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    The Spirit of the (Democratic) Laws

    by

    Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2016.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 53, Number 6, November/December 2016. Republished with permission.

     

    Montesquieu directed his attention to the spirit of the laws, considering what he called “the principles of government” underlying legal codes. The principle of republican government is “virtue,” by which he meant love of the laws, love of country, and a preference of public to private interest. By democracy, as distinct from republicanism, Montesquieu’s close reader Tocqueville meant a social condition, equality—defined not as the absence of social classes or of gradations of wealth but as the absence of aristocracy, a class entitled by birth to rule. This social condition in turn engenders habits of mind and heart that incline citizens toward “self-interest rightly understood”—but also toward “virtuous materialism”—the pursuit of material pleasures in a small way. Without the spectacular excesses of aristocratic corruption, virtuous materialism enervates souls, leads them away from public life, from virtue in Montesquieu’s sense.

    Tocqueville famously considers the importance of civil society as a bulwark against the overbearing government of modern, centralized states and also as a counterweight to materialistic individualism. As a sociologist, Dominque Schnapper continues this legacy; while making use of the empirical studies produced by her colleagues, she eschews the sharp dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ that so many of them have posited in their attempts to be scientific. While Tocqueville regarded democratic or egalitarian society (whether under republican or despotic government) as the bedrock of modern political life, Schnapper sees discontent with democracy. Some discontented democrats charge democracy with being insufficiently democratic (typically with respect to race, class, and gender) or with being too democratic, too vulgar and pedestrian or ‘bourgeois.’ More deeply, other critics point to tensions or contradictions generated by the democratic way of life itself—what she calls “democratic dynamics.” Like Tocqueville, who urged upon his fellow aristocrats an intention to guide and moderate democracy against its own excesses, Schnapper both describes and warns.

    She starts with Tocqueville’s observation that an egalitarian society will often derive what social cohesion it has from consent—”not on any outside structure religious or dynastic, but on the community of free and equal citizens” who join in “an abstract political society that by means of citizenship transcends the roots and specific loyalties of its members.” Having done so, those loyalties don’t go away, although they are attenuated. Over time, again as Tocqueville predicted, the modern state would take over many of the functions performed by churches and lords of the manor. The risk is that Homo democraticus begins as a citizen but ends as a “beneficiary”—a passive recipient of state-provided support. Moreover, as an ever-more-demanding client of the state, the democrat begins to lose not only civic relations with others but social relations, too. People feel as if they don’t need one another, anymore, and stop “shar[ing] common values and a common conception of the world.” This leads to the condition Schnapper calls “extreme” democracy; it is a long way from Montesquieu’s republican virtue. Such societies can no longer cohere at all, for long.

    Democrats thus succumb to “the temptation of the unlimited.” Whereas Adam Smith remarked that the desires of human beings are infinite and their means limited—hence the need for “political economy”—Schnapper extends this observation to all dimensions of political life. She distinguishes “autonomy”—the virtue of the deliberative citizen—from “independence”—radical self-sufficiency that finds no standard of conduct beyond the individual’s will. (I would have reversed these terms, probably because as an American I associate “independence” with our Declaration thereof, a document which firmly upholds standards of conduct and exemplifies deliberative citizenship. But let’s respect the author’s Frenchness.) “If the individual subscribes only to his own caprice and for his own short-term interest, he will overturn the objective trust that constitutes a basic given of all societal life.” The rule of law and political institutions—broadly defined not only as ruling structures but as a way of life—can only decline into confusion. At the same time dependence on the state increases. As this new way of life engrains itself in the minds and hearts of democrats, it redefines the family into an unstable grouping headed by merely consenting adults, which in turn generates single-parent households among those who choose no longer to consent to initial union.

    The democrat “is obliged to be himself, to assert his freedom by his personal action—a paradoxical imposition indeed,” and one reminiscent of Rousseau’s famous phrase, “forced to be free.” Without any transcendent standard to guide him, but with all around him equally self-assertive, the democrat finds himself mired in “the feeling of his inadequacy, emptiness and compulsion.”

