Angela Y. Davis: The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2012. (Hereinafter designated as MF.)

Angela Y. Davis: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. (Hereinafter designated as FICS.)

Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie: Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. (Hereinafter designated as AFN.)

 

Angela Davis became one of the most prominent participants in the New Left movement of the 1960s, a status for which she was well-prepared. The daughter of Communist Party members, she studied with Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and later at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse arranged for her to study with another celebrated Frankfurt School neo-Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany from the United States after the Second World War. 

The ‘neo’ in neo-Marxism derives from its expansion of the field of Marxist dialectic. Marx held that the course of human events proceeds ‘dialectically’—specifically, through the ‘contradiction’ or struggle between a socio-economic ruling class and a rival class which challenges its rule. Social and political phenomena other than class—contradictions between or among ideas, countries, races, and the sexes are driven by the class struggle, which unfolds according to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis logic according to rationally (and indeed scientifically) ascertainable laws toward a predictable conclusion: worldwide communism, which issues from a previously triumphant worldwide socialist state. There had been socialists before; Marx’s proudest claim was that he was the first genuinely scientific socialist, no mere sentimental dreamer. 

A couple of decades into the twentieth century, however, some Marxists began to have doubts. True, the Russian Communist Party had founded a socialist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ but the expected revolution had stalled. The Great War hadn’t sparked the expected revolution in Europe. And in the more thoroughgoingly capitalist major European countries—Great Britain, France, and above all Germany—there were communists, to be sure, but no revolution. The Great Depression seemed to portend the predicted collapse, but despite Stalin’s maneuvers, capitalism rebounded triumphantly in the years following the Second World War, limited not by economic weakness but by the political control of Eastern and Central Europe and China by communist parties. 

It had become harder to argue that economic struggle understood as ‘dialectical materialism’ adequately explained, let alone predicted, ‘history’ or the course of events. Some of the supposedly derivative ‘cultural’ factors looked as if they had the status of independent or perhaps interdependent variables. How ‘scientific’ Marxism really be? How materialistic should it be? The neo-Marxists began to take ‘culture’ more seriously; Marcuse, for example, added Freudian psychoanalysis to the toolkit. The socialism and the yearning for communism remained, as did the dialectic. The ‘harder’ dimensions of Marxist thought were supplemented. 

As Davis writes in the 1990s, when socialism again had stalled after the collapse of the Soviet empire, “the crisis has been produced in part by our failure to develop a meaningful and collective historical consciousness”; “transformed circumstances require new theories and practices” (MF 19). To be sure, the new theories and practices must not issue from any one thinker or practitioner. That would only reinforce the grip of capitalism, even if intended to oppose it. “Social meanings are always socially constructed, but we cannot leave it up to the state to produce these meanings, because we are always encouraged to conceptualize change only as it effects individuals,” a tendency “not unrelated to the possessive individualism of capitalism” (MF 132). She might have added that the one undeniably great literary figure ‘produced’ by the centralized state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—a decidedly great individual, and one decidedly unsympathetic to the state socialism which had ‘produced’ the Gulag Archipelago. She needs a socialism that does not depend upon any state, a socialism that does not need the dialectical clash between the ‘capitalist’ states and the (now failed) ‘socialist’ ones to emerge triumphant, a socialism that emerges from the civil societies framed by modern states and may not go through a ‘statist’ phase at all to reach fruition. Indeed, it may never reach fruition at all, instead resisting long-lasting institutional structures, remaining in a condition of joyful Heraclitean flow—the notion of ‘permanent revolution’ advocated (although she doesn’t mention it) Leon Trotsky, not Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.

Davis retains Marxist historicism. When Hillary Clinton ran in the Democratic Party primary against Barack Obama in 2008, she reacted to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by insisting that “all lives matter.” Davis pounces: “Does she not realize the extent to which such universal proclamations have always bolstered racism?” (FICS 87). For example, to say with the American Founders that “all men are created equal” has in practice meant that women, “people of color,” and other groups were regarded as less than fully human. This exemplifies “the tyranny of the universal,” whereby apparently abstract moral claims have “been colored white and gendered male.” Not universal nature but concrete history is the better source of moral and political guidance. As a young student reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, “I had not yet learned how to recognize the extent yet which the equivalence of ‘freedom’ and ‘manhood’ meant that women were excluded by definition from enjoying the full benefits of freedom.” Thankfully, “my training in German philosophy” eventually gave her “the conceptual tools that allowed me to analyze the complex trajectories from bondage to freedom (using, for example, Hegel’s approach to the relationship between master and slave in the Phenomenology of Mind)” (MF 194) undermined her esteem for Douglass’s natural-rights convictions, although it took the experience of incarceration and her study of the role of American slave women in their communities which brought a new ‘consciousness’ of the ineluctable historicity of human life. 

Hence “we” (i.e., Davis and her fellow neo-Marxists) “are interested not in race and gender (and class and sexuality and disability) per se, by themselves, but primarily as they have been acknowledged as conditions for hierarchies of power, so that we can transform them into intertwined vectors of struggle for freedom” (MF 197). Power: The Nietzschean, more than the original Marxist socioeconomic framework, frames neo-Marxist analysis, but of course neo-Marxists seldom openly profess their indebtedness to Nietzsche’s thought, with its hope for a ‘planetary aristocracy.’ It is a quasi-Nietzschean analysis with Marxist characteristics, at the service of a radical egalitarianism. Because “social realities always exceed the categories that attempt to contain them,” “we keep changing our vocabularies” (MF 198). This means that the Marxist claim that ‘history’ marches toward a predetermined ‘end’ disappears; neither state socialism nor the state capitalism that defeated it in the late 1990s is the ‘end of history.’ Francis Fukuyama is as mistaken as Marx. She prefers W. E. B. DuBois in his later, Communist Party, days, whose “theory of history” “relied neither on teleology—the idea that human history would inevitably lead toward social improvement—nor [Heaven forfend!] theology,” divine providence (AFN 56).  Davis remains a steadfast Communist Party operative in at least one way: “Despite its failure to build lasting democratic structures, socialism nevertheless demonstrated its superiority over capitalism on several accounts: the ability to provide free education, low-cost housing, jobs, free childcare, free health care, etc.” (MF 33). That this is nonsense, a reprise of Soviet propaganda, does not faze her.

This air of unreality is in a way principled. Having rejected the historicist rationalism of Hegel and the historicist scientistic materialism of Marx, Davis needs some other intellectual guidepost for her own non-teleological historicism. She finds it in imagination. “A necessary step to winning greater freedom and greater justice is to image the world as we want it to be,” to “imagine a world without war,” without prisons and police, and without social, economic, and political hierarchies of any kind (MF 132-133). In this, she is very much a child of the Sixties, replacing Lenin with Lennon, scientific socialism with Beatlemania socialism. We must “transcend the limits of nationalist patriotism in order to imagine ourselves as citizens of the globe,” a globe apparently to be devoid of national states or even a world state (MF 149).

This leads to some fascinating historical imaginings. We should “use our imaginations to try to come up with versions of democracy in which, for example, the practice of Islam does not serve as a pretext for incarceration in an immigration detention facility or in a military prison” (MF 149). Since the practice of Islam isn’t the reason for such incarceration—suspicion of links to Islamic terrorist organizations is—it doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of due process of law, which has proved rather more difficult to obtain under socialist regimes than under democratic-capitalist ones. Imagination can also lead one to fanciful conclusions in historical research, as when the Marxist historian Orlando Patterson, cited approvingly by Davis, claims that “the very concept of freedom must have been first imagined by slaves” (FICS 67). 

Whereas Marx and his followers scorned utopian socialism, the valorization of imagination enables Davis to exult in it. “We ardently embrace” the “utopian dimension” of the movement to abolish prisons, for example (AFN 15). But this dreaming is doable. “Far from utopian, this world is ready at hand, already underway” in the practice of neo-Marxian socialists, who continue to develop, dialectically, “political methods and practices” fitted “for these times” (AFN 1-2). These new and ever-renewing practices recognize, uncover, and forge “interconnections of race, class, gender, sexuality” against “racism, sexism, and imperialism” (FICS 18). There have been “those of us who by virtue of our experience, not so much by virtue of academic analyses, recognized that we had to figure out a way to bring these issues together” (FICS 19). Since there is “no finish line, no firm resolute end” to these interconnections and these struggles against power hierarchies, “we are our road map” (AFN 166). Admittedly, “the dominant power structures will attempt—often successfully—to absorb our labor and demands” with tactics of co-optation, “yet we still forge new language and practices, and we work, anyway,” inviting others to “write and to organize,” as “freedom is a constant struggle” (AFN 172-173). The eschaton of the ‘Left’ historicism is at once imagined and fully immanent. 

This gives Davis plenty of room to say more or less anything she wants. She may well like it that way. Although she associated herself with the New Left, she maintained her ties with the Old Left, running as the vice-presidential candidate of CPUSA on two occasions and happily receiving the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 19XX. As Soviet propagandists would say, that was no accident. And she remains unapologetic. “During the McCarthy era, communism was established as the enemy of the nation and came to be represented as the enemy of the ‘free world'” (MF 41). One must pause to admire the tactical use of the passive voice and of scare quotes in that sentence. But to continue: “Because of the moral panic that proclaimed communists to be enemies of the state, countless numbers of institutions were purged of communists, their allies, and people who simply believed in democracy” (MF 75). The fact that the genocidal tyrant Josef Stalin remained at the head of the Soviet Union during the “McCarthy era” remains absent from the Davis radar screen, decades after even the few remaining Old Leftists have admitted his crimes. 

Later, during the civil rights movement, “many of us thought we were changing the world,” “joining the revolutionary impulse that was happening around the world” in Cuba and in “the liberation movements in Africa and Latin America” (MF 131). That is, by “revolutionary impulse” Davis means Castroite tyranny and the tyrannies desired by other Soviet-backed “liberation movements.” 

Later, “the U.S. war in Vietnam lasted as long as it did because it was fueled by a public fear of communism,” a fear stoked by “the government and the media,” entities that “led the public to believe that that the Vietnamese were their enemy,” that “defeat of the racialized communist enemy in Vietnam would ameliorate U.S. people’s lives and make them feel better about themselves” (MF 42). Communism, you see, was really the friend of the American people; to think otherwise was to become a dupe of capitalist propaganda. (“Karl Marx revealed the manipulations underlying the equation of capitalism and democracy in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital“) (MF 102). When South Vietnamese people took to seas to escape the Communist takeover, Davis must have been distracted by some more pressing issue. 

This means that interpreting Davis’s writings requires a dual task. One must attend to the arguments she actually makes and respond to them in the terms she makes them—a duty owed to any writer. One must also keep in mind the distinct possibility that this is only her latest ‘line,’ a rhetorical adaptation to current circumstances.

One of those circumstances is “the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism” (FICS 1). In Marx’s time, and even in Davis’s earlier career, most capitalist corporations did the bulk of their business within the borders of their home country; even the major corporations were limited in their scope to ‘the capitalist world,’ largely excluded from ‘the socialist world.’ Now, the operations of those corporations are much more thoroughly worldwide in scope. At the same time, the corporations continue to promote “capitalist individualism”—holding up an Elon Musk, a Steve Jobs, for public honor, as an estimable human ‘type,’ a model of what a person should be. This also permits capitalists to perpetuate its system of law enforcement and punishment of those ‘criminalized’ by it. For example, campaigns “to convict individual police of white supremacist, misogynist, and transphobic ‘bad act’ have not resulted in contracting the power of policing or rendering it less repressive” (AFN 153). Only a mindset free of individualism will bring the downfall of capitalism and its ideology.

“This insidious promotion of capitalist individualism” presents “dangers” to the human race. Because “U.S. corporations have economically undermined local economies through ‘free trade’ agreements, structural adjustment, and the influence of such international financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” tens of thousands of displaced persons leave their homelands, “often travel[ing] along the same routes that have been carved out by migrating corporations,” “simply retrac[ing]” those routes “in reverse,” only to be faced with criminal charges when they attempt to enter the United States (MF 47, 64). “It is the homelessness of global capital that is responsible for so many of the problems people are experiencing throughout the world,” as the corporations “evade prohibitions against cruel, dehumanizing, and exploitative labor practices”—a “freedom to do virtually anything in the name of maximizing profits” (MF 64). [1] That is, what parades as individualism lurks as corporatism.

