In contemporary times, poll after poll shows the American public to be more self-interested than altruistic. Whether on the topic of humanitarian intervention, or promoting democracy abroad, or providing a humane detention for captured enemy protagonists, American society as a whole is not very supportive of these policy goals if significant costs—or fears—are involved. In the abstract, Americans may express liberal and cosmopolitan views supportive of universal human rights. But this country that sees itself as a beacon of moral progress for all the world to see, the engine for global good, is the same country with a demonstrable history of ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery and lynching, Jim Crow laws to exploit and repress African Americans, anti-Semitism, periodic isolationism and xenophobia, grinding poverty under a harsh form of capitalism, gender discrimination and intolerance for the LGBT community, and a host of other defects. As 19th century Frenchman Ernest Renan observed, intense nationalism requires a lot of forgetting.
Indeed, probing questions reveal what Bill Clinton clearly understood when he got past Somalia and dealt with Bosnia and Kosovo. If you want to help those in distress abroad, you have to do it at very low cost with minimal dangers to even the professional military. Promote democracy? Well, only where security and economic interests are not threatened. Avoid the temptation to torture enemy prisoners? The current trend among the post-9/11 public, pushed by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, is toward more and more acceptance of abuse, in the name, of course, of protecting a morally superior nation.
