Flawed liberator: what's right and wrong in President Bush's freedom crusade.(George W. Bush)

PRESIDENT BUSH'S confidence in the worldwide appeal of free institutions is now all but universally regarded as naive. The president's detractors ridicule as "Bush babble" the rhetoric of his Second Inaugural Address, the high-water mark of his Freevangelical policy; and, as distressing news pours forth from Iraq, they point to his claim that "eventually the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul" as evidence that he suffers acutely from a Messiah complex.

The criticism misses the mark. America was founded on a messianic idea; and whether John Winthrop was right or wrong when he crossed the ocean to build a city on a hill, it is too late now to abandon the visionary business. Nor is it evident that we need, or ought to. The convictions the president expressed in his Second Inaugural Address, utopian though they may be, have often, by a paradox that deserves but has never received careful study, inspired sound and pragmatic diplomacy. No, if Mr. Bush has gone wrong, his error lies, not in his adherence to a Freevangelical faith that Lincoln, FDR, Truman, and Reagan all shared, but rather in the methods by which he has tried to implement that faith--methods strikingly similar to those that brought two of his less happy predecessors, Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson, to grief.

I.

The error of President Wilson was to exalt the technical machinery of democracy--the plebiscite and the ballot box--and to overlook the demos itself, its hopes and its hatreds, all those apparently primitive, pathological impulses that do not fit neatly into a chart of Homo sapiens progress, but that are abundantly evident wherever actual human beings are gathered. Wilson, who had been bred a Calvinist, ought to have had a less pedantic idea of human nature. But he was also a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and he had been influenced by the 19th-century faith in social science, a positivist vision whose adepts regarded man's moral imponderables as reptilian vestiges that would melt away in the sunshine of the dawning administrative state. The technocrats, abjuring older vocabularies of right and wrong, good and evil, looked forward to the "scientific" solution of man's problems; social scientists would discover the "laws" that govern human nature, much as biologists and physicists deduce such laws within their own realms of study. Wilson's closest adviser, Edward Mandell House, was a specimen of the technocratic type in its purest form: His 1912 novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, envisioned the emergence, in the United States, of a technocratic utopia. In the theory of the technocrats, the promoter of free institutions had simply to compile a mass of statistics concerning the "social development" of a formerly oppressed people, sponsor an election or two, and a free state would rise from the ashes of a fallen despotism.

Such was the intellectual equipment Wilson brought with him when, in December 1918, he sailed to Europe on the George Washington to preside over the greatest failure of American foreign policy in the 20th century, the unsuccessful effort to create durable free states in central and eastern Europe, particularly in Germany, the largest and most powerful European nation. Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, warned Wilson that the central and eastern European peoples whom he hoped to save were "mostly untrained politically," and were "either incapable or deficient in the power of self-government." But Wilson failed to heed the warning. Winston Churchill spoke contemptuously of "the veneer of republican governments and democratic institutions" that Wilson, together with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, imposed upon the Germans. Churchill was right: The Weimar regime was an ineptly husbanded transplant. It put down no roots in the soil, and was soon swept away. Two decades after Wilson sought to make the world "safe for democracy," the free state was again in a death-grapple with the forces of coercion.

The mistakes Wilson made in Europe were repeated, four decades later, in Vietnam, where the U.S. endeavored to prop up ...