It also parades as democracy. “Our system of capitalism eschews economic democracy even as it proclaims itself to be the vanguard of democracy around the world” (MF 102). By economic democracy Davis means the provision of ‘free’ education and health care, “services we all should be able to claim by virtue of our humanity” (MF 102). To be sure, publicly funded education already exists in the United States and Europe, but “a juggernaut of privatization of public services” in the Southern Hemisphere threatens them there, and even in the United States rumblings about privatizing Social Security may be heard. “As crucial as voting rights may be”—that “may” in tantalizing—we “have long recognized that the right to vote by itself does not guarantee democracy,” “since elections can be subordinated to the power of money” (MF 90). Such are the ways of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46).

All this was understood by W. E. B. DuBois (again, in his later, Marxist phase), as seen in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. As Davis summarizes his argument, when the postwar Reconstruction of the political regime of the former slave states was terminated in 1877, “the crushing force of the property-holding elites” quickly prevailed in the American South in the form of laws enforcing racial segregation in a way that subordinated the ex-slaves. (AFN 54). DuBois saw that “capitalism cannot be understood outside of a relationship of power and race” (AFN 55). True revolutionaries must understand that “it is inevitable that mainstream political responses to [social-justice] movements will attempt to reject radical understandings of social problems such as he the prison crisis and the gender violence pandemic” (AFN164). The existing regime of worldwide capitalist oligarchy must be replaced, not reformed.

Appeals to nationalism will fuel the capitalists’ resistance, although they themselves have not a patriotic bone in their bodies. According to Davis, the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ was racist, having nothing to do with Muslim fanaticism (MF 75-76). Oh, “how quickly so many people who considered themselves to be progressive and radical took refuge in this idea that we as Americans had to consolidate ourselves as a militarized nation, which inevitably meant excluding all of those who were not Americans” (MF 112)—although in fact immigration continued under tighter restrictions.  But don’t interfere when Davis is on a roll: We should have “reflect[ed] on community formations that extend beyond the borders of the nation” (MF (73), “imagining ourselves as citizens of the planet” (MF 98). If one were to answer that American policymakers did in fact do as Davis recommends, “reach out and create community with people in other regions of the world” against the terrorists (MF 73), well, that was the wrong kind of networking, networking among capitalist regimes. Against “the circuits of capital” we need “other kinds of globalities,” globalities “disentangled from the agendas of global capitalism” (MF 98). Such “new social relations are possible,” linking “human beings around the planet not by the commodities some produce and others consume, but rather by equality and solidarity and cooperation and respect,” relations defined by “a radical multiculturalism” (MF 102). Why are they possible? She does not say. It is a matter of the imagination, again.

Racism is the enemy of radical-socialist multiculturalism. While legal racial segregation no longer exists in the United States, “deep structural and institutional” racism remains (MF 129). Her main evidence of this is the differences among incarceration rates among the black, Hispanic, and white populations. According to a 1991 study, 5.1% of all U.S. citizens would be imprisoned at some point in their lives, if current rates of incarceration held—9% of all men, 1.1% of all women. (Davis doesn’t hold this up as evidence of bias against men, for some reason.) Of the men 16.2% were black, 9.4% were Hispanic, 2.5% were white. One problem with using statistics this way is that things may change; they did. And not the way Davis wanted her readers to believe. “If trends continue,” she wrote, “50 percent of young black men could be behind bars in ten years’ time,” and “in another twenty-five years it might be as much as 75%” (MF 29). She is counting on readers not knowing that simply extending a line on a statistical chart often does not result in an accurate prediction of future events. It didn’t.  Between 2006 and 2020, incarceration rates fell in all racial categories, 34% among blacks, 26% among Hispanics, 17% among whites. Blacks still go to prison more often than Hispanics or whites, but that may be a measure of crime, not of racism. The same 1991 study also anticipated that five out of six Americans would be victims of violent crime at some point in their lives, so the desire of the general population to lock violent criminals away may well register an interest in self-defense rather than prejudice. Don’t think that way; not when Davis stands by to assert, “Prisons are racism incarnate” (FICS 107). 

No such thoughts enter Davis’s mind. According to her, resistance to crime has “already become so implicitly racialized that it is no longer necessary to use racial markers” when talking in favor of it (MF 27). President Bill Clinton, for example, “is lauded as the quintessential warrior against crime, with his shrewdly racist policies divested of all explicit racial content,” policies concealed by “a rhetoric that focuses on victims of crime” (MF 24). Clinton used the murder of a “white girlchild” by a white man as his example of the kind of violent crime he intended to fight, but no matter: “there is enough socially constructed fear of crime entangled in the national imagination with the fear of black men” that the murderer was “perceived as one white face representing a sea of black men who, in the collective mind’s eye, comprise the criminal element” (MF 24). Hence “law-and-order discourse is racist” MF 30). No one can accuse Davis of being unclever, although one must note that in this instance she presents “imagination” as malign. Orthodox Marxism reigned in imaginings of all sorts by its (attempted) rationalism, its claims about the iron laws of history, its dialectics. The only discipline imagination finds in Davis’s thought is the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.

Such imagining may be seen in her racialized account of the Union victory in the Civil War. Following W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument, she claims that “it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery” (FICS 36, italics added). This, Du Bois and Davis claim was a successful “general strike”—an anticipation of workers of the world uniting—which transferred the slave’s labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” and “won the war” (FICS 70). This rather minimizes the role of the white Union troops, who did most of the dying and, even more pertinently, most of the killing of Confederate soldiers in that war.

No matter to Davis, she’s on to a larger point. “Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom” in all areas—not only race but struggles over class and gender (FICS 39). “Black history, whether here in North America, or in Africa, or in Europe, has always been infused with a spirit of resistance, an activist spirit of protest and transformation” (FISC 112). [2] Indeed, “people all over the world have been inspired by the Black freedom movement to forge activist movements addressing oppressive conditions in their own countries,” whether in South Africa, in India, or in Palestine (FICS 114). In turn, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King “was inspired by Gandhi” (FISC 114). This is the new Internationale Davis would oppose to the international capitalist networks. Those networks in the United States do not merely incarcerate. They kill, massively. We know this because in 1951Communist Party attorney William L. Patterson and Communist Party member Paul Robeson submitted a petition, “signed by luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois,” “charging genocide with respect to Black people in the US” (FICS 132). The petition received backing from the Soviet Union and its satellites, then commanded by Comrade Stalin, criticism of whom for actual commissions of genocide was, she has assured us, little more than McCarthyite capitalist propaganda.

When it comes to ‘gender,’ Davis admits that she and her fellow Communists were a bit late to the game. “There was some measure of resistance from women of color, and also poor and working-class white women, to identify with the emergent feminist movement,” which initially seemed “too white and especially too middle class, too bourgeois” (FICS 95). But eventually her native ingenuity didn’t fail her. “Anticapitalist, antiracist internationalism” could be brought to drive feminism in resistance to “heteropatriarchy” (AFN 91, 95). Yes, “the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that [gender] is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations” (FICS 101), “so much more than gender equality” but “involv[ing] a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name” (FICS 104). This is the new way to understand “the old feminist adage that ‘the personal is the political,'” a new pathway toward “recraft[ing] ourselves” (FICS 105). The effort at conquering nature, especially human nature, based not only on class struggle but on denying the primacy of male-female sexuality is “a Marxist-inflected feminist insight,” after all, with a dash of Foucault’s critique of the “carceral state” (FICS 106). What this new, anti-bourgeois feminism must resist is the tendency to desire the incarceration of “those who engage in gender violence” (i.e., rapists); such feminists only “do the work of the state”—the capitalist state (FICS 138). 

What is needed, Davis contends, is “abolition feminism,” by which she means a feminism that aims at ending the prison system of the capitalist state; “gender justice will not be realized without the incorporation of abolition praxis” (AFN 82). “Women have always been the major supporters of those in prison not only as organizers, but also as anchors of families and kinship networks deeply affected by incarceration practices. This is especially true of women of color.” (AFN 45). Prison abolition forms the centerpiece of Davis’s project of neo-Marxist regime change.

Why prisons? Because a critique of prisons “can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism,” a “society in which people’s needs, not profits, constitute the driving force” (FICS 6-7). Imprisonment, you see, is a strategy of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46) to deflect attention away from the “underlying social problems” of “racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education” (FICS 6). Once again, Du Bois saw it. “His analysis” in Black Reconstruction in America “offers a challenge both to historians of the period and for the present in which he wrote” (AFN 55). He “call[ed] for dismantling institutions that are overtly causing social and civil death” by “broadening the liberatory agenda to include apparatuses of oppression beyond those specifically understood to be carceral” but at the same time “linking contemporary abolition praxis—or theory plus action and reflection—to questions of racial capitalism,” all seen “with an internationalist lens” and “always hinged to challenging capitalism” (AFN 55). [3]

Why capitalism, specifically? Because the “conception of justice” seen in “bourgeois democracy” “assumes that justice is retributive,” that “punishment is the very essence of justice,” a “proportional punishment” intended to rebalance “the aftermath of harm” (AFN 47). But this isn’t justice; it is only vengeance. And it is capitalistic vengeance because it is “individualistic,” focused on the criminal and his victim “in isolation from larger social contexts” in which alleged crimes are committed (AFN 47). We Marxists must “convinc[e] enough people that crime [is] not the unqualified cause of punishment” and (linking this now also to feminism) “central to this process of rearticulation [is] the recognition that race, gender, class, and sexuality were more important determinants of who goes to prison than simply the commission of a crime”; “this is especially true of women, both cisgender and trans[-gendered]” (AFN 47). This, Davis avers, is so much so that people in prison should be called “criminalized,” not “criminal” (AFN 48). How, indeed, could it be otherwise, if the economic, social, and political rulers and their institutions themselves are the real criminals? The regime of bourgeois democracy, the public order of capitalist statism, and the international network of capitalist corporations define criminality in terms of laws that bourgeois democrats make, laws that reinforce and both literally and figurative legitimize that regime, that order, and that network. In the new, socialist international and regime order, crime will be entirely redefined, even abolished along with the prisons built to enforce those laws. 

As “a tradition, a philosophy, and a theory of change,” prison abolition dates back to the early 1970s (AFN 50)—perhaps uncoincidentally, when the Nixon Administration’s abolition of conscription took the wind out of the anti-Vietnam War protests, which had been the centerpiece of New Left agitation in the years immediately prior. The movement drifted but then revived in the late 1990s linking prison abolition with increased funding for education. This was a shrewd move, as it forged an alliance with the now-powerful teachers’ unions which had supplanted the ‘proletarian’ industrial unions as the best-organized and most active labor organizations in the United States. Part of the proletarians’ weakness derived from “the deindustrialization of the US economy, which led to the elimination of vast numbers of jobs,” throwing many black men out of work (AFN 41). Although the jobless men, some now in prison, might have seemed the likely target for socialist organizers, Davis and her allies focused on the “decarceration” of women, especially those ‘criminalized’ for such nonviolent actions as prostitution and shoplifting, quite likely because their release from prisons would be a less intimidating prospect than the release of men.

But this is only a start, a relatively minor reform, the thin end of the proverbial wedge. One must never forget “the root causes of injustice and the impact of other systems of oppression, including, in the first place, global capitalism” and its attendant “racist and heteropatriarchal structures” (AFN 58-59). 

In the meantime, the decarceration of women should be supplemented by the abolition of the death penalty, which “remains a central issue” because “it incorporates historical memories of slavery,” memories of slaves being hanged for “very minor offenses” (FICS 30, MF 116). More, American bourgeois democracy “relies fundamentally” upon it, along with prisons (MF 56). “Today,” she writes in 1991, “there are more than 3,500 people on death row in the United States” (MF 57); this miniscule number of Americans, (admittedly, most of them white men) drawn from a population of more than 300 million, all convicted not of minor crimes but of murder, remains central to Davis’s polemic because guidelines for the application of the death penalty now “reflect the abstract individualism associated with liberalism and especially neoliberalism” (MF 107). Individualism, you will recall, serves as the ideological mask for corporate-capitalist class domination. And you will also recall that oppression in the form of punishment of white men stands merely as a signifier of punishment of black men, in the imaginative mind of Angela Davis. Even violent crimes committed by black men on other black men and on women must be explained as results of the racist order (MF 30). In this way, “institution of punishment have served as receptacles for structures and ideologies of enslavement” and racism, long after the abolition of chattel slavery itself (MF 140). 

