Freedom from What?

Fareed Zakaria, in his latest article, notes that Bush's inauguration speech about freedom and liberty is seen as hypocritical throughout the world. He writes:

To borrow an old saw about the mission of journalism, Bush’s words will “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Democratic reformers around the world will surely take heart. Dictators will nervously ponder what it all means. This, too, is in a great American tradition. When Wilson and Roosevelt spoke out against empires, it rattled Europe’s great powers. When Kennedy and Reagan spoke about freedom, it worried the juntas of Latin America and the despots of East Asia. When the Carter administration began issuing annual reports on human rights, it unnerved regimes across the world. In speaking honestly and openly about the importance and universality of freedom, America—and, to be fair, Europe—have made a difference. They have put freedom on the global agenda. Bush has aimed to push it even higher.

Just as he did when he entrusted Bush to responsibly wage what he considered a necessary war in Iraq, Zakaria is still giving Bush too much credit. The problem here is that George Bush's definition of "freedom" and "liberty" have very little to do with those previous edicts from the Oval Office. For Bush, "freedom" and "liberty" are not just the opposite of tyranny, they are the opposite of governmental responsibility as well. With Bush's idea of an "ownership" society, he feels that the government should no longer be a "crutch" for those that aren't willing to "work hard". This, to him, is "freedom", and he truly believes that this type of economic libertarianism is what will help America, and what he needs to export to the rest of the world. Of course, anyone who isn't drinking Karl Rove's Kool-Aid knows that the "ownership" society that Bush dreams of will end up the exact same way the Soviet Union ended up, with a plutocracy that controls all the cards, and everyone else working their asses off to break even. And people like veterans, children, and the elderly have to rely on the generosity of the ruling class to provide for things in which there's no direct profit motive. This is not the same "liberty" that our founding fathers fought for.

The difference comes from mistaking economic libertarianism for social libertarianism. The difference lies between complaining about Taxation without Representation and just complaining about Taxation. We're buying into the notion that tax cuts, and taking away social programs, equals greater freedom, even as we end up paying more in other ways.

The author of American liberty, James Madison, wrote in The Federalist papers that “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Order and then liberty (we might have remembered this in Iraq).

(emphasis mine)

Zakaria mentions this at the end, as if Bush's invocations of "freedom" and "liberty" were in some way related to these words. Fuck no. Bush doesn't believe in this balance at all. He believes in the exact opposite. He believes that the government is always an impediment to liberty (except as a means of protection from "the evildoers", of course).

Maybe when Zakaria figures out that Bush's ideals of "liberty" and "freedom" have little to do with building up strong, accountable, central governments that promote actual liberty, and more to do with "getting government off our backs", he'll realize why it was so foolish to ride his coattails into Iraq. "Liberty" isn't a form of entrepreneurial anarchy that you promote when you're already at the top of the food chain and can control the army. It's something that a strong government provides through responsible leadership. Not having to provide that safety net for this country is the "freedom" that George Bush is after. We saw this notion of full economic libertarianism play out into the chaos in Iraq as people without jobs and electricity started trying to kill us, and yet some of us somehow still think that Bush is on the same page as us when it comes to doing the right things to promote "freedom" and "liberty" throughout the world. He's not. He's never been. And he never will be.