    Fueling this radical egalitarianism or “independence,” modern science promises not only the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate but the conquest of human nature for—what? The conquest of human nature requires the conquest of natural right along with it. The abandonment of human nature as a moral standard yields moral and intellectual instability, as “the democratic individual wavers between the ancient dream of eternal life through science and the catastrophism that, while asserting science’s omnipotence, reverses the idea of nineteenth century triumphant science.” The “transhuman” demi-god fears perishing in some apocalypse, whether “nuclear” or climatological. And even while he lives, he is miserable, as technology and capitalism combine to accelerate life beyond the limits of the democrats’ social nature, which requires the slow growth of mutual trust for the sake establishing and maintaining civic and political association.

    Proceeding from liberty to license, the democrat’s critical habit begins to challenge not only prevailing norms but “the very idea of norms.” He goes from divine right to natural right to historical right to a radical historicism that questions the very existence of right. Even the fundamental sociobiological fact of reproduction begins to quail before the will of “the democratic individual,” who “chooses his or her partner freely”—that is, without reference to norms. Similarly, the act of eating means, as a well-know American fast-food chain so winningly puts it, having it your way, and with 24-hour drive-thru service at that. Cholesterol having accumulated, the democrat will die ‘with dignity,’ after which his self-designed funeral will be followed by remembrances designed by his survivors.

    The social act of transmitting moral and political standards from one generation to the next—the problem Abraham Lincoln considered in his Lyceum Address—cannot function adequately under the regime of extreme democracy, either. Here is where a life lived in France proves highly instructive, given the French-republican insistence, bordering on obsession, with forming citizens by means of education. Under liberal democracy, “The School transformed the members of a small community belonging to a limited world into citizens.” But, having been loaded also with the economic demand for vocational training, French schools have bent themselves out of shape, ill-fitted to combat new, rival communications technologies that challenge their monopoly on French culture and civisme. How will French culture survive if contradictory cultural norms can be ‘ordered up’ by students, like the hamburgers, they consume? When children can ‘outvote’ adults regarding their own education, has egalitarianism not gone a bit far? And how will political representation—that is, republicanism—survive in an extreme democracy, the logic of which is to govern itself by lot, as Aristotle had seen more than two millennia back? In rejecting deliberative intermediaries between his will and governmental decision, will the democrat enhance democracy or only empower the state, his chosen instrument for the delivery of the goods and services he demands? But contradictorily, if the state is a mere instrument, far from the mighty and authoritative being Hegel imagined, then the more that is demanded of it the less it will be obeyed.

    Equality in the public realm drives the quest for individual distinction into the private realm. Simultaneously, in asserting themselves, these individuals make demands on the public realm, on the state, which in turn invites the state to become “a negotiator or a manager, organizing collaboration between structures outside itself,” thereby blurring the “boundaries between public and private.” This only begins the process of erasing distinctions National boundaries, the sexes, public and private, high and low culture, moral and immoral, even living and inanimate, all mix together not in a grand historical synthesis but in an overheated social stew. Because “there is no real thought without distinctions” extreme democracy makes Tocqueville’s gentle remark that democracy “does not favor ‘slow and deep thought'” a gross understatement.

    Socially, this character of “indistinction” shows itself in Tocqueville’s well-known description of “individualism,” by which he meant the narrowing of one’s relationships to a small circle of relatives and friends. Its symbol today is the burka, which “demonstrates the rejection of participation in exchanges among all.” While making herself anonymous, so indistinct as to be invisible, the burka-wearer sets herself apart from all around her, isolated from all. This radical effect of equality contradicts equality, inasmuch as “the hidden woman can see others who cannot see her,” challenging the “reciprocity of social bonds” or, as one might say even more explicitly, social equality itself.

    The final reduction caused by egalitarianism’s indistinction amounts to nihilism. “A society is defined by a conception of the world that gives meaning, by their organization and hierarchy to the important facts of human experience: birth, filiation, marriage, alliance, death.” But a ‘post-ethnic,’ ‘post-rational,’ ‘post-mortal,’ and ‘post-human’ democracy “in which biological or inherited distinctions might be overcome,” a society in which “the reflexivity of all social norms” leads democrats to attempt to construct lives “solely by people’s will” will veer toward the absurd. In it, we read seriously proposals for giving political rights to the great apes—and indeed why stop with them?

