Originally published by Constituting America, April 24, 2015. Republished with permission.

In late January 1904 the president of Princeton College stepped to the podium of The Outlook Club in Montclair, New Jersey. Today, university presidents get into the news when some scandal erupts, but at the beginning of the last century they often enjoyed the status of what we now call ‘public intellectuals’—frequently quoted in the newspapers on the issues of the day, looked to for solutions to economic and social problems. Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, Charles William Elliot at Harvard, and Arthur Twining Hadley at Yale were well-respected national figures. The Outlook Club was exactly the platform for such a person; possibly named after The Outlook, a prominent magazine featuring literary and political commentary associated with the several ‘reform’ movements of the day, the Club afforded its speakers an audience of university-educated civic leaders who used their influence to promote ‘good government’—by which they first intended government free of corruption and of the party ‘bosses’ associated with it, but which would soon coalesce into something still more ambitious: Progressivism.

The speaker at the Outlook Club that night was Woodrow Wilson, who had been appointed to the presidency of Princeton two years earlier after a distinguished scholarly career at the Johns Hopkins University. Wilson was already one of the most prominent members of the Progressive movement, coming to the attention of his peers for his studies of, and advocacy for, professional or ‘scientific’ administration of the American state, in imitation of German and French models. And of course he would use the presidency of Princeton as a springboard to the governorship of New Jersey and then to the White House—a career path that seems implausible to us today, but only because we no longer lionize our university presidents as we did then.

The title of Wilson’s talk was “Our Elastic Constitution.” His argument was simple. “The Constitution is like a snug garment stretched to cover so great a giant as the nation has become. If it wasn’t stretched it would tear.” Today, Americans wonder at the use and abuse of executive power under the sitting president and many of his recent predecessors. In Wilson’s talk we find the origin of this startling expansion of executive rule, an expansion not authorized by any fair reading of, say, the United States Constitution, where executive power is enunciated. While it is unquestionably true that American presidents form time to time exceeded their Constitutional authority—Thomas Jefferson admitted as much in making the Louisiana Purchase—such overreaching typically occurred because some national emergency or other extraordinary circumstance had arisen. (Jefferson, citing the importance of New Orleans to the commercial prosperity and military security of the middle of the North American continent, refused to hesitate to make a bargain with the French despot who by then was calling himself Napoleon I, knowing that that tyrant’s vast military ambitions in Europe had opened an opportunity for America on this continent that might never arise again—the possibility for peaceably obtaining possession of a huge parcel of invaluable farmland overlain with a river system that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. This was a prize that Napoleon himself could not win in Europe at the price of his own Grande Armee, but Jefferson could win it here at the cost of four cents an acre.) But such circumstances were understood to be rare, and in need of public justification.

What we now see is a much more routine use of executive action that effectually usurps the actions of the legislative branch. How did this come about? How was it excused? Wilson shows us.

Even with the closing of the American frontier “less than fourteen years ago” in 1890, America has not stopped growing. Not only has it acquired Hawaii, the Philippines, and other far-flung territories, it has embarked on a vast project of industrialization and urbanization. “The American is skeptical of impossibility,” Wilson asserted, “he is ready for anything. He admits theoretical impossibilities, but has never found them actual.”

Well, actually Americans had found actual impossibilities from time to time, as Wilson well knew. The attempt at reconstructing the regimes of the former slave states in Wilson’s native Southland had met with mixed success at most. But that was in a way Wilson’s point, unspoken on the occasion of his Montclair speech but forthrightly advanced on other occasions. “Certain it is that statesmanship has been steadily dying out in the United States since that stupendous crisis during which its government felt the first throbs of life,” he had written, years earlier. Notice that the vitality of the government began not with independence in 1776, not with the Articles of Confederation in 1778, nor even with the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, but only during the greatest national emergency since the founding—the Civil War. and government soon went dormant thereafter.

But meanwhile, the country had not only lived but grown robustly, both in population and in territory, throughout the nineteenth century. Only a strong executive, “vouchsafed the freedom of Prerogative, which must include the power of supplementing as well as of shaping the law to fit cases,” can make the office of the presidency worthy of the energies of great men—or, as Wilson had come to call them, “leaders of men.”

Twentieth-century America will choose as its president a man judged by the people to “understand his own day and the needs of the country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.” Under twentieth-century conditions, the executive and not the legislative branch has “the most direct access to [popular] opinion,” and therefore “the best chance of leadership and mastery,” unimpeded by the confusion and contradiction of legislative debate. “[B]ecause he has the ear of the whole nation and is undoubtedly its chosen spokesman and representative, the President may place the House at a great disadvantage if he chooses to appeal to the nation.”

