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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Amy Gutmann: Identity in Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

 

‘Identity politics’ has its partisans. Citizens in democratic republics often organize around “ethnicity, race, nationality, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, age, ideology, and other social markers,” forming “identity groups” intended to exert political influence on such regimes. Gutmann wants to understand what this means for democracy—whether such organizations are good or bad when it comes to securing “democratic justice.”

Identity groups arise whenever a regime respects individuals’ “freedom of association”; indeed, “a society that prevents identity groups from forming is a tyranny.” Many modern tyrannies have attempted to eradicate identity groups altogether, earning the pejorative title, ‘totalitarian.’ Gutmann defines democracy as a regime animated by three principles: civic equality, liberty, and opportunity. Civic equality means “the obligation of democracies to treat all individuals as equal agents in democratic politics and support the conditions that are necessary for their equal treatment as citizens.” Equal freedom means “the obligation of a democratic government to respect the liberty of all individuals to live their own lives as they see fit consistent with the equal liberty of others.” Basic opportunity means “the capacity of individuals to live a decent life with a fair chance to choose among their preferred ways of life.” In terms of democratic justice, then, identity groups “are not the ultimate source of value in any democracy committed to equal regard for individuals,” but neither are they necessarily a source of evil. “Equal regard for individuals—not identity groups—is fundamental to democratic justice.” Identity groups that regard themselves as the ultimate source of value might easily “subordinate the civil equality and equal freedom of persons (inside or outside the group) to their cause” by, among other things, denying individuals the right “to live their lives as they see fit.” 

Nonetheless, identity groups may have value in democracies. If the moral principles esteemed by the group comport with individual freedom, the group will strengthen members’ commitment to that. Also, “numbers count in democratic politics,” so individual members of identity groups will exercise more influence within the regime than they could if they acted alone. In organizing themselves this way, citizens can better secure their civic equality, their freedoms, and their opportunities. Finally, “even when identity groups do not combat injustice, as long as they do not inflict it, they can be valued and valuable for the mutually supportive relationships that they provide their members.”

Identity groups may be organized or unorganized, inside or outside government institutions, based on a chosen (e.g., an ideology) or unchosen (race) characteristic. Identity groups are not the same as interest groups. An interest group “organizes around a shared instrumental interest”; its members may not ‘identify with’ one another for any other reason. The interests they pursue precede the formation of the group; members aggregate to secure something they want. Identity group politics centers on “a sense of who people are.” Though distinct, interests and identity usually find themselves in “close connection.” “Democratic politics is bound up with both how people identify themselves and what they therefore want”; group identities and interests often reinforce one another, as seen in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. 

Although the civil rights movement sought reforms consistent with democratic justice, their enemies in the Ku Klux Klan, equally an identity group, did not. As the example shows, identity groups may or may not “impede democratic justice.” “When mutual identification entails putting considerations of group identity above considerations of justice…identity group politics is morally suspect.” This has often been the case—so much so, that critics of identity politics charge that it endangers democracy itself by discouraging compromise, encouraging sectarianism, and making too much of characteristics not chosen but imposed by accidents of birth. On the other side, partisans of multicultural politics often present themselves as “preoccupied with supporting particularistic identities and interests,” ignoring or denying “egalitarian principles” central to democracy. 

Gutmann tellingly cites James Madison on faction. Madison defines a faction as any group that opposes the public good—an interest group or, for that matter, identity group which practices and preaches injustice. In the tenth Federalist, Madison famously insists that since factions are to liberty what fire is to air, it is futile to destroy liberty in an attempt to stamp out injustice. For Gutmann, who defines identity groups not as necessarily factitious but as neither good nor bad as such, “identity politics is an important manifestation” of the liberty Madison defends. And the regime of democratic republicanism deserves defense. It is not a neutral political instrument but a way of “institutionaliz[ing] in politics a more ethical treatment of individuals than the alternatives to democracy, which range from benevolent to malevolent autocracies and oligarchies.” Therefore, “identity groups need to be assessed by the same standards that one would apply to any groups that make political claims and exert political influence in democracies.”