    As a social scientist, Schnapper bravely seeks to rescue the discipline from such excesses. Whereas anthropology has made cultural relativism the sine qua non of research—studying such phenomena as ritual torture and cannibalism with calm rather than revulsion—anthropology does not entail absolute relativism, the denial that torture and cannibalism are morally wrong. Cultural relativism as a (so to speak) research technique is one thing, but its extension to the realm of moral judgment quite another. Schnapper recalls the question her father, Raymond Aron, posed to Claude Levi-Strauss: “Are universal judgments on moral behavior incompatible with cultural relativism?” Many have begun to treat them as if they are, and not only professional anthropologists. Against this trend, Schnapper recalls “the classical criticism of skepticism: there is a logical contradiction in the very idea of absolute relativism,” namely, that “in asserting a doctrine, the relativist implies that it is true, that therefore truth exists.” “Like all scientists, the ethnologist believes that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that the progress of scientific knowledge is, in itself, human progress.” But obviously, “if relativism, no longer relative but absolute, were to dominate the intellectual and moral conception of democratic individuals, which would then be founded on the indistinction of intellectual orders, there would no longer exist any difference between justice and equality, the analysis of society and political involvement, facts observed (even if they are always philosophically developed by the researcher) and value judgments.” This would make it impermissible to do what everyone must do, inasmuch as “normativity is part of the human condition,” and “one cannot think and understand the world, one cannot wish to act on it, without value judgments.” It would be to lay down a prohibition against all prohibitions, permitting only the impermissible. The dynamics of democracy would exhaust democracy.

    Schapper undertakes to counter this radical skepticism or nihilism dialectically, with a critique of universalized criticism, a critique of critique. She begins by observing that any critique must not only compare a particular society to its own principles (invariably finding it, and sometimes them, wanting) but also to other real, particular societies. It is then hard to avoid noticing that “we lie in the safest societies of human history” and “also the freest, most tolerant, and most prosperous.” Complaints about the rise of super-rich ‘one percenters’ and the decline of the middle classes beg for a touch of anthropological dispassion, if not relativism: “The notion that upward mobility was stronger in the past is a myth.” Anxieties about status divergence have grown because our “ambitions have grown.” The working classes have declined as a percentage of the population not because they have dropped into a Marxian lumpenproletariat but because the many have risen into the middle classes, and especially the managerial classes; the social prophet who saw the future that worked wasn’t Marx, it was James Burnham. Statistical studies claiming to show that the numbers of the poor have increased get those numbers by defining poverty upward. But “the poor in 2012 are objectively less poor than those of 1970.”

    “Homo democraticus enjoys freedoms unknown to members of other societies,” even if “the possibility of exercising those freedoms remains unequally distributed.” The real crisis in democracy is a crisis of honor, not material well-being or personal freedom. Economic globalization places working-class men and women “in objective competition with poorly paid workers of poorer societies,” removing the dignity of having a ‘trade’ or a ‘craft.’ The democratic society which honors those who, as the saying goes, ‘reinvent themselves’ as needed or as desired humiliates the single mother that same society has also produced. Not only the prosperous but also the smarter and more ambition reap the benefits. Although Schnapper writes two years before the American presidential primary elections of 2016, it’s easy to see how the condition she describes leaves our political parties vulnerable not only to the appeal of a socialist like Bernie Sanders but also Donald Trump, who avers that the least intelligent among us are also “the most loyal ones.” Thank you, my liege, you are the only one who respects me.

    The humiliation of the outsider looking in also animates the enemy of Mr. Trump’s followers, the immigrant. Immigrants and especially their children, “socialized in a democratic society” assert “democratic claims for equal treatment.” “They are democracy’s children,” but “they have not absorbed [democracy’s] obligations and do not know the codes for living together.” Like all disappointed lovers, they turn to reviling the beloved, at times to the point of murderousness. Resentment resists mere social welfare, which differs from old charity precisely by lacking caritas. The state cannot match its godlike providence with godlike love, the love that turns humiliation into just and honorable humility. Welfare states can feed the bodies but not the souls of its dependents; it is scientific/impersonal, and so cannot heal wounded honor. There can be no Department of Plausible Respect—at least not in a government animated by the principles of social science. “By a tragic ruse of history, the society created to ensure equal dignity for all human beings and their emancipation could become the society of humiliation.”