The ever-growing American nation, then, was held by the Progressives to need a leader, a person to focus public opinion and to act decisively not only to express but to guide it. President Obama is the latest example of this line, the most successful of which remains Franklin Roosevelt.

The difficulty lies in the definition. When you get down to it, a real constitution must constitute something. But if the constitution is defined by its elasticity, it no longer constitutes. Spandex may show off one’s best features or (as often) cover a multitude of sins. But it constitutes nothing. an elastic constitution shows off or covers up the will of the president, the Supreme Court, the Congress, the federal bureaucracy. It no longer limits their actions. And so we have what we have.

George F. Kennan: The Kennan Diaries. Frank Costigliola, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 52, Number 1, January/February 2015.

Upon putting down Charles Dickens’ characteristically verbose and melodramatic novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oscar Wilde famously opined, “One must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” Prematurely eminent, indefatigably self-important, and never admittedly wrong about anything of the slightest consequence, George F. Kennan invites such giggles at his life. Having never quite landed the job he most wanted—Secretary of State—he spent entirely too much of the second half-century of his life feeling sorry for himself and denouncing the policies and characters of nearly everyone he contemplated. By the late 1950s, he had decided that the Soviets would probably win the Cold War but only if mankind escaped nuclear annihilation, an evasion Kennan judged improbable. That is, if the population bomb didn’t explode first: the United States in 1982 was “of course some 200% over-populated,” and men having spawned more than two children should be “compulsively sterilized.” (Kennan himself had four children, but at least two of them “do not love me,” so maybe that would have spared him the imaginary knife).

And then there was industrial pollution of the land, sea, rivers, and air. “Doomed, obviously”—that’s what American and all of Western civilization are, and it’s a good thing, too, as they have spawned a vast, egalitarian, mongrelized mass of shameless décadents—unforgivably infesting the airport in Zurich in touristic forays that ought to be outlawed, to give but one example of their shameless misbehavior. Their fawning, hypocritical elected officials thoughtlessly ignore the only true Americans, the fast-disappearing WASP gentry, whose gentile Jeremiah was Kennan himself: “I am now in the truest sense a voice crying in the wilderness.” No one ever listens to me, he laments, year after year, reduced to making lists of vitally important predictions and measures he had enunciated, all to no avail. Such complaints reach a crescendo just when the thing he predicted initially—the collapse of the Soviet empire—began to occur. Perhaps it is all just as well, humanity’s demise; more than once, he quotes the old U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, who intoned, “Man is skin-disease of the earth.” Although he seems not to spare himself from this description—”If dislike for oneself were really, as the religious leaders claim, the beginning of virtue in the sight of the Lord, then I should be on the verge of sainthood”—it’s hard to shake the suspicion that what should have been a well-earned self-loathing only provides rhetorical cover for an otherwise invincible narcissism. His editor puts it with a diplomatic tact many readers will find impossible to muster: “He was a playwright who never wrote plays, perhaps because his gift for depicting scenes was not matched by a skill, or inclination, for dialogue.”

All this notwithstanding—and it’s a lot—Kennan’s diary proves a trove of insights. When he forgets about himself and gets down to thinking about world politics—which, thankfully, he does most of the time—he ranges from brilliance to intelligent provocation; even his blunders illuminate. As a companion he may be tiresome, grating especially when preoccupied with his own finely-tuned sensibilities, but as an observer and a thinker, yes, he was almost as good as he (and not only he) claimed. The diary fixes in place his acute perceptions and (frequently) wise deliberations as they unfolded over the decades in which his country irrevocably ventured into the world as its preeminent geopolitical act, much to his regret.

Kennan prepared himself meticulously for his vocation. Son of a Milwaukee lawyer, he remained loyal to the American Midwest—most especially to its habit of decently minding its own business, a principle it had so often extended to the realm of foreign policy (overseas, at least) up to the time of Kennan’s birth. This notwithstanding, he got out of the Midwest as soon as he could, first to Princeton College and, on vacations, to New York, London, and Paris (“I have never seen any city even remotely resembling it,” he writes, as a nineteen-year-old in 1924). He joined the Foreign Service a year after graduation, posted first at Geneva and then at Hamburg, eyes wide open (“like all the Swiss, the Genevese people are essentially what might be called innocent bystanders”). Already he commanded an ability both to empathize and to judge. At a communist demonstration, he feels “contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of Communism,” but with it “a strange desire to cry, when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street,” “ill-dressed, slouching brutalized people” but “human beings” who, “after centuries of mute despair, for the first time [were] attempting to express and to assert themselves.” “Under the manifold hokus-pokus of the red flags and the revolutionary ritual they had found something that they believed in, and were proud of.”

