Originally published in This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life, Number 16, Winter 1987.

 

2017 Note

In 1987, Professor Robert H. Horwitz brought out the third edition of The Moral Foundations of the American Republic, a collection of essays on the American founding by scholars including William Carey McWilliams, Martin Diamond, Joseph Cropsey, Walter Berns, and Benjamin Barber. Professor Horwitz kindly asked me to write the introduction to the volume.

The prolific Hungarian émigré scholar Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) took strong exception to the very notion that America had moral foundations, and this led to an exchange with me in This World. The following essay was my contribution to the debate.

Very briefly, in his opening statement Professor Molnar denied that the United States has a moral foundation on the grounds that states are never moral; rather, they are the “cold monsters” Nietzsche called them. A genuine ‘throne-and-altar’ Catholic, Molnar located the foundation of morality in the Church, dismissing both the philosophic and Protestant-religious dimensions of American moral doctrine as mere “ideologies.” To this he opposed what he called “Catholic Realism,” glancing at a well-known book by the Protestant writer Paul Ramsey on “Christian Realism” in foreign policy. This was consistent with his admiration for the French Catholic conservatives Charles Maurras and Georges Bernanos. On a personal level, Molnar had become disillusioned with American politics after what he regarded as the Eisenhower Administration’s weak reaction to the Soviet quelling of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Around the time of this exchange, Molnar invited me to visit him at the apartment he maintained in Manhattan; he had a house in New Jersey, but preferred not to commute very far during the school year, while he taught at Brooklyn College. He had a reputation as a curmudgeonly sort, but I found him to be quite the opposite: courtly, gracious, and witty—old-fashioned and thoroughly European in manner and in thought. Our shared interest in French things probably helped, although as a Maurrasien he could not have entirely approved of my admiration for Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux. We sipped tea, continued to disagree politely, and never saw  one another again.

 

Public Morality, and Public Moralism

If some new Daumier sketched an American group-portrait, I would admit the truth in every figure but mine. Vanity precludes confession, except by those proud of their sins. But so, at times, does self-knowledge, knowledge ‘from the inside.’ Daumier means to make the interior external, and he does, partially. Yet after overcoming indignation, shame, wounded amusement—in a word, one’s mortification—could not the dissected-but-unmurdered subject finally see more than Daumier sees? Freed (stripped?) of certain comforting illusions, could the subject rightly insist on some decent truths omitted from the portrait?

Thomas Molnar portrays Americans as they are, partially inside-out. Naïve, utopian, materialistic, self-righteous, hypocritical—those are Americans, all right, the very Puritan/Lockean vulgus itself, confusing moralism with morality as only a nation of ideologues can do. But, I want to ask, is this really me? Unlovable neighbor that I am, do I deserve barely more than a touch of Christian charity, if that? Have I survived, as a type, for some two centuries only by the grace of God or the whim of Fortune” Is there really no balm in Gilead, no there in Oakland?

Professor Molnar properly refers us to the foundations of the American republic, called moral by their admirers, immoral by detractors. Whereas Soviet Marxists employ their stupendously flexible ‘dialectics’ to lure or to whip masses into ideological pens, Americans proclaim “self-evident truths,” which, according to Molnar, prove rigid in practice and questionable in fact. Soviet mythology at least proves workable for the purpose of pretending to justify actions taken for raisons d’état; American mythology is not noble, is not true, and is not even very useful, except for the promotion of commerce. Enunciated by the Founders, “men of serious deliberation, politically free and morally disciplined,” and defended by statesmen (of whom Lincoln remains the highest example), the fragile “truths of the eighteenth century” must eventually fall prey to “new formulators”—unwise, tyrannical, and immoral—who will bury these so-called truths as far from Enlightenment sunshine as are the mortal remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