“So how does one persuade people to think differently? That’s a question of organizing.” (FICS 22). As Foucault remarks, prisons as ‘penitentiaries’ arose with the criminal justice reform movement spearheaded by the Quakers, “around the same time as the idea of a society in which citizens are defined as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59); prison “is the quintessential democratic institution, because it provides you with the negation of that upon which the whole concept of bourgeois democracy has been developed,” namely, the right to personal liberty (MF 143). Instead of killing or wounding the bodies of the ‘criminalized’ with torture, those bodies would be deprived of liberty, a “conception of punishment…only possible in a society that recognized its citizens as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59). Imprisonment “was thought to be humane and democratic, especially because it replaced corporal and capital punishment” (MF 59). A humanly-designed and implemented criminal justice system that was once reformed, even revolutionized, can be revolutionized once again, even abolished altogether. It is only a matter of persuasion. 

“When you look at the population of death row prisoners, you see that almost every single person there is poor,” whether white or black (MF 63). Prisons “thrive on class inequalities,” “racial inequalities,” and “gender inequalities” (MF 142). (If women are oppressed, however, why are there not many more women in jail?) For this reason, “the hidden danger of relying on incarceration as the major solution to behaviors that are often the by-products of poverty is that the solution reproduces the very problem it purports to solve” (MF 142). In this way, Davis can steer the argument back towards the more fundamental orthodox Marxist insistence on class conflict as the driver of ‘history.’ After all, the “carceral machinery” emerged not only around the time of bourgeois democracy but, perhaps more significantly, “around the time of industrial capitalism, and it continues to have a particular affinity with capitalism” (MF 82).

How so? Because prisons are increasingly being ‘privatized’ at least in the sense that private corporations build and profit from them. The “prison-industrial complex,” feeding off the “structural racism” of American bourgeois democracy (MF 84), “has become so big and powerful that it works to perpetuate itself,” devouring “immigrant youth and youth of color throughout the world” (MF 148). That is, “prisons catch the chaos that is intensified by de-industrialization,” as capitalists build more prisons and incarcerate more people, “thus creating the momentum for further expansion and larger incarcerated populations” in the “so-called free world,” which thereby retains “obvious vestiges of enslavement” (MF 49, 51, 52).  

The prisons will be replaced by “educational institutions,” institutions which, as one anticipates, will be animated by a new, socialist spirit. For example, Davis recounts her pedagogic technique in a class she ran at the San Francisco County jail. Although her students from her class at San Francisco State University were expected to help her teach the prisoners, but when they arrived, Davis “position[ed] the prisoners as teachers”—a “reversal of assumed hierarchies of knowledge [which] created a radical and exciting learning environment” (MF 53).

Such a reversal must finally be “systemic,” not piecemeal (FISC 32). Not only prisons but police should be abolished. The first step will be “community control of the police,” by which Davis doesn’t mean bourgeois control but “community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police”—a new sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, if you will (FICS 32). Since, “at this moment in the history of the US, I don’t think that there can be policing without racism,” (FISC 48), the communities in question will be populated by persons of color. According to Davis (and she is lying), police today “are encouraged to use violence as a first resort” (FISC 32), as “police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence” (AFN 116). As a matter of fact, police are trained to de-escalate potentially violent situations whenever possible, but the interesting phrase here is “root causes of violence.” Davis seems to be suggesting that a new form of non-police policing will enforce “community” efforts to outlaw racism, sexism, classism, and, above all, capitalism. The slogan is “Care not cops” (AFN 66). This may be understood as yet another instance of ‘dialectic.’

Divide and unite: Davis shares the old hope of establishing ‘one big Left,’ a notion at least as old as the Popular Front of the 1930s. “We’d better figure out how to build a resistance movement together” (MF 26), since “in today’s era of global capitalism, resistance to racism can only be effective if it is anchored in global communities of struggle” (MF 80). this means organizing racial, sexual, and class communities around political goals (MF 118-119). “Internationalist engagements are imperative to illustrate the continuing and global repercussions of colonialism and imperialism embedded in police and carceral institution” (AFN 22-23). 

This can be accomplished by establishing “accessible, free, and horizontal political education” (AFN 144) by the relevant groups, an education—suspicious minds might take it for propaganda—that contests “the public-private dichotomy” of the capitalism state (MF 33). The heuristic technique deployed in this task will be what the “critical race theorist” Mari Matsudi calls “ask the other question” (AFN). For example, “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?'” (AFN 3). This aids coalition work; one big Left requires one comprehensive account of all grievances, giving the one big Left one big, if multifarious, target for its dialectical struggle. 

Davis laments the fact that “despite years of relentless work, by the 1990s the gulf between [prison] abolitionist perspectives and gender work was widening, and many survivors were falling into the dangerous space between two movement” (AFN 103). “Issues of racial injustice, sexual exploitation, pernicious state violence, and the analysis of linked forms of oppression became incompatible with an emerging conceptualization of gender violence that relied exclusively on gender essentialism,” by which Davis means the dichotomy of male and female and its attendant impulse to lock up male rapists (AFN 103). The Clinton Administration-backed Violence Against Women Act put this “essentialism” into law, thereby using the capitalist state to divide one oppressed class (women) against another (black men). One purpose of LGBTQ+ agitation on the Left is to break down a dichotomy that divides the Left, a ‘dialectic’ that works against it, and to replace that ‘dialectic’ with one that unites the Left against the enemies of socialism. “Key to this abolition feminist ecosystem are networks, organizations, and collectives. This work is never a solo project. Individuals tire, fade. Movements deepen and continue.” (AFN 13).

Or so “movement” operatives like to think. As a matter of fact, movements also tire and fade. For now, deprived of an appealing socialist state to rally around, Davis and her allies direct their efforts at civil-social organizing aimed at undermining the formidable institutions they decry. They may hope to skip the Marxist ‘stage’ of state socialism altogether and instead proceed directly to the communist stage directly, once global capitalism collapses. Davis’s own unstinting celebration of state socialism throughout the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet empire makes one wonder at her bona fides. Such wonder is longstanding. In his speech before the AFL-CIO in July 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a ‘critique’ of his own—a critique of Marxism. Rightly describing Marxism as a pseudo-science, he observed that regimes animated by Marxism rule not by some scientific method but by abolishing political and economic freedom and state-sponsored terror, very much including a massive network of prisons. He told the story of how Davis, after her release from prison in America, toured the Soviet Union and rested in its resorts. When Czech dissidents appealed to her, asking her to back the release of prisoners held in the prisons of the communist regime in their country, Davis said, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” In a later speech at East Stroudsberg University, Davis denied the story.

Assume that Davis is telling the truth, that Solzhenitsyn believed a false claim. Nonetheless, Davis never once condemned the prison systems of the Soviet bloc or of China. She has had plenty of time to do so. She has instead proved a faithful daughter of her Communist parents. Prisons deserved no condemnation when Communist regimes maintained them. They deserved condemnation only when instituted by ‘bourgeois democracies’—the regime the Communist Manifesto denounces as the most dangerous threat to the socialist regime of proletarian dictatorship. Solzhenitsyn’s theme in 1975 was that Communist tactics change but Communist ideology remains steady at its core, through its various Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, even Brezhnevian permutations. “The Communist ideology is to destroy your society. This has been their aim for 125 years and has never changed; only the methods of changed a little.”

 

Notes

1. This sort of ‘critique’ has its limits. According to Davis (following longstanding Marxist polemics), capitalism causes war. “Why, in the aftermath” of al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “have we allowed our government to pursue unilateral policies and practices of global war?” she asks, rhetorically. You will understand this if you take President George W. Bush’s “recent speeches” and “systematically replac[e] the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ with the word ‘capitalism'” (MF 89). This proves that if you change the words in a sentence, you will change its meaning—supposedly revealing its true meaning thereby. A certain circularity of logic prevails in this move, but that’s ‘deconstructionism’ for you.
2. Carried along by her rhetorical momentum, Davis does not pause to consider that postcolonial “African” politics has been as much about war and tyranny as resistance.
3. The definition of Marxist “praxis” as theory plus action plus reflection is orthodox Marxism. If, as Marx claimed, an idea isn’t a passion of the head, a longing for noetic apprehension of the whole, but the head of a passion, a mere instantiation of some underlying material self-interest, then theory has no intellectually independent status. Instead, there is a ‘unity of theory and practice,’ as one commentator called it—a materialist version of Hegelian immanence which denies that the separation of ideas from ordinary reality is possible. The only rationalism remaining must keep theory and practice united but with theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning (“reflection”) overcoming self-interest. In orthodox Marxism, this process will be hastened by the ‘consciousness-raising’ vanguard of the proletariat, those who understand the historical dialectic and can point the workers in the correct direction; in the neo-Marxist formulation, feminism, antiracism, and, in Davis’s case, prison abolition are added to the dialectical mix.

 

Will Morrisey: “Why Have There Been No Military Coups in the United States?” Article published in Constituting America. May 2, 2022.

 

Plutarch writes of the life of Gaius Marius, the noted Roman general who seized power in the Roman Republic early in the first century B.C. Marius was no patrician. He was born into the equestrian class— “smallholders,” as Plutarch describes them, a family living outside the great city. He rose to prominence on the strength of his own abilities and of his leading virtue, courage. As a young man, he had disdained the liberal arts education which had entered Rome from Greece. After all, were not Greeks now the slaves of Rome their education corruptive of the manliness that resists enslavement? A real man evidently needed no Aristotelian moderation, in Marius’ judgment: Plutarch cites Marius’ “harsh and bitter character,” his “inordinate love of power,” and “insatiable greed,” along with his inveterately superstitious mid, as markers of his rejection of everything urbane and civil. No gentleman he, and proud of it.

A great military strategist and tactician, Marius began his rise to prominence by crushing the Teutones and Ambrones at today’s Aix-de-Provence in 102 B.C. Using paupers and slaves as his soldiers, he next defeated and captured the formidable African monarch, Jugurtha. When the Teutones and the Cimbri joined forces to invade Italy, moving towards Rome, the Romans elected Marius consul, empowering him to repel the enemy. In this war, he proved a superb manipulator of the souls of his men, taking them to battle with appeals to their fear, their courage, their shame, their honor—all, sometimes, in the same speech.

“In a military context,” Plutarch writes, Marius’ “status and power were based on the fact that he was needed, but in political life his preeminence was curtailed, and he took refuge in the goodwill and favor of the masses”—not the patrician senators—and “abandoned any attempt to be the best man in Rome, so long as he could be the most powerful.” To do that, he needed to keep his soldiers satisfied and thereby to maintain his power base. This political necessity mirrored the character of his soul: “He was incapable of just quietly enjoying what he had.” Therefore, when he ran out of foreign wars, he could only turn to civil war. Forced into exile by his even more vicious rival, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, he regrouped his forces and came back, turning the city into a field of blood. What animates a military man, the love of victory, caused him to derange his country’s civil life.

For centuries, Rome had been a proud republic, with elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy mixed in rough balance, the senate serving as the balance-wheel. Marius and Sulla overturned that regime temporarily, foreshadowing the end of the republican regime at the hands of Caesars, several decades later. Military overthrow of republics had occurred many times in Greece, as well, and modern history has seen such revolutions in England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), Iraq (Saddam Hussein), and many other countries. If there is any truth to the claim of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the absence of any such coup d’état in our own history undoubtedly ranks among the most striking examples of it. The dogs of war have barked no less frequently for American than at other nations, but the wolf of military takeover has remained silent. And this, despite the fact that we have seen some twelve U.S. generals elevated to the presidency, beginning with George Washington. Unlike Marius, our military men have been able to become first in peace after having been first in war, without bringing a general’s command-and-control temperament with them—at least, not beyond the White House staff. the framers of the Articles of Confederation and the ‘anti-federalist’ opponents of the proposed United States Constitution in the late 1780s had provided for no presidency at all, in large measure to avoid the possibility that an independent executive branch could be seized by a military man, using the equivalent of the Roman consulship as his vehicle.

As students of the Roman regimes, the Framers of the Constitution recognized the need of energy in the executive as much as the Romans did. They also wanted to make their chief executive a defender of republican liberty, not its subverter. Politically ambitious military officers might channel their vigor and courage into peaceful civilian life, including high office, but no more than that. With this intention, the Framers designed the ruling institutions of the new republic in ways that have kept tyrannical souls like those of Marius and Sulla out of the presidency.

