Sam Cohen: The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out. New York: William Morrow, 1983.

In the early years of the Reagan Administration, the proposed buildup of American nuclear weapons stockpiles provoked a backlash which took several forms. Among these were the ‘nuclear freeze’ movement in the United States and the demonstrations against deployment of short-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. At the time, the Warsaw Pact forces commanded by the Soviet Union outmatched those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The ‘neutron bomb’ (originally conceived in the late 1950s by physicist Sam Cohen of the Livermore Laboratories) was intended to redress this imbalance by threatening ground troops with destruction while causing less (although still substantial) damage to buildings and other structures. This capacity inspired a memorable Soviet propaganda line, which described the weapons as “the capitalist bomb, which kills people while leaving property intact.” Given the fact that the Warsaw Pact forces would have destroyed both people and property (a telling commentary on the character of Communism), the witticism fell a bit flat.

By the twenty-first century, the neutron-bomb technology had been countered by improved armor for tanks. Never deployed, the weapons themselves no longer form part of NATO stockpiles. This notwithstanding, the controversy raised important moral issues concerning military technology. The review below was published in Chronicles of Culture, Volume 7, Number 10, October 1983.

 

“This book marks the first time a ‘nuclear hawk’ has defected from the American nuclear establishment,” the blurb-writer exclaims, with customary dustjacket urgency. One expects another “what have I done?” lament by a guilt-ridden nuclear physicist, stuff guaranteed to make its author a celebrity on the church-and-college lecture circuit. Some partisans of disarmament will surely buy it, hoping to confirm their prejudices.

I hope they read it. For Sam Cohen resolutely disdains to conceive of himself as Dr. Frankenstein. After working at Los Alamos during World War II, he became a specialist in radiological warfare, inventing the neutron warhead in the late 1950s. “Speaking candidly and truthfully, I will say that I’ve never had any moral qualms or feelings of guilt about my pursuits in this military field. I have always believed that the United States must have strong and effective military forces—especially nuclear forces. His patience with dovish colleagues is limit; “many respected scientists… know better intellectually but are emotionally helpless to look objectivity at issues involving the military use of nuclear radiation.” Or, still more bluntly: “[T] here has been one thing that particularly impressed—better still, depressed—me about most renowned American scientists. This is their ability to be impeccably careful and responsible when working in their fields of specialization (if they’re not, their colleagues will catch them and even punish them) but their sloppiness and irresponsibility when giving their scientific opinion on nuclear weapons when they have an ideological bias against them, because they know that their colleagues, who share their bias, don’t give a damn when they do.” Among these are scientists now prominent in the ‘nuclear freeze’ campaign: Dr. George Kistiakowsky, science adviser to the president in the Eisenhower Administration, whose “strong ideological conviction that a nuclear test ban was imperative” led him to support the first such ban (1958), abrogated by the Soviet three years later; Dr. Jerome Weisner of MIT, who campaigned vigorously for John Kennedy and evidently has maintained his partisan allegiance; and Nobelist Hans Bethe, who claimed, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, that the hydrogen bomb could not be built. At very least, Cohen can further dispel the popular illusion that scientists speak to us, well, scientifically when they engage in politics.

Cohen divides his book into two sections. The first four chapters contain his account of the neutron warhead’s invention and the controversies attending it. The Pentagon had wanted nuclear warheads that would generate a powerful blast, intense heat, and radiation—in that order. Cohen wanted to reverse that priority, for two purposes: to develop a warhead whose high radioactivity would cause the explosive in an incoming nuclear warhead to decompose (the Sprint anti-ICBM missile resulted, “many years later”); to develop a short-range missile warhead whose intense but short-lived radiation would make it “the first battlefield weapon… in history [which] would allow a guaranteed, highly effective defense against an invading army without producing wholesale physical destruction of the country being invaded.”

The Pentagon, particularly the Navy, championed the neutron warhead from 1959 to 1961, not so much because it cared about the weapon itself but because it wanted to end the Eisenhower/Khruschev proposal for a nuclear test ban. Then as today, the Soviets denounced neutron technology, with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev averring, “This is the morality of monsters!” Similar protestations from the community of conscience recurred until September 1, 1961, when the Politburo announced a unilateral end to the ban, followed by “the most massive series of tests the world has ever seen.” Having arranged their experiments in advance while the Americans as it were busied themselves with inactivity, the Soviets briefly gained a lead in nuclear weapons technology. (Cohen has the good manners not to insist that readers associate this tactic with current Premier Andropov’s recommended ‘freeze’). After this debacle, the Pentagon no longer needed the neutron warhead as a weapon in bureaucratic warfare; interest in it disappeared until the mid-1970s.

By then, America’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union had yielded not a relaxation of tensions but a Soviet advantage in European ground troops so striking that even President Jimmy Carter noticed it. He planned the neutron warhead’s production and deployment, then reneged after Soviet ‘President’ Leonid Brezhnev, United States Senator Mark O. Hatfield, and other peace-loving souls inveighed against the ‘capitalist bomb’ that ‘destroys people but not property.’ “The problem,” Cohen remarks, “is that any agreement, tacit or explicit, to effect a mutual forswearing of N-bomb production is nonsense. There is no conceivable way by means of national technical verification, that such an agreement can be monitored.” Seismic sensors can detect the underground testing of warheads that explode by nuclear fission; they cannot detect the much smaller explosions produced by nuclear fusion in neutron warheads. An unverifiable treaty won’t amount to much.

President Ronald Reagan ordered the production of neutron warheads, but deferred their deployment in Europe until after land-based intermediate-range missiles (Pershing II’s and ground-launched cruise missiles) go into place. Impatient with diplomacy, Cohen argues that a weapon good enough to produce is good enough to deploy. This is not necessarily the case; scientists may not be any better at strategy than they are at purging their minds of ideological biases.