    “Democracy is not the society of contempt; it is a society dominated by the gap between the democratic individual’s unlimited aspiration to be fully recognized” in his “individuality unlike any other, and the reality of inevitably asymmetrical social relations.” To save his honor, the democrat recurs to “superstitions and conspiracy theories.” Because we live in a radically democratized society, many feel they are ruled by the Wizard of Oz.

    Following her great forebears Tocqueville and Montesquieu, has Schnapper presented us in the end with yet another tale of historical inevitability, based on the dialectical march of the Absolute Spirit or of class warfare or racial conflict, but on an iron logic of democratization? Schnapper thinks not: “Democracies are not fated to be lost because collective destiny is never fated in advance.” Like the real Montesquieu and the real Tocqueville, she urges not resignation but deliberation. When democrats begin to think about their problems, they are no longer simply democratic, and (very much like her father) she makes thinking attractive.

     

    Repoliticizing Political Theory

    by

    Jeremy Waldron: Political Political Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

    Originally published in Law and Liberty, November 17, 2016. Republished with permission.

     

    “Political political theory” is no misprint. That stuttering title well expresses the author’s intention. In the last generation, he observes, “political theory” has become synonymous with considering the moral foundations of political life; the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have framed much of the discussion. ‘Concrete’ their thought is not. By the phrase “political political theory,” Jeremy Waldron signals the need to direct some philosophic attention to the actual operations of political life, particularly the forms, structures, institutions by which we rule ourselves, or are ruled by others. As he rightly remarks, until recently philosophers had thought institutions too important to be left to political scientists.

    A Brit who teaches at New York University Law School, Waldron brings a background in the school of analytical philosophy to his task. This school initially needed persuading that politics (rather than epistemology and ontology) called for serious philosophic attention at all. Whatever one may think of Rawls, he does seem to have accomplished that. Waldron takes the next step in bringing the analytical school around to a fuller consideration of politics, while exhibiting the habit of insisting on careful definitions he has learned in it. As we Americans say, he likes to kick the tires on everything, and in that he belongs not only in the analytical school but in the company of philosophers generally. Had tires been invented, Socrates would have taken a whack at them or, better, interrogated their owners about where they thought they were going on them.

    Waldron devotes the first as well as the last two chapters in arguing for this turn to “political political philosophy,” using the central chapters to show how to think after one has made the turn. He justifies his proposal fundamentally by arguing that political institutions frame not only the way we act in the public square but also the way we think about moral and political matters; if you think all men are created equal, you will not only design institutions that embody that principle but the principles you design will incline citizens toward that notion. Institutions which channel my actions in a way that requires me to take account of your opinions will make me more likely to take your opinions seriously. I may even begin to take them as intrinsically serious. And once I start taking your opinions seriously, I am well on the way to taking you seriously, too, reinforcing respect for the equality principle of the regime. The profound psychic and intellectual damage done to victims of long-established tyrannies teaches the same lesson: political regimes considered as formal structures matter humanly, and indeed philosophically. Waldron reminds us of Montesquieu’s warning, that “a lack of interest in forms, processes, and structures [typifies] a society en route to a despotic form of government.”

    Waldron criticizes that great friend of liberty, Isaiah Berlin, for neglecting institutions. Berlin worried so much about the malign effects of Enlightenment optimism on modern politics that he dismissed the rational design of political institutions as a vain and dangerous aspiration. He failed to consider adequately “the constitutional devices that might be used to uphold the… liberty that interested him.” By contrast, Hannah Arendt appreciated deliberate constitutional design as the “furniture that enables us to sit facing one another in politics, in just the right way”—the way of discussion, the way of politics itself, which Arendt, following Aristotle, understood as ruling and being ruled by turn. Mere assertion of “the Rights of Man” will exhaust itself without institutions that help men and women to secure those rights. By exercising their political liberties, citizens act to secure all the others.

