WILL NEOCONSERVATISM LOOK INWARDS?
Here's a stylized history of the decades after World War II: stylized, to be precise, so as to provide a road map which I hope America will follow again. America suffered a devastating attack (Pearl Harbor, September 11th) and responded with a massive mobilization of its economic and moral resources for a war against tyranny and terror; it overthrew the regime which attacked it (Japan, the bin Laden-sponsored Taliban) as well as another somewhat irrelevant but disgustingly wicked regime (Hitler's Germany, Saddam's Iraq). Meanwhile, as an answer to the misguided fanatics with whom we were fighting, and to give our soldiers something worth fighting and dying for, our leaders (Roosevelt, Bush) articulated and made America the self-appointed proselytizer of a lofty creed of freedom. We won the wars and freed a lot of people, and became very much in love with ourselves and exhilarated by what we could achieve.

But then, after the war took a sordid turn (Korea and early Vietnam; prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib) we began to doubt ourselves, and the struggle (against communism, against Islamofascism) took an introspective turn. We began to ask: how well do we really exemplify the ideals we are trying to propagate? We began to take the beam out of our own eye, so that we could see clearly to take the mote out of our brother's eye. Last time, this led to the 1960s, the civil rights struggle, the war on poverty. This time...

I'm not sure whether the new economic ideas of the Bush team, described here in The Economist, really represent neoconservatism looking inwards, but it's interesting to think about.

But talk to the cleverer Republicans around the Bush-Cheney campaign, and it becomes clear that a much more comprehensive agenda exists. It centres on equipping Americans to compete in the global economy by reducing tax, trade, legal and regulatory burdens as well as revamping education and training. The goal is not simply lower taxes, but the eventual elimination of all taxes on investment income. Republicans will use a second term to push an “ownership society” in which people can prepare for their health-care and retirement costs with individual, portable accounts.

What would you have done in the Iraqis' shoes? Ask yourself that. Most of them want security, democracy, peace, but to get them takes civil engagement, cooperation, taking risks. Would you have founded a political party, a newspaper, or a business? Would you have volunteered for the Iraqi police, and done your duty even when some friends saw you as an infidel, and the insurgents were trying to kill you? Or would you have succumbed, been part of the passive masses who seem to be letting a pack of bloodthirsty fanatics hijack their future? Maybe you've never thought about it... But I suspect the administration has. They've done a lot of soul-searching. And now they're bringing liberation home. They're going to see whether we have what it takes to get out of dependency and make the world a better place, by being entrepreneurs, by not relying on the government to subsidize our retirement, by competing in the global economy.

Well, here's hoping that that's what they have in mind. Here's my stake in this fight: if Americans came to believe that they really were competitive in a global economy, maybe we wouldn't be afraid to open the borders and let that global economy flow in.