George F. Will:  The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses, 1981-1986. New York: The Free Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York Tribune, February 18, 1987.

 

“The morning after” means—here—the years since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration as President of the United States. 1986 is “midday,” when the euphoria of the victory party has worn off and, depending upon how much one indulged, the mind begins to recollect itself. Perhaps ominously, the metaphor also suggests nightfall to come and, indeed, political columnist George Will sees scarcely a photon of daylight in the minds of the president’s would-be successors. Reagan himself earns only the most measured praise and some sharp criticism—as he must, in a book that begins with the sentence, “Happiness is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

In America, happiness usually means the satisfaction of private desires, not public ambitions. This accounts for the comparative peaceableness of our politics, but also for their demoralizing pettiness. A too-inspiring politics might lead to worse vices, however, so Will aims at the center, with sobering thoughts on such honorable but unspectacular virtues as responsibility, prudence, restraint, and patience. Some years ago, the political scientist Robert Goldwin lamented the difficulty of inventing a rhetoric of moderation: moderation “is not the kind of cause for which people devise banners and slogans.” It still isn’t, but a newspaper column will do, and George Will has invented both a style and a persona that make moderation attractive. The style is gin, tonic, and a twist of lime, savored once daily, and just before dinner. The persona is the thinker-as-parent, not a philosopher (they don’t drive station wagons full of kids) but the son of a philosophy professor–filial piety but with some irony showing. It is a rhetoric of judicious mixture.

Will conceives of nature itself as a judicious mixture. One’s desires collide with those of others. (Will to his two-year-old daughter: “What is your name?” Daughter dearest: “No!”) Such realities make libertarianism fantastic. Contemporary liberalism combines erotic libertarianism (that is, freedom of ‘expression’ and of sexual passion), selfish righteousness (whereby “jurisprudence attempts to translate every unhappiness into a justiciable conflict of individual rights”), and state intervention in the economy in order to serve ‘justice,’ by which liberalism means egalitarianism. No governing thought or sentiment can make these unstable elements cohere. Conservatives err when they endorse a different libertarianism, economic libertarianism.

Will argues that liberals are right to want a strong but non-tyrannical state; they are wrong in their self-contradictory attempt to make that necessarily hierarchical structure serve egalitarianism. The state must exist because libertarianism is unreal. It should not betray itself by aspiring, or pretending, to egalitarianism; it rather should set the conditions for the human excellences or virtues. “The fundamental human right is to good government,” and “the fundamental problem of democracy is to get people to consent to that.”

Will’s policy recommendations follow from these principles. He opposes both pornography and violence in entertainment, Madonna and Dirty Harry, not so much because he feats they will be imitated but because he foresees a nation of dis-couraged, de-moralized persons “who respond only to depictions of excess.” He favors punishment over therapy because “a criminal has a right to be dealt with in a way that respects the integrity of his personality” by holding him responsible instead of deeming him sick. He advocates increased public spending for handicapped children, financed by taxes on consumption. He prefers baseball to boxing and, it should be needless to say, to football. He praises Ronald Reagan for “restoring trust in that which he distrusts—government,” and must find the president’s current (and probably transient) difficulties with the Iran-Contra investigations to be especially regrettable.

Some of those consumption tax revenues would also go to the military, but money alone won’t help. Will rightly criticizes the American “delusion” that the United States and the Soviet Union “share a frame of reference” that makes plausible appeals to such fictions as ‘détente,’ ‘international law,’ and trade-to-build-bridges-to-the Soviets. On this last piece of folly, Will remarks that the Reagan Administration “loves commerce more than it loathes communism,” and therefore countenances such cynical appeals to cowardice as that of Mr. Don Kendall, Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo Inc., who calls nuclear holocaust the alternative to increased U.S.-Soviet trade, that is, to increased profits for PepsiCo.

