Forrest McDonald: Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985.

Walter Berns: In Defense of Liberal Democracy. Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1984.

 

The distinguished historian Forrest McDonald has earned his reputation as a less than star-struck chronicler of the American founding. The distinguished political scientist Walter Berns equally has earned his reputation as an unenchanted observer of the drift away from that founding. Yet their criticisms issue from different premises, and thus present a challenge to each other as well as a rebuke to fashionable illusions.

In an earlier book, ironically titled E Pluribus Unum [1], McDonald questions what he calls nationalist “fictions” about the American founding: that the Revolutionary War aimed at national, not states’ independence; that the Articles of Confederation were unworkable and contributed to the collapse of “public and private morality” (as Publius contended); that the Founders were “demigods.” Along the way he delivers a number of amusing jibes, particularly about Virginians (“Because they often found it difficult to feed their slaves, they embraced humanitarianism….”). There are excesses, as when he dismisses James Madison as “at base… a brittle, doctrinaire theorists,” but beneath it all McDonald wants to find the truth even more than he wants to polemicize. He differs from many Southern writers in preferring the nationalist position even as he deflates nationalist mythology. There is a flaw, inevitable in any reductionist argument, no matter how measured: at the end of his apparent demonstration of the Founders’ profound disunity, he cannot quite explain how they produced a system that worked. Instead, he calls it “the miracle of the age, and of the succeeding age, and of all ages to come.” If “the wheel of history turns on petty pivots” all the time, then any lasting success at all must be attributed to incredible good fortune or amazing grace.

In Novus Ordo Seclorum McDonald undertakes to understand the Founders as they understood themselves. This presents not so much an interpretive problem—McDonald rejects the fashionable pessimism of ‘deconstructionists’—as a historical one, namely, making sense of the Founders’ many and apparently contradictory principles. He identifies four of these: the intention to protect citizens’ lives, liberty, and property; the intention to establish a republican government; the use of history as a source of evidence for their arguments, as a legacy, and as a stage on which their own reputations might find a place; and the appeal to modern political theory, particularly as enunciated by Hume, Harrington, Locke, and Montesquieu. These are less principles than rubrics containing many “ingredients,” some of them “incompatible.” In the first half of the book, McDonald tries to separate these ingredients and to demonstrate their incompatibility. In the second half he describes the properties of the compound resulting from their mixture.

McDonald tend to somewhat exaggerate theoretical contradictions among the Founders’ philosophic sources. For example, he contrasts Locke’s idea of property, based on nature, with Blackstone’s based on the king’s dominion. He rightly observes that Blackstone regards the source of kingly dominion as rather mysterious, teaching moreover that once the king has granted property, rights to it are beyond his reach except by means of due process. But McDonald does not draw the obvious conclusion: in practical terms, this argument makes Blackstone’s idea of property similar to Locke’s, and, in theoretical terms, the mysteriousness of the origins of kingly property leaves an opening, so to speak, for modern natural right. McDonald generally does not sufficiently allow for the philosophic writer’s need of prudence in such matters. He attempts to prove Locke a pious Christian simply by quoting theistic passages from his works; and he identifies Montesquieu with the argument for ‘virtuous’ or classical republicanism. Occasionally, even relatively straightforward arguments are garbled in paraphrase, as when he claims that Locke “sanctioned” slavery “under certain conditions”; in fact, in chapters 23 and 24 of the Essay on Civil Government the philosopher describes slavery among the Jews not as slavery at all but as a form of “drudgery” whereby any physical abuse of the servant was legal cause for liberation. At another key point in his argument, McDonald unaccountably describes the Lockean social contract as an agreement between the people and a prince, not among the people themselves.