Although the United States didn’t recognize the Soviet Union, someone in the Hoover Administration thought we needed to understand it; the State Department sponsored an intensive, three-year program in Russian language, literature, and history which Kennan took, and it enabled him to be the right man in the right place at the right time, twenty years later. It didn’t take him long to identify the narrowness of the Marxist ideology animating the Russian regime; focused on “class-consciousness” to the exclusion of “all differences of political and social development and character between the different nations,” “communist dogma…is an obvious absurdity,” he remarked, in 1930, when so many intellectuals of his generation found the stuff fascinating. Among Russians he preferred Anton Chekhov, “the last of the humanists” and now dead. Chekhov understood that social reform, though desirable, would not cure the more fundamental torments of the human soul. Soviet tyranny will not remake Russians, Kennan predicted, it will only infantilize them; even it succeeded economically, it will leave the Russian “totally untrained to think for himself, unaccustomed to face his own soul, guided neither by tradition, example, or the steadying influences of personal responsibility to persons near him”; “from being the most morally unified country in the world, Russia will become, overnight, the worst moral chaos.” In 1929, Kennan had lunch “with a Russian communist official in Berlin.” Upon telling him “the greatest danger for Bolshevism lay in its success, he said he understood what I meant.”

Not that any such economic success was in the offing. Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic corruption were quite noticeable Kennan by the mid-1930s. He has much less to say about the rise of Nazism, but from his several vantage points in Europe he foresaw the next world war easily enough. Understandably, the diary contains little from the hectic war years, which Kennan spent in London, but as his thoughts reappear in 1944, with victory now visible, characteristic themes of his mature thought emerge.

Although he saw as clearly as anyone that geopolitics in the twentieth century featured an ideological component unseen since the French Revolution, and that ideology, coupled with modern technology, resulted in unprecedented tyrannies, he longed to return to the limits recognized by the statesmen prior to and following the Jacobin upheaval. Crucially, and in a sense almost tragically, he hoped that somehow diplomacy would tame the beasts of this apocalypse. And so we see him deploring America’s demand that its enemies surrender unconditionally in World War II, worried that Americans could not shoulder the responsibility of governing either postwar German or Japan. He preferred to avoid such commitments, even at the cost of letting many officials of the enemy regimes off the hook; citing Edward Gibbon (along with Edmund Burke and Tocqueville, an intellectual hero), he predicted that the prosecution of war criminals would only stoke resentment in the peoples we conquered and prevent any future alliance. It is crucial to notice that this can often be the case, but was not the case in Germany and Japan, as things actually played out. America’s use of regime change as an instrument of foreign policy—first undertaken by the Washington Administration, which attempted to turn several of the Amerindian nations to agricultural settlement—has sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed. Each situation has differed, calling for a variety of policies. For all his esteem for the concrete and his horror for the abstract—for all his admiration of Burke—Kennan tended to generalize in his own way. As a result, when he condemned these and subsequent American efforts at regime change, he could be right or wrong, but always in the same way, always on the side of non-interference. It turns out that realism has its own dogmatism—that Burkeanism too can prove to be ‘abstract.’

Kennan became famous for framing the policy of “containment,” which, he predicted correctly, would eventuate in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He saw the mistakes the Roosevelt Administration was making in 1944: reliance on the new version of the League of Nations (such structures “have always served the purpose for which they were designed just as long as the Great Powers gave substance and reality to their existence”); over-reliance on FDR’s personal charm as a means of softening Stalinist ambitions. Given “the jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin,” which “can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies,” great-power interests would not remain congruent for long; therefore (among other things), Polish independence was doomed, whatever may or may not have been agreed upon at Yalta. Kennan further blamed the American regime itself—a popularly-based, ethnically-mixed stew of factions that prohibit elected officials from publicly formulating and consistently pursuing a genuinely national interest—for inclining presidents and secretaries of state to “take refuge in general and abstract schemes, which can serve at once to conceal the absence of a real policy, to cater to the American fondness for dealing [in] high moral principles, and to throw onto other governments the responsibility for future outbursts of violence.” Nothing will impel the Soviets “to part in good faith and permanently from their sphere of influence policy”—surely not a “United Nations” organization. Therefore, the United States and Great Britain must define their core interests on the European continent and “make it plain to the Russians in practical ways and in friendly but firm manner where this line lies,” always recognizing that such terms as “collaboration” and “democracy” “have different meanings for the Russians than for us.” Thus, some two years before his seminal “Long Telegram” and three years before the “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs, outlining the strategy of containment of Soviet power in Europe, Kennan had formulated one element of American Cold-War strategy.