In her case, these standards inhere not in natural rights of individuals but in civic equality. “There is no ethically neutral place to evaluate the contribution of identity groups to democratic societies, nor would a neutral place be desirable if it were available.” Rather, the regime of democracy “can and ideally should be a deliberative democracy, offering opportunities for its citizens to deliberate about the content of democratic justice and to defend their best understanding of justice at any given time.” This, she seems to believe, makes it unnecessary to conceive of rights as natural, although they might not be historical in the ‘ontological,’ Hegelian and Marxist sense of a rationally ascertainable and predictable course of events that determines the best understanding of justice at any given time. That is, she emphasizes the deliberative or prudential dimension of reasoning, not its theoretical or (putatively) scientific dimension. She may not consider nature as anything but ethically neutral, and thus an unfit source of moral principles.

Far from being a historical determinist, Gutmann considers a “just democracy” a regime that “respects the ethical agency of individuals”; “since individuals are the ultimate source of ethical value, respect for their ethical agency is a basic good.” Such agency has two components: “the capacity to live one’s own life as one sees fit consistent with respecting equal freedom for others,” and “the capacity to contribute to the justice of one’s society and one’s world.” Political ethics in a democratic regime consists of “a public commitment to treating individuals as ethical agents,” neither as “atomistic individuals” with no social or political obligations to one another nor as cells in a larger organism, with no capacity to deliberate and to choose. Civic equality, equal freedom, and basic opportunities serve as “preconditions of a fair democratic process” but also stand as “valuable in their own right as expressions of the freedom and equality of individual persons as ethical agents.” 

For this reason, Gutmann cautions against thinking that all identities are group identities in a morally or politically relevant sense. My personality surely ranks as part of my identity, but I don’t organize a group based upon it. “Wise or foolish, careful or careless, neat or sloppy, serious or light-hearted,” I am unlikely to reach out to my fellows to organize politically on such bases. On one occasion, a frustrated assistant of President Charles de Gaulle slammed down the receiver of a telephone, shouting, “Death to all fools!” De Gaulle happened to be walking by and intoned, “Ah, Monsieur, what a vast project you propose.” Surely too vast even for the Gaullist politics of grandeur.

Gutmann devotes one chapter to each of what she considers the four main identity groups: cultural, associational, ascriptive, and religious. A cultural identity group “represents a way of life that is (close to) ‘encompassing’ or ‘comprehensive'”; in Aristotelian terms, it is a regime with the sovereignty subtracted. As such, one’s culture forms a part of ‘who a person is.’ When any person engages in democratic politics, he therefore brings his culture with him, often making claims on his fellow citizens on behalf of that culture. And the group he belongs to which organizes itself around the shared culture will give those claims more political heft. Since “democratic politics typically depends on some dominant culture that includes a common language (or languages), school curricula, occupations, ceremonies and holidays, and even architectural styles, that are not culturally neutral,” a minority culture will pursue ways to defend itself, especially if the dominant culture “is alien and therefore alienating to them.” Members will demand “equal freedom and respect” from members of the dominant culture. Yet no large, modern democratic regime can fully accommodate all claims of all the minority cultures within its territory, since democracies need citizens who can speak with one another in order “to act coherently” and to maintain political union. This begs the question, “What kind of political claims on behalf of cultural identity groups are justified in democracies, and why?”

Gutmann agrees with cultural identitarians when they assert that cultures provide “publicly important goods” to a democratic regime. “Every person needs a context of choice”; a culture or way of life provides such a context, although it also narrows it by defining the range of choices consistent with that way. The question for democrats then becomes, how narrow is that range of choice? And does a given culture “offer equal freedom to its members”? That is, “the state and the dominant public culture that it supports, both indirectly and directly, cannot be culturally neutral.” What claims made by organized cultural minorities can it accept and what claims must it reject?

