Article published September 1982

NOTE: In August 1982, about 18 months into the Reagan Administration, former president Richard Nixon published an article titled “Hard-headed Détente” in the New York Times. The following response was distributed to newspapers by Public Research, Syndicated. 

Remembering their years in office, retired politicians bask in nostalgia’s warming rays. The golden afternoons when they wielded power seem so very much finer than the present, where dawn, noon, and twilight all come in shades of grey. Political memoir invite us to share the glory, on condition that we too remember those days as glorious, those men as masters of statecraft.

Richard Nixon partakes of this understandable tradition. He prefers not to dwell on domestic misadventure, of course. But foreign policy, always his greater enthusiasm, still mesmerizes him. He hopes that his account of his conduct will inspire us to similar action today. Such inspiration would guarantee him his coveted redemption in `history’ and, he doubtless believes, advance the interests of his country.

This requires Mr. Nixon to defend his principal foreign policy, détente with the Soviet Union. In a recent article in the New York Times, he argues for détente much as he did during his presidency.

He claims that détente reduces “the danger of nuclear war,” and of all war. At the same time, it “engag[es] the Soviet Union in those fields in which we have an overwhelming advantage”: the rich fields of economic and intellectual liberty. “Those critics who would have us scuttle détente and return to narrow confrontation are urging a form of unilateral disarmament,” by “depriv[ing] us of many of our most effective diplomatic weapons.” Although he scorns what he calls “soft-headed” détente, which would tempt the soviets with carrots while leaving the stick at home, he celebrates “hard-headed” détente, his détente, whereby trade and cultural exchange dovetailed, as it were, with military deterrence.

He admits that détente turned out badly, citing the resultant American disadvantage in land-based nuclear missiles, Soviet domination of southeast Asia, Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, “and the cruel snuffing out of Poland’s flickers of freedom.” But he insists that “The failure was not of détente but rather of the management of détente by United States policy makers,” the sadly inadequate men who always seem to follow any retired politician’s incumbency. With his memories Mr. Nixon also offers a promise: today, “in the broader context of détente, with an intricate mixture of both positive and negative incentives, the Soviet Union will respond. As it did in the early 1970’s it will moderate its behavior.”

We too must tie today’s policies to our memories. But we cannot afford Mr. Nixon’s understandable nostalgia. Détente failed because it misconceived not only the nature of the Soviet Union but the nature of America. The disasters that overtook Presidents Ford and Carter issued from Mr. Nixon’s policy, not only from mere clumsiness in carrying it out.

It was during the Nixon Administration that America gratuitously promised to refrain from building missiles that would threaten the Soviets’ land-based arsenal; in return, the Soviets accelerated their plans to do exactly that to us. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets organized guerrillas in Africa and the Middle East, drawing a circle around our major oil supplier. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets increased their exploitation of trade and cultural exchange for purposes of espionage. The harvest came later, but the crop was irrigated then.

More important, “hard-headed” détente encouraged an atmosphere in which “soft-headed” détente could thrive. Mr. Nixon remembers when he and Mr. Brezhnev “regularly clinked champagne glasses to celebrate agreements.” “We smiled at one another in public,” he writes, after “bargain[ing] hard” in private. True, but in America the public event eclipses the private one; Americans see the appearance, and hope for the best. In the Soviet Union, the hopes of the audience mean little, and no one believes public appearances, anyway.

A political atmosphere that encourages “soft-headed” détente allows “soft-headed” politicians to gain electoral victories. One need only remember Mr. Carter, and his naïve dismissal of his predecessors’ “inordinate fear of communism.”

Economic realities mirror these political ones. Mr. Nixon fails to cite even one example of a Soviet military concession in the face of an economic sanction , threatened or enacted. (He cites military threats). He argues, reasonably, that we cannot force the Soviet economy to collapse by refusing to trade, as some of today’s optimists suggest. But he ignores the fact that we cannot significantly influence the Soviets by trade, either, and for the same reason: their economy runs on command, not demand. Within limits, they can do much as they please, come feast or famine. Because our economy runs on demand, we find that our corporations resist economic sanctions, and they thereby contribute to the very “soft-headed” détente Mr. Nixon abhors.

Détente, as conceived by Mr. Nixon, was mismanaged by American presidents for a simple reason: it was unmanageable. The nature of the American political and economic system exerted pressures on our presidents unequal to the pressures exerted on the Kremlin. By weakening America and strengthening the Soviet Union, détente may have brought us closer to war, or to capitulation without war.

