Homeland in the (Rearview) Mirror

President Bush’s depiction of the past is sanitized, selective, and self-serving where not simply false. The great liberating tradition to which he refers is, to a considerable extent, poppycock. The president celebrates freedom without defining it, and he dodges any serious engagement with the social, cultural, and moral incongruities arising from the pursuit of actually existing freedom. A believer for whom God remains dauntingly inscrutable might view the president’s confident explication of the Creator’s purpose to be at the very least presumptuous, if not altogether blasphemous.

Still, one must acknowledge that in his second inaugural address, as in other presentations he has made, President Bush succeeds quite masterfully in capturing something essential about the way Americans see themselves and their country. Here is a case where myths and delusions combine to yield perverse yet important truths.

Reinhold Niebuhr helps us appreciate the large hazards embedded in those myths and delusions. Four of those truths merit particular attention at present: the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism, the indecipherability of history, the false allure of simple solutions, and, finally, the imperative of appreciating the limits of power.

Andrew J. Bacevich in World Affairs - Winter 2008

By the time that The Irony of American History appeared, Niebuhr had evolved a profound appreciation for the domestic roots of U.S. foreign policy. He understood that the expansionist impulse central to the American diplomatic tradition derived in no small measure from a determination to manage the internal contradictions produced by the American way of life.

From the very Founding of the Republic, American political leaders had counted on the promise and the reality of ever greater material abundance to resolve or at least alleviate those contradictions. As Niehuhr writes, "we [Americans] seek a solution for practically every problem of life in quantitative terms," convinced that more is better²² Through a strategy of commercial and territorial expansion, the United States accrued power and fostered material abundance at home. Expectations of ever increasing affluence in turn ameliorated social tensions and kept internal dissent within hounds, thereby permitting individual Americans to pursue their disparate notions of life, liberty, and happiness.²³ Yet even in 1952, Niebuhr expresses doubts about this strategy's long-term viability, acknowledging that expansion cannot and, he implies. should not “go on forever .... "²⁴
p. xix

Andrew J. Bacevich's Introduction to Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History - October, 2007

We frequently speak of "tragic" aspects of contemporary history; and also call attention to a "pathetic" element in our present historical situation. My effort to distinguish "ironic" elements in our history from tragic and pathetic ones, does not imply the denial of tragic and pathetic aspects in our contemporary experience. It does rest upon the conviction that the ironic elements are more revealing. The three elements might be distinguished as follows: (a) Pathos is that element in an historic situation which elicits pity, but neither deserves admiration nor warrants contrition. Pathos arises from fortuitous cross-purposes and confusions in life for which no reason can be given, or guilt ascribed. Suffering caused by purely natural evil is the clearest instance of the purely pathetic. (b) The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high value for the sake o a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic destruction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with[xxiii]guilt. (c) Irony consists of apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are discovered, upon closer examination, to be not merely fortuitous. Incongruity as such is merely comic. It elicits laughter. This element of comedy is never completely eliminated from irony. But irony is something more than comedy. A comic situation is proved to be an ironic one if a hidden relation is discovered in the incongruity. If virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits–in all such cases the situation is ironic. The ironic situation is distinguished from a pathetic one by the fact that the person involved in it bears some responsibility for it, It is differentiated from tragedy by the fact that the responsibility is related to an unconscious weakness rather than to a conscious resolution. While a pathetic or a tragic situation is not dissolved when a person becomes conscious of his involvement in it, an ironic situation must dissolve, if men or nations are made aware of their complicity in it. Such awareness involves some realization of the hidden vanity or pretension by which comedy is turned into irony. This realization either must lead to an abatement of the pretension, which means contrition; or it lends to a desperate accentuation of the vanities to the point where irony turns into pure evil.

Our modern liberal culture, of which American civilization is such an unalloyed exemplar, is involved in many ironic refutations of its original pretensions of virtue, wisdom, and power. Insofar as communism has already elaborated some of these pretensions into noxious forms of tyranny, we are involved in the double irony of confronting evils which were distilled from illusions, not generically different from our own. Insofar as communism tries to cover the ironic contrast between its original dreams of justice and virtue and its present realities by more and more desperate efforts to prove its tyranny to be "democracy" and its imperialism to be the achievement of universal peace, it has already dissolved irony into pure evil.
pp. xxiii-xxiv

Reinhold Niebuhr's Preface to The Irony of American History - 1952

But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have[120]merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘ Who should rule? ’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘ good ’ or ‘ wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question : Who should rule ? by the new ² question : How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?

Those who believe that the older question is fundamental, tacitly assume that political power is ‘ essentially’ unchecked. They assume that someone has the power—either an individual or a collective body, such as a class. And they assume that he who has the power can, very nearly, do what he wills, and especially that he can strengthen his power, and thereby approximate it further to an unlimited or unchecked power. They assume that political power is, essentially, sovereign., If this assumption is made, then, indeed, the question ‘ Who is to be the sovereign? ’ is the only important question left.
pp. 120-121

Karl Popper The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. I - 1945

This defines the essential crisis we face today. The basic precepts that inform U.S. national security policy are not making us safer and more prosperous while guaranteeing authentic freedom. They have multiplied our enemies and put us on the road to ruin while indulging notions of freedom that are shallow and spurious. The imperative of the moment is to change fundamentally our approach to the world. Yet this is unlikely to occur absent a serious and self-critical examination of the domestic arrangements and priorities that define what we loosely refer to as the American way of life.

“No one sings odes to liberty as the final end of life with greater fervor than Americans,” Niebuhr once observed. Yet it might also be said that no one shows less interest in discerning the true meaning of liberty than do Americans. Although I would not want to sell my countrymen short—the United States has in the past demonstrated a remarkable ability to weather crises and recover from adversity—I see little evidence today of interest in undertaking a critical assessment of our way of life, which would necessarily entail something akin to a sweeping cultural reformation.

Andrew J. Bacevich in World Affairs - Winter 2008