The book’s last five chapters consist of polemics on the military, political, and ethical problems associated with Cohen’s invention. He quickly disposes of opponents regarded as experts by the news media. To Herbert Scoville, Jr., one of the most-quoted ‘freeze’ eminences, who claims that irradiated soldiers will fight harder, Cohen replies that the soldiers targeted will become incapacitated quickly, and that by asking us to fear the possible behavior of soldiers on the periphery of the explosion Scoville “divert[s] the targeting issue to troops that aren’t targeted.” To Dr. Kistiakowsky, who claims that the Soviets could shield their tank crews against radiation, Cohen replies that indeed one can, “provided that you’re willing to incapacitate the tank” by overloading it with heavy armor. To Stanford University physicist Sidney Drell, who claims that a neutron warhead explosion would make the irradiated area “uninhabitable for long periods of time,” Cohen replies that “This is patently false,” that calculations show radiation declining to a safe level in a few hours. To United States Senator H. John Heinz, who claims that the neutron warhead is “literally dehumanizing,” Cohen replies, “Speaking for myself, if I were going to be wounded on the field of battle, I’d far rather be dosed by radiation than burned by napalm, or crushed by blast concussion, or have my body torn up by a land mine or fragmentation bomb.”

These arguments are not only persuasive, they are simple. Cohen argues that intellectuals think badly about war because they imagine suffering so vividly that their fear overturns their intellect. I am convinced that there is an additional problem; even when intellectuals master their fear, the basic simplicity of warfare befuddles them. It is too unsubtle for them to grasp, all this business of push coming to shove. They complicate matters beyond recognition, then take professional soldiers for bloody-minded dolt. Cohen, no professional soldier, is at his best when he thinks like one.

At his worst, he essays geopolitical strategy. His advertised ‘defection’ from “the American nuclear establishment” consists of an argument for isolationism. In a war with the Soviets, Europe and the Middle East would cost us more to defend than they are worth, he writes. So pull our troops out and use the money we save to rebuild our nuclear arsenal and strengthen our civil defense programs. These eminently American sentiments cannot amount to a serious policy for a commercial republic confronting a military oligarchy animated by ideologically-inspired fanaticism. Soviet domination of Europe and the Middle East would obviously give them control of two of our principal markets.

Even in its military aspect, Cohen’s isolationism must fail. He calls defending Europe impossible because the Soviets will try to destroy NATO’s nuclear defenses, including any neutron warheads in Europe, before the Warsaw Pact forces move in. But the Soviets warn that any NATO warheads hitting Soviet territory—and some surely would, even during an intendedly preclusive strike by the Soviets—will bring retaliation against the United States itself. If they mean that, they recognize that a European war would probably cause global war. They will not imagine they can win that war unless Western pacifists have their way. Nuclear weapons in Western Europe will tie America to its allies more firmly than at any time in the last twenty years. Europeans who fear this tie, who feel more threatened by our weapons and our policy than by Soviet weapons and policy may yet to decide to see more clearly. Cohen says they won’t; I suspect they will. We’ll see which one of us is right, but in the meantime it would be a bad mistake to insure defeat by giving up too soon.

This lecture was delivered at two Hillsdale College Symposium events in Kerrville, Texas and Georgetown, Texas in September 2016.

 

In assigning the title “Where Are We Headed?” to a talk on this year’s presidential election, the organizers of this Hillsdale Symposium may have given you the impression that I’ll be predicting the outcome of the November vote. That would be a fool’s errand—which of course may be the reason it was offered to me. But I learned a long time ago that there are far too many variables in most presidential elections to make accurate predictions two months in advance. I don’t pretend to know what will happen. What is more, all of us hear such predictions every time we turn on the television or open a newspaper. We already have more than enough pundits in this country. What could I possibly add to their mountain of a million molehills?

Besides, when it comes to political predictions generally, I agree with George Orwell. If anything, Orwell was a better journalist than he was a novelist, and in one of his essays he observed that if you ask a man what he foresees you won’t get a reasoned analysis founded on careful observation of the way things are. You will much more likely get an expression of his hopes or his fears. He will tell you not what he thinks but what he feels. You will hear an expression of wishful or woeful thinking. Any sense of the realities of the matter as they exist outside his own head will not trouble him.

So, no election prediction from me. But the question, “Where are we headed?” can have a broader meaning. There is a kind of political prediction that does make sense to attempt. This being an event sponsored by Hillsdale College, it’s quite possible that when the organizers devised the title they had in mind the opening sentence of a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln delivered to the Illinois Republican State Convention in June of 1858. Now known as the “House Divided” speech, it begins, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Americans had reached the crisis of the house divided because the question of whether or not to extend slavery into the territories had so sharply split American public opinion that it threatened the Union itself. Lincoln argued, “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new—North as well as South.” Lincoln based this conditional prediction squarely on what men like Senator Stephen Douglas and U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney were saying at the time.

So today, in 2016, where are we, and whither are we tending, in the larger sense that Lincoln meant? Today, where does American liberty, our natural and Constitutional right to govern ourselves, where does it stand, a century and a half after Lincoln issued his warning and fought a war to preserve the Union on the foundation of that natural right? In answering that question, I begin by promising you that I will show why it is that Orwell’s observation—that people so often think wishfully or fearfully, not reasonably, with little reference to reality—has become so generally true that it endangers our capacity for self-government, for liberty—the very thing that Hillsdale College “educates for,” and which we’re all here to exercise and support.

The results of many presidential elections have been hard to predict, but so far this one has been even less predictable than most. In the Democratic Party, United States Senator Bernie Sanders—a socialist who never ran as a Democrat before—ran a campaign in the primary elections against a former First Lady, United States Senator, and Secretary of State that proved embarrassing-all-too-embarrassing to Mrs. Clinton and the Party regulars. And in the Republican Party, real estate developer and television entertainer Donald Trump—who had never seriously run for office at all, on any level—defeated an array of seasoned governors and senators, all of whom began the campaign assuming that `the Donald’ was more tabloid king than presidential prospect. What is going on, here?

Many commentators point to economic causes, as many commentators so often do. Income inequality is rising, due to the effects of economic globalization. To identify a material or economic cause for any event is the very summit of their wisdom. This would explain a move toward populism and nationalism, all right, but American has seen populism before, and it was very different from what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders have had on offer. The 1890s saw depression on he farms and a flood of immigrants to our shores, but William Jennings Bryan stood firmly on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—neither of which has figured prominently in the speeches of Trump or Sanders, let alone Clinton. Populism and nationalism against globalization and economic inequality may explain part of what we’re seeing, but there’s more to it than that. We have the sense that none of these candidates understands where we are, or where we are going, although they are quite eager to lead us there.

This political tremor, like those in nature, was very long in building. The tectonic plates have been under increasing pressure for more than a century. We need to go farther back than the past couple of decades to see what really is `going on here.’

