Edward J. Larson: George Washington, Nationalist. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016.

 

Americans understood themselves as “a people” by the 1770s, at least, as the Declaration of Independence most famously indicates. But until the Declaration they couldn’t think of themselves as a self-governing people, a nation in full. Securing that nationhood took years of war, constitutional architectonics, and commerce both economic and social. The merit of historian Edward J. Larson’s compact and incisive essay begins in selecting for consideration the ‘middle’ years of Washington’s career, those between the war and his inauguration as our first president. In them we see not Washington the general or Washington the commander in chief, but Washington the adroit and great-souled politician, the man who used the fame he won during the war to take his country from domestic unrest and geopolitical insecurity to what he called an empire, what his sometime colleague Thomas Jefferson called an empire of liberty. Jefferson wrote the Declaration; Madison, James Wilson, and their colleagues wrote the Constitution; but Washington took the indispensable steps that enabled independence fought in defense of natural rights to issue in the security of those rights within a framework of constitutional and commercial republicanism.

This book’s “simple thesis,” Larson writes, holds that Washington was “the leading nationalist of the late Revolutionary era in American history.” By “nationalist,” he doesn’t mean blood-and-soil statism or even Burkean traditionalism but popular self-government. He commits an important misstep at the outset, saying that Washington “believed in the Lockean natural right of free men and the republican ideals of government by the consent of the governed”; obviously, if right is natural, it must belong to all men, as the Declaration affirms and as Washington recognized by emancipating his slaves in his will. Fortunately, this is just about the last mistake Larson makes, and it isn’t foundational to his argument, which centers primarily on practical policies not political theory. And he is exactly right to link Washington’s understanding of natural right to his commitment to the founding of a republican regime.

Having fought major battles in five states and coordinating troop movements in all thirteen, Washington understood American politics from “a national perspective” well before he re-entered civilian life. After the war, the English continued to prey upon American shipping and to occupy New York City, Charleston, and Savannah—all major ports, vital to American commerce. The union of the states, first asserted in the 1774 Articles of Association, weakened without a battlefield enemy on the ground who daily reinforced the sentiment of hanging together, lest we hang separately. Disunion led to reluctance by states to pay debts incurred during the war to the federal government, and this led to a regime crisis. Unpaid soldiers will grumble. Officers in Newburgh, New York became restive. They received some encouragement from such nation-builders as Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, who hoped that fear of a coup would spur the states to pay up. Major General Alexander McDougall was the point man for the proto-rebellion, threatening Treasury Secretary Henry Knox with refusal to disband the troops until payment was received.

Washington understood that such a rebellion would threaten republicanism itself by challenging civil authority. He decided to employ a peaceful form of what military men call tactical surprise, the civil equivalent of the Battle of Trenton. He made a unannounced visit to the officers’ meeting in Newburgh on March 15, 1782, reading what one historian has called “the most impressive speech he ever wrote.” Taking himself as his example, he cited “the great duty I owe to my country” to obey civilian authority, a duty deriving from the principle of government by the consent of the governed, itself derived from the equal natural rights of all human beings. Appealing to honor, the military virtue par excellence, he exhorted the officers to “express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of Civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” Who will rule this rising empire? Military men? If so, was Washington himself not the highest-ranking and most-honored such man in America? And had he not fought with them as comrades throughout the early defeats and hardships, sharing with them the final triumph? Instead of calling them to lay down their arms, could he not have led them on a march to the capital, taking over the government by force? He had done the opposite of that. The officers backed down.

“As word of the encounter first reached Congress and then spread across the land in newspaper accounts, Washington gained yet another laurel. Already first in war, he was now first in peace and clearly first in the hearts of his countrymen. He had no rivals.” Washington “use[d] his platform as America’s leading citizen to call for quickly and fairly compensating the troops, and ultimately for building a strong national union that could support those payments and some form of permanent military establishment”—an establishment which, going on 250 years, has yet to attempt a coup d’état against the people it is charged to protect or the civilian government those people have consented to be governed by. Working against any foolish potential backlash against the military as such, Washington advocated the maintenance of a small standing army, with a well-organized militia to supplement it, on the grounds that it could defend America’s northern border with British Canada and its northwest territories against Indian tribes and nations allied with the British.

Washington’s call for national union went well beyond national defense. In his 1783 Circular Letter to the states, he associated a stronger central government with the “happiness” of those states as parts of that union. “It is only in our united Character as an Empire, that our Independence is acknowledged” by foreign powers, and it is only by thinking of ourselves as “citizens of America,” by establishing our “National Character” that we can become “a happy Nation,” one so situated as to secure our natural rights of life, liberty, and self-government. By resigning his military commission at the national Assembly Chamber in Annapolis near the end of the year, and by declaring his intention to retire to private life, he astonished the world (and most particularly George III). As the “second Cincinnatus,” he “became the first American,” no longer merely a Virginian of great distinction but “a world-renowned personification of republican virtue.” In one of his many well-chosen quotations, Larson cites Thomas Jefferson: “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

Returning to Mount Vernon, Washington put his long-neglected household in order then turned his attention to his properties along rivers in southeastern Pennsylvania and today’s West Virginia. He discovered that a grist mill he owned had been mismanaged and that a Calvinist sect called the Seceders had claimed squatters’ right on another of his tracts since 1773. For his pains, a group of Indians attempted to capture him at Great Kanawha, along the Ohio River. These unpleasant surprises galvanized his ambition to empower the federal government to permit orderly settlement of the West. “If Congress could open, sell, and settle these lands and thereby gain authority and revenue, it could bolster the union. If not, it risked losing them to a foreign power, and with them, much of the reason for a national government.” As a result, why would the settlers in the West not turn to Spain, which ruled the West’s geo-economic linchpin, New Orleans, and to Great Britain, which ruled the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River, for both security and trade? “The touch of a feather, would turn [the Westerners] either way,” he wrote. To secure this portion of the Union, not only a well-funded military force but east-west transportation routes would be indispensable—the latter to be secured by linking the North Branch of the Potomac River to the headwaters of the Ohio River. To this end, he lobbied the Virginia and Maryland legislatures to establish a private toll route on the Potomac, while lining up investors. He played the role of what we would now call a ‘rainmaker’ with his usual skill, and by January 1785 “Washington had his company and soon would be elected its first president.” He proved a less successful entrepreneur, however, not because he lacked business acumen but because the Erie Canal soon became the main east-west corridor, due to its better positioning, closer to the commercial entrepots of New England.

Nonetheless, the project earned a substantial political profit. In obtaining the Mount Vernon Compact between Virginia and Maryland to cooperate on Potomac River commerce, he had partnered with the young Virginia state legislator James Madison, whom he enlisted in his broader intention to strengthen the Union. “We are either a United people, or we are not”; “if the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation,” with “national objects to promote, and a national character to support.” Madison concurred, proposing that the Virginia legislature “call a general meeting on interstate commercial regulations to be attended by delegates from all thirteen states.” Representatives of five states did attend the meeting, held in Annapolis in September 1786. This became the first step toward calling a national convention to revise the failing Articles of Confederation. But such a convention would need not only Washington’s support but his attendance, if it were to attract delegates from all the states. Madison and Washington’s former military aide Alexander Hamilton went to work on the general—who, in the end, needed little persuasion. Not only was the general well aware of the geopolitical dangers to Americans, he also worried about internecine conflicts, especially over borders and commerce, and, “perhaps most important,” the failure of states “to protect individual liberty and private property.” So were many of his fellow Virginians, who chose him to lead its delegation at Philadelphia. For his part, Washington worried that the convention wouldn’t be serious—that is, genuinely constitutional.

