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.

 

 

 

 

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.: The Decline of American Liberalism. New York: Atheneum, 1969 [1955].

 

By ‘liberalism,’ Ekirch means not progressivism—which defines individual liberty as the right to thoughts and actions deemed legal within, and by, a substantial administrative state—but as an attempt “to limit the authority of both church and state, and to protect certain fundamental individual rights from interference by governing power.” These rights include individual and political rights to self-government: for the individual, freedom of conscience and property; for a nation, independence or self-determination. Liberalism does not mean democracy, inasmuch as majority rule might repress these rights, nor does it mean “philosophical anarchism,” as a liberal might well advocate republicanism or representative government. Liberalism endorsed “the idea of a universe governed by natural laws” and the corollary “faith in human reason and in the ability of the educated individual to understand the laws of nature and guide himself accordingly.” This inclines liberals to accept ‘religion within the limits of reason,’ that is, religious conduct that does not impinge the natural duties and rights of the believer or of anyone else. The original liberals  limited the powers of the state, inasmuch as “arbitrary state regulations not only interfered with the operation of natural laws, but also curbed the natural rights of the individual,” as established by natural laws. “Political economy was a science devoted to the discovery and better understanding of natural laws” as they pertain to the natural human inclination to truck and to barter. “The state was limited in its scope of operations to the preservation and protection of the natural rights of its citizens,” as the Declaration of Independence does indeed declare. Liberals intend all of this to advance “the perfectibility of mankind,” not in any grand, utopian sense but in the sense of giving human beings the best practicable chance to realize their natures, as individuals and as political societies.

Ekirch won his most enduring support among libertarians or, as they came to call themselves, “classical liberals.” As a conscientious objector during World War II who worked as a self-described “political prisoner” in government-assigned civilian occupations for the duration of that conflict, he turned to the study of intellectual history in an attempt better to understand how such things could have happened with the enthusiastic support not only of government officials but of the American people. He received his doctoral degree in history (studying under Merle Conti), and published The Decline of American Liberalism in the aftermath not only of the war but of the Army-McCarthy hearings in the United States Senate, an investigation in which one formidable part of America’s central-state apparatus faced off against an elected representative deploying methods that did little to advance the cause of civil liberties. In a preface to the book’s second edition, published fifteen years later, Ekirch insists that “individual freedom continues to be threatened by the forces of nationalism and war—and the resultant concentration of ever greater powers in the institutions of the modern stat and its corporate adjuncts.” The newer, ‘progressive’ liberalism “becomes more and more identified with the mass or the group and with the rights and privileges associated with large-scale organizations and their aggregation of private or public power.” Progressives argue that “if certain traditional individual rights are lost in the process, compensation… will come in the form of new privileges offered by the modern welfare state.” Perhaps so, Ekirch concedes, but “what the government grants it can also withdraw.” Hence “what were considered natural rights at the time of the Declaration of Independence proceeds apace.” And “something of real value has been lost” in a political order in which wiretapping, government secrecy, and travel restrictions have become routine. It is true that there has been one substantial victory for liberty since 1955: civil rights for African-Americans. But even these are limited, since American blacks remain subject to the same legal obligations as whites, such as conscription.

Under such conditions, “I do not think many of the traditional freedoms will remain in any effective sense. Instead of fundamental liberties we will have privileges granted or taken away as the occasion permits.” This will be the culmination of a “gradual and cumulative” erosion of American liberties, an erosion made possible by a sort of deception: “What frequently passes for liberalism today is too often an opportunistic philosophy which, by its extreme relativist definition of terms, effectively conceals the disintegration of the liberal tradition.” Progressives have used a philosophic doctrine, historical relativism, to undermine a natural-rights doctrine, liberalism. And as a historian, Ekirch seeks to expose the ‘use and abuse of history’ for that erosive purpose.

Ekirch thus earns credit as one of the earliest scholars to identify the historicist, specifically Hegelian, source of liberal anti-liberalism. In the nineteenth century, he observes, economic nationalism and imperialism amounted to the thin end of the wedge that pried loose the forces of “the totalitarian nationalisms” (and internationalisms?) “of the twentieth century.” “Plans for state education and social security were advanced side by side with the conscription of individuals for military service,” especially in Bismarck’s Prussia but also in England. “During these years certain English intellectuals became admirers of Bismarck’s state socialism, while Hegel, according to the French historian Halévy, had more avowed followers in Britain than in Germany.” Limited government under the rule of law seemed much too slow and inefficient to ardent reformers, who “were prepared to welcome a coming era of strong executive administration.” By 1900, English liberals were caught between “two extremes”: ‘Left’ demands for social legislation and economic reforms; ‘Right’ demands for protective tariffs to finance a bigger navy, defending the empire for formidable rivals—very much including Wilhelmine Germany, successfully united by Bismarck and the first Wilhelm and now ruled by Wilhelm’s unruly son in association with military aristocrats. Under Liberal Party leader Lloyd George, “Liberals gave up their individualism and instead turned to new taxes”; the First World War would “wreck the Liberal party and fatally undermine English liberalism.” This would serve not as a warning to Americans but as a model. By the 1912 election, the forlorn sitting president, William Howard Taft, would come in a distant third to progressives Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

America had been settled by men and women “fleeing absolutism.” Such persons were welcome to go, as far as the European regimes of absolute monarchy were concerned. Except for slaves and indentured servant, American colonists were substantially free if not civilly and socially equal; even slaves and servants were intended for liberty, subjects of “educating and Christianizing” preparation “for eventual freedom.” Whether Deists or evangelical Christians, Americans affirmed “the importance of the individual in religion and his emancipation from older and more conservative”—read ‘hierarchical’ or ‘authoritarian’—”forms of worship.”

