Dignity Promotion?

Larison on Ackerman:

Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding.  It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level.  Team Obama’s problem with the “freedom agenda” is that it has been too superficial, and they intend to go much deeper, which in turn implies that they apparently intend to get us stuck much deeper in the conflicts and problems of all those countries to which we are supposedly “inextricably” tied.  Forget nation-building or building institutions, which are hard enough in the best of times–Team Obama calls for dignity-building, which is almost infinitely more open-ended and aimless. To repudiate the policies of hubris, they offer hubris cubed.