¿Is the Peace Corps a partisan political endeavor – a sacred cow of discredited liberalism?
¡You bet your sweet bipartisan sweet bippee it isn’t!
Since the Cold War, U.S. diplomacy has been evolving away from a largely bi-partisan consensus of preparing for a dreaded global confrontation with another superpower. Now we confront less dreadful, if daily, adversaries across the world attacking not only the United States but democracy itself.
‘Eyeball to eyeball’ great power rivalries are giving way to a nuanced, if partisan, diplomacy that ties together high-level government-to-government interactions, for example, in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with grass-roots counter-insurgency and economic development efforts just a few miles away.
In that context, I have favoured, and argued passionately within the U.S. government for the consolidation of development agencies, the foreign out-reach efforts of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Treasury as well as the Peace Corps into the Department of State. Such an integration unites often diverging non-military activities and presents a unified civilian chain-of-command with enhanced bargaining power against the Department of Defense. Now, however, I have come to believe that the Peace Corps should remain independent.
¿Why?
When the Peace Corps started out in the heady “can-do” America at the peak of her economic dominance two generations ago, the policy premise was hardly new. President Franklin Roosevelt had anticipated this vision of the Peace Corps in the bi-partisan appeal – no, a call to transcend politics in favor of defending democratic principles worth fighting for – of his ‘Four Freedoms’ Speech of seventy years ago.
That speech boldly argued to a troubled land, still neutral in the face of the bloodshed wrought by “gangster régimes”, that a post-colonial world could only hope to foster democracy through a continuing and universal presence of the freedoms of speech as well as those from fear, religious persecution and poverty. The United States has little left of the fresh-faced, deeply moral innocence of the ‘greatest’ generation. Perhaps, with American power so vast and international, such a decadence of values was inevitable in a Cold War fraught with moral ambiguity.
With the new diplomacy of our day, however, institutions are aligning for a whole-of-government approach that will inevitably make diplomacy more partisan as these executive branch institutions function at the pleasure of the President. Whoever that President is, he has to answer to many partisan interests coalesced to place him in the White House. That is the democracy of competing factions foreseen by President Madison, though the version we see today is admittedly ugly.
One institution needs to remain apart and above the trench warfare and trench-mouth of the contemporary debate of U.S. foreign policy: the Peace Corps.
Today, more than in most other periods, America needs to remember why she exists, not for what interest or for whom in particular. There are people who still shudder at the thought of a world without an America in it, notwithstanding many of the vitriolic, if defensible, self-recriminations poisoning public disquisition these days.
Obviously, I am one of these exceptionalists. I still believe that people the world over would suffer even more today without America. Yes, we can do better. But, first things first: we must justify that exceptionalism. That means that each American is a statesman now and should strive to be, well, exceptional.
One thing that lingered within me from my work in Afghanistan and Iraq was how often I was the only version of the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation or Universal Declaration of Human Rights that these people had ever seen. That thought changed my attitude, not radically, but enough for me to smile through most hard days or stare down a majority of fear-based bureaucrats.
To do so, I had to lay aside self-centered anxieties to show host-country counterparts, whatever their stations in life, that they still mattered. It could be something as simple as taking ice cream out to unwashed, invariably skinny, Iraqi children sadly forced into selling porno-DVDs in the U.S. Embassy parking lot. These incremental, fulfilling efforts are the daily fare of most Peace Corps volunteers, albeit in less tragic places, or at least they can be.
Our industries and industriousness make the United States a powerful nation. Only the American grace from within – that attitude of “¡heck yeah: these guys deserve a chance!” – creates that off-beat patriotism of giving back and humbly serving others that makes America great. The accumulation of thousands of little acts of charity – based not on ideology but on ideas people really have died and still die for – can hope to guide our Republic through the difficult days that lie ahead.
These ideas are simple – inalienable rights endowed by our Creator of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness – and yet their transmission requires sincerity, fortitude and character. What still gives me heart is to hear or read about what many of my fellow, particularly younger, members are doing with the goodwill and the optimism they bring, in spite of many frustrations, to Mexicans in the laboratory or campo alike.
These younger ‘exceptional’ Americans implicitly understand that the United States, and democracy itself, can only hope to continue through the attraction of what we stand for and not through promotion of self-interest, no matter how enlightened. Otherwise, we suffer the heretofore inexorable fate of Shelley’s Ozymandias.
These youthful compatriots give some in a rising generation of Mexicans the courage and the compassion to take up the mantle of leadership for their society’s future. These very ordinary Americans enable me to recall, with sentimental pride, a childhood Episcopal hymn I sang, usually in a broken voice, at my grade-school’s weekly chapel services 40+ years ago:
“I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true,
Who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor and one was a queen
and one was a shepherdess on the green:
They were all of them saints of God—
And, God helping, I mean to be one too.”