In philosophy, Americans turned away from Calvinist determinism and toward John Locke’s view (as Ekirch not-so-accurately depicts it) of a “plastic theory of human nature” whereby “man’s nature was subject to change and that reform could be achieved through an improvement of the environment.” This confuses Locke theory of the human mind as a tabula rasa with his much less “plastic” account of human passions, which Locke considered both innate and selfish. It would be better to say that Locke comes down somewhere between Calvin and Rousseau. But he does indeed reject the assumption that subjects must never rise up to make citizens out of themselves, forthrightly asserting a right to revolution unseen in his liberal philosophic predecessor, Thomas Hobbes.

“The American Revolution was an event of transcendent importance in the history of the liberal tradition,” asserting self-government on the basis of the natural rights of individuals. “Better than any other single document, the Declaration of Independence stated the liberal political philosophy on which the ideology of the Revolution was based,” and did so in the “mild and dignified” language of Thomas Jefferson’s syllogism, which “argued the cause of revolution in a rational and restrained manner.” Showing that the imperial state and monarchic regime of Great Britain waged war against them, not the other way around, the revolutionaries did not so much as call Americans to arms (as the French would do, later) but “appealed to world opinion to recognize the justice and merits of the American position.” This resulted in a commercial republic governed initially and only in part by General Washington, not a military republic followed by a military despotism ruled by General Bonaparte.

Ekirch imagines that most of the Founders “probably thought in terms of freedom and equality only for those already free or of freedom for political man as he existed in the eighteenth century.” In this dubious assumption he anticipates the ‘Left’ criticisms of the Declaration and the Constitution familiar today. But unlike these latter-day polemicists, he observes that “the question… was at least left open,” and even if (for example) “only a quarter of the adult male population was able to vote,” this “moderate concession to popular rule was regarded as a real advance toward democracy,” given the political conditions prevailing everywhere else in the world at that time. Even during the Revolutionary War itself, “many Americans, despite the state of hostilities, were able to carry on their normal peacetime interests and pursuits.”

It should be added that many were not: Loyalists eventually were driven out and their property confiscated—an omission that tells on Ekirch’s argument very quickly. He calls the Constitution produced by the 1789 Constitution convention the product of “conservative reaction.” But of course the real ‘conservatives’ had been driven out; the politics of throne and altar, even in its mild, unwritten-constitution British form, no longer had any real partisans in America. What Ekirch calls “the shift in thought in the period between the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution” could not have been a fundamental shift, as there was no one among the Framers who denied the natural right to liberty. To appropriate the formulation of an early American progressive, it wasn’t that progressives wanted to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends (in fact, as Ekirch rightly observed, progressive ends weren’t Jeffersonian at all, and their means weren’t simply Hamiltonian). Rather, Hamilton wanted to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends, that is, to use government to secure natural rights, rights he never failed to endorse in The Federalist and on every other relevant occasion. A stronger federal government, the national bank, the protective tariff, and internal improvements were all so intended. The quarrel with Jefferson and his followers centered on whether such means advanced or instead threatened the agreed-upon end.

As Ekirch remarks, following Henry Adams, by the beginning of the next century “the defeated Federalists… had the grim satisfaction of seeing their Jeffersonian opponents embrace many of the same consolidating principles”—more accurately, means—”that they had earlier bitterly denied.” Jefferson’s “liberalism and radicalism fell mainly within the periods when he was not holding an administrative public office.” Just so, and rightly so, one might comment, as the president “came to grips with the heart of the liberal’s dilemma,” namely, “there was danger that any government entrusted with authority would degenerate into one of force and tyranny,” and yet governmental authority must have recourse to force, if not tyranny, if it is to govern those persons, foreign and domestic, that seek to ruin it and the liberalism animating it. This is tantamount to admitting what should be obvious: liberalism needs a political regime to instantiate its philosophic and religious principles. Loyalists, ‘Tories,’ monarchists, eventually fascists and communists likely will not go quietly; their liberties, even at times their lives, may well be violated by the elected representatives of the people in a liberal regime in defense of the lives and liberties of the citizens of that regime. Ekirch wants to warn that in such efforts of self-defense, liberals may encroach upon their own liberal principles by altering their liberal practices, and so they may. But that is not to say that the Founding-era liberals, whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist, later Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian, truly ‘anticipated’ or paved the way for the administrative state. They made such a state possible only in the sense that they did in fact preserve a state in America, the federal union that served as part of the centerpiece of American political controversy, along with slavery and the increasingly anti-republican, oligarchic regimes of the Southern states, from Washington to Lincoln.

