Jeffrey A. Becker: Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Originally published in Law & Liberty, August 10, 2014.

 

As the ambit of modern life expands, like a gas, serious political ambition dilutes. We range more widely, but in a scattered way—a molecule of attention here, another over there. The time and care needed for real (as distinguished from Facebook) friendship and citizenship evanesce as we learn to think and feel in short bursts. Because worldwide, the Web is flimsy, thin-spun; building character takes time, but any twit can tweet. Citizenship requires patriotism, love of one’s own; one loves nothing so ephemeral as virtual reality. Statesmanship takes sustained thinking; the distracted mind sustains only nervousness.

This is the Tocquevillian problem, updated–the problem of what he called “democracy,” by which he meant social egalitarianism. The new technologies exaggerate this; they didn’t invent it. The love of general ideas—ideologies among them; the inclination to retreat to a cozy, private life (try getting children away from their devices); the complacent materialism to go with that foggy idealism; the irritable nationalism; the monotony of petty agitation: the vices of Tocqueville’s America has pervaded the world’s mind-space. A few of the old American virtues also have survived, such as the ability to organize civic associations for mutual help. Nonetheless, a flash mob can’t stay organized for long, even if the video of it gets a million hits among the yahoos.

Jeffrey A. Becker joins a large company of thinkers considering this problem, and he’s read his predecessors’ writings attentively. Becker argues that ambition rightly understood means self-government not only in personal but in public life. Because the flame of political ambition burns brighter in a Cromwell or a Napoleon than it does in your average voter, political regimes need to accommodate but also discipline these exceptional souls. How can a regime with no aristocracy do this? Tyranny founded upon social egalitarianism shows how badly such societies can go. Can republics do better? Becker thinks they can, but for the most part have not done as well as they might. It’s not a matter of celebrating other-regarding community action, either. “Citizen participation [in political life] and civic attachments will mean little unless people can translate that participation and those attachments into the formal expression of political power through governing.” If republicans don’t get the ruling institutions right they will continue to entangle themselves in a web stronger than the Internet with which they are entertaining themselves—”the soft despotism of an administrative state,” described unforgettably by Tocqueville decades before it reached America.

Although Becker recognizes the partial truth in Carl Schmitt’s description of political life as conflict between friends and enemies, he prefers Aristotle’s understanding of human nature as social and political, regarding this as a better foundation for democratic politics. This preference for a particular regime, democracy, pervades the book, although Becker initially takes care to associate it with the trans-political or natural principle of human equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He criticizes the Puritan founding as aristocratic. While recognizing the equality of all postlapserian humans and establishing a tightly-unified community guided by the principles of justice and mercy, this very unity and moral perfectionism divided sheep from goats in this world, replacing an Old-World aristocracy of birth with a New-World aristocracy of grace. The “benign vision of political leadership, where political power exists to cultivate and encourage a moral vision of the good community of model citizens”—a vision the Puritans shared with such ancient peoples as the Spartans and the Israelites, albeit with very different criteria for membership—”become authoritarian—and undemocratic—when members of a polity, bent on enforcing their moral vision, divide the community into a moral ‘is’ and an immoral ‘them.'” If such a regime holds elections to select its rulers, those elections will result in “moral polarization,” “foster[ing] a more narrow and reflexively intolerant social mindset.” Here, Becker obviously glances at contemporary American politics, especially on the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ extremes of the spectrum. He especially deplores “claims to moral certainty”—specifically, claims to rule based upon moral certainty—which “lead people to label one another either good or bad.” Such a “mindset” leads to “authoritarianism,” away from democracy.