Having said this, one should also say that the core of McDonald’s book—his chapters on Alexander Hamilton’s adaptation of the political economy of Smith and Steuart, on the tensions between “virtuous” and commercial republicanism, and on the relation of the Founders’ Humean theory of the passions to the governmental device of federalism—will clarify and deepen any reader’s knowledge of the American founding. The chapter on passion and federalism deserves particular notice. Many writers have expounded on the American Founders’ refusal to rely upon “the kind of public virtue required by classical and puritanical republicanism” while nonetheless insisting upon the need for certain common decencies often called ‘bourgeois virtues.’ But this cannot explain the character of the Founders themselves, of subsequent American statesmen, or of whatever it is in the character of the American people that enables them to respond to those statesmen with courage and self-sacrifice. McDonald recalls that certain modern writers did not imagine the ‘low but common ground’ to be a sufficient condition for civil society. He cites the neo-classical playwright and essayists Joseph Addison (his Cato was admired by George Washington), who emphasizes the importance of honor, the esteem of wise and good men, as a firmer ground for statesmanlike behavior than is virtue itself. Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith advance parallel teachings: McDonald overlooks their source, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, wherein esteem is presented as virtue’s basis, particularly among the class of gentlemen. The passion for honor finds institutional support in hereditary aristocracies; McDonald identifies John Dickinson as the Founder who saw the American states as “institutional substitutes” for the English baronies—”in a manner of speaking,” the states are “permanent and hereditary.” Dickinson “therefore proposed a mixed system,” wherein, for example, the House of Representatives represents the nation and the Senate represents the States, making the latter “as near as may be to the House of Lords in England.” One might add that the American federal structure resembles the English mixed regime as the modern version of honor resembles classical and Christian virtues. These resemblances cause McDonald to call the American Constitution “the culmination of a tradition of civil humanism that dated back more than two millennia.” Thus even as he emphasizes discontinuities among the Founders’ principles, McDonald works another ‘miracle’ of unity. “Tradition” plays much the same role in ‘conservative’ thought as Hegel’s Absolute Spirit plays (in various guises) in liberal and leftist thought: as an intellectual deus ex machina, ‘saving the phenomena’ at the expense of the principle of non-contradiction.

But perhaps the American founding is not so miraculous, in part because it is not so full of contradictions. “It should be obvious from this survey that it is meaningless to say that the Framers intended this or that the Framers intended that: their positions were diverse and, in many particulars, incompatible”; moreover, “no delegate or coalition of delegates was able to dominate the [Constitutional] convention except for brief periods and on specific issues,” a fact resulting in “repeated compromises.” This restates the century-old description of the Constitution as a bundle of compromises. McDonald’s argument limps because it has sustained a logical fall: he fails to see that a compromise itself represents an intention, albeit perhaps a modified intention. Contracts work that way: negotiation, compromise, deal. Thus when McDonald claims that “abstract speculative doctrines… were of limited use” to the Founders, that “experience, both their own and that of their mother country, provided a surer guide,” he inflates a distinction into a dichotomy. Theory as such does not ‘intend’ to be useful. Modern theory, often identical to method, does ‘intend’ to be useful, but not usually in any formulaic way when it comes to founding a political regime. As the failures of such men as Comte and Spencer show, even the moderns must rely on prudence, whereby moral and political principles may be brought to bear upon practice without any illusion of melding theory and practice. [2] Moderns attempt to substitute ‘History’ (‘conservatives’ read ‘tradition,’ libertarians ‘the invisible hand,’ the left ‘dialectic’) for prudence. As long as historians adhere to historicism, they will misunderstand statesmanship.

No historicism colors Walter Berns’s In Defense of Liberal Democracy, wherein he undertakes the Aristotelian task of strengthening the decent regime under which he lives. He does this not by seeking to ‘adapt the United States Constitution to his ‘time,’ but “in part and to the extent possible, to keep the times in tune with the Constitution.” The book’s five parts contain chapters on the principal issues facing American republicanism: the Constitution, foreign politics, domestic politics, “racial politics,” an “religion and politics.”

Berns conveys the Founders’ political realism more vividly than any other commentator on the Constitution. He has a healthy contempt for the high-flown. Thus he recognizes the Constitution without the Bill of Rights would nonetheless secure rights by its prudent balancing of governmental powers, but the Bill of Rights without the body of the Constitution would among to little more than a list of good intentions. By emphasizing ‘ideals’ instead of institutions, recent Supreme Courts have contorted the doctrine of judicial review and, not incidentally, overstepped their own institutional functions. Berns stresses the limited and even problematic role of judicial review in the modern political philosophy upon which the Constitution largely rests. Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu respected lawyers little more than they did priests. Modern natural law reduces lawyers to equality with other men because it regards all men as essentially equal, none more naturally fit to rule than the others. To the moderns, “no man can rationally agree to an arrangement where another man is authorized to convert his opinion into fundamental law.” The American judiciary enjoys more power than the great moderns would permit, but only if judges restrict to speaking for the Constitution—an organization of political institutions based upon consent—and not for themselves, for their own privately-held ‘ideals.’