I aim to take you back not to any recent presidential election, but to 1840 and the second volume of Democracy in America, the famous book by the French traveler, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville had arrived here in 1830, commissioned by the French government to report on the American penal system. But his main personal interest in visiting was to come to a better understanding of the political implications of democracy.

By democracy Tocqueville did not mean the American system of government. Having read James Madison’s tenth Federalist paper, he was well aware that Americans had a republic—a representative government—not a democracy in the ancient Greek sense of a regime in which all the citizens met together to vote laws up or down. Only the New England municipal governments featured such democracy, not the state or national governments. In Tocqueville’s vocabulary, democracy referred not to the government but to the society of America. In America, almost alone in the world at that time, much of society was egalitarian—not, obviously, in the sense that economic equality prevailed here, but because (with two important exceptions) no American could make the monarchic or aristocratic claim, `I am entitled to rule you by right of my birth into the ruling class.’ All Americans were in the ruling class; the people were sovereign. The only aristocrats left in America by the 1830s were the Indians—proud, warlike, and, in Tocqueville’s estimation, doomed to extinction—and the Southern planters—equally proud, almost as warlike, and quite as likely to fight a losing battle against the prolific commercial population of the North.

In Tocqueville’s view, older societies had an aristocratic class that served as a buffer between the central government and the people, a class with the pride and courage to fight back against the encroachments of centralized power. Modern societies, increasingly without such a class, could see one of two regimes: federal republicanism, in which the states and the innumerable self-governing civil associations, organized by equal citizens, could resist the political center; or statist despotism, in which the state, probably controlled by one man, would abolish citizenship itself and rule without effective resistance. France had already seen despotism in the person of Emperor Napoleon I, and it would see it again in the decades-long rule of Napoleon III. In choosing between these two regimes, Tocqueville favored republicanism, in American and in France; he intended in his book to show Europeans how Americans governed themselves, under democratic social conditions, without an aristocracy to defend them from the central government.

But the overt military despotism of a Napoleon was not the only kind of despotism Tocqueville feared. There was another, a kind more likely to overtake even Americans. Now, when giving a speech, one general rule is not to do what I am about to do, namely, to read a fairly long passage by some other writer. But this is a Hillsdale College event, and it’s in Texas, so let’s just go ahead and do it, anyway. And besides, this is easily the most intelligent thing I’ll be saying to you today. Even better, my eminent colleague, the political historian Professor Paul Rahe, is wont to read this same passage in some of his lectures. Here is Tocqueville writing in 1840, issuing a warning in the form of a prediction:

“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world. I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not se them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a country.

“Above all these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the only agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and procures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

“So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizens. Equality has prepared men for all those things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

“Thus… the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

“I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people”

To prevent this, as I mentioned, Tocqueville recommended the kind of political society he saw in America: democratic, yes, but federal in its governmental structure, with four levels of government: national, state, county, and municipal, each with its own sources of revenue and its own legal duties and prerogatives. And while the society was not hierarchical the way aristocratic societies are, American had instituted civil associations—voluntary organizations of equal citizens (from fire companies to churches to ethnic self-help societies). A republican regime with a federal state, both underpinned by an egalitarian (that is to say democratic) society full of self-governing civil associations: this was how the Americans had solved the problem of democracy. Americans did not need to succumb to the supine stupidity of soft despotism in the centralized, administrative state because they had arranged their society and their government in a way that preserved and strengthened what Tocqueville calls “the spirit of the city.”

What does he mean by “the spirit of the city”? He means what Aristotle means by “politics.” Aristotle begins his book, The Politics, by describing the three kinds of rule seen not first of all in the city but in the family. In a family there is the rule of parents over children, the kind Tocqueville mentioned when he said that the aim of fatherly rule is to prepare men for manhood; there is also the rule of masters over slaves. (which, Aristotle says, could be lessened or eliminated if machines were invented that could move themselves). These are both one-way, command-and-obey forms of rule. But there is also the mutual rule of the married couple. This is a two-way relationship, rule by discussion not command; Aristotle describes it as “ruling and being ruled, in turn.” He also says—and this is crucial to understanding “the spirit of the city”—it is the only genuinely political form of rule in the family. It resembles the rule of free, self-governing citizens who deliberate and choose what actions to take in common. Only human beings can govern themselves this way because we are the only species capable of speech and reason. To govern ourselves politically, animated by this “spirit of the city,” is the very opposite of being a timid and industrious animal, herded by our shepherds or leaders.

Self-government or genuinely political rule consists of a moral dimension and a social one. Morally, it means that the self-governing individual is ruled by his or her distinctively human characteristic: reason. Socially, it means the discussion, the consent, the give-and-take life of ruling and being ruled.

In the America Tocqueville saw, two elements of the regime lent themselves to self-government: the structure of government and the civil associational character of our society. With respect to structure, and to bring things back to presidential elections, the Framers of 1787 had designed the path to the presidency to bring men of good character into the office of Chief Executive. The Electoral College meets as a body entirely independent of Congress or the Supreme Court. In Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton sets down the reasoning behind this. As originally designed, the Electoral College “Afford[ed] as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder” in the election itself. By voting for electors and not a presidential candidate, voters were “much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” As we know, the Electoral College stopped working as planned—that is, as a deliberative body—as soon as George Washington left office and the Jeffersonians organized against John Adams and the Federalist Party. From then on, Americans were electing persons pledged to a party candidate, not persons prepared to consider and choose a candidate in consultation with delegates from the other states. Nonetheless, to this day the Electoral College does reinforce federalism by ensuring that our presidential elections are conducted as state-by-state campaigns.

Fortunately, in place of the Constitutional system as intended, Americans found a solution based not on governmental structure but on the other part of Tocqueville’s political equation—civil society organized into civil associations. One of the most important political inventions of the generation following that of the Framers was already established by the time Tocqueville arrived here. Professor James Ceaser of the University of Virginia has written about the American system of political parties, designed by a future president, Martin Van Buren, in the 1820s. A political party is a civil association not mentioned in the Constitution but consistent with the democratic-republic regime of the Founders. It is a civil association designed to organize political vote-getting in a democratic society. In order to moderate the “personal factionalism” and “demagogy” seen in the 1820s, especially during the early years of Andrew Jackson’s political career, Van Buren proposed parties that would require candidates to win support not only from the people, but from “seasoned politicians”—party organizers or `bosses.’ The party bosses had every incentive to win because by winning an election for their party they controlled political patronage in the form of government jobs; would-be officeholders had every reason to listen to the bosses because officeholders needed the bosses’ organizational expertise in order to win election and re-election. The prospect of government jobs also meant the nineteenth century saw very high voter turnouts and strong enthusiasm for party candidates. After all, in every presidential election, each local postmaster’s job was up for grabs. There was no civil-service tenure until much later in the century.

