James Miller: Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

 

From his early writings on Rousseau and on America’s ‘New Left’ of the 1960s to his brilliant study of Michel Foucault [1], James Miller’s scholarship has had two characteristic features. One is ‘methodological.’  He seeks to understand political thinkers by combining textual exegesis with biographical research, titling his first book (for example) Rousseau, Dreamer of Democracy, not Rousseau’s Political Philosophy. He never reduces the thinker to the work or the work to the thinker, but presents both in one coherent picture. In this, he resembles Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of the Eminent Philosophers he has indeed brought out in a beautiful new edition, complete with extensive notes and illustrations. Second, in terms of the substance or guiding principle of his work, he displays a commitment to justice understood ‘democratically,’ as equality. This centers his thought on democracy—both as a regime (as it has been understood by most writers) and as a social condition existing in the confines of the modern state. Democracy has remained ‘his’ theme, throughout his life in thought.

But can democracy work? And what exactly is it? Something called democracy has proven persistent, if only “as an article of faith or a figment of modern ideology.” Indeed, “virtually every existing political regime today claims to embody some form of democracy”—from Putin’s Russia to Kim’s North Korea to our United States of America, whose current chief executive rode to victory on a wave of sentiment often described as populist.

Given this wild diversity of opinions and definitions, Miller proceeds with a sort of Socratic combination of caution and daring, gathering the several most influential definitions of democracy and bringing them into dialectical confrontation with one another. Not for him are the illusions of historical dialectic, which bring scholars to imagine a gradual worldwide evolution of humanity toward democracy. To think of democracy that way is to succumb to moral complacency and intellectual laziness, expecting ‘history’ to do the work for you.

With Aristotle, Miller identifies the underlying principle of democracy as equality, which may or may not associate itself with liberty. This begs the question of what equality is, or what kind of equality ‘democrats’ want. The natural equality of all human beings to certain unalienable rights? The economic equality of a communal life animated by the principle, ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his need? The social equality of a community in which there is no ‘ruling class’? The political equality of one citizen, one vote on public policies? Some combination of these? Consistent with his question concerning the practicability of democracy, Miller answers these questions not by theorizing but by consulting the historical practices of those who have called themselves democrats. “Democracy before the French Revolution was generally held to be a fool’s paradise, or worse.” It was the Jacobins, borrowing their theories from Rousseau, who implemented the first modern democracy in the form of “direct democracy in local assemblies, now and then augmented through armed insurrections.” The movement then split into what would turn out to be the two characteristic, rival variations on the democratic theme: representative democracy, roughly modeled on examples in the American states; and democratic dictatorship—purportedly temporary—intended “to preserve the possibility of building a more enduring form of representative democracy once the revolution was complete and law and order were restored.”

Tocqueville famously registered this schism in the democratic movement in arguing that democracy—which he defined not as a regime so much as a social condition of equality (by which he meant a society without a ruling class)—could have one of two regimes—republicanism or despotism. Tocqueville saw American democracy as a political regime only in the small setting of the New England town meeting, within a large modern state but never its ruling form. This divergence between society and state, civil-social ‘regime’ and political regime, is the source of Miller’s question, Can democracy work, “especially in complex modern societies?” Today, although what’s been called ‘liberalism’ finds many challengers in and outside the commercial republics, “democracy as furious dissent flourishes as rarely before, in vivid and vehement outbursts of anger at remote elites and shadowy enemies.” Just about everyone this side of the Iranian mullahs “now claim to represent the will of a sovereign people” as the morally legitimizing principle of their claim to political authority.

Miller very sensibly distinguishes democracy from liberalism, observing that “democracy, when it first appeared in Greece, had nothing to do, either in theory or in practice, with any such modern conception as liberalism.” Athenian democracy killed Socrates—the sort of thing liberalism was formulated to prevent. In addition to decriminalizing philosophy, modern liberalism inclined to locate the final moral-political authority in natural law and natural right; a liberal wants a political regime that secures the natural right to liberty, among other natural rights. But modern democracy pointed instead either to “Rousseau’s concept of the general will,” which “has no necessary connection to liberalism,” or, earlier, to sixteenth-century Protestant notions of popular sovereignty, based squarely on doctrines of right religion, not on religious toleration. “A majority of voters in a modern representative democracy may very well support policies that are explicitly illiberal, as some Americans fear had happened after the election in 2016 of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States—and, it might be added, as some Americans fear when university administrators quail before the demands of the Leftist agitators who call Trump and his supporters fascists, a rhetorical move not unknown to both the Old and the New Left.

Given these broils, Miller remarks, “I probably feel more proud of the American accomplishment in this context than I did as a young man” because “I have lived long enough to appreciate the fragility of political institutions that are responsible to citizens, however limited that responsiveness may currently be.” Representative or republican government instead of direct democracy; organized political parties; “the polyglot expansion of our citizenry as a whole”: All these features of the American regime make the United States “the world’s most striking ongoing experiment in cosmopolitan self-government.” There is something to the claim of ‘American exceptionalism,’ yet. Miller will not cede that claim to the ‘Right.’

He devotes his next three chapters to three case studies, as it were, in democratic politics: ancient Athens, modern France, and the United States. Ruling a small place about the size of Rhode Island with a resident population of about 300,000, of which ten percent were citizens sharing rule (the politeuma, as Aristotle would say), ancient Athenian democracy saw direct and active participation on rule. Adult male citizens held forty Assembly meetings annually and all political offices were held by those citizens, selected not by voting but by lot—the most democratic means of election. What is more, the regime lasted for about a century, with one important interruption by the Thirty Tyrants; not internal faction (admittedly serious) but foreign conquest by Macedonia put the ax to it, and even then the name if not the practice of democracy survived well into the Hellenistic period. Miller suggests that it wasn’t democracy itself that weakened Athens sufficiently to leave it vulnerable to the Macedonians but a narrowing of the criteria for citizenship, which stoked factionalism.

What were the features of this regime? Its founder, Cleisthenes, opened membership in the Ekklesia or Assembly to all “free-born males over the age of twenty-one, with a native Athenian father, no matter how poor.” Cleisthenes also took advantage of the modest size of Athens. He centralized political authority, weakened the “few wealthy families who worshiped a divine ancestor and controlled the relevant priestly offices,” and designed a set of ten civic units he called tribes. He gave each tribe a new divine hero to worship and drew the members of each tribe from the several geographical regions of Attica. Infantry troops were also organized according to these newly formed tribes, and all freeborn Athenian men were required to serve before they could take their place in the Assembly. As a check on popular-majoritarian passions, Cleisthenes instituted the Council of 500, in which all tribes were equally represented, which prepared the Assembly’s agenda and audited all city officials, awarded contracts for public works, and supervised Athenian finances, military forces, welfare system, coinage, weights and measures, capital criminal cases (tried by citizen-jurors unencumbered by debt), and foreign policy. Yet it too was elected by lot, and so remained democratic. “By the time that Pericles emerged as the city’s undisputed leader [in the mid-fifth century BC], Athens had amassed the eastern Mediterranean’s most feared military machine, an armada of battleships backed up by a large infantry.”

This was anything but a regime dedicated to the protection of individual liberty. Miller quotes the noted historian M. I. Finley: “Freedom meant the rule of law and participation in the decision-making process, not the possession of inalienable rights.” Such critics as Plato and Thucydides charged that democracy in Athens consisted of “a collective tyranny of the majority”—a majority, moreover, swayed by flattering demagogues and swaggering military chieftains who captured the imagination and fired the indignation of the citizenry. Although “the rise of democracy in Athens coincided with the birth of philosophy as a distinctive way of life,” that same democracy threatened philosophers with exile or death if they offended the politeuma. With its carefully managed civil religion and resultant homonomia or like-mindedness, ‘the many’ were entirely capable of moving against such an odd fellow as Socrates. The gods of the city were not to be mocked, and neither were the gods’ human devotees. “Aristotle’s famous assertion that man is a political animal certainly applied to the citizens of fourth-century Athens.”

As a member of the Students for Democratic Society in the 1960s, Miller found in “this active and direct form of democracy” an inspiring alternative to American representative government, especially as then weighed down by bureaucracies military and civil. “A wish for a more perfect democracy was part of what first inspired my interest in both radical activism and political philosophy.” He continues to esteem the importance of citizen participation in government as a means of “forg[ing] a shared civic culture,” but he also now recognizes that such a culture in no way precludes stasis—conflicts yielding”faction, sedition, even civil war.” A politeuma consisting of ex-soldiers may result in “a certain fear of non-conformity” and in foreign war and imperial ambition. There’s a thing or two to be said in favor of James Madison and the republican regime he helped to design.

Democracy as a political regime can survive and even thrive for a fairly long time in a small political community, a polis or ‘city-state.’ There, centralization of political authority need not lead to a substantial bureaucracy, an oligarchy claiming to rule on the basis of its status as a sort of aristocracy or ‘meritocracy.’ In the much larger modern state, centralization exerts pressure to bureaucratize authority, and thus to compromise democracy. And of course a truly democratic (as distinct from republican/representative) ‘national’ assembly becomes physically impossible in a large place; even today, a ‘virtual’ assembly, constructed on the Internet, might raise many reasonable suspicions, and in any case could hardly capture the personal, ‘face-to-face’ ethos of democracy in Athens, where even philosophers were known by name, for better or for worse. Here the French experience proves (as any child of the American ‘Sixties might say) relevant.

In politics, spontaneity is a scarce commodity, and democratic politics are no exception. ‘Flash mobs’ don’t happen in a flash. Despite the claim of the marvelous Romantic Jules Michelet in his buoyant mid-nineteenth-century History of the French Revolution, the Paris insurrection of August 1792 was openly and indeed carefully prepared. A network of self-organized neighborhood assemblies, verbally whipped into action by militants invoking the very reasonable fear of an invasion by Prussian troops commanded by the Holy Roman Emperor, in collusion with Louis XVI himself. The newly-redesigned constitutional monarchy—really a republic with an elected Legislative Assembly “represent[ing] the people as a whole”—had been structured to limit democratic neighborhood assemblies to control of municipal affairs, only. Those assemblies fit Aristotle’s precise definition of democracy as rule by the many who are poor. To the radical democrats, the national regime was republican, all-too-republican, and therefore insufficiently democratic—especially given its monarchic executive. The Communards, as the municipal rulers were called, insisted that “Popular sovereignty was ‘an indefeasible right, an inalienable right, a right that cannot be delegated'” to king or even to representatives. “Out of this explosive melee of political passions and interests there appeared a critical mass of people fiercely devoted to forging a radically egalitarian new form of self-government,” for “the first time since ancient Athens.” No ‘mixed regime’ could satisfy the democrats of Paris; They took their bearings not from Aristotle or Cicero, not from Machiavelli or even the American Founders, but from Rousseau, who had “redefined sovereignty in terms of democracy” in the form of the “general will,” defined as only those “wants and interests that all individuals in a group happen to share.” According to Rousseau, the general will, if enacted, maximizes liberty and equality at the same time. Rousseau’s fellow-citizens in republican Geneva considered such a notion “destructive of society and of all government, and very dangerous for our Constitution.” The Parisian democrats, however, proclaimed them as rights of men (human beings as such) and citizens (members of this particular civil society). Calling themselves the Jacobins, after the Jacobin monastery where they met, the biggest of the democratic political clubs organized affiliates throughout the country. “The views of the club’s dominant members grew fiercer and its national appeal narrowed, even as its political power in Paris slowly expanded.” That proved sufficient to topple the regime because France, as a centralized modern state, could be revolutionized and ruled by anyone who controlled the capital city. That is, a modern state can be democratized, after a fashion, if democrats rule its central nervous system, although those same democrats might amount to a rather small minority of the national citizenry.