As a democrat and a feminist, Gutmann respects many of the claims made by the Pueblo tribe in defense of its cultural practices. But one of those practices denies civic equality to women. A United States District Court sided with the Pueblo tribal council against Pueblo women who brought a lawsuit against the council under the U. S. Voting Rights Act and the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. The Court ruled that “to abrogate tribal decisions, particularly in the delicate area of membership, for whatever ‘good’ reasons, is to destroy cultural identity under the guise of saving it.” Gutmann judges this “a particularly suspect argument in the context of a case brought by women to claim their civic equality as Pueblo.” The Court granted absolute sovereignty to a cultural group which denies a fundamental principle of the democratic regime which should exercise sovereignty over it in the name of that principle. “Respect for culture cannot mean deference to whatever the established authorities of that culture deem right,” although there may be prudential reasons for leaving well enough alone if “trying to resist injustice would likely be futile or counterproductive.” In the not-so-distant past, some Amerindians engaged in slavery, cannibalism, and torture; had these practices persisted into the late twentieth century, the minds of our august justices might have seen what they were arguing more clearly and, one hopes, argued differently.

“Legitimate political sovereignty needs to rest somewhere.” That being so, “what degree of sovereignty should any group be granted, and by what standards may its sovereignty be limited…out of respect for individual rights?” Gutmann answers that sovereignty seldom is, and never should be, absolute. “A cultural perspective goes awry at the start if it rests on the premise that a single culture encompasses the identity of the individuals who are its members,” as if cultures were “homogeneous wholes.” As a matter of fact, some members of every culture will “imagine beyond it” even as they use the “resources” of that culture to do so. Just as a minority culture may rightly oppose a democratic majority that makes “oppressive claims” upon it, so a democratic majority may rightly oppose a minority culture that oppresses its members, recognizing them as “fellow persons who can reciprocally recognize the basic freedom and civic equality of all persons, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, and nationality.”

“If there is a right to culture, on democratic grounds, it must be an individual right to shape one’s own identity, partly through cultural affiliations.” There is no “fundamental moral standing to a group qua group” because “once we treat a cultural group as having fundamental moral standing, we are logically led to subordinate the claims of individuals to the morally fundamental group.” Indeed, “the right to oppose cultural practices that violate basic rights is as fundamental any right within a democracy.” If Gutmann were a natural-rights liberal, this distinction would be easy to make, but because she is not, she needs to base her liberalism what might be termed cross-culturalism.  

Against Judith Butler, who accuses human rights advocates as “unjustifiably privileging a particular culture—the culture of human rights—over all others,” denying that any “external standards by which to judge any culture” exist, except “the standards of another culture,” Gutmann replies that “critics of oppressive cultural practices need not claim to stand above other cultures.” Rather, in upholding human rights, democrats in fact “stand inside cultures,” but they “stand inside many cultures.” There are democrats in ‘the West’ but there are also democrats in ‘the East,’ democrats in the United States, China, Russia, Iran, Brazil, Germany, Zaire, and partisans of autocracy and of oligarchy in all those places, as well. This is because the “rights culture” isn’t really a culture at all. It has no common language or literature, no common visual art or music, no distinguishable way of dressing, celebrating, or mourning. “Human rights doctrine is multicultural,” and “so is its rejection,” whether by Chinese or Russian today, Japanese or German yesterday. 

“Democratic standards are shared by particular cultures that can defend human rights in their own way.” There likely will be occasions when these differing ways seem to contradict one another in ways that also contradict those standards. In these instances, “democratic deliberation across cultures about the content of human rights is one way of furthering our understanding.” 

Gutmann next moves to the claims of “associational” identity groups, the kind Tocqueville esteemed as checks on majority tyranny. Membership in these is entirely voluntary. It is good for a number of reasons, among them being that they promote a political way of life, that is, a life animated by “reciprocity,” including “mutual aid.” Care must be taken to ensure that such groups do not violate “the conditions of equal freedom of association” by excluding those who wish to join them “out of prejudice.”