Review
Robert A. Goldwin, ed.: Political Parties in the Eighties. Washington: The American Enterprise Institute and Kenyon College. 1980.

Published September 1981. Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 9, Nos. 2 & 3.
Republished by permission.

 

Nearly twenty years ago, Robert A. Goldwin edited Political Parties, U. S.A., a collection of essays that aimed at connecting the contemporary questions surrounding political parties with the enduring principles of American republicanism. Of the essayists, Edward C. Banfield was the lightning rod, attracting heat and sometimes light from fellow contributors and readers. Almost alone in the warm, reformist atmosphere of the early sixties, Banfield stood for unreconstructed 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 ben least able to maintain democracy [was probably thinking of the Weimar Republic and the Third Republic in France]; 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 the increase of voter manipulation by television and ideologues if party patronage declined further. A pessimist in Camelot, he predicted that egalitarian reform would reduce the organized power of the American regime itself, its ability to get things done. For that reason, “Jefferson may have been right in saying that democracy cannot exist without a wide diffusion of knowledge throughout the society. But it may be right also to say that it cannot exist with it. 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.”

The reformers, of course, were not listening. Banfield’s serious critics thought the gentleman too dismissive of reasoned planning (Walter Berns), and reminded him that ordinary, patronage-based politics must at times give way to the principled politics of “great parties” (Harry V. Jaffa). But they knew that Banfield’s main argument was right.

So, increasingly, do the rest of us. Goldwin’s new collection, Political Parties in the Eighties, contains only one enthusiastic defense of the much-reformed system we now have, and even its authors recommend still more reforms. Journalists, politicians, and scholars are, for the most part, unenthusiastic. The public, which disliked the old system but liked its results, now dislikes both the system and its results.

Goldwin reminds us that Banfield told us so; not only does he reprint the 1961 essay in the Appendix, but he includes a new essay in which Banfield tells us that he told us so. Perhaps too pessimistically, he contends that, despite his telling and retelling, “Enthusiasm for pressing further and faster toward direct democracy remains unabated”; the dissatisfaction with the present system only goads Americans toward further democratization. Thus, “during the icentennial period in which we celebatte the achievement of the Founders, we also complete the undoing of it.” The American found is undone because, as Banfield and Nelson W. Polsby argue, the attempt to establish direct democracy instead of representative government leads, in practice, to the ruin of those political authorities who once stood between the populace and its most powerful rulers. In the short term this results in what we see today: a centralized but divided elite that attempts to rule a somewhat bewildered, restless people by holding up idols called images and extolling quasi-ideas called visions (or, if they are social scientists, `concepts’). Instead of Jeffersonian enlightenment, we see the decline of knowledge, concurrent with the decline of that class of politicians who made it their business to know. The new knowers, the journalists, lack political experience and political responsibility. Responsible to executives whose business is to attract customers, journalists provide the melodrama customers want. Predictably, the public is entertained but not ruled; the star of our favorite afternoon serial may excite us, but we do not confuse him with a ruler. With the dramatizing of politics, people do not confuse contemporary politicians with rulers, either.

Two members of the Democratic Party’s several commissions on party reform defend the system they helped devise. Kenneth A. Bode, a reporter for NBC News, and Carol F. Casey, who spent much of 1980 working on Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s campaign staff, argue that the reforms ended many undemocratic practices–a fact no one seriously denies–and say that if new elites have replaced the old ones, observers should not gape and losers should not complain.

They are less convincing and tough-minded when they try to debunk myths about the genesis and results of party reforms. They deny that the left-liberal wing of the party, then led by Senator George McGovern, controlled the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection: “Senator McGovern was chosen to chair the commission by Senator [Hubert] Humphrey, wwho viewed Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa as too liberal and too closely identified with the [Eugene] McCarthy/[Robert] Kennedy forces,” which had challenged Humphrey for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1968. Anyone who recalls that McGovern was a stalking horse for Robert Kennedy in that year will wonder at that. Moreover, Hughes was appointed to the commission along with liberal Senator Birch Bayh and left-liberal Senator Fred Harris–a Humphrey backer at the time, but hardly one averse to undercutting the party establishment. For that matter, Humhrey himself was to the left of the majority of Democrats, a fact that escaped his left-wing critics in those days, largely because he had served as vice president in the Johnson Administration, the prime target of the left because Johnson had escalated the war against the communist regime in North Vietnam.

