FDR, Lincoln and Bush

Reading The Prince again for a class, I came upon the famous discussion of cruelty. Machiavelli draws the distinction between cruelty well used and badly used. Cruelty well used is performed "at a stroke," ruthlessly but cleanly. Cruelty badly used is prolonged and gradually undermines a prince's hold on his subjects' loyalty. Machiavelli concludes by saying that a prince who uses cruelty well will find favor with both God and men.

In other words, the ends justify the means. Thoughts of Machiavelli naturally led me to the current administration's flaunting of both the Constitution and international rules in its treatment of prisoners, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, etc.

Bush hasn't succeeded at attaining his ends; he leaves a disastrous war, bloated government, deficit, and economic recession behind him. But what of other presidents? Did the ends justify the means?

Franklin Roosevelt flagrantly violated the constitution when he gave the order to detain 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them citizens. Yet no one would consider his presidency a failure, even though the Internment is now common knowledge.

Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and declared martial law at the start of the American Civil War.

All profoundly illiberal and unconstitutional measures, even though they were mitigated, to a certain extent, by the fact that these presidents, while scrapping civil liberties in this specific case, still upheld the legal and political system in general. Moreover, both presidencies are viewed as successes because Lincoln and FDR saw the nation through two great crises.

I don't think it's enough to say that the two former presidents were justified by the fact that the threat to the country was greater in their cases. This isn't even true. Terrorists hit Manhattan on 2001; the Japanese never made it further than Pearl Harbor and the Aleutians. Which enemy posed a greater existential threat?

So I think Machiavelli may be right. The difference between FDR and Bush is not the degree to which they threw aside civil liberties in times of national crisis; FDR was far more illiberal than Bush has been, anyway. The difference is that FDR shepherded the country through the dark years of war and into an era of prosperity. The same, or similar, could be said of Abraham Lincoln.

In times of war, our democracy congeals around the executive branch. Our judgment of a war president is not based upon his regard for civil liberties. It is all just a question of cruelty well used or badly used.