It might also lead away from morality altogether, towards moral relativism or egalitarianism—quite evidently a danger in any regime, inasmuch as one cannot make claims about justice without labeling some people and behaviors good, others bad. Democracy may risk cultivating an atmosphere of moral relativism precisely because it makes so much of equality, extending that principle beyond equal natural rights to the extent that pervades moral judgments altogether. Becker hopes to fend off this problem by deploying moral uncertainty in the service of a virtue, moderation, and of a politics that requires citizens to “give reasons for private opinions,” whereby citizens “may learn to appreciate the moral shades of gray involved in reaching agreement about political questions.” This, he hopes, may give us a greater inclination to humility, “self-awareness,” and “compromise about public questions.” In effect, Becker makes Rousseau’s move, aiming to replace “loyalty to, and active defense of, abstract moral principles” with “a compassion for the well-being of other citizens,” “loyalty to the welfare of people as the mark of moral integrity.” More concretely, he prefers Social Gospel Christianity to Christianity as understood for nearly two millennia before Walter Rauschenbusch brought us that new gospel. He admires Abraham Lincoln, but not the Lincoln who upheld what Lincoln himself called an abstract principle, equality of right; he prefers the Lincoln of Progressivism, of Herbert Croly, the Lincoln who ‘was’ a Progressive avant la lettre. As the real Lincoln might well have observed, however, without some principled criterion of right, what do such notions as “well-being” and “welfare” actually mean? Becker uses the term “the practical welfare of the people” as his criterion, but he needs a principle—indeed, an abstract principle—to define it. That’s what a definition is, as no less an epistemologist (not to say moralist) than Bill Clinton once had occasion to remind us. While acknowledging the Founders’ principle, natural right, Becker drifts instead into the territory of pragmatism and of historical progress—although, by his own account, we are neither especially pragmatic nor advanced at the moment.

Turning from the Puritans to the American founding, Becker faults Publius for regarding ambition so sourly and for setting up institutional barriers whereby the ambitious will counteract the ambitious. “Gridlock at the congressional level is by design,” Becker exclaims, perhaps more in sorrow than in anger. Although the Founders esteemed one form of ambition—the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds—they failed to “educate” citizens generally “toward higher aims.” Tellingly, he quotes Robert Eden, in his important study Political Leadership and Nihilism, who remarked the negative connotations of the term ‘leader’ in The Federalist, but he doesn’t say what Eden’s point was: The Founders associated ‘leader’ with military captians and military rulers generally, whereas the Progressives, replacing natural right with rights derived from the march of ‘history,’ esteemed leaders precisely because they were the ones who were bringing us closer toward the morally authoritative future. [1]  This formulation can bring us to salute well-intentioned ‘idealists’ like Woodrow Wilson, but also to even more dubious enthusiasms, such as those evinced in Wilson’s contemporaries for the likes of Lenin and Mussolini. Again, without a firm criterion for what “higher” aims are, a political society will risk marching off the cliff it wants to march up. In line with these progressivist leanings, Becker charges the federalists with failing to provide sufficient play for citizen action. Representative government means that only a few of us can participate directly in governance. This overlooks the federalism of the federalists, who after all founded not only a republican regime but a federal state—just not one so states-centered as the one seen under the Articles of Confederation system. Americans had plenty of civic space for active self-government at the municipal, county, and state levels throughout the nineteenth century. It was the Progressives and their successors, the New Dealers, who changed that.

After a chapter criticizing the democratizing Jacksonians and Populists as ineffective democrats, he turns not to the Progressives—that would have required him to confront squarely these principled differences between the Founders and men like Wilson, John Dewey, and Croly—but to Franklin Roosevelt. Here Becker’s argument weakens to the breaking point. He begins by asserting that “Tocqueville recognized a need for political associations capable of cultivating ideals of excellence for democratic citizens,” ideals that “counterbalance democracy’s leveling effects.” What Tocqueville actually argued was that civil and political associations cultivate not “ideals” but habits of mind and heart that enable Americans to learn how to govern themselves by the very practice of governing—a practice that counterbalances not so much democratic leveling but the tendency of democrats to build over-centralized governments. Becker does see that such associations can serve a function within egalitarian societies similar to that served by the ‘vertical’ structures of aristocracies: cultivating the virtues of rulers, including self-rule. Becker’s omission of centralized government from Tocqueville’s argument makes sense rhetorically, however, because he wants to claim that Roosevelt displayed “Tocqueville’s aristocratic sensibilities in practice.” Roosevelt “used his aristocratic sensibilities to challenge an economic status quo and thereby reinvigorate more Tocquevillian democratic traditions and practices.” Becker makes FDR into the prototype of what one New York City wag called a “limousine liberal.”