And so, for example, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was indeed an extra-Constitutional move but, as Jefferson wrote at the time, control of the Mississippi River was geopolitically and economically indispensable to the safety and prosperity of Americans. Such vagaries were not merely “related to the fatal dilemma posed by the long drawn-out war in Europe,” but a recognition that what Jefferson called the Empire of Liberty was indeed imperial, that is, a form of rule exercised over a territory that ought to be configured in such a way as to secure the natural rights of the citizens of the American regime. The question in such circumstances will always be a matter of prudential not theoretical reasoning, of means to an end. Citizens will need to remain vigilant in those circumstances, but it is when the end changes that they may need to reach for their muskets.

One of Ekirch’s merits is that he does see this, intermittently. “In contrast to a policy of economic nationalism which [Jeffersonian] Republicans had proposed after the War of 1812, the Jacksonians revived in realistic and practical fashion much of the old Jeffersonian individualist philosophy.” Less “optimistic than the Jeffersonian apostles of the Enlightenment had been about the nature of man and the possibility of his achieving Utopia,” the Jacksonians accepted industrialism and forged an alliance between urban workers and farmers—”a program for the lower middle class, or the plain people” which guarded their rights, including their liberty to be capitalists. Jacksonians frowned on internal improvements sponsored by the federal government, but they didn’t try to stop the states from undertaking them, and they did. “Economic liberalism of an agrarian, laissez-faire nature was as much a part of the states’ policies as it was of the national government’s from the 1830s until the Civil War,” always with the vicious exceptions of mistreatment of slaves and Indians. In fact, Ekirch underestimates the Jackson Administration’s Indian policy, taking the now-exploded view that the president intended the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from Georgia as an attack on their rights rather than as a (botched, catastrophic) attempt to protect them from the Georgians. Ekirch returns to firmer ground in observing that western expansion, including the Mexican War, amounted to a sort of “agricultural imperialism” that “linked democracy to expansionism” (as later seen in Senator Stephen Douglas’s unbridled version of popular sovereignty) that made the Civil War “possible.” What it really did was to make the Civil War even more likely, although a regime-based analysis of the Southern states would indicate that such a war was quite possible with or without expansion, since the Northern republicanism and Southern oligarchy didn’t really ‘mix.’

Slavery was “the greatest single factor in the decline of nineteenth-century American liberalism.” Ekirch gives the standard economics-based account of Southerners’ newly ardent defense of slavery—the industrial revolution in general, the cotton gin in particular—but also gives prominence to decline in “the older faith of the Enlightenment in the natural rights of man,” bringing on attacks on “the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence with its assertion of the equality and natural rights of man.” Even in the North, segregation of the races increased, and the proposal to emancipate and resettle blacks in Africa replaced the earlier intention to educate and Christianize them. Nat Turner’s armed revolt in Virginia spurred anxieties; as Southern prejudices hardened, the small but vocal Abolitionist movement contributed to the climate of polarization which led to civil war. Although Ekirch cites Calhoun and James Fitzhugh as critics of the Founders’ principles, he makes no attempt to link their opinions to the historicist doctrines he cited previously.

The “incompatibility of war and liberalism becomes even more true in the case of a vast internal conflict such as the American Civil War.” He cites President Lincoln’s assumption of such extraconstitutional powers as troop call-ups and suspension of habeas corpus without Congressional approval, and conscription (initiated by the Confederacy, but enacted by Lincoln soon afterward). He also objects to the expansion of military training, which continued after the war, along with the pensions granted to Union military veterans, whose lobbying organization, the Grand Army of the Potomac, also enabled “a host of ambitious Republican politicians” who “would be able to refight the Civil War in their election campaigns.” The need to pay for these postwar programs caused Republicans to turn the Whig Party’s policy of higher tariffs. “The downfall of the lost cause was not the real tragedy of the Civil War, for the South in its perfervid defense of slavery had long since ceased to be the champion of liberalism. The essential tragedy of the Civil War was rather the failure of free society in the North to follow up the liberal ends implied by its wartime goals of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery” by inculcating a “new nationalism, involving a frank repudiation of a former American liberalism.” By this, Ekirch means first of all the failure and corruption of Reconstruction, which “encourage[ed] the freedman to believe that he was a privileged ward of the Federal government.” Second, Reconstruction gave full civil rights to freedmen immediately, before the needed period of civic education; Republicans wanted black votes in order “to stay in power” in the South. This, coupled with eventually successful Southern resistance to Reconstruction, set liberalism back.

Once again, however, Ekirch misses the regime issue, writing that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the rights of all individuals and groups were regarded as inferior to the overriding demands of a victorious nationalism and statism.” What if Republicans needed to stay in power precisely because they —were republicans, politicians who intended to prevent the antebellum oligarchies of the Southern states from reconstituting themselves? While claiming that “the remnants of the older natural rights and state rights philosophies of government were now replaced by the new teachings of nationalism,” he fails to cite any examples of this, and, as Forrest Nabors has shown, the Radical Republicans consistently explained their policies in terms of natural rights and republican regime change, not nationalism. [1] If “the Reconstruction policy of the North, based on force and military occupation of the former Confederacy, was the opposite of liberal,” then why was the Revolutionary War not the opposite of liberal? Liberalism without a regime is only a theory, and a regime that will not enforce its principles will not survive.