    In this, Waldron wants to find a way for human beings to live together in our vast, modern states, in which extraordinarily diverse human groups pursue “competing and incommensurable values.” Waldron mis-describes this ambition to the American Founders, who grounded their thought in natural right. He may do so because he conceives of nature as mere “animality” and thus in-free. On this view (derived perhaps from David Hume’s ‘Is-Ought’ dichotomy, routinely accepted by philosophers in the analytical school), we need “political convention [to] hold ourselves to one another’s equals.” Waldron thus applauds “Arendt’s rejection of all theories of a natural basis for human equality,” which run “the risk of holding that our natural similarities and dissimilarities are the ones that matter, whether they turn out finally to support the notion of equality or not.” But that of course is not at all what the American Founders thought; it is to confuse George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.

    To regard natural rights—rights coincident with human nature as such, and therefore true so long as human beings survive—as the moral foundation of the civil rights which enable citizens to secure those natural rights, and equally to acknowledge, as the Founders did, that human nature is flawed that we often put each other in danger with our ambitions and appetites, is to retain Berlin’s skepticism regarding the wilder Enlightenment notions of human perfectibility while also retaining Arendt’s esteem for institutional forms. It is to reject notions of inevitable social and political progress, the ontology of that large basket of philosophic and political doctrines that turn the study of history into historicism, and the desire for progress into progressivism—ideologies that have resulted in ills ranging from the bureaucratic “soft despotism” described by Tocqueville to some very hard despotisms indeed.

    To his credit, Waldron shows little sympathy with the more optimistic doctrines of historical necessity, which have taken hammer blows from philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger and those contemporary thinkers who attempt (rather optimistically) to domestic their teachings to the ways of modern democracy. This leaves his political thought eminently sane but unclear as to its ground: If genuinely political life is good, on what grounds can he judge it to be so? He wants to avoid taking a stand on this, probably because he knows that his fellow citizens disagree so sharply on precisely these questions of grounding. He wants them to see something in political life for them, as they so diversely and in many instances contradictorily conceive of themselves.

    Fundamentals aside, the bulk of the book consists of unfailingly astringent discussions of the most important structural features of modern democratic republics. These include constitutionalism (he rightly insists that constitutions not only limit government but empower it to act authoritatively, that is to say with moral as well as physical strength); separation of powers (which he over-optimistically supposes can be established effectively within the administrative agencies of the modern state, which notoriously combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions); bicameralism (he applauds it, so long as the two legislative houses ‘house’ different ways of representing the sovereign people, each capturing perspectives and opinions the other would overlook); “the principle of loyal opposition” (which provides the politically indispensable habit of not needing to take politics as a ‘zero-sum game,’ the impact of hammer upon nail); and representation (he rivals James Madison in his esteem for it). He considers lawmaking—which, in democratic republics, requires institutions that enjoy the widespread support of citizens with deliberative seriousness, consent of the governed, respect for the losers, formal procedures that minimize “mutual misunderstanding” among “people who have very little else in common,” and majority rule, because “eventually decisions have to be made,” and also because majority rule is the way to decide that preserves respect for the equality of each citizen).

    All of this leads to Waldron’s longest and most controversial chapter, a critique of judicial review, which he deems “inappropriate as a mode of final decision-making in a democratic society.” (He regards the prospect of constitutional amendment too dim to be viewed with much seriousness.) To condense radically his carefully-drawn argument, Waldron takes what amounts to the argument of Federalist #84 against a bill of rights and extends it to a critique of judicial review. In one of the most-quoted sentences in that eminently quotable book, Publius affirms “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense and to every useful purpose, a BILL OF RIGHTS.” No appendages need apply, not only because the key civil rights (including the writ of habeas corpus and the ban on primogeniture) are already included in the body of the Constitution itself, but primarily because the Constitution so structures our political life as to vindicate liberty by forcing ambition (including tyrannical ambition) to counteract ambition, and more, to “refine and enlarge the public views.” If so, Waldron asks, why do we need judges to tell us what the (constitutional) law is? Why can’t we just work it out amongst ourselves? The American Progressives agreed, but unlike Waldron, they imagined that ‘History’ was on their side—which is what makes Waldron interesting, here. He has no ontology, no secularized version of Providence to make everything come out right.