Another myth–that the reforms give power to activist elites who do not represent most voters–turns out not to be a myth at all. “That is and has been true in every election held in the United States.” Rule by the old elites did not always work anyway, for “when party leaders substituted their judgment for the popular view registered in primaries [they mean the somewhat more popular view–they mention the selection of Stevenson over Kefauver in 1952, Humphrey over McCarthy in 1968]… they do not always pick winners.” True, but no one picks winners every time. Does anyone imagine that Kefauver could have defeated Eisenhower, or that McCarthy could have defeated Nixon?

The authors also deny that proportional representation “will fragment the American party system, exacerbate divisions, prolong the nominating contest, and make unity more difficult.” “Contrast 1976 with 1968,” they suggest; in 1976, under the new rules, the nomination process was shorter. Very well, but contrast 1972 with 1976, and 1980 with 1976, and notice that the contrast they have selected is arbitrary and self-serving. As for the alleged myth that “guidelines eliminated party leaders from national convention delegations, thereby depriving the convention of their judgment and experience,… here is some truth to this charge,” although more in 1972 than in 1976.

In sum, “Parties are getting weaker. Anyone would concede as much. But they have been eroding over the course of the past century.” Indeed: since the reform movement began. Bode and Casey actually contend that Americans are less cynical about politics today than ten years ago, roving that our debunkers of myths also have a penchant for making them.

Of the essayists who seriously prescribe, two concern themselves with practice, two with theory. Donald M. Fraser, who succeeded McGovern as chairman of the Democratic Party’s Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, regards the problem of political authority with something like historical fatalism: “once the legitimacy of the old ways was challenged, the national party had little choice but to acquiesce in a movement toward procedures that were more defensible under the values of a democratic society.” But surely the legitimacy of the party leaders’ authority had been challenged for decades. Fraser mistakes enthusiasm and the inability to moderate it for acquiescence.

Fraser sees that the results of democratization, as distinguished from the idea of it, leave few people enthusiastic. He hopes to regain some of the old system’s virtues by exhorting the organized party, whose members know the potential candidates better than most voters do, to enlighten its rank and file, to improve communications within the party. He would reduce the number of primaries and, in general, strengthen the national party. He does not consider if this would only further weaken the local party organizations; he may believe their weakness irremediable, or even desirable.

Political scientist James W. Ceaser knows more of political history and political thought than Fraser does. Unlike many scholars, he can put his learning to practical use. He shows that Martin Van Buren, the founder of “the idea of permanent party competition” in America, used a non-constitutional innovation to serve the aims of the Constitution’s framers. In order to straiten the “personal factionalism” and “demagogy” that developed during the 1820s, Van Buren proposed parties that would moderate the potential candidates by making them win support not only of the people, but also from powerful, “seasoned politicians.” However, Van Buren had no immoderate appetite for moderation; recognizing the occasional need for important change, he did not attempt to prohibit the formation of new parties or the reforming of the old. Such change, he knew, often makes constitutional change unnecessary.

From Woodrow Wilson to George McGovern, the reformers have disliked the non-ideological, routine politics of self-interest, with its hierarchies and its limited capacity for rapid change. Ceaser dislikes the reformers because they offer no evidence that their much-vaunted responsiveness will yield practical wisdom. Reform of institutions can increase responsiveness to the political atmosphere, but wisdom is another thing than the political atmosphere. “It is an affliction of one strain in the American mindset that when something foes wrong, some cannot attribute it to unavoidable circumstances or normal human failing, but instead see it as remediable s=by some institutional change. More than anything else, it may be the inability to accept the inevitable limitations of politics that lies at the basis of reformist thought.” This echoes Banfield’s complaint tht “The fundamental fact of today is that man is seen, not as he is, but as he ought to be.”

Result: “The `open’ system at the [presidential] stage now very much resembles the popular nonpartisan system at the final election stage,” with its personal factionalism and demagogy, “that Van Buren attacked in 1824.” Ceaser recommends that the parties undo “much of what we have seen in the last decade.” Instead of opening the parties by allowing primaries to proliferate, Ceaser would limit the number of primaries to ten per year, held on a rotating or lottery basis. This would strengthen the state parties and, possibly, eliminate the need for government subsidies of primary candidates, whose expenses would decline. While closing the parties, Ceaser would open the elections to third and fourth party candidates by abolishing contribution ceilings to new parties that do not receive public funding. He predicts that existing parties would then moderate themselves to prevent the loss of their centrist members to the new parties. At the same time, he would strengthen existing parties by allowing them to give money to their nominees in addition to public funding.