There’s an old article by a University of Chicago political scientist named Edward Banfield that describes what happened to the old party system; the article dates back to 1961. Almost alone in the reformist atmosphere of the early Sixties and the Kennedy Administration, Banfield stood for unreconstructed political parties. “Anyone who reflects on recent history must be struck by the following paradox: those party systems that have been most democratic in structure and purpose have been least able to maintain democracy.” He would have been thinking of Weimar Germany and the Third and Fourth Republics in France as prime examples of this. “Those that have been most undemocratic in structure and procedure—conspicuously those of the United States and Britain—have proved to be the bulwarks of democracy and civilization.”

Banfield predicted increased voter manipulation by television news programmers and ideologues if party patronage declined further. A pessimist in Camelot, he predicted that egalitarian reforms would reduce the organized power of the American political system, its ability to get things done. “For as we become a better and more democratic society, our very goodness and democracy may lead us to destroy goodness and democracy in the effort to increase and perfect them.” Twenty years later, after the party reforms of the 1970s, Banfield wrote another article saying in effect, `I told you so.’ “During the Bicentennial period in which we celebrate the achievement of the Founders, we also complete the undoing of it.” The American founding had been undone because the attempt to establish direct democracy within the parties and in our elections—coupled with, I should add, the establishment of the centralized bureaucracy or administrative state Tocqueville had warned of—in practice leads to the ruin of those political authorities who once stood between the people and its most powerful rulers. By the 1980s, the non-aristocratic but not purely democratic bosses who headed the old civil-associational political parties were just about finished. I their place, a centralized by divided elite that attempts to rule a somewhat bewildered, restless people by holding up idols called images and extolling quasi-ideas called `values’ has led us away from Jeffersonian enlightenment and self-government. This has fostered the decline of political experience among ordinary citizens, who no longer understand the spirit of the city, the give-and-take, the ruling-and-being-ruled that only actual civic participation can give.

The new `insiders,’ journalists and bureaucrats, lack this genuinely political experience. More, they also lack the political responsibility that the Founders prized and that the old bosses and their candidates had shouldered. If a party boss and his candidates lost too many elections, they would be turned out of work. But journalists and bureaucrats have no elections to lose.

From Woodrow Wilson to George McGovern and down to today, party reformers have disliked the routine politics of getting things done, with its hierarchies and its limited capacity for rapid and radical change. The `open’ system of presidential primaries, which today does not even require that primary voters belong to the party for whose candidate they vote, resembles the factionalized and demagogic system of the 1820s, which Van Buren’s party system was designed to correct.

But is it not true that the old party system lent itself to corruption? It did. But what is the modern, centralized, welfare, crony-capitalist state but a system of legal corruption that wants to think of itself as progressive, high-minded, and scientific? And, with tenure for civil servants, does this not give us a new aristocracy—hardly a humble `service class’ at all? But this aristocracy does not ‘buffer’ us from the centralized state; it is the centralized state. As the journalist Jonathan Rauch remarks in a recent issue of The Atlantic, in the days of party reform “it was easy… to see that there was dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water was dirty, which was the baby.” The baby was political life itself—messy, impure, inefficient, but also socially democratic and politically republican. Rauch calls the hostility toward American self-government ‘politiphobia,’ and right he is: as bureaucracy and the democratization of candidate selection advance together, we look for the `charismatic’ leader who will solve our problems for us, presumably by the copious use of executive orders.

Fundamentally, there have been two ways to organize modern states, two ways to connect the central government to the people. One is the political way: by parties whose bosses control the distribution of government jobs but who also depend on keeping in touch with the citizens who will vote their candidates in or out of office. The other is the anti-political way, rule by professional bureaucrats whose claim to command-and-obey authority is based upon supposedly scientific expertise while democratized, de-bossified elections become competitions for media time and a battle of attention-getting ‘tweets.’ The candidates twitter while Rome churns.

Both political parties have democratized themselves into near-obsolescence, further reducing Americans’ opportunities for real political experience. We often hear it said that regime change or ‘democratization’ won’t work in societies that have no experience in self-government. Well, what about us?

Americans simply govern themselves less than they once did. This fact is easily obscured by the civil-rights victories of women and African-Americans, but it is no less true for that. And the spirit of the city that Tocqueville esteemed has been transformed by mixing the soft-despotic bureaucracy he described with the new technologies of information and entertainment the spectacularly democratic Internet brings. Today, many of us live large portions of our lives in ‘virtual’ reality, an entirely artificial and almost infinitely manipulable alternative world. Aristotle writes that partisans of democracy define freedom badly, conceiving of it as doing what one likes. The Internet is democratic not only in the usual sense that it erects very low ‘barriers to entry’ but also because it feeds this fantasy of false freedom. Virtual reality disconnects us from the natural reality that surrounds us. The problem is that the disconnection is only in our minds; we still sit and move in actual reality. In virtual reality, if I encounter anything or anyone I dislike, I simply hit the ‘delete’ button. But in actual or natural reality it’s not that easy. In political life, for example, I can easily delete Mr. Putin from my computer screen, but I can’t delete his tanks from Georgia just by hitting a button.

Insofar as we funnel our minds into virtual reality, we lose patience with one another much more easily. We hit the delete button or change the channel, instead of talking things out, face to face. We cease to be practical. We cease to face reality, and the virtues that had steeled us to face harsh realities soften from disuse. Even as we rebel against the administrative state, we lose our ability to do anything but disrupt it with projects like WikiLeaks and cyberattacks. Those efforts can damage or maybe destroy, but what can they really build, other than websites—that is, more augmentations of virtual reality?

The ‘social media’ dimension of virtual reality exaggerates another feature of democratic society described by Tocqueville. In aristocratic society, the social pressure to emulate others or to draw back from thoughts and actions others deprecate comes ‘from above’—from our social superiors, those who have established their claim to have been born to rule us. In democratic society, social pressure from above dissipates, replaced by social pressure that comes at us from all around us. We all remember ‘peer pressure’ in school, but the experience of being swarmed by nasty and often anonymous tweets can cause us to draw back even further from saying what we think—unless we too put on the mask of the avatar, which amounts to shedding responsibility for what we say to one another. Madisonian responsibility disappears under this hyper-democratization of public opinion.

