Obama official speaks to packed town theater Anne-Marie Slaughter offers seven core values in "The Idea that is America"

Author: J.P. Allen

Middlebury residents gathered on Feb. 13 to discuss U.S. values and politics with Anna-Marie Slaughter, a distinguished scholar and recently-appointed high official in the Obama administration. Held in the Town Hall Theater, the talk was sponsered by The Vermont Humanities Council, Middlebury's Rohatyn Center for International Affairs and the Ilsley Public Library.

Slaughter is a former dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In January, she was nominated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be director of the Policy Planning Staff, a government think tank charged with taking what its mission statement calls a "longer term, strategic view" of U.S. foreign policy. The Staff reports its findings directly to the Secretary of State. Slaughter is the first female ever to be appointed to lead the elite research group.

But Slaughter did not speak in Middlebury as a representative of the State Department, but rather as a private citizen and author of the book, "The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World." In fact, the event was the only speaking engagement Slaughter did not cancel after taking up her new post in Washington, making it was also her last presentation as a private citizen. These unique circumstances allowed the audience, composed of a mixture of students, faculty and other area residents to ask incisive questions and get candid answers from Slaughter.

The talk began with an hour-long exposition. After the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, Slaughter felt "compelled" to search for the values she felt had been all but destroyed by the photos of American soldiers and their degraded prisoners. The result of that search was "The Idea that is America." The book examines what Slaughter sees as the seven "core American values": liberty, equality, justice, democracy, tolerance, humility and faith.

She considers the first four of these relatively simple and familiar to most Americans. "If you woke someone up in the middle of the night and said, 'Quick! Name me core American values,' they'd probably come up with liberty, equality, justice and democracy," she said during the presentation.

The last three values - tolerance, humility and faith - required more explanation and comprised a larger portion of Slaughter's speech. Slaughter often called on examples from U.S. history to argue and support the three less obvious values. She admitted to having received in the past many incredulous reactions to "humility" as a core American value, and was keen to offer quotations from Washington, Lincoln and others articulating American modesty.

The Middlebury community responded in force. On a Friday night, the Town Hall Theater was packed with people enthusiastic to hear from a figure who, though vastly influential, lacks the celebrity status of an ambassador or other government official. When Slaughter opened the floor for questions, hands shot up.

One audience member asked Slaughter why she had called the fifth value "tolerance," a word with neutral connotations at best, rather than "respect." The answer was frank: to expect "respect" is to expect too much. She argued that it is impossible to stop people from thinking, "I may not agree with you, I may not like you, I may not want my children to go to your schools," and therefore tolerance and a bit of civility are large enough moral goals.

A Middlebury professor, concerned with the coherence of Slaughter's set of values, asked what should be done at times when promoting one value undercuts another. "We never achieve these values perfectly," replied Slaughter. "You have to trade them off." She offered a theoretical example: If the U.S. were forced to choose between, on the one hand, striking a deal with the Taliban, and on the other hand, leaving Afghanistan in certain chaos, what should be done? When justice is pitted against liberty, the U.S. must do "the best we can do" - which, Slaughter admitted, may by very little.

Slaughter made similar points when asked about her thoughts on the genocide in Darfur. She originally favored military intervention (with a UN mandate) in Sudan. But after seeing the consequences of the Iraq invasion, she began to think that a deal with the Sudanese government might be the only way to stop the violence. In short, "peace may trump justice right now."

On other issues, Slaughter proved more optimistic. When asked how humility can remain valued in a nation seemingly obsessed with self-aggrandizement, Slaughter argued that we are more humble than we seem. She cited the American love of self-improvement as a primary example: "You can't always want to get better if you think you're already perfect," she said.

She evinced faith in the generation currently aged 15-30, arguing that today's "digital natives" who have grown up with globalization are more prepared to accept the tough realities of this century than their predecessors may believe.

The final question came from a member of that generation, a College student: "People of my generation who are graduating from college are full of energy and are hyper-educated, but we can't get a job at Starbucks. Can you give us hope that we are employable in your State Department?"

Slaughter remained optimistic about such career quandaries. She proposed creating "the civilian equivalent of the military": a system that would allow regiments of volunteers to sign up for short tours of duty to work on development and humanitarian projects - a sort of expanded incarnation of the foreign service or Peace Corps. Slaughter said that, as director of Policy Planning Staff, she would look seriously at the possibility of creating such a service.

After the presentation, Slaughter signed copies of "The Idea that is America" and spoke one-on-one with people who had been unable to ask questions during the allotted time. Many of those who attended took advantage of the opportunity for extra conversation, extending further this brief, unprecedented look into the future of the Obama administration.