On November 3, 1988, just before the U. S. presidential election, I debated Dr. Richard Plano, a Professor of Physics at Rutgers University, at the Busch Student Center. The topic was United States policy of nuclear weapons. The debate began with a screening of “Mandate From Main Street: Americans Advise the Next President,” a videotape produced by the Union of concerned Scientists and the Better World Society. The video consisted of a presentation of information about nuclear weapons to a small group of Americans, who discussed the presentation amongst themselves. The strategy was to have the audiences for the video watch and listen to the audience in the video, then to carry on the discussion.
Dr. Plano and I were each given twenty minutes for our opening statements.

 

EMPTY MANDATE

What is the “mandate from Main Street”? According to this film, it has two components:
1. Americans don’t want nuclear war; we find the prospect of violent death distasteful.
2. Americans want to proceed with peace treaties, but with caution.
Polling data suggest that these sentiments have held fairly steady for the last three decades at least. Within this consensus, there are fluctuations: one year we’re passing nuclear ‘freeze’ resolutions, the next year we’re reelecting Ronald Reagan in a landslide. We know what we want; we’re not so sure about what we should do to get it.

Why, then, does the discussion filmed here, make the participants so happy? At the end, they heartily congratulate one another for reaching these utterly unexceptional conclusions. I imagine that many of us who watch them find their enthusiasm contagious.

The answer has nothing to do with the content of the film. Its conclusions are too general to give any useful guidance to a president, and the information offered, such as it is, will mislead anyone who takes it seriously. But the technique here is admirable.

Most films of this sort present their case by offering statistics, some ‘visuals’ designed for maximum emotional impact, and opinions delivered by authority figures. This film goes a step further. It uses these ordinary techniques on an audience that we, the second audience, watch. The ‘group dynamic’ of the audience in the film thus reaches out to involve the audience watching the film. Anyone here who’s interested in marketing or advertising might study this carefully. I don’t know if you can sell cars or laundry detergents this way, but it might be fun to try.

As for the substance of the film, it is weak. I’ve listened twice, now, and unless I’m mistaken, no one in the discussion group ever cites a single fact, with the exception of the former Coast Guardsman who assures everyone that the billions spent for defense actually bought things.

All else is emotions, opinions, and short commonsense arguments. None of the participants really knows anything about the issues.

Let me be more specific. The film commits errors in four categories: history, military strategy, economics, and politics.

In History: The film tries to portray the Reagan Administration as having changed its policies with respect to the Soviets. The producers try to contrast Reagan’s “evil empire” statement with his recantation in Red Square. They ignore the context of the two statements. “Evil empire” was [a phrase in a speech given at] a convention of evangelical Christians. “No longer an evil empire” was during a summit conference, with Gorbachev at his elbow. What do you expect?

Beyond the rhetoric, Reagan’s policy has been completely consistent throughout his two terms. In response to the well-documented decline of American strength in the 1970s, and a steep Soviet buildup, Reagan undertook an American buildup accompanied by several small-scale, rapid military forays—Grenada and Libya—and longer-term efforts in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf. This balance of action and talk has remained consistent for more than seven years.

In treating the Pershing and Cruise missile deployments as if they occurred in a vacuum, the film is misleading. In claiming that “Reagan’s popularity plummeted” in 1983, not 1982, the film is wrong—and for a purely polemical reason. [The producers] want to link Reagan’s popularity with arms talks, instead of the economy. And in claiming that Reagan was “playing on the fears” of the American people, the film conveniently ‘forgets that these fears were our response to the very real Soviet military buildup, and to [Soviet] strategic advances through proxies in Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, and Latin America throughout the 1970s.

In terms of military strategy, the film has no substance at all. The participants agree that we have more than “enough” bombs because we can “blow up the world.” This is simply irrelevant. We won’t blow up anything if we can’t deliver warheads on target. Nuclear deterrence rests on the perceived ability to retaliate after your own forces have been attacked. We manufacture a variety of weapons, in large quantities, precisely because we want to have a formidable arsenal left over after an attack—enough so the Soviets won’t attack us in the first place. The film never grasps this elementary point of strategy.

Similarly, the film assumes that more weapons are more dangerous than fewer—wrong again, and for the same reason. Survivable and deliverable weapons are the key to security, not ‘more’ and ‘fewer.’ This is why Reagan can build up [our nuclear arsenal] and negotiate for reductions, simultaneously.