The impassioned fears and ambitions in this face-to-face regime turned toward phantasmagoria. “The most radically democratic phase of the French Revolution began with a carnival of atrocities.” Indeed, “the threat of violence gave ordinary citizens an unfamiliar, and therefore intoxicating, power to challenge constituted authority”; it’s a mistake to assume that “the ardent desire of ordinary people for public freedom can be separated, in fact, from their willingness to use force in its pursuit.” Democracy not fails to offer any guarantees against fanaticism but may well gin it up. Although Robespierre wanted to rid France of the Legislative Assembly altogether, most Jacobins preferred to call a constitutional convention “tasked with creating a new, truly democratic constitution, to replace the mixed, but still monarchic, constitution of 1791.” Such a constitution of course “would have to square a circle, somehow reconciling the demands of the sectional assemblies for a direct expression of popular sovereignty with the needs of governing a large nation”—that is, a modern state—”that consisted of citizens holding diverse—and even divergent—views about what a good society should look like.” How could a large modern state, with a population consisting mostly of more or less pious Roman Catholic peasants, rule itself as if it were a giant Paris commune? The Convention’s drafting committee made a brave try.

The proposed constitution eliminated the monarchy and established a unicameral legislature consisting of ‘instructed’ delegates—persons entitled only to vote for policies approved in advance by their constituents. Thus they could be said to embody the General Will, somewhat redefined by mathematics-mad drafting committee member Nicolas de Condorcet as what’s left over when you remove contradictory opinions from the sum of all opinions. Meanwhile, the decidedly contradictory head of Louis XVI was subtracted from his body in January 1793.

The efforts of Condorcet and his colleagues went for nothing, as the radical democrats from Paris saw the proposed constitution as an attempt to bridle the power of the Paris communes. The Convention itself now became “the scene of a pitched power struggle between rival factions,” with “the constitution itself [as] a bone of contention.” Robespierre’s rhetoric eventually carried the day. Arguing from his central claim, that “the interest of the office holder” always remains private but “the interest of the people is the public good,” Robespierre sought to overcome the basic institutional dilemma, that a modern state is much bigger than an ancient polis, by declaiming his way out of it. “While it was obviously impossible for the people of France to assemble as a whole, as the people of Athens had assemble, Robespierre proposed, as an approximation to the ideal, that the republic build ‘a vast and majestic edifice, open to twelve thousand spectators,” who in this way would monitor meetings of the National Assembly.” No corruption, intrigue or perfidy would “dare show itself,” he claimed, and “the general will alone shall be consulted, the voice of reason and the public interests shall alone be heard.”

All of this turned out not to matter, as the Jacobin constitution, though ratified, was “set aside indefinitely on October 10, 1793, when a ‘Revolutionary Government,’ endowed with extraordinary powers to repress ‘counterrevolutionaries,’ was declared, thus beginning the Reign of Terror. France had become “a kind of dictatorship.” The consequent bloodshed sobered even Citizen Robespierre, who came to see the virtue of representative government, albeit atop of a democratic electorate, a national government not dominated by Parisian activists. For his heresy he was executed. “The French Revolution had produced a new understanding of democracy—and a hecatomb on a grand scale.”

By contrast, the Americans chose representative government from the start. Miller quotes Benjamin Rush: “All power is derived from the people,” but “they possess it only on the days of their elections. After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can [the people] exercise or resume it, unless it is abused.” Government by consent of the governed in this sense “didn’t exist in the classical world” because it didn’t need to; the democratic poleis were not big enough to have a state-civil society dichotomy. As in those poleis, the rule of the many didn’t mean the rule of the majority; as in Athens, women and slaves could not vote. This notwithstanding, the American republic had established ruling institutions that induced ambitious men to reach out to “ordinary people to settle disputes among rival elite factions”—with the elites themselves, it might be added, hardly qualifying as elites at all in the eyes of the dynasts and aristocrats of Europe. To Europeans, all Americans were commoners.

Out of such a motley crew, new oligarchs might arise, particularly in the financial sector of the American economy. In the next generation, Andrew Jackson took due advantage of such men, riling democratic sentiments against the Monster Bank and swamping his opponents at the polls. Greatly aided by his ally, the organizational genius Martin Van Buren, Jackson organized the first recognizably ‘modern’ political party in America and found his own way to bridge the state-civil society divide by appointing his key party organizers to positions in his administration. Tocqueville identified the ideational limit on this kind of popular sovereignty: the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which he heard recited at a Fourth of July celebration in Albany in 1831, entwined with a “Christianity that [as Tocqueville wrote] can best be described as democratic and republican.” “According to Tocqueville, democracy denoted not merely a form of government but, in addition, and more important still, a new kind of society, in which the principle of equality was pushed to its limits”—those limits being demarcated by the laws of nature and of nature’s God, in principle, but also by the aberrant phenomenon of slavery, in practice, as well as by property qualifications that disqualified the landless poor from voting. Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842 aimed at expanding the suffrage, but balked at any restriction of the Atlantic slave trade, and also at the possibility of extending the franchise to black men. The rebellion failed after its leader, Thomas Dorr, led a “botched assault” on the Rhode Island state armory. He triumphed post mortem; as decades passed, the franchise was indeed extended, not only in Rhode Island but throughout the country.

As a noted historian of rock-and-roll, Miller doesn’t neglect the effects of democratic civil society on what we have come to call, democratically enough, ‘popular culture.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson “became the architect of a popular philosophy for the new nation by lecturing on the Lyceum circuit of organizations that sponsored public events meant to promote ‘the universal diffusion of knowledge’ to the general public.” The content of this ‘philosophy’ was the notion of self-reliance, which Miller rightly considers a forerunner of Nietzscheism. (Nietzsche himself sighed, “In Emerson, we lost a philosopher,” meaning that Emerson might have attained Nietzsche’s own intellectual heights had he only undergone a really rigorous education at a European university). Also rightly, Miller remarks that such “a quasi-religious sanction for the American cult of individualism” tended more to civil disobedience (as in Emerson’s friend, Thoreau) than to serious political construction or reconstruction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s coruscantly popular novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, inspired ardent sentiments against slavery, but little in the way of suggestions as to what American might do to re-found the regimes of Southern states, were slavery to be abolished. In music, Stephen Foster became “the first popular musician to achieve global fame, through the international sale of sheet music”—it was a commercial as well as a democratic republic, after all—and the minstrel shows for which he wrote eventually produced the musical foundation “for almost all subsequent forms of African American musical entertainment, from ragtime to blues to jazz.” Miller points out that the earliest minstrel shows consisted of white performers in blackface, acting out an American form of bohemianism last exemplified by Al Jolson; at the same time, black entertainers did their own minstrel shows, transforming the music from sweet, nostalgic Foster tunes to the harder-edged ‘urban’ sounds and lyrics of the twentieth century. One might conclude that democracy meets with its greatest success on the civil-social level of the modern state—that is, on the most democratic level of that state.

Oddly, Miller misses the point of Tocqueville’s famous critique of democracy gone wrong in the second volume of Democracy in America. Tocqueville’s dystopian vision of a no-longer-civil society consisting of “an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls” in “orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery,” does not indicate that he regarded American culture as likely to “prove more significant than its political institutions for determining the future of democracy in America.” Tocqueville rather fears that a democratic society might readily come to accept a bureaucratic elite which keeps it safe and stupefied at the cost of popular withdrawal from the sterner tasks of self-government. This would be one way in which a democracy (that is, an egalitarian civil society) might succumb not only to a Napoleonic or czarist despotism but to oligarchy, even as it might also succumb to an oligarchy founded on industrial capitalism. That is, Tocqueville foresaw both the bugbear of twentieth-century Left and the bugbear of the twentieth-century Right in America. Very often, each faction ignores the oligarchy that’s on its side, but Tocqueville worked under no such partisan illusions.

Miller next discusses four democratizing movements in Europe during the century following the American and French revolutions: Chartism, Marxist socialism, Mazzini’s republicanism, and the Paris Commune. In England, the Chartists sought to accelerate the widening of the franchise initiated by the Reform Act of 1832. Hoping for improved wages and working conditions, urban factory workers organized the General Convention of the Industrious Classes at the end of the decade, aiming not only at the enfranchisement of all male adults but at a secret ballot (to prevent employers from intimidating voters) and at coupling elimination of property qualifications for those who served in Parliament  with salaries for MPs, which would allow citizens of low income to take seats there. Perhaps unfortunately, Chartists “treat[ed] the Jacobin constitution of 1793 as sacred scripture” and “idolized Robespierre”; this could only make their fellow-Brits a bit nervous. Sure enough, the Chartists split over the question of using physical force to advance their cause, “promis[ing] a restoration of harmonious social relations” while “simultaneously rais[ing] the prospect of a civil war.”

By the 1840s, London provided a home for radicals exiled from several continental countries. Among these, Karl Marx would have the most lasting effect on European and indeed world politics. Miller provides an excellent, succinct summary of Marx’s theory, observing that he took Hegel’s historicist doctrine of dialectical struggle among persons, ideas, and nations and pared it down to a materialist dialectic centered on struggle between socioeconomic classes. Far from peaceful, this struggle had been and would continue to be violent: “Marx represented the laboring class as a historical agent seething with violence,” spoiling for battle against the bourgeoisie and its capitalist system. A final “collective act” of what Marx himself called “overthrow and dissolution” would wipe out the bourgeois state and clear the way, first for a socialist state and then (in Lenin’s famous phrase), the withering away of that state, as well, leaving only peaceful, egalitarian, and communal civil societies, worldwide.

