terms of the variables it privileges the specific content of interests or policy choice. In
order to account for the liberal character and logic of periods of US imperialism and
political expansion, and specifically the centrality of vindicationist democracy promotion,
some domestic-political process must be introduced.
15
My argument is that activist democracy promotion in periods of imperialism can
be explained by both external and internal dispositions: Both cases of vindicationism -
the 1890s and Bush doctrine - followed periods of an expansion in material capabilities
and witnessed the rise of powerful nationalist ideologies in Progressive imperialism and
neoconservatism, respectively. While power is an important part of the causal story,
long-term variation in democracy promotion strategy also turns on subtle but significant
ideational shifts in the doctrine of liberal exceptionalism. The founding fathers, grounded
in a political-realist and Calvinist view of politics, were skeptical towards the capacity of
the US to effect democratic change abroad, distrusted the concentration of power
necessary to implement an activist foreign policy, and resolved to limit the American
liberal mission to demonstrating the success of an experiment in self-government. The
character of liberal exceptionalism began to shift in the late nineteenth century. Various
reform movement such as Progressivism and the Social Gospel, political reactions to
post-Civil War industrialization and modernization, produced a different set of normative
and instrumental beliefs about the nature of progress and the efficacy of US power to
create a more perfect social and political order.
15
This conceptual deficiency in realism, and especially with respect to American liberalism, is discussed in
the appendix of Tony Smith, America’s Mission (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1994. Also see
Legro and Moravscik’s methodological “two-step,” in which certain sets of theories – “epistemic,” social-
constructivist – explain the sources and perceptions of interests, while rationalist third-image theories –
neorealism and neoliberalism – explain the strategic pursuit of those interests subject to variation in
external constraint such as the distribution of material capabilities or information; Jeffrey Legro and
Andrew Moravscik, “Is Anybody Still a Realist,” International Security, 24:2 (Fall 1999), pp.5-55.
Convention