Professor Molnar’s critique presents us with two paradoxes: first, that men of moral and intellectual virtue could build, then defend, such a flimsy structure; second, that the structure could survive so long—particularly in view of Madison’s accurate prediction, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” A period of two hundred years exceeds the lifetime of the ‘thousand-year’ Nazi Reich, of any Greek democracy, or of any political regime governed by the body of Thomistic theory and practice Molnar names, strikingly, “Catholic realism.” Does the relative longevity of the American republic evidence merely the tenaciousness of ideology and the good fortune of geographical isolation? Possibly it does both. But the thought stubbornly persists, that some considerable, realistic (if not Catholic-realist) perception must have been at work in the founding and perpetuation of the American republic. To find out, one must try to look at the founding ‘from the inside,’ that is, in light of the carefully documented intentions of the Founders themselves, while measuring those intentions against the world we know and the criticisms Molnar advances. For I think Professor Molnar is substantially right but not entirely so, and in matters of this nature the degree of an argument’s rightness decides whether certain evils are sufferable or insufferable, tolerable or intolerable.

Nature Has Written Her Moral Laws

In the Declaration of Independence, men of serious deliberation asserted the seemingly naïve doctrine of self-evident truths. That all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights, and that those governments derive their just powers from consent—a proposition that also posits the people’s right to alter or abolish unrightful governments and establish new ones intended to secure unalienable rights: these “truths” had been declared by John Locke in the second chapter of An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government. As Professor Harry V. Jaffa reminds, us, Locke teaches that “nothing [is] more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted Right to Dominion and Sovereignty” (II, 4, emphasis added). This scrupulously limited proposition of human equality is evident to natural reason (identical to the “law of nature” [II, 6]), which commands respect for the fundamental moral equality of all human beings and perceives such equality insofar as all men would preserve their lives, and therefore their health, liberty, and possessions.

Two details distinguish the Declaration’s argument from Locke’s. First, the Declaration calls the truths it enumerates “self-evident,” a very different concept to Locke than the inductive reasoning seen above. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke associates self-evidence almost exclusively with what he calls “simple ideas,” such sense perceptions as ‘White is not black’ and ‘A square is not a circle’ (I, ii. 18). Locke clearly distinguishes intuitive from demonstrative knowledge, teaching that there are no self-evident propositions about another being, including another human being. He does not claim that knowledge of natural law is self-evident (IV, 19). This effectively denies the cognitive status of conscience, with obvious implications for Christian doctrine. Whether Locke’s impolitic teaching in the Understanding can be reconciled with the apparent fideism and modern natural law doctrine of the Civil Government (and indeed of some passages in the Understanding itself), may be reasonably doubted by any careful reader. Although Locke occasionally seems to regard moral laws to be as demonstrable as geometric theorems, he never actually demonstrates any; when his friend William Molyneux urged him to produce a system of demonstrated morality, Locke temporized and finally demurred. For our purposes it suffices to remark the extraordinary concision with which the American Founders promulgate a public morality while subtly pointing to the philosophic difficulties, for the benefit of those who know their Locke, by melding Lockean intuition with Lockean demonstration. Whether sincere or merely judicious, this alteration of Locke’s teaching results in a version of Christian conscience.

For Jefferson, “the true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man,” wherein “nature has written her moral laws.” A Christian or Jew can read the Declaration more literally, without Jefferson’s naturalistic assumptions. This moral foundation enables the American Founders to construct a regime that both appeals to and moderates the diverse convictions of a large and heterogeneous people. The foundation is no more a mere “product” of the eighteenth century than is the religious doctrine to which it appeals a mere “product” of the epoch in which it was first inaugurated.