As he had done with his officers during the war, Washington consulted his most trusted advisers before going into battle. Madison, Knox, and Jay all advocated “a truly national government” with “separate legislative, judicial, and executive branches” and a bicameral legislature. Madison also argued for a fully articulated federal judicial system, which would “avoid local bias in expounding national laws and deciding cases involving citizens of different states.” All agreed that “in areas under its domain the national government must have the power to act directly on the people, not just through the states.” Washington “embraced their proposals and made them his own,” while wondering if, as he said to Jay, “the public mind [was] matured for such an important change.” He called the convention as “the last peaceable mode” of “saving the republic.” Virginia delegate John Randolph was designated to present what was immediately labeled “The Virginia Plan,” which in most aspects carried the day, with some compromises at the insistence of the smaller states.  Respecting the office which everyone expected Washington to occupy, the new constitution broke with parliamentarism, electing the president not by legislative vote but through the novel Electoral College, which, tellingly, would dissolve at the end of each presidential election cycle, making the chief executive entirely independent of any standing set of officeholders in the national or states’ governments. Governmental powers would thus be not only separated but balanced.

At times bitter and hard-fought, the ratification contests in the several states saw determined opposition to the new constitution from advocates of the Articles of Confederation system. “Federalists would rely on the public’s trust in Washington to carry the day,” and it did. Further, once ratification was assured, it was crucial to ensure that anti-federalists didn’t control the first Congress. To this end, Washington set down three “main goals for the United States under the Constitution: respect abroad, prosperity at home, and development westward”—goals obtainable by policies of “effective tariffs, sound money, secure property rights, and a nonaligned foreign policy.” As Washington put it, “America under an efficient government, will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons of industry and frugality,” a country not “less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people,” thanks to the vast tracts of land available in the West. “He saw it as a model for individual liberty and republican rule everywhere,” and candidates for the first Congress under the Constitution would see in that model what amounted to an exceptionally attractive political platform.

After his election, Washington journeyed to New York, stopping in Philadelphia and Trenton. At a City Tavern banquet in his honor, the diners raised their glasses to the toast, “To Liberty without licentiousness,” a republican slogan if ever there was one.  At Assunpink Creek, near Trenton, where Washington’s troops had rounded on British forces in January 1777, a banner unfurled to read “The Defender of the Mothers, will be the Protector of the Daughters.”

This resembled a king’s progress across his realm, with one critical exception. The crowds who greeted the new president didn’t bow to him; he bowed to them. George Washington had become “the master of the correct gesture.” (Adams called him “the finest political actor he had ever seen.) The regime he had been instrumental in founding lodged sovereignty in the people, not in the government, and not in some elected monarch.

And the regime worked, far better than the Articles regime had done. Treasury Secretary Hamilton worked out a financial system capable of paying the war debt. Secretary of War Knox organized for war against the Western Confederacy, an alliance of Indians which had blocked American settlement in the rich lands of the Ohio Valley. John Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain that got them out of its forts in the Northwest Territory. North Carolina and Rhode Island finally ratified the Constitution; Tennessee and Kentucky also joined the Union. Congressman Madison floor-managed the Bill of Rights through Congress, “with Washington’s support.” Secretary of State Jefferson “devis[ed] a broad regime of federally protected intellectual property rights,” which would secure the innovations on which manufacturing and commerce depend.

Controversies over the national bank and Jay’s treaty caused tensions between Washington and his fellow Virginians Jefferson and Madison, who eventually began “a formal national political party with a states’-rights bent.” Thus what began as a controversy between big states and small states during the ratification contest morphed into a controversy between finance and agriculture by the turn of the century, a controversy that would eventually morph into the controversy between slavery abolition and slaveholding which nearly destroyed the Union. Far-seeing George Washington manumitted his slaves in his Last Will and Testament; had enough of his fellow slaveholders done that, there might have been no Civil War.

Shamim A. Siddiqi: Methodology of Dawah in American Perspective. Brooklyn: The Forum for Islamic Work, 1989.

Mohamed Akram al-Adouni: “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” April 1991.

 

The late Shamim A. Siddiqi (1928-2018) served for many years as the moving spirit of the Islamic Circle of North America—a New-York-City-area organization not to be confused with the Islamic Society of North America, which was founded by the Muslim Brotherhood and controls the Islamic Learning Foundation. A Muslim born in what is now India, he fled to Pakistan with his family after the Partition in 1947. He admired and met with the most prominent Pak Islamist, Mawlanda Mawdudi, eventually carrying the Islamist message to the United States, where he lived for most of his life.

He states the core of that message, its purpose, in the opening sentence: “The book in hand is an effort towards the achievement of our cherished goal, i.e., how to make Allah’s Deen dominant on this earth.” Such dominance will lead to the Falah or deliverance “of the entire mankind” [sic], and the “methodology” outlined will cause the call [dawah] to all the peoples of North America to join the Islamic ummah or body of believers to be “properly projected and penetrated deep into the society.” Those peoples, but especially the people of the United States, “are in need of a superb ideology to counteract the menace of their social evils, economic upheavals, racial/color discrimination, political corruption and socialist/communist hegemonies on a global level.” Once converted, Western peoples generally will rise to the top of the worldwide Islamic movement, given their technological superiority to the rest of the world. The task is to show “how to make the message of Islam acceptable to the West,” thereby freeing “the Muslim world” from Western interference and intervention, “pav[ing] the way for the emergence of a global Islamic order.” He assures his readers that “it is Allah who guided my thoughts, my thinking process and its development in its entirety. Nothing in this book is mine. Everything is from Allah.”

With all Muslims, Siddiqi holds up the Qu’ran as God’s “last and final Guidance” for a humanity that is otherwise “weak, ineffective and in a pitiful state,” with each individual “fearful of his own species” and nations “skeptical of each other.” He finds one hopeful sign in Afghanistan, where, as of 1989, the Taliban sought to establish “an ideal Islamic state, to serve as a model for the rest of mankind.” In a post-9/11 “Updating Note,” he praises the Taliban for having “tactfully disarmed the people” of the country and “establish[ing] the rule of Sharia within their domain.” The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by “the anti-Islam Western hegemony” and its regional allies under the pretext of counteracting Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The “very tragic drama of September 11 was staged”; it was blamed on Bin Laden and the Taliban “without the least ascertaining the facts and looking elsewhere who were and are the greatest beneficiaries of this tragedy”—whom Siddiqi carefully leaves unnamed. Any attempted regime change in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the defeat of the Taliban will fail because “Stooges cannot fill the gap.”

Be all of this as it may, Siddiqi returns to the project at hand—changing the regime of the United States and giving it “an alternative way of life.” This “is the responsibility of Muslims who fortunately migrated to Western countries after the Second World War, when there was a dearth of labor in Europe and America and the immigration restrictions were eased.” This must be done because “the sheiks and kings of the Middle East are all in the pockets of the Western powers, especially the U.S,” which aids those rulers in their attempts “to crush the Islamic forces ruthlessly wherever they raise their voice for establishing Allah’s Deen.” “This dirty game has been goin on throughout the Muslim world unabated for the last two hundred years” and true Muslims must not tolerate it. “This will be possible only by building Islamic Movements in the Western countries in the homelands of those who have caused and are causing incalculable loss to the Muslim world and casting baseless aspersions against Islam day in and day out.” Muslims must “remove the prejudices of the West against Islam.” To do this, they must play “a game of strategy” whereby they “find out and create new friends for Islam and its cause on the side of the enemy, inside and at the rear of the forces fighting against Islam.”

This is right because “sovereignty belongs to Allah alone and denies all authorities besides Him…. Only Allah-given laws are to be accepted, practiced and implemented in an individual’s life and established in the society where the Muslims live”—the United States now being one such society. “A Muslim has to put all that he has either to change the society into an Islamic society or state or be perished for it [sic]. A Muslim has no other choice.”