All right. That was the introduction to my talk. Now a word about this year’s election.

How has this affected the 2016 election. This year, once again the Constitution is at issue, although in some ways less obviously so than in 1912, 1932, or 1964. The one candidate who based his campaign squarely on the hope of restoring the original understanding of American constitutionalism, Senator Ted Cruz, didn’t survive the primaries. Moving into virtual reality, then, what do the campaign websites of the two nominees tell us about how they understand American constitutionalism?

Senator Clinton’s website has been entirely redone since she won the nomination. The last time I looked at it, the old website featured “112 reasons (and counting!) Hillary Clinton should be our next president.” One of them was that the next president will likely nominate several Supreme Court justices, a remark implying that Senator Clinton would surely make wiser choices than her opponent. Overall, however, the Constitution did not loom large on the list. Solar panels, background checks for gun purchases, student loans, health care, abolition of “sentence disparity between crack and powder cocaine” all got a shout-out. And perhaps above all, Senator Clinton is “a progressive who gets things done”—that being a slap at Senator Sanders, a socialist whose record of legislative achievement had not furnished him with any major talking points.

It’s fair, then, to say that on Clinton-for-President website 1.0 the candidate self-identified with Progressivism and therefore with the notion of an “elastic” or “living” Constitution, whereby we go from law made by legislators to law made by judges, bureaucrats, and presidents via executive orders. Her list of legislative proposals did not say, but merely assumed, that they are constitutional, for the evident reason that under a living Constitution any ‘live law’ or law-like edict is constitutional. In the immortal words of Senator Clinton’s Progressive ally in the House of Representatives, Congressman Nancy Pelosi, upon being asked if nationalized health insurance is constitutional, “Are you kidding?” Or, as Ring Lardner chronicles the reply of an impatient father to his inquiring boy, “Shut up, he explained.”

Clinton-for-President website 2.0 is quite different. It still gives us a substantial list of policy proposals. But it never mentions the Constitution or even the Supreme Court at all.

In 2013 Senator Clinton became the proud recipient of the Liberty Medal, awarded annually by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The Center selected her “in recognition of her lifelong career”—maybe she was baking Cookies for Peace with her mother at the age of two—”in public service and her ongoing advocacy effort on behalf of women and girls around the globe.” That is, the Constitution Center honored her for nothing specifically constitutional. Nor is the award intended for anyone necessarily national, that is to say, American. Last year, it went to the Dalai Lama—an estimable man, but a Tibetan or, if you prefer, a ‘citizen of the world’—a sort of virtual citizenship, inasmuch as the world doesn’t really offer citizenship in itself, having none to offer. Judging from this pattern, globalism trumps both nationhood and constitutionalism at the National Constitution Center. Globalization, however, does suggest a new way of organizing the world, one that vaguely resembles the old international society of aristocrats. Aristocrats married across national borders, forming a sort of interlocking network of birthright rulers. The new international aristocracy consists of a non-titled but exceedingly wealthy elite of similarly cosmopolitan orientation. Such personages do not need constitutionalism; they transcend it.

Speaking of trumping, the website of the Republican Party nominee turns out to be an interesting mixed bag, so far as the Constitution is concerned. The good news is, it actually mentions the Constitution—or, at least, one part of it, the Second Amendment. And it doesn’t merely assert the right to bear arms. It goes further, saying where the right does not come from: “The Constitution doesn’t create that right—it ensures that the government can’t take it away.” The right to bear arms “is about self-defense, plain and simple.” If we already have a right to defend ourselves, prior to our Constitution—and indeed we were defending ourselves when we fought for our independence from the British Empire—then where does the right come from? Mr. Trump’s website does not say, but at least it doesn’t contradict the fundamental principle of the Founders, that rights exist by nature.

Similarly, the website is consistent with, without clearly enunciating, the idea that the American union rests on a social contract among its members. “A nation without borders is not a nation” is a sentence implying that human beings come together to form nations, and not that nations arise from ‘blood and soil’—a European notion that has caused no end of trouble in the past two centuries. The call to “end birthright citizenship” also suggests a contractual rather than a biological bond uniting Americans. And it suggests that the widespread interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as establishing birthright citizenship is mistaken.

Extending the search beyond the website itself, we learn that Trump is no Progressive when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution. In a televised interview, Anderson Cooper asked, “Do you see the Constitution as a living, breathing document, or do you see it as something set in stone a long time ago?” A college professor might object that the dichotomy is false and prejudicially stated. The Constitution isn’t “set in stone”; it has been amended 27 times. And the phrase “a long time ago” implies that in its original intent is somehow irrelevant to this day, outmoded. But true to his tendency to go ahead and gulp down his interrogator’s bait, then dare him to try to reel him in, Trump went right ahead and replied, “I see the Constitution as set in stone.”

His critics are not so sure that he does. For example, when challenged on his stated intention to expand the libel laws to protect public figures such as himself, he cited not the U. S. Constitution but English common law, which does indeed put the burden of proof of libel on the alleged libeler and not the libeled. The obvious problem (as a patriot like Trump should see) is that this isn’t England. Critics have also pointed to Mr. Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for a rather expansive definition of eminent domain, one that seems to include takings of property not merely for clear-cut public goods—a highway, for example—but for the benefit of private developers (such as himself) whose acquisitions would lead to increased revenues or the municipality, and therefor (so his argument goes) serve the public good. That strikes many of us as a bit of a stretch.

Probably the most intense unease about Mr. Trump’s constitutional bona fides arises in considering the general tone of his campaign. Entertaining and unforgettable it has been. But even his most devoted supporters find it hard to claim that he has elevated the tone of American political discourse. A candidate who takes pride in refusing to keep a civil tongue in his head raises understandable worries about his respect for the framework of civil society itself. The rule of law, including constitutional law, requires an underlying tone of law-abidingness and civility if we are to sustain it.

On this 240th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, a year away from the 230th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, we see a presidential election contest between two candidates who give constitutionally-minded Americans cause for worry. The Democratic Party candidate gives every sign of continuing the longstanding Progressive effort to replace American moral and political principles, in part by treating the Constitution as malleable. To Progressives, the Constitution doesn’t really constitute anything. The Republican Party candidate articulates a reasonably sound basic understanding o the character of American constitutionalism, but also veers off that foundation in ways that do not build confidence in his civility, what might be called his constitutional temper.

