The Pure Heart

Earlier this month, a group of sixty American public figures issued a statement on the attacks of September eleventh and the conflicts that have followed it. Titled What We're Fighting For, the document was a measured defense of the American war against Al Qaeda and, by implication, its Taliban allies. What we are fighting for, the authors declared, are American beliefs that are also the universal principles of modern societies: all individuals possess equal intrinsic dignity; there are true and enduring differences between right and wrong; because truth is obscure, tolerance and civility are necessary political virtues; and the freedom of conscience and religion is sacrosanct. The willingness of Al Qaeda terrorists to take innocent lives in the name of an absolutist doctrine puts them outside this circle of shared values, and so the statement defended war against them as a defense of social life itself.

The signatories cut across some conventional divisions. They included Michael Walzer, editor of Dissent magazine and a dean of the American left, along with a number of left-liberal scholars; Harvey Mansfield and Robert George, notorious in certain circles as the arch-conservatives of the politically liberal Harvard and Princeton campuses; Samuel Huntington, the political scientist identified with the "clash of civilizations" thesis; and Francis Fukuyama, the neo-conservative student of Hegel who famously declared "the end of history" in the early 1990s. They were not all academics, but included a handful of political activists, charity directors, a former United States Senator, and others from several reaches of America's political spectrum.

Their purpose was to express a form of critical patriotism, loyal to the national interest but able to judge American actions in terms of the best values of the country and the world. They noted that many of them object to some American habits, such as consumerism and individualism, and "pledge[d]" themselves to "doing all we can to change them for the better." They paused to warn -- seemingly against the possibility of an attack on Iran, for instance -- that war is not legitimate against dangers "that might plausibly be mitigated solely through negotiation, appeals to reason, persuasion from third parties, or other nonviolent means." They began their conclusion with this: "We pledge to do all we can to guard against the harmful temptations -- especially those of arrogance and jingoism -- to which nations at war so often seem to yield."

In Europe, where political leaders and the public have offered spirited criticism of American conduct since the Afghanistan campaign, this stance might seem unremarkable. Although the statement received little attention in the United States, its measured tone is more unusual here. The signatories of "What We're Fighting For" speak for a minority tradition in American political culture, one that is aware of the hazards of great power and the terrible danger of arrogance in politics.

The predominant American tendency, especially in foreign affairs, holds that the United States is an innocent nation, founded on decency and incapable of doing harm as long as it follows its truest instincts. The original source of this idea is the belief of the seventeenth-century English settlers here that their remote colonies enjoyed a special covenant with God -- an idea that has persisted in almost every generation of American politics, from the conquest of North America to the Cold War. Another, more subjective part of this impulse comes from the romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a national muse in the nineteenth century who urged his fellow citizens above all: "Trust thyself!" -- advice Americans have remained quick to accept. A similar mood emerged in America's popular tradition of Protestantism, in which believers find divine guidance in the sentiments of their hearts. In politics, this tradition translates into some persistent suspicions: that our enemy is always evil, doubt is unpatriotic, hesitation unmanly, and a willingness to admit ambiguity a sign of weakness. This political tradition is skeptical of any stricture that stands in the way of the pure heart and the steady hand.

The minority tradition holds that perfect self-confidence is the most dangerous attitude for a ruler. As the great twentieth-century jurist Learned Hand put it, "The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right." It has been Americans' great fortune that, at critical moments in history, this spirit has moved some of the country's great leaders. The framers of the American constitution, who worked at a rare moment of enlightenment in American political thought, believed that what they called zealotry marked the road to tyranny. They developed elaborate mechanisms to check the popular will because they believed that fanaticism, delusion, and greed would always lie near the heart of political life. Because human nature is not trustworthy, they judged, only a good set of laws can enable people in a complex society to trust each other. One of their greatest successors, President Abraham Lincoln, inhabited a dark world, filled with melancholy over the evil history of American slavery and, the irony of a civil war in which both sides invoked God's support. By the end of his life Lincoln, who led a war as morally clear as any until World War Two, was ready to say that any leader who claimed God's support in war was a fool and a kind of sinner, and that humility and reconciliation were the necessary companions of moral certainty.

George W. Bush exemplifies the majority tradition of American optimism. In the 2000 presidential election, voters chose between a loquacious polymath given to speculation and a candidly ignorant, intellectually uncurious candidate whose chief appeal was that he promised decency and good sense -- sound moral instincts and a sure hand to carry them out. His implicit message was that government did not matter much, but that having a "good man" -- his favorite term of praise -- at its helm was better than rule by clever rogues. Bush was the candidate of the pure heart tradition in American politics. His administration's controversial decisions have reflected two consistent themes: that its good intentions inoculate it against abuse of power, and that the only moral guidance it needs are the compass points of good and evil.

