David Ignatius on transition from President Bush to President-elect Obama

David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post:

We have been living for eight years with the paradox of "conservative optimists" running our nation's foreign policy. That's what sticks in the mind in this last week of the Bush presidency. This administration has fused a dark, conservative view about the need for military power with a rosy conception about the perfectibility of humankind. The result has been a kind of armed do-gooderism -- and a foreign policy that has frightened and angered the rest of the world.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama, the moment has arrived for what I want to call the "progressive pessimists." This new worldview would marry the liberal desire to make life better with a realist's appreciation of the limits of political and military power. This is a gloomier progressivism than President John F. Kennedy's 1961 admonition to "pay any price, bear any burden." We've tried that.

The patron saint of progressive pessimism is George Orwell, who was at once a passionate social democrat and a political reactionary. He was as suspicious of the do-gooder impulse of the left as he was of the imperialist jingoism of the right. In his famous novels "1984" and "Animal Farm," Orwell conveyed his deep skepticism about the utopian impulse and the way it could be manipulated by authoritarian leaders. He was torn all his life between a progressive's passion for the downtrodden and a pessimist's recognition of how this humanitarian impulse could be misused.

Bush's great mistakes have been those of an optimist who believed in social engineering on a global scale. He rolled into Iraq convinced that this traditional tribal society could be remade in a Western image of progress. When he talked of democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, there was a sense of inevitability -- that democracy and freedom are immutable historical forces rather than the product of frail and imperfect human decisions.

What was missing from Bush, oddly, was the conservative's abiding skepticism of big ideas and grand designs. He talked often of President Lincoln but seemed not to recognize how deeply pessimistic Lincoln was, and how desperately he hoped to escape a civil war. It is impossible to imagine Lincoln saying "bring it on," or even thinking it.

If the sunny, ever-hopeful Bush needed to read anything from American history, it was the passage in the Federalist Papers where James Madison cautioned against optimism: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."