This is indeed a democratic telos, but, as Miller tellingly observes, “Fraternity was hard to sustain among the revolutionary sects vying for preeminence in the late 1840s” and, as he knows, would continue to be hard to establish, much less sustain, at any subsequent time or in any other place. Marxian socialism has never quite worked its way out of the ‘dialectical’ phase of ‘History.’ The Communist Manifesto “predicted an end to all social divisions but clinched the argument with a barrage of insults aimed at rival groups,” a habit that has persisted ever since. Part of the problem may be the underlying notion of historical progress itself. If ‘History’ proceeds dialectically toward the telos, communism, then claims to rule made by men and women before the ‘end time’ will derive from their self-asserted position on the ‘cutting edge’ of that historical progress. ‘Top-down’ elitism may disappear, at least in theory, only to be replaced by a ‘horizontal’ elitism; ‘statesmanship’ may go away, swapped out for ‘leadership.’ And of course the would-be leaders will fight among themselves. Marx and his followers assumed that all this would sort itself out in the end, but that’s all they had: a wishful thought wrapped in a rhetoric of scientism.

A Christian democrat from Genoa, Giuseppe Mazzini presents a more appealing face for egalitarianism than Marx ever did. Animated by “a redemptive new social gospel,” in 1831 he founded “Young Italy,” a secret society dedicated to the founding of a unified, democratic nation-state. He returned to Italy from his London exile in the annus-not-quite-mirabilis 1848, exhilarated by the newly-formed, but also short-lived, Roman republic. It soon became “clear that most people didn’t yearn for democracy, as Mazzini did, as a sacred end in itself,” and that, even more disappointingly, Italian democracy found no favor with God, at least in terms of some such earthly reward as longevity. Providence as interpreted by Mazzini proved no more reliable than History as interpreted by Marx. (It might be recalled that the God of the Bible acts on His own timetable, not ours.) “Mazzini, in defeat more famous than ever, returned to London,” where he exchanged rhetorical barbs with the Marxists over questions of idealism versus realism, Christianity versus atheism, nationalism versus internationalism, the modern state versus communism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 renewed democratic hopes once more, and ended in similar disappointment. Once again, the city’s democrats manned the barricades, attempting “simultaneously to form a new municipal government, draft new policies to regulate the economy and society, and raise an armed force able to wage and win a civil war with a hostile but duly elected provisional government,” which had taken hold after Emperor Napoleon III had proven himself less-than-imperial in his war with Prussia. The Commune ended quickly and violently, but not without winning the accolades of Marx, who saw in it a “working class government,” the “political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor”—a brief glimpse, if a failed experiment, in the egalitarian communalism the iron laws of History were sure to deliver, someday. Rosa Luxemburg put the very best face on things when she asked, rhetorically, “Where would we be today without those ‘defeats,’ from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism?” ‘Another day older and deeper in debt,’ a less enthusiastic observer might reply, but Marxian socialists soldiered on, millennial hopes undimmed. Miller astringently remarks, “Such a veneration was jarringly at odds with the realism and other tough-minded radical democrats championed in other contexts,” and indeed, such “quixotic myth-mongering also encouraged zealots to use self-defeating tactics in quest of unworkable goals, and this would become a defining feature of many modern experiments in radical democracy.”

What such uprisings did accomplish was to strike a sort of salutary fear into monarchist and aristocratic elements, who began to cooperate with middle-class reformers to extend the franchise to workers (if not yet to women) and to tolerate “a new kind of political pluralism in Europe”—an ideological version of the religious pluralism liberalism had established. Europeans began to imitate none other than Andrew Jackson, at least respecting his interest in establishing popularly based political parties, competing more or less peacefully for votes registering the consent of the governed. This modus vivendi remained uneasy, however, with Marxists themselves splitting into the parliament-oriented Social Democrats and the harsher elements who insisted on retaining the option of bullets as well as ballots. In Russia, the latter form of soi-disant democracy prevailed, with consequences that would remain bloody long after the revolution itself was over.

Such discouraging results may have led the sociologist Robert Michels to formulate what he called “the iron law of oligarchy,” holding that “a tiny minority of business and political leaders wield power regardless of a state’s ostensibly democratic political practices.” What Tocqueville saw at its beginning Michels and his contemporary Max Weber saw in its better-elaborated form, some seventy years later. The two scholars disagreed only on Michels’s residual Rousseauian longings, which Weber dismissed as utopian. Democracy remained for Michels “not a fiction but an inviolable matter of faith, precisely in Martin Luther’s sense (‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’)” Weber conceded to democracy only the possibility of a kind of benign demagoguery, which might “harness productively the otherwise dangerous passions of unruly and uninformed citizens” while the oligarchs ruled quietly behind their backs.

Michels enjoyed no such luck. He lived long enough to see the rise of Mussolini, whom he mistook as the charismatic ‘leader’ Weber had described. He hoped (again remaining more utopian than his friend) that “a charismatic leader like Il Duce could help counteract the bureaucratic inertia of normal politics.” And moreover, Michels imagined, Mussolini could overcome that inertia in a democratic direction, as averred by the ‘philosopher of Fascism’ Giovanni Gentile, who proclaimed the Fascist State “a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic state par excellence,” a state in which the relation between state and citizen becomes “so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist.” Under Gentile’s spell, one expects a modern state to mimic an ancient polis—somehow. To his credit, Michels remained a bit more sober, concluding that democracy and oligarchy will struggle to the end of time, and that ‘History’ goes nowhere, except in circles.

A similar dynamic may be seen in the major ‘Left’ alternatives to fascism: progressivism and communism. Woodrow Wilson advanced the ‘leadership principle,’ making him seem to Miller closer to John Adams’s “natural aristocracy” than to Jackson’s “plebeian democracy.” However, it should be noted, Wilson’s aristoi think not in terms of natural virtues and talents but in terms of historical consciousness. This enabled Wilson to make his leadership principle consistent with his early work on the administrative state; no feature of progressivist historicism seeks to fulfill human nature so much as to master it, to conquer nature in the name of freedom. To Wilson, democracy inheres in a people made progressively more equal among themselves, not a people untutored by leaders and administrators. It is, as Miller observes reminiscent of Weber’s Führerdemokratie.

Lenin took historicist Führerdemokratie in a more violent and tyrannical direction, undertaking to “smash” (as he put it) not only the bureaucratic-military machine of Czarism but also the bourgeois class, worldwide. ‘The few,’ strictly subordinate to ‘the one,’ both intending to level the social and economic conditions of ‘the many,’ formed a party that seized control of the existing state, transforming it after its own image under the slogan of “democratic centralism.” Where Wilson relied upon administrators, Lenin relied upon party militants. It might be added that Wilson also depended upon elections, assumed generally to register the ever-advancing leadership of ‘progressives,’ whereas Lenin felt no need for such things.

Miller accordingly examines Walter Lippmann’s work on public opinion with some care, inasmuch as the progressive Lippmann came to doubt “the capacity not just of ordinary citizens but also of their elected leaders to meet the challenges of governing a complex society.” As a journalist, Lippmann knew already what men like Donald Trump thunder about: the citizenry have come to need news media to provide information about such a society, to organize the information, to highlight what’s important, what deserves citizens’ attention. Yet the minds of journalists think as wishfully and fearfully as everyone else’s minds do. ‘Fake news’ may be deliberately crafted, but it also can be the result of ordinary moral failings leading to intellectual failings, to failings of both perception and of judgment. To this, the people add their own passions, stereotypes, and misconceptions. Whereas “a simple, self-contained community”—a polis—might be understandable to its citizenry, more often than not, a modern state is too big and complicated for such comprehension, especially given its situation among many other modern states, equally complex and working at cross-purposes. Lippmann concluded that the common interests of democratic citizens must be, as he put it “managed” by a “specialized class” consisting of well-trained administrators and wise-man commentators such as himself. A few decades later, the Washington Post journalist and ‘insider’ Douglas Cater would publish a book describing elite journalists as “the fourth branch of government.” [2]

In this sense, today “democracy as a form of government in most actually existing regimes is more or less a sham”—a fake regime in which fake news has taken its rightful place, so to speak. Yet paradoxically, in the twenty-first century “very few regimes, unlike most of those that existed in the early eighteenth century”—that is, before the American and French revolutions—”can rule over a subject population with impunity.” Rulers still need to account for the passions of voters, and indeed for the passions of non-voters in the more oppressive regimes. The many may not rule, but they set limits on the rule of the few.

Miller concludes with a discussion of democratic prospects. Citing the later works of Samuel P. Huntington– particularly his The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and Who Are We? (2004)—he appreciates the sobriety of a thinker who puts the basic issue of social and political order—”Does anyone govern?”—prior to the question of the regime itself. “For the many peoples around the world in the last century who have had to endure massacres and famines in failed states, these are not academic questions”; while it is true that the worst tyrannical regimes have massacred and starved millions (causing even more deaths than wars, themselves often initiated by such regimes), even despots and imperialists sometimes prevent inter-communal slaughter.

Miller also acknowledges Huntington’s recommendation to accept the diversity in a multicivilizational world: “A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible.” Expectations of inevitable historical progress towards ‘one world’ have been greatly exaggerated, although they’ve not necessarily abated, however, as both Chinese and Islamist ambitieux will tell you.

If so, Americans will continue to need to define themselves clearly. Huntington posits “four main components of American identity”: race, and specifically white supremacy (“the first and most important”); ethnicity (Anglo-Saxons as distinguished from other ‘whites’); religiosity, particularly Protestantism; and “ideology” (the “American Creed” expressed in the Declaration of Independence). There are some serious problems with this formulation. By putting race, ethnicity, and religiosity before the “Creed,” Huntington centers his analysis on conflict. But given the endurance of the American political union for nearly 250 years, this makes little sense. Something must be holding the country together; if Huntington means to say that our social bonds have consisted of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant domination, one must be at a loss to explain the Declaration of Independence itself, the United States Constitution, and the Union victory in the Civil War. The conflicts in all of those instances involved white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants struggling with other white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants over the questions concerning not only the regime, not only the conditions of civil peace, but the definition of what it means to be human, and not only over what it means to be ‘white,’ Anglo-American, or Christian. Huntington’s formula additionally fails to register a principal (and principled) conflict of the past century or so: the challenge American Progressives mounted to the moral foundation of the ‘old’ republic. To locate right in ‘History’ is to break radically with a regime that had located right in the laws of nature and of nature’s God. If right is said to change in the course of time, then no right can be unalienable. Rulers are no longer adjured to secure rights but to invent them. Government powers no longer need to be limited by and enumerated in a written constitution; they need to be expanded, elaborated, on no foundation in nature but on a purportedly progressive economic, social, and political evolution defined by the ‘leaders’ and administrators who run the new and far more ‘statist’ regime. Miller’s sensible question—”Why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient” than the regime of the late and unlamented Soviet Union “if put to the test by white nativism?”—becomes harder to answer if one defines America in Huntington’s ‘cultural’ terms, or the Progressives’ historicist ones.