Berns identifies the underlying tension between the so-to-speak theoretical realism of the moderns and the realities of American life in the 1780s: “More, of course, than the principles of modern natural right and law went into the founding of the United States. In theory, the country was founded by men claiming rights against each other; in fact they were men closely associated in families, churches, and a host of other institutions.” These institutions formed the character of Americans. Such character and institutions may have no place in modern ‘realism,’ but modern ‘realism’ needs them. A country “founded on the principle of self-interest… could not be expected to flourish if it consisted only, or mainly, of self-interested men.” But the problem may be more subtle than this. Berns says that modern natural right finds equality and unalienable rights self-evident, by nature. But this is not what the Declaration of Independence says. The Declaration calls it self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The Founders’ idea of self-evidence goes beyond Lockean self-evidence, and even beyond a moral sense; it posits what might be called a metaphysical sense (reportedly much to the annoyance of principal author Thomas Jefferson, who had included no religious language in his draft). This moral and metaphysical sense strongly resembles Christian conscience, although it would be a mistake simply to identify the two. In the Declaration, the Founders enunciate a public or politic conscience. The tension between Christianity and modernity remains, but there can be no question that the Founders worked to moderate it.

Berns vigorously shows how the American compromise between Christian and modern thought unravels when ‘idealist’ sentiment exerts too much pressure on institutional safeguards. Fear animates American pacifists more than faith does, and their hoped-for world government could end only in despotism, rule by fear. In politics, ‘love’ is not enough, because “experience shows” that Christians “are more likely to love their neighbors when their neighbors are like themselves.” “Religious faith seems to unite men but divide mankind,” Berns drily remarks. As for existing institutions, the United Nations cannot quite overcome certain formidable obstructions to universal humanitarianism, most notably the Soviet Union.

In American domestic politics, the problems of pornography and violence escape the obvious antitoxins, censorship and capital punishment, because libertarianism allies with a tolerant or ‘soft’ Christianity to dull the instruments of justice. Shame and anger are the passions that prevent liberty from descending to license; they hold men responsible. Because the American Constitution acknowledges the sovereign power of “We, the People,” not to God, “it is only a short step from the principle that the laws are merely a product of one’s own will to the opinion that the only consideration that informs the law is self-interest; and this opinion is only one remove from lawlessness.” Berns cites Lincoln on the Constitution as an inheritance of our fathers, worthy of veneration, but Lincoln centrally appeals not to the veneration of the old but to the truths or “propositions” of the Declaration, without which the work of Americans’ fathers would be no more venerable than the monarch they rebelled against—or, as the Declaration puts it, the monarch who rebelled against them and indeed against Creation itself.

Veneration of the law, its principles, and its framers has never been conspicuous in American “racial politics,” to which Berns devotes a section separate from ordinary domestic politics. In one of his most substantial essays, Berns charges that the Constitutional provision to restrict the importation of slaves suffers from an ambiguity exploited cynically by Southern politicians, including Jefferson and Madison. Today, unfortunately, attempts to counteract the longstanding effects of such willful distortion rest on much the same contempt for constitutionality. Worse still, mere hypocrisy has given way to ideology, as the school of “legal realism” tries “to persuade us that the essence of the judicial process does not consist in interpreting law… but in making it.” The attempt defeats itself, because ‘realism’ regarding law cannot but reflect upon its self-proclaimed makers, whose actions, intentions, and authority then become fair, broad targets for political deconstructionists.

In the book’s final part, Berns argues that contemporary religious zealots make the same mistake in a different way. They denigrate the law not by arbitrarily seeking to make it, but by arbitrarily seeking to transcend it. In calling conscription immoral (for example), the U. S. Catholic bishops put lay Catholics “in the position [someday] of having to choose between obeying either their spiritual advisors or the law of the land,” a dilemma likely to weaken the authority of both. The dilemma mirror Americans’ “acceptance and simultaneous rejection of modernity,” their eager pursuit of self-interest and community feeling.

If McDonald’s neo-Burkean historicism causes him to underestimate the intellectual coherence of American statesmanship at the time of the founding, Berns’s emphasis on the Constitution’s theoretical underpinnings occasionally causes him to overlook the exact character of the Founders’ statesmanlike adaptation of modern political philosophy. Writing about statesmanship is nearly as difficult as practicing it.

