The inauguration of George W. Bush has left-wingers all over the world foaming at the mouth for the usual reason: Mr. Bush makes them feel cheap. In Paris, American voters living overseas sponsored an “anti-inaugural” that made the French proud of their little tail-wagging guests. A leading French newspaper (the famously obnoxious Le Monde) explained that, “in the eyes of Bush the criterion for tyranny is above all hostility towards the United States.” In Britain, the Daily Star summarized Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address this way: “Have I got nukes for you!” At home, left-wing Democrats noted that the president was a power-mad lunatic and America was going to the dogs.

Obviously Saddam Hussein was, in Le Monde’s view, no tyrant. He just liked murdering people. (All right: tens of thousands of people.) Granted, he employed henchmen to drive nails into the skulls of his political opponents, but constant American hectoring would make any dictator cranky. The Daily Star must have been referring to the part of the inaugural address where the president said, “My fellow Americans, let us seek out peoples we dislike all over the world, un-Christian peoples who do not share our fanatic religious beliefs, and blow them up with nuclear bombs.” (You missed that part? Maybe you were out in the kitchen grabbing a beer, as usual.) When the lies get this rank, we had better look for an explanation. Leftists are furious at Mr. Bush for making them feel sleazy and small.

The president has blown their cover. They call themselves compassionate but are monstrously indifferent to human suffering. Otherwise they would be elated that Afghanistan and Iraq have been freed from bloody tyrannies. They call themselves democrats but democracy, they believe, is appropriate to educated, sophisticated peoples only. After all – what happens when you bestow democracy on a dumb, ignorant mob of savages? They elect George W. Bush! Where have you been? We just did that experiment!

Here is a perfect picture of the patronizing sneer so many “superior” people direct at the president, straight from the front lines of the Washington social scene. “At a dinner party in Washington,” the report reads, “composed mainly of opponents of the war and the administration, [the president’s policy was,] as usual with this class, the subject of vehement denunciation.” After a while, a lone dissenter (just one!) gets up to say something in the president’s defense: “However deficient he may be in the head, he is all right in the heart.”

This is the president’s champion talking, remember. Anti-war and anti-American sophisticates are positive that the president is an amiable moron at best. Most won’t even be that generous. But this particular “dinner-party in Washington,” with its lone presidential defender, took place during Abraham Lincoln’s administration. I am quoting the painter and friend-of-Lincoln F. B. Carpenter, who published “Six Months at the White House” in 1866.

Long-ago, sophisticates hated Lincoln the same way “sophisticates” hate Mr. Bush today. Lincoln, with his earnest, plain-spoken honesty, his dislike of the social scene, and his Midwestern, middle-American style, was so obviously dumb that no one could even begin to take him seriously. Even worse, he believed in God, quoted the Bible, and insisted that America had an obligation to do right. Mr. Bush isn’t Lincoln; Lincoln was incomparable. But just as Lincoln once did, Mr. Bush makes his political enemies feel superior plus guilty – which equals nasty.

The humiliating thing for today’s left is that Iraqis ought to hate Mr. Bush worse than anybody, but somehow they just don’t. And the families of American soldiers – surely they must hate the president’s guts for sending soldiers into battle for no better reason than to protect America and liberate tortured peoples shrieking for help. Yet they don’t seem to hate the president either! What’s wrong with everybody? Does the world even deserve to have left liberals running the United Nations, the BBC, and so many other important institutions?

You can imagine today’s international press on the topic of the American Civil War. “In the eyes of Lincoln, the criterion for tyranny is above all hostility toward the Northern States. Who says the slaves want to be freed? Who says they are capable of democracy? And can’t everyone see that the North is only in this war to secure its cotton supplies, on which it depends because of its greedy cotton-guzzling habits?”

Here is a deep dark secret. Yes, America was pursuing its national interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and (for that matter) the Civil War. The right foreign policy for America is to pursue our national interest and world freedom simultaneously. Can it be done? The president is showing how. But this explanation might be too complicated for left-wingers to grasp. (Two goals at once?) Will someone please explain it to them?

Mr. Gelernter is the author of “The America Haters,” forthcoming from Doubleday in 2006, and a professor of computer science at Yale University.