What Roosevelt actually did with his “aristocratic sensibilities” was to build a centralized, administrative state of exactly the sort Wilson had admired; the government of party appointees gave way in part to a government of tenured, professional, supposedly ‘scientific’ administrators. Becker acknowledges that Tocqueville might have had his reservations about Roosevelt’s project, but contents himself by assuring us that Roosevelt himself shared concerns “about expanding government responsibility,” and that he didn’t really mean to establish a centralized bureaucracy. More, “the ambition to govern oneself was revived through the expansion of the administrative state,” Becker bravely avers, “though what it mean to be self-governing was made more complex by the Depression, global war, and an evolving interdependency between private industry and government.” That’s one way of putting it.

In his final chapters, Becker wisely retreats from such complexities and evolutions, offering some sensible suggestions about counterbalancing bureaucracy with reinvigorated political parties. Party government is indeed the principal realistic alternative to administrative government within the modern state. Becker sees that if the most ambitious among us can eschew parties and run campaigns based upon manipulating their own ‘images’—an opportunity opened by the Progressives, who tried to supplement the administrative state with more direct forms of democracy, such as candidate-centered elections, initiative and referendum, and similar devices of direct democracy—then you will get exactly the kind of ideologically-driven, uncompromising, polarized politics he deplores. Reinvigorated parties means candidate selection by experienced party bosses, men and (now) women with experience not only in elections but in government. In the past, “political parties were rooted in local organizations and relied upon the explicit power of face-to-face campaigning.” True, but this dovetailed with confederal republicanism and with party appointees to governmental posts, not with administrative centralization. “The common ground of the American character and the American soul was and remains citizenship,” he concludes. But actually the common ground of the American character was (but does not in practice remain) natural right, with citizenship as the protector of those rights. Replace natural right with ‘historical’ right under the modern administrative state and the American character must change. As it has.

 

Note

1. See Robert Eden: Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1983.

Herbert Hoover: The  Crusade Years: 1933-1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath. George H. Nash, ed. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2013.

Originally published in The New Criterion. Volume 33, No. 1, September 2014.

 

Vilified and ridiculed throughout the second half of his long life—he died in 1964 at the age of ninety—Herbert Hoover was a great and good man. Statesmen often find themselves required to kill, earning their reputations in part by fighting and winning wars. Hoover’s statesmanship consisted first of all in saving lives, literally by the millions. His biographer and editor George Nash estimates that the relief efforts Hoover managed between 1914 and 1923 fed 83 million people in twenty war-ravaged countries. With that sense of the apt historical allusion we no longer have, Europeans of Hoover’s day called him “The Napoleon of Mercy.” During his one, ill-starred term as president, when the Great Depression for which he was blamed left Americans hungry, he again organized food supplies that sustained lives. And although Franklin Roosevelt refused to allow him to reprise these efforts during World War II—”I’m not going to resurrect old Herbie,” he told an aide—Harry Truman put the seventy-two-year-old Hoover back to work, sending him on a thirty-eight-country, five-continent fact-finding mission to determine the extend of the war’s ravages. He urged Truman not to implement the Morgenthau Plan to “pastoralize” Germany, preferring the much wiser and humane Marshall Plan. If to save one life is to save a world, no one knows how many worlds Hoover saved.

Greatness as a man, however, even greatness as a statesman, does not necessarily translate into greatness as a politician. In 1932 Hoover found himself pilloried and defeated by Roosevelt, the master of American politics in that generation, indeed of that century. Hoover devoted much of the remainder of his life not only to defending his economic policies but also, much more importantly, to warning his countrymen against the massive governmental centralization New Deal liberals enacted. The publications he issued during this struggle including eight volumes’ worth of speeches, a three-volume memoir recounting his life through his presidency, a four-volume history of American relief efforts after the world wars, and two volumes unpublished during his lifetime. Of these two, the first is Freedom Betrayed, in which Hoover argues (against Roosevelt and Churchill) for the continuation of the Washington-Monroe policy of American nonintervention in foreign wars and non-entanglement in Old World alliance structures. This amounts to a much more intelligent (if still dubious) version of Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” stance, thankfully with none of Lindbergh’s inane and poisonous hostility toward Jews. Hoover had effectively completed this manuscript at the time of his death, but for reasons best known to themselves his heirs allowed it to remain in the archives of the Hoover Institution until 2013, when Mr. Nash brought it to publication.