    Given the fact that Publius and other framers of the Constitution did endorse judicial review, what does Waldron have? Once again condensing and perforce oversimplifying his intricate and stimulating argument, I draw attention to two points. First, he argues that “tyranny is tyranny” no matter how we get it, but the majority tyranny we fear from a thorough democratization of constitutional judgment is the least bad form; it features “at least one nontyrannical thing about the decision,” namely, that “it was not made in a way that tyrannically excluded certain people from participation as equals”—this, of course assuming that the decision only affects fellow citizens, and not (for example) a slave population or a colony. Waldron here overlooks Tocqueville’s description of the power majoritarian rule exerts on each individual; liberated from social and political pressure from above, men and women in democratic societies find themselves subject to pressure that surrounds them. ‘Horizontal’ pressure replaces ‘vertical,’ ultimately with more malign effects on liberty of minds and hearts.

    Additionally, Waldron explicitly assumes that disagreement in democratic societies “is not usually driven by selfish interests.” This assumption Publius most assuredly does not grant. Without succumbing to the ontological optimism of the Progressives, Waldron nonetheless does partake a bit of the Enlightenment optimism that his nemesis, Isaiah Berlin, so vigorously scorned. It is precisely the tendency of majorities—whether well-intentioned but conformist, as in Tocqueville’s America, or ill-intentioned as they often are as Publius understands them—to override reason with passion that forms the core of The Federalist‘s defense of judicial review.

    But let’s not end on a sour note. This book deserves careful study, first of all by philosophers, but equally by political scientists and all citizens who enjoy a good argument. And what real citizens, what real philosopher, doesn’t enjoy a good argument?

    The Popular Front Reconstituted?

    by

    Harvey J. Kaye: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

     

    We now mark a publishing event: the first book I’ve seen that came to reviewers with a publicity packet including not only the usual blurbs, bio, and boilerplate hype, but a list of “talking points.” Sheltered creature that I am, I’d associated talking points with documents enlivened by cartoon elephants and donkeys, cheerful notices to partisans offering hints on how to talk persuasively to relatives and neighbors. But here we have something that at least looks like a history, complete with 60 pages of endnotes, yet accompanied by a bullet list of things-done-and-to-do, to wit:

    • “In 1930, Franklin Roosevelt stated that Americans needed to make America ‘fairly radical for a generation.’ And through the labors and struggles of the New Deal and then in the course of World War II that is exactly what they did….

    • “In 1941, FDR articulated their progressive accomplishments and aspirations in the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech and worship, Freedom from want and fear….

    • “Moreover, at war’s end they made the United States the strongest and richest nation on earth….

    • “After 35 years of deepening inequalities and insecurities, of declining industries and decaying public infrastructures—indeed, of denying who we are—we need to do what our parents and grandparents did….

    • “We need to harness the powers of democratic government in favor of progressive policies and programs….

    • “We need to mobilize, organize, and bolster progressives like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Bill de Blasio. We need to make American radical for at least a generation.”

    I especially admire that use of the word “need,” which recalls its deployment at sub shops and diners in my adopted home of Michigan. In those lighthouses of the liberal portion, “Do you need cheese on that?” really means, “Do you want cheese on that?” O reason not the need, Cordelia of The Coney Hut, and slap some right on.

    What’s not to like, with this talking points stuff? How much better our world might be, had the publicity mavens at the University of Chicago Press gotten off their verandas back in 1975 and issued

    Talking Points for THE ARGUMENT AND THE ACTION OF PLATO’S LAWS

    • In early fourth-century BCE, Plato penned his most political and pious work, asking himself, ‘What would have happened if Socrates had gotten out of jail, free, instead of drinking poison?’

    • If he were alive today, Plato would have told us that goodness and kinship are two very different things and therefore all is not in the family, the Bunker archē notwithstanding.

    • Infants are crazy, but lately they’ve been getting tenure-track positions.

    • The best and truest kind of equality can be called monarchic, since the sole rightful ruler is the Intellect.

    • Military training of women and, more generally, equal education of both sexes is to counteract the misplaced or excessive piety to which the female sex is prone.