Nor is there much evidence that Republicans assumed that the United States Constitution was “a permanent contract”; Lincoln and others instead maintained that popular sovereignty was limited by natural rights and constitutional consent, the latter rejecting secession only as unconstitutional if the other parties to the contract did not consent. In the sentence immediately following his assertion that Unionists understood sovereignty to reside “in the people as a whole and not in the states or in the people of the separate states,” he claims that “northern writers on politics now located sovereignty in the Federal government.” But sovereignty can’t rest in the people and the government at the same time. It must be one or the other. He is right to remark the way in which such writers as Elisha Mulford replaced “John Locke and other philosophers of the natural rights and compact theories of government” with “Hegel and the German idealists, whose philosophy glorified the role of the state,” “following Hegel in giving the state the human characteristics of personality and conscience,” but Mulford was an academic, not a Radical Republican in the Reconstruction-era Congress.

Ekirch notes the tendency of the renewed Southern oligarchy, led by the “Redeemers,” as they were called, to brandish state rights with one hand while holding out the other for protective tariffs and internal improvements, a habit which would persist into the 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority projects and beyond. In the North, civil service reformers urged the replacement of party-selected bureaucrats with professionals: “Generally overlooked, however, in the American enthusiasm for civil service reform, were those few individuals [E. L. Godkin among them] who complained that a class of Federal officeholders, guaranteed permanent tenure, might become an insolent aristocracy comparable to the bureaucracies of the Old World.” In addition, the Homestead Act, intended to help small farmers settle the West, was mis-crafted, enabling speculators to purchase large tracts for development by large railroad corporations and forcing “authentic homesteaders” further west. With the exception of Henry George, whose agrarianism recalled Jeffersonian individualism and agrarianism, “doctrines of laissez-faire and of the limited state were being twisted and distorted from their original meaning,” toward the defense of corporations re-defined as ‘persons,’ even as the nation-state increasingly was re-defined. The Supreme Court now extended the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporate ‘persons,’ and such Congressional enactments as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Antitrust Act of 1890 (which “actually encouraged monopoly in the new form of the holding company”) extended governmental centralization, establishing nonpartisan regulatory bodies “with quasi-judicial authority”—effectively the beginnings of a new branch of government. Indeed, the political struggles of subsequent decades featured corporate ‘persons’ against the ‘person’ of the national state, with real persons, individuals with natural rights, left behind as spectators, diminished as citizens.

“The abandonment of liberalism was to be made explicit in the 1900s, when the reformers adopted the name Progressives and accepted much more than the liberals or Populists a frank nationalism and centralization under the aegis of the Federal government.” Although usually animated by an intention to curb corporate abuses, Progressives established federal bureaucracies that the corporate oligarchs often captured. As corporation attorney Richard Olney shrewdly argued, respecting the Interstate Commerce Commission, “the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things.” Therefore, “the part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” Progressivism, Ekirch remarks, drily, was “not primarily a liberal movement,” but “was based on a new philosophy, partly borrowed from Europe, which emphasized collective action through the instrumentality of government”; in Wisconsin, where “German influences were powerful,” the famous reforms of Robert La Follette rested squarely on his “great admiration for the social legislation of the German states.” For his part, University of Wisconsin president Charles R. Van Hise maintained that “The United States cannot successfully compete in the world’s markets without large industrial units,” which therefore deserved federal-government protection along with regulation—an arrangement corporate executives found not entirely uncongenial. “American reformers and scholars” had turned “to Bismarck’s Germany and to the Fabian Socialists in England as models for their political and economic theories.” Reformers even redefined the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (itself ontologically identical, if economically opposite, to Progressivism) as a call not for competition but cooperation and social control: “governments and reform agencies, the progressives believed, could help reshape the environment to meet the needs of individuals or of the species. Darwinian evolution, expressed in social terms, became reformism”—a democratized, materialist Hegelianism sometimes calling itself ‘pragmatism,’ as in the writings of John Dewey. [2]