Gutmann affirms Tocqueville’s claim that voluntary associations have value in democratic regimes. They do indeed support liberty—specifically, the liberty of persons to “identify themselves as they themselves see fit rather than as government—or any other powerful agent in society—determines for them.”  They “are an antidote to atomistic individualism that is completely consistent with a free society.”

Even groups which “reject democratic values” may be tolerated in a democracy so long as they do not inflict injustice on other persons or groups. You are free to join the International Monarchist Society (if there is one), so long as you don’t oppress anyone who is either a member or a non-member of it. A criterion for judging whether an association has overstepped this limit is whether or not a member can “exit it and still live a decent life.” Leaving the United Auto Workers imposes more hardship than leaving the American Fern Society.

Gutmann seeks a mean between the extreme of removing the freedom of association altogether by “forcing all associations to include anyone who wants to join” and the extreme of “permit[ting] all voluntary associations to exclude would-be members on any grounds.” The UAW should be entitled to discipline any member who takes bribes from an auto manufacturer in order to induce him to take a weaker position when bargaining over a contract; it should not be entitled to exclude someone from membership on the basis of race, class, gender or any other characteristic irrelevant to the democratically legitimate purposes of the organization. “Democratically legitimate purposes” are those which do not obstruct “civic equality.” 

Gutmann considers two Supreme Court cases centered on policies of voluntary groups. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), the plaintiff challenged the Jaycees’ denial of membership to women on the grounds of nondiscrimination. An association of businessmen, the Jaycees provide what she describes as a “public good,” namely “professional contacts.” Businesswomen were being denied the opportunity to ‘network’ on equal terms with businessmen. It is of course questionable whether the opportunity to do business deals in a social setting is a public good at all. It looks rather like a private good, a setting for one-on-one transactions. Be that as it may, Gutman sets down three “features of discriminatory exclusion [that] create a strong case for public intervention”: that “the exclusion must be discriminatory based on false or statistical stereotyping”—in this case, that women somehow have no interest or ability to engage in commerce; that “the discriminatory exclusion occurs in a public realm and is connected to the distribution of a public good”; and that “the voluntary association is not primarily defined by its dedication to an expressive purpose,” by which she means the expression of opinions, the restriction of which would violate the First Amendment. On the most dubious point, Gutmann claims that, according to “their own stated purposes,” the Jaycees aimed at providing and promoting the skills of “solicitation and management” as public goods, presumably meaning that they were serving the public good by those aims. If so, would it have made a difference if the Jaycees had simply claimed to promote the business interests of their members, with no rhetoric about serving the public good at all? In other words, as Gutmann rightly asks, “How broadly should we construe the realm of public goods and services?”

In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), the plaintiff objected to the Boy Scouts’ exclusion of openly homosexual boys and men from their organization. The Court upheld the Boy Scouts’ right to do so, but Gutmann argues that while homosexual behavior might be a criterion for exclusion, homosexual identity should not be. Until (for example) a homosexual man does something “that justifies denying [him his] equal freedom or civic equality,” such as committing sodomy with underage boys, he should not be barred from membership. She acknowledges a complication. “What makes the Boy Scouts case both difficult and troubling is that free identity expression is centrally at stake on both sides,” necessitating some rational “ranking” of “the competing values of free expressive association”—the Boy Scouts uphold the principle of being “morally straight”—and “freedom from discrimination.” Gutmann’s preferred solution here is to permit the Boy Scouts to continue their policy but to deny them any government support, as for example the use of public-school buildings for their meetings. Generally, “the more freedom that expressive associations have to discriminate, the less state support they should receive beyond the support of legal toleration.” She does not consider the possibility that lawsuits of this sort are intended to advance the claim that homosexuality and homosexual activity are morally straight, that the plaintiffs intend precisely to override “free expressive association,” just as she stands ready to override it in the case of the Jaycees.  

