Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The
people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton
hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln
hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant
hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.

But Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the
intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries
of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to
employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and
demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by
the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing
it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is
not only a rational response to the president and his administration
but a mark of good moral hygiene.

Protesters scream as President Bush's motorcade drives by.
This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a
recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on
a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American
Prospect editor Paul Starr's excellent new book, "Freedom's Power: The
True Force of Liberalism." To put in context Prof. Starr's grounding
of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I
recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted
in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive
scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner -- and perhaps
mischievously -- I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made
rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One
guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, "What's
irrational about hating George W. Bush?" His vehemence caused his
fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a
playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served,
I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found
hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was
a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn't allow it. "No," he said, angrily.
"You started it. You make the case that it's not rational to hate
Bush." I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen
for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting
that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the
president's policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues,
hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a
citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid
bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that
would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and
writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long
admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his
throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention,
confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in
support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush
hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second
time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he
proclaimed, "I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks."

And so, I told my Princeton audience, in the context of a Bush hatred
and a corollary contempt for conservatism so virulent that it had
addled the minds of many of our leading progressive intellectuals,
Prof. Starr deserved special recognition for keeping his head in his
analysis of liberalism and progressivism. Then I got on with my
prepared remarks.

But as at that D.C. dinner in late spring of 2004, so again in early
autumn 2007 at dinner following the Princeton panel, several of my
progressive colleagues seized upon my remarks against giving oneself
over to hatred. And they vigorously rejected the notion. Both a
professor of political theory and a nationally syndicated columnist
insisted that I was wrong to condemn hatred as a passion that impaired
political judgment. On the contrary, they argued, Bush hatred was
fully warranted considering his theft of the 2000 election in Florida
with the aid of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore; his
politicization of national security by making the invasion of Iraq an
issue in the 2002 midterm elections; and his shredding of the
Constitution to authorize the torture of enemy combatants.

Of course, these very examples illustrate nothing so much as the
damage hatred inflicts on the intellect. Many of my colleagues at
Princeton that evening seemed not to have considered that in 2000 it
was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by
filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county
election supervisors. Nor did many of my Princeton dinner companions
take into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S.
Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges -- five of whom were
Democratic appointees -- found equal protection flaws with the recount
scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court. And they did not
appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner's sensible observation,
much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was
strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election,
it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided
by the Florida Supreme Court.

As for the 2002 midterm elections, it is true that Mr. Bush took the
question of whether to use military force against Iraq to the voters,
placing many Democratic candidates that fall in awkward positions. But
in a liberal democracy, especially from a progressive point of view,
aren't questions of war and peace proper ones to put to the people --
as Democrats did successfully in 2006?

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling
of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the
common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush
administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily
overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which
has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime
bound to overreach -- especially when it confronts on a daily basis
intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats -- but that when
checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in
accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush
perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims -- who
pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance --
to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters
of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to
the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a
monster instead of a political opponent.

Prof. Starr shows in "Freedom's Power" that tolerance, generosity, and
reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit. His
analysis suggests that the problem with progressives who have
succumbed to Bush hatred is not their liberalism; it's their betrayal
of it. To be sure, Prof. Starr rejects Bush administration policies
and thinks conservatives have the wrong remedies for what ails America
today. Yet at the same time his analysis suggests, if not a cure for
those who have already succumbed, at least a recipe for inoculating
others against hating presidents to come.

The recipe consists above all in recognizing that constitutional
liberalism in America "is the common heritage of both modern
conservatives and modern liberals, as those terms are understood in
the Anglo-American world," writes Prof. Starr. We are divided not by
our commitment to the Constitution but by disagreements -- often, to
be sure, with a great deal of blood and treasure at stake -- over how
to defend that Constitution and secure its promise of liberty under
law.

The conflict between more conservative and more liberal or progressive
interpretations of the Constitution is as old as the document itself,
and a venerable source of the nation's strength. It is wonderful for
citizens to bring passion to it. Recognizing the common heritage that
provides the ground for so many of the disagreements between right and
left today will encourage both sides, if not to cherish their
opponents, at least to discipline their passions and make them an ally
of their reason.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover
Institution and a professor at George Mason University School of Law.