The Founders’ politic understanding of natural conscience provides the ground for the Declaration’s second departure from Locke, the assertion of an unalienable right to pursue happiness. For Jefferson this does not mean the acquisition and enjoyment of possessions. Rather, “good acts give us pleasure,” he writes, tacitly rebuking Locke’s contention that men are naturally asocial. In the Civil Government, Locke emphasizes the moral and political dangers of the pursuit of happiness, piously affirming that human beings are made by God “to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure,” and that each must preserve not only himself but ,”as much as he can,” act to preserve the rest of mankind (II,6). The pursuit of happiness more often will tempt men to suppress the natural rights of others than to affirm them. In the Understanding Locke does associate goodness with pleasure, but in a manner opposite to Jefferson’s. “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these are indeed innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions… but these are inclinations of the appetite to good, not impressions of truth on the understanding” (I, 2). Human custom, “a greater power than nature,” establishes a system of rewards and punishments, preferably by means of laws, which socializes men by causing them pleasure and pain. Jefferson finds man to be naturally social if not political. For him, moral acts are intrinsically pleasurable.

Although more “optimistic” than Locke, the Declaration does not lack sobriety with respect to the persuasive power of self-evident truths. On the contrary, after the second paragraph’s long first sentence enumerating these truths, the first word of the next sentence is “Prudence.” Prudence counsels no change of long established governments for “light and transient Causes,” a formulation that adds precisely the virtue of prudence to Locke’s earlier version: “People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest…. [Only] a long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people” (Civil Government, XIX, 223). In the bulk of the Declaration, the signers enumerate “repeated Injuries and Usurpations” by the British king against the colonies, a list formulated as proof of his despotic intent. Every one of these “Facts… submitted to a candid world”—from the king’s refusal to recognize good laws to his use of “merciless Indian savages” against American frontiersmen—exemplifies Locke’s argument concerning the “State of Nature,” wherein the foundations of human morality may be seen most clearly, but which foundations require subsequent political artifice for their defense. The Declaration does not lack realism, nor does it obstruct political action by moralistic demands. On the contrary, the moral requirements of the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and of the Creator-God who instills unalienable rights, cohere with national self-preservation and the defense of political liberty. Morality neither takes the place of politics nor succumbs to so-called Realpolitik.

Not subterfuge and hypocrisy but candor, a stated reliance on divine Providence, and a public pledge among statesmen of their lives, fortunes, and “sacred honor” results from this balanced theory. As for practice, any honest historian can present a dozen failures by the Founders to live up to their pledge, as well as admirable incidents in which they did. Neither the failures nor the successes should astonish any but the naïve. Among the last to be astonished by anyone’s moral shortcomings would be such men as the American Founders, today more generally faulted for esteeming human virtue too little. Theirs is not Catholic realism to be sure, but it is principled realism, despite its acknowledged shortcomings in theory and practice, many of which sharply scrutinized by Professor Molnar. It is neither utopian nor ideological—except insofar as any doctrine other than Catholic realism must be termed utopian and ideological, a thought no intelligent reader of Professor Molnar’s insightful books can lightly dismiss. In this connection, it is perhaps important to note that the great critic of excessive moralism in politics, a moralism said to result in a mixture of utopianism and hypocrisy, is that prominent unfaithful Catholic, Niccolò Machiavelli, in the course of his sometimes bold, sometimes attack on Christianity—Catholic Christianity most immediately.

In his Utopia, the Perennial Heresy, Professor Molnar criticizes Calvinists, including the American Puritans, for confusing arrogant self-divinization with the pious man’s imitation Christi. Politicized, such arrogance yields that worship of the state seen today in “two ideological empires”—American and Soviet—which “resemble each other increasingly in the techniques they utilize and even in some fundamental thinking.” This critique initially of Puritanism, and ultimately of Protestantism generally, stands behind the seemingly contradictory assertion in his present essay, that the Puritan “New Zion” of “newly born innocence” resists “the fact that the state is a necessity rooted in human nature.” The link between statism and the denial of man’s political nature becomes clear in the consequent attempt to idealize, moralize, the state our nature makes necessary. This idealized state—a state animated by moralism—soon becomes intrusive, then totalitarian. The American republic’s Lockean component only “reinforces” or complements this, because the commercial republic depends upon religious, moral, and social “controls” imposed by Puritanism. This incipient state-worship may be seen in Americans’ confusion of a particular form of the state, the republican form, with virtue; Americans falsely believe the republican regime “a fount of morality.”