    • No man’s nature is sufficient for knowing what is conducive to political life and, if knowing it, for always being able and willing to do what is best.

    • Many members of the Nocturnal Council that rules the city will lack the ability to raise and answer the most important questions—the true art of conversation.

    • In the end, the Laws points back to the lesson of the Republic: Don’t let your mouth write a check your body can’t cash.

    With ammo like that, President Ford’s National Endowment of the Humanities director Robert A. Goldwin might have won the culture wars, fending off the Carter Administration before it even got elected. And—theoretical wisdom being timeless and universal—many of these points make perfect sense for use in publicizing Professor Kaye’s book, with obvious application not only to monarchic Franklin and pious Eleanor, but to the science of administration the New Deal dealt out.

    Speaking of the will to power, Nietzsche would have classified this book as monumental history, a hero tale of Progressivism. This presents a problem of sorts. If neither God nor nature guides human conduct, if we take our moral and political bearings from history—conceived no longer so much as a literary genre or a mode of inquiry but as the course of events, unfolding in a lawful way toward an end or purpose—then the most authoritative thing lives not above us in Heaven or in and around us in nature but ahead of us in time. According to Progressivism, the most authoritative thing is the Future. But a history—a narrative of the course of events—looks to the past. What’s a good Progressive to do, especially if, like Professor Kaye, he wants to call us to remembrance of glories lost? “We need to remember what conservatives have never wanted us to remember and what liberals have all too often forgotten”—namely, that “we are the children and grandchildren of the men and women who rescued the United States from economic destruction in the Great Depression and defended it against fascism and imperialism in the Second World War,” a generation whose greatness consisted precisely in doing those things on behalf of the “Four Freedoms” enunciated by President Roosevelt in his Annual Message to Congress, of January 6, 1941. That is, the United States the greatest generation rescued and defended was most particularly the New Deal state, about which FDR’s Attorney-General and Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Jackson said, “We too are founders,” and “We too are makers of a nation.”

    Now, to charge that conservatives have never wanted us to remember the New Deal or the Progressive ideology that animated it is surely unfair. In fact, conservative scholars have been the ones to revive scholarly interest in Progressivism, as seen in books and articles beginning at least as far back as Paul Eidelberg’s 1974 book, A Discourse on Statesmanship, and continuing in the work of Paul Marini, Dennis Mahoney, Sidney Milkis, Ronald J. Pestritto, along with many others. But such a whining complaint ignores the obvious: meticulous engagement with the scholarly literature is not the purpose of Professor Kaye’s project, which leans toward the inspirational.

    It is impossible to reproduce the full range of his revival-sermon voice, but here are some highlights. The Roaring Twenties was “a time of economic growth and prosperity,” but only “for a certain class of people”—by which Professor Kaye means the rich, not the middle class and the urban working class. For those who would leap up to cite pesky stats about middle- and working-class real wages rising 20% in that decade, or the mass production of consumer goods that sharply increased Americans’ buying power, what don’t you understand about monumental history? Please be quiet. To continue: luckily, as the rich got richer, polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt convalesced under the benevolent eye of his wife, receiving a “continuing ‘liberal education,’ dispensed by Eleanor, even as she herself became more active in politics and reform efforts”—an imagined scenario which, I must confess, brings out my inner Alice Roosevelt Longworth a bit too much for the ease of my conscience. Be that as it may, the (talking) point is that while greedy, bathtub-gin-swilling jazz-age bacchanalians careened toward The Crash, the soberer souls of Hyde Park were steeling themselves for the struggles to come.

    And they were ready. “Roosevelt and the New Dealers… initiat[ed] a revolution in American government and public life” by means of the stronger regulation of capital, “relief on a grand scale,” and “pursuing social- and industrial-democratic policies and programs,” thereby “redrawing the nation’s constitutional order” and aiming at  bringing “the nation ever more progressively toward social and industrial democracy”—all in the face of those villains, the “economic royalists” and “Tory Republicans” who sought to defend their “industrial dictatorship” and “economic autocracy.” True, for a short time the Nine Old Men on the Supreme Court stood, palsied, in History’s way, but FDR’s eventual appointment of seven new justices began “nothing less than a Constitutional Revolution.” The vast benefits of this revolution rippled long past the world war; America’s postwar decades of economic prosperity occurred, thanks to the prior “investments” in infrastructure by the New Dealers, the G.I. bill, and “the profits, savings, and technical investments and ‘know how’ accumulated in the fight against fascism and imperialism.” What, you ask, of America’s sheer physical advantages over bombed-out Europe and Japan, and the postwar tax-cuts. Don’t be silly; such stuff deserves no place on the honor roll of economic causation.

