American Ideal
How America can keep its values in the age of terrorism. By Asheesh Siddique, Princeton University
Wednesday June 20, 2007
Six years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Americans remain intensely divided over how the United States should conduct itself in an increasingly volatile international arena. Incensed by the rush to war in Iraq and revelations that the Bush administration sanctioned the torture of enemy combatants, progressives warn that their country’s “values” are being trampled upon by a president with little regard for the “rule of law” and “constitutional tradition.” Against them, conservatives insist that “true American patriots” would seek to prevent the next attack by any means necessary, including the suspension of the historic traditions of habeas corpus, and violations of individual privacy through roving wiretaps and intrusions into library records. How can such contradictory visions be simultaneously “American”?
 As Anne-Marie Slaughter argues in her compelling new book, The Idea That is America: Keeping Faith With Our Values in a Dangerous World, they cannot: to be American means to share the seven common values of liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith (which she broadly defines as “an unshakeable confidence in the capacity of Americans to live up to their ideals”). For Slaughter, a distinguished scholar of international law, a highly influential voice in Democratic foreign policy circles, and the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, each value has a specific meaning that can be elucidated through a careful reading of founding political texts, especially the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and The Federalist, as well as consideration of our history and artistic heritage. Devoting a chapter to exploring each of these keywords, Slaughter demonstrates that we can win the war on terror and achieve “a more perfect union” at home only by letting these values guide our actions.
“Before promising to stand for democracy throughout the world,” Slaughter writes, “we Americans need to reflect on our own form of democracy to understand just what we are, or should be, promising.” We mandate that economic liberalization and poverty reduction are essential for developing economies, but we are skittish in our own commitment to free trade and turn our backs on fellow citizens living in degrading conditions—a fact sordidly revealed by Hurricane Katrina. As a liberal democracy composed of people of every race, creed, and religious affiliation, America elevates tolerance as a fundamental value guiding its social arrangements. But after 9/11, the rhetoric lambasting “Islamo-Fascism” embraced by politicians and pundits on the left and the right—as if all Muslims were at fault for the heinous actions of an insane minority—makes the Muslim world view the war on terrorism as a war against Islam rather than radicalism, “exactly the message that Al Qaeda uses to whip up supporters and new recruits.”
Most important for Slaughter, by engaging in the torture of “enemy combatants” suspected of association with Al Qaeda at the Guantanamo military base, the Bush administration has not merely reneged upon America’s commitment to the Geneva Conventions but also abandoned the fundamentally American principal of “liberty and justice for all.” [Slaughter’s emphasis.] She passionately argues that the president’s “sweeping claims of absolute power,” especially to deny detained terrorists fair trials in court and to violently interrogate them, undermines our ability to fight terrorism by producing bad intelligence, alienating our allies, and mocking our values. With these policies, Slaughter warns, we “degrade ourselves, beginning with the young men and women ordered to carry out such treatment and ending with our very identity as a nation.” Once, the idea of inalienable rights for all—even those from other lands and those accused of crimes—reigned in America, including the right to trial and the right to be free of cruel and unusual punishments. Now, she laments, “we are prepared to do such things because we are trying to protect the lives of our people—lives that, contrary to everything we believe as Americans, are suddenly more important than our values.”
Slaughter offers a litany of solutions to close the gap between our values and our policies. For example, the United States should commit to following the Geneva Conventions by honoring the rights of prisoners captured in the war on terrorism and set clear rules for the conduct of military interrogations to avoid more abuses like what happened at Abu Ghraib. Policymakers should eliminate agricultural subsidies and protective tariffs for corporate farmers that hurt their poor counterparts in the developing world. Slaughter concludes that when Americans unite around the common and fundamental values explored in The Idea That is America they will again make their country a respected leader on the global stage and an effective advocate for solutions to the great international problems of our time.
Although Slaughter’s argument and many of her policy prescriptions have been bandied about among progressives since 9/11, very few have made the case for liberal internationalism as eloquently, or in such self-consciously patriotic terms.
Still, Slaughter does engage in one of the more aggravating tendencies of mainstream liberalism since 9/11: even as she insists that both progressive and conservative visions of America cannot be simultaneously right, she glosses over the extent of our bitter, fundamental disagreements over what all of these values actually mean when she implores that we unite around them. Like politicians who speak of “one America” and the need to transcend the divide between “a liberal America and a conservative America,” Slaughter believes that we all could all put aside our partisan identities and come to some working agreement on what these ideas might mean. However, the true history of the concepts of “freedom,” “democracy,” “tolerance,” and “equality” has never been one of simple consensus, but rather of complex argument and bitter contestation. Americans have fought repeatedly (and sometimes violently) over what it means to be “free,” what a “democratic” society would look like, or how to achieve “equality.” Our debates over these ideas repeatedly beget more exchange, not resolution. It is unclear why these conversations would or should operate otherwise today or in the future. But they will be more productive if progressives all know what they are fighting for.
A Campus Progress contributing writer, Asheesh Kapur Siddique graduated from Princeton University in June 2007.
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Apparently Slaughter forgot that this country was founded on two basic systems: the genocide of indigenous people and the slave labor of Africans. The whole myth about “Americans” standing for values like “freedom,” “democracy” and “equality” rings hollow when you remember that the founding fathers owned slaves, etc.
Additionally, the policies of economic liberalization have the effect of increasing poverty both domestically and globally. So, liberalization and poverty reduction are antithetical. The way the US pushes neoliberal policies while preaching “poverty reduction” is a good microcosm for how the supposed values that this country was founded on have no relation to the actual reality of the impact of US government policy.
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