Looking back on his own instructive political experience, Miller sees in the recent “Occupy Wall Street” movement an echo of “my own experiments in radical democracy,” which also “quickly fell apart.” Both efforts collided with two problems: “the incompatibility of rule by consensus with accountable, responsible, government in a large organization” and with factions within small groups of person “with divergent interests and a limited patience for endless meetings.” Max Weber, meet Oscar Wilde. At the same time, Miller insists that “the search for a democracy of individual participation” lastingly changes one’s “sense of what politics can mean.” Yes: recovering some sense of the experience of the ancient polis—however attenuated that experience will be, given ‘modern’ (and indeed supposedly ‘postmodern’) assumptions and habits—cannot but give a thoughtful participant in such a recovery a more lucid perspective on political life itself.

Miller thus looks with strengthened appreciation at the achievement of the American Founders, who combined democracy understood as popular sovereignty with the regime of republicanism and a federal state. This may be the best practical answer to those who wonder how some vestiges of small-scale local self-government can survive in the modern world of large, centralized states—states designed to crush small city-states and loosely-organized feudal states. Among his contemporaries, he admires Václav Havel, who carried many of these institutional structures into his Czechoslovakia, newly liberated from oligarchy and empire. To appreciate the achievement of the Americans and the Czechs can initiate consideration of the moral foundations of their regimes, neither of which make sense as ‘ideologies’ animated by the valorization of historical change for the sake of some imagined paradise-on-earth.

 

Notes

1. James Miller: The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
2. Douglass Cater: The Fourth Branch of Government. New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

 

 

 

 

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. Alexis Klimoff translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

 

Born a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Orthodox-Christian Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived to see the much-welcomed demise of that tyranny. By 1990, when he published this Rebuilding Russia in his own beloved language, he saw that “Time has run out for communism,” although “its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled.” Russians therefore “must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The tyrants had used human blood as mortar; “we have lost a full third of our population” in “labored pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia,” a body count including those killed in “the ineptly, almost suicidally waged ‘Patriotic War'” against Nazi invaders. With this physical devastation, a moral-political crisis has ensued; “a helplessless bred of the absence of rights permeates the entire country,” as “we cling to only one thing: that we not be deprived of unlimited drunkenness.”

Not quite one, only, however: “Human beings are so constituted that we can put up with such ruination and madness even when they last a lifetime, but God forbid that anyone should dare to offend or slight our nationality!” “Such is man: nothing has the capacity to convince us that our hunger, our poverty, our early deaths, the degeneration of our children—that any of these misfortunes can take precedence over national pride.” To begin reconstruction of Russia under a new and better regime, Russians need less to feel their nationhood than to think about it, to make it (as Marxists would say) conscious, thoughtful. Far from the dogmatic nationalist his enemies have called him, Solzhenitsyn wanted Russians to deliberate with him about what it means to be Russian.

“What is Russia?” The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “will break up whatever we do.” Much of it has consisted of non-Russian peoples gathered under that regime, an ideological rather than a national construct. Russians should declare “loudly, clearly, and without delay” the independence of eleven of the Soviet ‘republics’: Moldavia (“if it feels drawn to Romania”) along with those in the Baltic area, in Transcaucasia, and in Central Asia (except Kazakhstan, which has a substantial Russian population). Without these peoples, who long for self-government according to the ethoi of their own nationalities, there would remain “an entity that might be called Rus,” consisting of “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), “Great Russians,” and Belorussians. Since those Russian peoples live in areas home to dozens of other nationalities and ethnic groups, “a fruitful commonwealth of nations,” a “Russian Union,” will require Russians to “marshal all the resources of our hearts and minds to the task,” in part by “affirming the integrity of each culture and the preservation of each language.” In his own way, Solzhenitsyn is a ‘multiculturalist.’

The American regime initially founded its ‘multicultural’ regime on natural rights; the Bolsheviks founded their regime on Marxism-Leninism. What does Solzhenitsyn offer as the foundation of a new Russian regime?

He addresses each Russian group in turn. To his fellow ‘Great Russians,’ he warns that “we don’t have the strength,” economic or moral, to sustain the existing, collapsing empire, “and it is just as well.” Unfortunately, “the awakening Russian national self-awareness,” no longer narcotized by Communist ideology, “has to a large extent been unable to free itself of great-power thinking and of imperial delusions,” continuing to take pride in a ‘superpower’ status that it is losing. Against this, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the example of Russia’s rival in the war that began to reveal the decline of the Czarist regime—Japan, which found “a way to be reconciled with its situation, renouncing its sense of international mission and the pursuit of tempting political ventures,” gaining prosperity in return. As Solzhenitsyn must know, Japan did this with the aid of a powerful American ‘prompting’ in the person of the American general, Douglas MacArthur, backed up by his occupying troops. Russians haven’t been conquered; they will need to write their own new constitution, then live by it. To do this, Solzhenitsyn would redirect Russian pride away from imperialism and toward the preservation and enhancement of Russianness, “clarity of what remains of our spirit,” a “precious inner development” that alone can reverse Russians’ harrowing demographic decline. “‘Taking pride’ is not what we need to do, nor should we be attempting to impose ourselves on the lives of others. We must rather, grasp the reality of the acute and debilitating illnesses that is affecting our people, and pray to God that He grant us recovery, along with the wisdom to achieve it.” Christianity in the form of Russian Orthodoxy would then replace atheism in the form of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.

To Ukrainians and Belorussians, he recalls that “our people came to be divided into three branches by the terrible calamity of the Mongol invasion, and by Polish colonization,” but originally “we all sprang from precious Kiev,” where “we received the light of Christianity.” It should be noted that the Russians originated in Scandinavia—probably from Viking stock, which would explain a certain battle-readiness as well as the incidence of red hair in the population (not unlike the Irish). It is also noteworthy that Kievan Rus didn’t extend very far east, not even to the Volga River. Nonetheless, “the Muscovite state” was “created by the same people who made up Kievan Rus,” and the Rus people who eventually fell under Polish and Lithuanian rule to the west “resisted Polonization and conversion to Catholicism.” That is, they maintained not only their ethnic but their spiritual identity.

This notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that many Ukrainians or ‘Little Russians’ no longer feel any strong allegiance to their ‘Great-Russian’ brethren. What to do? Invite them to join the Russian Union, but do not force them in. Each locality within Ukraine should be allowed to vote themselves in or out. For himself, Solzhenitsyn exhorts them to come in: “Brothers! We have no need of this cruel partition. The very idea comes from the darkening of minds brought on by the communist years. Together, we have borne the suffering of the Soviet period, together we have tumbled into this pit, and together, too, we shall find our way out.” Insofar as Ukrainian Russians and Belorussians have indeed developed “cultures” distinct from that of ‘Great Russians,’ those cultures should enjoy “free manifestation,” “not only on their two territories but among the Great Russians as well.” Parallel schools should be established, with children attending in accordance with “the parents’ choice.” As for the dozens of smaller nationalities and ethnic groups, to grant sovereignty to each would lead to chaos, but they could find political representation in a Council of Nationalities in the Russian Union—”a forum in which event the smallest of national groups can have its voice heard.”

Once paths to separation of most major nations in the Soviet empire and the consensual union of Russians have been established, Russians must begin their inner reconstitution as a well-ordered nation. Materially, “a patriot and a true statesman” will eliminate such unnecessary expenses as aid to “the tyrannical regimes we have implanted the world over,” the manufacture of offensive weapons, the ‘space race,’ subsidies to Eastern European countries, and the Communist party and state bureaucracies. Above all, “our people must urgently be made aware of the meaning of work, after half a century when no one could see any advantage to putting forth an effort,” while recognizing that “Nature, disdained so ungratefully by us, is taking its revenge” by the pollution of Russian earth, water, and air by radioactive and other poisonous materials. “On top of all this,” Russians “must now prepare to resettle those compatriots who are losing their places of residence” in lands that will free themselves of the imperial grip.

Morally, “a public admission by the Party of its guilt, its crimes, and its helplessness would at least be the first step toward alleviating the oppressiveness of our moral atmosphere.” The political corollary to this moral statement would be the dismantling of the KGB. But political reform must be preceded by social reform. “There can be no independent citizen without private property”; lands now ‘owned’ by the Communist state must be leased or sold to individual Russians or Russian families (not to corporations and not to foreigners). Such privately-owned lands will easily feed the country, as indeed the few private plots permitted under the Communist regime had done. Small businesses, anti-monopoly and anti-usury laws, environmental laws, regulated foreign investment, and stable prices all will underwrite a decentralized governmental system, featuring “perhaps forty centers of vitality and illumination throughout the breadth of the land.” “The road back to health must begin at the grassroots”; Solzhenitsyn’s stays in Switzerland and rural Vermont, with their responsible local governing authorities, reminded him of Russia’s own practice of village self-government dating back to the Middle Ages. These governments and the small-scale economic structures that enable them to flourish, will require revival of “normal families,” which “have virtually ceased to exist in our country” because women were forced into the workplace and men lacked salaries sufficient to support a household. Further, underpaid local schoolteachers were required to teach “ideological gibberish” to the children. “All changes and all efforts to salvage true knowledge must begin with revamping the curricula at the teachers’ colleges.” As for the overall culture, the Soviet regime “gave our country superb protection against all the positive features of the West,” such as civil liberties, respect for the individual, and civil-social organizing, but it “permitted the continuous seepage of liquid manure,” that is, “the self-indulgent and squalid ‘popular mass culture” “mindlessly ape[d]” by Russian youth.

If Russians address these crucial matters in a measured and prudent way, they can avoid “repeat[ing] the chaos” of February 1917, which led to the ruinous Bolshevik Revolution in October. “A decisive change in regime calls for thoughtfulness and a sense of responsibility”—exactly what Russian intellectuals and politicians generally lacked during and in the years preceding the Great War. “There is no guarantee whatever that the new leaders now coming to the fore will immediately prove to be far-sighted and sober-minded.” Nonetheless—and this is the monumental risk Solzhenitsyn judges Russians must take to avoid such chaos and resultant tyranny, this time—Russians will need a “strong central authority” to undertake the transition to a genuinely federal and republican Russia at some time in the future. An immediate democratic-republican revolution will not work under current conditions of economic impoverishment, spiritual desolation, and political inexperience. “Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul, freeing it for reflection and feeling.” Mankind cannot do that collectively, but only nation-by-nation and indeed village-by-village, family-by-family. “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.” “That is why the destruction of our souls over three-quarters of a century is the most terrifying thing of all,” a destruction planned, carried out, and perpetuated by “the corrupt ruling class,” shamelessly hanging on to positions of power in government, business, and the universities. “West Germany was suffused with the feeling of repentance before the coming of their economic boom. But in our country no one has even begun to repent” Even the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy partakes in the corruption, unable thus far event to reform itself, let alone to undertake the moral reformation of Russians. Russians can only look to themselves, under God, in a spirit of “conscious self-limitation,” making a virtue out of material and political necessity.