In this, Americans have reaped what academia has sown. Whether we consider the original, university-bred Progressivism of Wilson’s generation, with its elastic or living constitution, or the state-building, centralizing, ‘Brains-Trust’ New-Deal liberalism of FDR and LBJ, or the denigration of civility seen in the New-Left campus politics that has ensconced itself in academia and in the realms of entertainment and the news media in the past half-century, American educator have poorly served their fellow citizens. Although Hillsdale College teaches students in many ways as they were taught when the College began in 1844, when its curriculum was typical of small, liberal-arts colleges, it has since become (to borrow a term from current political debates) an ‘exceptional’ place, mostly because the other colleges and universities have turned away from their original missions. Had the universities continued to follow the path laid down by the Founders in the Northwest Ordinance, and by Jefferson in his plans for the University of Virginia, and by Franklin in his plans for the University of Pennsylvania—or the original intentions of the service academies at West Point and Annapolis—American constitutionalism and American statesmanship would have a very different tone, and our candidates for high office would be different kinds of men and women. Hillsdale would not be ‘exceptional’ in the least.

The older kind of education was founded on the classics. Far from matters of merely antiquarian interest, the classics always make us look at real things—real human nature, real politics, and the need to live within those realities, not in fantasy worlds of infinite progress or wish-fulfillment. For the Greeks and the Romans, even the gods are human-all-too-human, and in the Bible there is only one perfect Man.

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This is the second of two lectures first delivered at Hillsdale College in the spring of 2016.

 

By the time George Washington published his Farewell Address in September 1796, the United States had added three new states to the Union: Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee. James Madison’s “extended republic” had begun to push west, adding to its strategic depth. And of course the substantial Northwest Territory was waiting to be populated. Out of it would come the states of Indiana (1800), Ohio (1803), Illinois (1818) and, a generation later, Michigan (1837) and Wisconsin (1848). Washington knew some of this land quite well, having surveyed and purchased some Ohio property before the Revolutionary War. A major domestic and foreign-policy objective takes up the first half of his Address, namely, the political union of the United States, which he calls “the main pillar in the edifice of your real independence,” providing tranquility at home and peace abroad—the foundation of Americans’ safety, prosperity, and liberty. The Union provides safety by making the United States more formidable to would-be invaders; it provides prosperity be establishing a large free-trade zone; and it provides liberty because it obviates the need for “those overgrown military establishments” which “are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.” A broken-up North America would feature a collection of small and medium-sized sovereign states suspicious of one another, armed against one another, and to the extent armed prey to military coups d’état. No mere alliance among such states could substitute for their constitutional union, Washington argues. Indeed, disunion or faction is by itself “a frightful Despotism,” quite apart from the threat of military oligarchy to republican liberty.

In terms of the first two considerations I mentioned in the previous lecture, Washington addresses the need for a unified, modern federal state as the means to a stable, republican regime—both at the service of securing Americans’ natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The second half of the Address, now the most celebrated portion, addresses geopolitics. Unlike so-called foreign-policy ‘realists,’ Washington regards geopolitics as no less a realm to be governed by moral standards as domestic politics. In fact he regards what academic and journalistic commentators now call ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as indispensably linked, not contradictory.

Americans should, he writes, “observe good faith and justice to all nations while cultivating peace and harmony with all.” As we’ve seen, this policy had governed his dealings with the Cherokee, and it had also governed his policy of neutrality respecting the wars attendant upon the French Revolution. During those wars, the French ambassador to the United States, Edmond Genêt, had attempted to whip up sentiment for American intervention on behalf of his country. On the contrary, Washington says, we should adhere to neutrality because “religion and morality enjoin” it, and prudence does, too. In sharp contrast to the advice of Machiavelli, who contended that a prince must learn “how not to be good,” Washington’s anti-monarchic, non-‘princely’ republican foreign policy rested on the claim that it’s smarter to cultivate virtue than virtù.

But how to bring this general set of rules into action?

The centerpiece of Washington’s advice to his countrymen is to avoid “permanent, inveterate antipathies” toward and “passionate attachments” to any particular nation. In the 1790s, with memories of the Revolutionary War still vivid, Americans understandably inclined toward antipathy toward Great Britain—our “unnatural Mother,” as one patriot described her—and leaned toward sentimental attachment to our ally, France, without whose naval intervention the war would have dragged on for years longer. But a policy, a plan of action derived rationally from the politics of the national community (its regime, its state, its geography), must avoid such impassioned, unreasoning sentiments. Passions are slavish, not self-governing, in the soul of a creature capable of reason. Specifically, permanent antipathies and attachments—hostility or alliance unrelated to changing circumstances—will produce bad economic and political consequences, weakening our security in the enjoyment of our natural rights.

With respect to political economy, such antipathies and attachments put our trade at a disadvantage. If we favor one nation for reasons of sentiment alone over another, we will lose the value of the free market, wherein foreign nations compete for our market— a large and expanding market, given the westward march of Americans that had already begun, a march made possible by vigorous population growth. Politically, they open us to foreign influences—the likes of Genêt—which exacerbate our own internal factions and thus threaten the Union.

Therefore, Washington argues, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nation is in extending our commercial relations, but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” He is thinking particularly of Europe, which “has a set of primary interests, which to us have no, or very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence therefore it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships, or enmities.” Fortunately, we are “detached and distant” from Europe; our geographical position across the Atlantic Ocean affords us the capacity to “choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall counsel.” That is, under ordinary circumstances we will stay out, although there may be extraordinary circumstances—presumably, a situation directly affecting our safety and happiness—in which we might intervene.

Washington isn’t an ‘isolationist,’ opposed to all alliances, much less a pacifist, opposed to all war; he had not suddenly become ashamed of his status as a war hero and Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. He rather opposed alliances committing us to war in advance and thus, as he puts it, “entangle war, peace and prosperity” with European ambitions and interests. Two decades later, Washington’s former protégé James Monroe and Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, would formulate the Monroe Doctrine, intending to limit the expansion of Old-World empires of monarchy and aristocracy in the New World, where the Empire of Liberty was beginning to see republican regimes—friendly regimes—replacing Spanish imperial rule.

