After September 11, reflection on what President Bush means when he calls himself a compassionate conservative has about disappeared. He is now mostly a war leader, and surely compassion is not a virtue of a commander-in-chief. The president does know how to put a compassionate face on what we must do in Afghanistan. We are dropping bombs on our enemies the Taliban, but food on our friends, the hungry and oppressed people of that pathetic nation.

And we, the president adds, are not at war with Islam; genuine Islamic believers are also compassionate or kind and gentle conservatives. We are at war only with terrorists who distort that religion for their evil purposes. But let's face it: We know those seemingly compassionate distinctions are mainly rhetorical devices the president is employing to vanquish our enemies and secure our "homeland." At this point, we must hope and we have reason to believe that we do not have a compassionate foreign policy.

But the president's resolute response to the terrorist attack can be, I think, integrated into compassionate conservatism properly understood. The phrase means that genuinely conservative policy is not libertarian, or at least not completely libertarian. It is based on some concern for the souls of Americans.

I remember reading on the day of President Bush's inauguration an article by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist that sought to remind us that the Democratic party is not primarily stupid but "evil." The Democrats, Norquist alleges, remain the party of "coercive utopianism." That phrase, of course, was used to describe the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. But say what you will about Bill Clinton, he was no coercive utopian. As president, he put his faith far more in the market than in government planning, and in his mind communism's failure completely discredits its theory. Not only that, President Clinton was pretty much for freedom across the board: On the social or cultural issues, such as abortion and gay rights, he is pro-choice or libertarian. He was, all in all, the most consistently libertarian president we've ever had. (Someone here might object with environmentalism or affirmative action, but I didn't say perfectly consistent!)

Dare I say that President Bush sees that the greatest danger to human liberty now is far more "anticoercive" than "coercive" libertarianism? Both anticoercive (meaning libertarian) and coercive (meaning Marxist) utopians share the vision of the withering away of the state. We now know that certainly will not happen through the revolution Marx described. Old-fashioned libertarians did not really believe that it would happen at all. They tended to look not forward but backward. They favored the restoration of some freer—if not perfectly free—moment in America's past and whined that history was not on their side. They also served liberty, of course, with their anticommunism. But today libertarians believe that the progress of history or technology will make their dream a reality. They call their opponents, as Marxists used to do, enemies of the future. They believe that we will have a designer future. Biotechnology will extend life indefinitely, and so we will even be relatively unconstrained by biological necessity. And genetic manipulation in the womb will even make it possible for parents to design or perfect their children. Economic freedom, meanwhile, will triumph over political restrictions; the technological imperatives that produce globalization cannot be stopped.

President Bush sees that conservatives are now defined, or ought to be defined, by opposition to extreme libertarianism and unfettered technological progress. They must insist that technology must be subordinated to properly human purposes, and they realize the moral and political limitation of technology will require political will and coercion. That is, in fact, what the president said in his most thoughtful speech defending the limits he imposed on stem cell research, and it is what he implied by making Leon Kass—our most eloquent opponent of biotechnological assaults on human nature—his chief advisor on biotechnology. When it comes to issues like abortion, euthanasia, cloning, cyberporn, and so forth, conservatives such as the president are to some extent statists. They see libertarianism as culminating in a misanthropic form of compassion: The libertarian hope is that technology can liberate us altogether from human suffering by overcoming what had been regarded as natural limits to human choice. As the president explained in his inaugural address, conservatives are now distinguished by their defense of the virtue of beings who can not only be compassionate but courageous, and who can acknowledge their necessary and beneficial dependence on God.

The unprecedented attack against America on September 11 only reinforces the anti-libertarian or political impulse of compassionate conservatism properly understood. The president just said, quite rightly, that Americans now are all soldiers. They must now remember, in other words, the basic duty of citizenship; they cannot escape the fact that human beings are necessarily citizens. True compassion means acting effectively to protect those who are truly vulnerable, a category which now includes our fellow Americans even here at home. We have been reminded forcefully of another dark side of globalization and high technology; we are more vulnerable than ever to the forces of evil in the world. The world is a much more dangerous place because so many governments have become so weak. We have also been reminded that human beings remain divided religiously, and that our view of liberty cannot be separated from very definite views concerning the dignity of the human being and his or her relationship to God. Tolerance cannot mean indifference to the truth about what we really believe. Our enemies believe they can succeed only because they mistakenly believe that Americans have become so mindlessly decadent that they are no longer capable of acting as if they had souls, that we have become so apathetic and self-absorbed that we are incapable of acting compassionately and courageously.

There is almost nothing less true than the libertarian view that high technology will cause the state to wither away and produce a new birth of almost unconstrained human freedom. Political will is needed now more than ever to defend human liberty against two dangers posed by technological progress. The first is the threat that technology poses to human nature or the soul itself, and the second is the threat posed by the access those that hate us have to that technology. Compassionate conservatism turns out to be about how government can defend and encourage the virtues characteristic of a free human being under God.

Peter Augustine Lawler is a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia.