A personal tone in view of our dark present

The distinguished dean of liberal historians has written a short new book with the stated aim of providing historical perspective -- a measure of intellectual ballast -- as counterweight to the flurry of instant history pummeling us relentlessly in the 24/7 news cycle and the post-9/11 era. Taking the Iraq War as his departure point, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reexamines the policy terrain, foreign and domestic, of war and the American presidency, expounding fundamental democratic tenets with his familiar passion and cogency and casting scholarly light on the hopes and dilemmas facing liberal democracy in these unmoored times. The hopes are shadowed by his pessimistic assessment of the dilemmas. His tone is personal, his language vernacular; the text as a whole seems to reflect a cranky disappointment at the dark present and prospective state of things.

Unilateralism is as old as the republic and “still in the DNA of many Americans,” yet this approach to the world has run counter to U.S. strategic interests throughout the two world wars of the 20th century and our leadership of the coalition that won the Cold War. Nevertheless, in response to a radical new threat, the current President Bush (who “radiates a serene but scary certitude”) has not only “unfurled [this] historic banner” but given it a new twist. Discarding deterrence and containment, he has embraced preventive war as the basis of our foreign policy. Because this sets up the U.S. as “judge, jury and executioner,” Schlesinger writes, it has made our country more “feared and hated by the rest of the world” than ever before in our history. Fortunately, unilateralism seems unsustainable, for the gross failures in Iraq have created a credibility gap, at home and abroad, rendering “a second application of the Bush Doctrine very unlikely.” Schlesinger regards President Kennedy’s 1961 warning against hubris as the standard for all presidents: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient, that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population, that we cannot impose our will on the other 94 percent of mankind and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

The realm of foreign affairs poses a “perennial threat to the constitutional balance”: The superior leverage of the executive branch is a fact of modern life, encouraging an “imperial president” to claim the power to act without congressional approval. The author notes an odd, euphoric “season of triumphalism” after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., when scholars foresaw, in the words of political economist Francis Fukuyama, “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Schlesinger himself briefly glimpsed a possible end to the imperial presidency. He acknowledges that this view underestimated the global reach of American influence and that it also failed to anticipate Osama bin Laden.

Schlesinger sees the Bush administration’s political response to the terrorist threat as suppressing vigorous debate and dissent through intimidation, affecting even a press anxious not to appear unpatriotic. The current attorney general is “a politician of the hard right, and a religious zealot,” whose 342-page Patriot Act, rushed through Congress after Sept. 11 “without hearings or committee reports,” poses broad new dangers to civil liberties, as does Homeland Security’s “color-coded exploitation of the politics of fear.” He quotes Theodore Roosevelt in 1918 on the courageous exercise of First Amendment rights: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

Even without the still ill-defined challenge of Islamic terrorism, the author sees major dangers to democracy’s future in the ever-accelerating scope of technology and the onrush of global capitalism, “crashing across frontiers ... denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny.” The computer revolution, “far swifter, far more compressed” than its industrial predecessor, leaves little time for intellectual and social adjustment. In particular, increased “interactivity” via television, computers and cellphones “encourages instant responses [and] discourages second thoughts” on large public questions.

The whole new apparatus of communications tends to produce shallow analysis, erode critical thought and offer “outlets for demagoguery, egomania, insult, and hate. Listen to talk radio!”

The pessimism with which Schlesinger views the coming period is tempered: “Has democracy a future? Sure it does, but not the glorious, irresistible, inevitable future predicted in the triumphalist moment. Democracy has survived the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth. It will not enjoy a free ride through the century to come.” Yet the “inscrutability of history,” he observes, “supplies the antidote to every generation’s illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive.”

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Townsend Hoopes is the author of several books, including “The Limits of Intervention” and “Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal.”