As a writer, Solzhenitsyn can assist in one area to which he can indeed limit himself, in adherence to his own advice. “Before the [Bolshevik] Revolution, the bulk of our people had no experience with political concepts, and the ideas that were pounded into our heads by propaganda in the subsequent seventy years served only to cloud our minds. But not what our country has begun moving in the direction of real political life, and when the forms of the government-to-be are already being discussed, it is useful to focus on the precise meaning of some terms in order to prevent possible mistakes.” A writer can attend to his nation’s language, and Solzhenitsyn does that.

To talk sensibly of regimes, of governmental forms, he recurs first to Spengler and to Montesquieu, both of whom emphasized the need to fit the regime to the physical size of the country, its topography, history, traditions, and ethos. “The task is to set in place a structure that will lead to a flourishing of this people rather than to its decline and degeneration” (and not to worry so much about the flourishing of ‘that‘ people somewhere else, which has a very different territory, history, tradition, and ethos, and thus quite likely a different regime or variation of the same kind of regime suited to Russia). Solzhenitsyn cites Aristotle’s tripartite regime classification (rule of the one, the few, the many), noting that each type can have a good or bad version, and that the type chosen will survive only if prudent statesmen choose carefully. “Many new countries have in recent years suffered a fiasco just after introducing democracy; yet, despite such evidence, this same period has seen an elevation of democracy from a particular state structure into a sort of universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.” But democracy, whether defined politically as popular sovereignty or civil-socially (as by Tocqueville) to mean social egalitarianism, does not guarantee liberty. To be just, democracy needs individual freedom and a government of laws, what one of the 1917 Constitutional Democrats called “a certain level of political discipline among the populace,” “precisely what we lacked in 1917,” and what “one fears that there is even less of,” in the Russia of 1990.

Therefore, if republicanism is to be introduced gradually to Russia, to Russians as they are, statesmen must institute well-defined electoral procedures—procedures that do not merely express the popular will in direct elections (“in a country as huge as ours,” direct election of representatives can only means that voters won’t know the people they vote for), but also (as Madison famously wrote) refine and enlarge the public views. Once lost, self-government is hard to recover. “European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force,” increasingly replaced by “the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.” Unlike such Central European thinkers as Adam Michnik and Vacláv Havel, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t hope or expect that either elections or the political parties competing in them aim at “the search for truth.” More, even in democratic regimes the parties tend toward oligarchy, whether of party leaders or of administrative agencies with no enforceable responsibility to the people they rule. Political parties and other civil associations should “exist freely, propounding ay views and issuing publications at their own expense,” as long as their records are “open to public inspection,” are “registered”—as lobbyists are, in the United States— and make their “programs” public. No political parties could legally interfere in the workplace, in the service sector, or in the schools. Elected party candidates would be required to suspend their party membership for the duration of their term in office.

In many ways the zemstvo—a territory organized for self-government—serves as the centerpiece of Solzhenitsyn’s institutional structure. A zemstvo would exist on several levels of government, measured by size: a local unit (consisting of a mid-sized municipality, a district in a big city, or a group of villages); a large city; a region; and finally an all-Russian body, the All-Zemstvo Assembly. Western readers will recognize in such a system the embodiment of the principle of subsidiarity. “For us who have completely lost touch with genuine self-government, the task will be to assimilate this sequence step by step, starting from the bottom,” a sequence “useful for many in the population to acquire political skills.” Candidates for seats in the local zemstvo “normally will be well known to the voters,” and elections campaigns would consist only of the candidates’ programs, biographies, and “views.” Election to a larger zemstvo would be determined by a vote by the zemstvos within its territory. Bureaucracies would be curbed, although Solzhenitsyn gives no details on how to do it; he seems to envision a zemstvo veto on bureaucratic regulations. Meanwhile, a powerful head of state would be elected directly by national vote from a list of nominees provided by the All-Zemstvo Assembly. There would also be a second house of the legislature, its 200-250 members consisting of representatives of various “estates’ (soslovia)—persons with a common occupation, elected by members of each designated estate. This body could veto presidential candidates proposed by the All-Zemstvo Assembly and to interdict laws and actions proposed by a government institution or agency, but this would need to be a unanimous decision by the members. This means that the estates assembly would at most exercise a certain moral authority, inasmuch as it is nearly inconceivable that a 200-member body would deliver a unanimous vote on any matter.

Solzhenitsyn deliberately leaves his proposals incomplete, acknowledging that he has said nothing about the military or the courts. He wants Russians to act for themselves. “Building a rational and just state is a task of surpassing difficulty, and the goal can only be approached slowly by means of successive approximations and small, cautious steps.” Caution makes sense, as Solzhenitsyn shows in another brief and readable book, The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, which amounts to a short history of Russia since the beginning of the Romanov Dynasty. That history illustrates “the numerous blunders in our past” from which “our plight today in many ways stems.” If initially Russians must work with the handicap of unfamiliarity with civic life, a history can at least give them some vicarious experience of what ruling entails—from the viewpoint of rulers, not only of the ruled (a viewpoint with which they are much too familiar).

The very young aristocrat Mikhail Romanov ascended to the Russian throne in 1613, elected by the Zemsky Sobor during the first of three ‘Times of Troubles’ identified by Solzhenitsyn—the others being the collapse of the czarist and Communist regimes in 1917 and 1991, respectively. An assembly organized around three social groups—aristocrats and top bureaucrats; Orthodox clergy; commoners (of course excluding the vast peasantry)—the Zemsky Sobor had been founded some three generations earlier, in 1549, by Ivan IV, a couple of years after his marriage to a Romanov. When Tsaritsa Anastasia died under suspicious circumstances in 1560, Ivan went on a rampage against the aristocrats, whom he supposed had poisoned her (hence “Ivan the Terrible”). When Ivan’s dynastic line ended with a childless czar, in 1598 the Zemsky Sobor elected Boris Godunov, the last Rurikid czar’s brother-in-law, he moved to ruin the Romanovs, who had contested his election. This succession crisis occurred during the desperate Polish-Muscovite War; as in 1917, foreign and domestic crises intersected, although ‘intersected’ is a painfully abstract term for describing such a crisis of blood and honor.

Solzhenitsyn takes a political lesson from this crisis, beyond an account of dynastic struggle over the monarchy. Citing historian Andrei Platonov, he writes that “the tortuous and enervative Time of Troubles brought also a beneficent change to the political outlook of the Russian people; even with no Tsar, with Russian no longer his ‘estate’ and its people no longer his ‘servants’ and ‘serfs,’ the State must not collapse, but must be salvaged and shaped by the people themselves.” Local authorities prospered and took charge of their own communities, linking themselves with one another to form a “council of the all the land.” “This testimony to the Russian people’s organizational abilities provides instructive examples for us, the descendants.” “Thus arose the zemstzo.” Solzhenitsyn adds, heuristically and patriotically, that “this entire system of State was not created under any Western influence, and by no means amounted to an imitative structure.”

It didn’t last. Mikhail Romanov’s son, Alexei, began to replace the zemstvo rule with bureaucracy. Although he won his war against Poland, recovering lands lost in the previous generation, Czar Alexei contracted the notion that Russia would need to modernize or Westernize the country, which project included a thus-far critical weakening of the Orthodox Church. After his son by his second marriage, Peter, won his own dynastic fight in 1682, Russia embarked on a thoroughgoing effort to ‘modernize.’ “Peter I was a man of mediocre, if not savage, mind. He could not grasp that one cannot transfer specific results of Western culture and civilization without the psychological atmosphere in which these results had ripened.” Russia did indeed require Western science and technology for survival in the modern world, Solzhenitsyn concedes, “but not at the cost of stamping out (in quite a Bolshevik fashion and with many excesses) her sense of history, her people’s beliefs, soul, and customs, for the sake of accelerated industrial development and military might.” And not only for technological prowess: Peter ‘the Great’ greatly centralized the Russian state, making it into a modern state with himself, an ‘absolute’ monarch, at its head, in the process destroying the Zemsky Sobor because it stood as a barrier to both the administrative structure of statism and the regime power of absolute monarchy. He also finished the task his father had begun, “bridl[ing] the Orthodox Church, [breaking] its spine.” And in a 1714 decree, he established gentry primogeniture and “turned the peasants into the direct property of landowners,” who in turn were firmly subordinated to himself, having been deprived of the assembly in which they had exerted some governing influence in Russia as a whole. Peter thus made himself not a reformer but a revolutionary, one who built up the state with these policies straight out of Machiavelli, adding to them the equally Machiavellian policy of attempting to unite the nation by embroiling it in foreign wars.

“Pausing at the end of the eighteenth century, one cannot but marvel at the string of errors committed by our rulers, at their concentration on matters superfluous to the life of the people.” A policy of offensive war and territorial expansion—imperialism—replaced the only right kind of war against the Western powers, defensive war. “Unfortunately for us, this mindset persisted long into the nineteenth century,” as Alexander I needlessly provoked Napoleon’s invasion, then, after devastating sacrifices, won that war only to return to ‘The Great Game’ of imperial meddling. At home, even the liberation of the serfs in 1861 granted only personal freedom, not the right to own land and the fruits of the peasant’s work on that land—the kind of liberty that makes personal freedom sustainable. As in the 1990s, the people were thrown into a market economy without the material resources or (above all) the moral and mental preparation for the rigors of market competition. Then as now (that is, the 1990s), usurers and speculators took charge. Solzhenitsyn cites the novelist and short story writer Gleb Uspensky, who understood that peasant “rule of the land” was indispensable to giving “our people patience, humility, strength, and youth; take it away and there is no people, no national world view, only a spiritual void” because “rule of the land held the peasant in obedience, developed in him a strong family and social discipline, kept him from pernicious heresies; the despotic rule of the earth-mother went together with her ‘love’ for the peasant, thus easing his labor and making it the prevalent task of life,” protecting him from the personal and exploitive rule of oligarchs. Because land is impersonal, its “rule” caused no resentment; the land is what it is, and those who live on it learn to work it or starve—a point not unfamiliar to readers of the New Testament.