Because Men Are Not Angels

Whatever Americans may believe, the Founders did not imagine the republican regime to be a source of morality. In the central number of The Federalist, Madison defends the new government’s Constitutional obligation to pay debts incurred by the Confederation, by condemning “the pretended doctrine that a change in the political form of civil society has the magical effect of dissolving its moral obligations.” Unalienable rights may be better or worse secured under a given regime, but they do not originate in that regime, which is a product of human artifice. The claim that unalienable right originate in a regime exemplifies not a doctrine of natural or God-endowed rights but a doctrine of conventionalism. Following Tocqueville, Molnar acutely remarks the commercial republic’s dependence upon the moral constraints religion provides, but the Founders saw as clearly as did Tocqueville the difficulties in “grafting” the natural necessity of government onto the remnants of Puritanism: perhaps the most famous sentence in The Federalist reads, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The corollary might read, “Because men are not angels, and governments consist of men, no government presents us with a paragon of virtue, an ideal-on-earth.” Secularized Puritanism or utopian ideology remains strong in America, but the regime survives because ideology remains subordinate to the realism of the Founders, embodied in their regime. Without such realism, we would have had more than one civil war, with the Union eventually disintegrating mercurially into irreconcilable factions obedient to the laws of ideological chemistry. This has happened to republic in France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain, as none of them contained sufficient anti-toxins to ideology. Although its fever at times rises dangerously high, the American republic survives. Professor Molnar has observed that “all utopians follow the same pattern: the liberation of man from heteronomy, from the guidance and providence of a personal God, in the name of autonomy, of moral self-government.” With no guide but himself, eventually “nothing remains in reference to which [man] might say ‘no.'” So far at least, Americans have said ‘no’—’no’ to slavery in the last century and to totalitarianism in this one. As regards fascism and communism, they stood and stand firmer than many European republicans, who more often confuse appeasement with peacemaking.

Professor Molnar identifies an especially virulent strain of ideology when he criticizes Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hans Kelsen for dismissing natural law and for “mak[ing] our laws,” including the Constitution, “hardly more than summations of societal fashions.” This “consensual morality” or rule by “the manipulators of public opinion” derives from Locke, as we have seen but from the Locke of the Understanding, not the Locke of the Civil Government whom the Founders ennobled. That a Supreme Court Justice would abandon natural law for Lockean conventionalism, and that “most people” today do not regard the state as moral because it respects the laws of nature of nature’s God and secures unalienable rights, but because it “pays lip service to the general utopian expectations shared by contemporary western men” who demand such nullities as “permanent peace, guaranteed prosperity, and a vague unification of the planet,” should disquiet any friend of American republicanism. Nonetheless, the latter riposte deserves a response. First, peace and prosperity, and the hop for their perpetuation, rarely fail to please the average citizen of any regime. Even in many bellicose countries, l’homme moyen sensuel hopes the next war will bring him greater security and treasure. Second, few Americans I know expect permanent peace or guaranteed prosperity, although they do hope for them; also, any unification of the planet would need to be very vague indeed to please Americans, many of whom don’t much like foreigners. Third, insofar as utopianism does infect Americans generally, they have departed from the principled realism of the Declaration and the Constitution, by exaggerating the principles and forgetting the realism, rather as all human beings everywhere do.