Siddiqi lays down the basics of dawah as presented in Muslim Scripture. Man has free will, but he must choose rightly, according to God’s commands: “The achievement of both heaven and hell depends on the treatment which one accords to the guidance from the Creator.” Free will exists because God intends to “test him and ascertain who among the human beings accepts Allah and His Guidance by his freewill which will qualify him to be the citizen of the next world.” Choosing the right way of life or regime on earth will entitle you to citizenship in the best regime, hereafter. The Prophet Muhammad struggled to “rout out” the wrong way of life and found Allah’s Deen in “the body politic of the Arabian Peninsula”; “this was to serve as a prelude to make Al-Deen-Al-Islam dominant in the rest of the world.” Or, as Muhammad himself said, his disciples must act to “bring Arabs under your control and bring the non-Arab world under your domination [La Yuzharahu].”

In this “revolutionary” struggle, the idolators’ “political hegemony” was threatened. These tribal chieftains were given the chance to change their regimes, as Muhammad, using Mecca as his base, delivered a series of dawah speeches to them. “We should realize the magnitude of this Dawah effort. Continuously for ten years, every tribe was echoing with the challenge of [Muhammad’s] message.” Subsequent to this, after establishing a new base at Medina, he fought battles against those who resisted. He also undertook “a letter-writing campaign” to “all the Kings and rulers around him,” displaying “the political sagacity and statesmanship of the greatest order, ” warning them that “Arabia was not weak” and “was now dominated by a revolutionary Movement” which non-Arabs were welcome to join—or else.

The Prophet’s way of life exemplifies the way in which all Muslims should live. “He took advantage of every opportunity to expose and project [his vision] to the people around him,” making the objective “supreme” in his life; “everything was subservient to it.” “Dawah work, whether in America, Europe or elsewhere in the world must have this clear objective in the mind of the Da’ee [proselytizers] that they are out to establish Allah’s Deen in the land or the society in which they are living.”

For this task, “Allah Himself poured upon [Muhammad] through startling revelations of Al-Qur’an in bits and pieces at the time of every need, every difficult situation, every turning point and every calamity in the shape of short and long, forceful, and eloquent verses to meet the situation.” He command Muhammad to “develop and build up [a devoted and dedicated] character in each individual who responded to his call in the affirmative.” His message “most attracted the youth.” Opposition came not only from tribal chiefs but tribal elders and parents, who “realized the revolutionary aspect” of the message. But convinced that their choice was between an eternity in Paradise or Hell, “no amount of torture, oppression or hardship could move the believers even an inch from their position.” Persecution strengthened them, as it winnowed out the weak and enabled Muhammad to “pick up the best souls from the society of Mecca for the cause of Allah”; bribery and other inducements did not tempt such souls. To them, Allah “was the dearest of all, dearer than their parents.”

Muhammad’s Meccan converts numbered in the dozens. Threatened with death at the hands of his enemies, he listened to Allah’s command to migrate to Medina. The Hejira “sets a model to Muslims all over the world to migrate to a place where there are better prospects to practice, preach and establish the Deen of Allah. The migration of Muslims to America today presents a parallel situation provided the Muslims reorient the objective of their stay in this country and live by the commitment which they have with their Creator, Allah” to “spread His Deen.” At Medina, Muhammad took three steps to establish his base: building a mosque “to serve as a place of worship, a meeting ground, a guest house, a parliament, a conference hall, a court room, a training camp; establishing a covenant with local Jews “through which the power and the mischief-mongering habit of the Jews was neutralized” and “transferred the political and judicial authority” of the  city into the hands of Muhammad; and founding “The Brotherhood,” whereby all Muslims “share[d] the economic burden” of their newly-founded political community. This enabled Muhammad to organize Medina into “a military camp and the Muslims into a very active mobile military force,” aided by “a very effective system of gathering information” (as we would say, ‘intelligence) about surrounding tribes. Muhammad’s “political maneuvering and many preemptive military actions were thus always timely and befitting to the development of events.” “The stage of Peaceful Resistance was over,” and Medina became “a real Islamic State.”

“Through well-planned diplomatic activities,” Muslims “dismantled the enemy’s trust among themselves,” dividing them and preparing them for the kill. At the same time, “determined to carry out his mission to logical conclusion,” Muhammad never ceased revealing “Qur’anic injunctions revealed to him” by Allah, guiding “the transformation of society from ignorance into Islam.” In this way he “was constantly busy in building, developing and consolidating the team of his devoted and dedicated workers into a dynamic force of the Islamic Movement.” “Only such a team of workers would be capable of establishing Allah’s Deen in today’s world.” Thus Siddiqi presents himself as modeling Muhammad in contemporary America.

By the eight year of the Hejira, Muhammad had 10,000 followers under his command. Fortified by a peace treaty with his enemies and with God’s protection, Muhammad accelerated his dawah efforts, re-entered Mecca and converted “the entire population of Mecca.” Now, “the Deen was only for Allah.” “The Islamic state of Medina which had the authority all over the Arabia, was now a power to be reckoned with,” and Rome’s Caesar “was alarmed” at “this growing power at the Eastern frontier of his empire.” Soon, “the frontiers of the Islamic State [came into]… open confrontation with one of the superpowers of the time.” Although remaining “hypocrites in Medina” hoped to exploit this confrontation to “administer a fatal blow to the Movement in case [Muhammad] could be defeated by the Roman Empire,” they “were finally warned to accept Islam or be ready to fight,” “either to accept Islam or pay Jizyah [a tax on non-Muslims] and live a life of second class citizen [dhimmitude] under the bounds and bounties of [the] Islamic State.” That settled the matter, and Muhammad took the opportunity to practice dawah, universally. “This directive is binding on all Muslims until doomsday. It is now incumbent upon all Muslims to deliver the message of Islam to mankind and struggle their best to make His Deen dominant, irrespective of where they are and what they are doing.” In the late twentieth century, “this is now the only way left for Muslims to regain the leadership of this world.”

Accordingly, Siddiqi devotes his central chapters to the United States. Dawah “is the primary job,” there. In order to accomplish it, Muslims must organize themselves, and educate themselves for that job. American Muslims find themselves in the stage of jihad called “peaceful resistance.” They should wage “a relentless war against immoral practices, drugs, pornography, alcoholism racial discrimination, homosexuality, and other[s] like these.” Not only will this struggle bring the Da’ee into “direct contact with the people of the land at a grass-roots level,” it “may also offset the prejudices of Judeo-Christians against Islam,” leading them to “cooperate with the Muslims with better understanding and a with a soft corner in their hearts.” By so “creat[ing] the necessary goodwill among the people,” the Da’ee “will pave the way for the spread of Dawah deep in the society which otherwise would not be possible.”

Although this “initial stage” may prove “smooth sailing,” that won’t last. “Alarming signals will be raised by the so-called ‘free press,'” and “the Judeo-Christian anti-Islam propaganda machinery will then let loose its game of hate against Islam and the mission of the Prophet Muhammad,” filling the air with “baseless allegations” against them. Fanatics, reactionaries, conservatives, fundamentalist, and terrorists: the name-calling will begin, to be faced “with patience, cool-minded temperament, good behavior and exemplary character.” As “the Movement” begins to “penetrate deep into the hearts of the common folk,” a “counter-offensive campaign against the false propaganda,” coupled with a quest for “legal protection from court for fundamental human rights to propagate what its adherents believe to be correct and to profess the  same through democratic, peaceful and constitutional means,” can begin. Nonetheless, circumstances will worsen; “a period of trial is a must and is inevitable for Muslims wherever and whenever they rise and try to build the Islamic Movement for the establishment of Allah’s Deen”: “this is the logical consequence or the reaction of the society whose values and fundamentals of life are different from those of Islam.” Fortunately, the very character of the American regime, mere human artifacts though its laws may be, “provid[es] the opportunity to individuals or to a group of people to profess, practice and propagate any ideology of their choice.” Thus “the Muslims of America will also be free to mobilize themselves and carry out the program of Dawah Illallah [calling the people to the fold of Islam] to every nook and corner of America,” there being “nothing to hold them back” in “an almost congenial environment for Muslims to work,” at least initially. In this way the Muslim task will be easier in modern America than it was in tribal Arabia, with its “society of ignorance,” its lack of recognition “for fundamental human rights.”