One might add that the modern West, especially in Europe, garnered its power precisely from the fact that its philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, but going along through Bacon, Descartes, and their followers, resented and rebelled against the personal but beneficent rule of the Creator-God and the impersonal ‘despotism’ of nature. For these forms of rule they substituted the human rule of the scientists, absolute monarchs in control of nationalized churches, and both aristocrats and smart commoners who made themselves into financial and industrial oligarchs. The American Founders may be said to have countered or at least moderated this project by the political revolution of federal republicanism founded upon nature—natural rights—and religious liberty. Although Solzhenitsyn sees that Russia cannot and indeed should not imitate America, he seeks a similar result. But on Russian terms, and in the (perhaps very) long run.

Oligarchs’ rule of Russian peasants, who unlike American yeoman farmers didn’t rule their own land, economically or politically, “flowed organically into a revolutionary mindset and rebellion” by the beginning of the twentieth century, as did the monarchy’s continued imperial, ‘great-power’ ambitions. (“Even Dostoevsky, despite his incomparable acumen, failed to resist this subjugating influence: the dream of Constantinople, ‘the East will bring salvation to the West.'”) One of the few Romanov czars Solzhenitsyn praises, Alexander III, did understand “the ruinous effect of both Russia’s service to the interests of others and her pursuit of new conquests,” rightly preferring to focus his rule “on the inner health of the nation.” But even he “failed to detect the worrisome deadening of the Orthodox Church,” the one institution that might have reset the nation’s moral compass. His successors went back to the same policies of imperial expansion and ill-judged foreign alliances that set the nation on the course for ruin in the second ‘Time of Troubles’ in 1917.

Solzhenitsyn needs to show that the people could and did do better than the czars, and not only in the distant past. He finds this demonstration (somewhat paradoxically) in one great effort of Russian expansion, the settlement of Siberia. There, the Russian people enjoyed “complete freedom for private economic activity,” as well as “freedom to select both occupation and place of residence.” And in Russia generally, the bureaucracy was opened to commoners of proven ability, an “independent and open courts system” was established, and the revived zemstvos provided “free, high-quality medical care to the population.” Briefly, between 1906 and the Great War, Russia even had “a true parliament and multi-party system (for both of which we pine today as a novel achievement).”

For reasons detailed in his novel, March 1917, the misjudgments of Czar Nicholas II, the follies of liberal politicians, and the pressures of the war enabled “the defeat of Russia by the Bolsheviks.” (In a rare display of injustice, Solzhenitsyn cynically remarks that this revolution “was quite advantageous for the Allies,” as “they would not have to share with Russia the spoils of victory.”) As for the new regime itself, its mass-murderous rage at its ‘class enemies,’ its initial relinquishment of territories inhabited by Russians, its subsequent return to an imperialism even more hubristic than that of the czars, its gross mismanagement of the national economy all need little description, as by the mid-1990s they were acknowledged by all but the most benighted Leftist ideologues. Far from joining in the chorus of accolades for the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn dismisses him as an example of the “usual Bolshevik stupidity,” a bungling craftsmen of the oxymoronic “socialist market,” the “perestroika” or “restructuring” that merely replicated the old Leninist ploy of token liberalization, and the “glasnost” or “opening” of free speech by which “he was flinging the doors wide open for all the fierce nationalisms” of the components of the tottering Soviet empire. That empire “was not only unnecessary for us, but ruinous.”

At the time of Solzhenitsyn’s writing, “Russia has truly fallen into a torn state: 25 million have found themselves ‘abroad’ [in Ukraine and elsewhere] without moving anywhere, by staying on the lands of their fathers and grandfathers,” now relinquished by Moscow. To reverse this, Solzhenitsyn recommends three policies: evacuation of Russians who wish to leave the Transcaucasian and Central Asian countries, with resettlement in Russia; a call to the Baltic states to fully comply with “all-European standards of national minority rights”; and some degree of reunification with areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan with Russian-majority populations. (He never advocates forceful reunification, however; in this, President Putin has quite outdone him.) He very sensibly warns Western politicians not to keen over Russian weakness, as “circumstances will arise… when all of Europe and the United States will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

As for Russian regime politics, Solzhenitsyn derogates the parliament-and-party system of democracy because it attempts to impose democracy undemocratically, “from above, from the central parliament,” “with the party deciding who shall represent a particular electoral district.” “Our ingrained and wretched Russian tradition” refuses “to learn how to organize from below,” leaving Russians “inclined to wait for instructions from a monarch, a leader, a spiritual or political authority.” In the mid-1990s, “such are nowhere to be seen, while small-fry bustle at the heights.” Economic ‘shock therapy’ in the form of abrupt introduction of free-market principles meanwhile has resulted in “the triumph of the frisky sharks of non-producing commercialism”; instead of following the example of postwar Japan, which “entered world civilization without losing her distinctiveness,” Russia has only aped the West. But “national consciousness must always and everywhere be respected”; for Solzhenitsyn, nationalism never means ‘blood and soil,’ but “a person’s”—and then a people’s—”orientation of preferences.” And this consciousness or orientation is never above criticism: “”Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins.”

Therefore, the three ‘Times of Troubles’ that have brought catastrophe down upon Russia “could not have just been accidents. Some fundamental flaws of State and spirit must be to blame.” The main purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s historical account of Russia since the founding of the Romanov dynasty is precisely to identify those flaws, just as the main purpose of Rebuilding Russia was to suggest some pathways toward mending them.

 

J. D. Crouch and Patrick J. Garrity: You Run the Show or the Show Runs You: Capturing Professor Harold W. Rood’s Strategic Thought for a New Generation. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

 

Harold W. Rood was a plain-spoken man who “wanted, above all, to instruct his students in the hard logic of power, especially as that logic played out in international politics.” The notion of international relations struck him as touchy-feely, and he never hesitated to strike back. But he neither worshiped political power nor supposed it to operate like electricity, He considered it as an instrument of strategy, that is, of prudential reasoning—reasoning that itself both served purposes but needed steady reminders that purposes must be navigated through a complex landscape. Part of that landscape is political, but much of it really is landscape—that is, geography. As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he could scarcely overlook the importance of terrain, physical resources, and logistics. He was a geopolitician, and proud of it.

The authors divide their book into three segments. The first three chapters present Rood’s understanding of nature: the nature of politics, the nature of international politics, and the nature of strategy. The final three chapters present the main strategic problem Rood considered in his career—the Russian problem—and the strategy Americans devised to address it; the last chapter shows that Rood did not think the Russian problem had disappeared with the disintegration of the Soviet empire; moreover, the Chinese problem had been added to it. The fourth, central chapter treats the “democratic strategic deficit,” that is, the limitations imposed upon democratic-republican regimes as such, apart from the territorial, demographic, and other material strengths and weaknesses a given democratic republic must work with and against. The strategic deficit such regimes characteristically suffer ensure that while they may embody ‘the end of history’ in Fukuyama’s sense of the best practicable regime under modern conditions, they will always have weaknesses other regimes can and will exploit, and therefore will never put a stop to historical conflict, never bring on an ‘end time’ of perpetual peace.

The chapter on the nature of politics is short. Rood did not elaborate on human nature in the direct manner of a political philosopher. One gets the sense he thought Aristotle had already done that, with Hobbes providing a useful supplement. Subtitled, “The Inherent Logic of Events,” this chapter shows Rood to have been anything but a Hegelian; the “logic” here amounts to a set of deductions from human nature, embodied in human individuals and groups living in physical places and ruled by “constitutional arrangements” or regimes “through which men seek to control and govern their environment,” that is, those physical places. The “inner logic of historical themes” derives from the nature of human beings, in their physical and political circumstances. Rood described themes, preferring not to attempt to track down causes, because “strategy involved an appreciation of human agency”; he was no fatalist, no historicist in the philosophic sense. In too many circumstances causation is too complex to account for. Attempts to do so usually lead to terrible simplifications wielded by terrifying simplifiers.

Rood saw what physicists came later to see: There is no such thing as chaos. “Organization and control are present even in what seem to be the most chaotic and violent of circumstances.” Spontaneous ‘uprisings’ and ‘riots’ are seldom spontaneous, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. But strife does concentrate minds on the fact that “power is intrinsic to politics, something that intellectuals often forget.” Power, including technological power, serves purposes. In the early years of the Internet, when I told college students that warfare had moved from land and sea to the air and now to cyberspace (without moving away from land, sea, and air) they thought me a fool. Didn’t I know that networks of personal computers would bring peoples closer together, facilitating peaceful commerce and friendship? That the new technology would make war far less likely? No, I didn’t. Neither did Rood. In his opinion, power, including technological power, remains instrumental for any number of human purposes, not all of them pleasant. Ten years later, students treated my observation as ordinary; cyber-warfare was on, now noticeably. As Rood once wrote, politics is “the organization and application of power to accomplish purpose,” whatever that purpose might be. Worthy purposes include peace, justice, and defense, purposes and indeed “obligations” that “exist irrespective of the nature of the regime and whether its constitution is written or unwritten.” Unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, “Rood drew a fundamental distinction between the position of the tyrant and that of the lawful prince” because tyrants effectively wage war against their own subjects, ruling by force alone and not by law. Tyrants invite faction and rebellion, and these make foreign intervention likely and also more likely to be effective. “When the weak, faction-ridden French government and people failed to defend France in 1940, there was no justice in France, save for that dictated by the occupying authorities.” Faction arises even in well-governed countries, and in large, diverse, democratic republics it poses a problem for foreign-policy strategists as well as for citizens and ordinary politicians. Rood never succumbed to the typical geopolitician’s prejudice: assuming that states are like billiard balls, caring only about the size, density, and velocity of each ball, ignoring its internal structure. He cared very much about size, density, and velocity in international politics, but those things did not add up to the whole of the matter.

Rood understood the nature of international politics in Hobbesian (but also Socratic-Platonic) fashion: “There is going to be a war.” International politics consists of conflict. “There are clashes of will between nations or communities of nations just as there are clashes of will within nations,” clashes “arising from profound differences in outlook and purpose,” some of them “irreconcilable short of war.” War isn’t pathological or anomalous; it “is the political means by which humans, to a first (if not final) order, determine who will organize things, and for what purpose they will be organized.” Accordingly, in international politics “there is either war, or the preparation for war,” and you had better be ready to fight if you don’t want to lose. Nuclear weapons, economic ‘globalization,’ non-governmental organizations, sensitivity to the need to protect human rights, the interdependence of peoples: none of these things has stopped warfare from continuing, although they have all altered the ways in statesmen fight wars. Therefore, “the bottom line of war—who rules in whose land—should never be ignored.” If you want to be ruled this way, not that way—by the way of (for example) British parliamentarism or the German tyrant—you won’t, or at least shouldn’t, ignore that bottom line. For all our technology, geography remains central to understanding international politics. Sitting at your computer, you may feel as if the screen links you to the whole world, and so it does. But to what is your computer linked, if not to an electric grid constructed on a particular topography, in this climate, on a territory of a certain size, featuring some resources but not everything you need to live as you sit in a safe space, tapping away on the keyboard?

