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CIAO DATE: 10/00
Volume XVII, No 1, Spring 2000
Civil society, an old and, until fairly recently, largely forgotten concept in political theory, is currently enjoying a robust renaissance in academic and policymaking circles. The visibility and vitality of the concept of civil society in contemporary American politics is most tellingly suggested by its presence in the rhetoric of political figures who appear to agree on very little else.
Indeed, the embrace of civil society and its presumed virtues by both the left and the right is nothing short of extraordinary. At the very heart of Hillary Rodham Clinton's contention that "It Takes a Village" and George W. Bush's agenda for a "Compassionate Conservatism" is a plea for greater engagement of civil society organizations in the delivery of social services once deemed the primary responsibility of the state. For both Clinton and Bush, the involvement of business, churches, and private charities in healthcare, child rearing, and education is based on the belief that such engagement not only benefits the common good but may actually improve the quality and efficiency of public services.
However, it is in the sphere of international politics that civil society has made its biggest splash. Guided by the assumption that building a vibrant and robust civil society is a prerequisite for successful democratization, in recent years civil society has become the focus of efforts by the United States to promote democracy abroad. According to a U.S. government report, such work entails providing support to "non-state actors that can (or have the potential to) champion democratic/governance reforms."
The philosophical underpinning of these efforts is provided by an old and revered source: Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville's classic treatise on American culture and institutions in the early part of the nineteenth century. It championed the idea that a flourishing civil society was the bedrock of a healthy democracy. In Tocqueville's view, hierarchically ordered institutions (from churches to private associations) served American democracy by strengthening society's capacity to check the dictatorial powers of the state; affording "large schools" for the development of democratic values such as trust, tolerance, and compromise; and promoting equality among the citizenry.
Any initiative of the U.S. government targeted at promoting democracy abroad deserves serious attention and indeed intense scrutiny. Despite its lofty goal, the history of America's efforts to export democracy overseas is a highly problematic one. Past efforts on behalf of democracy have been fraught with abuses, heavy-handedness, hypocrisy, and above all, ill-conceived notions about democracy and how best to encourage it in countries lacking much of a democratic tradition.
In early 1996, the United States found itself in the middle of two international disputes that threatened to turn into military confrontations. In the space of a month, it came closer to trading blows with China than it had since the Korean War and with Cuba since the Missile Crisis. Although both crises blew through geographical straits—through the Taiwan Strait that divides Taiwan from mainland China, and the Florida Strait between Cuba and the United States—and both were the product of a dysfunctional triangular relationship, the American public did not connect the two events because they were on opposite sides of the globe and seemed to be the result of very different circumstances. The two crises passed, but only after reopening old festering wounds and hardening U.S. policy toward both areas.
It is not a coincidence that both crises occurred in a U.S. presidential election year. In a modern form of political jujitsu, weaker actors gained leverage over the world's superpower through a combination of electoral and Cold War politics. Presidential election years are times of maximum influence for well-organized advocacy groups, such as the Cuban-American lobby; and as the Taiwanese electoral cycle coincides with the American, election years also present the greatest opportunity for those who would like Taiwan to assert its autonomy. Whatever its cause, tension in either of the straits, and the resulting political strains in the United States, inevitably generates a crisis.
The Dayton Peace Agreement was intended to signify a break with the usual pattern of Balkan history, where war begets war. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war, a massive international effort was launched involving billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers, administrators, aid workers, and diplomats. The aim was to supplant militant ethnic nationalism with pluralism and economic liberalism. Bosnia was not just to be rebuilt; it was to be re-created—transformed into a stable, prosperous democratic society.
Nearly five years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, much has been accomplished in this odd demi-protectorate of the international community. The military side of the effort has been a resounding success, having achieved all of its major goals. The guns are silent, the respective local armed forces are corralled back at their bases, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been demobilized.
The civilian effort, loosely coordinated by the international Office of the High Representative (OHR), has proved a much more arduous task, although the list of achievements is significant. State institutions at all levels have been created—from a tripartite presidency and joint parliament on down to local civic councils. A new national currency, a new flag, and even a Bosnian state seal and anthem are in place. Several internationally monitored elections have been held. Only last summer, over 30 world leaders attended the Stability Pact Summit in Sarajevo, providing further proof of how far things have come. Symbolically, it was held in a stadium outside the city that had once been completely decimated by cannon fire and was now rebuilt.