The administration's security policies, devised hastily in the aftermath of September eleventh, rest on the premise that a government of good men does not legal constraints but can rely instead on the personal conscience. The government's new powers to monitor telephone calls, e-mail, and Internet use seriously weaken the protections set up in the early 1970s after three decades of government spying on Americans suspected of subversion. Those protections relied on the oversight of federal judges, who had to approve most new monitoring by law-enforcement agencies. The new laws expand monitoring powers outright in recent technologies such as the Internet. At the same time, it evades the oversight system by reclassifying large tracts of surveillance as "foreign intelligence," basically counter-espionage investigation, which requires no judicial approval. Now, whenever government investigators can make out even a remote link between a criminal inquiry and terrorism, they can claim to be conducting virtually unregulated "foreign intelligence" monitoring.

The upshot is that anyone likely to come under suspicion of terrorist sympathies -- Muslims, Arab-Americans, and others with potential links to dubious organizations -- is subject to monitoring that the law scarcely restricts. Regardless of possible terrorist links, Internet use and employer records are no longer private for anyone in the vicinity of a criminal investigation. Those powers would be useful in the hands of angels, but in this world they are almost certain to result in gratuitous and harassing monitoring.

The new laws also enable the government to detain foreigners on minor visa violations, which normally would not lead to police action. The government is supposed to release detainees, deport them, or begin criminal proceedings against them within ten days of their arrest. However, under a policy announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department has simply refused to release eighty-seven prisoners slated for deportation while it spends months seeking reasons to file criminal charges against them. The new law also makes possible short-term roundups of foreigners when an investigation is underway and the police need leads. In the wrong hands, this power is likely to teach resident foreigners suspicion and fear of American law.

The Bush administration has notoriously announced that it will create military tribunals for non-citizens linked even remotely to terrorism. This decision represents a piece of singular bad judgment reached for credible reasons. [Cut sentence.] The tribunals that the Bush administration described in its initial announcements were a travesty, with no assurance of the right to select a defense attorney, no regular appeal to a civilian court, a death penalty almost comically easy to apply, and a backdrop of total secrecy at the president's discretion. This policy attracted criticism from all points on the political map, and the administration has not said much about the tribunals recently, although it may yet revive them for some of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay.

The tribunals exemplify much that is worrisome about the Bush administration's attitudes: mistrust of the courts, comfort with the military, a willingness to put even legal non-citizens on a very different standing from citizens, and an eagerness to assign itself broad discretionary power. The chief check against abuse of the tribunals is the president's assurance that he can be trusted not to abuse them -- perhaps true of this president, but the very antithesis of rule of law. These are not the only attitudes present, of course, in an administration of thousands of people, most of them thoughtful and principled. These attitudes, though, represent a specifically American danger, the tendency to dispense with the structure of legal protections at the core of ordered liberty. In American political culture, this move begins in goodwill, in the idea of the pure heart, and its sincerity always makes it appealing. It always bears watching, because every political culture needs to cultivate an awareness of its own illiberal tendencies.

It would be a mistake to pursue these pessimistic sketches into a dire picture of an impending police state. The passion for privacy and the mistrust of government run deep in American political culture, and have always been in shifting balance with dislike of dissenters and deference to authority. It is almost inevitable that the less liberal impulses should come forward in crisis. History counsels hope, although not perfect confidence, that the balance will right itself in time.

More worrisome, because more consistent with American experience, is that non-citizens might be pressed deeper into second-class status in the criminal justice system. The American constitution applies in most of its provisions to "all persons," not all citizens, and in an immigrant nation this has been an important mark of good faith with new arrivals. American tolerance of plural religions and ethnicities have mostly stood the test of September eleventh, but the tradition of xenophobia in the United States is too old and powerful to be counted out of the game. Public displays of tolerance do not change the actions of overworked law enforcement agencies with newly expansive discretion.

Internationally, the pure heart tradition has had two consequences. Americans have stepped up their longstanding mistrust of international laws, institutions, and even negotiations, reviving a unilateralist spirit that comes with perfect moral self-confidence. At the same time the Bush administration's relentless rhetoric of good and evil, culminating in the president's identifying an "axis of evil," has renewed the belief that God is on the American side and sanctifies all that we do.