“Geography conditions the distribution and configuration of the great powers, as well as their natural enemies and friends.” ‘Powers’ great and small being located somewhere, “international politics are characterized by certain persistent patterns of great power interactions despite apparent changes in political regimes.” The exact ‘whereness’ of those states will shift, given the continual struggle that animates international politics. In his long career, Rood considered five major topics, each illustrating this point. They were: the German problem; the problem of Asia; the Middle Eastern question; the Caribbean-Cuban salient; and, as mentioned, the Russian problem. The first and the fifth problems, taken together, might be said to form the European problem, which reflects the geographical fact that Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals” (in de Gaulle’s phrase), and especially northern Europe, consists of a large, flat surface, well-suited for running armies through it.

Germany made itself a problem in Europe by the mid- to late 1800s, when Prussia overcame the divisions in which the 1648 Peace of Westphalia had left it. That settlement had been very much to the advantage of France, already united during the early modern period. Rood cited the Prussian General Staff’s history of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866: The war “must sooner or later have broken out,” the authors wrote. “The German nation could not forever exist in the political weakness into which it has sunk between the Latin West and the Slavonian East since the age of Germanic Emperors.” French statesmen saw that German unification spelled “disaster for France,” but Napoleon III made things worse by launching a premature war in 1870. His defeat cost him his throne, making the next war not only a war for territory but a regime war, a war setting republics against monarchies, with the French republic and the German monarchy at its center. Through 1945, in fact, “the logic of strategy dictated that it would be in united Germany’s interest to see that France was dismembered and removed from the ranks of European great powers. Otherwise, France would inevitably seek allies to encircle and redivide Germany.” This core conflict in turn troubled, and was troubled by, the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, European imperial rivalries outside Europe, European social revolutions, the stresses of industrialization, and even Japan’s defeat of China, on the other side of the now-interconnected international-politics world. The Great War occurred not because diplomats failed but because they had to: “the growth of German industrial, military, and naval power [was] nothing short of revolutionary, as German rulers could now hope to push hard against the western country, France, the eastern country, Russia, and, on the seas, the British navy which had effectively policed what Thomas Jefferson had called the great highway of the nations.

“The defeat of Imperial Germany in 1918 did not reset the German strategic agenda. This was as true of the Weimar regime as it would be for the Nazis, although the Nazis proved considerably more dangerous. It was the moderate president of the German Armistice Commission, Matthias Erzberger, who took care to tell the Brits, in the form of a 1920 letter to The Times of London, that “another war between Germany and the Anglo-Saxons [that is, the British and the Americans] is inevitable,” especially given the injuries sustained by the French during the war, making France a dubious shield for the Atlantic powers. At that time, Germans had already begun rearming, and Reich Chancellor Hitler described the next, complementary step: “We must never permit anybody but the Germans to carry arms!” The relatively modest re-dismemberment of Germany (into merely two, rather than some 300, independent states) was only reversed near the end of the Cold War because Americans saw Germany as an ally against the Soviets and, Rood argued, because the Russians considered it “necessary to weaken and eventually eliminate the U.S. presence from Europe”—a trend already visible by the beginning of the next millennium.

The problem of Asia consists of the rise of Japan in the twentieth century, Russian/Soviet expansion, and “the breakdown and recovery of a unified Chinese empire.” At the core of the Asian problem Rood saw “a China Problem—whether China is to be divided or unified,” who will rule the mainland, what the mainland’s boundaries and “strategic perimeter” will be, and what allies it will have. Rood pointed to The Problem of Asia and Its Effect on Modern Politics, published in 1910 by the great British geopolitician of naval power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and the lesser-known 1936 book by Gregory Bienstock, The Struggle for the Pacific, as perennially useful guides to Asian geopolitics.

Rood identified the source of the “the modern manifestation” of Sino-Japanese conflict as the 1868 regime change in Japan, when a centralized modern state was established with the emperor as its head, replacing the feudal-warlord regime of the Shogunate. China at that time still suffered from the absence of a modern state, with oligarch/warlords vying for control. Just as French statesmen long intended to keep Germany divided, so Japanese statesmen intended to keep China divided; they also wanted it isolated from foreign powers that might use it “as a means of weakening Japan.” Accordingly, Japan fought wars against China in the 1890s and Russia in the 1900s, acquiring Korea and with it the means to take control of Manchuria when offered it by its fellow-allies at the end of the Great War. In the settlement they also acquired German island colonies which “made ideal bases from which Japan could sever communications between the United States and the Philippines and isolate America from China.” The Japanese also “used commercial enterprises to penetrate those places they would target later in wartime,” as strategy that the China of the twenty-first century may well be emulating. By the late 1930s, Japan had conquered China, establishing a vast empire. As for Russia, the Soviets were happy to sign a non-aggression treaty in 1941 because Japanese conquests in Asia would rid the area of the Western empires and “expose those territories to the rise of nationalist movements that the Soviets were prepared to abet through indigenous communist parties,” as indeed they did throughout the postwar period. American anti-colonialism aided Soviet purposes in that regard, too. “Newly independent nations were susceptible to Soviet influence in a manner not possible when imperial control was being effectively exerted,” whether by the Japanese or the Europeans.

The breakup of the Soviet empire left China with a freer hand in Asia, where its sole remaining ‘superpower’ rival is the United States. “Since 1949, Rood noted, the Chinese government has suppressed internal dissent, sought the unification of Chinese territory, and promoted loyalty to the regime in Beijing”; this in turn has enabled modernization, including industrialization and militarization, with a network of highways and railways to the borders and, after Rood’s death, beyond those borders. “Han Chinese, accompanied by Communist Party cadres, have been transferred to the outlying regions to ‘dilute’ the local population, despite resistance from the indigenous peoples.” They have re-taken the key commercial and financial hub, Hong Kong, and intend to recover Taiwan, as well. Recent Chinese political-economic inroads into the Philippines (to take but one example) would come as no surprise to Rood. Nor have they relinquished hopes of unifying Korea “under a friendly regime.” As Rood summarized it, China remains “a one-party, totalitarian regime where international politics is seen to be an arena of unending struggle for a world order in which Chinese interests are respected and deferred to by other powers,” and this will require the United States to respond, if it intends to line up with its allies in the Asia-Pacific region.

In the Middle East, peace has prevailed only when enforced by “ruthless application” of authority by an imperial power—a pattern Rood might easily have traced back to Biblical times. Even such well-removed powers as Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and China have involved themselves in the Middle East for one reason or another, ranging from the need to defend against Muslim encroachment, maritime trade and naval routes, the desire to secure routes for navies and maritime commerce, or the hunger for oil. From a military standpoint, Mesopotamia is central to the region; accordingly, the British founded modern Iraq, hoping to “render Iraq an independent nation, one that was self-governing and equipped to maintain internal stability and defend its borders.” Half a century later, the Americans were still attempting to do the same thing. Meanwhile, the Russians, once under the Soviet regime, now under Putin, continue to follow their own geopolitical imperative to establish warm-water access points; their thus-far successful intervention in the Syrian civil war follows from Rood’s analysis of a strategy pursued since the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. The regimes have changed on all sides, but the geography hasn’t. The Soviets may have been atheists in principle, following Marx, but their policy “aimed to array Islam against the West, just as the Kaiser and Hitler had once done,” and the well-trained geopolitician Vladimir Putin is no different. Thus Rood supported the 2003 United States war in Iraq not because he cared about changing its regime or worried about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but because the United States could use a military anchor in the region, just as it had one in Germany, against Russia.

Closer to home, Rood considered the Caribbean-Cuban salient indispensable to American security. (He was not alone; Thomas Jefferson called any country that controlled New Orleans the enemy of the United States). America must always defend the two main avenues of approach to its heartland: the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence; and the salient, whose gateway from the Atlantic is Cuba, commanding the sea routes into the Gulf of Mexico. The British proved that in the 1760s, when its capture of Havana “crippled Spanish power in the West Indies and cut the communications between Old and New Spain.” “Whenever Cuba has been in the hands of a weak regime or one hostile to the United States, American interests have been threatened,” whether from piracy in the 1820s, Confederate raiding ships that found friendly ports there in the 1860s, or potentially from any hostile European power. (Although Rood may not have suspected this, it seems likely that Theodore Roosevelt took a strong disliking to the young Winston Churchill because Churchill wrote articles for publication in 1896, suggesting that the British seize the island from Spain. Whether or not this is so, Teddy did beat them to the punch, a couple of years later.) Rood did recall the 263 U.S. merchant ships sunk by German submarines in the Gulf and the Caribbean during World War II, and the Soviet-sponsored communist coup in 1959 gave the Russians what he called “an unsinkable aircraft carrier, 90 miles from the United States”—a platform “for expansion into the Western Hemisphere.”

Throughout this chapter, Crouch and Garrity take pains to show that although the conflict of regimes is indeed a major consideration in international politics, geography—combined with existing, if temporary, circumstances—may override such differences. For example, although “Russia and Japan were mortal enemies in East Asia over the future disposition of China” they “shared a common interest in expelling the Western colonial powers from the region,” just as Russia and Middle-East jihadists shared an interest in ridding the Middle East of Americans and Europeans. In the 1940s, Soviet Russian gyrations—a peace treaty with Germany, then alliance with the ‘Anglo-Americans’—were products of shifting military circumstances; either way, Stalin wanted control of Eastern Europe.

From the nature of politics and the nature of international politics, the authors shift to Rood’s understanding of the nature of strategy, encapsulating in his mot, “You run the show or the show runs you.” As the authors remark, this is no time-bound, ‘historically relative’ principle but one that’s “been in operation since before Thucydides.” More formally stated, “the ultimate goal in strategy is to confront an enemy with such a preponderance of forces, and such superiority of strategic position from which to deploy those forces, that the enemy, however much he may resist, can only conform to one’s will.” General Lee, meet General Grant. Geography enters in because this goal usually requires occupying physical chokepoints such as the city of New Orleans, controlling the mouth of the Mississippi River; Gibraltar, controlling the western entrance to the Mediterranean; the Straits of Malacca, connecting the Pacific with the Indian Ocean. Even in the era when the British ‘bourgeoisie’ enjoyed unmatched ascendancy in the world, no less a personage than Queen Victoria understood that maintaining military power is “the true economy.” (Adam Smith would not have disagreed.) Pace George Kennan, but “diplomacy cannot substitute for military power or make up for its deficiencies.” Sooner or later, someone else will cut through your verbiage.