The essayists who offer theoretical prescriptions examine the philosophic basis of the American party system and, more important, of the American regime. Both men find the regime defective, but for radically different reasons.

Benjamin R. Barber, the energetic Rousseauan who edits Political Theory, condemns the American system as undemocratic. The practice of representation–more, the principle itself–kills “full freedom, equality, and social justice.” By voting for someone else to ruler, whether in a party primary or a general election, we renounce our citizenship. Voters are “as far from citizens as spectators are from participants or from the doctors they select to heal them,” for true citizens make laws and set policies themselves. Representation kills freedom because only those “directly responsible” for “the policies that determine [their] common lives” are free; it kills equality because it reflects only the formal, legal, abstract equality of one man, one vote in a mass society, and does not reflect economic and social reality. It also kills social justice because it “encroaches on the personal autonomy and self-sufficiency that every moral order demands, … incapacitates the community as a self-regulating instrument of justice and destroys the possibility of a participatory public in which the idea of public justice might take root.” Barber’s desire for both individual moral autonomy and community was shared, of course, by Rousseau, who understood thei combination as paradoxical. Barber quotes Roussea, but not on this point; he should have done so.

Representative government, Barber continues, destroys citizen autonomy and community. It destroys autonomy by allowing leaders to exist; it destroys community by promoting mere interests, private fragments of the public, at the expense of the general interest. (Barber mistakenly describes modern political parties as identical to the factions Madison describes in the tenth Federalist. They are not–or, at least, not usually. See Harry V. Jaffa, “The Nature and Origin of the American Party System,” in Political Parties, U.S.A. Bode and Casey also make this mistake.) Thus elitism and anarchy war with one another in the modern pseudo-democracies. Representative government “can know no form of citizenship other than the sometime voter and the hungry client, and ca achieve no public purpose other than the self-interested trade-off and the prudent bargain.”

No mere reform can change this. Only what Barber calls “strong democracy,” a community ruled by “the deliberate common will of a community of active citizens” can remedy modern self-destructiveness. Antidemocrats dismiss communitarian democracy as impractical; they elicit some of Barber’s most thunderous rhetoric: “The strategy [of the antidemocrats] is elementary but not ineffective: give the people all the insignia but none of the tools of citizenship and accuse them of incompetence; throw referenda at them without providing civic education or insulating them from money and media; and then pillory them for their ill-judgment, inundate them with problem issues the `experts’ have not been able to solve… and then carp at their uncertainty or indecisiveness or simple-mindedness in muddling through to a position.” Perhaps significantly demagoguery does not make his list of things the participatory democrats need to be insulated from. Alone among the contributors to this book, Barber thus gives signs that he knows the majority of his readers are undergraduates. In telling them America has feared human depravity too much and appreciated human virtue too little, he reminds me of Socrates’s observation: the young judge men too leniently because they judge by the light of their own innocent natures. Some forms of innocence no longer characterize American youth, but much political innocence remains beneath the cynicism. Professor Barber will mine it.

“Representative government has had two hundred years in which to commit a thousand errors, he exclaims; “direct popular government is rarely given more than a single chance.” If the ancient Greeks, who gave such democracy several chances, can teach us anything about it, they show that the reason direct popular government is given fewer chances than republicanism is that its error are more spectacular. They are regime-ending errors. Republics, too, commit them, but usually after a much longer period of time–often, if we are to believe Oswald Spengler, periods of two hundred years or so.

Robert A. Licht “inclines toward the pessimistic view that the present state of the political parties portends an unraveling of what shall here be called the polity.” He regards the kind of recommendation Barber makes as one likely cause of that unraveling, or perhaps a symptom of it–unable to weave a new fabric.

Licht takes his political science from Aristotle, not Rousseau. Madison’s “new science of politics” was to have cured the factionalism seen by the old. Like Aristotle, Madison considered a strong middle class the thing that can moderate the contemptuous rich and the envious poor. Licht agrees with Paul Eidelberg that America was not founded as a democracy but as a mixed regime or polity–citing Eidelberg’s first book, The Philosophy of the Constitution. Nevertheless, the economic basis of our regime differs from that of Aristotle’s: “an end to natural scarcity by human agency, and the creation of wealth as a goal of polity, are… radical alterations [of] Aristotle’s political thought.”