However, Bosnia is not yet set on the path to stability and prosperity. If much is going right in Bosnia, why is its fate still in the balance? The answer to that question is to be found in the primary obstruction that now remains to the full achievement of the Dayton peace process—the criminalization of the Bosnian body politic. Instead of the expected shift from ethnic nationalism and war to political pluralism and economic liberalism, there is only a tightening vise of corruption and cronyism.
This is not to say that ethnic nationalism is no longer of intense concern to the international community. But the obstacle to success in Bosnia now centers on an inert and corrupt political system. An overall lack of good governance has stunted the political and judicial process and created an economy that can be described, at best, as broken. This has led to a deepening division in the population of Bosnia, one that transcends strictly ethnic lines and centers more on the gulf between haves and have-nots and between thoses who are connected and those who are not. Even superficial appearances can be deceiving. Visitors often take it as a sign of success that cars now fill the streets of Sarajevo. But more significant is the empowered minority who drive by in their new, often stolen, luxury Mercedes.
In the wake of the nuclear test explosions that took place in May 1998, first in India and then in Pakistan, much of the world responded with disappointment, shock, and outrage. The tests were presented by the authorities both in New Delhi and in Islamabad as definitive refutations of the images of India and Pakistan as "Third World" cultures or "third-rate" powers, but they were far more than simply a demonstration of military prowess or technological potential. They were in fact one of the more worrisome results of a larger mythology within each country revolving around ideas of historical purity and cultural superiority. Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that it is not the existence of nuclear weapons in and of themselves that poses the main threat to stability in South Asia, but rather the unmediated chain of command that spans the short and direct link between the mobilization of these ideological myths and the deployment of weapons of mass destruction.
Generally speaking, the debate over nuclear weapons in South Asia is something much broader than merely a question of strategy, technology, or power. It is, in essence, a question of culture. In more specific terms, the political culture of India and Pakistan has, for a number of reasons, increasingly fostered a culture of chauvinism and a culture of confrontation. That is, animosity and intolerance toward outsiders and foreigners have become politically more attractive and powerful than critical or constructive viewpoints on longstanding, difficult domestic issues.
This helps to explain at least in part why the decision of both countries to "go nuclear" produced such a misguided sense of euphoria in both India and Pakistan, where the popular reaction was, if anything, even more extreme than that of the political leadership in New Delhi and Islamabad. The news that India had successfully tested a nuclear device led almost immediately to macabre and carnivalesque scenes of revelry on the streets of India's main urban centers. This response, combined with press surveys in the days afterward that supposedly showed overwhelming public support for the government's decision to go nuclear, testified to the degree to which, as a nation, India thirsted for international recognition and prestige. The same dynamic applied to Pakistan, where the entire drama was repeated, act for act, two weeks later.
That there were so few critical or cautious voices to be found amidst the revelry was unsettling to many observers. No one seemed to notice what should have been palpably clear: namely, that the chauvinistic and pugnacious tone that saturates so much of the rhetoric regarding nuclear weapons in the region is firmly anchored in a blend of myth and history designed to support a larger matrix of beliefs regarding cultural purity and superiority. Obviously, it is science that provided the technology to build nuclear weapons in South Asia. But it is history, or more important, how certain people use and manipulate history, as much as if not more than science or even geopolitical strategy in the conventional sense that will ultimately determine if and when they are to be used.
To be sure, this is a very different explanation from the one usually advanced either in India or in Pakistan. Officials and analysts in both countries routinely insist that the decision to go nuclear was forced upon their respective countries either by each other or by outsiders. They also tend to insist and even to boast that their weapons programs are entirely "indigenous." Perhaps this is partially understandable in the context of a long-term process of decolonizing South Asian political culture, but when nearly every article or report regarding the nuclear industry in the Indian or Pakistani press repeatedly insists that everything was conceived and built indigenously—indeed, the nuclear program is often referred to as an "indigenous weapons system"—one begins to suspect, rightly, that something is amiss.