It is on the issue of enforcement of treaties that the film plays its cleverest sleight-of-hand. You’ll recall that one of the participants says he wants to see arms treaties enforced. The narrator responds with a videotape on verification. There are some problems, here. [Former CIA Director] William Colby is a poor choice as an authority on verification, having presided over the CIA at a time when it underestimated Soviet nuclear strength. Even this year when the Soviets revealed the extent of their INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] arsenal, we learned we had underestimated the number of their weapons by 33%.

But the real point is this: To verify a violation is not the same as to respond to it. The man wanted to know what to do after verification. He never got an answer.

In terms of economics, the participants claim we’re “losing ground” and blamed military spending. The facts contradict them. Our GNP is $4 trillion. We generate one-fifth of the world’s wealth. If the Japanese, or the South Koreans, or any other nation is rising faster and now competes, good for them. It’s up to us to compete successfully, and the 6.33% of our GNP we spend on defense, only one-fifth of that on weapons, and less than that on nuclear weapons, poses no real obstacle to that—as our own history proves. In previous decades it has run as high as 12%, and there is no prospect of anything near that, again.

Further, if economic pressures and not the Reagan arms buildup drove the Soviets back to the negotiating table [as the film claimed], why did we get the INF Treaty only after proving we had the political capacity to get Pershing and Cruise missiles deployed in Europe? and why has the military share of the Soviet GNP continued to escalate? It’s now at approximately 17%, up from 12% fifteen years ago.

Despite the seriousness of these historical, strategic, and economic flaws, the film’s greatest deficiency is its superficial conception of politics. On the simplest level, we see this in the silly suggestion that America should somehow “help” Gorbachev by expediting arms treaties. The Soviets have shown that this sort of thing is useless; they were the ones who walked out of the arms talks in 1983, only to accept every one of the American terms on [the] INF [Treaty], only a few years later.

I’ve been involved with negotiations among politicians—nothing on this level, of course, but I know how it’s done. Adversaries don’t “help” each other; they help themselves. Sometimes, what they do is mutually beneficial. If Gorbachev is deposed, it will likely have nothing to do with whether or not he obtains treaties from us. It will be a power grab over which we will have little or no control.

The film’s narrator asks, “What is national security?” The [discussion] group’s answers are, “Economics and the prevention of drug trafficking.” That’s all right as far as it goes, but it misses the political character of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

When Lincoln said the United States was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he wasn’t just playing with words. The United States was founded as the first really practical anti-tyrannical regime.

The Founders wrote the Constitution to insure liberty, not merely by stating those liberties in the Bill of Rights (what good would that do?) but by structuring our government in such a way as to re-channel the ambitions of political men away from tyranny and toward liberty. They did this by separating sovereignty from government.

America was something new: Novus ordo seclorum. The highest secular authority is the people; as the Declaration of Independence says, “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But the people don’t govern directly, as in the old democracies that failed. Instead, they elect representatives to govern during fixed terms.

This principle of consent also governs the economy. We don’t have a ‘command economy,’ as the Soviets do. We have a commercial economy.

Government by consent is a commercial republic.

Contrast this with the Soviet founding, accomplished by Lenin. Lenin explicitly condemned government by consent, and the commercial economy that goes with it:

“Disarmament is the ideal of socialism. There will be no wars in socialist society; consequently, disarmament will be achieved. But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist. Dictatorship is state power based directly on violence. And in the twentieth century… violence means neither a fist or a club but troops. To put ‘disarmament’ in the programme is tantamount to making the general declaration: We are opposed to the use of arms. There is as little Marxism in this as there would be if we were to say: We are opposed to violence!”

The dictatorship of the proletariat, which is really the dictatorship by the Communist Party over the proletariat, is nothing less than a new form of despotism directly opposed to the new form of liberty founded in America and since then initiated and sustained in many other parts of the world. This is why Soviet propagandists deride the American regime as an example of “bourgeois formalism”: both a commercial economy and a government separated from the people, its powers are divided and balanced within the government. All of this protects consent. The American regime prevents dictatorship, ‘proletarian’ or otherwise.

Where does this leave Gorbachev and his perestroika, his ‘restructuring’ of Soviet society? At this July’s Soviet Communist Party Conference, Gorbachev left no doubt:

“The wish to see the Party still stronger has resounded here most passionately and resolutely. This can only be welcomed, and I think all of us are pleased. As put down in its resolution, the Conference demanded that our Party should in every respect be a Leninist Party not only in content but in its methods.”

The political methods have if anything been more Leniniist than Lenin’s: to merge the party leadership with official state leadership to a degree seen only in another Communist-bloc country—Romania, where it has been a disaster.