Marius could not have risen to power in Rome except by exploiting Rome’s factionalism, the inveterate resentment of the many plebeians for the few patricians. In Federalist 10, Publius famously calls faction the characteristic vice of popular governments, as liberty is to faction what air is to fire. Factions typically center on what he calls the various and unequal distribution of property. The regulation of property has become “the principal task of modern legislation,” since “neither moral nor religious motives” adequately moderate factitious passions. As Rome itself had repeatedly proven, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” One way to control faction and thereby to prevent the tyranny that may arise to eradicate it is by designing the republic’s ruling offices not so much along the lines of a mixed regime, as in Rome, but in accordance with the principle of representation. The people will have a voice, but not directly—only through their elected delegates to the bicameral legislature and, much more indirectly, through the Electoral College to the presidency. The most democratic part of the government, the House of Representatives, will consist of persons who know their constituents but do not need simply to register their desires. Representative government enables officials to deliberate, to “refine and enlarge the public views.” The kind of appeal Marius made to the Romans would find itself quickly diluted among the Americans.

If there is something resembling a ‘mixed-regime republican’ element in the United States government, it can be found in that bicameral legislature. Although, as a democratic republic, America doesn’t have a born-to-rule patrician class as in Rome (and indeed as in most European countries at the time of the Founding), there is no question that Senate members tend to be wealthier than members of the House. In the thirty-fourth Federalist, Publius examines how this kind of legislature will govern military expenditures. Such expenditures, he writes, cannot be limited constitutionally, as it’s impossible to estimate far in advance the cost of wars, “contingencies that must baffle all the efforts of political arithmetic.” As we are not “entirely out of [Europe’s] reach,” and would become less so as naval technology advances, “to model our political systems upon calculations of lasting tranquility would be to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.”

Rome exemplified this dilemma, Publius observes. Its liberties “proved the final victim of her military triumphs.” As for modern Europe, its “liberties…as far as they have ever existed, have, with few exceptions, been the price of her military establishments” (Federalist 41). This being so, a standing army “is a dangerous, at the same time that it may be a necessary, provision.” Therefore, “a wise nation will combine all these considerations.”

The federal union, however, “by itself, destroys every pretext for a military establishment which could be dangerous.” Although one or a few states might be easy prey to foreign invaders, “America united,” even without a standing army, “exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited.” “The moment of [the Union’s] dissolution will be the date of a new order of things.” In that event, “the face of American will be but a copy of that of the continent of Europe,” its liberty “crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes.” Worse still, a disunited America would see foreign powers playing divide and rule on this continent, even as they do in Europe. As I write these lines, this has been exactly the strategy followed by Russia in its several invasions of Ukraine, perhaps with more to come, beyond Ukraine.

The fact that all spending bills must originate in the House—again, the most democratic branch of the democratic republic—will limit such spending nonetheless, as the people have won the battle against taxation without representation. At the same time, the more nearly patrician, or at least richer, Senators, with their longer terms in office, will moderate any impassioned rush into war. Congress as a whole can check and balance ambitious presidents, if only by exercising the power of the purse. Further, Congress must limit its funding, as “the Constitution ties down the legislature to two years as the longest admissible term” for military appropriations.

The Framers built additional constraints into the office of the executive itself. Publius forthrightly remarks that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government”—a character the Articles of Confederation lacked. “A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” which is one way of having “a bad government.” This, he continues, is especially true in war, which is why the American president is commander in chief of the armed forces. In Federalist 70, Publius pays considerable attention to the executive offices of the Roman republic.

The “ingredients” of executive energy are unity, duration in office, financial support, and competent power.” Safety in the executive depends upon a due dependence upon the people and due responsibility for one’s conduct in office. How did Rome measure up to these standards?

In its frequent wars, Rome “was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of dictator, as well as against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasion of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.” The dictator had little or no dependence upon the patricians, let alone on the people as a whole. And he made sure that he could not be prosecuted for anything he did while dictator.

When it did not suffer under dictatorship, however, Rome had not one but two co-equal executives, the consuls. That is, if something went wrong, each blamed the other. Responsibility was lacking. This executive dualism might well have led to even more rivalry than it did, except that the patricians were so frequently in conflict with the plebeians at the same time they faced foreign wars and invasions. This led the Romans to give one consul authority over foreign policy, the other over domestic policy, keeping the two men distracted from one another. “This expedient must no doubt have had great influence in preventing those collisions and rivalships which might otherwise have embroiled the peace of the republic.”

In the American republic, by contrast, the executive enjoys the unity of a Roman dictatorship along with the powers of commander in chief, while at the same time being constrained by four-year terms in office and by dependency on Congress for financial support. Publius knows that an executive might be tempted to undertake a life of Marius. “Self-love” often causes “the great interests of society [to be] sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, to the obstinacy of individuals who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind.” Against this, the Framers designed a regime that frustrates such passions, while recognizing that they will never be extirpated so long as human beings are what they are.

In addition to the institutional structures ordained in the Constitution, one must notice that the way of life in republican Rome differed from that of America. Rome had begun as a military monarchy, then became a military republic. Even in its founding legend, Romulus overpowered Remus and, as Roman historians from Livy to Tacitus testify, it fought its way through the centuries. Because it was so good at pursuing that way of life, its great generals became its principal heroes. More, as those men ranged farther afield in the republic’s extensive empire, their troops became more attached to their generals than to Rome and its republic. A military republic thus encourages not only habits of obedience to one commander but the geopolitical circumstances in which such a regime might easily threaten the civilian-ruled capital.

America’s commercial republic is as extensive as many of the ancient empires, but the American way of life inclines us to think of territory less in terms of military rule than of free trade. From the start, Americans have understood their political union as a vast free-trade zone. Ambitious citizens most often devote their lives and energies to peaceful commercial competition, not military rivalry. The best accounts of the distinction between military and commercial republics remain Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline and his massive and authoritative The Spirit of the Laws—both works well known to the American Founders.

Finally, the purpose of the American republic differs from that of Rome. The Declaration of Independence maintains that government should aim at securing the safety and happiness of the people. Romans most assuredly sought their own safety, but it wasn’t happiness so much as glory that its leading men prized. War did not only seek them out; they sought it. And so have many rulers and many peoples, before and since—America (mostly) excepted. Our presidents have sometimes conquered for territory—invoking our ‘Manifest Destiny’ to rule from sea to shining sea on this continent—but seldom for fame, which Alexander Hamilton called “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” Thanks to the Framers’ work, that ruling passion has stayed within the boundaries of reason, along with the men whose minds are ruled by it.

 

Angelo Codevilla: America’s Rise and Fall among Nations: Lessons in Statecraft from John Quincy Adams. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.

 

Progressives can be said to have re-founded the American state and the American regime, centralizing the former by establishing a substantial, unelected (therefore non-republican) bureaucratic element in the latter. At the same time, Progressives changed the emphasis of foreign policy, eschewing the Washington-Jefferson foreign policy of non-entanglement with foreign powers and promoting a set of comprehensive ‘entanglements,’ beginning with the League of Nations (never ratified by still-unProgressive Senate) and on to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, NATO, SEATO and many others. In these organizations, too, bureaucracy looms big. This foreign policy is usually called liberal internationalism; Codevilla more precisely calls it Progressive internationalism. 

Why the shift? Progressives criticized the American regime not only for its institutions and policies but for its moral foundation in natural right. The Founders considered security for life and happiness to be the purpose of government. Progressives had more ambitious plans. They rejected natural right as a fiction and followed instead the claim of more recent philosophers who derived right not from the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God but from ‘history,’ the course of events. Governments’ new task was to position themselves on ‘history’s’ cutting edge, leading the people to the perfection of democracy, of economic, social, and political equality. The fact that a bureaucratic oligarchy might compromise the very historical movement it claimed to lead seems not to have troubled American Progressives, although Karl Marx and his followers saw this clearly enough, promising that someday the bureaucratic state would “wither away.” 

The results have not been uniformly favorable. “This book contrasts America’s successful foreign relations under presidents from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt with the disarray resulting from Progressive management ever since,” “bid[ding] us to reenter the minds of America’s founding generation to consider how their principles might be applicable in our time.” The contrast is rather stark. After all, the United States has done rather well for itself since Wilson took it into the First World War, replacing Great Britain as the major ‘power’ in the world. Still, no one is satisfied with American foreign policy of the past half-century or so, or with much of American domestic politics, for that matter. Can (and should) recurrence to the political thought of the American Founders, particularly the foreign policy of John Quincy Adams, their political and intellectual heir, serve as a guide for us still?

Americans then, and for the most part now, want American foreign policy to protect their self-government by defending the American way of life. Before the Founding, Americans protected themselves, fighting “the Indian tribes”—some, not all—that “slaughtered, enslaved, and retreated behind French protection,” protection offered because France competed with England for control of North America. More, after independence, “neither the British nor the French, nor the Spaniards who controlled the exit from the Mississippi, nor the Barbary pirates who ruled the Mediterranean, were going to be nice to impotent Americans.” Americans wanted peace, including peaceful commerce with other nations, but they “had no pacifist illusions.” Beyond our own continent, American statesmen avoided wars on land because we could fight better on our own ground and because involvement in the wars of foreigners, especially Europeans, would embroil us unnecessarily in their endless conflicts, leading to disunion at home. The attempt by France to lure us into their war with Great Britain in the 1790s, which spurred angry partisan disputes here, brought that lesson home, and Washington’s Farewell Address famously linked the continuance of America’s political union to the avoidance, when possible, of foreign wars. 

John Quincy Adams followed and elaborated upon Washington’s policy, earning himself consideration as “the fount of American geopolitical thought,” framing policies on his “primordial distinction between America’s own interests—hence the ’causes’ for which Americans might fight—as well as…the (largely geographic) bases for evaluating the extent to which any cause or interest may be our own.” This framework enables Americans to rank foreign policy issues in their order of importance to their country: first, our borders and the islands nearby, “followed by the oceans,” the “great highway of nations,” as Thomas Jefferson called them, “then the rest of the world.” Because treaties with nations whose purposes differ from ours never hold, “Adams practiced and taught a meticulous sort of diplomacy that aims at the mutual clarification of objectives,” at finding out what other countries’ rulers really want, and letting them know what we really want. This enabled him to establish “good relations with the governments of Britain, Russia, and so forth, in full acknowledgement of the radical differences between their regimes and ours.” Avoiding wars with such regimes typically required non-interference with them on their territories, “the essence of the 1648 treaties of Westphalia,” which solemnized relations among sovereign states in Europe, limiting most of its wars to compromisable boundary disputes and making a beginning of the end of the wars of religion.

These policies remained in place, Codevilla claims, up to the last years of the nineteenth century. Even the war with Mexico was undertaken reluctantly by President Polk, who, after winning the war, “paid Mexico the price he would have paid to purchase what he conquered.” Such imperialist temptations as Americans entertained were resisted, and American foreign policy centered on reducing the sway of European imperial ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. Even Theodore Roosevelt, who did entertain such temptations as a young man, acted with sobriety as president, pursuing Alexander Hamilton’s policy of building up the navy. 

All this changed with Woodrow Wilson. For him, “humanity’s good was primary and America’s secondary.” “Wilson led American into the Great War on behalf of his private abstractions”—namely, the doctrine of Progressivism. And “because his admirer Franklin Delano Roosevelt led American into an even greater war on similar bases, the American people have known little peace ever since.” Progressives have been “trying to bring into reality their own imagination,” although in practice this has led them to justify their own self-aggrandizement as a set of de facto oligarchs. Codevilla goes so far as to claim that “keeping foreign lands out of Soviet hands was merely the international background of and the domestic justification for the U.S. establishment’s deep involvement in other nations’ affairs,” partly out of ‘idealism’ but mostly for profit. In the decades following the end of the Cold War, the elites have collaborated with Russian ex-Communists and Chinese Communist bosses, claiming that their self-enriching schemes will serve to ‘liberalize’ those regimes. They haven’t.

