Catch a leftist in an affront to the public record and he'll throw everything from Jim Crow to Mahatma Gandhi to trip you up. Glenn Reynolds overturned syndicated columnist Sylvester Brown's try at the most repulsive illiberal canard against President Bush's success in establishing a democratic vision for the Near East. In retaliation, Brown stooped lower, chiding American license to judgment with the scold's adage: a drunk who goes sober is forever that drunk.
Glenn does well knocking aside Brown's misappropriation of a Gandhi quotation: indeed, the only ones who are forced to accept democracy are a nation's strongman minority. As for Gandhi's moral implications, satyagraha is an appeal to conscience; it is useless if an oppressor has none. In Kiev and Beirut, buttressed by international succor and arms, it can succeed. In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as one of Glenn's correpondents has pointed out, it could not. Gandhi showed us just how much pride and arrogance can be held by a man in rags, to have thought that his singular experience in British India defined Adolf Hitler better than the simple metric of good and evil — demonstrating, from the error, that peace is made only with peaceable men.
Dwelling too much on the failures of men ends in relativism and misanthropy. Liberating Iraq was a judgment of Saddam Hussein and dictatorship, and Brown argues that flawed men and states can do no good. Yet every American shortfall Brown recites is one that has been overcome by those who have seen wrong and moved to correct it. There could be no stronger repudiation of the balance-of-power doctrine than the president's 2005 State of the Union address.
This past week despotisms and free-world intellectuals with axes to grind were looking to mar Japan's stride towards complete, democratic sovereignty. It doesn't matter that Japan paid dearly for its crimes in war, or that it has become a model in sixty years of liberalism; redemption and transcendence, and the good Tokyo has and will accomplish matter far less to Japan's detractors than does revenge and a troubling design to thwart ideals guiding the new country. So which does Sylvester Brown want more, Third World liberty or Western guilt?