Peter Beinart on the rhetoric of freedom
I thought that Bush’s inaguaral speech was pretty damn good, despite glaring policy contradictions. Peter Beinart has posted a great article on how Liberals can develop a rhetoric of freedom that trumps Bush, not only in policy-coherence, but also in effectiveness.
But that’s exactly the point. Bush’s second inaugural doesn’t challenge liberals at the level of policy; it challenges them at the level of rhetoric. And, unless they respond in kind, they’ll experience the same fate that befell John Kerry. In policy terms, Kerry probably had a more serious democratization agenda than Bush. But, rhetorically, he never matched Bush’s grandeur. And, in the United States, where it is great causes and missionary impulses that rouse citizens to engage with the world, Bush’s language captured the public imagination, and Kerry’s did not.