Those who fancy themselves to have positioned themselves on ‘history’s’ ever-progressing ‘edge’ will likely view those behind them as, well, backward—at best to be pitied and guided forward, at worst to be viewed with contempt. Today, “the U.S. ruling classes [have] ceased to respect the American people, who, in turn, have ceased to respect their rulers.” The sham morality of Progressivism has had much the same effect as the equally historicist morality of Marxism: to maintain the illusion of unceasing project, workers (including students) pretend to work and their overseers pretend that they, and themselves, deserve ever-increasing credit. Inflation sets in, from money to school grades to the ‘celebrity’ that has replaced honor. “Fully and safely returning to the principles and practices that built the once-great but now-depleted reservoir of respect for American requires of disposing of current problems in a manner that enhances America”; in foreign policy “that means leaving enemies either dead or sorry that they ever troubled America and eager to avoid giving Americans cause for reengaging against them.”

Having outlined his overall argument, Codevilla next turns to a fuller account of Adams’s statecraft. Adams founded his statecraft upon the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation of the natural rights of human persons and the consequent separate and equal station of each nation. Although all human beings possess such rights, and all nations deserve such a station, only Americans at the time of the Founding “had grasped, declared, and practiced to some extent the connection between civil liberty, self-rule, and reciprocal respect among nations.” This is why no American statesman up to and including Adams’s administration expressed any “desires or designs, to reform, to dominate, much less to conquer any other people.” Peace was the priority of American foreign policy because “combining virtuous living at home with political neutrality abroad was Christians politics in the most fundamental sense: Christians believe that Christ’s birth ended the history of nations and that, thenceforth, God’s relations have been with individual souls, not with nations,” and governments should merely “provide the context within which individuals might worship God and show His glory.” In foreign policy as in personal conduct, do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

It must be said that much of this is rubbish. Americans quite obviously conquered the Indians and did indeed attempt to change their regimes, too, beginning with the Washington Administration’s largely successful efforts to bring the Five Civilized Tribes of the American southeast to lives of agriculture. This policy remained in effect, with considerably less success, when Americans encountered the Lakota on the Great Plains, decades later. No American president seriously diverged from such policies, including Adams. As Codevilla himself writes, “America’s long-term interests determined Adams’s diplomatic objectives—not the least being expansion over the North American continent.” That, however, meant war or the threat of war with Indians and European imperialists alike. It was to be Jefferson’s “empire of liberty,” to be sure: newly acquired territories would enter the United States as states constitutionally equal to the original thirteen. But the Indians would become domestic dependent peoples, as Chief Justice John Marshall called them, and the Europeans would go.

Overseas empire and military-political entanglements were a different story. Codevilla quotes Adams as saying that “the most important paper that ever went from my hand” was dated November 27, 1823 and addressed to Russian envoy Baron de Tuyll. As President James Monroe’s Secretary of State, Adams had been negotiating with Tuyll over Russian colonies in North America. During these discussions, Tuyll had communicated the czar’s request that the United States continue its policy of neutrality respecting the wars between Spain and the nations it ruled in its American empire; for his part, the czar intended to refuse to recognize the independence of the Spanish colonies or to receive their diplomats. In a subsequent message, the czar justified his refusal by stating “his belief in the superiority of monarchic, divine-right rule” to the democratic republicanism then being established, however tentatively, in Latin America. 

Adams had authored the Monroe Doctrine. He opposed any “possible attempts by France, Russia, and Spain to reconquer the newly freed South American states.” Accordingly, in his reply to the czar in his letter to Tuyll he emphasized the Christian character of their two countries, their similar moral perspectives. He didn’t overlook the political differences, however, clearly stating that “the United States is republican,” a regime founded upon the consent of the governed.” Being that, Americans hold that “each Nation is exclusively the judge of the government best suited to itself, and that no other Nation may justly interfere by force to impose a different Government upon it.” This was the basis of the neutrality the czar hoped Americans would observe. But it did not entail acquiescence in the imperial designs of foreign governments in the Western Hemisphere, where Americans’ geopolitical interests were strong. Unlike Russia, the United States recognized the independence of South American governments from Spain once that independence had been won by South American nations without U.S. assistance. And, as Codevilla summarizes the argument, “the United States would continue to be neutral in any wars between them and Spain—so long as others so remained as well.” If Russia wanted U.S. neutrality in those conflicts, Russia “should itself practice neutrality.”

Adams had consistently associated foreign policy with moral principles and moral principles with prudence throughout his lifetime. As a young man, he “rejoiced at the Louisiana Purchase’s doubling of American territory” while “trembl[ing] that it had been done without clear constitutional authority, and that neither party was interested in regularizing such authority through constitutional amendment.” He opposed the annexation of Texas because it was a slave state, believing, in Codevilla’s words, “that power that decreases the nation’s moral integrity makes for domestic strife, which precludes greatness as he understood it.” The portion of America from Texas to California would fall into American hands without war “because it was being peopled by Americans,” anyway. Peaceful ‘demographic conquest’ had been in the offing, had Americans been more patient. 

Regime conflict and imperial ambition threatened peace in the Americas when Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France formed the Holy Alliance against political liberalization at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The Alliance’s most pressing concern was Spain, which had deposed its king; in violation of Westphalian principles, they invaded. They also “spoke of reconquering its South American colonies for her,” a notion that alarmed the British government. Equally worried, President Monroe and his Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, initially responded favorably to British feelers regarding an alliance to repel any such venture. Adams demurred. He argued that the Holy Alliance couldn’t sustain an invasion of the Western Hemisphere politically, let alone militarily. “Governments so unsure of their standing with their own peoples as to require each other’s support to stay in power could not risk sending their armies across the ocean to secure a nonmember’s colonies.” And the Alliance would fall apart soon enough, given the divergent interests among the monarchs in matters other than their shared opposition to republicanism. Militarily, France alone had “a good navy,” but not one capable of standing up to the one Britain had. Finally, what exactly were British intentions regarding the former Spanish colonies? Would it buy Cuba, for example? Cuba’s closeness to American shores makes it a permanent point of interest to the United States. Would a formal alliance with Britain to resist Holy Alliance incursions into the Western Hemisphere not open it to British imperial ambitions? 

In Adams’s words, “the first and paramount duty of the government is to maintain peace amidst the convulsions of foreign wars and to enter the lists as parties to no cause, other than our own.” Therefore, we have engaged in “the maritime wars of Europe,” inasmuch as we have “a direct and importance interest of our own” in waging wars defending our access on the sea, “an element which is the common property of all.” Given our maritime commerce, “we have already been once compelled to vindicate our rights by war,” the War of 1812. Since the Cubans were unlikely to vindicate their own right to independence, even if they expelled the weak Spanish rulers, American should continue to support Spanish rule against all European rivals to it, including the British. Even if Spain sold it to the Brits, the United States should, as Codevilla puts it, “consider itself in its rights in supporting the Cubans to resist such transfer.”

The resulting Monroe Doctrine, which Adams in fact authored, amounts to “a principle of geopolitical priorities that concerns Latin America only because of its proximity.” It did nothing to contradict “George Washington’s formula for America’s relationship with extra-hemispheric powers: mutual non-interference, and to extend that formula to the rest of the hemisphere.” It reserves American sovereignty while respecting the sovereignty of other nations. Thus Adams stood up in defense of General Andrew Jackson when he invaded Florida, then a Spanish colony, where British officers leading British soldiers of fortune joined with Indians and blacks who had escaped from slavery in attacks on U.S. territory. When Britain and Spain, feigning outrage at this violation of sovereignty, “demanded that Jackson be punished,” Adams coolly responded that Spain had never protested the presence of British marines in Florida, who had arrived there near the end of the War of 1812 and stayed. Spain had also done nothing to stop the subsequent outrages. General Jackson’s incursion didn’t initiate war; it finished one. Territories conquered by him, Adams wrote, “should be restored whenever Spain should place commanders and a force there able and willing to fulfill the engagements of Spain to the United States or of restraining by force the Florida Indians from hostilities against their citizens.” End of squabble. It wasn’t long before Spain would cede all of Florida to the United States. 

With Adams running the State Department, the Monroe Administration also faced down threats to Cuba and Puerto Rico by the newly liberated Latin American countries. Led by Simon Bolivar, Colombia and its ally Mexico had promoted a “far more muscular version of the Monroe Doctrine: an alliance, perhaps a confederation, of all American republics to keep European monarchies at bay.” Bolivar invited those republics to a conference in Panama in 1825, intending to advance this proposal. For his part, Adams (by then president) regarded such a “permanent alliance” as contradictory to our “most basic commitment to unilateralism,” even if “some sort of cooperation with other hemispheric republics made undeniably good sense.” At the conference, American delegates persuaded “Latin American countries individually to redouble their commitment to republicanism, to hold European influences at bay and to act as good neighbors while privileging commercial contact with another.” Adams and his Secretary of State Henry Clay called this the American System. It was “the Monroe Doctrine’s version rather than Bolivar’s.” 

Codevilla duly notes the major deviations from the Washington-Adams foreign policy, namely, the Mexican War and ‘popular sovereignty,’ Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s amoral version of Manifest Destiny, enunciated in his debates with Lincoln, in which he averred not to care if territories eligible for statehood voted to legalize slavery. The Mexican War was the more complex and interesting of the two. Polk intervened in Mexico’s domestic politics by backing Antonio López de Santa Anna’s bid to return to power in return for his (empty) promise to sell California and New Mexico to the U.S. and to fix the Mexico-U.S. border at the Rio Grande. Santa Anna expected to win the war, hoping to continue on to seize New Orleans; although Codevilla cites this as proof of his competence, it must be said that most Europeans capitals expected the same outcome. Underestimation of the United States seems to have been chronic among foreigners and even some Americans alike, for all of our history. Throughout the century, calls for an overseas American empire went up from persons as diverse as James Buchanan and Walt Whitman. Nothing much came of them, although President Grover Cleveland did face down an attempt to seize Hawaii, even as he took care to renew a treaty binding the islands to the U.S. commercially and establishing a naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was left to U.S. expatriates on Hawaii to overthrow Queen Liliuokalani, with the assistance of a rogue U.S. Navy ship’s crew, during the William Harrison administration. After returning to office in the next election, Cleveland refused annexation, and told the Americans “to restore the queen”; “when she made that impossible by demanding the plotters’ beheading, Cleveland washed his hands of the matter,” although he left annexation to a future administration.

It was left to President William McKinley to more or less stumble into an overseas empire which, however, didn’t really amount to much of an empire. The problem of Spain’s weak rule over Cuba had never been solved. Codevilla fails to give a clear account of what happened, contenting himself with saying that he tried to solve the problem with “legal finesse,” offering battle without declaring war and leaving it to Spain to declare the war, which of course the United States won and “saddled itself with an empire.” 

What actually happened was more complicated. Since 1895, Cuban revolutionaries had fought for independence from Spain. The conflict interested America, given Cuba’s proximity to the United States, the possibility of foreign intervention, and Spanish atrocities. When the Battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898, Americans suspected Spanish sabotage; many years later, it was determined that an engine-room malfunction was the more likely cause. In this charged atmosphere, McKinley asked Congress to authorize U.S. intervention to end the fighting and to establish a “stable government” on the island, one that would guarantee the safety of Cuban citizens and American residents. He had no intention to annex Cuba. Congress passed a joint resolution recognizing Cuban independence and authorizing U.S. military intervention, absent a formal declaration of war. Spain immediately severed diplomatic relations with us. McKinley ordered a naval blockade and called for volunteers for a military intervention. Spain then declared war and Congress did likewise—the third of our five such declarations. 

Both countries accepted France’s offer to host a peace conference after the United States easily won the war. The resulting treaty stipulated not only the cession of Cuba to the United States but also the cession of Guam and Puerto Rico. Spain also agreed to sell the Philippines to us. The Spanish couldn’t rule any of them, anymore, and the McKinley administration hardly wanted them to fall into the hands of foreign empires, given the proximity of Cuba and Puerto Rico to the U.S. coastline and the strategic utility of military bases between our west coast and the Asian mainland. While they were at it, McKinley and Congress also took the opportunity to annex Hawaii.