Beyond Europe, and regarding the foreign world generally, we should also “steer clear of permanent alliances” and “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” A good example of this policy was the war against the three Barbary States—Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli—which sponsored piracy against our Mediterranean shipping. The Jefferson and Madison administrations fought those states in the early 1800s, and rightly so, by Washington’s standards. The Barbary States were attacking the commercial interests of the American commercial republic, specifically defying the principle of free commercial traffic on the open seas. Similarly, the War of 1812—the first of the five declared wars we’ve fought under the 1787 Constitution—was fought in defense of the principle, “Free ships, free goods, free men.”

Washington concluded his address by explaining, “With me, a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption , to that degree of strength and consistency”—the political equivalent of moral character—”which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.” Unlike Machiavelli, who claims that the prince can determine his own fortunes and those of his principality, Washington understands that the laws of nature and of nature’s God have a moral content, that foreign policy can issue in peaceful friendship and not a perpetual war of all against all.

Washington’s policy of gaining time, extending the republican empire of liberty westward while avoiding major wars with great powers, governed American foreign policy for the next century. It isn’t at all clear how far west Washington himself would have wanted to go. For example, several decades later, the Whig Party tended to prefer not to go farther than the Mississippi River, whereas the Democrats—more favorable to the extension of slavery and also amenable to very substantial self-government by the states even at the expense of the coherence and indeed the perpetuation of the Union—optimistically pressed the nation ahead, through Texas and on to the Pacific Ocean. The resulting conflict over territorial expansion nearly split the Union, but by 1890, when we’d consolidated our Pacific claims and the frontier was judged to be ‘closed,’ we had some very substantial choices to make.

As far back as 1787, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton had argued that oceans are as much highways as they are barriers; as a Caribbean-born transplant to New York, he knew that very well. By 1890, technology had made this much more so, with steam-powered vessels having replaced the old sailing ships and telegraphs making ‘messaging’ nearly instantaneous. These improved means of transportation and of communications had strengthened European empires; by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Britannia not only ruled the waves but about one-fourth of the land on earth and about one-fifth of its population, while France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and even Belgium had substantial holdings as well.

Also as a result of these technological advances, rulers were beginning to reconceive the world as one ‘system’; our term ‘geopolitics’ was invented at this time. The leading naval strategist of geopolitics was the American, Alfred Thayer Mahan, among whose readers and correspondents numbered an ambitious and vigorous young American politician, Theodore Roosevelt. In the English-speaking world, the leading geopolitical writer who concentrated  his attention on land masses was Halford Mackinder. Whereas Mahan focused on the importance of controlling key oceanic chokepoints as indispensable to world commerce, Mackinder pointed to what he called “the World Island”—the giant land mass comprised by three interconnected continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. Mackinder understood that if you lay a political map over the map of the World Island, you see that the central flashpoint for conflict in the twentieth century would be the large, flat European plain running from the Atlantic to the Urals; along this plain, the central region (the flashpoint within the flashpoint) is the space between Germany and Russia. World Wars I and II would in large measure be ‘about’ control of that Heartland of the World Island, and the Cold War would ‘freeze’ rival forces in that place, too, as NATO forces confronted those of the Warsaw Pact.

Such a radically changed circumstances presented American strategists with a set of problems noticeably different from those seen by Washington and his successors. Would the strengthening empires block American trade? Would they once again threaten American shores, as they had not done since 1812? Further, having fought a devastating civil war, a war on our own territory, we were less likely than ever to want to fight a war on our own territory—especially given the increasingly devastating power of modern weapons and of the well-organized and trained mass armies raised by modern states. We needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, a question we thought we’d answered in turning the middle part of North America into an empire of liberty. And we also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce.

American strategists proposed several choice. The first, advocated by German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue the Washington policy: to reject not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire,” as he called it) but even to reject any major strengthening of the military—this, on the traditional grounds that big military establishments threaten republican regimes and that a bigger navy would be a “dangerous plaything” in the hands of ambitious men. By far the most distinguished American statesman to carry this policy forward was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus” (as he rightly called it), Freedom Betrayed, was published for the first time only a few years ago, after decades of suppression by the Hoover estate.

The second, opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast imperial project based upon the alleged superiority of the white race, a notion itself based upon the ‘race science’ that formed part of early Progressivism. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered at a Republican Party convention in Indiana. In it, Beveridge called for American conquest of the rest of the Americas and their incorporation into the United States—not, to be sure, as equal states but as colonial territories. Such an expression of racial superiority fit right into the Progressivism of the day, and Beveridge might be described as the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of the movement, which ranged from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams.

Two in-between policies also emerged, and from them flow the American versions of foreign-policy ‘realism’ and foreign-policy ‘idealism.’ Heading the realist camp was TR, who advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually succeeded in obtaining, and peacetime military conscription for the army, which he hinted at but never formally proposed. These forces, but especially the navy, would be used not so much for imperial expansion but for obtaining naval bases throughout the world, usually but not always with the consent of foreign governments. These bases would counterbalance the much more expensive (and, as it turned out, untenable) imperialism of the Europeans.

To reinforce America’s opposition to European imperialism in the New World, Roosevelt also propounded his well-known “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, stipulating an American right to intervene in Latin American countries if they fell down on their debt payments to European nations. Such refusal to repay loans, if they became “chronic,” invited European military intervention into the Western Hemisphere—which the original Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. If looked at from this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent: drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and the Philippines, avoiding the acquisition of such countries by other empires (especially the Brits and the Germans) while eventually spurring the newly-acquired countries to govern themselves. The policy deploys the old Washingtonian policy of regime change to obviate any need to (quite implausibly) make them into U. S. states while also avoiding their (un-American) use as permanent colonies of our own. Add the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under new circumstances.

As an aside, I should mention that Roosevelt’s ‘realism’ differed sharply from the academic schools of foreign-policy ‘realism,’ seen (for example) in the writings of the late Hans J. Morgenthau. Academic realism focuses entirely on economic, military, and political ‘power relations’ among states; as such, it is amoral. TR on the contrary was nothing if not a moralist. His geopolitical calculations aimed at the promotion of what he described in one essays as “realizable ideals”—policies that were informed by such general moral principles as honesty and human rights, but which were at the same time practicable. Up to and including his years in the presidency, TR did not assume that the realization of such ideals could be complete, nor did he assume that something called ‘History’ would inexorably deliver them. Statecraft depended upon “fearing God and taking your own part,” to cite one of his many book-titles.