The Crusade Years addresses the effects of what he calls the New Deal’s “false liberalism” on the American regime itself, and indeed on any regime in which its tenets are enacted. The book scarcely amounts to a memoir in the usual sense; in his almost perfunctory accounts of his love of family, fly fishing, motor trips, and annual vacations with old school chums in the thirty-odd pages he devotes to such matters we meet a thoroughly public man, not a self-reflective one. Indeed, it’s hard to call this a book at all; obviously unready for publication as such, never completed, it consists in large measure of materials published before. But Nash has served readers well, as what we do have has great value: Hoover’s selection of his most telling speeches against the New Deal regime with narratives connecting and commenting upon them, along with incisive, often devastating assessments of his contemporaries—from the sinister Hitler, whom he met during a 1938 tour of Europeans capitals, to the smarmy poseur Wendell Willkie, the failed Bill Clinton of his day. Throughout, Hoover unrelentingly lays out his case to the fellow citizens who had rejected him.

They rejected him in favor of a new iteration of Progressivism, and since Hoover is often considered a bridging figure between the old republicanism and the new, between what’s now called conservatism (exemplified in Hoover’s lifetime by men like Cleveland and Coolidge) and the liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt, it’s important to mark the differences between himself and FDR, as he understood them.

American Progressivism had several dimensions, none unique to itself but distinctive in their combination. On the (as it were) ontological level, Progressives rejected the permanent “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the sources of right or justice, instead endorsing putative laws of history, of economic and political development. In a word, they replaced Locke with Hegel. Theirs was a democratized Hegelianism, one adapted to American social conditions. Instead of Hegel’s constitutional monarch, we got a president reconceived as a democratic opinion leader, the voice of ‘History’s’ cutting edge; instead of corporations formally represented in parliament, we would see corporations around Congress—interest groups with hired lobbyists seeking to influence votes.

Morally, Progressives emphasized not so much the self-rule and civic courage esteemed by the American Founders as compassion, giving the central government a plethora of churchlike functions, first and foremost being tax-funded charity to the poor It was Bismarck, alert to the socialist threat, who called upon the Christians of Germany to support the welfare state on exactly those grounds.

Politically, Progressives found institutional accommodation to their historical determinism in what Woodrow Wilson called “the Elastic Constitution”—now more often “the Living Constitution.” Under this dispensation, the Constitution no longer means what it actually says; it rather must be interpreted to accommodate the ever-developing Zeitgeist. What gives Progressivism the backbone, the sinew, and the nervous system needed to enforce this rather broad political spiritualism is bureaucracy, justified by the sentiment of compassion but guided by what Wilson called, in his first and pioneering 1887 article, “The Science of Administration.” Universities were to be transformed accordingly, educating the professional classes need to staff the bureaucracy, or to negotiate with it on behalf of clients. Tending toward democratic socialism in economics but with obvious tendencies toward political oligarchy or ‘meritocracy,’ the new Europeanized American state would extract its revenues from capitalist corporations and direct them to whatever good projects opinion leaders envisioned, whether they be public works, welfare programs, education subsidies, the conservation of natural resources, or any of a number of other ‘policy areas,’ which have tended to proliferate as the decades slide by.

Internationally, Progressivism went in several more or less incompatible directions, from the march-of-empire militarism of Albert Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams to what eventually became its dominant motif: liberal internationalism—that is, the institution of worldwide organizations intended to promote the Progressive ideals. These have included the League of Nations and the United Nations, but also the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and literally dozens of others. Hoover suspected that such institutions would weaken American self-government, empowering bureaucratic elites. Hating war, he consistently opposed American military actions overseas and distrusted NATO. He regarded such arrangements principally as the global component of the New Deal template.

Most fundamentally, Hoover rejects the historicist claim that there are no fixed principles except laws of change and development. such principles as gravitation, the existence of God, and “the ceaseless struggle of mankind to be free…have always been and ever will be true.” If so, the principles of moral and political right contradict the Hegelian notion that “the rights of man came from the state”—i.e., from the latest instantiation of History’s dialectic. “The world is in the grip of a death struggle between the philosophy of Christ”—positing a personal, Holy Spirit separate from God’s creation, including human beings endowed with “free will”—”and that of Hegel and Marx.” Hegel posits an impersonal, Absolute Spirit immanent in all being; Marx posits a universe consisting exclusively of matter in dialectical motion—including human beings, whose societies develop according to the iron laws of class struggle. These twin determinisms deny human liberty, thereby obscuring human self-understanding and leaving us vulnerable to the blandishments of tyrants.