As Kennan subsequently never tired of saying, his version of containment featured only the minimum use of military force and was not intended as a worldwide commitment; if ever there was a man who deserved the epithet, ‘Eurocentric,’ it was Kennan, who would have preferred an early settlement with Japan (with no regime change), allowing Tokyo to police Asia at the expense of what he regarded as  sclerotic China. In Europe, after the war, military force wouldn’t work, he argued, because “blows aimed in exasperation at the [Soviet] regime itself are no help to the people by whom it is dominated,” but are rather “promptly ducked and passed on to the people, while the regime, breathing sympathetic indignation, strikes one fiery attitude after another as the protector of a noble nation from the vicious envy of a world which refuses to understand.” Even when the United States developed nuclear weapons, he argued against brandishing them against a now-vulnerable Soviet Union; if we destroyed Soviet power we would take upon ourselves the impossible task of assuming “political authority and responsibility in Russia.” Regarding such responsibility in the much more limited territories of Germany and Japan as over-ambitious, how much more “we would not morally competent to exercise [such authority] with good effect” in Russia. At the same time he hoped, just as unrealistically, “to convince the Russians that it is in their interest to disarm themselves” and accept “an international atomic energy authority.” Why such an authority would not suffer exactly the same defects as the United Nations, he did not say. Militarily, the United States should not join a North Atlantic Treaty Association but rather “be like the porcupine who only gradually convinces the carnivorous best of prey that he is not a fit object of attack.” Whereas the old Washington-Monroe-Adams policy of non-involvement in Europe would not have worked against Nazi Germany—”the Germans were in effect waging an undeclared war against us” by “pursuing a policy which aimed at least at a radical reduction in our state power and one which certainly would have been incompatible with our state security”—vis-à-vis the Soviets we could return to a much-modified form of the Monroe Doctrine, involving ourselves in Europe by financing European reconstruction (he helped to formulate the Marshall Plan) and also by funneling military and other aid to such early Cold War flash points as Greece and Turkey.

As Chief of Policy Planning for the State Department, Kennan reached the apex of his diplomatic career in 1947, but he soon found himself disagreeing with the Truman Doctrine, which understood the Soviet threat as entailing a worldwide struggle requiring a strong military component. Kennan believed such an effort to be far too costly, both materially and morally, to be entered into—much less sustained. By the fall of 1949 he was contending that America “as a society…has no control over the direction in which it is moving socially and technologically, and no assurance that the currents in which we are being involuntarily borne are not ones which carry us away from our national ideals and the foundations of our type of representative government.” The Truman policy “takes us along a street to which there are only three outlets: a Russian collapse, a disintegration of our own position, or a terrible war.” His own version of containment—including the neutralization of a reunited Germany, accompanied by a pullback of Warsaw Pact and NATO forces in their respective spheres—he argued, would result in a more gradual and peaceful change in the Soviet regime, after a period of what was later called détente. He left the State Department in August 1950, regretting the Korean War and eventually denouncing the war in Vietnam from his position as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Truman gave him one last chance in diplomacy, in the position he had been groomed for; in 1952 he was appointed as U. S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, only to be expelled by Stalin after making some intemperate if not entirely unjust remarks comparing the isolation of Western diplomats from Russian society by the Soviet regime to the behavior of the Nazis toward foreign diplomats in the 1930s.

Enter Kennan the American Jeremiah, destined to be perpetually misunderstood by an uncomprehending and increasingly vulgarized world: “Such hopes as I had entertained for a yielding or a relaxation from the Soviet side were based on realizations too subtle and too delicate, too deeply founded in the peculiarities of Soviet reality, for people in the outside world to understand”; “most of my colleagues did not agree with me.” “I am an exile wherever I go, by virtue of my experience”—”a foreigner in my country.” But, along with this disappointed ambition, enter Kennan the historian, who could now write books on Russian history that have taught, and will continue to teach, anyone who devotes time and attention to them. In this he drew upon a profound empathy for Russians; after watching a production of The Cherry Orchard, he wrote of my Russian self, which is entirely a Chekhovian self and much more genuine than the American one.” Chekhovian, indeed: detesting the tyranny of the Communists while loathing the bourgeois, a loathing that perforce put him at odds with the minds and hearts of most Americans. He consequently viewed the world scene in that clouds-of-grey mood guaranteed by those Russian plays.