To this Professor Molnar would reply that modernity makes inevitable the popular discovery of its immoral foundations. Materialism plus ‘Enlightenment’ yield ideology or “state theology,” as the elites who understand modernity’s nihilist foundations lose the prudence of the Founders and corrupt the people with flattery and baubles. Americans see this clearly when they watch contemporary totalitarianism exalt History and Party. They have thus far failed to see, but perhaps will begin to see, that individual freedom and pluralism have much the same character. If you liberate people politically, you set in motion forces that ‘liberate’ them spiritually. The people eventually “determine their own morality” without reference to God or nature. They finally worship themselves. More precisely, they worship their own appetites, abandoning their true self-government, rule by the better angels of their nature. Talmon’s “totalitarian democracy” came to France almost immediately after the Revolution, but even the sober Anglo-Saxon regimes will succumb to it, sooner or later. Perhaps they have already, without knowing it. While totalitarians force men to be ‘free’ of spirituality, republics seduce them. Even a man of Solzhenitsyn’s stature only plays Jeremiah to a nation that has “chosen death rather than life,” imagining all the while it preserves life and pursues happiness. But unlike the ancient Jews, the inhabitants of the New Zion have no place to go.

Qualifying the Argument

For comfort’s sake, it would be easy to dismiss Molnar’s argument. One need only shut one’s eyes to the world around us. Refuting his argument is another matter. I should rather say it must be qualified, beginning with his proferred remedy, which requires a spiritually renewed and politically prudent Catholic Church.

Molnar does not complacently imagine the prompt advent of such a renaissance within the Church. Egalitarian sentiment infects it, too. For example, the “God” of such slogans as “God is love,” “is hardly more than a human artifact,” a product of Lockean consensus-morality operating within the Church itself. “The task of American Catholics is to penetrate the Church with a political sense,” requiring a more-than-political foundation, namely, respect for the hierarchical character of natural and divine law. Only then will the Church be able to act in the secular realm with a sense of orderly spirituality, and of the limits of politics. Professor Molnar might agree that in the meantime, given the surreal character of the American bishops’ recent pronouncements on economics and nuclear strategy, a wall of separation between Church and state does more good than harm except in one major respect, the issue of abortion.

Molnar sees possibilities in the Church’s Catholicity, not in its Americanness. Here we part company. To penetrate the Church with much-needed political sense, American Catholics must draw chiefly upon the political character of their native country, in my opinion. For they have experienced no other. To set any doctrine, even one so cogent as “Catholic realism,” against experience—particularly a seductive experience—will nearly guarantee defeat. Nor is the American character so entirely closed to political sense and even to spiritual deference as Professor Molnar contends. At the beginning of his essay he asks two questions: Is there such a thing as a moral nation? May Americans claim such status? To each he answers with a resounding ‘No.’ But in the two most authoritative statements they composed, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the American founders never claim to represent a morally superior nation. The laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle this people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth—no less, but no more. The Founders act, it is true, “by the authority of the good people of these Colonies,” but they appeal not to those people and not even to a “candid World” for the rectitude of their intentions; they appeal only to the “Supreme Judge” of that world.

The Constitution they wrote eleven years later does not ignore the need for public and private virtue in the commercial republic, but neither does it depend entirely upon such virtue: Madison established that point in the tenth Federalist. The most prudent American Founders never imagined Americans to be more virtuous than anybody else intrinsically, although some of them (Jefferson and Adams, for example) detested the corruption of European courts and cities. Professor Molnar rightly observes the defects of our people and our statesmen, but he does not give sufficient consideration to our institutions, in whose construction the Founders expended much of their considerable prudence so as to mitigate the admitted defects of the American character. Here they followed Montesquieu’s observation: “In a free nation it is very often a matter of indifference whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason: hence springs that liberty which is a security from the effects of these reasonings” (L’Esprit des lois, I, XIX, 27). American institutions consistently thwart the worst schemes of ideologues, ambitieux, fools, and fanatics—types no less common in America than in other countries, but somewhat less successful here than in many of the others. These institutions give moderate citizens and prudent statesmen the chance to survive, deliberate, and act.