 

NOTES

1. Forrest McDonald: E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the Republic 1776-1790. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969. Reissued in 1979 by Liberty Press, Indianapolis.
2. For an excellent critique of McDonald on precisely this point, see Charles Kesler’s untitled review in The American Spectator, Volume 19, Number 5, May 1986, pp. 35-36.

 

Glen Thurow and Jeffrey D. Wallin, eds.: Rhetoric and American Statesmanship. Durham and Claremont: Carolina Academic Press and The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1984.

 

The senior editor intends “to recapture and examine the older tradition of republican rhetoric and to contrast it with the rhetoric dominating our public life today.” He would do so not for the purposes of historiography but for purposes of statesmanship. As citizens forget the principles of republican government, the republican statesman’s task becomes, obviously, progressively dependent upon mere fortune. That statesman’s task involves understanding those principles and making them understood or, at least, sufficiently understood to withstand challenge. Understanding political principles requires speech—private speech, which is philosophic at its best, and public or rhetorical speech. But if we conceive of rhetoric as the use of words as weapons, and if we replace speech with ‘communication,’ we lose the distinctions between freedom and slavery humanness and animality. The eight essayists in this volume insist on these distinctions.

Eva T. H. Brann and Forrest McDonald examine the rhetoric of two American founders, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Brann offers a careful interpretation of Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” to the Virginia Assembly, a petition against Patrick Henry’s bill establishing a provision for teachers of religion. Madison’s politically successful argument emphasized the individuality of religious convictions, that is, the absolute duty of each person to God and the allegedly consequent right to privacy of conscience. This argument for religious liberty does not presuppose a doctrine of “mental liberty,” for Madison believed opinions and beliefs involuntary. One might say that Brann’s Madison reflects a paradox if not a contradiction of much modern thought: its enthusiasm for religious, political, and economic liberty based on a doctrine of mental determinism. Indeed, in private correspondence Madison advocated the encouragement of numerous small religious congregations (at times citing Voltaire as his source for this inspiration) in an argument he would reiterate in political terms during his famous treatment of, and for, faction. Madison’s Humean rhetoric of “measured passion and sober ardor” advanced a “harmonizing of the spirit  of the Enlightenment and the claims of Christianity” (emphasis added).

McDonald recovers Hamilton’s distinction between popular and public opinion—the former being vulgar, the latter associated with the status and responsibility of manhood. Popular opinion is democratic; public opinion is republican. McDonald goes further, writing that in the 1780s Hamilton “learned from study of the principles of natural law that morality, in the long run, was a more stable foundation for government than was economic self-interest.” Hamilton, then, was an Aristotelian, McDonald claims, notwithstanding the somewhat dubious standing of natural law in Aristotle’s thought. McDonald acknowledges that in Federalist #31 Hamilton treats geometric and moral truths as equally certain, a more ‘Enlightenment’ than Aristotelian thing to do, but he insists that Hamilton did this only for rhetorical effect. McDonald also acknowledges Hamilton’s intellectual debts to Adam Smith and David Hume, but does not here explore their relation to Aristotelianism.

The rarity of classical rhetoric in this century may be seen in the fact that the editors select only one American, Calvin Coolidge, who is supplemented by Winston Churchill. Thomas B. Silver finds Coolidge’s central theme “not the exaltation of greed but the exhortation to virtue,” more, to “classical ideals.” Silver rejects the characterization of the Founders as Lockeans in the ‘low sense,’ insisting that “modern democracy does not arise out of the licentious impulses in the human soul. It arises as a response to arbitrary or artificial rule.” Far from rejecting human excellence or virtue, modern democracy presupposes the individual’s self-government, Silver argues. Many of the principal Founders, including the first several U. S. presidents, do indeed make much of self-government as the rule of reason over the human soul; a fuller account of their thought would require a careful examination of what those great men meant by the arbitrary and its opposite, the natural.

