George F. Kennan: The Kennan Diaries. Frank Costigliola, ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 52, Number 1, January/February 2015.

 

Upon putting down Charles Dickens’ characteristically verbose and melodramatic novel, The Old Curiosity Shop, Oscar Wilde famously opined, “One must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” Prematurely eminent, indefatigably self-important, and never admittedly wrong about anything of the slightest consequence, George F. Kennan invites such giggles at his life. Having never quite landed the job he most wanted—Secretary of State—he spent entirely too much of the second half-century of his life feeling sorry for himself and denouncing the policies and characters of nearly everyone he contemplated. By the late 1950s, he had decided that the Soviets would probably win the Cold War but only if mankind escaped nuclear annihilation, an evasion Kennan judged improbable. That is, if the population bomb didn’t explode first: the United States in 1982 was “of course some 200% over-populated,” and men having spawned more than two children should be “compulsively sterilized.” (Kennan himself had four children, but at least two of them “do not love me,” so maybe that would have spared him the imaginary knife).

And then there was industrial pollution of the land, sea, rivers, and air. “Doomed, obviously”—that’s what American and all of Western civilization are, and it’s a good thing, too, as they have spawned a vast, egalitarian, mongrelized mass of shameless décadents—unforgivably infesting the airport in Zurich in touristic forays that ought to be outlawed, to give but one example of their shameless misbehavior. Their fawning, hypocritical elected officials thoughtlessly ignore the only true Americans, the fast-disappearing WASP gentry, whose gentile Jeremiah was Kennan himself: “I am now in the truest sense a voice crying in the wilderness.” No one ever listens to me, he laments, year after year, reduced to making lists of vitally important predictions and measures he had enunciated, all to no avail. Such complaints reach a crescendo just when the thing he predicted initially—the collapse of the Soviet empire—began to occur. Perhaps it is all just as well, humanity’s demise; more than once, he quotes the old U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, who intoned, “Man is skin-disease of the earth.” Although he seems not to spare himself from this description—”If dislike for oneself were really, as the religious leaders claim, the beginning of virtue in the sight of the Lord, then I should be on the verge of sainthood”—it’s hard to shake the suspicion that what should have been a well-earned self-loathing only provides rhetorical cover for an otherwise invincible narcissism. His editor puts it with a diplomatic tact many readers will find impossible to muster: “He was a playwright who never wrote plays, perhaps because his gift for depicting scenes was not matched by a skill, or inclination, for dialogue.”

All this notwithstanding—and it’s a lot—Kennan’s diary proves a trove of insights. When he forgets about himself and gets down to thinking about world politics—which, thankfully, he does most of the time—he ranges from brilliance to intelligent provocation; even his blunders illuminate. As a companion he may be tiresome, grating especially when preoccupied with his own finely-tuned sensibilities, but as an observer and a thinker, yes, he was almost as good as he (and not only he) claimed. The diary fixes in place his acute perceptions and (frequently) wise deliberations as they unfolded over the decades in which his country irrevocably ventured into the world as its preeminent geopolitical act, much to his regret.

Kennan prepared himself meticulously for his vocation. Son of a Milwaukee lawyer, he remained loyal to the American Midwest—most especially to its habit of decently minding its own business, a principle it had so often extended to the realm of foreign policy (overseas, at least) up to the time of Kennan’s birth. This notwithstanding, he got out of the Midwest as soon as he could, first to Princeton College and, on vacations, to New York, London, and Paris (“I have never seen any city even remotely resembling it,” he writes, as a nineteen-year-old in 1924). He joined the Foreign Service a year after graduation, posted first at Geneva and then at Hamburg, eyes wide open (“like all the Swiss, the Genevese people are essentially what might be called innocent bystanders”). Already he commanded an ability both to empathize and to judge. At a communist demonstration, he feels “contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of Communism,” but with it “a strange desire to cry, when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street,” “ill-dressed, slouching brutalized people” but “human beings” who, “after centuries of mute despair, for the first time [were] attempting to express and to assert themselves.” “Under the manifold hokus-pokus of the red flags and the revolutionary ritual they had found something that they believed in, and were proud of.”