Still, the debate on reform, said to concern a struggle of “the interests” with “the people,” is “the lineal descendent of the quarrel between the oligarchs and the democrats” that Aristotle described. In America, “everyone believes himself to be a `democrat,'” yet here the many are not poor, nor propertyless.” “The American democracy then may perhaps best be described as an oligarchical democracy, although to say this requires more candor than prudently we should have.” Our regime is not a democratic oligarchy because even our oligarchs must speak of equality, albeit “equality of opportunity,” as distinguished from “equality of result.”

Oligarcs and democrats come to terms in America. Aristocrats, sometimes, do not. Jefferson’s “natural aristoi” do not lack means of advancement here, as they can enter the government or the sciences-dominated academy. But in America science serves commerce (and vice versa)–a service some aristocrats find distasteful. “The increase in prosperity based upon scientific inquiry is indispensable to a political liberty that is not based directly upon the older idea of virtue.” A distaste for the commerce that, with scientists’ help, brings prosperity amounts to a distaste for one foundation of liberty. Moreover, those of the aristocracy who have nothing to do with science, who have no “commercial value,” often dislike the regime intensely. “[R]esentment is now the aristocratic passion, not the democratic passion.” This is to say that modern aristocrats partake of no classical virtue.

These discontented aristoi would replace prosperity with virtue, but not with classical or Scriptural virtue. “The central idea that animates the natural aristocracy of our time I moral autonomy,” an ethics based on will and rights, not on custom, piety, or law.” For such persons, political liberty as we have it (Barber considers it a combination of quasi-political and nonpolitical liberty) has lost its allure, as any halfway house must; they “forget the alternative,” which is modern tyranny or `totalitarianism’–or they imagine, with Barber, a utopian alternative.

Their egalitarianism is “but a weapon” used against oligarchs, “and can stem from no love of equality for its own sake.” (Here Licht assumes that our aristoi think consistently, an assumption permissible for paradigm drawing but for nothing more than that). In attempting to win the hearts of the democrats, the aristoi “undermine the middle class’s confidence by imposing [their] tastes,” which oppose those aspects of democratic taste that incline democrats to tolerate oligarchs. The aristoi would supplant oligarchic democracy with “aristocratic democracy,” socialism.

Unfortunately, socialists in power cannot solve the problem of wealth. Even socialist economies produce some wealth, and rulers–being rulers–must do something with it. Having acquired control of the means of production, they find that they have followed, as t were inadvertently, the bourgeois king’s scorned advice: they have enriched themselves. Aristocrats who remain aristocrats in this circumstance are purged by their bougeoisified comrades, only to reappear in future generations as the dissident scions of the once-new oligarchs.

Licht concludes with prescriptions put modestly in the form of questions, not exhortations. “Is it both desirable and possible to break the grip of this idea [moral autonomy] and, if so, on what intellectual basis? Is this the central question of our time?” These are questions one might not expect to see in a book titled Political Parties in the Eighties. But the editor of this book has a classical aristocrat’s sight for things beyond today’s atmosphere.

Lecture to the Political Science Club
Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School
Rumson, New Jersey
November 22, 1982

 

In November 1982, New Jersey voters passed a referendum calling upon the United States government to negotiate a moratorium or `freeze’ on nuclear weapons production in both the United States and the Soviet Union. The `freeze’ movement had a short, intense life, fueled by such books as Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness and Jonathan Schell’s considerably more thoughtful and interesting The Fate of the Earth, along with a televised film depicting the devastation of nuclear war. Although it was hard to ignore the timing of these referenda, which were held in several states during an off-year election, in an apparent effort to increase voter turnout for candidates on the `left,’ the movement activists themselves were often sincere and the fears they tapped into were real. I had been active in New Jersey as one of the very few people willing to oppose the `freeze’ in public (there had never been any question that the referendum would be approved); after the election, I was invited to speak at the local high school.

 

The question before us is clear: How can we, as Americans, avoid destruction by nuclear war–preserve our lives–while perpetuating the institutions that enable us to make our lives worth living, worth preserving? this is the same as asking, `How shall we perpetuate peace?’ because Americans know that peace does not mean simply the absence of war with another country; it also means liberty, the absence of internal war that tyrants wage against their own people.

In this century we find ourselves in a circumstance that previous generations also knew. No need to list the obvious at much length: We live in a country with extensive territory, fertile soil, temperate climate. Our political institutions encourage civil and religious liberty, enabling us to pursue happiness. No one in this room can claim much credit for this circumstance. It was given to us.