Ekirch depicts the nationalist side of Progressivism less convincingly, amalgamating the military preparedness doctrine of Theodore Roosevelt with the imperialism of Senator Albert J. Beveridge—”big navy and dollar diplomacy” men. That they were, but Beveridge was a real imperialist who advocated the military conquest and colonial rule of Latin America, whereas Roosevelt wanted no part of real imperialism, preferring to extend the American defensive perimeter by establishing naval bases located at geopolitical chokepoints around the world, typically with the consent of the local government (although admittedly defining ‘consent’ rather loosely, in some cases). Ekirch also badly misreads the Progressive internationalism of Woodrow Wilson—quite distinct from either the Beveridge or the Roosevelt policies—as nationalistic, adding erroneously that Wilson only began to “embrace the nationalistic and progressive currents of his time” when he left academia for politics; as a matter of fact, Wilson made his academic reputation with his article “The Administrative State,” while still a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, and whatever nationalist sentiments he may have harbored were powerfully qualified by his advocacy of a Kantian League to Enforce Peace among nations, with its obvious diminution of national sovereignty. Predictably, Ekirch deplores Wilson’s decision to lead America into the First World War (conscription, war-spirit fed by propaganda, curbs on free speech and press) on the grounds “that a German victory posed a greater threat to American democracy than the illiberalism and militarism that he expected would accompany American belligerency.” But he does not show that Wilson was mistaken. Also predictably, he dismisses the postwar moves against Communism as an overblown attempt at “stamping out so-called radical activities.” Overblown that attempt may have been, but “so-called”? Surely regime of tyranny at the alleged service of economic and social equality must strike Americans, even Progressives as well as liberals, as a tad on the extreme side? That kind of regime was, after all, what the “activities” of the American Communist Party aimed at. “Although much of the radical movement was liberal in neither its methods nor its goals, the toleration of dissenting minorities and the free expression of dissenting opinion had always been cardinal liberal tenets.” True, but not unqualifiedly so—as American Loyalists and Confederates had learned, much more harshly, when they ran afoul of the American regime.

The same problem arises in Ekirch’s critique of the National Origins Act of 1924, which he finds illiberal on the grounds of racism and economic protectionism; under the Act, most legal immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe, and nearly half from Great Britain. And he is a hundred times right to despise the likes of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, contemporary writers who wrung their hands over “the rising tide of color against white world supremacy,” as Lothrop graphically called it in his principal tome. However awkward it may be to say so, however, any regime, even a liberal regime, is still a regime, with a way of life to maintain. British immigrants in the 1920s may well have been admitted rightly, even if for the wrong reason; their ‘racial’ or ethnic identity should have been irrelevant (though I have no doubt that it was relevant to the legislators of the day) but their way of life was indeed more amenable to that of, for example, my own maternal grandparents, who had arrived from Galicia at the turn of the century. Their children readily adapted to the American way of life, in large measure because those running the public school system set out to ‘Americanize’ first- and second-generation students. But it is understandable to think that such a system could have been overwhelmed by a very large number of students who didn’t speak English at home and whose parents had grown up under such despotic regimes as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had ruled Galicia in the years before the First World War. To say so is not to endorse the resurgence of the inane if dangerous Ku Klux Klan, a well-known excrescence of the 1920s.

Ekirch justly recurs to the writings of V. L. Parrington to summarize the political problem of the 1920s, looking ahead to the next decade and the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. In a letter to a friend written just before he died in 1929, Parrington lamented, “We must have a political state powerful enough to deal with corporate wealth, but how are we going to keep that state with its augmenting power from being captured by the force we want it to control?” Just so, and Ekirch adds that in his 1932 campaign speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco Democratic Party candidate Franklin Roosevelt betrayed no such qualms, more or less openly calling for a new regime to replace the old republic. Such counter-attacks as Herbert Hoover’s The Challenge to Liberty and Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society had little practical effect on a people stunned first by economic depression and then by another world war. Even FDR himself considered changing course, toward “a program of encouraging competition and enforcing the antitrust laws,” but the war (and perhaps an already entrenched bureaucracy) put a stop to that. In the run-up to the war, conscription and restrictions free speech returned. Indeed, “After 1914… the swift succession of two world wars, interspaced with the depression of the thirties, put a strain on liberalism that the new crises of cold war and Korean struggle did nothing to alleviate.” Ekirch goes so far as to write, “The new totalitarian liberals argued that [the old liberalism] had become outmoded,” that what the polemicist Max Lerner called “democratic collectivism” had, and should, prevail. A “permanent war economy” emerged, with the Cold War against the Soviet Union, along with peacetime conscription and a substantial national security apparatus. Government and private corporations interlocked more and more; if postwar prosperity blunted criticisms of the new regime, Ekirch (following such economists as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises) observes that American prosperity might have been even greater if less public-private collaboration had occurred.

Ekirch goes too far in endorsing C. Wright Mills, who claimed (in Ekirch’s words) that “labor could be forced to cooperate with the conservatives’ views” on an anti-Soviet foreign policy, “in order to prove its innocence of communist connections.” As a matter of fact, the AFL-CIO was well aware that no free trade unions were allowed to exist under the Soviet tyranny (and later oligarchy). Its leaders had seen what had happened to social democrats under Communist rule, and they had every reason to prevent that from happening in the United States. To argue that President Truman’s failed attempt to keep nuclear-weapons technology away from the Soviets “quite naturally intensified Soviet fears of American power” by signaling U. S. “distrust of Russia” somehow does not quite capture the not-so-innocent character of Josef Stalin. With similar overenthusiasm for his libertarianism, Ekirch goes along with Senator Paul H. Douglas’s claim that “if it were not for war the government colossus could be trimmed to almost pygmy stature.” But of course domestic social programs were already substantial in the 1950s, and President Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programs pushed such expenditures to well over fifty percent of the federal government’s total outlays in the next decade.

