The greats

National Review, Dec 31, 2006 by Michael Knox Beran

The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O'Sullivan (Regnery, 360 pp., $27.95)

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JOHN O'SULLIVAN does not, in this dazzling new book, indulge in schadenfreude. But he permits the reader this pleasure. "That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years," John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1984, when the ground was already shifting, "is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene." Those "in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse," Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said in 1982, as the earth rumbled around him, are "kidding themselves."

Such were the orthodoxies Ronald Reagan, Karol Wojtyla, and Margaret Thatcher found and overthrew. What is striking is the brightness of spirit with which they did so. A quarter of a century later, the mood of the Right is Spenglerian. The gardens of the West, or at least of Europe, have, we are told, already closed; the specter of Islam does not merely haunt, it dominates. Very different was the mood of Ronald Reagan when Mikhail Gorbachev first looked into his eyes at Geneva in 1985. Asked what he saw in them, Gorbachev replied, "Sunshine and clear sky." The President could afford to be serene. "I know in my heart that man is good," Reagan later said, "that what is right will always eventually triumph."

Was Reagan's messianic confidence in the future of the free state naive? Otto von Bismarck maintained that the "practical benefits" of a free constitution were "but little understood" by most people. A politics that exalts force and will, the German statesman predicted, would in almost every instance trump a free-state program. But Reagan's Freevangelical politics appears in retrospect to have been as shrewdly realistic as it was utopian. There was of course nothing original in his belief that the free system, which liberates peoples' energies, makes possible a technological creativity that no command regime can match. What was new, O'Sullivan shows, was the boldness with which Reagan translated technological advances in the West into strategic supremacy. SDI was ridiculed by the Schlesingerian clerisy; but Gorbachev saw in Reagan's brainchild an innovation that the creaking Soviet economy could not possibly equal. When Reagan, in the face of great temptation, refused to sacrifice SDI at Reykjavik in 1986, the struggle was over. "Ronnie," O'Sullivan quotes Charles Z. Wick as saying on Air Force One, "you just won the Cold War. They admitted they can't compete."

"Like a chrysalis," Reagan said in Moscow two years later, "we're emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution" into a world "in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create." With his faith in the transforming power of liberty, Reagan emerges as the most visionary of O'Sullivan's trio. Mrs. Thatcher was skeptical of SDI. John Paul was skeptical of the free market. But the Prime Minister acquiesced in the President's strategy, and the Pope modified his economic theory in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which he argued that economic freedom is an essential condition of human flourishing. Reagan had changed the debate; the Pope, O'Sullivan writes, "revised Catholic social teaching in the light of the Reagan-Thatcher transformation of capitalism."

The free system gave the President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister an immense material advantage in the struggle against coercion. But material causes and effects, Clausewitz observed, are "no more than the wooden handle" of a leader's sword; the moral element is the "noble metal, the real bright-polished weapon." O'Sullivan shows that his protagonists prevailed, first, because they believed in the moral superiority of their ideals, and second, because they believed that men and women around the world shared their faith in them. There was in O'Sullivan's trio no inclination to hunker in the bunker, in Fortress America (or Britain or the Vatican). The Pope was the most peripatetic of the three evangelists of liberty; but none of the three sought to wall off the West. The Communist world seemed in 1980 to be as resistant to freedom as the Islamic one does today. But Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul were undaunted.

Their faith in the power of freedom seemed, at the time, fantastic to many, just as it seems fantastic to many today. But the three leaders were, O'Sullivan shows, adroit in their approach to exporting the constitution of liberty. Woodrow Wilson believed that the United States could give a people a list of pedantic policy points, sponsor an election or two, and--hesto presto--a free state would emerge. This was democracy by fiat: "I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men," Wilson declared.

The Wilsonian school overlooked a lesson of Lincoln, who was as keenly interested as Wilson in the world-struggle between the free state and those novel forms of coercion that German romanticism had inspired. Lincoln, like his contemporary Bismarck, saw that romantic neofeudal paternalism (and romantic blood-and-soil nationalism) possessed a perverse appeal. He saw also that free-state politicians were slow to counter this appeal; the romantic politics that, in their different ways, Bismarck, Marx, and such American pro-slavery thinkers as Calhoun (a student of Hegel) all embraced appeared to be gaining the upper hand. Lincoln strengthened the hold of free-state principles on the popular imagination by linking them to the ongoing struggle in every soul between good and evil, and by connecting the free state to (what he argued was) a providential design in which man's better impulses would prevail. In his late orations Lincoln contended that America must suffer for having embraced slavery, an evil and despotic system. But from this evil, providence would bring forth good, would bring forth the "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln, paraphrasing the rebirth theory of John 3:3, announced in the Gettysburg Address.