Well, Michael Gerson certainly went out in a blaze of glory. The president's speechwriter, now bound for other duties within the administration, left with a Lincolnesque, Wilsonian, Kennedyite sound of the trumpets, and George W. Bush delivered it as well as any text he's ever been handed. The gap between the scripted Bush and the unscripted Bush must be measured in light years.
The spirits of Wilson and Kennedy were no surprise; if a president seeks to convey the logic and rightness of America's global mission, they are the predecessors to invoke. But the evocation of Lincoln was something else again. The world, as Bush described it, was Lincoln's house divided -- half slave, half free -- and America's mission was the continuation of the work of emancipation. Lincoln's was the only name that Bush spoke, once he got past acknowledging the eminences in attendance, and to Lincoln he attributed the line, “No one is fit to be a master; no one deserves to be a slave.”
Echoes of Lincoln, and his Second Inaugural -- by a wide margin, the greatest inaugural address ever delivered -- were everywhere in Bush's speech and certainly structured its best line. After the Cold War and the calm of the 1990s, Bush said, “Then there came a day of fire.” This reference to September 11 is also a reference to Lincoln's four-word evocation of the Civil War still raging as he spoke. At the time of his first inaugural, Lincoln recalled in his second, talks to avert the conflict were proceeding. “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
Two presidents, two conflicts, two crusades. But what is present in Lincoln's speech that is nowhere in Bush's is a sense of sin -- or, rather, a sense that we are not a sainted Galahad, even as we seek to rid the world of evil. The Civil War was, with World War II, surely the most righteous conflict in which the nation was ever engaged; but Lincoln was not willing to blame slavery only on the South. It was “American slavery,” he said, not Southern slavery, that was an offense against God; for this reason, divine providence seemed to have decreed that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” A few days after the speech, Lincoln said he thought it his best effort, but he doubted it would be immediately popular. “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”
This gap between God and county was, to put it mildly, nowhere apparent in Bush's statement of mission. In Bush's world, the justice of our ends suffices to wipe away the most dubious of means. To be sure, extending the reach of liberty, democracy, and modernity to all corners of the world is a vision that transcends party in America. But how to do that -- and whether we are always and inherently the best agent for that job, much less whether we are the best agent when acting alone in a preemptive war -- is a question that divides us deeply. Besides, there are the tyrannies that we oppose (Iran, North Korea) and the tyrannies in which we are complicit (Saudi Arabia, China).
Freedom may be indivisible; but in this administration, and those of its predecessors, that doesn't mean freedom trumps oil or cheap labor. We may intend, in Bush's words, to light “a fire in the minds of men,” but we splash cold water on that fire every day.
The Wilsonian abroad is, of course, the individualist at home. The domestic half (really, more like a quarter) of Bush's speech extolled individual ownership as the solution for our social woes. Of course, as early as 1865, it was apparent to Lincoln that some woes required collective action, that in post-Civil War America, individual ownership would not be sufficiently widespread to address the nation's problem and pay its debts. “Let us strive on to finish the work we are in,” he said in his Second Inaugural, “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” The American welfare state, as Theda Skocpol has demonstrated, began with the Second Inaugural. In Bush's vision, by contrast, no one is asked to pay a little extra to care for anybody. There is precious little obligation in an ownership society, just an on-again, off-again noblesse oblige.
In sum, Bush's declaration of globalized Lincolnism came up a bit short. And beyond the deficiencies of his own vision -- his radical individualism, his underdeveloped sense of sin -- there was the problem of the Inaugural's master of ceremonies. Why, knowing that you are preaching the gospel of liberty and equality, would you ever let yourself be introduced by Trent Lott? Lincoln may have advocated malice toward none, but that didn't mean he wanted Jefferson Davis as his warm-up act.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.