Almost alone among his contemporaries, Will has noticed that Leonid Brezhnev “was the most effective politician of the last two decades,” building his arsenal and extending his empire while mouthing the slogans of peace. As for the Gorbachevs, Mikhail “is going to be around for a long time, and it is apt to seem like a long time”: professorial Raisa “is what passes for a philosopher in a society where the humanities are illegal.” Every Soviet ruler “has been thoroughly marinated in the ideology that legitimizes him,” and that ideology teaches contempt for political liberty and the denial of the religious and philosophic convictions that make genuinely human communities possible. In the book’s most brilliant essay, Will shows how Hitler’s rightist totalitarianism, because extreme, presents a pure example of all totalitarian regimes in this century, including those the commercial republics are up against now.

“Defense of democracy depends on pessimists who are not defeatists,” that is, it depends upon “spirited realists.” “Today the West is unevenly divided between those of us who are and most persons who are not preoccupied, even obsessed, by the fact that the stakes of politics were forever transformed by the eruption in our century of the radical evil of totalitarianism, and by the necessity to make anti-totalitarianism the touchstone of all politics.” Conservative who carp at Will because he calls Americans “undertaxed” should remind themselves that tax policy doesn’t much matter in the face of the Gulag.

In his recent book, American Conservatism and the American Founding, Professor Harry V. Jaffa makes a more telling criticism. Will contends that the American Founders, James Madison in particular, believed “that America’s system can work without anyone having good motives—without public-spiritedness.” Jaffa properly corrects Will on this; the pledge the signers of the Declaration of Independence—”we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—makes no sense as a cri de commerce. Were Madison alive now, he would understand the need for statesmanship alone with sound institutions, just as he did in his own time.

Even with Jaffa’s correction, the question remains: How can statesmen in commercial republics overcome the combination of fear and complacency that often numbs their countrymen? George Will has an uncommon talent for political-philosophic portraiture, of which Plutarch’s Parallel Lives stands as the greatest example. Perhaps some future book of his will portray twentieth-century statesmen and tyrants as they have defended and assaulted human nature in our time.

James Finn and Leonard Sussman, eds.: Today’s American: How Free? New York: Freedom House, 1986.

Originally published in The New York City Tribune, May 20, 1987.

 

This is a poor book in a good cause. Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband’s latest political victim, Wendell Willkie, began Freedom House weeks before the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Then as now, Freedom House promoted political liberty in and beyond the United States. Then, threats to liberty emanated primarily from the ‘Right’: from the practice of legal, racial segregation in many part of the United States and from the advances of Fascism in Europe.

Today, threats to liberty emanate primarily from the ‘Left’: from the Soviet Union and, paradoxically, from excesses of liberty here. As Freedom House Board Chairman Max M. Kampelman remarks, “Today’s American is the freest person ever, here or elsewhere.” But of course when liberty degenerates into license, decent people and those who exploit them may react angrily, endangering liberty. Accordingly, this book’s thirteen contributors seek to defend liberty against both tyranny and anarchy—to defend what legal scholar John W. Riehm calls “the rule of reason,” resented by impassioned extremists of all ideological colors.

Unfortunately, and despite the contributors’ high reputations, the essays themselves are almost unrelievedly mediocre and tedious. Even the best of them amount to no more than rehashes of arguments advanced more tellingly elsewhere. Although the book’s dust jacket describes the contents as “always exciting,” the only excitement your reviewer could derive from these pages was of a decidedly secondary character: He had never thought that liberty could be made dull. That is an interesting realization.

Case in point: Bayard Rustin, the distinguished civil rights advocate, discusses “Equal Opportunity: What’s Happened to It?” What happened, he maintains, was that liberty revealed its down-side. Economic libertarianism does little or nothing for the desperately poor; better housing opportunities induce the black middle class to leave inner cities, taking skills and good examples with them; sexual libertarianism coupled with a family-busting ‘welfare’ system results in 58% of all black children being born out of wedlock. Quite so, but to remedy these severe problems, Rustin can only endorse a moderate-liberal Democratic Party program: national industrial policy, more money for better-quality education, more “social spending for the poor.” It is disheartening to see that after a lifetime of work advancing civil rights, Rustin hasn’t a single new proposal to offer.