Larry P. Arnn presents a subtle argument concerning Churchill’s rhetoric. Examining two early Churchillian writings (an essay on rhetoric and a political novel), Arnn discovers a much more complex mind than most detractors or admirers have suspected. In the essay, Churchill writes that rhetoric manipulates human beings by exploiting both human ignorance and the human desire to know; by the use of analogy, connecting the known to the unknown, the concrete to the abstract, the finite to the infinite the rhetorician wields what Churchill calls a weapon, one that can, in Arnn’s words, “dominate a political issue.” Churchill appears to redeem the rhetorician by claiming that he must be open and sympathetic to the people, sympathetic and earnest. He is a manipulator, but not a “detached manipulator.” A detached manipulator would be a tyrant.

In Savrola, Churchill’s only novel, we find a somewhat different teaching. The rhetorician is “responsible for the actions of the crowd he addresses,” therefore not completely of the people. “Savrola’s democracy… is a democracy founded upon an unchanging standard, a standard that determines what constitutes excellence or superiority….” Discovering that standard requires private thought, not public speech or sympathy. Although Arnn does not explicitly say so, this means that the Churchillian rhetorician is something of a detached manipulator. Still, he is no tyrant. He is perhaps not quite a philosopher, either; he is an “independent statesman.” Rhetoric “unites the two aspects in [the independent statesman], the aspect having more to do with the urgencies of the moment, and the aspect having more to do with the enduring questions posed by politics.” Unlike the detached manipulation of the tyrant, which aims at grasping benefits for the tyrant, the detached manipulation of the independent statesman seeks the good of those he rules.

With the exception of Silver’s Coolidge, each of the ‘classical’ rhetoricians combines classical and modern thought in some way. Given limitations of space, none of the writers except Brann precisely measures the ratio of classical to modern. The volume’s other four writers discuss contemporary ‘rhetoric,’ better called “popular or mass rhetoric” (Jeffrey Tulis), “liberal democratic rhetoric” (John Zvesper), Holmesian rhetoric (Walter Berns), or “communication” (Harvey Mansfield, Jr.). Whatever it is called, there is no doubt concerning its modernity.

Tulis remarks that the Founders and almost all of the nineteenth-century presidents spoke to the people through Congress, appealing to Constitutional principles. The only one who did not was Andrew Johnson, and the tenth Article of Impeachment against him cited “intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, delivered in a loud voice.” By contrast, Woodrow Wilson spoke to Congress through the people, anticipating the now-customary practice of attempting “to build ‘visions’ of the future out of undisciplined vulgarizations of leading strands of contemporary thought.” As a result, Tulis notes, Congressional deliberation atrophies, presidential thought declines to crowd level, and the people lose respect for their putative leaders.

Zvesper describes the problem faced by Wilson’s political heir, Franklin Roosevelt. Rightly pointing to the anti-rhetorical character of one aspect of modern liberalism, which associates rhetoric with “passionate controversy” and “illiberal claims to power,” Zvesper sees that liberals must seek a way to “say something as strong as these claims” without becoming illiberal. Liberals must learn to combine “finality and progress,” “moderation and daring.” Roosevelt did not entirely succeed in this. He was too ‘conservative’ in the sense that he wrongly assumed U. S. industrialization had ended, that the political task was to more justly manage a permanently limited economy. Administrators, captains of social work, would replace captains of industry. In attempting to effect this replacement, Roosevelt not only overlooked continued opportunities for entrepreneurial daring but occasionally neglected rhetorical moderation, as in his complaints against the “new despotism” of “economic royalists.” Zvesper endorses the rhetorical deployment of “righteous anger” against individual opponents but deplores “passionate hatred” aroused against a social/economic clash.

Walter Berns finds a forerunner of Wilson not in the partisan political arena but on the Supreme Court. Owing in part to the influence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “instead of defending constitutional principle from popular majorities, the Supreme Court… has come to see its function as that of imposing ‘modern authority’ on a population that is not disposed to accept it.” As with the office of the presidency, this high trendiness causes the people to “lose respect” for the Constitution.

