Late last year, I gave a talk at a university debating society on the subject of 'Evangelical Democracy and Exemplary Democracy'. I can't imagine my argument would have been well received by the theorists of globalisation who dominate American opinion on international relations. But these were not IR types or neoconservatives. Young neoconservatives (but 'young' is a tricky word: their parents are almost always in it) look forward to careers of power and are subsidised in college by well-funded journals and paid summer internships at prestigious think tanks. The undergraduates I spoke to were interested in political ideas, and I was offering a contrast anyone could have worked up from two easily available archives: the foreign policy speeches of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (as well as the National Security Strategy of September 2002, largely written by Condoleezza Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

LRB 10 April 2008 | PDF Download