It is as if India and Pakistan are trying to convince themselves as much as each other that these weapons programs were developed without the taint of foreign assistance. If it were about anything other than nuclear weapons, this might be regarded as a disturbing but mostly innocuous political exercise. But the repetitive insistence on being indigenous in this context has become something of a narcotic mantra, or a collective exercise in self-deception, which feeds directly into the political mythologies of purity and chauvinism.
The first decade of the new millennium promises to be a turbulent period for U.S. military institutions and for the militaries of the Western democracies generally. During recent months there have been many startling reports:
What is happening, and why is there such significant change and adaptation now? What factors are influencing military institutions and their organizational structures, and how are they doing so? How is the interested American, accustomed for decades to hearing about the military primarily, if not solely, in terms of budget battles between the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, to understand the welter of information coming from Washington and other capitals about changing military institutions?
Competing Imperatives
It has long been accepted that military institutions under democratic regimes are shaped by two competing imperatives, one from the society they serve and the other growing out of the socially useful function—protecting the nation-state and defending its people and their interests—they perform.
Military institutions reflect—as they must—the societies from which they are drawn and are sworn to serve and protect. Given that armies are primarily human institutions, the existence of this social imperative should not be surprising. The method used to provide soldiers—conscription, voluntary service, or some combination of the two—does over time influence the degree to which a military is representative of the society it serves. "They" are "we," or at least a part of us. In America, the ideal and tradition of the citizen-soldier remains strong in our affections, though much less so within the military today than in the past.
Democratic societies do not want, nor are they comfortable with, "their" militaries being too different or too separate from them. The "supremacy of civilian values" has long been bedrock to the Western, and American, approach to civil-military relations. The citizenry is sovereign, thus its values and way of life are what the military is defending. But soldiers will not be inclined to defend those values, particularly at the risk of death, unless they hold them dear, as being worthy of their individual and corporate self-sacrifice.
At the same time, militaries—responding to the functional imperative—are influenced and shaped by the demands of winning wars, a societal endeavor so illogical and irrational as to have its own "grammar," if not its own logic. Thus, military culture, and its central ethic, focuses on what is required to accomplish its mission. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur once said in an address to the cadets at West Point: "Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose the nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, and Country." Self-abnegation and self-sacrifice are inherent in the soldier's concept of duty. The moral obligation exists not only to do one's duty when called upon by society, but also to be prepared at all times to be so called.
The study of the military art and of history has for decades convinced military professionals of the necessity of well-trained and disciplined soldiers organized into the cohesive and responsive units, the well-integrated teams and weapons crews with which wars are now fought and won. Thus, the needs of the mission and the unit are always more important than those of the individual. The military ethic is cooperative and cohesive in spirit, meritocratic, and fundamentally anti-individualist and anti-careerist. It holds dear the concept of devotion to duty, the ideals of honor, integrity, trustworthiness, and allegiance to country.
There is a stark, but potentially healthy, tension between the two imperatives and the character and ethos of their respective cultures, civilian and military. This is the tension between the freedoms and individualism so esteemed in America, whereby individual citizens can flourish, and the corporate nature of the military that demands sacrifice, that the individual soldier abnegate self to the higher good of his mission.
REFLECTIONS
A decade has come to a close in which the most radical changes imaginable took place on the territory of what was once Yugoslavia. In light of these changes, I think it worthwhile, perhaps even instructive, to look back at the beginning of this decade-long cycle. I'm referring to a specific period when many of the terrible events that subsequently transpired in the Balkans could conceivably have been averted, a time when the bloodshed that followed might have been avoided. Of course, it was not avoided; and last year the drama returned, with a kind of historical inevitability, to a small place on the map where it had all begun— Kosovo.
It might be useful to start with two diametrically opposite examples of nations that emerged from the former Yugoslavia: Serbia and Slovenia. Today, the former is at one of the lowest points in its long history. Its economy is destroyed, it suffers from international isolation, and seemingly has little to offer either present or future generations. A decade of Serbian-sponsored wars—conflicts characterized by their mercilessness and barbarity—has resulted in a noticeable dearth of international sympathy for Serbia (something that was not necessarily the case in the early 1990s). Slobodan Milosevic's concept of a Greater Serbia brought devastation not just to other ethnic groups within the former Yugoslavia, but also to the Serbs themselves. Large areas of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo—where Serbian populations used to live—were lost; Montenegro, the last republic left within Yugoslavia apart from Serbia, will probably break away too. And yet, against all odds, Milosevic holds on to power.
