinguishes our culture, and the political party seen by voters as the most willing to defend and expand liberty is the one that usually wins elections. Conservatives have learned this lesson; too many liberals have forgotten it. And as long as liberals fool themselves into believing that appeals to income distribution tables can take the place of policies that promote freedom, they will lose.

The questions before us are, what is the meaning of freedom in the 21st century and what are the means needed to make it effective in our lives? Those of us who oppose the conservative answer cannot succeed by changing the question. We can only succeed by giving a better answer.

Free love and free markets

For much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders. Teddy Roosevelt expanded the 19th century laissez-faire conception of freedom, in which government was seen as the greatest threat, to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world, freedoms restricted by concentrations of economic power and protected by the exercise of public power. Woodrow Wilson boldly reversed the inherited belief that America's national freedom was best secured by abstaining from foreign entanglements, insisting that the liberty of...