Codevilla concludes his own oversimplified summary of the events with the dour observations that “interference in Cuba ended up transforming it into a cancer on the Americas” and “possession of the Philippines, incompetently managed, eventually brought war with Japan.” This begs the question whether competent management would have avoided these consequences. If so, what was the real harm in taking over places we stood up for self-government or, in the cases of Guam and Puerto Rico, incorporated as American commonwealths? Codevilla writes that “by not allowing Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and others conquered in 1898 to enter the Union as States equal with others, the U.S. had abandoned its founding principle that political legitimacy derives wholly, entirely, exclusively, from the consent of the governed.” Except that it didn’t, as our dozens of Indian wars so obviously attested. What is more, this obscures our fulfilled intention to turn Cuba and the Philippines over to the peoples in question, once they seemed ready for self-government. As for Puerto Rico, it has held several referenda on independence and has rejected it.

Additionally, Codevilla never carefully outlines the options considered by U.S. policymakers in the 1890s. By the beginning of the decade, when the United States had fully secured its continental empire ‘from sea to shining sea,’ statesmen considered four possible policies. By then, such technologies as steamships and telegraphs had made the oceans what Alexander Hamilton had said they were, writing as Publius in 1787: not simply barriers to foreign intervention in North America but potential highways for foreign troops. What should we do about that new and massive fact? One recommendation, advocated by an old Lincoln ally, Carl Schurz, would have continued the Washington-Adams policy. On the opposite extreme was Beveridge, whom Codevilla mentioned earlier, who pressed for what the Confederate States of America had wanted, a colonial empire in Latin America over supposedly ‘inferior’ races. A third notion, progressive/liberal internationalism, also began to be formulated during the Nineties; its main alternative proved to be that of Theodore Roosevelt.

Codevilla doesn’t get Roosevelt’s policy quite right. According to him, TR retreated from his earlier imperialist stance and as president “showed most fully how America could fulfill George Washington’s and J.Q. Adams’s view of foreign affairs by wielding world-class power for America’s own maintenance.” This effort consisted of building the Panama Canal and treating it as part of the American shoreline; building a navy capable of defending that expanded ‘shoreline’ and of undertaking and completing a world-spanning voyage while assuring foreigners “that none of that power was necessarily directed at anyone.” All true, but this ignores the worldwide system of naval bases TR also began to construct, beginning with those already acquired in the Spanish-American War. American naval presence overseas would not be a one-off event. Our bases would be consented to by their foreign hosts, given the mutual advantage of American protection for them and a convenient worldwide set of naval fueling stations for us. That is no real empire (’empire’ denotes imperium, rule), and in fact avoided the main burdens of such a structure. But neither is it non-involvement in the domestic politics of other countries. It is a reasonable policy founded upon the realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Part II, Codevilla addresses U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. “By 1903, the issue of empire had lost importance to both sides,” as the wisdom of Roosevelt’s strategy became increasingly apparent. “But the division over empire had masked a deeper one,” namely, the division between those who held to the natural-rights moral foundation of the American regime and those who espoused Progressivist historicism. The Progressives’ foreign policy was internationalist. Although Wilson was the most conspicuous proponent of Progressive internationalism, Codevilla identifies Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, then Secretary of State, Elihu Root as “the father of Progressive American statecraft,” just as Adams had been the father of the statecraft of the previous century. Root took care to keep his legacy alive at State, mentoring Henry Stimson, who mentored McGeorge Bundy, who mentored Anthony Lake. 

Codevilla finds a useful précis of Root’s thought in his Nobel Peace Prize speech of 1912. In it, Root called for “pulling up the roots” of war and even of national selfishness by instituting international tribunals which would settle disputes that might lead to war. The tribunals would adjudicate cases guided by fast-developing international law, including the 113 general treaties of obligation governments had signed since the 1899 Peace Conference at the Hague. Such conferences amounted to international lawmaking bodies that, in Codevilla’s words, could “transform international law from mutual bilateral commitments into commitments to abide by the decisions of multilateral institutions.” With national sovereignty diluted worldwide, war could be bred out of international politics. The many sovereign nations would agree to such disempowerment “because it is the most profitable thing to do.” After all, doesn’t “everyone want economic well-being more than war”? In Root’s words, economic interdependence “will make sure that the peoples will push for peaceful, rational international relations.” They can push effectively, too, given vastly improved means of international communication, “there has come to be a public opinion of the world,” Root said, an opinion which “has set up a new standard of international conduct which condemns unjustified aggression” and “punishes the violation of its standards.” Morality and economic interest perfectly entwine, forming the pattern of a new world order. Human pride and anger? We shall overcome: “There is so much good in human nature that men get to like each other through mutual acquaintance” and, with that, “civilized man is becoming less cruel.” It’s worth noting that we would hear exactly the same sort of blather when the Internet was organized. 

Eminent Progressives around the country shared Root’s sentiments. Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler averred that “Mankind has been climbing upward and neither standing on a level nor going downhill.” Thanks to history’s happy advance, it’s as easy to do business with Bombay as it once was to do business in a village. Stanford University’s president, David Starr Jordan (“Herbert Hoover’s mentor”) claimed “there is nothing in the world for us to fight for,” anymore, “at least not with sword and gun.” We must instead fight “greed and folly,” with “a tribunal of just men,” drawn from “the cosmopolitan clubs of our universities made up of men of all races.” Despite the Great War, “the utter negation of what these Progressives had lived for,” many Progressives “doubled down on their illusions.” Enter Woodrow Wilson, entering the United States into that war avowedly to claim a place at the coming peace conference and to hasten progress toward international peace under the auspices of a “League to Enforce Peace.”

“For the Progressives, America belonged to history more than to the American people,” as “America’s establishment had well-nigh agreed that their country was merely at the head of mankind’s common Progressive march.” Codevilla speculates that had Roosevelt won the 1912 election “he would have warned Germany about America’s interest in maintaining Britain’s role in the Atlantic, hence that America could not afford a British defeat by a rising naval power.” Such a warning might have prevented the war, and if the war started anyway, a Roosevelt Administration fought “solely to protect the Atlantic…from becoming a hostile German lake.” As matters happened, the American people fought the war not only in the Atlantic but on European soil, helped to win it, then opposed Wilson’s League of Nations as a dangerous entanglement—that is, on the traditional grounds of U.S. foreign policy. “Wilson blamed his political opponents” for their failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and “to this day, Wilson’s vindictive narrative is ruling class Progressive gospel: the American people’s rejection of the League of Nations and refusal to ‘lead the world’ caused World War II and risks causing the next world war also.”

The next world war began in Asia. Although it never ratified the Versailles Treaty, the United States did ratify the three treaties negotiated at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22. In the Five-Power Treaty, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy agreed to limit their naval tonnage, reduce their navies overall, and to prohibit expansion of existing naval bases in the Asian Pacific. U.S. Navy officers rightly warned that the ban on base expansion would put our forces in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam at risk; their advice was overridden. The Four-Power Treaty committed the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and France to mutual consultation in the event of a crisis in the region but did not commit the signatories to any military obligations. Finally, the Nine-Power Treaty, which included Belgium, China, Portugal, and the Netherlands, guaranteed respect for China’s territorial integrity while obligating China to maintain the “Open Door” to free trade with all the signatories. When Japan violated the Nine-Power Treaty in 1931, invading China, Secretary of State Stimson cited the treaty in a conversation with President Hoover, who deflected the matter by claiming that the Japanese invasion was primarily a violation of the League of Nations charter, to which the United States had no obligation. Otherwise, the United States might be put in what the president called (in Stimson’s paraphrase) “a humiliating position in case Japan refused to do anything about what he called our scraps of paper or paper treaties.” Thus, Codevilla comments, the “Progressives’ faith in treaties had put America precisely in the position of having to choose between humiliation and war. For the next decade, it chose humiliation. Then war.” Having honored its own treaty commitment to reduce its military capabilities, and thus its capacity to deter war, it could very easily have lost that war, when it came. 

“No president from J.Q. Adams to TR would have placed America in such a position,” making “a treaty commitment to China’s independence, or to anyone’s, especially as they were depriving themselves of the means to keep the commitment.” According to Codevilla, by “fixat[ing] on America’s own interest and on America’s capacity to security it,” those presidents “likely would have avoided the Pacific War—and possibly even the European tragedy.” This might mean that those presidents, free of the stipulations of the Naval Conference treaties, would have fortified our Pacific bases, deterring Japanese assault on them, leaving Japan with the formidable task of pacifying and then retaining the vast territories and hostile populations of Japan and Korea which they undertook to conquer in the 1930s. But Codevilla makes a grander claim: refusing to sign the treaties and building up our forces in the region would have denied Japan her “uncontested invasion of China.” That is, we might have been able to stop the Japanese or even to deter Japan from attempting the invasion in the first place. In the event, he claims, a militarily weak United States imposed a trade embargo on Japan “without prospects of resuming normal trade relations in case of compromise,” leaving “a starving Japan with only the choice of where to wage war”—eventually, Pearl Harbor. One may doubt whether Japan’s imperial ambitions were so easily manipulated or its policy options so constrained by American actions and inactions.

Meanwhile, when it came to Europe, “FDR did not indicate that something was wrong with Hitler until after the fall of France,” having before that event “sympathized with Hitler’s statism.” His left-wing constituents within the Democratic Party had “demanded support for Hitler because he had become Stalin’s ally” after the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. And in any event, “Nazi Germany’s primary interests were eastward,” and would eventually lead Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, anyway, after gobbling up the Central and Eastern European nations between Germany and Russia. But instead of defending their own interests, “France and Britain started a war over Poland without an idea of what these interests might be, without plans for doing any good for themselves or for Poland, and without the intention of doing anything but halfhearted defense.” They should have stood by, gathering their own strength. The war in western Europe was effectively provoked, prematurely, by the democracies. 

This analysis ignores FDR’s cautious efforts to prepare the United States for the war he thought likely, efforts that began in 1935. It also ignores the outcome of the war itself. It is inconceivable that France would have substantially fortified itself in time for the invasion of 1940 because its rulers seriously believed that they had already done so. And without the crisis of the Nazi invasion of France, no Churchill and no major war preparation in Great Britain, either. Europe would have seen a war between Germany and Russia, anyway; one side might have won that war, with the victor ready to deal with the European democracies, later on. 

According to Codevilla, John Quincy Adams “would never have made contradictory commitments or pledges that the United States had no means of redeeming,” such as the pledge to restore Poland’s independence while “placing no conditions on [Allied] aid to the Soviet Union, which had collaborated with Nazi Germany to dismember Poland and intended to keep its share—if not the whole thing.” Such an unconditional alliance was foolish because the Soviet Union’s objectives in the war “were, by definition, hostile to America.” “One of J.Q.’s most valuable teachings is that even when an alien regime’s short-term interests line up with America’s, it is essential to separate that regime’s purposes from ours in our own minds.” FDR, his eyes fixed on the Wilsonian vision of international cooperation, failed to see that, instead placing his hopes in that League of Nations redivivus, the United Nations. It has proven to be as much of a sham as its predecessor, but now the U.S. has caught itself up in it.

But would Adams have supported postwar American efforts at regime change in West Germany and Japan? They were successful and geopolitically beneficial, a point Codevilla prefers to overlook. That regime change itself was no bugbear to George Washington and to subsequent U.S. presidents of that era, we already know, although Codevilla doesn’t have much to say about that, either.

Since then, American foreign policy has formed in the “intramural clashes of ideology, identity, and interest within an ever-bigger, wealthier, and more independent U.S. establishment” centered in the international affairs division of the Progressivist-inspired, New Deal-enacted administrative state. Presidents no longer set policy; bureaucrats do, and “that is not how a republic is supposed to work.” Our foreign embassies often have large staffs representing various administrative agencies of the United States government, which represent not the America people but “the interests of their constituencies” (agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and so on). No “coherent U.S. policy” can emerge from that alphabet soup. Universities have revamped their degree offerings to prepare students “for careers in this array of constituencies.” At the same time, foreign countries have entrenched themselves in the non-governmental U.S. bureaucracies our embassies represent, especially business corporations and, again, universities. Tiny but rich Qatar, for example, doles out money to fifty-one universities, dozens of foundations, and no small percentage of American Congress members. The champion of dubious influence remains, of course, China, whose money “reaches every part of the U.S. body politic.” U.S. corporations, long mesmerized by the market potential, allow themselves to be led by the nose by Chinese Communist Party commissars.