The contrast with Slovenia is dramatic. Today Slovenia is a prosperous, successful country with a stable democratic system and a transparent legal system. Various indicators make it clear that our economy leads those of all the other former socialist states, and we are well on our way to full membership in the European Union and in NATO. Slovenia enjoys good and productive relations with its neighbors, has established a rich network of diplomatic, commercial, and cultural ties worldwide, and is solidly committed to its democratic path.
How could such disparate outcomes have resulted from the Yugoslav breakup of 1991? After all, both Slovenia and Serbia were once component parts of a common federal state.
REPORTAGE
It was a low-key homecoming last November for the family of Morocco's best-known opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, kidnapped by royal henchmen and presumably killed 35 years ago. Representatives of the new king, Mohammed VI, and the government were at the airport to greet Ben Barka'swife, daughter, three sons, and their families in what was described as a private visit. But there was no mobilization of political militants, and television cameras were excluded from the scene. There seemed to be an unspoken accord not to rock the boat of Morocco's delicately balanced political opening under the young monarch.
Before the gathering of some 200 of Ben Barka's political companions, disciples, family and old friends at a relative's villa, 50-year-old Bachir paid an emotional homage to his father "who sacrificed his life and fought for the construction of a democratic and progressive society." Bachir Ben Barka told friends that he was determined to learn "the truth" about what had happened to his father, whose body has never been found.
Other political exiles have regained Morocco in recent months, but none so powerfully symbolize the momentous changes taking place in this ancient North African kingdom as the Ben Barka family. A leader of the nationalist struggle for independence from France, Mehdi Ben Barka was twice condemned to death for alleged conspiracy against the monarchy. Although the late King Hassan II subsequently pardoned Ben Barka, his disappearance in Paris was linked by the press to the Moroccan secret services and ultimately the Royal Palace. Ben Barka's family was understandably reluctant to return to this constitutional monarchy, which still bore the trappings of a police state.
When France granted independence to its protectorate in 1956, Morocco was a largely feudal kingdom of 12 million inhabitants, with a handful of university graduates, and a well-developed infrastructure of ports, airports, railways, highways, and diverse industries. King Hassan II, who succeeded to the throne on the death of his widely loved father, Mohammed V, in 1961,ruled the country with a firm and arbitrary hand for 38 years. Admired as a statesman, Hassan II's main legacy was in having made Morocco a pro-Western bastion of stability in a volatile area and a leader in Middle East peace efforts, as well as having laid the foundations for a modern constitutional monarchy. At the time of his death on July 23, 1999, there were thousands of Moroccan engineers, doctors, and other professionals, many of whom were women, and a dynamic civil society.
Historians will point out, however, that Moroccan peace and progress have come at a high cost to human rights. Fearful of the rise of Arab socialism in the 1960s, King Hassan's security forces carried out waves of repression against leftist trade unionists, politicians, and students. But the threat to the monarch actually came from army dissidents, and he miraculously escaped two coup attempts in the 1970s. There followed purges in the armed forces and the creation of a dominant Interior Ministry with a powerful security apparatus. As Commander of the Faithful, Hassan II encouraged Islamic associations in the early 1970s as a counterweight to the left. The king succeeded in forging national unity with his "Green March" of 300,000 citizens, followed by troops, to dramatize Morocco's claims to the Sahara in 1975. Soon there was new unrest as people chafed at widespread corruption, abuses by security forces, unemployment, and the growing gap between rich and poor. Pressured by the rise of the Islamists in the early 1990s, the king cautiously began to liberalize his regime but could not relinquish his absolute power.
But now an exciting era of reform has opened in this Muslim country, strategically situated at the gateway to the Mediterranean. Actually, the Moroccan Spring was initiated two years ago by King Hassan, who named as prime minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, leader of the Socialist opposition. A former companion of Ben Barka, Youssoufi is a human rights lawyer with impeccable moral credentials. His coalition government has done much to consolidate the rule of law and protect human rights, and prepare the groundwork for major economic and social reform. Since Hassan II's death last July and his succession by Crown Prince Mohammed, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically. The 36-year-old King Mohammed VI has taken a number of measures that show he has the will and courage to break with the past.