Writing in the aftermath of the McCarthy hearings, Ekirch criticizes its excesses. American Communists’ “essential loyalty to the United States was certainly open to question,” he wisely concedes. But “the dilemma” facing Americans “was how to handle the communist problem without destroying fundamental American liberties,” a dilemma they addressed poorly because “the actual number of Communists in the United States after World War II was small”—”somewhat over fifty thousand persons” in a nation of millions. Therefore, he concludes, “communism represented no threat to the American way of life that could not be met in the free market place of ideas.” True, “there were undoubtedly among American Communists some who stood ready to work in conjunction with Soviet agents to do damage to the United States,” but “this damage would be of a criminal sort that could be detected by the American police and intelligence systems and prosecuted under the laws forbidding such conduct.” Concede all that, and the argument still doesn’t quite work. Well-placed Communist operatives could readily influence American policy, without breaking any criminal laws whatsoever. One sees this even in the slippage noticeable in this sentence: “The danger rather lay [not in ‘McCarthyism’ but] in the assumption that there was a minority class or group of political lepers guilty of so-called wrong thinking.” But to accuse adherents of Communism merely of wrong thinking “so-called” wasn’t to “censorship of ideas”; it was censure of those ideas. Ekirch backtracks: “the whole problem of disloyalty among government employees would have been far better handled by an extension of the practice of allowing supervisors to dismiss, without prejudice and without record, those individuals whose conduct, or even whose views, they had reason to suspect.” Very well, then, one must concede, as he does, that “if liberalism is to remain viable… liberals had to face the unpleasant fact that liberty and security were not always compatible, either for the individual or for society.”

On a wider level, Ekirch objects to the “growing nationalization and centralization of all values” seen during the early 1950s. In public education, for example, “there had not been any direct control exercised by the Federal government” before then. “But in the battle for men’s minds, which was one of the more important features of modern integral nationalism, the educational system was a natural object of increasing official attention and interference”; under anti-Communist pressures initially, but under other pressures subsequently, “the school and the college became the adjunct of the nation,” and this was especially true of higher education, as universities and research professors succumbed to the temptation of chasing federal grant monies.  Although the teacher loyalty oaths required by some thirty states eventually disappeared, the grants didn’t, and what could be used by anti-Communists to promote ‘Americanism’ in one generation could be used to promote other leftist ’causes’ in the following generations, once illiberal or (in Ehrlich’s terms) progressive convictions took hold among federal ‘educrats’ and their university-based sympathizers and (in many cases) teachers.

Ekirch views matters with a refreshing refusal to entertain any serious hope for reversing illiberal trends, ending his book with an invocation of “the subversion of the ideals of the Republic of Rome in the new concepts of the Empire,” which, as we all know, ended badly. He will only say that such “decline need not blot out the great achievements already recorded.” “Liberals will at least be able to look back with some satisfaction into the distant past, while they do their best to challenge the fate held out by an increasingly illiberal future.”

What have we here, then? A cri de coeur from a Left-libertarian (Quaker-influenced?) soul, undoubtedly. But also a pioneering work of scholarship. Although American writers (such as Emerson), politicians (such as Wilson), philosophers (Dewey most prominently) and social scientists (again, Wilson, and a legion of others) never concealed their indebtedness to German philosophy, and especially to doctrines deriving the ideas of moral and political right from history, not God or nature, several generations of scholars obscured that fact, maybe because they wanted to appropriate the term ‘liberalism’ for historicist/’progressive’ purposes and (in later generations) to obscure the intellectual origins of their historicism from a nation which had fought two world wars against Germans and a ‘Cold War’ against a regime animated by one version of that historicism. By the mid-1970s, such scholars as Paul Eidelberg and John Marini had picked up the trail, but Ekirch had got on it nearly twenty years earlier. And for all the criticisms one might raise concerning his assessment of such genuine natural-rights thinkers as Hamilton and Lincoln, some dubious ‘policy’ judgments on banks, immigration, and war (among others), and above all his lack of clarity about the exigencies of establishing not simply liberalism as a doctrine but a regime animated by liberalism as he defines it, both his recovery of American intellectual and political history from historicist distortions and the heft that work gives to his Tocqueville-like warnings against despotism ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ deserve recognition and appreciation, more than half a century after he wrote.

 

Notes

1. See Forrest Nabors: From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017.
2.  Ekirch writes that Dewey rejected “the absolutist philosophy of Hegel and the German idealists, imposed upon him while he was a graduate student” and adapted by German nationalists prior to World War I. He had turned to pragmatism, and viewed “the war as a conflict of ideas in which the German mind was quite incompatible with the American mind.” Aside from the fact that President Wilson had by no means abandoned the historicist idealism imposed upon him while he was a graduate student, it must be said that Dewey never abandoned historicism—only idealism. To his credit, he didn’t turn to Marxian historicism, which produced worse tyrannies than the absolutism of the Kaiser, preferring a more modest historicism founded on social experimentation with no ‘end of history’ assumed. But the laws of nature and of nature’s God, as the Founders understood them, and which Ekirch defends, are not invited to the pragmatist party.