The rhetoric is glasnost [openness], but the deed is centralization—more than ever. Perestroika is an attempt to reform centralism, not to abolish it. Consent still has no real place in the politics and economy of command. Liberty is granted as a privilege, not preserved as an unalienable right. There is still no reliable way to re-channel ambition into constructive purposes.

There’s no separation of sovereignty from government. There’s no separation and balance of powers within the government. There’s no genuine rule of law, based upon consent. For all of these reasons, there is no real recognition of, or solid protection for, human rights.

Perestroika has been attempted before. Lenin’s New Economic Policy and Khruschev’s de-Stalinization program are the most memorable examples. These efforts failed. Such efforts have to fail, because they are not radical—they don’t go to the root of the problem.

The great Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov understands this. In today’s Christian Science Monitor, he criticizes proposals for constitutional reform, which make Gorbachev not only the Party chief but the head of government. “As in the past, we are relying on one man,” Sahharov writes. “This is exceptionally dangerous, both for perestroika as a whole, and for Gorbachev personally. Today it will be Gorbachev, tomorrow it can be anyone.”

All of this has direct relevance to “Mandate from Main Street.” Arms treaties cannot get to the root of the political conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Gorbachev himself implies as much. “Our restructuring is demolishing the fear of the Soviet threat, and militarism [he means the military defense of the commercial republics] thereby loses its political justification.” Gorbachev does not say perestroika demolishes the Soviet threat itself, or the military justification of our arms buildup. He suggests that restructuring will affect the political situation, which determines military policy.

As the Oxford University historian Michael Howard has written, “Arms control becomes possible only when the underlying power balance has been mutually agreed.” This comes about only with a political settlement.

Commercial republics don’t fight among themselves. Britain and France, two countries with a long history of mutual hatred, possess nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy one another. But neither nation worries about this. There is no arms treaty, there. Rather, both are commercial republics, regimes designed to re-channel military and political ambition toward liberty and consent, not violence.

Until the Soviet Union solves that [regime] problem, arms treaties will merely re-channel the conflict from one class of weapons to another. This can be worthwhile in a limited way. But it cannot mean real peace.

W. B. Allen, ed.: George Washington: A Collection. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988.

Originally published in the Washington Times, December 5, 1988.

 

In April 1789 the first President of the United States delivered the first Inaugural Address, in writing; the practice of delivering them orally in front of both houses of Congress would commence more than a century leader, when Woodrow Wilson reconceived the presidency as a platform for the nation’s ‘opinion leader.’ Washington restricted himself to more sober thoughts: “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican form of government, are justly considered as deeply, and perhaps finally, staked on the experiment trusted to the hands of the American people.” Almost two hundred years later, as another president-elect and his writers prepare another ‘inaugural,’ George Washington’s words remain true, his thoughts on the preservation of liberty and republicanism worth heeding.

Washington understood the need for republican government, and its hazards, as clearly as any among that most lucid generation of American statesmen. Political liberty means government by consent of the governed, a principle denied by the British to the Americans. “What is it we are contending against?” Washington wrote in the aftermath of disturbances in Boston in 1774. “Is it against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea because burthensome? No, it is the right only, we have all along disputed.” Consent to taxation matters more than taxation. “We must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”

Washington considered a peaceful boycott of English goods, but judged it likely to be ineffective, requiring infeasible unanimity of American opinion. The right to liberty guarantees disagreement, making absolute unity in action impossible. Yet without a degree of union, men will never enact their right to liberty. Only warfare might unify Americans sufficiently to defend their right to thoughtful and moderate individual liberty. Washington therefore saw “no alternative but civil war or base submission,” and began the difficult, almost paradoxical act of fighting a civil war for political union, and maintaining a united effort for the rights of individual liberty and national independence.

A nation of individualists may organize itself to fight, but how well? For how long? Sunshine soldiers and summer patriots abound in this climate, and Washington had to devise a way to sustain a war with the people he had. In public, to his soldiers, he encouraged manly elevation of spirit. In the face of Congressional failure to pay them, he asked, “Is the paltry consideration of a little pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation, and of millions yet unborn?” He appealed to shame not to humble ordinary souls but to fortify them.

To his private correspondents and in his confidential memoranda to Congress he took an icier view. “Nothwithstanding all the public virtue which is ascribed to these people, there is no nation under the sun (that I ever came across) who pay greater adoration to money than they do.” Americans are human, only more so, and in every nation “the few who act on principles of disinterestedness, are, comparatively speaking, no more than a drop in the ocean.” Statesmen “must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” regulating and rechanneling them to defend natural, human rights. Though unalienable, those rights are always vulnerable.