Although the United States didn’t recognize the Soviet Union, someone in the Hoover Administration thought we needed to understand it; the State Department sponsored an intensive, three-year program in Russian language, literature, and history which Kennan took, and it enabled him to be the right man in the right place at the right time, twenty years later. It didn’t take him long to identify the narrowness of the Marxist ideology animating the Russian regime; focused on “class-consciousness” to the exclusion of “all differences of political and social development and character between the different nations,” “communist dogma…is an obvious absurdity,” he remarked, in 1930, when so many intellectuals of his generation found the stuff fascinating. Among Russians he preferred Anton Chekhov, “the last of the humanists” and now dead. Chekhov understood that social reform, though desirable, would not cure the more fundamental torments of the human soul. Soviet tyranny will not remake Russians, Kennan predicted, it will only infantilize them; even it succeeded economically, it will leave the Russian “totally untrained to think for himself, unaccustomed to face his own soul, guided neither by tradition, example, or the steadying influences of personal responsibility to persons near him”; “from being the most morally unified country in the world, Russia will become, overnight, the worst moral chaos.” In 1929, Kennan had lunch “with a Russian communist official in Berlin.” Upon telling him “the greatest danger for Bolshevism lay in its success, he said he understood what I meant.”

Not that any such economic success was in the offing. Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic corruption were quite noticeable Kennan by the mid-1930s. He has much less to say about the rise of Nazism, but from his several vantage points in Europe he foresaw the next world war easily enough. Understandably, the diary contains little from the hectic war years, which Kennan spent in London, but as his thoughts reappear in 1944, with victory now visible, characteristic themes of his mature thought emerge.

Although he saw as clearly as anyone that geopolitics in the twentieth century featured an ideological component unseen since the French Revolution, and that ideology, coupled with modern technology, resulted in unprecedented tyrannies, he longed to return to the limits recognized by the statesmen prior to and following the Jacobin upheaval. Crucially, and in a sense almost tragically, he hoped that somehow diplomacy would tame the beasts of this apocalypse. And so we see him deploring America’s demand that its enemies surrender unconditionally in World War II, worried that Americans could not shoulder the responsibility of governing either postwar German or Japan. He preferred to avoid such commitments, even at the cost of letting many officials of the enemy regimes off the hook; citing Edward Gibbon (along with Edmund Burke and Tocqueville, an intellectual hero), he predicted that the prosecution of war criminals would only stoke resentment in the peoples we conquered and prevent any future alliance. It is crucial to notice that this can often be the case, but was not the case in Germany and Japan, as things actually played out. America’s use of regime change as an instrument of foreign policy—first undertaken by the Washington Administration, which attempted to turn several of the Amerindian nations to agricultural settlement—has sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed. Each situation has differed, calling for a variety of policies. For all his esteem for the concrete and his horror for the abstract—for all his admiration of Burke—Kennan tended to generalize in his own way. As a result, when he condemned these and subsequent American efforts at regime change, he could be right or wrong, but always in the same way, always on the side of non-interference. It turns out that realism has its own dogmatism—that Burkeanism too can prove to be ‘abstract.’

Kennan became famous for framing the policy of “containment,” which, he predicted correctly, would eventuate in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He saw the mistakes the Roosevelt Administration was making in 1944: reliance on the new version of the League of Nations (such structures “have always served the purpose for which they were designed just as long as the Great Powers gave substance and reality to their existence”); over-reliance on FDR’s personal charm as a means of softening Stalinist ambitions. Given “the jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin,” which “can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies,” great-power interests would not remain congruent for long; therefore (among other things), Polish independence was doomed, whatever may or may not have been agreed upon at Yalta. Kennan further blamed the American regime itself—a popularly-based, ethnically-mixed stew of factions that prohibit elected officials from publicly formulating and consistently pursuing a genuinely national interest—for inclining presidents and secretaries of state to “take refuge in general and abstract schemes, which can serve at once to conceal the absence of a real policy, to cater to the American fondness for dealing [in] high moral principles, and to throw onto other governments the responsibility for future outbursts of violence.” Nothing will impel the Soviets “to part in good faith and permanently from their sphere of influence policy”—surely not a “United Nations” organization. Therefore, the United States and Great Britain must define their core interests on the European continent and “make it plain to the Russians in practical ways and in friendly but firm manner where this line lies,” always recognizing that such terms as “collaboration” and “democracy” “have different meanings for the Russians than for us.” Thus, some two years before his seminal “Long Telegram” and three years before the “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs, outlining the strategy of containment of Soviet power in Europe, Kennan had formulated one element of American Cold-War strategy.