It was given to us by those who defended liberty in three major wars. The Revolutionary War gave Americans the chance to establish a regime based on liberty; the Civil War tested if that regime could long endure in the face of those who denied liberty to their fellow men; the World War of this century determined the immediate fate of that regime against a new birth of tyranny, totalitarianism, which remains the most comprehensive denial of liberty ever attempted. If our generation seeks to defend liberty, we can do so out of gratitude to those who came before us and gave it to us. And we can do so out of a sense of justice for ourselves, of duty to posterity, and of care for our species in general.

But we also find ourselves in a new circumstance. There is no need to list its features at much length, either. In 1929, a decade after the war that broke Europe and some fifteen years before the invention of nuclear weapons, Winston Churchill wrote: “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wise guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination. This is the point in human destinies to which all the glories and toils of men pause and ponder upon their new responsibilities. Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command.”

This circumstance, too, was given to us. Modern technology, which brings economic abundance, also brings humanity the chance for unprecedented destruction. No one here invented this technology; no one alive today originated the philosophy that made it possible. Our task is to seek a way of enduring with it.

Perpetuating peace, the absence of both war and tyranny, of course requires more than the desire for peace. It requires us to examine ourselves. Nuclear devastation or a regime of tyranny in American could be accomplished by the Soviet Union, but the preparations for that accomplishment would have to be made, in large part, here. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author…. As a nation of freemen, we must lie through all time or die by suicide.” He means that precisely because we are at liberty, we will make the decisions that eventually save or ruin us.

The traditional cause of the ruin of mixed and democratic regimes is mob rule, properly called misrule. A contemporary writer has observed that “It is the great fiction of this new generation that the mass movement is the highest manifestation of democracy, democracy’s triumph…. This is a misconception. Far from elevating `ordinary people’ to the stature of self-governing human beings, the mass movement is threatening in our age to reduce democratic citizens to the level of a mob–albeit well-educated.” [Patrick Glynn: “Nuclear Politics.” Journal of Contemporary Affairs, July 19, 1982]. “In the end,” he continues, this more or less genteel mob reduces itself to the lowest common denominator–to “that cowering, fearful creature inside every man and woman that is indifferent to all concerns but comfortable self-preservation.”

We sees this ourselves. One year, the fever is for text cuts; the next year, for balancing the budget. One year, we hear demands for rebuilding our national defense; this year, for a `freeze’ on nuclear weapons. This is not to say that none of these demands is right. It is to say that the mass movements accompanying them rarely add anything more than commotion to our public dialogue, loosening the attachment of Americans to the institutions that perpetuate peace. While encouraging those who tend toward hysteria (whether by nature or by art), mass movements alienate those who are not hysterical, the people who may eventually demand that liberty be abridged in order to silence the agitators.

In order to know ourselves better, let us examine pacifism, the doctrine of today’s most fervent mass movement. To be sure, the large numbers of Americans who voted in favor of nuclear arms `freeze’ resolutions on election day were very far from endorsing pacifism. They believed the question before them a general one, asking them to favor arms control and to avoid nuclear war. But the specific language of the question was promoted by the pacifists, in alliance with certain economic and political interest groups that had their own, rather more practical, aims to promote. But pacifism is the phenomenon to examine here.

There are two kinds of pacifism: the secular and the religious. Secular pacifism is morally trivial and easy to dismiss, an exercise in escapism. “I believe that the Russian people are so frightened of nuclear war,” writes Dr. Helen Caldicott, “that they would heave a momentous sigh of relief and would want their own leaders to follow America’s moral initiative toward nuclear disarmament.” Dr. Caldicott fails to suggest what the Russian people would do if “their own leaders” declined to follow these earnest desires. Mr. Jonathan Schell, author of a widely-distributed book title The Fate of the Earth, claims that “the defense of our nation, or the defense of liberty, or the defense of socialism, or the defense of whatever we happen to believe it” are morally negligible in contrast to the possibility–and he admits that it is only a possibility–of human extinction after nuclear war. In so arguing, he ignores an argument nearly three centuries old, made by one of the philosophers who formulated the modern doctrine of human rights. John Locke wrote, “I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.” “[H]e who attempts to get another Man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a state of war with him; It being to be understood as a Declaration of a Design upon his Life.” In this century, millions of Russians, Chinese, and others have learned that. Some of our most respected authorities on totalitarianism have not. A distinguished former State Department official would prefer to sacrifice liberty in the hope of preserving life. “Rather Red than dead,” he has insisted. He overlooks the power of modern technology, far more formidable than any known in Locke’s time, to destroy life after liberty is abandoned. So do our secular pacifists. While we wait for them to learn, we an home that their learning comes from peaceful consideration of history and not from violent experience.