Jörg Haider, the governor of Carinthia, and until recently the leader of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, has periodically stirred up controversy with his remarks about the Nazi past. Haider has referred to concentration camps as "punishments camps," lauded Hitler's labor policies, and called Winston Churchill a war criminal. His insouciance about the Nazi past has even earned him a portrait between Idi Amin and Jean-Marie Le Pen at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which Haider himself dropped by to see a few years ago on a visit to the United States. Like Patrick Buchanan, Haider is a revisionist who revels in attacking establishment orthodoxies.
But even Haider could hardly have been prepared for the flap that his party's inclusion in a new government coalition created in February, and that has yet to die down. After Haider's party came in second in the October 3 elections—behind the Socialist Party and ahead of the People's Party with 27 percent of the vote—he and his deputy, Susanne Riess-Passer, traveled, among other places, to London and Munich in order to spruce up his image. Their tour ended up being something of a debacle. Wherever he went, Haider, to the delight of the Austrian media, was dogged by protesters. Still, this was a mere warm-up for what was to come. In October, it still seemed highly unlikely that the Freedom Party would enter government. All the signs were that the Socialists and the People's Party would patch together another rickety coalition in the hope that Haider's party would lose adherents by the time the next elections rolled around.
But this time, it didn't happen. The Socialists held out for control of the Finance Ministry and the People's Party refused to accept such a deal. Instead, Wolfgang Schüssel, the head of the People's Party, decided to fulfill his dream of becoming chancellor and opened negotiations with the Freedom Party. Once it became clear that the Freedom Party really would be part of the government, the furor over the emergence of what looked like a new Austrian führer began.
At a conference in Sweden on the Holocaust, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak announced that should Haider's party enter government, he would withdraw the Israeli ambassador from Vienna. The European Union quickly signaled its displeasure with Haider, declaring that it would downgrade its contacts with Austria. And Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated, "We share their concerns. We'll be watching, and we'll take appropriate steps." Haider triggered fresh controversy with his remarks about giving reparations to the ethnic Germans who were driven out of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. His only defender appeared to be Patrick Buchanan, who said that outrage over Haider "is an indication, I think, that any candidate of the right can expect universal hostilities."
The furor over the Freedom Party's inclusion in the coalition government led by Schüssel reached a crescendo late last month. Indeed, in an attempt to quell the international outcry, Haider resigned as head of the party on February 28, although he remains very much a force behind the scenes.
For all his audacious comments about the Nazi past, Haider is not a throwback to the past so much as something else—a yuppie fascist. Fascism and yuppieism have never really been at odds—part of the Nazi movement consisted of arrivistes who hated the German establishment—but Haider does not truck with people bellowing addresses or marching around with drums and flags. He's a man of the television age, ready with a sound-bite to be delivered while he's wearing fancy loden or Armani suits, prompting one commentator to call it "designer populism." He likes to run marathons or go bungee-jumping. And above all he loves the United States, where he has been trying for years to shed himself of the Nazi image by taking summer courses on free market economics at Harvard University and going disco dancing with his fellow-students from Third World countries.
RECONSIDERATIONS
"I am sure in Greece I found one of the best opportunities for wise action that this war has tossed to me from its dark waves." So wrote Winston Churchill to his wife on February 1, 1945, while on his way to meet with Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta.
Churchill was of course referring to the decisive intervention by British forces in Athens, in December 1944, barely two months after Greece's liberation: an intervention that—at least for the moment—helped put down a Communist-led revolt during what is still commonly referred to as the Second Round of the (almost) decade-long Greek Civil War (1942–49). The British move had been ordered personally by Churchill in the face of furious opposition from within his own party and government, as well as from various Labour Party spokesmen and (to Churchill, more galling yet) from a number of U.S. officials, many based in faraway Washington, who were protesting what they saw as the indiscriminate squashing of democratic reformers by an unholy alliance of corrupt, old-time Greek politicians, reactionary monarchists, and even wartime collaborators—all anxious to regain their prewar power bases—now aided and abetted by British "imperialists" whose main concern was the safeguarding of London's traditional sphere of influence in the Mediterranean.
