WASHINGTON — Why don’t conservatives love freedom?
Judging by last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, that’s a fair question. As Egyptians overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak, politicians at CPAC’s annual gabfest ranged from silent to grumpy on the subject.
Mitt Romney, a leading Republican presidential contender, gave a speech without mentioning the upheaval in Cairo that may signal the most important geopolitical shift since the end of the Cold War.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, believed to be considering a presidential run, seemed not to have noticed that the world was changing. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty confined himself to criticizing President Barack Obama for somehow appeasing “Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who won the CPAC presidential straw poll, was at least forthright: He said the United States has no “moral responsibility to spread our goodness around the world” and urged the administration “to do a lot less a lot sooner, not only in Egypt but around the world.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was all over the map. At CPAC, he mentioned “what’s happening in Egypt” without commenting further. On Saturday, he told The Associated Press that Mubarak’s resignation was “good for the future” but criticized Obama for publicly supporting the dictator’s ouster. On Sunday, Gingrich said on ABC’s “This Week” that Obama was right to side with the freedom-loving protesters in Tahrir Square but should have done so privately.
Meanwhile, protests sparked by the Egypt uprising are raging across the Arab world — Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain. On Monday, Iran had its first consequential street protests against theocratic rule since 2009.
House Speaker John Boehner, at least, has come out forcefully on the side of freedom. But why the ambivalence from so many prominent conservatives?
For one thing — and I think this applies to most of the tongue-tied — there’s the fact this is happening on Obama’s watch. If everything turns out well, heaven forbid that the president get any credit.
The administration’s public comments as the Egyptian revolution unfolded seemed to take two steps forward and one step back, but there was never any real question about Obama’s sentiments. The United States was by no means in control of events, but the White House used whatever influence it had to push for a transition.
The conservative mantra has been: Obama Is Always Wrong. Therefore, there must be something wrong with the way he handled Egypt — even if it appears, from what we’ve seen so far, that the result is a historic opening for democracy.
One possible explanation for the lukewarm conservative reaction is a lack of faith in our most cherished democratic values, at least where majority-Islam countries are concerned.
I’m not talking about Glenn Beck’s paranoid fantasy of a vast leftist-Islamist conspiracy for world domination; that’s a job for a licensed professional with a prescription pad. I’m talking about people like former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who told CPAC that “democracy as we see it” in Egypt would be all right but grumbled that “a democratic election can produce illiberal results.”
It is unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win a majority in fair elections or even that it would lead a government that would necessarily be more dangerous than the Mubarak regime. But some seem to believe that only parties of which the United States approves should be allowed to participate.
They are arguing that the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims cannot be trusted to govern themselves. That’s not what I call loving freedom.
Eugene Robinson: eugenerobinson@washpost.com