Opposition “will come from the vested interests in the society,” such “modern idolators” as “the secular press cum media, the agents of capitalists, the champions of atheism (Godless creeds), the missionary zealots and extremely influential Jewish lobby of America.” These interests notwithstanding, “the Peaceful Resistance will… go on winning the hearts, the minds and the imagination of the people all around. There will be no status quo.” This campaign will prepare the way for the final two stages. Eventually, Allah will provide some territory in which true Muslims establish the Deen. Muslims worldwide may then emigrate to that territory. This may be in the United States, or not. In due course, Allah will make his choice manifest. “The Islamic Movement of America, resorting to intensive Dawah work, fighting Munkar [XXXX], rendering useful services to common folk through various projects of service-to-humanity, may influence a region or a state overwhelmingly,” resulting “in getting political strength through state legislatures and gubernatorial elections.” Muslims can then “try to make it into a model Islamic society within the power available under the constitution of the U.S.A and what it does not prohibit.” In turn, “this will pave the way to get hold of other states in a like manner. Thus, without disturbing or violating the constitution of the U.S.A., they can prepare the ground for the emergence of Islam as a way of life acceptable to the electorate of this country,” sending representatives to Congress and establishing “a strong lobby in Washington for the promotion of Islam and its cause in this country as well as elsewhere in the world.” Siddiqi insists, “This is not daydreaming. This is possible as well as feasible, if the Muslims are determined to play their part as Muslims in this country,” showing the American people that “the only way to get their past sins pardoned by God” and “to enter into paradise after death” in accordance with “the American way of life” is peaceful conversion to Islam. “This process is wide open in this country. It is anybody’s game.”
“The establishment of ‘God’s Kingdom’ on earth will not be a distant dream. It can emerge in the U.S.A. within the next two to three decades,” if Muslims take care not to test the limits of American constitutional law prematurely.

Thirty years since Siddiqi published those words, this has not happened, whatever inroads political Islam may have tunneled since the 1980s. Siddiqi sees the difficulties, soberly warning Muslims against “the fallacies of their wishful thinking.” At present, “Dawah work is pretty much limited to Afro-Americans and some other ethnic minorities,” and usually to those in prison. Worse, “the revolutionary aspect of Islam is rarely brought before the new converts, as in most of the cases the Da’ee himself is not conversant with it.” And it is “really a great tragedy” that the many Afro-American Muslims themselves are “divided into hundreds of water-tight compartments with no unity, or united platform or central leadership.” Dawah work remains “haphazard, irregular and without any planning.”

The same disunity prevails among Muslim organizations generally. “There is no central leadership and no common platform.” But “this is the only process through which the Muslims of America can emerge as a united political entity in the body politic of America.” Further, this platform requires a strategy, one designed for American circumstances. And it needs money, which it will need to acquire not from poverty-stricken African-American ex-convicts but from Muslim immigrants, who “are mostly affluent and can meet the target” of $25-$30 million per year, which would finance radio and television networks, schools, media, and research centers “to attract talented Muslim youth in and outside America to compete with the secular world.” Therefore, the African-American Muslim communities, who have the population numbers, and the mostly Arabian immigrants, who have the wealth, must combine in one Muslim Community of America.

But these organizational and financial issues pale before “the main cause of Muslims’ failure to come forward and meet the obligation lying on their shoulders”: “lack of vision.” “A Muslim has no place in this world until he undertakes what he is raised for in this world as a Khairal Ummah, the Best of Nations.” So long as Muslims “cut themselves off from the Qur’an,” or “study it in an academic fashion,” they will never found the Deen. Only when professing Muslims practice Qur’anic teachings will the deeper meanings of Allah’s message be revealed to them. Siddiqi insists that to know the Qur’an the believer must know it in ‘the Biblical sense’: intimately, in his heart, as a part of his inner self. “There have always been thousands and thousands of learned scholars of the Qur’an, Hadith, and Fiqh throughout the last thirteen hundred years, but they could not establish Allah’s Deen anywhere in this world in its totality after the first four Caliphs and Umar Bin Abdul Aziz.” “As a result, the Qur’an could not present itself as a practical reality to these learned scholars as it was to the Prophet Muhammad and his companions,” who were “cavaliers of the Islamic Movement,  not academicians of the Qur’an.” Such scholars are “perhaps” more sinful in God’s eyes “than one who is ignorant,” as they have no excuse. This is why, regardless of success or failure, which depend upon God’s Will, American Muslims must formulate a plan for action, where they are, now.

What kind of person is a true Da’ee? “Islam is a way of life.” The Da’ee must understand with “the fundaments” [sic] of that regime, its basic doctrines including the sovereignty of Allah, “Islamic social justice,” “the concept of Jihad and its necessity,” and “the principle of excellence on the basis of piety.” He will find these principles stated in the Qur’an but also embodied in Muhammad’s person and way of life. He must carefully assess the existing American regime, with its expanding economy under “the goddess of capitalism,” its notion of human, popular sovereignty, and the results of those features: “Gradually, America is growing into a colony of vested interests and international Zionists’ caprices and intrigues.” Moreover, “individual liberties and personal freedom have been distorted to serve only as a means to create lust for sex in the society, promote pornography and adopt perverted attitudes and violence in human relations.” As a result of these converging forces of corruption, popular sovereignty “has been eroded to an alarming state,” “women are challenging the authority of men’s domination in every field, resulting in the emergence of a society of unisex at an accelerated pace,” and “personal freedom amounts to a free license to dismantle the moral values and ethical standards of the society both by individuals and the media.” American material, military, and political greatness remains, but it is “ideologically and morally very poor.” Only Islam can truly enrich it.

In terms of geopolitics, American dominance has bred ‘Third-World’ resentment. As a result, “an economic war is imminent.” In Europe, the European Union, along with Japan, will also challenge the United States, as will the Soviet bloc. (In a later note, Siddiqi admits that “Russia has disintegrated and has become the ‘sick man’ of Europe,” but correctly insists that “still it has the potentials [sic] to play a third-party role in world politics in collaboration with China, North Korea and Cuba.”) In the Middle East, the state of Israel “is a smoldering bomb,” currently the instrument of U.S. policy but with dreams “of dominating” the region, with American partnership “in this dirty game.” As it also seeks to please “the so-called moderate Arabs,” America has “landed in a quagmire.” As for Latin America, “the people need some superb ideology to give redress to their problems and peace to their mind”; once again, Islam is the answer. So, because “America, in the present context of the world, has the potential to remain s superpower for many decades to come,” the Da’ee must continue to study world events, seeking opportunities to advance the cause.

Still, mere knowledge will never suffice. If a Da’ee “is weak in character, if he lacks in manifesting cool temperament, palatable manners, the requisite amount of devotion and dedication to the cause, if he is short of patience and perseverance against provocations and if he is devoid of determination to carry out the mission against all odds, he will not be able to meet the challenge.” “No amount of knowledge can bridge this gap.” Such character “cannot be produced in the cozy atmosphere of the drawing room or sitting in a corner like a hermit or Sufi and keeping aloof from the world and its happenings.” An umbrella organization of American Muslims must arrange for Dawah field work, whereby the Da’ee will get out and deal with people, deepening his knowledge of Islam by his practice of it among the American people—conversing, organizing, taking care to model the character type of the man under Allah’s regime. Without such practice, it is “rather impossible to generate the sterling qualities of heart and mind and acquire the required amount of personal endurance” necessary to advance that regime politically. Social work, service to the needy, will “gain recognition” for Muslims, “generate the goodwill of the masses and muster the support of the electorate.” “The process of learning, practicing and preaching will go together.”