 

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Why have ‘states’ in the Union, anyway? True, the colonies predated the United States, the colonies became states, the states formed the Articles of Confederation, and ratification of the United States Constitution proceeded on a state-by-state basis. But many municipalities preceded the states; some existed before the British wrested control of them from the French. Yet courts in most states regard all or many of the municipalities to be creatures of the state for legal purposes, even if historians beg to differ. Why not treat states the same way, considering their relation to the national government analogous to the municipalities’ relation to them? Whatever practical barriers to this there may be, what is wrong with it in principle? After all, many countries around the world have commercial-republic regimes while nonetheless treating the provinces as, well, provincial. Why shouldn’t we do the same?

If the distinctive human characteristic is the ability to speak and to reason, then what is good for such a being must not only allow but encourage it to exercise that ability, just as it must be good for a horse to have room to run. To live in societies ruled by tyrants terrorizing their subjects with brute force must be bad for human beings, somehow beneath their real nature—hence the adjective ‘brute.’ By nature, human beings belong in civil societies, societies in which they may speak and reason together, deliberate with one another on what they should do, how they should act. Old-fashioned mothers would tell unruly children to ‘be civil,’ to ‘keep a civil tongue in your head.’ A civil tongue is one indirectly but closely attached to a reasoning brain, a brain more fully developed in accordance with its nature than the brain of a madman or a dolt, to say nothing of a barking pit bull or a chorusing frog.

Civil society begins in the home. Parents command children, ‘for their own good.’ But father and mother themselves properly form a civil partnership, ruling one another by mutual consent, sharing responsibilities, authority, and obligations. Outside the home, what we call civil associations work in somewhat the same way, as fellow citizens form businesses, churches, clubs, and schools. Families and civil associations alike govern themselves deliberately, reasonably—insofar as they are genuinely civil, institutions fitted for mature human beings. Children learn to do the same thing, choosing up sides for games, ‘ganging up’ (for better or for worse), imitating the adults (also for better or for worse). You learn to be civil in small groups.

The earliest political societies were small—outgrowths of extended families or clans which united with one another for convenience and protection, and generally for a better life than families alone could provide. The polis or city-state rules itself, perhaps as a democracy, more often as an oligarchy, sometimes as a monarchy. Whatever its regime, the city-state occupies a small territory and consists of a small population; in ancient Greece, such communities seldom consisted of more than 30,000 souls. Given this small size, political life mattered. There was nowhere to hide from whomever ruled; whether it was the one, the few, or the many, whether he or they were good or bad, the ruler(s) could and did reach out and in many respects determine your way of life. No adult could be indifferent to politics because everyone felt the effects of political rule.

City-states faced a serious, ultimately fatal threat. If children and adults like to ‘gang up,’ what is to prevent the most ambitious, if perhaps the less reasonable, among them from gathering together not merely to tyrannize the city-state but to conquer other city-states? If, say, a tyrant gains control of Macedonia, masters the nearby dity-states, and sets sail for Greece, what is to prevent him from conquering it? In the event, nothing, as Alexander the Great proved not only in Greece but throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and beyond. As did many others: The Old Testament chronicles the empires of Egyptians, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians; the New Testament is full of Romans. A small people could retain its self-government among the empires only if God chose to protect it. It couldn’t go it alone.

What is more, small places foster political passions as much as they foster rational deliberation. If I care intensely about who rules me, because whoever that is he will make me feel his rule, I may gang up with others to make sure that we are the hammers, not the nails. In The Federalist, Publius remarks that small republics were often as short in their lives as they were violent in their deaths. When no ruined by foreign conquerors, they succumbed to suicide-by-faction. Although human beings may be rational by nature, they often fail to live up to their nature. “Why has government been instituted at all?” Publius asks. “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”

The problem only intensified in the modern world, the world of Machiavelli. As an official of the Italian city-state of Florence, Machiavelli became impatient with smallness, with petty states which squabbled with one another, incapable of extending their power beyond their own small territories, as the Romans had done. He conceived not so much of another empire but of lo stato, a governing body extending over the whole of the Italian nation. Lo stato might be governed by one or many, be a principality or a republic, but whichever regime it had, it would be able to extract substantial numbers of soldiers and impressive amounts of revenue from all parts of Italy. Even the larger nations of Europe—the French, the Turks—did not have lo stato; they were feudal societies, in which monarchs reigned but found themselves constrained by ‘the few,’ by titled aristocrats, by churches or mosques—by elites of various descriptions, all bent on aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the central government. Machiavelli recommended what we would now call a strategy of ‘state-building’—of bringing ‘the few’ to heel, extending the ruling apparatus of the central government into the provinces and subordinating those provinces to it. Once a few rulers took the advice he preserved in his books (he died powerless), once the Tudors in England and the Bourbons in France began to put an end to feudalism in their own countries, all European nations needed their own states, if they were to avoid conquest On that continent, the Hohenzollern-Bismarck-Prussian forging of the many small German states into one nation-state proved the most salient political and military fact of the nineteenth century, and the most ominous fact of the first half of the twentieth century. Without states of their own, European nations would have fallen under German rule, as Germans aimed at reconstituted a new and much more malevolent form of the Holy Roman Empire, no more holy or Roman than the original, but very much more imperial.