“To embody human liberty in workable government, America was born,” said Hoover in American Ideals Versus the New Deal. The state cannot “create and sustain a system of morals”; only religion can do that because only a religion founded upon the Creator-God gives human beings the ontological space for the freedom genuine moral choices require. Statism negates the very social progress Progressives desire not because they violate the claims of rational choice theory—Hoover is no libertarian—but because “the only impulse to social progress is the spark of altruism in the individual human being.” Insofar as government can practice the charity or compassion commended by the Bible, “it is solely because [charity] rises from that spark in the hearts of the people”: “At best, charity by government must be formal, statistical, and mechanistic.”

Having read his Tocqueville, Hoover finds the “essence of our self-government” in the cooperation of citizens “outside of political government”: “The fabric of American life is woven around our tens of thousands of voluntary associations.” To absorb these activities in bureaucracies will destroy American’s distinctive way of life, but more, it will kill the joy of that life—the joy of striving, of proving one’s own worth, of championing justice where you are. “These are the battles which create the national fiber of self-reliance and self-respect. That is what made America. If you concentrate all adventure in the government it does not leave much joy in the governed.” The New Dealers’ rhetoric of class hatred—denunciations of “economic royalists” and the like—acts as moral poison because it corrodes this spirit of association, replacing American self-government with rule by “collegiate oligarchs” who find their joy in running social experiments on the rest of us. “A gigantic shift of government from the function of umpire to the function of directing, dictating, and competing in our economic life,” reduces “every plan in life” to “a bet on Washington,” a bet on what the collegiate oligarchs will think of next, consistent with their liberalism sans liberty.

Hoover maintains that the several relief programs his administration initiated differed from the New Deal in exactly that way. They formed “an emergency operation, not a social experiment” and remained “within the confines of the Constitution of the United States” because they operated through local and state boards staffed by volunteers. Some of the funds came from Washington but “complete decentralization” and therefore self-government prevailed throughout; no professional, permanent bureaucracy was envisioned or established. As a result, he observes, unemployment began to decrease by the summer of 1932—too late to save his administration but a promising start. The effort faltered, he argues, as a result of FDR’s election itself, which caused a bank run and financial panic, leading to a continuation of the Depression in America at a time when mot of Europe was pulling out of it. (Unimpressively, the notorious Smoot-Hawley tariff, signed by Hoover and frequently blamed for worsening the Depression, goes entirely unmentioned; he stubbornly admits no errors.) Agreeing with Progressives that the Industrial Revolution spawned corporations that challenged Americans’ self-government, Hoover attempted to stay within constitutional bounds, as had previous efforts to curb corporate-oligarchic excess: the Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1887 and the Anti-Trust Act of 1890. While Europeans responded to industrialism with “a maze of state-favored trade restraints, combinations, trusts and cartels”—now called crony capitalism—leading to the economic stagnation that made fascism and communism tempting, the United States retained self-government and the innovative dynamism that come with it. That dynamism alone can reverse a depression.

If all this seems uncannily contemporary, it is. At the time of Hoover’s death, Roosevelt’s protégé, Lyndon Johnson, readied a vast extension of the New Deal. But the Great Society, as Johnson called it, floundered in exactly the ways Hoover expected such efforts always would: abroad, in southeast Asia, and at home, when a new generation on the Left demanded, of all things, ‘participatory democracy’ and raged against the bureaucratization of our political life. At the same time, political conservatism began to gather strength, with Governor Ronald Reagan honing Hoover-like criticisms of New Deal statism while rejecting the Old Right’s suspicion of military strength. Today, New Deal liberals have taken to calling themselves progressiis, again, and their struggle against the self-government advocates called the ‘Tea Party’ reprises the same kind of domestic debate, even as ‘neoconservatism’ versus ‘neo-isolationism’ reprises it in foreign policy. So the question, ‘Roosevelt or Hoover?’ remains current. FDR’s assumed relegation of Hoover to history’s dustbin failed because, contra Progressivism, history has not dustbin—only perennial principles and questions that return to challenge every generation.