To supplement appeals to principle, Washington insisted on discipline of, and pay for, his troops. Discipline rechannels the passion of fear, overwhelming the fear of death in battle with the “fear of punishment”; this latter fear “most obviously distinguishes” the trained from the “untutored” soldier. Pay rechannels the passion for gain; without it, soldiers will look elsewhere to support themselves and their families—often back to farm and hearth, where musket balls seldom fly.

Discipline and regular pay for troops require a Congress willing to back up its military officers, and able to raise money. This gives political union its practical urgency. Washington had advocated colonial union as early as 1756, during the war against the French. He intensified his call during the War of Independence. Disunion from England and union among the American states complemented one another, as both served the cause of peace; union with England and American disunion would prolong war. Union with England would mean “a peace on the principles of dependence.” This “would be to the last degree dishonorable and ruinous”—”if I may be allowed the expression, a peace of war.” Here Washington follows John Locke’s insight; tyranny is a form of war, and to fail to resist tyranny with arms actually perpetuates a peculiarly inconvenient war in which only one side has firepower.

American disunion frustrated Washington during the war and, in his view, would make Americans “instruments in the hands of our enemies” even after victory. To forge a political union, the bulwark of national liberty, independence, while protecting individual liberty and other unalienable rights, Washington participated in the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The delegates there sought to frame the world’s first sustainable republic. Washington regarded their successful Constitution-making as America’s real revolution, not the war. Changing a regime is one thing, sustaining the change another.

He considered a just government as consisting of three elements: a foundation supporting “pillars,” and a “fabric” supporting by them. Liberty—in political terms, consent—is the foundation of republican government. Its four pillars are union, a “sacred regard to public justice” (especially the willingness to pay debts), a “peace establishment” (that is, a reformed militia), and a “pacific and friendly disposition” among the people for each other. The materials of these pillars are enlightened minds and manners—”above all” the religious spirit that teaches us of “human depravity” and its malign effects on government, thereby adjuring citizens to restrain themselves and maintain a spirited vigilance toward their governors.

The fabric upheld by these pillars consists of independence and national character. Washington balances the ends of foreign and domestic policy, denigrating neither at the expense of the other. He can do this because he conceives of America’s revolution as the first practical, political step toward achieving not only the purpose of Americans but the purpose of mankind. He expresses two hopes for the future: First, he hopes that “that period is not very remote, when the benefits of a liberal, and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.” But commerce alone will not suffice. He also hopes that human beings “will not continue slaves in one part of the glove, when they can become freemen in another.” Commerce or consent-based economics, and republicanism or the content-based politics of representative government, together can bring genuine peace to the human race.

There are dangers. Washington imagines no inevitable progress; the project can derail. Commerce and industry generate more wealth than all the gold and silver mines of Spain, he writes, and “in modern wars the longest purse must chiefly determine the event.” Yet commerce can also bring greed, and the destruction of that modest degree of military spirit needed to defend its very wealth; greed can also bring union-threatening faction.

On the problem of faction, Washington deferred to the brilliantly-conceived remedies described by his friend and collaborator, James Madison, in the tenth Federalist. On the military spirit, he spoke for himself. “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” He thus connects military strength, which requires financial sacrifices, with the prosperity that only peace can secure. That this is a verbal not an institutional solution, that it depends for its success on enlightened statesmen to enunciate it and enlightened citizens to heed it, suggests is perpetual precariousness. Were it not precarious, spiritedness and statesmanship could be rendered obsolete, and men something like Washington could retire forever behind the neatly clipped hedges of administration.

Washington saw no prospect of such retirement. “It is to be regretted, I confess, that Democratical States must always feel before they can see: it is this that makes their governments slow, but the people will be right in the last.” Republican government, taking human beings as it finds them, rechanneling their passions into juster courses without crushing human liberty, defending itself against tyrants without and would-be tyrants within, by means provided by this modestly improved human nature, sets humanity on a race between its demons and the better angels of our nature. By doing what it can to make the people feel so that they can see, republican statesmanship appeals to those better angels without forgetting the demons. Having succeeded in this statesmanship, Washington earned the right to view America’s prospects with measured optimism.

 

Thomas L. Pangle: The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 1988.

 

Americans’ very familiarity with the Declaration of Independence distances us from it. To us, sonorous phrases about the self-evident truths that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with such unalienable rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, seem statements of the obvious—common-sense arguments in support of independence from king and mother-country.