Having felt the pinch of rule within an empire by a would-be absolute monarchy wielding the powers of the modern state, Americans needed to solve two problems at once. Armed, they could depict themselves as a rattlesnake telling the world, “Don’t tread on me.” Disunited, severed into thirteen pieces, as depicted in an equally famous illustration of the period, they would die, prey to one or more of the surrounding empires. Americans needed a modern state to defend themselves against other modern states. Divided, they would be conquered, even as the American Indian nations and tribes had been, and would continue to be conquered, whenever they attempted to resist ‘modernity’ as practiced by the surging Americans.

At the same time, Americans had won their independence in resistance to tyranny, in resistance to an overbearing modern state that denied them their rights not only as Englishmen but as human beings. The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness require self-government, including civil society. Civil or genuinely political life, the association of citizens who share rule with one another, requires small associations—families, towns, city-states. How can civil society exist in a large, centralized, modern state, the very thing needed for self-defense in a world dominated by such states—a ‘Eurocentric’ world in which men armed with the instruments of modern science, very much including the new, Machiavellian science of politics, of statism, was already extending its tentacles into every continent? Europeans ruled not only with gunpowder-propelling projectiles but with a new form of ruling organization, one sufficient to divide, conquer, and perhaps most crucially rule even  a vast empire like China, or a subcontinent of such staggering diversity as India.

Statism and self-government at the same time: That sounds very much like a circle never to be squared. The Framers found their answer in another institutional device: federalism.

Writing only a few decades before the American founding, Montesquieu had written, “If a republic is small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it is large, it is destroyed by an internal vice”—typically, corruption. What is needed is a “constitution that has all the internal advantages of republican government and the external force of a monarchy,” namely, the constitution of a “federal republic.” Each element of this republic should itself be commercial-republican—peaceful and moderate, not a military republic like ancient Rome, much less a military monarchy like that of Alexander the Great. Each element should have liberty, which “in no way consists in doing what one wants” but rather in having “the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being constrained to do what one should not want to do.” What one should want to do is to observe “the law of nature, which makes everything tend toward the preservation of species,” the “law of natural enlightenment, which wants us to do to others what we would want to have done to us,” and “the law that forms political societies,” which aims at the perpetuation of those societies. Certain moral virtues inhere in liberty itself. Republicanism consists of citizens who rule one another reciprocally, doing to one another as they would have done to themselves; federation enables republics to follow the political law of self-perpetuation.

If one were to draw a diagram representing the modern state, it might look like a wagon wheel: a solid border or rim; a central government or hub; strong but limited lines of control or spokes extending from the center to the border, reinforcing the border but emanating from the rim. But if civil society consisting of local associations and institutions exists in the spaces between the spokes, how can this state be republican, as association of self-governing citizens, not of mere subjects? A return to feudalism would solidify the spaces but reduce the importance of the hub.

Federalism solves the problem by retaining the integrity of both the central state and the constituent, smaller states. In the United States Constitution, the central government gains certain enumerated powers, including the power to raise revenues from within the territories of the states without the consent of the state legislatures and governors and the power to regulate interstate commerce. The states retain all powers not enumerated, although these powers must be limited by their character as republican regimes, in accordance with Article IV, section iv, the republican guarantee clause.

State governments were assured a voice in the councils of the central government by their power of electing two representatives each to the United States Senate. The peoples of those states had their voice in the House of Representatives, elected by popular vote within voting districts located within the boundaries of each state. Additionally, of course, the people also elected their representatives to the legislatures which chose the United States senators, making the entire system republican either directly or indirectly. Neither the state governments nor the central government exercise sovereignty over the people. To emphasize this point, James Monroe titled his book The People the Sovereigns.

To return to the image of the wheel, in a federal-republican country we see the powers of the central government as strong filaments running through the spokes, which are the constituent states of the federation. If one shifts the image from a wheel to the more dynamic example of a power grid, the power of the sovereign people run through the intertwined, mutually strengthening wires. One wire depicts the government of you state; the other depicts the government of your country as a whole—the central government. Both derive their energy from the same source, the people, united through the political union of their states, each itself a political union encompassing smaller ‘unions’ from families to civil associations to municipalities and counties.

The sovereign people in a republican regime will rule and be ruled, therefore more likely to do as they would be done by. Their way of life will be genuinely political, civic, fostering habits of mind and heart that incline toward civility because each citizen knows he needs the others and wants to do harm to none of them. At the same time, such a people will have the strength to defend themselves against other sovereign states and empires, far more centralized and far more ambitious for conquest.

For more than a century, the constitutional republicanism established by the Founders increasingly has given way to administrative government at the national, state, county, and even the local levels. As a result, Americans have needed to deliberate together less. The decline of civility in what remains of American political conversation may well originate in the decline of genuine civic life, genuine self-government, as part of the American way of life.