    Alas, “Harry Truman was no FDR.” He began the Cold War, while the labor movement’s purges of communists from their organizations made it “cease to be the militant progressive force it had been.” Just as bad, liberals and progressives (read: Henry Wallace and his allies) “differed critically over how to handle the Soviets and America’s own communists”; “the horrors of fascism, Nazism, and communism” led even some ‘Left’ intellectuals “to question the prospect of giving too much power and authority to the state.” And with that heresy, things only got worse. President Lyndon Johnson, a loyal New Dealer, nonetheless failed “to break the Cold War’s grip,” supporting “the authoritative and corrupt U.S.-created South Vietnamese state” against “the Communist North and revolutionary Viet Cong”—who, if my own memory serves, were merely mass-murderers and tyrants. After the “infamous red-baiter,” Richard Nixon, defeated “liberal and antiwar” George McGovern in 1972, and then fell victim to his own corrupt thuggery, Democratic President Jimmy Carter could do not better than to invoke God’s help—a call “as vacuous as it was ineffectual.” This opened the door for that slow-cured old Hollywood ham, Ronald Reagan, who had the effrontery to praise the Greatest Generation even as he jettisoned “what made the Greatest Generation and its greatest leader truly great”: the social and industrial democracy implied by the Four Freedoms.

    And today? After some promising campaign rhetoric, President Obama has failed, not because he “ask[ed] too much of Americans” but because “he asked too little,” compromising on national health care and worrying about the federal deficit—to the extent of saying such a thing as, “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford o we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.” After an outburst like that, we should probably start calling him Barack Harding Obama. No wonder we “need” to “get radical”—and not just “fairly” radical—”for at least a generation.” Such an extensive list of sins will take a long time to purge.

    A reader might ask, what is the real point of this militant nostalgia for a past future that never quite was? Professor Kaye would like to do two thing which run just slightly under the cover of his rhetoric. He would like to revive the old Popular Front strategy of the mid-1930s, whereby leftists united—at least they seemed to unite—against those nasty conservative, reactionary, corporate crypto-fascist elites. Ah, for the golden year of 1935, when “Communist intellectuals, who had previously scorned liberal democracies and other leftists… receiv[ed] welcomed new party directives from Moscow” to “promote the causes of labor and democracy.” In those days, Pete Seeger breathed free.

    As a second task, Professor Kaye evidently wants to undo at least some of the tortured doings of the intellectual Left of the past two generations: the ‘postmodern,’ too-ironical, dubious-about-the-white-collar-bureaucratic New Left. After all, it wasn’t only conservatives, libertarians, and postwar, ‘vital-center’ liberals who question the Progressive-New Deal confidence in the possibility of combining populism with the science of administration. Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman made that attack while trying to form a new kind of radical Left, one that rightly made all the components of the old Popular Front coalition exceedingly nervous. Professor Kay would like to overcome the odd combination of cynicism and millennialism the New Left has left us, and do it with nothing less than that old-time, New-Deal religion.

    My guess? Some of what he says may find its way into the speeches of Hillary Clinton, as the former Madam Secretary weaves her way back toward the White House, blogospherics flaring—and watched by at least one earnest, enthusiastic democratic-socialist professor, his soul in a condition of mesmerized agony.

    For if—as FDR maintained—we must fight the economic Titans, are not Titans followed by Olympians? And what if, after the fight, the Titans of industry prudently marry the Olympians of the administrative state? Will their offspring not grow into rebellious adolescents who eventually mature into academic and corporate-welfare careerists? Careerists named Bill and Hillary Clinton, for example—those adepts of rearranging the deck chairs on our new ship of state. No myth of a high-flying Icarus will hold them back, but they sure can use the myth.