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132 chapter 4 Cities on a Hill When President Bush proclaims that the United States has made the pursuit of democracy and liberty the basis of our foreign policy, what exactly does he mean? Anti-Bush critics tend to simply write off such rhetoric as cover for less-attractive goals, including maintaining global hegemony, U.S. access and control of critical resources, and maximization of the interests of American multinational corporations. Perhaps some would highlight the evangelical aspiration to make fundamentalist Christian values dominant throughout the world. Others would argue for a neoconservative hand in transforming the Middle East to strengthen a Likud-dominated Israel.1 Those defending the president, on the contrary, not only take his liberating rhetoric at face value, but also contend that it is consistent with a long-term American idealism going back to the notion of a city on a hill for all the world to see—and emulate. His supporters challenge those who see Bush policy as a violation of long-term American views of our role in the world. Still, critics counter that those parts of the American experience, from Dollar Diplomacy to Gunboat Diplomacy; from Marines being sent to the Dominican Republic to United Fruit–influenced interventions in Guatemala; from CIA coups in Iran to U.S. support for apartheid in South Africa, reveal our less idealistic, more bullying past.2 It might be useful to consider the ways in which main currents within the history of both American foreign policy and, more broadly, America’s responses to the rest of the world have shaped the particular initiatives and goals of the present Bush administration. There has been an ongoing and inherently contradictory set of questions and issues that have driven U.S. foreign policy from the outset of the nation’s history. One way to approach these questions and issues is to investigate Cities on a Hill 133 what I will suggest are the multiple meanings of the notion of a city on a hill, their respective purposes, their varied audiences, their essential logics. Indeed, there is more than one version of that city, more than one notion of topography, and more than one target for more than one message. One version, consistent from the beginning, is that humankind has been placed upon this earth to labor and make it plentiful to the greater glory of God and that the United States has taken on this covenant with greater success and with more consistency than any other nation. This essentially Protestant version fuses with an economic and technological emphasis that claims an American mission to bring the benefits of our sacred accomplishments to the rest of the world. In brief, this version evokes the notion of a redeemer nation, an America called to transform the earth in its own image. The most eloquent embodiment of this vision has been Ronald Reagan: “I in my own mind have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land. . . . I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land.” It was at the close of Reagan’s concession speech of 1976 that he evoked “a shining city on a hill.”3 There are obvious connections with nineteenth-century notions of Manifest Destiny. Aware of such providential history, Lincoln referred to the United States as “the last best hope for mankind.” More recently, neoconservative Ben Wattenberg extended this claim after the collapse of the Soviet empire, proclaiming America as “the first universal nation,” the single and benevolent model for the entire world.4 Lincoln’s quote evokes the political dimension of American specialness, our constitution, our republican institutions, our democratic and egalitarian culture, a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The religious, economic, and political dimensions of this claim, however, contain deep and powerful contradictions and fissures. The emphasis on productivity promotes the turning of a wilderness into a garden of plenty, but it concomitantly can justify imperial, even genocidal policies directed toward those less productive, less enamored with the Protestant version of a work ethic and with the compulsion to accumulate. Native American claims to this continent were denied, in part, by such a logic. Such a justification is consistent with social Darwinism—those who flourish in the ruthless marketplace, including that of wilderness development, are...

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