She concludes her discussion on voluntary associations by citing “an underappreciated fact.” Between 1960 and 1990, membership in such associations declined. At the same time, Americans were “becoming more tolerant by all available measures,” in their opinions and in their actions. She doesn’t seem much to mind the trade-off, although it may evidence the increased bureaucratization of American life, threatening the liberty she esteems. See Tocqueville on the perils of democratic despotism.

Things get more interesting when Gutmann turns to considering “ascriptive” identity. “What distinguishes ascriptive identity groups is that they organize around characteristics that are largely beyond people’s ability to choose, such as race, gender, physical handicap, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and nationality.” Every one of those categories is natural or has roots in nature. One can make choices in relation to them, but only to the extent of deciding whether to join or leave an organization centered on them in some way. One can base that choice on whether or not a particular organization is “justice-friendly.”

Ascriptive identity groups closely resemble interest groups because ascriptive identity and material interests intermingle in “dynamic interaction.” After all, “people’s interests and understanding of their interests are as identity-driven as their identities are interest-driven”; “ascriptive identities inform peoples interests.” “Even in the extreme case of someone who adopts an ascriptive identity that he had never before seriously considered as his group identity in order to make a living”—at the risk of unkindness, one may think of Barack Obama—the “identity plays a causally important and independent role in shaping how the living is pursued.”

Given the intimate bond between ascriptive identity and self-interest, ascriptive identity groups can still be justice-friendly if they “encourage subordinated individuals to organize and stand up for themselves,” admit members of other ascriptive groups into their organization, and form coalitions with other groups in pursuit of “the general cause of democratic justice.” During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, that is of course exactly what the NAACP and other organizations did, with substantial effect. More, “there is no good reason why obligations to fight injustice should be placed first and foremost at the feet of members of disadvantaged groups.” Other justice-friendly groups should seek to join them.

By contrast, when ascriptive groups are “least successful, they create new (or deeper) divisions among the disadvantaged and convey the dangerous impression that people need only band together on the basis of their ascriptive identities and not on the basis of their common humanity or a commitment to fighting injustice whoever its victims happen to be.” The virulent response of the recent Black Lives Matter operatives to the slogan “All Lives Matter” may be taken as a case in point, and an unsurprising one, given BLM’s origins in neo-Marxism.

Just or unjust, to what extent do ascriptive identity organizations really represent the groups they claim to represent? For example, how many American women endorse the policies propounded by the National Organization of Women? Obviously, no such organization can represent the opinions of all those mentioned in its grand title. Therefore, it should “recognize a burden of representation to those individuals who are associated involuntarily with the group” by scrupulous “avoidance of injustice.” The temptation to treat members of out-groups roughly should be resisted; the temptation to deal roughly with members of their own group who do not fully concur with the organization’s principles and policies should be resisted even more. Closely related to this danger is the tendency to urge group members to “take pride” in their identity. “What sense does it make to take pride in an involuntary identity?” None whatsoever: If justice requires that I not be blamed for an identity I didn’t choose, then I cannot claim credit for it, either. Rather, “the appropriate object of pride is not the ascriptive identity in itself but rather the identity’s manifestation of dignified, self-respecting personhood, the personhood of someone who has overcome social obstacles because of an ascriptive identity.”

Given the fact that injustice “is a moral blight on democracy, and therefore on everyone’s life within it”— one “especially great on the lives of people who materially benefit from injustice but do nothing to combat it”— there is a more comprehensive form of identification than those favored by particularistic identitarians. Individuals are in fact “bound up with living in a more just society,” and should recognize “that contributing without undue sacrifice to making society more just will improve their own lives.” Without acknowledging it, quite possibly without knowing it, Gutmann here makes exactly the same kind of argument George Washington liked to make: Your interests and the interests of your country very often cohere with your moral duties. As she puts it, “our interests are bound up with our identification with other people, and our identification with other people makes us want to contribute to making our society more just.”

