Where is the line?

Hegemony/Pre-emption

The easy one is the external policies of pre-emption and hegemony. I'll trust, first of all, that you've read the appropriate information (as in Bush's speech at West Point or the numerous other analyses) such that you acknowledge these policies are driving present policy.

Both policies are unique to this administration as foundations or givens for foreign engagement.

Church and state

Let's acknowledge first of all that church/state issues have arisen both in the courts and in public discourse coincident with two other phenomena - the internal organization and political engagement of the evangelical community, and the rise of that group's influence within the Republican Party. (As a relevant anecdote, a dozen years ago I met the fellow who had been contracted to write the organizational software for the Moral Majority. He said, as he passed me a chubby joint, "I hate these guys, and I've armed them really really well...but I needed the money.")

I don't think you'll contest that the last ten or twenty years have witnessed a distinct increase in attempts to bring 'creation science' into classrooms, to forward biblical mention in schools (prayer,etc), and to place christians on local school boards.

Or, to limit access to abortion through judicial appointments, attempts to change law, and through organized efforts towards placing christians on local hospital boards (I'll leave the fringe element out of this).

And, I don't think you'll contest that the evangelical community has become deeply influential in the Republican Party. Enough traditional Republicans have themselves spoken to this issue.

I also doubt you will contest here (after acknowledging dys above) that this administration is more deeply influenced by this evangelical element than any administration previously.

So, what threat to separation of church and state? Read any legal brief put forward by the ACLU, or Jewish or Muslim interested party, as to where the constitution is in danger. What, for example, would be the response of this part of the Republican party to a rotation of spiritual beliefs and symbols in the operation of the state? For example, if a fellow stood up in Congress and brought forward for discussion a bill which would change US currency for one year to "In Vishnu We Trust", then the following year it would become "In Hubbard We Trust"?

The 'freedom' being pushed for is NOT freedom of religion, it is freedom for ONE religion. There's the danger.

It is precisely this danger, the monopolization of power and influence within the nation which the framers had seen more than enough of in Europe and which they wanted desperately to avoid here.

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists... (p. 6)

Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us;

To some, the Manifest Destiny Doctrine was based on the idea that America had a divine providence. It had a future that was destined by God to expand its borders, with no limit to area or country. All the traveling and expansion were part of the spirit of Manifest Destiny, a belief that it was God's will that Americans spread over the entire continent, and to control and populate the country as they see fit. Many expansionists conceived God as having the power to sustain and guide human destiny. "It was white man's burden to conquer and christianize the land" (Demkin <manif_l.htm>, Chapter 8). For example, the idea that the Puritan notion of establishing a "city on a hill" was eventually secularized into Manifest Destiny--a sort of materialistic, religious, utopian destiny.

The perception persists among some that the United States has become a hectoring hegemon. And since perceptions do matter, this is a problem we must do what we can to resolve. Let's begin by understanding the various strands of the criticism we face.

At one extreme, we are accused of trying to dominate others, of seeing
the world in zero sum terms in which any other country's gain must be
our loss. But that is an utterly mistaken view. It's not just because
we are the first global power in history that is not an imperial power.
It's because for 50 years, we have consciously tried to define and
pursue our interests in a way that is consistent with the common good -
rising prosperity, expanding freedom, collective security."

All of the statements you've made are based on positions developed by the US Supreme Court over the last 40-50 years which have turned the Seperation clause on it's head. Those decisions, and the opposition to them are what gave rise to the "Religious Right".

What had been for the past several decades the origin myth of the neoconservative right had become, in part because it so uniquely filled the need of the political class to explain its own estrangement from the elec-torate, the official story, shared by all participants in the process: America, in this apocalyptic telling, had been from its inception until the 1960s a deeply religious nation. During the 1960s, through the efforts of what Robert H. Bork called "the 'intellectual' class and that class's enforcement arm, the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court of the United States," the nation and its citizens had been inexplicably and destructively "secularized," and were accordingly in need of "transformation," of "moral and intellectual rearmament," of "renewed respect for moral authority." In a country already so increasingly steeped in evangelical teaching that a significant number of its citizens had come to believe that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last ten thousand years" (47 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup in 1991 said they believed in such a fell swoop, or "recent special creation"), those who wrote and talked were arguing how the nation's political system could best revive those religious values allegedly destroyed (in an interestingly similar fell swoop) during the 1960s.