Religious pacifism can be equally trivial and escapist. It can also rest on sincere faith and a courage fortified by faith. We have all heard numerous statements, made by clergymen, that partake of triviality and escapism. A local minister spoke at a forum shortly before the election; unwittingly imitating a well-known television `personality,’ he informed us that “Nuclear war is insane.” Having delivered himself of that insight, he went on to belabor it, insisting on what all of us have known for some time, namely, that a nuclear attack would devastate any country that suffered it. He concluded with an endorsement of the nuclear `freeze,’ without troubling to examine whether or not that policy would contribute even slightly to a lessening of the chances for nuclear war. Another minister was quoted in a local newspaper as endorsing an even more spectacular proposal: “I wish I could have just two hours alone with President Reagan. Someone has to have the courage to say, `Dismantle the Army, dismantle the Navy and the Air Force,’ and then stand ready to be martyrs before the world for the survival of the human race.” One can only hope that the minister will get his wish, as it would probably take at least two hours for the President to straighten him out. Mr. Reagan could begin by explaining to his reverend guest that a government has no right to make unwilling martyrs of its people as a gesture (and surely a preposterous one) toward human survival.

Nor does Christianity itself recommend martyrdom for the sake of human survival. Quite the contrary: Jesus rejects the fear of apocalypse. Recall the story told by Matthew: After condemning the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem, Jesus speaks privately to his disciples, a private speech made public by the written account of it. The disciples ask about the Second Coming, and Jesus replies, in part:
And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end.
For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes.
But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs.
Then they will deliver you up to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of My name.
And at that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another.
And many false prophets will arise, and will mislead many.
And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.
But the one who endures to the end, it is he who shall be saved. [Matthew 24.6-13]
Christian martyrdom is for the survival of souls, not for the physical survival of the human race. When clergymen preach fear of violent death to worried suburbanites, they imitate not Jesus but the noted seventeenth-century atheist, Thomas Hobbes.

Somewhat more sober Christians quote the Sermon on the Mount, which blesses peacemakers. “I say to you, do not resist him who is evil; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also” [Matthew 5.39]. But to bless peacemakers surely does not mean to curse the peace won by military deterrence. Nor does the Bible ever justify treating a military attack as if it were a slap on the face, teaching that would confuse slaughter with petty humiliation. Moreover, the New Testament speaks to individuals, not to nations. It does not claim to guide nation as a whole in their political conduct. As one writer puts it, “As a Christian, I am told to be read to turn the other cheek in response to aggression; I am not told to turn the other cheek of my neighbor when he is struck by someone else. If I myself choose to make a sacrifice, that may well be honorable. If I choose to sacrifice my wife and my child, who depend on me for their security, that certainly is not honorable.” [Philip Lawler: “The Bishops and the Bomb: The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence.” Washington, D. C.: The Heritage Foundation, 1982, p. 3].

Understanding Christianity as a primarily individual, not political religion in no way denies the prophesy of Isaiah:
They shall hammer their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not lift up sword against nation,
And never again will they learn war. [Isaiah 2.4]

This prophecy refers to the time when God intervenes directly in human events, the days of the Messiah when divine power overthrows the rule of human kings. While our religious pacifists are sometimes very nice people, we not confuse their interventions in human events with the interventions of God.

There is, nonetheless, a serious Christian pacifism discernible in this smog of fear, naïveté, and Scriptural misinterpretation. Perhaps its best contemporary formulation comes from the Mennonite scholar, John Howard Yoder, in his book The Politics of Jesus [Grand Rapids: William S. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972].

Yoder argues that “God will fight for us.” He observes that for the ancient Israelites, to believe was “to trust God for their survival as a people.” [E]ven when Israel uses the sword, in a most fearsome and destructive way, the victory is credited not to the prowess of the swordsmen” but to the “help” of God. The Biblical holy war was “more a miracle than a calculating instrument of politics”; Yoder defines “miracle” as “a cause for wonderment,” sidestepping the question of whether or not the miraculous contravenes nature.