The American oligarchs have shown themselves unforgiving to their critics. As early as 1952, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination and a critic of Progressive internationalism, saw his campaign torpedoed by “corrupt deals,” including “one that substituted one Texas delegation for another.” That was the year when Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded President Harry Truman “to fire the establishment’s other bête noire, General Douglas MacArthur”—and founder of Japanese republicanism—from “command of U.S. forces in Korea.” When President Kennedy later considered attending to MacArthur’s admonition not to fight a land war in Asia, “consider[ing] instead his suggestion for a naval-economic strategy reminiscent of J.Q. Adams and TR,” he eventually acceded to the superior political weight of the establishment and increased U.S. troop presence in Vietnam—with decidedly unpleasant results to come.

As for the overarching circumstance of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Codevilla regards the two main foreign policy events of 1956 to have been the turning point, when “the foreign policy establishment placed their interest in avoiding confrontation with the Soviet Union—as well as their preference for a Europe shorn of its colonies and for a world reshaped in their own image—ahead of anti-communism. Nothing would ever be the same.” When the Soviets put down an anti-communist rebellion in Hungary, NATO did nothing. And when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, provoking armed opposition from Great Britain, France, and Israel, the United States sided with the Soviets and their client, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nassar. A few years later, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the U.S. supposedly faced down a Soviet naval caravan transporting missiles to Cuba, the establishment secretly brokered a deal whereby we removed U.S. nuclear weapons from Britain, Italy, and Turkey in exchange for a Soviet reversal. Establishment media outlets uniformly celebrated President Kennedy’s supposed heroism. Since these events, “the NATO Alliance has been a bureaucratic reality masked by military pretense,” and U.S./European policy in Europe “consisted of competition to see whose package of concessions could most thoroughly satisfy Soviet demands.” The trend culminated in the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger policy of détente, the consequences of which the anti-establishment Reagan Administration deflected.

Whereas West German president Konrad Adenauer and French president Charles de Gaulle proposed a “Europe of the Fatherlands” to consist of self-governing nations loosely confederated for self-defense and trade (de Gaulle even extended the extravagant invitation, “Come, let us build Europe together,” to the nonplussed Soviet ruler and ideologue, Alexei Kosygin), the U.S. government backed the nascent European Union bureaucracy, successfully discouraged the British from building “a truly independent nuclear force,” and failed to dissuade de Gaulle from building France’s nuclear force de frappe. Increasingly, the “habits, minds, hearts, and tastes among America’s Europe’s, and to a lesser extent the Third World’s ruling classes” have prevailed; this “international ruling class” knows that “American voters are the major threat to all that it deems good.”

Small wonder, since the ruling class’s interests, like those of all oligarchies, prefer to squeeze the wages of workers in order to extract more wealth for themselves—something that’s been noticed at least as far back as Aristotle. As a result of Alexander Hamilton’s policies—more or less continued even in the years after the Second World War—American workers were well paid for producing manufactures in their own country, a policy that had enabled America to be what FDR bragged it was, the “arsenal of democracy.” But gradually, U.S. corporations “began to use the lower labor costs in their overseas facilities to produce for U.S. markets as well,” turning our trade policy “against the American people’s historic prosperity and independence.” This “effectively de-industrialized America” and enhanced the regime change initiated by Progressives. One part of any regime is its way of life. “A society of people who make things is very different from one dominated by managers and financiers, served by a vast service sector.” For one thing, it takes political power and moral self-respect away from those not in the oligarchy. For their part, American politicians began to see the American people “strictly as consumers of products”—including, one might add, substantial income transfers in the form of welfare payments, ‘social security,’ and similar ‘programs’—rather “than as producers who live certain kinds of lives because of what they produce at a given price.” But to see Americans that way and to accept the erosion of our manufacturing is to sacrifice “the indispensable ingredient for international independence.” And “nobody voted against it, either, because the U.S. foreign policy establishment and educational establishment—and, of course, politicians—did not think of sovereignty over essential materials, products, processes, and skills as an issue.” Why would they, if they assumed that a new international order would make political sovereignty go away, and good riddance to it?

Oddly, this generated a circumstance in which America’s small overseas wars became frequent, not to say perpetual, while both elected and bureaucratic politicians took war and preparation for war less seriously. This has “blur[red] distinctions between war and peace themselves,” as “U.S. military forces at all levels have been planned and used in ways that have left them unable to secure victory, and therefore peace, on any level.”

For example, in books such as Bernard Brodie’s The Absolute Weapon, establishment academics claimed that “fear of nuclear weapons must be equally prohibitive for peoples everywhere forevermore,” making “major war virtually impossible.” Ergo, America mustn’t prepare to fight a nuclear war, as such preparation might provoke one. ‘Small wars’ are o.k., but nothing else. This notwithstanding, “the U.S. military generation of World War II” didn’t buy into these claims, arguing that America should deter and, “if necessary,” fight, survive, and win a nuclear war. This was called the “counterforce” strategy; as technology advanced, enabling militaries to target foreign militaries while minimizing civilian casualties and to shield their own civilian populations with air and missile defenses, this strategy became increasingly plausible. Codevilla judges that “any Soviet bomber or missile could have reached America in the 1960s,” not because the Soviets lacked intercontinental reach but because our defenses would have prevented their weapons from landing. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, firmly in control of U.S. foreign policy at the time, preferred to deter Soviet nuclear attacks by threatening counter-strikes on cities. “Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, codified all this and made it into the ruling class’s default paradigm that endures in our time.” Unfortunately, Soviet, later Russian, and Chinese militaries didn’t play along, and continued to deploy counterforce weapons along with missile defenses, which include hardening the silos of their land-based missiles to make them invulnerable to anything but a direct hit. Today, “it is difficult if not impossible today to explain how America might use its nuclear forces in battle to its own advantage.” In effect, we have deterred ourselves more than anyone else. “Official policy remains not even to try to defend against missiles from Russia or China.” 

De Gaulle understood this as early as 1962. When the Cuban Missile Crisis began, knowing that the United States enjoyed an “overwhelming military edge” over its enemy, he signaled his support “in war as in peace” to Kennedy. But when he saw the way Kennedy shrank from using American superiority, instead weakening NATO’s nuclear capabilities, “this wise statesman uttered the most damning of his judgments: ‘They are not serious.'” Not only his move to build an independent French nuclear force but his eventual withdrawal from NATO followed. De Gaulle proved an equally acerbic critic of American involvement in the Vietnam War. And no wonder, when President Lyndon Johnson identified the enemy not so much as the Vietnamese communists as (in his own words) “poverty, ignorance, hunger, and disease,” dangling the prospect of turning the Mekong Delta into an Asian version of FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority project in exchange for peace with the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, no esteemer of bourgeois economics. Not only in Vietnam but in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere in Asia, American officials “aimed to conquer hearts and minds, to birth and build nations according to their imagination of what America should be”—all the while signally failing in that domestic vision, too, as they declared wars on poverty and racism, illiteracy and terrorism, all with more impressive unintended than intended consequences, not the least of which have been abridgement of Americans’ civil liberties and ever-increasing moral and intellectual decline. “In sum, a half century of skirmishes has left Americans less respected abroad, more divided at home, and rightly wary of getting into more wars, but ill equipped morally an politically, as well as militarily, for any other kind of relations with the rest of the world.”

On the diplomatic side, “Progressive statesmen have used diplomacy to try accomplishing things inherently impossible”—specifically, to “‘rise above’ the very real differences between cultures and among sovereign nations” by appealing to “interests that they incorrectly presumed all nations had in common.” Accordingly, in negotiating peace agreements and other treaties, they have often worked “to find common language that admits of varied interpretations”—what they ever-ingenious Dr. Kissinger has called “creative ambiguity.” Hence the fatal vagueness of his missile limitation agreements with the Soviets and his ‘peace’ settlement with the Vietnamese Communists in the 1970s. While Codevilla absurdly continues to claim that the Americans of the Founding and their heirs “intended no conquest, except of the wilderness” (pretending that they limited themselves to purchasing Indian lands), he’s right about Kissinger and the interests he embodied. “Whenever Americans have confused America’s interests with those of mankind at large, they have done so in a way that rationalizes their own assumption of the right to lead, to teach, to help, to act as sheriff, and to provide world order,” all in the name of “progress.” 

What to do? In the third and most successful part of his book, Codevilla asks how John Quincy Adams would understand our contemporary circumstances and what policies he might recommend to us. It is of course impossible to tell how much of this is Adams, how much Codevilla, but whatever the ration of A to C may be, the results are worth considering.

He begins by rehearsing the familiar but no less lamentable facts about the decline in American morals, literacy, and comity, asking, “What foreign policy is possible for a people who hate each other?” The divide between the elites or “ruling class” and the rest of us lies not along a geographic line, as it did in the 1860s; the two groups find themselves marbled together throughout the country, if in different neighborhoods. What a nation disunited along ‘cultural’ lines can accomplish in foreign policy is “by no means clear.” Given the absence of moral consensus among us, Codevilla wisely suggests appealing not so much to principles, which simply are no longer shared, but to consequences. Christian or atheist, ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive,’ you are not likely to want to die thanks to some blunder in foreign policy.

Given Adams’s aims of defending the self-government of Americans and of making policy consistent with our “real military forces” and “diplomatic realities,” Codevilla recommends abandoning Europe and befriending Russia, concentrating our attention on China, upholding commercial reciprocity, treating enemies in the Middle East the way Jefferson treated the Barbary pirates, and getting out of the many international organizations we’ve joined. America should return to unilateralism—that is to say, independence of action—except when we undertake treaties ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution stipulates. This contrasts with the elite consensus stated by President Barack Obama in an address to the United Nations in 2009: “Giving up freedom of action…binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.” “Truth, Adams would argue, is exactly the reverse.” We should reserve our international commitments for “specific interests in specific circumstances.” Far from devaluing our commitments, this means “making only the ones that we must and intend to keep.”

Codevilla’s Adams would see that the size of the American military is greater than its warmaking capacity. Our military forces should be reduced and reconfigured. Instead of spreading them out over the globe, they should be concentrated for the task of homeland defense. That consists of “firm control of the North Atlantic, of the eastern and central Pacific, as well as assured access to the rest of the oceans.” It also “means control of orbital space over America,” defense of American territory “against all missiles from anywhere,” and space-based defense of our satellites. The Roosevelt strategy of a network of naval bases around the world should be maintained but reduced to those essential to the purposes mentioned. We should regroup “American forces now scattered and vulnerable all over the globe, mostly back onto U.S. soil.” Get them out of Europe, Korea, and Japan, as the countries in those places “have abundant resources to take care of themselves.” Taiwan, however, excepted: located in “the geographic and political bull’s eye of China’s drive to control the Western Pacific,” it should be fortified “military and politically” in order to keep the South China Sea open to American shipping. As for Iran, we should “kill this enemy for its enmity to America and…do it in exemplary fashion,” not with military force but with rigorous economic sanctions.

Codevilla’s remarks on Taiwan are an important concession to contemporary geopolitical reality. Adams would have no interest in stationing U.S. military personnel and weaponry in such a remote place. TR would, and so has Codevilla.

Remarking the political use of U.S. intelligence agencies by operative within the agencies themselves, Codevilla attributes these vagaries to bureaucrat bloat and the consequent loss of “their republican character.” “Restoring that character—insofar as that may be possible—requires shrinking them” and “stripping them of the prestige that they are weaponizing” against critics of the “partisan oligarchy” to which they have come to belong. Most of the CIA’s functions (for example) could be transferred to the Pentagon and the Foreign Service. Statesmanship requires not so much ‘top-secret intel’ but straightforward summaries of publicly available information and careful observation of actions taken, “informed by the statesmen’s own knowledge, experience, and good diplomatic reporting.”

As for trade policy, Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufactures remains a sound guide. Hamilton understood that political independence requires economic independence, and “to some extent, economic rationality”—most notably the practice of free trade—must be “sacrificed to the ratio of statesmanship.” His support of protective tariffs laid the cornerstone of American economic policy for generations, pursued by Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, among others. China’s thus-far successful manipulation of American capitalists into putting the country into a position of dependence on Chinese manufactures is the principal case in point. With its “dictatorial control over the world’s biggest reservoir of intelligent, disciplined labor,” the Chinese Communist Party has ratcheted itself into the position of chief supplier of basic pharmaceuticals, electronics, and materials for batteries for the U.S. Why allow this to continue?