Siddiqi emphasizes the importance of distributing “Dawah literature” in the United States, a point made to him by Mawlanda Mawdudi himself in a conversation at the end of Mawdudi’s life, after he had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, where his son practiced medicine. “We have to produce our own literature in the American perspective,” tracts that register “the moods, the temperament, the psychology of the people and the needs of this country.” Also, the Islamic organization should not depend on immigrants (such as himself) to lead the movement here. The immigrants “should remain in the background,” training American converts to serve as the spokesmen. And of course the Da’ee must avail himself must pray to Allah, asking to avail himself of Allah’s power.

Because “America is a predominantly secular cum permissive society” in which “people are mostly dominated and dictated by their physical urges,” “slaves to their physical instincts,” and governed by “a secular, rigid constitution that guarantees unrestricted personal freedom to act, to speak, to behave, to assemble, to move around and enjoy life the way they desire”; and because the slogan “In God We Trust” “is simply a slogan coined by their forefathers,” with “no bearing on their living condition,” religion “is nowhere visible in the life pattern of the people,” in what Aristotle calls their Bios ti; and because “the Judeo-Christian God is powerless, keeps away from the people’s lives, and has nothing to do with their social, economic and political activities” (“except in very small pockets of conservative Jews and Christians”); “for all practical purposes, America is a Godless society and purely materialistic in every walk of life.” This being so, America resembles the kind of society Muhammad encountered in seventh-century Arabia, “the society of ignorance (Jajhilayah)”. It is the society of modern ignorance. Therefore, “the basic principle for the presentation of Dawah Ilallah should naturally be the same: to call upon the people to obey God and accept Muhammad as God’s messenger.

But although America is a free society by habit and by law, “when the question of Islam arises, centuries-old prejudices come in the forefront,” such as “the distorted image of so-called terrorism” in the Middle East. Why “so-called”? Siddiqi doesn’t say, but it is likely that he regards acts of violence committed by devout Muslims as legitimate acts of jihad. To correct this such ‘distortions,’ the Da’ee must “proceed patiently, cautiously and diligently with Hikmah (wisdom) in the presentation of Islam to the American people. This will be possible because both God and prophethood are familiar to Jews and Christians. The Christian understanding of God as one Godhead, three Persons, should be challenged as polytheistic or else illogical. “The concept of Trinity appears to be unreasonable and self-contradictory”; the Da’ee must argue against “the dogma of the ‘human-God’ of Christendom, innovated by the Jewish conspiracy against Prophet Jesus.” It is noteworthy that Siddiqi intends a rational argument (aimed initially at priests and pastors). Siddiqi optimistically contends that “there is no reason why positive response will not be forthcoming, at least from the moderate Christians”; as for the immoderate ones, they can be made “shaky in their beliefs” in this way. [1]

Alongside this deployment of reason (or sophistry, as the case may well be), the Da’ee should also invoke the passion of fear. This is the approach not so much to priests and pastors as to the people. Tell the people: You will be held accountable before God on the Day of Judgment. Better get this right, or else. “The fear of God and the fear of accountability in the Hereafter will keep the people on the path of righteousness.” Heed the prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad—especially the latter, since “when a new prophet came the previous code of conduct was automatically canceled” “it is essential for every man and woman on earth to follow the latest Guidance brought by the last messenger of God,” namely, Muhammad. For these reasons, the people “have no choice but to accept the Qur’an as the only Guidance now available to mankind to follow.” [2]

“The Christian community of America will need a special approach to make them understand their misguided concept about Jesus.” On this, Siddiqi logic-chops thusly: God created Adam with no father or mother, Eve without a mother. Christians don’t “ascribe the attributes of God to either one of them. How then can they profess Jesus to be the Son of God? It is illogical and quite absurd.” The syllogism, such as it is, amounts to this: Adam had no father; Adam was not God (he did of course have some of the “attributes” of God, but let that pass); therefore, Jesus cannot be the Son of God. But (obviously) if Jesus is not the same kind of being as Adam, why not? Somewhat more seriously, Siddiqi then claims that ‘making’ Jesus into a human-God “is clear idolatry,” inasmuch as “making partners with God is a sin,” and an unforgiveable one at that. But if Jesus’ godliness and humanity, if Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time, this is self-contradictory only if He was fully God and fully man in the same way as He was in His fatherliness. The designation of the second Person of the Trinity as the Son of God indicates otherwise.

Once Christians (and presumably “shaky” Jews) have had their convictions de-centered, they will be prepared to receive the message of the Messenger as the only way out of their predicament. Verbal argumentation is one thing, but printed tracts and pamphlets are indispensable for this “important task [that] has been neglected so far by the Muslim organizations of America/Europe due to lac of vision.” Islamic publications shouldn’t be restricted to things aimed at the masses. A magazine “to serve as a vehicle to carry out the message of Islam to the intellectuals of the society presenting an alternative system of life against what is in practice today” will “prepare the ground” for “the better educated and informed segments of the society” to “accept Islam as their way of life.” Congruently, “For Dawah work in the universities and colleges, it must be pointed out that there should be more concentration on the teachers than the students, or equally on both.” The teachers are “free, they have the time and they exert a lot of influence upon the students. If they are convinced about Islam as a way of life, they can motivate their students to that effect in great numbers. Teachers will therefore be the special Dawah targets of the Islamic Movement.”

In all these efforts, “the Da’ee must know the inhabitants, to whom the message is to be delivered, well.” “Their mood and temperament, their habits and tastes, their likes and dislikes, their fields of interest, the qualities of their character”—in sum, the ethos of the regime—must be thoroughly understood. “The job of a Da’ee is like that of a doctor,” diagnosing and prescribing to his patient. Once cured of his spiritual ills, the patient may himself become a doctor, or at least a medical paraprofessional, a partner in the task of Islamification. As the cure in its initial stages will be verbal, the doctor of Dawah must be alert to “the situation and timing” of his presentation, waiting until “the contactee is in a receptive mood,” changing the subject if “an addressee is found yawning or restless or absentminded or [un]interested.” And of course “when the attitude of obstinacy comes into the dialogue or the addressee becomes adamant,” “refus[ing] even to listen to logic,” the Da’ee should retreat with the intention of “meet[ing] again at some future time.” “In no way should he hurt the feelings of his contactees.” “Neither force nor any coercive method is to be applied while presenting Dawah to non-Muslims.” In America, at least. “Pray to Allah for the opening of the heart of the contactee and beg from Him to present the message in soft but effective language and in a palatable manner.”

Proselytizing can also take the form of action. “Every worker of the Islamic Movement, through service to the people in his neighborhood and vicinity, should acquire prominence as a person to be sought after in time of need,” not for the sake of “fame or reputation” but to “earn the sympathy of the people for the sake of Allah and then go deeper into the society for Dawah work.” For this, the elderly—many of them “sick or incapacitated and confined to homes or elderly people care centers—”are a useful electorate” and a rich potential source of community outreach, if converted. On the other side of the spectrum, runaway children, foster children, abused children, and other needy youngsters will respond to “fatherly guidance” from the Da’ee. Model foster hopes and hostels in which Islam is taught will bring this opportunity to fruition, as they will amount to a parallel to the care facilities available to the elderly. Finally, “counseling service to battered husbands and battered wives will ultimately bring them nearer to Islam,” as “they will all feel obligated to the teachings of Islam that changed their lives and made their matrimonial life happier and rejuvenated.” All such services can help to effect regime change, “bring[ing] before this nation Islam as a way of life” and counteracting depraved sexual behavior by “creating hate/contempt against the existing lifestyle of the people” of America—which, as he has already contended, has sunk deep into sinfulness.

