
Americans have been trying to shape democracy around the world for more than a century. It is the American mission, our distinctive form of evangelism. But when President Bush declared, in his second inaugural address, that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends...

As we leave behind an era in which America tried to assert democracy by force (and often failed), the question arises: what part of our efforts to spread democracy can we preserve for the future? In The Freedom Agenda, James Traub traces the history of America's democratic evangelizing,...