"Revolution from Above" By Ian Buruma
(Review of _Terror and Liberalism_ by Paul Berman)
"... To think that American force will bring liberal democracy to the Middle East is indeed a form of militant Wilsonianism, and this is why it warms the hearts of former leftists, such as Berman, who can't settle for what they see as the bourgeois, compromising, peace-loving mediocrity of "European" democracies, but crave instead the Sturm und Drang of revolution from above. Berman calls himself a liberal, but it is hard to distinguish him from the more radical neoconservatives, whose mentors under Reagan mixed up Straussian conservatism with the revolutionary zeal of their Trotskyist origins. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the former student leader of Paris '68, recognized this immediately in a recent debate with Richard Perle, when "Red Danny" called his opponent a Bolshevik who reminded him of his own student days."
"The idea that liberalism is mediocre, unheroic, and without martial vigor is an old battle-cry of the anti-liberal European right. That is what such disparate figures as Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, the eminent jurist who justified the Nazi state, and indeed Leo Strauss believed. Schmitt and Jünger advocated an authoritarian state of heroic citizen-warriors, bound together by their constant struggle against outside enemies. Leo Strauss was a refugee from Nazism. Nevertheless, in a letter to Carl Schmitt, he expressed a similar idea: "People can only be unified against other people."[3] But neither Strauss nor Schmitt, let alone Jünger, would have called themselves liberals. This is where the neoconservatives and old leftists, such as Paul Berman, are different. Their radical vision of an American state, filled with revolutionary élan and military steel, battling heroically and alone with outside enemies, is anti-liberal, yet they call it liberalism-tough, militant American liberalism, as opposed to the homebody European variety. Berman invokes the spirit of Lincoln. To have mentioned Carl Schmitt might have hit the spot better."
"If the philosophical side of Berman's liberal battle-cry is oddly illiberal, what about the state of America's world revolution on the ground? So far US policy has fallen short of Lincoln's ideals. Even as the stated aims in the Iraqi war are to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, other dictatorships (Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and an assortment of other Stans) are coddled as prized allies; the Russians are barely criticized for demolishing Chechnya; human rights in China are hardly even mentioned anymore; and when Turks or Brazilians exercise their democratic rights to vote for leaders or policies that the American administration doesn't like, they get chastised for doing so. Clearly democratic revolution is rather a selective business."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16211