Turning to the New Testament, Yoder observes “a strand of Gospel teaching that holds secular government to be “the province of the sovereignty of Satan.” This, of course, includes democratic government. In this formulation, we have no right either to participate in government or forcibly to rebel against it. Caesar’s things are Caesar’s, as well as Satan’s, and Caesar is welcome to them. This teaching contradicts both the traditional Christian doctrine of the `just war’ and the leftist doctrine of the `social gospel.’ “[T]he cross and not the sword, suffering and not brute power determine the meaning of history.”

Yoder clearly understands the implications of his interpretation, speaking of “the inevitable suffering of those whose only goal is to be faithful to that love which puts one at the mercy of one’s neighbor, which abandons claims to justice for oneself and for one’s own in an overriding concern for the reconciling of the adversary and the estranged.” He goes still further: He rejects the pacifism that says you can get what you want in this world without violence–the pacifism of Gandhi and King. He insists that as a Christian you must be ready to sacrifice what you want in this life, no matter how legitimate what you want may be, in order to avoid coercion of any kind, violent or nonviolent.

To the question posed by classical political philosophers–`Who rules?’–Yoder replies that God rules. “The spiritual and providential laws which we expect to see at work in the system,” he writes, “are as solid for the believer as are the laws of dialectical materialism for the Marxist.” He understands the command to love one’s enemy as a command to ally oneself with the one truly absolute Power. Only that Power, he contends, a Power identical to love, will prevail at the end of days.

The theological question raised by this serious Christian pacifism is simple to ask, far from simple to answer: Do the commands to love one’s enemy and to depend on God’s power mean that we abandon the forceful means of deterring war, thus tempting our enemy to commit great evil? Shall we depend on God not only primarily but exclusively? The ancient Israelites evidently depended on God primarily but not exclusively. Should Christians? We must leave this question to those more learned in Scripture than I.

We can do so, knowing that there is not one pacifist in twenty who conceives of pacifism in Yoder’s way. Most contemporary pacifists do indeed follow the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. These men, pacifists say, embodied a pacifism that worked. But one must ask, `How long did it work?’ The lives of both were ended by the violence they condemned. The mass movements they inspired never recovered. The reason for this is not hard to see, One must have something better than a mass movement in order to defend justice. For that, we need institutions that can survive the inevitable mediocrity of the majority who rule. Pacifism cannot survive mediocrity. It requires the exceptional; it requires something that approaches a combination of saintliness and cunning. This is rare, and the defenseless nature of pacifism itself results in the eventual destruction of that rarity.

We can come away from our examination of pacifism with a renewed understanding of the worth of our political institutions. Without necessarily making a political religion of our esteem for them, we can esteem them for providing a defense against threats to our lives and our liberty.

Those of you familiar with mythology will know of a beast called the griffin, part lion and part eagle. In the Middle Ages the griffin symbolized absolute duality–Savior and Antichrist. We live today as never before under the sign of a new griffin, a griffin belonging to this world: the technology of modern science, which both enhances and threatens our lives and our liberty. Behind modern science we find modern political philosophy, a philosophy that commends to us the task of using nature to conquer nature, including human nature. Because a philosophy underlies the science that underlies technology, the passion of mass movements cannot get us very far. It is no substitute for reason. Most of the materials for our future support and defense must be furnished by the reasoned examination of ourselves–our policies, our thoughts, our institutions–and by the reasoned examination of our adversary’s policies, thoughts, and institutions.

You will recall that I began by asking, `How shall we perpetuate peace?’ In the larger sense, the perpetuation of peace requires the sort of examination I just proposed. In the immediate sense, one might say there is no peace to perpetuate, as a look at any map from 1945 and one of today will confirm. But there is peace in terms of nuclear weapons, and I see no means of perpetuating it beyond maintaining forces capable of deterring Soviet attack. What that will require is, of course, subject to debate.

 

2016 NOTE: Just to clear up a minor, and comical, feature of this talk, the joke about the “well-known television `personality'” whose catchphrase I parodied referred to a commercial for a bargain-basement electronics store called “Crazy Eddie’s.” The actor who played Crazy Eddie in the omnipresent TV spots always ended his pitch with the tagline, “At Crazy Eddie’s, the prices are insane!” My joke was actually much more apt than I knew. Several years later, Crazy Eddie’s was driven into bankruptcy for fraudulent business practices; as with the `freeze’ movement, sophistry had its day but finally went down to defeat.