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., agrees with Berns that the phrase ‘modern authority’ constitutes a near-oxymoron. What is now called ‘communication,’ as distinguished from rhetoric, levels distinctions among citizens of different countries and in that sense is apolitical. Communication stresses novelty as against tradition and custom, the ‘rule’ of ‘intellectuals’ as against political rule, and the excitation of “feelings” (particularly compassion and indignation, those associated with insecurity, mortality) as against religion or philosophy. Mansfield calls this “an idealism of materialism.” Not speech or deliberation but decision, tending toward the arbitrary, issues from this peculiar idealism. Among philosophers, Kant insisted on the moral importance of decision, but he was no simple materialist. “Today we might regard Kant’s confidence in knowing evil and good as naïve, but to make up for this, we assume with greater complacency than he that ignorance of good and evil do not matter.” By “we” Mansfield means democrats generally but democratic intellectuals preeminently. Such complacency tends to undercut intellectuality itself: “How can intellectuals maintain their status if they admit that information has replaced deliberation and no longer assert that the intellect elevates them above others? To reflect on that question, a philosopher is needed.” The philosopher might begin by considering James Madison’s bow to mental determinism and the extent to which too deep a bow in that direction might cause citizens to lose sight of their own deliberative capacity.

This book stands readers up, again, readying them for deliberativeness.

Noam Chomsky: The Fatal Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians. Boston: South End Press.

Sam B. Girgus: The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Peter Grose: Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The review was originally published in Chronicles of Culture. Vol. 9, No. 12, December 1985. Republished with permission.

 

Most of the nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major lines of thought that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with the people of the Old Testament”; until 1787, Harvard College (which then promoted an identifiable morality) required its students to learn Hebrew. But a bit further south, in the name of Christianity, Peter Stuyvesant unsuccessfully tried to expel from Manhattan 23 newly-arrived Brazilian Jews. In general, “the early American was fixed in his belief that [for refusing to worship the Christ] the Jew had forfeited his full rights in Christian society.” Among the ‘moderns,’ Thomas Jefferson unhesitatingly extended his principle of religious toleration to Jews while privately lamenting, “among them ethics are so little understood.” John Adams endorsed the aspirations of Jews to return to Israel but imagined they might “possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.” Among both Christians and ‘moderns,’ this desire to convert Jews was strong, exhibiting that mixture of esteem and hostility any proselytizer feels for potential proselytes.

America’s contemporary ‘Left’ has not escaped ambivalence toward Jews and the Jewish state. Grose, Girgus, and Chomsky represent, respectively, the liberal, left-liberal, and leftist ideologies prevalent in late twentieth-century academia. Each writer illustrates the situation of world Jewry today not only by what he sees but by what he makes of what he sees.

As the sort of liberal found on the Council of Foreign Relations and the New York Times, Grose presents the most accurate and least colorful of the three pictures. Although titled Israel in the Mind of America, his book is primarily a political history of Zionism in America between the First World War and the Israeli founding. As might e expected, during this period political Zionism—the desire for a Jewish state in Palestine—enjoyed the support of nowhere near the majority of American Jews, much less American Gentiles. American Jews wanted the right to settle peacefully in Palestine, but then as now not many wanted to exercise that right; as for Jewish sovereignty in the region, even fewer insisted on that. Ethnic, social, political, and religious divisions within American Jewry assured continued political incoherence. Typically, well-established “uptown” Jews of German origin preferred quiet, behind-the-scenes lobbying; they regarded Judaism as a religion without national/political content. Newly-arrived “downtown” Jews of Russian origin preferred political activism; to them, Judaism included nationality, if not national sovereignty.

Louis Brandeis attempted to overcome these divisions by uniting Jews behind a particular form of Zionism. He added some of “downtown’s” political energy to the elitism of “uptown” in an effort to make Zionism a Jewish version of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Progressivism.’ This Zionism for middle-class liberals declined when World Zionist Organization leader Chaim Weizmann attacked it as still insufficiently political, too much a reflection of the American pragmatism that wants to ‘make the desert bloom’ without much caring who rules the desert. But Brandeisian Zionism lasted, albeit in different for. Brandeis and his allies left the Zionist movement and involved themselves in the Democratic Party politics that led, tortuously, to American support for the Jewish state in Palestine.

The path proved tortuous in part because the State Department remained anti-Zionist up to and beyond Israeli independence, for motives ranging from anti-Semitism to timidity. (A young diplomat in Germany, George F. Kennan, best exemplified the latter when he advised against U. S. protest over Nazi anti-Semitism, “saying it would be an ineffective interference in another country’s internal affairs”—a refrain he would sing more than once in his long career. Kennan would later oppose Israeli independence out of fear of a Mideast war.) Unfortunately, the complacency of Americans, including American Jews, also added to the tortuousness of the path. The saddening fact is that only the Holocaust rallied American Jews to Zionism. As late as 1944, most Americans did not credit reports of mass extermination in Europe. Felix Frankfurter explained this most tellingly: “I do not have the strength to believe it.”