Another case in point: Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration’s lone sane voice on foreign policy, suggests that America’s ethnic diversity gives us inroads to the countries our ancestors came from enabling us justifiably to focus world attention on a geopolitically relevant form of liberty—national self-determination. Brzezinski recommends tripling the amount of money we spend for propaganda directed at nations captive to Soviet imperialism, not the least of which lie within present Soviet borders. But he follows this sensible advice with a recommendation to increase trade with Central and Eastern Europe; against all evidence, he claims this will loosen the Soviet grip on those countries. Brzezinski never bothers to substantiate this foundationless assumption.

More cases in point: Leonard Sussman on press freedom and responsibility; John Diebold on computers and privacy; Leo Cherne on intelligence gathering; James Finn on religion and civil liberties. Each of these essays belongs to the ‘on-the-one-hand-then-on-the-other’ school of school of rhetoric: bland, generalizing, uninformative, without even the energy to pontificate. The book costs fifteen dollars. Do you really want to pay even that modest sum to be reminded that during ‘loose lips sink ships’ years of World War II democracies enjoyed more press freedoms than dictatorships? That “the primary purpose of intelligence is to avert war by alerting us to any dangers to our national security”? That computers make once-private information publicly available” That “the advance of modernity and its attendant forces has not been followed by secularization and a decline of religious observance”? If your responses to the above points were, respectively: 1) “I figured that”; 2) “Do tell”; 3) “No kidding” and 4) “Baloney”; then you don’t need to read such stuff.

Two essays rise to the stop of the stew. The philosopher Sidney Hook defines academic freedom as an unusual right, “one that must be earned.” Commercial republics guarantee the natural and civil right to talk nonsense on a street corner, but “one must, so to speak, be professionally qualified to talk nonsense in a university.” Academic freedom rests on the scholar’s professional duty to seek the truth and report his findings. “During the past few decades there has emerged in some quarters a new conception of the university that discards the traditional objective of scholarship and regards the university as primarily an agent of social change to effect political goals.” Marxists, feminists, and other doctrinaires “insist on the right to use the classroom for political purposes” and to “challenge the very conception of objective truth as a superstition.” Notoriously, this means that the Communist hack Angela Davis receives a more polite hearing on many campuses than does Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Political scientist Paul Seabury shows how the same ideological mindset functions off-campus. Unlike those who imagine that Marxism-Leninism serves merely ritualistic purposes in the Soviet Union, Seabury knows that “Leninist tenets permeate [the Politburo’s] strategic planning.” These tenets reverse Clausewitz’s famous maxim. War is not a continuation of politics by the admixture of other means; politics is a continuation of war, indeed, “politics is war.” This results in the easily observable militarism of all communist states. Politics-as-war replaces scholarship and journalism with propaganda, uses negotiations as psychological weapons, encourages terrorism, and prepares for offensive not defensive war. Liberal democrats, and particularly left-liberal Democrats, ignore to these facts to their peril, and ours.

Most of the contributors to this volume are liberal Democrats. Left-liberal Democrats deride them as ‘Cold-War liberals,’ but the facts belie the charge. Freedom House originated in the struggle against fascism, not communism; unlike today’s ideological heirs to the egregious Henry A. Wallace, Freedom House consists of liberals who really do fight for liberty. America needs a Democratic Party that can distinguish among license, liberty, and totalitarianism, ready to defend liberty in deeds as much as words. This soporific volume will do nothing to strengthen the resolve of that party or to make that defense more likely.

The fifteen dollars you might spend to purchase this book would serve better as a direct and tax-deductible contribution to Freedom House. Its work is invaluable. Its latest book is not.

John M. Swomley: Religious Liberty and the Secular State: the Constitutional Context. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987.

Originally published in the New York Tribune, July 22, 1987.