As Kennan subsequently never tired of saying, his version of containment featured only the minimum use of military force and was not intended as a worldwide commitment; if ever there was a man who deserved the epithet, ‘Eurocentric,’ it was Kennan, who would have preferred an early settlement with Japan (with no regime change), allowing Tokyo to police Asia at the expense of what he regarded as  sclerotic China. In Europe, after the war, military force wouldn’t work, he argued, because “blows aimed in exasperation at the [Soviet] regime itself are no help to the people by whom it is dominated,” but are rather “promptly ducked and passed on to the people, while the regime, breathing sympathetic indignation, strikes one fiery attitude after another as the protector of a noble nation from the vicious envy of a world which refuses to understand.” Even when the United States developed nuclear weapons, he argued against brandishing them against a now-vulnerable Soviet Union; if we destroyed Soviet power we would take upon ourselves the impossible task of assuming “political authority and responsibility in Russia.” Regarding such responsibility in the much more limited territories of Germany and Japan as over-ambitious, how much more “we would not morally competent to exercise [such authority] with good effect” in Russia. At the same time he hoped, just as unrealistically, “to convince the Russians that it is in their interest to disarm themselves” and accept “an international atomic energy authority.” Why such an authority would not suffer exactly the same defects as the United Nations, he did not say. Militarily, the United States should not join a North Atlantic Treaty Association but rather “be like the porcupine who only gradually convinces the carnivorous best of prey that he is not a fit object of attack.” Whereas the old Washington-Monroe-Adams policy of non-involvement in Europe would not have worked against Nazi Germany—”the Germans were in effect waging an undeclared war against us” by “pursuing a policy which aimed at least at a radical reduction in our state power and one which certainly would have been incompatible with our state security”—vis-à-vis the Soviets we could return to a much-modified form of the Monroe Doctrine, involving ourselves in Europe by financing European reconstruction (he helped to formulate the Marshall Plan) and also by funneling military and other aid to such early Cold War flash points as Greece and Turkey.

As Chief of Policy Planning for the State Department, Kennan reached the apex of his diplomatic career in 1947, but he soon found himself disagreeing with the Truman Doctrine, which understood the Soviet threat as entailing a worldwide struggle requiring a strong military component. Kennan believed such an effort to be far too costly, both materially and morally, to be entered into—much less sustained. By the fall of 1949 he was contending that America “as a society…has no control over the direction in which it is moving socially and technologically, and no assurance that the currents in which we are being involuntarily borne are not ones which carry us away from our national ideals and the foundations of our type of representative government.” The Truman policy “takes us along a street to which there are only three outlets: a Russian collapse, a disintegration of our own position, or a terrible war.” His own version of containment—including the neutralization of a reunited Germany, accompanied by a pullback of Warsaw Pact and NATO forces in their respective spheres—he argued, would result in a more gradual and peaceful change in the Soviet regime, after a period of what was later called détente. He left the State Department in August 1950, regretting the Korean War and eventually denouncing the war in Vietnam from his position as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. Truman gave him one last chance in diplomacy, in the position he had been groomed for; in 1952 he was appointed as U. S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, only to be expelled by Stalin after making some intemperate if not entirely unjust remarks comparing the isolation of Western diplomats from Russian society by the Soviet regime to the behavior of the Nazis toward foreign diplomats in the 1930s.

Enter Kennan the American Jeremiah, destined to be perpetually misunderstood by an uncomprehending and increasingly vulgarized world: “Such hopes as I had entertained for a yielding or a relaxation from the Soviet side were based on realizations too subtle and too delicate, too deeply founded in the peculiarities of Soviet reality, for people in the outside world to understand”; “most of my colleagues did not agree with me.” “I am an exile wherever I go, by virtue of my experience”—”a foreigner in my country.” But, along with this disappointed ambition, enter Kennan the historian, who could now write books on Russian history that have taught, and will continue to teach, anyone who devotes time and attention to them. In this he drew upon a profound empathy for Russians; after watching a production of The Cherry Orchard, he wrote of my Russian self, which is entirely a Chekhovian self and much more genuine than the American one.” Chekhovian, indeed: detesting the tyranny of the Communists while loathing the bourgeois, a loathing that perforce put him at odds with the minds and hearts of most Americans. He consequently viewed the world scene in that clouds-of-grey mood guaranteed by those Russian plays.