Quiet diplomacy and behind-the-scenes lobbying could not work without public pressure, and this finally came through the energy of Rabbi Hillel Kook (better known at the time by his nom de guerre, Peter Bergson), who was a disciple of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Given his own ideology, Grose cannot help but undervalue the Jabotinsky branch, Zionism’s right wing; he is better on Silver, a brilliant political organizer who disdained courteous relations with Gentile politicians and, for that matter, with many fellow-Jews. Rudeness was what the circumstances required. Silver’s one blind spot was his failure to see and respond quickly to the disaster engulfing Jews in Europe. Nonetheless, “under Silver’s leadership, aroused and appalled by the ‘news from Europe,’ America’s Jews changed.” They learned to use the American political system. Congress and President Truman saw this and acted accordingly; political pressure caused such basically decent Americans to act with the vigor mere decency often lacks. While the major fight came ‘on the ground’ in Palestine itself, American support for Israel was indispensable, and it has endured for nearly four decades.

Noam Chomsky condemns that support as one imperialism rewarding another. Had he written a generation earlier, he would not have done so, because initially the principal international ally of Israel, then firmly under the control of democratic-socialist Labour Zionists, was the Soviet Union, followed (after the 1956 Suez Canal War) by France. But in 1967, after crushing the massing Arab armies in the Six-Day War, Israel chose the United States as its main ally and arms supplier. That was enough for the American Left, which decided to back the Palestinian Arabs. Grose admires Israel but deplores Jabotinsky and his “zealot” follower, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; Chomsky, an anti-Communist left-winger, believes all Israeli governments infamous in their domination of ‘the Palestinians.’ In his view, Begin’s Likud Party descends from fascism, the Labour Party from Bolshevism. America’s “critical supporters” of Israel remind him of American Stalinists of the 1930s and 1940s. “[T]hose who exercise real power in the U. S.”—evidently, large business corporations and the CIA—find Israel a useful ally, he claims. He does not base this claim on any talk with oil company executives. Such criticism of Israel as heard, for example, during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon in response to terrorist attacks is merely an instance of “feigned criticism” that has “made an impressive contribution to indoctrination in the democratic societies.”

Chomsky’s rhetorical legerdemain doesn’t end with that. Anyone who rejects Palestinian Arab claims—”rights,” in Chomsky’s vocabulary—to a state west of the Jordan River is a “racist.” Security concerns? He dismisses them by citing Israeli military prowess and by saying that the phrase, “a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be a dagger poised at the heart of Israel,” was “borrowed from Hitler, who used it with reference to Czechoslovakia.” With equal sobriety, he praises what he calls an “international consensus” held by Arabs, Soviet-bloc oligarchs, and oil-blackmailed West Europeans, for a return to Israel’s 1967 borders. Although he makes much of national self-determination, he cannot claim that the “consensus” in question arose without undo interference from other countries or native despots.

Chomsky concedes that “Israel has been and remains a vibrant democracy on the western model for its Jewish citizens,” although his comments on news-media “indoctrination” must dilute his joy at such vibrancy. He also concedes that PLO terrorism is “surely to be condemned,” although it “hardly matched” that of the Israelis in Lebanon. He goes so far as to compare the PLO to the Zionists of the 1940s, without noting how ominous that must be in the blood-red light of his own polemic. Not only does he fail to explain how two ‘Zionisms’ could ever share the same territory peacefully, but he fails to show why two such regimes would be better than one. Governments generally are a bad lot, in Chomsky’s opinion, and those who attempt to defend them are “modern state-worshippers.” If states are so bad, why demand one for Palestinian Arabs? Would the PLO’s compaction of Islam and Marxism ever yield some for of anarcho-syndicalism that Chomsky might favor?

