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The neoconservative myth: Our values are universal
By George Will
WASHINGTON POST

...Disregard Blair's straw men: No one says Afghan women were "content," Saddam was "beloved" and Milosevic was a "savior." But Blair suggests that unless you believe such preposterous things, you surely believe that "freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law" are not exclusively Western values. But what does that mean?

Certainly not only Westerners value, or can come to value, those things. But certainly not everyone everywhere shares "our attachment to freedom." Freedom is not even understood the same way everywhere, let alone valued the same way relative to other political goods (equality, security, piety, etc.).

Does Blair believe that our attachment to freedom is not the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries that prepared the social ground for seeds of democracy? When Blair says freedom as we understand it and democracy and the rule of law as we administer them are "the universal values of the human spirit," he is not speaking as America's founders spoke of "self-evident" truths. They meant truths obvious to all minds unclouded by superstition and other ignorance.

Blair seems to think Boston, Baghdad, Manchester, Monrovia - what's the difference? Such thinking is dangerous. Blair's argument is true only if it is trivial: "Ordinary" people choose freedom, democracy and the rule of law because those who do not so choose prove thereby that they are not ordinary....

...Blair's thinking is Bush's, too. "There is a value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the values we praise," says President Bush. "And if the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others."

But one must compromise in the face of facts, those stubborn things. It is a fact that not everyone is inclined to praise "the values we praise." And not every society has the prerequisites - of institutions (political parties, media) and manners (civility, acceptance of pluralism) - of a free society.

Bush and Blair and many people called neoconservatives believe that moral objectives in politics are universally applicable imperatives. If so, then either national cultures do not significantly differ; or they do not matter; or they are infinitely malleable under the touch of enlightened reformers.

But all three propositions are false, and antithetical to all that conservatism teaches about the importance of cultural inertia and historical circumstances.

The premise that terrorism thrives where democracy doesn't may seem to generate a duty to universalize democracy. But it is axiomatic that one cannot have a duty to do something that cannot be done.