By the mid-1950s, Kennan understood himself as an “isolationist” of a certain sort. There are isolationists “who hold the outside world too unimportant or wholly wicked and therefore not worth bothering about”—Kennan’s somewhat polemical description of the Willian Borah/Hiram Johnson isolationism of the 1930s; there are also “those who distrust the ability of the United States Government, so constituted and inspired as it is, to involve itself to any useful effect in most foreign situations.” “I… belong to the latter school.” “In the last analysis, one country cannot impose its will permanently on another except by military occupation or the threat of occupation, and then, on the latter instance, only if it can find a local regime to do its bidding.” He judged that Americans lacked the character and the experience—thanks to their popularly-based republican regime—to do that sort of thing effectively. Only an aristocracy could conduct the kind of consistent and persistent foreign policy that works in the long run. The State Department might have been constituted as just such an aristocracy of merit, but American populism and militarism had precluded this; repeatedly throughout the remainder of his life, Kennan predicted nuclear war as the world’s reward for American ineptitude and shallowness as it collided with Soviet malice and folly. “I have no hope that a nuclear disaster can be avoided,” he intoned, in 1988.

This makes his entries on the Reagan Administration and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire—falsifying his most recent doomsday prediction—especially worth considering. He rightly saw, as early as 1982, that “the administration has decided that the time has come for an all-out effort to break up the Soviet hegemony in eastern and Central Europe, and to do it in a manner as humiliating as possible to the Soviet leadership”; this was, he wrote, unnecessary (“the hegemony was disintegrating by itself without our doing”) and dangerous (“probably leading to war”). “Ignorant, unintelligent, complacent, arrogant,” as well as “frivolous and reckless,” the “Reagan regime” merely reflected the character of the president. “I love certain old-fashioned values and concepts—but not his.” By patriotism Kennan meant love of the land “to the extent the people have not yet made a wasteland, a garbage dump, or a sewer out of it”—all tendencies Kennan imagined that the capitalist, Reagan, exhibited. As for loving the people, he charged Reagan with “idealizing them,” endowing them with “a superior virtue and strength [that] entitles them to consider themselves leaders in the world.” What Kennan missed in Reagan was not only Reagan’s intelligence—Reagan (I suspect deliberately) made that easy to miss—but also Reagan’s devotion to the principles of the American regime and its constitution. As an admirer of Burke and, well, part of Tocqueville, Kennan deprecated such things as natural rights as too abstract, and political institutions as too flimsy, to form the foundation of any serious political thought. He looked rather to manners and morals, to habits of the mind and heart, to tradition, even to a mild form of race theory (seen in his celebration of the culture of the American WASP, which group he regarded as the only real Americans, their “homeland raped and destroyed by modernity”). He judged America as ill-founded, both in colonial times (the colonists began as part of Europe’s international civilization but quickly turned themselves into provincials “without poetry, without art, without esthetic feeling”) and in the years following independence. Although he admired The Federalist for its insistence on the imperfections of human nature, he rather disliked the constitutional union itself, musing at one point that it was a shame that Lincoln preserved it. A North America more like Europe, with its smaller and more diverse countries, would have been much more congenial to his moral and esthetic sensibilities.

When the Berlin Wall fell, he sighed, “This revolution in the Communist world fails, for some reason, to excite me very greatly. I can fairly say that I saw it coming,” but of course the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations could in no way be credited. After all, if only they, and previous administrations, had listened to him it all would have come more gradually; “had my efforts been successful, [they] would have obviated the vast expenses, dangers, and distortions of outlook of the ensuing Cold War, and would have left us in far better shape than we are to face the problem we now confront.” His pessimism respecting other people’s policies was rivaled only by his optimism respecting his own. As things did turn out, the newly-liberated people were “totally unprepared for self-government,” with no “viable political parties to take over from the Communists.” He further predicted, in 1996, “that the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers”—that is, to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—a move that he regarded as “the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period.” Notice both how right and how wrong he was: Most of the ex-communist countries have managed their regime changes well enough; for its part, not only has Russia not managed a commercial-republican regime change but has indeed reacted badly to Western advances. Yet only after the regime changes in Ukraine and Georgia: Central Europe wasn’t the trigger; Eastern Europe was.

One of the dimensions of the problem Kennan confronted—the problem of Socrates, really, the problem of wisdom and consent, the dilemma of the thinker amongst the unthoughtful—is the need to convey certainty, authority of judgment, not to say a sort of vatic self-assurance in a political world full of what scientists call variables too numerous and changeable to give even the wisest man much real certainty at all. Social science, with its bell curves and statistics, has attempted to eliminate or at least reduce such uncertainty; Kennan kept social science firmly subordinate to a humane and sympathetic perception of how real human beings are. As a strategist he both needed to predict the likely results of actions and faced the impossibility of doing so consistently. He persisted in his efforts and his lamentations. It is a privilege to have the chance to think along with him.