By the mid-1950s, Kennan understood himself as an “isolationist” of a certain sort. There are isolationists “who hold the outside world too unimportant or wholly wicked and therefore not worth bothering about”—Kennan’s somewhat polemical description of the Willian Borah/Hiram Johnson isolationism of the 1930s; there are also “those who distrust the ability of the United States Government, so constituted and inspired as it is, to involve itself to any useful effect in most foreign situations.” “I… belong to the latter school.” “In the last analysis, one country cannot impose its will permanently on another except by military occupation or the threat of occupation, and then, on the latter instance, only if it can find a local regime to do its bidding.” He judged that Americans lacked the character and the experience—thanks to their popularly-based republican regime—to do that sort of thing effectively. Only an aristocracy could conduct the kind of consistent and persistent foreign policy that works in the long run. The State Department might have been constituted as just such an aristocracy of merit, but American populism and militarism had precluded this; repeatedly throughout the remainder of his life, Kennan predicted nuclear war as the world’s reward for American ineptitude and shallowness as it collided with Soviet malice and folly. “I have no hope that a nuclear disaster can be avoided,” he intoned, in 1988.

This makes his entries on the Reagan Administration and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire—falsifying his most recent doomsday prediction—especially worth considering. He rightly saw, as early as 1982, that “the administration has decided that the time has come for an all-out effort to break up the Soviet hegemony in eastern and Central Europe, and to do it in a manner as humiliating as possible to the Soviet leadership”; this was, he wrote, unnecessary (“the hegemony was disintegrating by itself without our doing”) and dangerous (“probably leading to war”). “Ignorant, unintelligent, complacent, arrogant,” as well as “frivolous and reckless,” the “Reagan regime” merely reflected the character of the president. “I love certain old-fashioned values and concepts—but not his.” By patriotism Kennan meant love of the land “to the extent the people have not yet made a wasteland, a garbage dump, or a sewer out of it”—all tendencies Kennan imagined that the capitalist, Reagan, exhibited. As for loving the people, he charged Reagan with “idealizing them,” endowing them with “a superior virtue and strength [that] entitles them to consider themselves leaders in the world.” What Kennan missed in Reagan was not only Reagan’s intelligence—Reagan (I suspect deliberately) made that easy to miss—but also Reagan’s devotion to the principles of the American regime and its constitution. As an admirer of Burke and, well, part of Tocqueville, Kennan deprecated such things as natural rights as too abstract, and political institutions as too flimsy, to form the foundation of any serious political thought. He looked rather to manners and morals, to habits of the mind and heart, to tradition, even to a mild form of race theory (seen in his celebration of the culture of the American WASP, which group he regarded as the only real Americans, their “homeland raped and destroyed by modernity”). He judged America as ill-founded, both in colonial times (the colonists began as part of Europe’s international civilization but quickly turned themselves into provincials “without poetry, without art, without esthetic feeling”) and in the years following independence. Although he admired The Federalist for its insistence on the imperfections of human nature, he rather disliked the constitutional union itself, musing at one point that it was a shame that Lincoln preserved it. A North America more like Europe, with its smaller and more diverse countries, would have been much more congenial to his moral and esthetic sensibilities.

When the Berlin Wall fell, he sighed, “This revolution in the Communist world fails, for some reason, to excite me very greatly. I can fairly say that I saw it coming,” but of course the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations could in no way be credited. After all, if only they, and previous administrations, had listened to him it all would have come more gradually; “had my efforts been successful, [they] would have obviated the vast expenses, dangers, and distortions of outlook of the ensuing Cold War, and would have left us in far better shape than we are to face the problem we now confront.” His pessimism respecting other people’s policies was rivaled only by his optimism respecting his own. As things did turn out, the newly-liberated people were “totally unprepared for self-government,” with no “viable political parties to take over from the Communists.” He further predicted, in 1996, “that the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers”—that is, to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—a move that he regarded as “the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period.” Notice both how right and how wrong he was: Most of the ex-communist countries have managed their regime changes well enough; for its part, not only has Russia not managed a commercial-republican regime change but has indeed reacted badly to Western advances. Yet only after the regime changes in Ukraine and Georgia: Central Europe wasn’t the trigger; Eastern Europe was.

One of the dimensions of the problem Kennan confronted—the problem of Socrates, really, the problem of wisdom and consent, the dilemma of the thinker amongst the unthoughtful—is the need to convey certainty, authority of judgment, not to say a sort of vatic self-assurance in a political world full of what scientists call variables too numerous and changeable to give even the wisest man much real certainty at all. Social science, with its bell curves and statistics, has attempted to eliminate or at least reduce such uncertainty; Kennan kept social science firmly subordinate to a humane and sympathetic perception of how real human beings are. As a strategist he both needed to predict the likely results of actions and faced the impossibility of doing so consistently. He persisted in his efforts and his lamentations. It is a privilege to have the chance to think along with him.

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.