 

 

Jack Turner, III: Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

 

Exercised by claims that race no longer much matters as a bar to full participation in American society, Turner writes a lively scholarly polemic seeking “to move beyond” “simplistic debates pitting advocates of self-reliance and personal responsibility against analysts of historical inheritance, structural constraints, and inequality of opportunity.” He does no such thing, coming down firmly on the side of historicism, structuralism, and egalitarianism, building a ‘postmodernist’ version of a progressive/social-democratic intellectual history traced through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Turner presents their thought as an ascending dialectical interplay between individuality and social obligation, calling the final synthesis, seen in Baldwin, the culmination of “an African American democratic individualist tradition” or individualism “properly understood.” These writings are well-trodden ground; Turner’s analysis of Emerson will stand as his most valuable contribution, correcting the relative neglect of Emerson’s writings on slavery. Douglass fits most uneasily into the story—a natural-rights man without a historicist (much less postmodernist) bone in his intellectual body. The book culminates in a chapter that calls for “rhetorical jiujitsu” on behalf of the author’s democratic socialism, a tactic the book itself amply exemplifies. Readers may wonder why African-American democratic individualism speaks with such strong accents of German philosophy.

Turner stages individualism in a Hegelian-dialectical manner: “Only by being conscious of race can you be truly conscious of yourself and your world, and only by working to overcome racial injustice can you ensure that you are not complicit in it.” That is, true individualism is really a social relation or, as Hegel has it, a matter of mutual ‘recognition.’ By ‘structural’ racism, Turner means race prejudice; to this he adds inequality of wealth. Failure to see these things and act upon them constitute “a failure of democratic individualist virtue,” particularly “a failure of self-reliance.” Rhetorical jiujitsu, indeed.

He begins with what can only be a willful distortion of Tocqueville’s discussion of individualism. Accurately reporting Tocqueville’s description of “a pattern of public withdrawal,” whereby “the individualist interacts only with his family and a small social circle,” Turner then absurdly claims that Tocqueville charges “male domination and white supremacy” as the causal culprits of such behavior. As even a novice reader of Tocqueville knows, he regards individualism as a product of democracy itself, of social equality. This, however, would ruin readers’ appetites for the more radical social egalitarianism Turner desires, who calls Tocqueville’s individualist an “atomistic individualist” while reserving the valorous title of “democratic individualist” for socialists and proto-socialists.

Emerson and Thoreau, for example, “transformed these tendencies into something much finer than the individualism portrayed in Tocqueville’s Democracy.” Although Turner prudently ignores it, Emerson (paralleling his contemporary Thomas Carlyle in Britain) became among the first American writers to import German moral and political thought to the United States. Acting as a sort of cultural middleman, he defined ‘self-reliance’ in German-Romantic, anti-‘bourgeois’ terms as self-realization and ‘transcendentalism,’ abhorring prudential thought on quasi-Kantian grounds as sadly immoral timeserving. In Turner’s and Emerson’s defense, they do register Emerson’s central and sound argument against slaveholding, that it “cuts out the moral eyes” of the master, causing him to attempt to justify stealing the labor of another man. The slaveholder doubly lacks self-reliance; he does not work for himself, and he corrodes his own moral and intellectual faculties by habituating them to hypocritical sentiments and sophistic arguments. These habits in turn corrupt public life, as seen in the gag rule on anti-slavery petitions imposed by Congress in 1837. As a good quasi-Kantian, Thoreau went so far as to insist that Americans abandon commerce altogether—hopelessly entwined with slavery as it was—and go ‘back to the soil’ as yeoman farmers. Emerson couldn’t quite bring himself to go that far, preferring moral self-examination to tilling the soil. “In Emerson,” Nietzsche would later lament, “we lost a philosopher”; Turner has the opposite regret, that “Emerson seemed to value his purely philosophical pursuits more than his antislavery activities.” Or, as one might put it today, in Emerson we gained an intellectual. Turner does quite sensibly bring himself around to accept Emerson’s proposal to compensate slaveholders in exchange for emancipating their slaves. “Morally impure” though this is, “prudence is mandatory”; “if self-reliance required moral perfection it would be an unlivable ideal.” He concludes with democratic-socialist fervor, laying down two obligations: the “nonexploitation obligation,” requiring one to ensure that his “pursuit of self-reliance…does not directly abridge others’ ability to pursue self-reliance”; and the “democratic egalitarian obligation,” requiring one to “contribute to the common effort to ensure that all democratic citizens have self-reliance’s material prerequisites” (otherwise known as socialism). He rightly does not claim that Emerson advocates these principles, only that “provides the initial basis” for them.