 

Having led a war for American liberty, George Washington never imagined liberty to be self-maintaining. Like a country, like a homestead, liberty needs defensible borders, limits. In his Farewell Address, he urged his friends and fellow-citizens to cherish not only their liberty but also their government’s unity, “a main pillar in the edifice of real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”

To maintain governmental unity, Americans need a degree of national unity. National unity requires several things: patriotism; shared commercial advantages; a Constitution both respected and amendable; the mitigation of extreme factional spirit by public opinion favoring the Union. But in any republic, such popular sentiments, interests, and opinions themselves require a foundation. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports… [the] firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them,” as the rule of law itself requires oaths backed “the sense of religious obligation.”

Washington denies that “morality can be maintained without religion” in the public mind. “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure”—one might say, for example, certain philosophers—”reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Here Washington denies a cardinal assumption of the ‘Enlightenment’: that thoroughgoing secularism may replace religion without harming, and probably by greatly benefiting, the public morality.

While dismissing ‘Enlightenment’ presumptions, Washington appropriates ‘Enlightenment’ language. “Promote… as an object of primary importance, institutions for the diffusion of general knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion be enlightened.” Washington can use this language precisely because he firmly identifies knowledge and enlightened opinion with religion and morality. In his time, churches and church-supported schools educated substantial numbers of Americans.

John Swomley never mentions the Farewell Address, and understandably so. A member of the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union and a retired professor of “social ethics” at a theology school, he speaks for the ‘Enlightenment’ in one of its contemporary forms—the one that mistakes the New Testament for a ‘social gospel,’ the polite forerunner of the violent ‘theology of liberation.’

According to Swomley, the United States Constitution establishes a “secular state,” that is, a state “not hostile to religion” but not religious, either—a state whose authority derives from “civil and natural law,” not “religious doctrine or… divine revelation.” This is only partially correct. The Declaration of Independence refers not only to the laws of nature but to the laws of nature’s God, to the self-evident truths of Creator-endowed natural rights. The Declaration and the Constitution artfully blend Biblical teachings with modern natural right, revelation with reason, all put into practice by statesmen whose prudence recalls the best of classical political thought.

This fundamental error, committed on the book’s first page, forces Swomley into committing numerous absurdities in defense of his doctrinaire civil libertarianism. Tax deductions for parochial schools are unconstitutional, he says, because not all churches sponsor schools—an argument that overlooks a church’s liberty to sponsor or not sponsor schools. “The state has no responsibility to support or aid religion in any way” because this would compel “those who support no religion to support what they do not believe”—a sad condition familiar to every American whose taxes go to support institutions animated by principles he does not believe or, to put it differently, every American. The Constitution cannot “be construed as creating the authority to enact laws benefiting religion financially”—as it cannot, if you presume that tax deductions and credits for contributions to religious institutions somehow deprive governments of monies rightfully belonging to itself, instead of allowing citizens to use their own money the way they want. If Americans consent to laws granting tax exemptions to religious institutions, there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent them from doing so.

Swomley laments, “The original intent that government was not empowered in any way to deal with religious matters”—an intent unknown to Washington or to any other Framer—”has been changed… so that government may aid religion so long as it doesn’t seem to the [Supreme] Court to be a step in the direction of establishing a state church.” But that is exactly what the Framers themselves thought.

Having drunk so deep of confusion and hypocrisy, Swomley cannot but declaim more and more incoherently as his diatribe continues. America has a dangerous “civil religion,” really an “ideology… founded on myths” and seen in such “slogans” as “In God We Trust.” Speaking of myths, Swomley advances a number of them himself: The American founders were narrow-minded defenders of economic interests; Lincoln was a pious fraud; Wilson’s speech on national self-determination and Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” were nothing but “war propaganda.” What is more, Marxism has contributed usefully to “the process by which society has moved away from control by the church.” Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics “are collaborating not only to achieve their mutual interests”—which would be horrifying enough, in Swomley’s view—”but also to assist right-wing political candidates friendly to their religious beliefs.” I suppose we can all thank God that Leftists never do anything like that.

In sum, Swomley can’t decide whether to revere the Constitution or to denigrate its authors. This silly little tract will perish with other ephemera spawned in the flow of Constitutional-Bicentennial publishing. Such decent oblivion remains a true blessing of liberty in the American republic.