There are a number of meaty, bite-sized nuggets o' intellectual fun to chew on in a New York Times Magazine piece by Professor Michael Ignatieff, Carr professor of human rights at the Kennedy School of Government, who asks, Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?
As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter telling the citizens of the city of Washington that he was too ill to join them for the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting his letter to inspire the gathering, he told them that one day the experiment he and the founders started would spread to the whole world. ''To some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,'' he wrote, the American form of republican self-government would become every nation's birthright. Democracy's worldwide triumph was assured, he went on to say, because ''the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion'' would soon convince all men that they were born not to be ruled but to rule themselves in freedom.
It was the last letter he ever wrote. The slave-owning apostle of liberty, that incomparable genius and moral scandal, died 10 days later on July 4, 1826, on the same day as his old friend and fellow founder, John Adams.
It's impossible to untangle the contradictions of American freedom without thinking about Jefferson and the spiritual abyss that separates his pronouncement that ''all men are created equal'' from the reality of the human beings he owned, slept with and never imagined as fellow citizens. American freedom aspires to be universal, but it has always been exceptional because America is the only modern democratic experiment that began in slavery. From the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it took a century for the promise of American freedom to even begin to be kept.
(snip)The charge that promoting democracy is imperialism by another name is baffling to many Americans. How can it be imperialist to help people throw off the shackles of tyranny?
It may be that other nations just have longer memories of their own failed imperial projects. From Napoleon onward, France sought to export French political virtues, though not freedom itself, to its colonies. The British Empire was sustained by the conceit that the British had a special talent for government that entitled them to spread the rule of law to Kipling's ''lesser breeds.'' In the 20th century, the Soviet Union advanced missionary claims about the superiority of Soviet rule, backed by Marxist pseudoscience.
What is exceptional about the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance. All the others -- the Soviet, the French and the British -- have been consigned to the ash heap of history. This may explain why what so many Americans regard as simply an exercise in good intentions strikes even their allies as a delusive piece of hubris.
(snip)While Americans characteristically oversell and exaggerate the world's desire to live as they do, it is actually reasonable to suppose, as Americans believe, that most human beings, if given the chance, would like to rule themselves. It is not imperialistic to believe this. It might even be condescending to believe anything else.
(snip)When American policy makers occasionally muse out loud about creating a ''community of democracies'' to become a kind of alternative to the United Nations, they forget that America and its democratic friends continue to disagree about what fundamental rights a democracy should protect and the limits to power government should observe. As Europeans and Canadians head leftward on issues like gay marriage, capital punishment and abortion, and as American politics head rightward, the possibility of America leading in the promotion of a common core of beliefs recedes ever further. Hence the paradox of Jefferson's dream: American liberty as a moral universal seems less and less recognizable to the very democracies once inspired by that dream.
(snip)The fact that many foreigners do not happen to buy into the American version of promoting democracy may not be much of a surprise. What is significant is how many American liberals don't share the vision, either.
(snip)A relativist America is properly inconceivable. Leave relativism, complexity and realism to other nations. America is the last nation left whose citizens don't laugh out loud when their leader asks God to bless the country and further its mighty work of freedom. It is the last country with a mission, a mandate and a dream, as old as its founders.
All of this may be dangerous, even delusional, but it is also unavoidable. It is impossible to think of America without these properties of self-belief.
(snip)There is nothing worse than believing your son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother died in vain. Even those who have opposed the Iraq war all along, who believe that the hope of planting democracy has lured America into a criminal folly, do not want to tell those who have died that they have given their lives for nothing. This is where Jefferson's dream must work. Its ultimate task in American life is to redeem loss, to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose. The real truth about Iraq is that we just don't know -- yet -- whether the dream will do its work this time. This is the somber question that hangs unanswered as Americans approach this Fourth of July.
Is American democracy truly rational? Has it always been so?
Does the fact that it took a horrible Civil War and then a hundred-year wait to fulfill the promises of American democracy for all of its citizens expose its weaknesses, or demonstrate its strengths?
Is it possible -- or even desirable -- to be an "empire for liberty"?
If "[helping] people throw off the shackles of tyranny" is America's imperial raison d'être, how successful could such an empire truly be? Is it really possible to speak of imperialism in this way? That is to say, is an imperialism of liberty nothing more than a rhetorical construction that has seduced boosters and detractors, alike?
Does the fact that "the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world" testify to the merits of the ideology?
If Americans are irrationally convinced of the superiority of their rational philosophy, is it condescending to promote an imperial ideology of freedom? Or, as Dr. Ignatieff suggests, is it condescending to believe that some humans can't or shouldn't rule themselves?
Are the philosophical differences that exist between America and its democratic peers significant? What relation -- if any -- exists between them? Do these differences reflect something other than historical realities, with the American experiment rooted in Enlightenment ideas, with the other finding their bases in more contemporary thought?
Why don't American liberals subscribe to American Exceptionalism? Reading Ignatieff's piece, can the answer really be explained as amounting to nothing more than the result of domestic political movements and partisanship contingency? If they don't believe in the "empire of liberty" mission, are liberals -- strictly speaking -- anti-American?
Setting aside the matter of deserved or undeserved self-belief, is relativism compatible with the universalist claims of American political philosophy? That is to say, is there a place for relativism when it comes to "inalienable rights"? Conversely, are the "inalienable rights" of American liberty truly universal?
Is Jefferson's dream -- "to rescue sacrifice from oblivion and futility and to give it shining purpose" -- the secret to America's success and the measure of its uniqueness? Is this dream alive and well?
The American character looks always as if it had just had a rather bad haircut, which gives it, in our eyes at any rate, a greater humanity than the European, which even among its beggars has an all too professional air.
Congratulations! The June 27, 2005 issue of Time featured a Special Report on China ("