If we draw ourselves back, we can begin to see the strangeness of this. If you don’t want your tea taxed, or your liberties abridged, why bring philosophy into it? Why appeal to first principles in order to send Tories packing, and maybe attract the support of monarchists in France (who needed very little philosophic motivation to aid a rebellion in a rival empire)? What were the American Founders thinking?

Thomas L. Pangle, author of the most illuminating commentary on Montesquieu published in this century, comes to his study of the moral foundations of the American republic with a clear and profound understand of the philosophy of modern liberalism—not to be confused with the unpalatable hash of pop-psych feel-goodism that passes for liberalism today. More, he sees how this philosophy has worked itself out in America, how it lives in our lives now. “The culture of the modern West is, in large measure, the result of theory and theorizing.” And the modern West itself takes its guidance from the kinds of political institutions first established by the American founders—some of whom saw “the philosophic roots and the distant goals of the new political culture being generated.” Philosophy, then, “is embedded in the very soil of the modern liberal republic.”

Most scholars who look at the American regime see that philosophy matters in it, but fail to appreciate the way it matters. They try to explain the founding in terms of the tradition of constitutionalism, or the forces of economics, or even the classical republicanism of antiquity. Pangle examines these explanations, redeeming some insights of reach, finding none entirely sufficient. The Founders’ republicanism, indeed constitutional and commercial, and alive to the need for the stern virtues exemplified by the citizens of republican Rome, nonetheless does not fit traditionalist, economic-deterministic, or classical paradigms. When the Founders wrote of a new secular order, they meant it, and were right to say it.

In their writings, the Founders “tend to treat virtue… as an important instrument for security or ease, liberty, self-government, and fame.” Busy productiveness, not warlike ambition or theological disputation, will characterize Americans. Our form of moderation more successfully opposes fanaticism than it disciplines self-indulgence. Our form of liberty serves individual, private interests first, the public interest through them; thus America liberty must end in the abolition of slavery, whereas Spartan and Roman liberty depended upon its perpetuation.

Those victory-loving souls among us will seek fame more than they seek the sometimes dangerous independence of virtue. The emphasis on privacy and sociality, not politics, requires a regime based upon economic and political consent—that is, commercial republicanism. To the Founders, ‘rational’ means reasonable in much he same sense we mean it today: avoiding passionate extremes, respecting the rule of law out of self-interest, and associating self-interest with a regime founded on the sovereignty of the people, governed by their elected representatives—that is, democratic republicanism.

Many of these principles resemble those of the English political philosopher, John Locke. Parts of the Declaration parallel sentences from his Essay Concerning Civil Government, although the Constitution amounts to a considerable improvement over the institutions Locke proposed. Pangle devotes over half the book to Locke’s conception of human nature.

Locke takes pains to emphasize the reasonable side of Christianity, emphasizing Nature’s God, from whom reliable rules of everyday conduct can be said to emanate. That ‘God helps those who help themselves’—in free commerce and in self-government—epitomizes Lockean folk-wisdom. Even in education, Locke promotes a decent, self-respecting sociality: “Children should not be made mere slaves to opinion, or taught to be concerned with good reputation among all sorts of people. They should be taught to respect calm, reasonable, and deliberate opinion.”

Pangle observes that Locke downplays the two ‘extremist’ elements of the human soul: spiritedness and love. This leads to a problem. Being a philosopher, Locke himself needed the spiritedness to stand firm against popular opinion ‘in his own mind’ if not openly; as a philosopher, he uncompromisingly loved wisdom. “One cannot help but feel that Locke has mysteriously left out of his account of human action his own action as a philosopher.” The emphasis on ‘getting on and getting along’ makes Lockean man, praised and damned for his individualism, not quite individual enough for real independence.

Hence the persistence into our time of the old traditions: strong, Biblically-based religion and, occasionally, courageous “republican statesmanship and citizenship.” Unmoderated by Lockean common sense, these might veer into fanaticism. Uninformed by them, however, Lockean common sense cannot defend itself against modern tyranny, tellingly called by Mussolini ‘totalitarianism,’ that new fanaticism designed to conquer the commercial republics.

In order to defend republican government and the advantages it gives us, we must understand the spirit of modern republicanism and the institutions it animates. Pangle’s contribution to republican self-understanding will endure as a tribute to real liberalism. Whether even this best form of modern liberalism adequately explains men who mutually pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, and whether these men themselves would have found Pangle’s account accurate, will remain the most serious point of contention between Pangle and his thoughtful critics.