Free of historicism, Frederick Douglass proves harder to force into Turner’s framework, although not for want of trying. Referring to Douglass’s “transracial humanism” instead of his natural rights doctrine, Turner “awakened to race” as “a historical and social force,” preferring to concentrate on Douglass’s postbellum writings on the “economic underpinnings of freedom,” particularly “the idea of fair play” enforced by “a strong central state.” After disputing Peter Myers’s natural-rights interpretation of Douglass’s thought he eventually gets round to admitting Myers is right, but laments that “this prevented Douglass from supporting the plans of Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans to confiscate rebel land and redistribute it to freedmen.” Those pesky property rights, you see. In fact, natural rights doctrine most assuredly does not prevent confiscation and redistribution of land owned by defeated enemies in a just war, as American Tories learned in the 1780s, on their way to Canada and other points British. Turner does cite Douglass’s alternative proposal: to establish a National Land and Loan Company which would sell stock and use the money to purchase Southerners’ property and then lease or sell it to former slaves. The failure of this proposal allows Turner to condemn industrial and financial interests that overbore the Radical wing of the party after Stevens’s death; this valid point sets up his next move, which is to try to squeeze a bit of socialism out of his man by citing a passage in which Douglass urges that black men be given straw to make bricks. What Douglass actually means is that black men should not be cut off from access to building materials on the basis of unjust, racially-based discrimination; Douglass remains a very good Lockean indeed by insisting on the value of work as the basis of self-help. American “political culture lacked a philosophic vocabulary of positive economic rights,” or, to put it in plainer language, there weren’t many socialists around here. Nonetheless, “it is plausible to read him as a forerunner of twentieth-century ideas of positive economic rights” because he thought “freedmen were owed the material rudiments of self-help.” This is nonsense, inasmuch as confiscation of property, homesteading, and similar policies were entirely compatible with the American regime from early on, and had none of the foundation in the historicist economic egalitarianism Turner strains to see in Douglass.

In Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Turner finds much more congenial spirits. Ellison joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s, breaking with it in the mid-40s because it had become insufficiently Marxist and anti-bourgeois for a self-respecting militant; expatriate Baldwin was a socialist throughout his adult life. No natural-rights republicanism for Turner to worry about, here. “The primary responsibility of the American writer, Ellison insisted, was ‘to give as thorough a report of social reality as possible,'” “arbitrating the representation of reality.” To Marxist class consciousness he very understandably added race consciousness to counter the “false consciousness” of writers and readers who ignored racism. In an area where natural rights and Marxist ideas do intersect, Ellison was on board: He eschewed any attempt (which would have been entirely Quixotic, anyway) of substituting black racial dominance for white racial dominance; proletarian dictatorship was one thing, race-based dictatorship another. “Black people would be their own death and destruction if they sought not equality and justice but merely an inversion of American racial hierarchy”; “interracial fraternity” or genuine racial integration fits well enough with ‘America’ and ‘Germany’ alike. (Race and class, yes, but Turner pauses to deplore the notion of fraternity, a sex-based word that he should have discarded. Even Ellison did not achieve the trifecta of the twenty-first century Left, ‘race, class, and gender.) “Well versed in Marx, Ellison recognized the economic and social roots of white supremacy,” but he also saw that white supremacy contradicts the “unalienable rights and natural equality” enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He did not base his own critique of racism so much on natural rights as on the analysis of the neo-Marxist Erich Fromm’s claim that the remedy for modern man’s loss of the security of “a stable social order” (i.e. feudal aristocracy) was “self-creation and the pursuit of meaningful work,” lest one turn toward the new ‘aristocracy’ offered by fascism. Racial supremacy feeds into this quest for a new aristocracy; Ellison’s rhetorical strategy was to point this out, alerting American ‘innocents at home’ that they should not “take for granted their own good character” in matters of race relations. He remained a historicist, “treat[ing] the word America as an indefinite signifier of mystical importance,” “keep[ing] the word’s significance indefinite, so as to encourage his audience to regard the meaning of American as evolving”—the characteristic strategy of the ‘progressive’ Left, Marxist or not.