Churchill knew better; and even back then, in December 1944, so did most Athenians—and perhaps most Greeks. For the bloody, month-long "Battle of Athens" did not simply pit good "social democrats" against evil "monarcho-fascists." Notwithstanding the recondite arguments still raging among historians of Greek communism concerning the "real" intentions and long-term goals of the Communist Party's badly divided leadership in the fall of 1944, the fact remains that—though slow in coming, badly planned, and incompetently executed—there was a Communist coup-in-the-making in December 1944 that, had it proved successful, would have turned Greece into (at best) a Titoist "workers paradise."
The coup failed; Athens was, in effect, liberated for the second time in less than three months by British troops; and the Second Round of a civil war that had begun roughly two years earlier in the mountains of occupied Greece now came to an abrupt halt. To be sure, the main and by far the most destructive phase of this civil war (the so-called Third Round of 1946–49) was yet to come—a phase that was to be highlighted, this time around, by America's own active involvement, and, just as important, by the Soviets' noninterference.
Today, it is this international dimension of the Greek civil war that fascinates the most and thus merits a sober reappraisal.
BOOKS
For the most part, the American foreign policy debate remains one between competing versions of internationalism. Conservatives may indignantly deny that they are "Wilsonians," but most look with nostalgia on the activism of the Reagan era. And what was that period of crusading enthusiasm if not a species of Wilsonianism? As for liberals, is not their faith in international institutions, from the United Nations to the new structures like the International Criminal Court that are designed to give teeth to the often utopian theorizing of international lawyers, the updated, twenty-first-century version of Wilsonian internationalism?
To be sure, there remain American isolationists—those attracted to such right-wing or libertarian demagogues as Ross Perot, Jesse Ventura, and Pat Buchanan—just as there is still a small American left that sees in events as various as the rise of street gangs and demonstrations against the World Trade Organization the lineaments of a revolt against U.S. imperialism. But these are marginal movements at best, paling into insignificance compared to, say, the kind of isolationist and left-wing mass movements that were active in America before the Second World War.
Perhaps, it is the ingrained belief, so brilliantly vulgarized by Ronald Reagan as he all but single-handedly mobilized Americans for what would turn out to be the final phase of the Cold War, that the American mission in the world is necessary and inescapable. In this worldview, the City on the Hill that is America must do more than lead by example, as that liberal realist, George Kennan, has argued so passionately for more than half a century. Rather, it must export its values, if necessary by exercising its military power.
Despite all the moral, cognitive, and strategic confusions that have been the accompaniment to the birth of the post–Cold War world, some version of either liberal or conservative internationalism continues to dominate the American debate. Liberals like U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke want to wrap American power in the septic sheets of international legitimacy they believe the United Nations can confer. Conservatives, for the most part, seem determined to carry on much as they did during the Cold War. As William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, put it recently, "U.S. foreign policy was successful in the 1980s because it was militarily strong, strategically robust, and morally assertive; and it should continue to be all these in the post– cold war world."
To imagine that, when the whole world has been turned on its head, and when the Soviet Union, our adversary of half a century, has ceased to exist as such, American foreign policy can simply remain the same is a species of utopian madness. Nonetheless, this contentless hegemonism remains far more influential in America today than the somber warnings of the realist tradition in American thinking about foreign policy. Despite a number of brilliant and influential exponents that include Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and Fareed Zakaria, realism is a worldview that tends to be abandoned or so radically adulterated as to become unrecognizable, at least once its advocates become members of an administration.
The reasons for this are quite straightforward. To begin with, the deep pessimism about the future that is the hallmark of any authentic realist perspective, as it is of any genuine political conservatism (as opposed to the capitalist boosterism or politicized religious fundamentalism that passes for conservatism in contemporary America), is too out of sync with American idealism to make political sense to any politician who wants to appeal to a broad electorate. How can one say the world is going to hell in a handbasket in a country in which optimism is a dogma and pessimism, which Americans confuse with cynicism, an unacceptable heresy. Reagan was loved because he seemed to epitomize this optimism. Bill Clinton, who modeled his political persona on Reagan to an astonishing degree, was trying to tap the same deep American longing when he declared, "I still believe in a place called hope."
CODA