Siddiqi concludes with a personal postscript. “In 1982, I went around the world and visited many countries, with the sole objective of finding out the place where an effective Islamic Movement could be developed in the present context of the world in order to make Allah’s Deen dominant somewhere on this earth.” He found that “America is the most suitable place in the Western hemisphere for that glorious end to be started.” But it has barely begun. “A serious Islamic Movement for the establishment of Allah’s Deen is yet to emerge in the body politic of the U.S.A.” He calls for existing Muslim organizations to “take up the task of Dawah Ilallah along the lines suggested in this book,” to unite without delay in working toward that end. Among those who seem to have done so was Mohamed Akram al-Adouni, then a member of the Board of Directors of the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at this writing the General Secretary of the Al Quds International Forum, which finances the Hamas organization in Gaza. In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” published in 1991, Akram praised “the brothers in the Islamic Circle”—Siddiqi’s organization—for their “attempt to reach a unity of merger” with other like-minded organizations. In Akram’s language, the purpose of such an organization does indeed resemble Siddiqi’s stated intention, albeit expressed more tartly: workers “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ it miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Whereas Siddiqi emphasizes the rhetorical content and methods of Dawah, Akram focuses more on the need for organization—the beginnings of the politeia of the new regime, beginning with Islamic Centers “in every city.” “The center ought to turn into a ‘beehive’ which produces sweet honey,” a civil-social political society in itself, offering education, recreation, social activities, and headquarters for political campaigns. The role of the Islamic Center “should be the same as the ‘mosque’s’ role during the time of God’s prophet… when he marched to ‘settle’ the Dawah in its first generation in Medina.” In modern times, such organizational tasks were first begun by Hassan al-Banna, “the pioneer of the contemporary Islamic Dawah” and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the decades before the Second World War. In America today, “the big challenge that is ahead of us is how to turn… seed or ‘scattered’ elements into comprehensive, stable, ‘settled’ organizations that are connected with our Movement and which fly in our orbit and take orders from our guidance.” Larger and better-funded than Siddiqi’s Islamic Circle of North America, the Brotherhood was indeed better situated to effect Siddiq’s program.

Controversy remains on whether the American organization heeded Akram’s memorandum. But why would it not?

 

 

Notes

1. As Christian theologians from Augustine forward have observed, the Trinitarian understanding of God involves no contradiction if the three Persons are understood as Personae of the same God or “Godhead,” to use the preferred term of these thinkers. Otherwise, it would be impossible to ‘have faith’ in the existence of such a God, since one cannot have faith in any person or any thing who or which is inconceivable. If you tell me to accept on faith that you are holding a square circle in your closed hand, at most I can believe that you are holding something you call a square circle; because I can’t conceive of such a thing, I cannot ‘have faith’ that you have a real square circle in your hand, not knowing what you could possibly be talking about.
2. In fact, Jesus tells his Jewish disciples that not one jot or tittle of the Jewish law has been suspended for them. He does not require non-Jewish converts to take up obedience to that law, but that is not a cancellation of the prophecies already heard by the Israelites insofar as they were directed exclusively to them.

Russell Muirhead: The Promise of Party in a Polarized Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

 

Hand-wringing over the partisan animosities of the day bore me somewhat, as it strikes me that the day deserves them. Legal abortions or not? An administrative state oligarchy or a constitutional republic? And what about China? Given such conflicts, political tranquility would be a very bad sign. Under these circumstances, lack of animosity would betray weakness of anima in Americans.

Professor Muirhead understands the thumotic dimension of politics. “I prefer the eighteenth-century phrase ‘party spirit’ to the social-scientific ‘partisanship'”; “party spirit” captures the spiritedness of politics, its characteristic claims to rule and demands for ‘recognition.’ “Reason can—and should—inform, guide, and chasten party spirit” (why else write a scholarly book about it?) but politics will never be purely rational, whatever Enlightenment worthies may have believed. “Rather than expect that partisanship can be overcome, or transcended, or simply turned off in those places where its presence would be corrupting, it, is better—more true to the real possibilities for democratic politics—to differentiate between more elevated and more base expressions of party spirit.” American politics needs “not less partisanship, but better partisanship,” party spirit aiming not merely at victory but at the implementation of policies informed by “convictions, principles, and perceptions of the common interest.” As it will transpire, he understands that victory is indispensable to the implementation of such policies, and also that a tyrant might have convictions, principles, and perceptions of the common interest.

In contemporary America, “intense partisanship is the new normal,” as “government has become a theater for entertaining partisan true believers rather than a setting for brokering, negotiation, deliberation, and compromise.” Party spirit now pervades the souls of many people, not only “political elites.” Lack of shared “values and goals” makes people distrust one another, which in turn “can threaten the unity of the political community” because “losers to political conflict have less reason to abide by the constitutional processes that delivered their loss” and may even “decide that violence or secession is preferable to peaceful opposition and constitutional obedience.” This is why George Washington warned against what he called the “baneful effects of the spirit of party” in his Farewell Address. Thomas Jefferson concurred, but nonetheless “founded the first opposition party” out of concern that elements among those who had supported ratification of the 1787 Constitution surreptitiously harbored monarchist ambitions. Muirhead sympathizes with Jefferson’s dilemma: “No open society over the past three centuries has succeeded without parties and partisanship.”

Moving ahead to the present (for him, this is 2014), Muirhead remarks the increasingly “conservative” (and therefore partisan) character of the Republican Party, but oddly contrasts this with the Democrats, whose party, he claims, “retains its catch-all flavor,” “continu[ing] to cover a greater variety of ideological views.” At best one might say this is no longer true. The statement that “the tactics that the Republican Party uses in office appear to be less compromising and more destructive of the trust that governing requires” than those of the Democrats is equally dated. Again dubiously, Muirhead equates ‘liberalism’ with ‘progressivism,’ following the old New Dealers’ self-description, which was plausible only when New Dealers contrasted themselves with Marxists and their ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ And of course his suggestion that liberals, so defined, “might be more effective if they could see themselves as more partisan, and as engaged in a partisan fight” hardly applies to American politics now, even if it did in 2014. (It didn’t.)

What Muirhead “want[s] to defend” is “a kind of party spirit that is worn lightly, one that is open to facts and revision, and tolerant of—even appreciative of—opponents.” Partisans animated by that spirit would serve the right functions of partisans: with “a shared memory” of past achievements,” they “come together, and stay together, to protect these achievements.” What partisans should avoid is erecting “a ‘perceptual stream’ that filters out all information embarrassing to one’s own party,” thereby suffering “epistemic closure that makes it impossible to contemplate one’s own party’s errors and misdeeds.” Individual partisans must do a bit of that, anyway, simply in becoming partisans—that is, in joining a party that includes fellow-citizens who do not agree with every detail of their own opinions on all ‘issues.’ If partisans refuse to, as it were, lighten up, they might “render the government incapable of governing.” As he knows, this is what more-or-less happens in civil wars, and (as he seems not to know) this is what foreign enemies want to happen, as they essay to divide us preliminary to ruling us.

Muirhead steps back to consider party spirit as understood by Americans in the past, and by the ‘ancients’ as well as ‘moderns.’ In America, the Progressives hoped to reduce that spirit to an absolute minimum because they regarded contemporary parties as defenders of oligarchy, “corrupt[ing] government of the people by substituting for it government by party bosses and special interests,” such as big industrial corporate bosses who paid off those bosses. Not only did Progressives valorize “the ideal of the independent citizen who could think and vote free from the influence of party,” their “lasting reforms” (i.e., not prohibition of alcoholic beverages) “all aimed to circumvent the parties and directly empower the people.” These reforms included the secret ballot, the direct primary, direct election of U.S. senators, ballot initiatives, and recall of suspect public officials. Crucially, he ignores the new oligarchy Progressives substituted for the parties: tenured civil servants in an ‘administrative state’ or bureaucracy. Woodrow Wilson wrote as tellingly about that as he did about the ‘democratic’ side of his proposed ‘new-republican’ revolution.

