Are Pres. Bush and the Founding Fathers on the same page?

• Author: Kesler, Charles R.
• Position: National Affairs - George W. Bush

"There is, in Bush's use of ... ideas, a certain ambiguity or confusion between the right to be free and the capacity to be free. The two are not quite the same."

AS WE LOOK AHEAD to four more years under Pres. George W. Bush, we would do well to assess the last four with this question in mind: Could the Bush Administration have done better--from a conservative and constitutional viewpoint? Let us look first at foreign and then domestic policy.

The Bush doctrine in foreign policy has been elaborated in a series of set-piece speeches by the President. Political scientist James Ceaser has pointed out in the Public Interest that these speeches have restored the idea of natural rights--rights that every human being has by virtue of being human--to a prominence in the Republican Party that it has not enjoyed since Abraham Lincoln. Ceaser may have shortchanged Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge, but the overall point is striking and correct. George Bush has staked a lot on natural or human rights and their connection to democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world.

A cautionary note, though: There is, in Bush's use of these ideas, a certain ambiguity or confusion between the fight to be true and the capacity to be free. The two are not quite the same. Every human being has, by nature, a right to be free, but it does not follow that every human being has the capacity or the moral equipment--the habits of the heart and mind--to do so. The Founding Fathers used to say, in words that Bush now echoes, that they staked all their experiments on mankind's capacity for self-government. The emphasis was on the word experiments. The Founders were well acquainted with the history of republican government, strewn with countless failed experiments. In fact, republican government was--and is--the most difficult form to establish and preserve because in it, ultimately, the people are everything. There is no king or aristocracy and no other class to correct the people's mistakes or prevent them from committing injustice. It is up to the people to govern themselves morally. Thus, even with the

improvements in political science that the American Founders celebrated, they never expected republicanism to spread easily and universally across the globe. In this sense, they were students of French writer Baron de Montesquieu, who taught that governments have to be suited to a people's character and conditions.

This, of course, does not mean that governments cannot be founded anew. America's Founders would not have been founders if they had not thought regime change was possible. Founding is possible because culture is not destiny: politics can help to reshape a nation's culture. Yet, the Founders also knew that no founding is completely de novo. Every founding begins from the existing habits and beliefs of the people for whom you me trying to found a new regime. Consequently, the Founders, I think, would have been more cautious about the U.S.'s ability to transform Iraqis into good democrats. In fact, the Founders actually gave some thought to the specific problem of Islamic regimes--as had Montesquieu, who wrote extensively on Mohammedanism and the problems of the Ottoman Empire.

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