The other policy, advanced most conspicuously by TR’s great rival, Woodrow Wilson, has come to be called ‘liberal internationalism.’ Wilson’s phrase, “The League of Nations,” comes from the famous essay “Perpetual Peace,” published by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in 1795. Someday, Kant predicts, the European system of sovereign states, solemnized by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, will break down as the result of a cataclysmic war. All the major powers will exhaust themselves. Seeing the error of their ways, they will form a League of Nations to prevent any future wars. Wilson evidently saw in the Great War exactly this Kantian apocalypse. As the war dragged on, he proposed what he originally called a “League to Enforce Peace,” which was actually more descriptive than “League of Nations,” inasmuch as the League did in fact commit its members to intervention —diplomatic at first, but military if needed—to stop cross-border wars and to punish “aggressors.” What Wilson called “the organized major force of mankind” would be rapidly mobilized to prevent another world war, making this one (he hoped) a “war to end war.” Although the United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty that would have brought us into the League, President Franklin Roosevelt’s subsequent plan for the United Nations amounts to essentially the same thing. That is, instead of avoiding “entangling alliances” in order to avoid unnecessary wars, the United States would involve itself in a sort of comprehensive entanglement in the hope of preventing small wars from becoming world wars.

Why did Wilson suppose that this would be feasible rather than exhausting? He does not say. But given his confidence in historical progress, my guess is that he believed that human nature was getting the aggression bred out of it, that ‘History’ was ‘moving on’—progressing—beyond war-consciousness and towards peace-consciousness. That is, liberal internationalism in its more buoyant forms may depend on the belief that peace can be made permanent because human nature isn’t, because we are near ‘the end of History.’ Wilson’s ideals, always more ambitious than those of TR, seemed realizable to him because ‘History’ was on his side. For a League of Nations really to enforce peace around the world, wars would need to become not only small but rare.

With these innovations—some consistent with American principles, some not—we see clearly the elements of American foreign policy today. The undermining of European imperialism continued, as the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires collapsed in the First World War; the German Empire went down, too, then reconstituted itself before collapsing again in the Second World War; the British and French empires were the next to go, critically weakened during that same war;  the Russians expanded, then lost their empire at the end of the Cold War. The United States had a hand in hastening the demise of each of these empires. Although one piece of TR’s policy—routine intervention in Latin American affairs—was bridled, the centerpiece of that policy—a network of naval bases supporting an extensive fleet (later supplemented with air forces) endures to this day. I am not sure that Alexander Hamilton would have disapproved and, given the Jeffersonian/Madisonian defense of U. S. shipping in the Mediterranean even the old Democratic Party might have hesitated to condemn it under contemporary conditions.

On the other hand, liberal internationalism would have been viewed by the Founders with much more suspicion. Such a strong and continuous requirement to intervene may strike one—as it did indeed strike the majority of U. S. senators during the League of Nations treaty debate—as a weakening of American sovereignty. Since the end of the Cold War, every president and Congress have been forced to choose the places in which we intervene, although the principles of liberal intervention open the possibility of such intervention in any instance of cross-border aggression. But what liberal internationalist principles do is to bias the debate in favor of economic, military, and diplomatic intervention, thereby distracting statesmen from their more fundamental task of defending the self-government of the United States.

In terms of our self-government, the U. S. Constitution has also seen a subtle but profound alteration, at least in the way it is interpreted or perhaps misinterpreted by the Supreme Court. The pivotal case here was U. S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation. In this case, decided in 1936, the Court opined that, first, foreign policy is preeminently the domain of the executive and, second, that the necessary and proper clause applies only to domestic matters and not to foreign policy. This gave President Roosevelt and subsequent presidents very great discretionary powers indeed—powers they have at times not hesitated to exercise. Now, once again, it should be noticed that in the case of war a president has always had the right and in fact the duty, as Commander in Chief, to take immediate action against enemy attack without a declaration of war by Congress. Of the roughly 200 wars the United States has fought since the ratification of the Constitution, only five were formally declared.

But the decision in Curtiss-Wright had nothing to do with U. S. military action. It authorized the president to embargo two Latin American countries that were at war. While Congress continues to exercise the power of the purse, and thus can shut down presidential ventures in foreign policy in due course, ‘due course’ may take a lot of time. In both foreign and domestic policy, the new constitutional dispensation under the aegis of Progressivism and its several variants (New Deal-ism, Great Society-ism, and so on) have inclined toward the practice of generous transfers of authority to the executive branch—whether to the executive branch proper, that is, the White House, or to the administrative agencies, which have become a sort of fourth branch of government. That is, we have moved some distance from a regime of democratic republicanism, and from a federal state, toward a centralized state governed by a mixed regime featuring an executive who enjoys quasi-monarchic powers in foreign policy and an administrative elite or ‘meritocracy’ which reminds one a bit of Old-World aristocracy, absent the blue blood. The Founders would be less than pleased about all of that.

As to Washington’s policy prescriptions, we have mostly avoided permanent, impassioned attachments or antipathies toward any nation, although our ‘special relationships’ with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Israel have become partial exceptions to that rule. These partnerships are far less worrisome than they would have been in the 1790s, given the similarity of the regimes involved and also given American power, which far exceeds that of any of the countries in question. And of course all of these countries continue to serve our strategic interests. Washington’s policy of avoiding all but necessary political relations has been violated or upheld, depending on whether you regard the United Nations, the North Atlantic Alliance, SEATO, and other such organizations as necessary to the defense of American rights. The Founders would have examined each of these alliances carefully, probably regarding the United Nations as the most dubious.

And finally, on the matter of immigration—unmentioned by Washington in his Address but of great interest to the Founders generally from the Declaration of Independence on—the questions remains as it was: Who do we want as fellow-citizens in our shared enterprise of self-government under the laws of nature and of nature’s God? We have usually wanted immigrants, as the Declaration makes clear. At that time, we wanted Europeans because Europeans were understood to be civilized, ready for self-government, to a degree that most likely immigrants from other countries were not. This no longer holds, to the degree that it did. But we are unquestionably entitled to control our borders, to enforce the laws that the representatives of “We the People” as sovereigns have enacted, and to be the final judges of the criteria for citizenship. Insofar as we depart from those principles, the Founders would once again demur.