The title of his concluding chapter, “The Road to Armageddon,” suggests a certain pessimism about all this. Israel “drift[s] towards internal social, moral, and political degeneration”—that is, towards the Bible. Israeli “Khomeinism” swells daily, as rabbis quote from “the genocidal texts” of the Torah. Chomsky expresses disgust at Israeli political scientist Mordechai Nisan who, in Chomsky’s words, would “put aside” the “Western Enlightenment” as a “heresy” against the Torah. Chomsky does not cite the Biblical texts in question, but presumably he refers to such teachings as the laws of warfare in Deuteronomy 20. While these are scarcely humanitarian in the modern, “Enlightenment” sense, they are not racist. Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites may be “utterly destroy[ed]” if they occupy the cities “the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance” (that is, cities located in the Biblical land of Israel) and if they refuse to make peace. This must be done “in order that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the LORD your God.” Sin, not race, is the issue.

Against this Biblical teaching, Chomsky praises the modern doctrine of “human rights, equal rights,” whereby Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs “have essentially equal rights within the territory of the former Palestine.” While the Enlightenment derives rights from what all men are, the God of the Bible judges men by what He wants them to do: live according to His regime, His “way.” The egalitarianism and toleration of the Enlightenment quells religious warfare by denying that religion is worth fighting for. But if it also tends toward denying that anything at all is worth fighting for, or living for, except comfortable self-preservation. Its reductionist materialism tends to undermine the foundations of its own doctrine of “human rights,” except as that may be defined in the least ‘righteous’ terms. This can do Chomsky’s formidable self-righteousness no good. Evidently, there are at least two roads to this Armageddon without revelation, and one of them passes very close to nihilism on the way.

Sam B. Girgus describes the journey of certain Jewish writers in America whereby “Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America.” “America” is a compound idea consisting of “freedom, democracy, equality, and republicanism”; “in turn, Jewish writers, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea.” The two-sided metamorphosis amounts to a “new covenant,” one with rather less divine authority than the old one but welcome to a scattered and persecuted nation. The question one asks such writers must be, ‘Emancipation for what?” Unfortunately, Girgus can discover only the most general answers: “moral elevation” in “a competitive and brutal world,” egalitarianism, “consciousness.” His ideological hero is Brandeis, which explains some of the muddle; mixing in sexual ‘liberation,’ feminism, and ‘identity’-assertion obscures matters still more. For example, Girgus actually can countenance Norman Mailer’s puerile inflations of Marilyn Monroe and Gary Gilmore; “thus, Gary joins Marilyn as an important force in Mailer’s conception of the continuing powers of the American myth.”

Occasionally, such misplaced reverence can help a reader discover something no one else has seen. While E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel hardly amounts to “a major work of contemporary literature,” Girgus does persuasively contend that most critics, across the political spectrum, failed to see past the novel’s treatment of the Rosenberg spy case. Like its Biblical counterpart, The Book of Daniel tells “the story of Jews in a foreign land.” But Doctorow’s Jewish martyrs “let their belief… become a new kind of orthodoxy that inflates their importance, disguises their vulnerability, and encourages a sort of moral myopia, which confuses immediate self-interest, personal status, and convenience with universal truth and justice.” To put it more harshly than Girgus does, Doctorow’s Rosenbergs are not true martyrs at all. Their son, Daniel, achieves a “fusion” of Jewishness and Americanness, finding an equilibrium in responsibility—as a father, and before the law. Because they require authority, neither fatherhood nor law comport easily with liberty and equality as (mis)interpreted in contemporary American politics. Girgus sees this and worries. In his postscript he finds both power and danger in Jewish “moral authority.” “Jews embody patriarchy,” and patriarchy is resented, according to Ellen Willis, one of the scholarly hens of feminism that peck Girgus’s deferential skull.

However much one may deride his male feminism, a sort of out-of-wedlock uxuriousness, Girgus does uncover something important here. Radicalized or unqualified liberty and equality want no authority but mean nothing without it. That is, after an individual achieves liberty and equality, he has nothing left to do but defend them, and if he knows of nothing beyond them he may doubt them worth defending. Liberty and equality resent but need some authority. Brandeis and the other pragmatist-progressive intellectuals tried to solve this problem with the doctrine of pluralism. It proved unstable. Insofar as pluralism is coherent it is no longer pluralist, and insofar as it is pluralist it cannot cohere. America’s ‘Left,’ whether pluralist, Marxist, or merely indignant, cannot decide what it thinks of Jews because it cannot decide what it thinks of authority and liberty. In less abstract language, it cannot decide what it thinks of God and His relation to His most (as academics say) problematic creature. Or it decides, with Marx, not to think, not to ask.