Muirhead sees that there’s much more to it than that, however. The modern critique of parties comes from the modern reconception of parties themselves, itself a part of the modern reconception of politics. “The modern conception of politics is founded on principles of political morality that are taken to be true (and thus beyond contestation) in contrast to the traditional conception of politics, which denied that any political regime could be founded on truth.” Both modern party spirit and modern anti-partisanship share “an exaggerated sense of the work that moral principles can do in politics,” thereby “inflat[ing] expectations for a commonsense pragmatic politics that can only, in the end, leave citizens disappointed and confused.” Traditional anti-partisanship makes more sense because it shifts the highest moral expectations away from politics.

By traditional anti-partisanship Muirhead means Aristotelian regime theory, not the actual practices of partisans in the ancient polis. Aristotle understands partisan politics as fundamentally a contest between oligarch and democrats, each faction making claims to rule, and each finding their claims “convincing and complete,” matters of “right and wrong, justice and injustice.” Aristotle disagrees. Political philosophy distances itself from such claims; that’s what got Socrates in trouble—eventually, Aristotle too. “To the philosopher, the claims each group advances look more partial than they seem from the inside” because those claims “reflect a group’s particular interest” rather than any dispassionate, reasoned consideration of the political community as a whole. To understand a political community as a whole includes seeing the reasons for the claims to rule made by partisans, some of which are more reasonable than others. Such claims “involve arguments about who deserves what; they are connected to ways of life and understandings of character that are nourished by and sustained by these ways of life.” They are claims about not only who should rule here and now but about the best regime, what the best way of life is, what the best human ‘type’ is, and what place each human type justly occupies in the political community. Every regime has one set of rulers and not another; every regime remains incomplete for that reason, while mistakenly believing itself to be complete. Questioning that completeness will likely enrage the rulers.

Muirhead rightly notes that “traditional partisanship is motivated fundamentally not by selfish interests but by pride.” He means that Aristotle understands claims to rule to register not material desires primarily but honor: the desire for the prestige of office. This sense of honor or pride tends to foreclose reasoning. “Citizens must be unaware of their own—and their regime’s—partiality,” and when the annoying reasoner points this out they do not to it kindly. This inevitable and to some extent indispensable prejudice can be tempered by civic education. In its mild-mannered, eminently civil way, Aristotle’s Politics consists not only of thoughts interesting to philosophers but of considerations thoughtful if non-philosophic citizens need to weigh, teaching them (among many other things) why their partisan enemies think the way they do.

James Madison shared much of Aristotle’s understanding of the party spirit. The tenth Federalist “adapts the traditional worry to the circumstances of commercial society, where the fundamental classes of the ancient polity—the demos and the oligarchs—are fragmented into a multiplicity of interests.” Although Muirhead doesn’t say it (persisting in his neglect of modern statism), Madison’s solution to excessive partisanship or factionalism depends in part upon the scope of the modern state, as well as upon the form of that state Madison famously commends: federal republicanism, the “extended republic.” Within that state, Madison would encourage a vast free-trade zone, fostering “a dynamic and extensive commercial society” that will multiply factions, preventing any one faction to become strong enough to dominate the others. By so “offer[ing] a modern solution to the partisan threat, he saw the threat in traditional terms.” Modern political parties would aspire to a size big enough to win national elections, and in so doing would encompass many of the factions seen in that nation. ‘Extended’ political parties would therefore be somewhat more faction-like than the American nation, but not nearly so factional and impassioned as the ones that troubled the small poleis of antiquity.

Muirhead adds the familiar argument that modern political thinkers set a somewhat lower bar for political life than the ancients did. “No more is politics about justice in the sense of upholding an idea about which way of life is most worthy”; modern politics aims “principally” at “self-preservation and commodious living,” while ‘privatizing’ the quest for higher things. Its way of life is commercial, leaving room for religion but not establishing any particular church or creed, “tak[ing] rival conceptions about how best to care for the immortal soul out of politics”. Those thinkers did so in a largely successful attempt to end religious warfare in Europe and, in consequence, prevent its appearance in Europe’s North American colonies.

This did not, and was not intended, to preclude the formation of what Muirhead calls a “last party,” that is, a party “distinguished by its commitment to the rational first principles of political morality at a moment when these principles remain in dispute.” He gives Whigs, Marxists, and John Rawls’s “deliberative democracy” proposal as examples of such parties, although he unaccountably ignores the Founders and their distinguished defender Abraham Lincoln. He objects to such efforts: “This is the wrong way to conceive of political unity. What defines a liberal politics is not an agreement only to disagree within certain bounds (never touching foundational ideas), but to disagree in a certain way; according to constitutional procedures, in a certain manner.” Whether Progressives, Whigs, Marxists, or Rawls would endorse this is irrelevant, however; it is the Founders who count when it comes to the United States Constitution and the regime it fortifies. If ‘liberalism’ now means ‘Progressivism,’ or some closely related phenomenon, then that simply means that Progressives have likely departed from Constitutional principles.

Muirhead commits this error because he misconceives the “fundamental points” underlying “modern representative democracy,” at least as the Founders stated them. He cites rule by consent of the governed, liberty (especially liberty of conscience), and “the affirmation of political equality” (especially the rejection of slavery). But the Founders base their regime not on political right but on natural right, and the regime fought a civil war in large measure over just that point, which was denied by the regime of the secessionist entity.

He continues, quite reasonably, to say that “We agree, while disagreeing about procedures, Court decisions, and the ends politics should serve, to keep our guns in their holsters.” That is the core of liberalism as Muirhead defines it, and it means that neither the Founders nor the Progressives (to say nothing of Marxists and American Whigs) were liberals in his sense. He reaches firmer ground when he observes that partisanship “ultimately concerns the most fundamental questions of politics,” the regime questions: Who rules, and who deserves to rule? What are the purposes of the political community? And what does it stand for?

Since “being reasonable is never sufficient to permanently and justly settle conflict” in practice, he turns to a modern liberal who recognizes that fact and addresses it, well, reasonably. John Stuart Mill acknowledges the partial cogency of both Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian rationalism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s esteem for tradition. Muirhead rejects the argument of the Declaration of Independence because its “self-evident” truths are not really self-evident. Mill’s version of utilitarianism, at once more capacious and refined than Bentham’s, comes close to appropriating Aristotle’s sense of the philosophic umpire captured, however imperfectly, by the mind of the civically-educated citizen, one who tests his own convictions against those of others and against stubborn realities of everyday life. If “what we need is not less partisanship but better partisanship,” then Mill’s brand of utilitarianism may point the way to it. It might, except that it’s hard to distinguish Mill’s mild skepticism from ‘being reasonable,’ the very stance that Muirhead finds insufficient to settle conflict.