Codevilla devotes a chapter each to Adamsonian responses to Latin America, the Muslim world, Europe, Russia, and China. Adams “would judge Latin America more consequential than ever”; not only is it connected to American territory by land, its young, poor, “mal-governed” and “restless” population, “over twice our number,” inclines to move northward. This migration poses an “existential threat” to the United States, as those who come here no longer seek temporary, seasonal work but move “from Central America’s welfare rolls to ours.” Expecting a new pool of voters, the Democratic Party welcomes them, despite “the danger of deculturation and increased criminality” they present. Codevilla recommends making our southern border impenetrable and rejecting moves to decriminalize drugs. In addition, we should boycott the enemy regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, imposing secondary sanction on all governments and corporations that continued doing business with them. The U.S. government should invoke the Monroe Doctrine against Chinese and Russian penetration into the region.

With regard to Muslims, Codevilla regards their civilization as “sick” “beyond the reach of foreigners to cure.” American involvement in the region made some sense during the Cold War and “as along as we depended upon Middle East oil, but neither of those conditions exists now”. The terrorists of today should be treated as Founding-generation Americans treated the Barbary pirates: “exterminate them physically as mankind’s common enemy.” Regime change strategies will remain fruitless because “Western standards of material comfort and civil freedom” cannot be sustained “while adhering to the Koran’s moral and social prescriptions.” As for the secularized segments of the population, in the past century “they have tried socialism and dallied with Nazism, aligned themselves with Americans and with Russians,” but “corruption and despotism are the main things they have delivered to their peoples.” Americans have frustrated themselves in the Middle East because we haven’t focused “on what we want for ourselves from the region—which is not much,” any more. Once again, secondary sanctions are his preferred weapon against regimes that sponsor terrorism against the U.S. Muslims “lived peaceably alongside the West when the West had left it no alternative to doing so”; ergo, leave it no alternative.

There has been much talk of bringing India into closer alliance with the United States as a counter to China’s increasing power in Asia. Codevilla doubts that this can go very far. Indian statesmen already know very well that they need to oppose Chinese naval activities in the Indian Ocean, “but nothing could persuade India to send its navy through the straits of Malacca into the South China Sea to back up the U.S. Navy in a confrontation with China.” Trade with both India and its enemy, Pakistan, should continue, as it has since the eighteenth century. As is so often the case, “where interests align, little if any effort to coordinate them is necessary,” and “where they do not, attempting to make them so is largely futile.”

What about Europe? First, Americans should recognize that “no part of Europe can possibly remain European unless it walls itself off from the Muslim flood.” “Europeans serious about reviving a dying civilization” will need “to restore their relationship with Christianity”—a task Americans have become singularly unlikely to be useful in assisting. De Gaulle understood that, and sought to supplement it with the patriotism secular Frenchmen have long embraced. Codevilla judges that patriotism has declined even faster than Christianity in Europe, whose “very capacity to marshal people for any common purpose whatever has well-nigh disappeared.” Europeans today will never “hazard comfort, let mind lives, for their national governments,” much less for the “supranational elites” of the European Union, “whom they increasingly despise.” “The Europe of states with structured, responsive societies and high-quality educational systems…is past history and can never return.” The only exceptions are Poland and Hungary; given more recent events, he might add Ukraine. But as for Western Europe, in Codevilla’s acerbic turn of phrase, “the establishment deplores the voters in the name of democracy.” Given all this, “America should not modify its policies to please European governments or elite opinion,” instead negotiating trade agreements on a country-by-country basis. If Europeans want to assert their independence, they should shift from Russia to America as their supplier of natural gas.

Militarily, Europe has no real need of U.S. military assistance to defend it against Russia, since “conquering and occupying Ukraine, never mind Germany, France, Italy, etc., is beyond Russia’s physical as well as political capacity.” Besides, “Europeans have even less interest in defending themselves than Russia does in attacking them.” In this, one sees again the limitations of Codevilla’s strictures. Just as in the 1930s, when British university boys averred they would never fight for king and country, so contemporary Europeans sober up fast when a real threat looms. As always, or at least intermittently, Russia stands ready to provide that kind of threat. 

“What is Russia to us?” Codevilla asks. It was the Bolshevik Revolution that turned it into an enemy, and Russia still resents its defeat and retreat in the Cold War. Although its population continues to decline and its regime still “lacks the sort of entrepreneurship, trust, and cooperation that produces widespread wealth,” its neo-czarist government successfully appeals to nationalism (indeed revanchisme) and moreover wields “fearsome, intelligently built” military forces in the form of nuclear weapons systems. Republicanism won’t happen, there. Codevilla claims that when America “pushed NATO to Russia’s borders in the Baltic states and interfered massively in Ukraine” during the 1990s, “Russians came to see America as an enemy” and chose Putin as their instrument of resistance. But U.S. withdrawal of missile defenses from Eastern Europe didn’t satisfy President Putin, who has proved a man difficult to appease with concessions. His successful conquest of Crimea “has exposed the West’s incapacity to interfere militarily in the former Soviet Empire”—a rather large claim, inasmuch as that empire extended into Germany. This notwithstanding, Codevilla assures his readers that “Putin is painfully aware of Russia’s limits,” although his own chapter recounts how fluid those limits can be. “With Ukraine (and the Baltic states), Russia is potentially a world power. Without it, much less.” True, but Putin aspires to Russian greatness. Codevilla counters that it was Communist ideology that made a Soviet Russian empire possible, and that Russia owes its influence in Western Europe to its natural gas, which produces money from Europe useful in corrupting European officials. Eastern Europe continues to detest its former master, but “America cannot possibly guarantee” its independence. This is because Russia “can safely conduct military operations on its borders, even with nukes, because it possesses missile and anti-missile weapons superior in number and quality to those of America and China combined.” “The U.S. military has no way of dealing with this.” Although “Ukraine is the greatest practical limitation on Russia’s ambitions,” and “its independence is very much a U.S. interest,” that independence “is beyond our capacity to secure.” Evidently, that remains to be seen. To secure it by ourselves, yes; to secure it by backing the Ukrainians, who’ve proven themselves ready to fight, maybe. 

Codevilla identifies China as America’s most formidable rival. He dismisses its Communist ideology as “Marxist gobbledegook, the only intelligible aspect of which is to justify the Party’s rule.” This is very much in line with his ‘realist’ assumption that ideational structures only mask libido dominandi, whether they are seen in Progressive ‘idealists’ pursuing postwar containment of Communism to the Communists themselves. Unfortunately, he is wrong. Mao used that Marxist gobbledegook to justify murdering tens of millions of Chinese; his successors today use it to justify a Leninist New Economic Policy as a weapon against the commercial republics.

This error doesn’t prevent Codevilla from seeing that China’s rulers pay “for unfettered access to American markets, schools, corporations, and political systems with money from their people’s cut-rate labor.” This “outright economic warfare” aims at “subordinat[ing] America” in order to position China as the center of the CCP’s own new world order—the “most thoroughgoing mercantilism ever conceived.” Codevilla’s Adams would observe that Chinese nationalism, even racism, lacks the attraction that Marxism, including Maoism, once exerted: “money and power” cannot substitute for the “universal claims” of Marxism-Leninism. Similar to the Russian czars, China’s rulers claim rule on the basis of a new version of the traditional Mandate of Heaven, but this “emphasizes rather than transcends China’s particularity and foreignness.” 

Therefore, the United States should concentrate its attention on “China’s straightforward military-geopolitical challenge in the Western Pacific.” They have already completed an effective extension of their borders by occupying international waters by constructing islands in the South China Sea for the support of their military personnel and weapons. This is “a slow-moving borderline act of war,” and “round one has gone to China.” Unlike the United States, it has real strategists at the helm, their objective being “to dominate the Western Pacific eastward, and nearby Eurasia to the West, with power that radiates out from Zung Guo, the center country.” Nor have they neglected war preparations in space, placing an unmanned probe on the far side of the moon, away from the prying eyes of Americans. This proves that “China can do anything in space that America can do—and that it may do or have already be doing things that America has chosen not to do,” such as inserting laser weapons into space, weapons designed to destroy U.S. satellites, which afford command and control over U.S. naval and ground operations. 

Codevilla would respond, as indicated before, by backing Taiwan. Seizing it remains “China’s foremost symbolic political-military objective.” But “Taiwan’s people, with per capita GDP 250 percent of mainland China’s fiercely guard their independence from Beijing. Their mountains are ideal for placing modern sensors, as well as missiles, defensive and offensive.” Denying China the possibility of a successful assault on Taiwan “may be the key to persuading Beijing that it has no sane alternative to peace,” if Americans supplement this policy by deploying missile defenses in the United States itself and by strengthening our own military bases in the Pacific. To prevent the Chinese from controlling the geopolitically crucial Straits of Malacca, the United States should support other nations to “fortify their land approaches to the straits” without “try[ing] to substitute for locals’ commitments.” On China’s other ocean border, Japan should arm itself with nuclear weapons and North Korea, China’s pawn, should be ruined with economic sanctions.

Codevilla devotes his last two chapters to summarizing the principles of John Quincy Adams’s foreign policy as they can be applied to our contemporary circumstance. We can no longer rely on the natural-rights Christianity Adams knew. But we can still attend to the consequences of continuing in our present course. As “the world’s primary economic power,” America’s most effective weapon now is the secondary economic sanction, refusal to trade with anyone who trades with a target country. “Compared to that measure of war, bombing a few ports is nothing.” In the Middle East, Iran would then need to choose “between starving and ending their government’s war on America.” Also, the Kurds deserve our support (although he doesn’t admit it, Kurdish independence resulted from America’s forced regime change in Iraq). A Kurdish state “would be in America’s interest because, in our time, America’s enemies are the ones who benefit from its absence,” namely, Turkey, Iran and its allies in other sections of Iraq, and Syria (along with the regime’s Russian backers). Codevilla is understandably shy about admitting what he failed to admit about Adams’s (and Washington’s) America—that carefully chosen regime changes in foreign nations are not such a bad idea.

He is more forthright in laying down the other principles of a revived version of “America First.” Inasmuch as “precision of speech is a precondition for responsible thought,” and responsibility (as Madison argued) is the moral precondition of representative government or republicanism, Americans should practice such speech much more often than they have been in the habit of doing. Not only will this shore up the American regime, it will enable American statesmen “to deal without pretense with diverse foreign regimes regardless of their differences with ourselves.” And of course those statesmen must back up their words with actions.

Next, we should mind our own business in the sense first of all of understanding ourselves, knowing “what we need and what we should fear from others.” Not only self-respect but self-knowledge is indispensable for self-defense, and self-defense requires to define how what happens relates to us, to our own interests as citizens in a commercial republican regime. For example, which foreign powers are making themselves our business? Iran, North Korea, China, and Qatar all qualify; Codevilla leaves Russia off the list, rather too optimistically. 

Having understood the moral need of responsibility, we should shoulder it. “Too many people performing too many functions physically prevent presidents from exercising control as they did a century ago,” thanks to Progressives’ state-building throughout those years. “The CIA has long contended that intelligence, properly done, would leave the president only command’s ceremonial function.” Its pretensions to oligarchy should be bridled. “The point here is not that presidents are likelier to make better judgments than bureaucrats, but to reiterate that the logic of operations requires unity of conception and consistency of execution, while the logic of representative government demands that the persons responsible for conception and execution be answerable to the people.”

Finally, Americans need to relearn the art of matching means with ends. “Solvency is the basis of business.” Such Progressive tropes as ‘world order,” ‘rules-based environment,’ ‘international democratic values,’ ‘international comity,’ and ‘international norms’ sound impressive, but what, exactly, do they mean, and what will it take to achieve them? Progressivist historicism puts the burden of working that out its grandest and haziest notion of all, ‘historical progress.’ But “who would have to be killed to remove [the] obstacles” to that? “Who would do the killing. At what point would it stop?” The questions such men as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao faced forthrightly are the questions Progressives prefer to wave away. “Trying to fulfill Progressive dreams would require far more power, knowledge, and virtue than is available to human beings,” whose nature ‘historical progress’ has yet to alter. “The past century’s foreign policy of semi-forceful global meliorism has been based on pretense. It is time to get back to reality.” Progressives will resist that return because they will prove reluctant to give up their de facto bureaucratic oligarchy, now well-entrenched. On the other hand (and here Codevilla puts his own optimism on display) “it should not be difficult, even for Americans who hate one another, to agree that the consequences of foreign wars, especially of wars unsupported by the public, are not good for anyone.”