The long and undignified squabble over the Geneva Convention's application to the Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay stands for a larger refusal to submit the actions of the United States to standards shared among liberal nations. The American attitude to international law in the Afghanistan campaign and its aftermath has been cavalier, opportunistic, and mostly indifferent, which is quite consistent with recent history. Had the United States supported the creation of an International Criminal Court, it would not need secret military tribunals -- a fact that the defense establishment is not likely to regret. If it had remained within the Kyoto agreement, it might enjoy European allies more inclined to believe in its good faith as it contends with its prisoners of almost-war and plots the next step of its anti-terror campaign.

Invoking legal forms when they are convenient and ignoring them when they are not is the lawfulness of the medieval sovereign who could exempt himself from troublesome laws -- the power that much of liberal politics was born resisting. The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not so sure it is right -- or that those who follow it will be right -- and so submits itself to law to preserve liberty. Americans are a free and freedom-loving people, but they too seldom doubt they are right, and therein lies the ironic threat to their liberty.

The threat, though, is not only to American liberty. A cavalier attitude to international standards encourages much less well-intentioned governments to take the same view. Should the United States again presume to criticize China for its treatment of political prisoners, that criticism will be weakened by the memory of America's shrugging off the Geneva Convention. Beijing's leaders must be relishing the thought of that confrontation, when they will be able civilly to point out the hypocrisy of the American position. Perhaps with this in mind, President Bush was punctiliously circumspect in his remarks during last week's visit to China. We should not soon expect a complaint about Egypt's secret, military anti-terrorist tribunals, which have caught up non-violent dissidents in terrible abuse. Other examples are as abundant as the possibilities of abuse. Another great American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., suggested that the purpose of law is to address to worst man in the social order, not to honor the good instincts of the best. Whether one denounces the American attitude as arrogance or finds it an appealing but dangerous form of innocence, it is not well suited to understanding this elementary point: George W. Bush should follow the Geneva Convention not because he would commit atrocities otherwise, but so that those more likely to commit atrocities can be held to a credible standard.

The American tendency to fall back on strong ideas of good and evil -- with all good on our side and all evil elsewhere -- only makes it more likely that the campaign against terror will end up distorting global politics and lending comfort to local tyrannies. The talk of an "axis of evil" strengthened the hand of anti-American and anti-liberal politicians in Iran, a country where the prospects of democracy and eventual liberalism are poised on a knife-edge. It also ran together three profoundly different regimes, Iran's, Iraq's, and North Korea's, in a way that did not illuminate the sources of terror or suggest a consistent strategy against it.

Thanks to such language, fighting terrorism provides any government with a moral blank check and a chance at American military support. We may be confident that governments will find terrorists to fight. Already the Philippines has enlisted American troops to settle scores with a restive population of Muslim bandits. Indonesia, where ugly ethnic battles are producing Islamic and Christian militias in remote villages, may be the next to enlist the United States in strengthening the central government's hand. [Cut sentence.] Since September eleventh, Russia's brutality in Chechnya [cut phrase] has been retroactively vindicated. It is likely that the Chinese government is biding its time before cracking down on the Muslim Uighur population of its Central Asian northwest, which is one reason that Beijing has studiedly avoided clashes with the United States since September eleventh, to the point of preventing its journalists from criticism of the Afghanistan campaign. Of course, good as well as bad may come from shifts in previously intractable circumstances, particularly in the long-running dispute between India and Pakistan. Nonetheless, a reason of state characterized by undefined scope and limitless righteousness is a dangerous rationale to have floating about the capitals of the world. It would be a grim irony if the United States, still one of the world's great emblems of the rule of law, were to abet chaos and repression elsewhere because it cannot now muster the political prudence that shaped its constitutional tradition at the outset.

America needs its European allies to remain critical of its reckless impulses. Without such criticism, the United States is not likely to outgrow its specious ideas of moral and political self-sufficiency. Europeans, for their part, might recall that Americans do not much respect mosaic codes and respond poorly to hectoring. Rather than invoking letter and verse of the Geneva Convention or simply denouncing American arrogance, European critics should make the larger case: if we want something like global rule of law, we must take the idea seriously enough to act on it, even when it is not perfectly expedient. The liberal spirit is in the ascendant globally, but not by much. It stands a much better case against the illiberal atavisms of Islamicist extremism and the illiberal capitalism of China and Singapore if it has not just power but justice on its side.

Advocates of international law and self-restraint by the powerful are sometimes dismissed as dreamers, particularly in the United States. The truly unworldly people, though, are the ones who think rules are unnecessary, that pure intentions and a strong arm are enough to set the world right. That idea is a potent part of the American inheritance, but it is the wrong America for these times. Indeed, it has always been the wrong America.