One thumotic characteristic of political life is loyalty. “It is possible to be loyal and to see the object of our loyalty as it is, with all its faults.” Indeed so: Christians call this agapic love. (This is a point that Dartmouth political scientists may be excused for not noticing.) In ordinary circumstances, however, loyalty is double-edged, as it may lead both to crucial support in difficult times and to foolish assent to evildoing. “If loyalty were merely strategic, it would boil down to a form of prudence.” True enough, but there’s more than one form of prudence, as when Jesus tells His disciples to be innocent as doves but prudent as serpents. To love my friend, in the sense of desiring the best ‘him,’ will require me to know him, to know the good, and to figure out how to fit those two knowledges together. (The same goes for loving my enemy, or myself.) Muirhead sees some of this when he writes, “to be loyal we do not need to close ourselves off to the terrain of elemental facts.” We can ‘fact-check’ our own party’s candidate, not only the other party’s candidate. What is more, in doing this and in undertaking other political tasks we can exercise “remembrance and patience,” the latter again being a consequence of agapic love. “The judgments we make today are subject to revision in light of events and developments that have yet to take place.” Partisanship coupled with patience proves “necessary to any government that tries to serve a popular purpose” and, one might add, any government that serves nearly any purpose.

Having availed himself of Christian virtues without invoking Christianity, Muirhead now turns to several specific matters relating to modern-day democratic politics in the United States. The first is the primary election. Progressives advocated ‘primaries’ as a device to reduce the power of party ‘bosses.’ This didn’t so much eliminate party spirit as extend it to the voters who show up to vote in party primaries, who no longer necessarily expected government jobs from winning candidates (those were increasingly filled by professional administrators) but instead were motivated by ‘issues’—very often advanced in a manner that stirred passions strong enough to impel party members to show up at the polls. Following his prescription, Muirhead wants simultaneously to elevate and moderate the many issues-oriented voters. This is hard to do, and “few democracies in the world today routinely invite the general citizenry to participate directly in party nominations,” as Americans have done in the past 120 years or so. Here, only primaries closed to everyone except registered party members can make it likely that the candidate will be a genuine representative of his party, but the logic of inclusion characteristic of democracy has made closed primaries things of dubious legitimacy, even in the eyes of loyal partisans. He sees nothing more than increased “civic knowledge” among voters as a possible solution to this dilemma. The real solution would be to get cut back on the administrative state and offer spoils to the victors, again. Is this any more corrupt than a primary system in which special-interest money will always get in, somehow, and an administrative state and a popularly-elected legislature both far from immune to cozy alliances with oligarchs.

Of the three branches of American government, the legislature provides the most natural home for partisanship. “This is where modern partisanship was born, and where it continues to be nourished.” Organization along party lines is the only way to get things done in such a body, an excellent point, given the common assumption that parties in legislatures lead only to ‘gridlock.’ Further, “without party unity, voters would have a far more difficult time sorting out what their vote is endorsing or rejecting,” as they “would need to track the voting records of individual legislators.” Like any good follower of Mill, however, Muirhead finds an exception to this rule: the unicameral legislature of Nebraska, “one of the only nonpartisan legislatures in the world” and also one of the most popular with citizens. It is true that this results in piecemeal, even incoherent, legislation when an observer searches for any overall policy and purpose in Nebraska lawmaking, as shifting coalitions vote for laws on a case-by-case basis. The legislature’s designer, the well-known early Progressive George Norris, wanted government to run ‘like a business,’ solving concrete problems; in this, he partook of the pragmatic Progressivism of (for example) John Dewey, rather than the German-idealist Progressivism of a man like Wilson. This is all too businesslike for Muirhead, who protests that the business model exists to maximize profit, but in government “there is no single purpose that must be prioritized over all rivals”. But if the Nebraska legislature proceeds piecemeal, and yields no coherent overall policy, how can it be criticized for being too businesslike, too focused?

Another proposal for legislative reform is the establishment of a “Centrist Party,” which would perform the same function in a legislature as the middle class would do in Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’: serving as a balance wheel between the two more extreme, and possibly larger, parties. Unlike the Nebraska system, this “does not suppose that politics, ideally, will lack partisan conflict.” Muirhead doubts that it would work, as the Centrist Party itself would still be a party but at the same time “could not easily elicit passions and devotion because it can offer no stead principles, it can invoke no social or historical history about itself, and it cannot connect in a stable way with concrete social groups.” In this it would be quite unlike Aristotle’s middle class.

Beyond legislative politics one finds the executive and judicial branches. In them, partisanship works less well than it does in the legislature. The original duty of the executive under the Constitution as originally understood was precisely to execute, and nothing else: to execute the laws passed by Congress in accordance with the constitutional framework and to defend the country against any sudden foreign attacks or domestic violence on those occasions when there was no time to consult Congress. The original duty of the judiciary was to “say what the law is,” and surely not to ‘interpret’ the Constitution in such a way as effectively to amend it. But “in the twentieth century, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and even more notably with Woodrow Wilson presidents became partisan in a new way: they were charged”—by themselves, it should be noted—”with formulating and advancing a program that would orient the actions of both the national legislature and the executive administration.” The intention to “us[e] the presidency to transform eighteenth-century constitutional democracy into twentieth-century party democracy was Woodrow Wilson’s idea,” Muirhead rightly remarks. As a result, when Ronald Reagan essays ‘conservative’ policies, he could only act as a ‘visionary’ Wilson-like president, exercising ‘leadership.’ That was the way the circumstances of the office of the presidency effectively had been rearranged. By contrast, but still within the same framework, President Barack Obama presented himself as an above-the-fray manager, as if he were the Bureaucrat of all bureaucrats. “Hidden in this [was] an arrogant insistence that everyone should agree with us, without the bother of explaining why.” Obama’s difficulties in justifying his national health care program were self-created; he pretended that a partisan, indeed socialist or quasi-socialist policy could be fobbed off as a mere tying-up of a governing loose end. Muirhead goes on to criticize Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, not for Olympian complacency but low-minded, partisan use of the Attorney-General’s office.

The Department of Defense also has become partisan in the wrong way, Muirhead charges. The white, male, and Southern enlistees who predominantly populate the American military vote Republican. “The specter of a military coup seems fantastic only because the nonpartisan posture of military officers has made it so unthinkable.” But, according to him, “this professional norm is the principle that retired generals invade when they endorse political candidates.” Given the fact that numerous retired generals have not merely endorsed political candidates but have become political candidates—Washington, Jackson, Grant, and Eisenhower being among the more prominent—with no ill effects, it is hard to take this complaint seriously.

Muirhead concludes, “The modern conceit—that having discovered the first principles of political morality, we have escaped the partisan predicament of traditional politics—is overdrawn.” It is, although neither the Founders, nor Lincoln, nor any of the major political figures of eighteenth and nineteenth century America thought of politics that way. The “self-evident” truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence were a casus belli, not a settlement, of a partisan dispute; those same truths also saw not merely partisan but violent partisan defense in the Civil War and in several foreign wars.

This notwithstanding, Muirhead correctly observes that “the realignment of conservative southern whites away from their habitual attachment to the Democratic Party”—it had become “habitual” during and after the slavery controversy, in opposition to the Republicans—”and toward the Republican Party is what allowed the parties to become more ideologically distinct.” The “bipartisan consensus” that had prevailed, rather briefly, from roughly 1940 through the mid-to-late Sixties, came at the price of tolerating systematic violation of the natural rights of the descendants of slaves. But he misreads the immediate future, supposing that the “disconnect” between the American people and the political elites will hinge on popular disinclination to pay higher taxes colliding with the elites’ sober recognition that higher taxes will be necessary to pay the national debt. The actual “disconnect” has in fact been not financial but moral—or, as one says now, ‘cultural’—and economic. A substantial portion of the American people reprehend the libertine morality of the elites, and their attempts to prevent the practice of traditional morality by that portion of the American people. At the same time, many of these same persons have lost well-paying manufacturing jobs as the result of internationalist economic policies designed by the elites. Hence Trump—much to the dismay of the elites. ‘Conservatives’ have been saying such things for years; seldom heeded or even noticed by the elites, including those ensconced at Ivy League political science departments, and have only begun to take notice in the years after Professor Muirhead published his book.

This intelligently-argued if often confused book contributes to the discussion of the party spirit in America, a discussion that itself has become partisan.