Catholic Realism Today

A Church establishment to guide American government would of course require a Constitutional amendment, and probably an altogether new form of government. Republics animated by religiosity require a spiritually homogeneous population. In practice this means a small population, a small territory. In a country the size of the United States, with its extraordinarily heterogeneous population, a religious establishment would probably require monarchy, or perhaps aristocracy. Such a prospect may well be more Catholic than realistic in the near future. Catholic realism will do better to build on the American foundations, observing St. Thomas Aquinas’s wise teaching, “the purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually.” Even John Calvin recognizes that political government properly instructs citizens in duties of humanity and civility, not in such spiritual objects as piety and service to God. On such common sense foundations alliances with America’s Protestant majority might also be built. The American regime provides the necessary structures and ethos for such alliances.

Modern republics rarely if eve go to war with one another. They were designed that way, conceived by political philosophers and founded by statesmen reacting to the bloody civil wars of seventeenth-century Britain. Those wars formed part of a larger ‘civil war’ within Christendom itself. The Catholic realism of St. Thomas Aquinas might have healed those wounds, had it been heeded. But then as now, realism enjoyed less than unanimous applause. Once well-established, modern republics do resist civil war; the threats to them come primarily from totalitarianism and from their own inclination to complacency toward their enemies. Those who would return to a stronger, perhaps sovereign, Church establishment must weigh the spiritual and political benefits of an end to such complacency against the political and indeed spiritual dangers of the Christian tendency toward faction. Christian realism may have reason to heed James Madison, even as Madison’s heirs have reason to heed Christian realism.

 

2017 Postscript

In his brief answer, Professor Molnar made several main points:

1. Private associations such as the non-established churches in the United States cannot “fill the moral gap” when the state is “deprived of a spiritual authority.”
2. Insofar as the United States has indeed avoided the worst of Europe’s convulsions, this should be credited to “the Anglo-Saxon spirit of compromise” and to “a salutary lack of political imagination”—that is, to non-institutional habits of the mind and heart.
3. “Not men but souls are created equal, and only in the eyes of God.”
4. “Nor did I suggest the establishment of a particular Church….”
5. Nothing can be done to remedy the situation, and “the United States is now torn apart” by “vicious ideologies.”

Taking the central, and crucial, claim first, I reply that Molnar’s argument is incoherent. “Not men but souls”? But what is man, if not an ‘ensouled’ being? Furthermore, it doesn’t take a God’s-eye view to concur, with Locke and every other philosopher before him, that human beings are equal in the sense that they are all of the same species; they are not apes, pigs, or platypuses. As Lincoln pointed out, my fellow human being may be my inferior in intelligence, virtue, and looks, but she has the same right to keep the bread she bakes with her own hands as I do, or as any other man does. Molnar wants to pretend that nature is morally irrelevant, but if God created nature that may well not be so. He treats Adam and Eve quite differently than He treats the trees in the Garden of Eden.

On the importance of ethos in addition to institutions, who denies it? Molnar attributes to me the view that institutions are the only bulwark against moral rot, but that’s not what I claimed.

On the matter of spiritual authority and Molnar’s denial that he suggests “the establishment of a particular Church,” I can only raise an eyebrow. If states need a spiritual authority to prevent them from turning into Leviathans, and if non-‘established,’ civil-associational church institutions will not suffice, what is left other than an established church? It may of course be that Molnar expects no remedy short of the return of the Lord and the creation of a new heaven and a new earth—a view all Christians share. But I rather suspect that a proponent of “Catholic realism” who insists on the necessity of an spiritual authority above the states most likely desires the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in Christendom.

On the observation that America is being torn apart by vicious ideologies, this now thirty-year-old observation could as easily be repeated today, as indeed it could have been repeated in many decades of American life. Our eras of good feeling have been few and far between. And yet here we still are. Can the “Anglo-American” inclination to compromise and lack of political imagination really be the core of such longevity, especially since the United States hasn’t been all that “Anglo-Saxon” for more than a century?

 

 

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.