Baldwin not only “personifies ‘awakening to race'”; he also adds the category of ‘sex’ to race and class. “I interpret Baldwin as a democratic individualist,” which is to say a democratic socialist, and the interpretation is fair enough, at least when considering his later writings—especially The Fire Next Time. He rejected the progressivist liberals of his time; “liberal idols such as Roosevelt and Kennedy, according to Baldwin, defended black humanity only when it cost them little or nothing,” or, as a politician who has responsibility for making real-world decisions in a republic might say, when the public opinion upon which they depended for accession to and continuation in high public office permitted them to act. A critic of American ‘exceptionalism,’ Baldwin viewed his native country as “a prosaic nation among prosaic nations, unexceptionally capable of both good and evil. At the same time, Baldwin believes we have it in our power to create a redeeming future if we admit that redemption has yet to occur.” This is why he was so foolish. Why would human beings “capable of both good and evil” transform themselves into purely good ones?

Baldwin replies in the accents of neo-Hegelian egalitarianism. “White citizens must accustom themselves to hearing blacks’ imperative voice”—Hegelian recognition. In Baldwin’s words, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it…and history is literally present in all that we do,” that is (in Hegelian terms) immanent. Turner sees the problem. “Baldwin runs into a classic problem of democratic reconstitution: reconstitution is necessary both to do justice to citizens and to create citizens capable of sustaining a just regime. But for citizens to recognize that reconstitution is necessary, they must be better than they presently are.” Historicists typically invoke the figure of the leader to address this problem, but Turner’s Baldwin contents himself with calling for “the assertive speech of dissident citizens.” But are not members of the Ku Klux Klan equally dissident citizens? Indeed so: American “self-creation” must then become “a self-conscious struggle with historical inheritance, a battle to reduce history’s power over the self through patient and forthright confrontation.” Turner makes a brave if implausible effort to refute Locke on this basis. “In Locke’s political theory, property is conceived as a natural institution that comes into existence prior to the constitution of either political society or government,” a claim Turner’s Baldwin denies on the basis that Locke assumed that “any pauper could find untilled land and create property by mixing his labor with it.” The real Locke defined property first and foremost as the innate capacities and characteristics of human beings—physical strength, moral rights, and intelligence. Arrangements for civil property rights derive from human nature. It isn’t hard to refute Locke if you haven’t understood what he says. But it is hard to understand Locke if you read him assuming that human beings ‘constructed’ by their society—”socialized all the way down,” as Richard Rorty puts it, along with hundreds of lesser historicists.

Although Turner dresses his “democratic individualism” in American garb, it really amounts to familiar contemporary postmodernism, “sensitivity to dialectics of identity and difference” wedded to “historical consciousness.” With these elements in hand, his readers will develop “appreciation of relinquishment as a virtuous act,” also known as ‘give us your money, and do it with a smile.’ Such are the arts of “rhetorical jujitsu.” “Though advocates of racial justice argue in a sense for a type of group equality”—one must admire that “in a sense”—”they must put the rhetorical focus on the individuals within the group.” This enables them to “talk about conditions of deprivation and inequality” in “specific terms,” as they affect individuals, or what might be called the HLN News approach to social analysis. Disagree in whole or in part? Well, “those who pretend otherwise do not have the courage to face reality.” So there. You are probably “a very specific type of citizen insulated from the worst aspects of American life: the white, middle-class, heterosexual male.” You blackguard.

It is equally necessary to face unreality. To take ‘race, class, and gender’ as a moral slogan intended to reduce one’s political rivals to a condition of guilt-ridden disarray confuses morality with rhetoric. To take it as a political slogan to unite socialists overlooks the question of whether socialism would actually produce the egalitarian effects its proponents seek, or claim to seek. Inasmuch as socialism transfers economic resources from private to public control, it enhances the power of the modern state, as Marx forthrightly admitted. Marx also claimed that once the state had done its proper work of eradicating socioeconomic classes it would wither away, yielding communism. That has yet to happen anywhere socialism has been tried; supposed socialist realism turned out to be utopianism and then soured into a scam (as in the old joke, ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’). Egalitarianism wasn’t served. To insist that this time it will be different because this time we will have democratic socialism studiously overlooks the need to empower the state in order to redistribute income, an empowerment unlikely to be relinquished once—if—redistribution has been accomplished.