However her relations with America’s first president may stand, Gutmann leaves no doubt that she knows the Golden Rule: “We can perceive it to be in our own interest to contribute to fighting injustice insofar as we identify with other people, and therefore with a society that treats other people justly, as we wish to be treated ourselves.” This takes her to the interesting point I alluded to: “Humanity itself is an ascriptive identity, identification with which can serve the cause of justice.” Human beings form a natural species, to which all capable of reading her book belong. Since “democratic justice cannot leave anyone out of its reach,” it requires “identification with humanity and a commitment to justice.” Very well then. Humanity is natural. Justice is right. Put them together, and they spell out ‘natural right.’ For all her ‘deontological,’ Rawlsian gesturing, an attempt to drive out nature with a pitchfork, Gutmann finds herself brought to witness nature’s return.

Following reason, she devotes the final main chapter to revelation. Natural-right political philosophy solves the religio-political problem by permitting any religious practice that doesn’t violate natural rights. A congregation of pious Aztecs are welcome, provided that they refrain from sacrificing virgin girls to the Sun God, a ceremony violative of the natural right to life. In terms of U. S. constitutional law, this has meant free exercise of religion combined with separation of church and state, which Gutmann calls “two-way protection” of human rights. 

Her primary interest is in defining and protecting the right to conscience. This is because no more personal, no more individual aspect of religion exists. Further, conscience exists in the souls of religious and non-religious persons alike, forming a commonality (based, again, on human nature) between citizens who otherwise might find little in common. Further still, my conscience likely differs from yours, which means that if we are to live together as fellow citizens, we need to address that fact. Gutmann resolves this latter difficulty by appealing to politics as Aristotle defines it, as “reciprocity.” As an observer of democracy in the Greece of his time, Aristotle didn’t much associate reciprocity, ruling and being ruled, with that regime because in his experience the many who were poor inclined to seek unjust rule over the few who were rich. Gutmann’s modern-liberal understanding of democracy enables her to think of it more along the lines of what Aristotle calls a mixed regime, which does indeed engage in political or reciprocal rule.

“Rather than deny the truth of revelation for political purposes, democrats” of Gutmann’s persuasion “argue that revelation by itself cannot justify a coercive law because it cannot reasonably expect the public assent of citizens who have not experienced it and do not share the religious faith of those who take its dictates on faith.” What democrats can do is to acknowledge those religious truths which “can be defended by publicly accessible arguments,” suitable for democratic deliberation. “Then it is the argumentative force of a revelation, judged in nonrevelatory terms, that is doing the justificatory work for democratic purposes, not the revelation itself.” This is essentially where natural right puts the matter.

Given the fact that natural right no longer finds wide acceptance of modern liberal democracies, and especially not in universities, Gutmann appeals once again to Rawls, who “recommends the democratic ideal” because it lacks a “necessary foundation in any comprehensive philosophy” but instead overlaps “with all reasonable philosophies, where reasonable philosophies include religious ones.” Because it appeals to reason, this “ideal”—which Rawls arrives at with ‘deontological’ legerdemain—rules out fanaticism religious and secular, ‘Islamist’ and Leninist alike. “Reasonable moral faith” can be held by “religious or secular persons, so long as they are democrats”—a clever reworking of Kant’s famous sentence in his Perpetual Peace, “the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils, so long as they possess understanding.” True, faith “goes beyond reason, but reasonable faith is compatible with what the best methods of reasoning can deliver at any time.” And it is compatible with reciprocity, which “does not require agreement among citizens or arguments on the same secular or religious terms.”

Why Rawls, instead of Aristotle ‘all the way down,’ as the saying goes? It seems that Gutmann inclines to the Humean claim that you can’t derive the moral ‘ought’ from the natural ‘is.’ “A purely empiricist position would yield no commitment to democratic justice or to treating people as civic equals, since evidence and log alone are morally inconclusive”; “empiricism is amoral” and empiricism is the way of modern natural science. Whether empiricism suffices to understand human beings insofar as they are natural beings is a question Hume takes to have been settled.