"I wish we could send copies of this book[Compassionate Conservatism: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America by Marvin Olasky] to all Americans who still believe - all evidence to the contrary - that their religious freedom will be protected under a Bush administration," Ira N. Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, noted today. "The book outlines, in no uncertain terms, that the goal of the 'faith-based' domestic agenda espoused by Governor Bush is indeed taxpayer-funded proselytization of the poor. When Governor Bush - in his forward - calls this book 'a blueprint for government' and 'an approach I share,' he does a better job than we could ever hope to do to of showing just how out of touch he is with the Jewish community and all Americans who treasure their religious liberty and the First Amendment of the Constitution."

Yet the phrase "compassionate conservatism" describes a specific and deeply radical experiment in social rearrangement, the aim of which was defined by Governor Bush, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Philadelphia, with sufficient vagueness to signal the troops without alerting the less committed: what he meant by compassionate conservatism, he said, was "to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity." Marvin Olasky, the journalism professor at the University of Texas who has been a Bush adviser since 1993 and is the author of the seminal work on the subject, The Tragedy of American Compassion[1] (this was the 1992 book that Newt Gingrich received as a Christmas present from William J. Bennett in 1994 and promptly recommended to all Republican members of Congress), and of this year's Compassionate Conservatism,[2] has been more forthright. "Compassionate conservatism is neither an easy slogan nor one immune from vehement attack," he advises readers on page one of Compassionate Conservatism:
It is a full-fledged program with a carefully considered philosophy. It will face in the twenty-first century not easy acceptance but dug-in opposition. It will have to cross a river of suspicion concerning the role of religion in American society. It will have to get past numerous ideological machine-gun nests. Only political courage will enable compassionate conservatism to carry the day and transform America.
The source of this "river of suspicion" and these "ideological machine-gun nests" becomes clear on reading the text, which is largely devoted to detailing a 1999 road trip during which Olasky, who before "God found me and changed me when I was twenty-six" had wrestled first with atheism ("I was bar mitzvahed at thirteen and an atheist by fourteen") and then with the Communist Party USA ("What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?"), introduces his fourteen-year-old son, Daniel, to anti-poverty programs in Texas, the Midwest, and the Northeast. The drift soon emerges. "God's in charge," a retired couple who run a community center in South Dallas tell Olasky and Daniel. "I had to learn that God's in charge," they are told by a former user of heroin and cocaine who now runs the day-to-day operation of a recovery center in Minneapolis. A teacher at an evangelical summer school in Dallas explains how "curriculum is cleverly tied" to a pending mountain field trip, for example by assigning "Bible passages concerning mountains, eagles, and hawks."

Monroe Doctrine...there is no licence here for either hegemony or pre-emption. In fact, the constraints the US is obliged to acknowledge are contained in it...

Manifest Destiny... I'll assume you aren't defending this rather arrogant and nutty messianist idea, and you are just making the much easier claim that the Bush administration is a believer in, and proponent of it, thus is off the hook (on the charge of uniqueness) because others held the same position earlier. Well....who previously?

Then you quote a Clinton staffer, I guess to suggest that if a Democrat says nice things about the US's role in the world, it must be so.

Well, aside from the 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' three monkey thing...

What is entirely avoided here is Bush's speech at West Point (that the guiding purpose of US strategy after the end of the Cold War should be to prevent the emergence of any 'peer competitor' anywhere in the world. It also avoids acknowledging the 1992 'think tank' document by Wolfowitz, Perle, and the rest of Rumsfeld crowd. This IS new. This doctrine has no previous voice in US adminstrations.

On church and state you avoid discussing the modern influence of the evangelical community in the party and in American politics. Perhaps you are doing the 'devil's advocate' thing, as you've acknowledged (to Dys) previously the notable influence of this wing in the party. If you are, I don't think it terribly valuable. Evangelists have been around for centuries, but never so powerful an influence. Perhaps in a hundred years, the Scientologists will have replaced them in power and influence. I suggest this is not likely to be a grand thing.

The important point is not how or why they got organized, but rather what consequences are, or are likely to, follow.