In practical terms, Guttmann (following Rawls) doesn’t care so much whether a democracy respects “ethical personhood” as seen in conscience because conscience is taken to originate in God or nature or reason or “human individuality itself,” so long as the regime understands that such respect is indispensable to its existence. “Conscience and democracy share a fundamental premise: persons are ethical subjects.” 

That being so, how shall democracies deal with the fact that ethical subjects often conscientiously disagree with one another? How can democracy justly resolve the rational contradictions that arise from the free exercise of conscience? Guttman answers that whereas “respect for conscience is a moral good because it reflects respect for the ethical identity of persons, a respect that democratic governments cannot consistently reject,” such respect “cannot be an absolute value for democratic governments because it can conflict with other basic democratic principles such as equal liberty.” The fact that one conscience may call for war and another call for peace proves that “conscience is ethically fallible.” And so is “democratic decision-making,” which generates laws and policies individuals may conscientiously endorse or oppose. Once again, there needs to be politics, reciprocity, deliberation—mutual testing of arguments and counterarguments in the public square.

“The great challenge to democratic governments is to decide when conscientious objection should be accommodated, even though the law in question is legitimate.” One answer to the challenge would be to say ‘Never.’ Such an accommodation would smooth the slippery slope toward anarchy. The opposite answer would be ‘Always,’ or at least whenever the objector doesn’t reject “a basic democratic principle” such as civic equality or equal freedom.

The first answer would track a strict separation of ‘church’ and ‘state.’ As Locke recommended, a conscientious objector should be free to defy the law so long as he accepts the punishment established for that defiance. Gutmann considers this too harsh. “A stable democratic state can and should exempt conscientious citizens from some legitimate law and in so doing resect their conscientious objection,” and therefore their ‘personhood,’ “without harming other innocent people.” If strict separationists worry that some will fake conscientiousness in order to evade the law—a common enough occurrence during the Vietnam War—then the regime can establish boards of review requiring of the objector some plausible proof of his conscientiousness, such as “past actions and affiliations” indicating “that they hold a set of conscientious beliefs that can qualify them for the status of conscientious objector.” While “not a foolproof test”—the review board is attempting to ascertain the inner character of another human being”—it is fair enough for government work. 

The second answer, maximizing “accommodation of conscience” by the regime, would fail to “reciprocally protect other citizens of the state from the harms that can come from conscience.” Why should my conscientious objection to a war, or to war generally, result in your conscription? Those who would maximize a government’s accommodation of conscience “are reluctant to recognize is that a democratic government”—even a democratic government—cannot do that “without undermining the legitimate purposes of democratic government”—its need to defend the country against foreign attack or civil disorder, its need to collect revenues, and the like. They “do not expect conscientious citizens to support democracy supports them, by abiding by laws that are legitimate and democratically elected.” 

To avoid the tyranny of democracy over individuals, or the tyranny of individuals over democracy, one needs not a Berlin Wall of separation of church and state, or not wall of separation at all, but “a permeable wall of separation” whereby conscience and democracy limit one another. Gutmann’s democracy will “accommodate conscientious dissenters when doing so does not discriminate against other conscientious dissenters or undermine the legitimate purpose of the law,” thereby publicly acknowledging “the centrality of ethical commitments to the identity of persons, and the contribution that those commitments can make to democracy.” Such “reciprocity is the lifeblood of democratic justice.”

In conclusion, Gutmann remarks, “without ethical precepts to guide group identity, members of groups are blind and can just as easily tyrannize over others as aid them. When guided by ethical precepts, individuals can enlist group identity as a justifiable means for organizing in democratic politics.” Her emphasis on the classical understanding of regimes and of politics as ruling and being ruled in turn raises her treatment of ‘identity politics’ well above most of the other available accounts written in the past couple of decades.