Different regimes incline toward different kinds of strategies. Although Carl von Clausewitz famously called war a continuation of politics by other means, Rood thought that modern tyrannies, “following Lenin,” consider politics “a continuation of war by other means.” So, for example, while “the United States thought it could seek a political solution in Vietnam as though it were an alternative to a military resolution of the war,” the Vietnamese communists “pursued a straightforward military victory, at the conference table as well as on the battlefield.”  Throughout the ‘Peace Talks’ held in Paris, the communists sought a settlement whereby they would “preserve their armed forces and… retain strategic positions in South Vietnam,” thus “set[ting] the stage for its eventual victory in the war, as American patience with the war waned.” In the words of an even more conspicuous tyrant, Adolf Hitler, after military victory has been achieved “the wise victor will, if possible, always impose his claim on the defeated people stage by stage, dealing with the people that has grown defeated, and this in every people which has voluntarily submitted to force. He may then rely on the fact that not one of these further acts of oppression will seem sufficient reason to take up arms again.”

In preparation for such a consummation, the tyrant may often rely on his enemy’s wishful thinking, “the tendency for the inferior, unprepared power” to, in Rood’s words, “rethink the enemy’s strategy until one comes up with one that is not threatening.” Between the world wars and after the second one, many influential citizens in the commercial republics did exactly that, readying themselves in some cases for a nasty military surprise. Israel was nearly obliterated in 1973 for that reason, and of course the conduct of French and British parliamentarians in the 1930s remains the best-remembered example of the syndrome. Such psychological defeat can be hastened by deception and subversion. It was no wonder (to those who notice such things) when some of the most persistent apologists for Soviet conduct suddenly fell silent when the Soviet Union went out of business, although they might easily have told us that they had been right all along in claiming the regime was incapable of harming the commercial republics.

If you want to run the show instead of letting it run you, and you also intend to avoid war unless necessary, the best strategy will rest on deterrence. “But, like peace, it can never be achieved directly.” You will deter your enemy only if he knows you can and will act in such a way as to do him insufferable harm. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover kept the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii beyond its usual annual stay, but this failed to deter Japan from moving against China because Hoover “had already made it clear that he would not fight for Asia.” Worse, in 1940 President Roosevelt supposed that the mere presence of the U.S. naval forces in Hawaii would restrain Japan, without ensuring that they were ready for war if it came. The Japanese military leaders figured that out, and moved accordingly. Shows of force only work if the enemy believes the force is real; bluffing a steadfast and well-informed enemy risks a lot.

The authors turn to the regime-specific “democratic strategy deficit” in their central chapter. In view of the catastrophic failures of tyrants in the twentieth century, twenty-first-century tyrants “may become more subtle without becoming more just.” The constitutional-democratic, commercial-republican way of life and the ethos it generates and reinforces commendably seek to protect the weak, but that principle does not “ordinarily operate within the international community.” Tyrannies, however, “constantly at war with their own citizens,” apply that mindset and the policies it generates to “free peoples outside of their borders,” although such warfare may not entail “a shooting war” at all times, any more than it entails the use of truncheons against all their own subjects at all times.

As a result of the regime ethos of the republics, foreign policy ‘realists’ in them often display little realism. For a man like George F. Kennan, for example, “war, not totalitarianism, was the enemy to be resisted.” The purely diplomatic means proposed by him when he wrote on ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union could not work because Kennan largely eschewed military action and even adequate military preparedness to back up his diplomacy. Kennan’s ‘political’ geopolitics was therefore in fact apolitical, assuming that no “fundamental conflict between totalitarianism and democracy” existed. Kennan’s ‘realism’ treated the state instead of the regime as fundamental to politics, but, like all organizations, states have regimes, and therefore characters, inclinations, sentiments that effect their actions, even if they do not simply determine those actions. Democratic-republican ‘idealists’ do see the differences in regimes, but, precisely because they are idealists, often fail to see the serious real-world difficulties in establishing congenial commercial republics in foreign countries, many of which have “never known” political liberty and don’t know what to do with it when they get it. And so in Iraq, United States policy should have been less ambitious—aiming at a regime that fostered “a stable and comfortable place for ordinary citizens to live and prosper,” which might well be a decent rule of ‘the one’ and/or ‘the few.’

Significantly, in searching for an instance of sound military planning in a modern republic Rood found it within a sort of a non-democratic, non-republican organization within that republic: the policy set down by the U.S. military between the world wars. Given that “war is an instrument of national policy,” and that “wars are won by attacking, disorganizing, and destroying the armed forces of the enemy,” the American military should be “capable of carrying war to an enemy.” An “isolationist” policy would have amounted to coastal defense, reinforcing a naval fleet restricted to home waters—the naval equivalent of France’s Maginot Line. No other agencies in the federal government were “prepared to accept war as a legitimate act of policy and not imply as an expedient for the defense of the physical borders of the country.” Interwar U. S. foreign policy was ideological, “not territorial, and devoted to goals that had the haziest definitions,” such as “peace, disarmament, world order, sanctity of treaties, and international law.” “It was not until the middle of 1941 that the services received a firm directive from the president concerning the kind of war for which they should plan.” Fortunately, the military officers already knew what they needed to do, having learned from the experience of the Great War and rejecting “the reliance on static or trench warfare” seen in that war. As early as 1919, an article in the Infantry Journal argued that “war is motion,” that “only the unlimited offensive brings decisive results.” This doctrine quickly got into the curricula at West Point and Annapolis. Indeed, future naval officers had been studying Mahan in the years before the Great War, and drew from him the determination to prevent attacks on the American coasts, not merely to respond to them. To his credit, Franklin Roosevelt, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the war, imbibed this doctrine, too, although he didn’t understand the need for an army expeditionary force until much later. Although Crouch and Garrity don’t mention it, the idea of ‘advance defense,’ of carrying the war to the enemy, animated American military policy throughout the nineteenth century during the Indian Wars and the Civil War. When American military planners decided that “the implacable logic of military doctrine” required preparedness to fight the country’s “nearest and most dangerous enemy,” they followed the practice of their predecessors.

For the United States and its allies after the Second World War, the nearest and most dangerous enemy was Soviet Russia. Crouch and Garrity turn to Rood’s analysis of “the Russian Problem” in the first chapter of the book’s third triptych. Since Peter the Great established the first modern state in Russia, the country’s grand strategy has consisted of “the persistent drive to open waters” on all sides of its huge territory. “If successfully accomplished, this strategy would have left Russia the dominant Eurasian power, given Russia’s long-standing ability to control or influence events in Eastern and Central Europe and Central Asia”—vast, mostly flat expanses that lend themselves to the movements of mass armies culled from a massive population. “The political-religious notion that [Russia] was destined to be the ‘Third Rome'” has reinforced this policy; the Marxist-Leninist ambition to serve as the cutting edge of ‘World History’ yielded the same policy, albeit on an atheist foundation. “Rood took seriously the statement of… Soviet officials that the end of their policy was to be the establishment of socialism and communism throughout the world.” Under their ideology, the world needed to be reorganized, wrested from the capitalists. “So long as the nations of the West continued to claim the right to rule themselves under the principles to which they adhered, Rood concluded that there was a high probability of war.”

Rood understood Soviet grand strategy to consist of five characteristics: in contrast to the Nazis, postwar Soviet rulers showed patience, relying on the security provided by their Eastern and Central European empire and the absence of any Asian power capable of launching a major invasion; Soviet rulers “played both sides against the middle,” often backing both sides in a conflict, thereby positioning themselves for influence over whichever side won; the Soviets always linked politics, economics, and military strategy ( beginning in the 1950s, in Afghanistan, they built roads and airports as an apparent means of improving commerce, then used that infrastructure to launch their 1979 military invasion); they established alliances with two or more countries that could serve one purpose, as when they allied with both Egypt and Libya in the late 1960s, reasoning that if one of those countries ‘turned’ on them or lost a major war, the other would still provide them with a foothold in the Mediterranean; and finally, the Soviets “sought to force the United States to defend areas away from the principal theater of war,” as for example in Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, theatres far from the crucial European Plain. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia not only served to firm up the Soviet empire, it also “effectively served as a dress rehearsal for an invasion of Western Europe, without unduly alarming the United States and its NATO allies.” After the re-conquest, the Soviets took care to leave two tank divisions and three motorized rifle divisions behind, strengthening their in-place military capabilities near the border with the West Europeans, and doing so without provoking “any commensurate military response” from NATO. Meanwhile, in southern Europe, by the 1970s Yugoslavia “had become an advanced base for Soviet military power in the eastern Mediterranean,” serving as a point of transit for Soviet military supplies to Egypt during the 1973 Middle East War. By then, NATO would have been hard pressed to defend Greece or Turkey in a war with Warsaw Pact forces. The beauty of all this, from the Soviet perspective, was that “nowhere had the Soviet Union needed to wage war to change the strategic circumstances in its favors, although wars in the area had frequently opened opportunities for new strategic gains.” They employed a similar strategy in Asia, aiming at isolating the United States from such allies as Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines.

But what about deterrence based on U.S. nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles? The Soviets devoted substantial resources to civil defense, evidently not concurring with Western claims that such efforts must be useless against such weapons. “Rood thought that if the West acted upon the belief that the Soviets were not really serious about going to war, that they were only interested in security, the West would fall victim to the self-deception that characterized the democratic strategy deficit.” But if the nuclear standoff really was a standoff, if nuclear weapons were truly ‘unusable’ because a first strike by one side would provoke an obliterating counterattack by the other, why would a well-prepared ‘conventional’ war in Europe not make sense? What would the Americans do about it? “Americans had not toughed it out in Vietnam—why should it be any different in Western Europe, when the costs would be so much higher?”

In Rood’s judgment, the end of the Cold War left American more, not less vulnerable to Russian machinations, in the long run. “He wondered if objective conditions now rendered an alliance between Moscow and Beijing, based on their common anti-Western perspective, much more viable than it had been.” Nothing that has occurred since his death in 2011 has undermined that suspicion.

How would America’s rivals address their “America Problem”? “If there is to be a war, Americans will want to fight it abroad.” To avoid fighting on American soil, and to avoid fighting a large and costly war far from that soil, Americans will need to prepare “to fight a lot of little” wars; this requires a network of “bases and allies abroad, from which to conduct military operations.” Considered as targets, North and South America “are little more than continent-sized islands off the west coast of Europe and off the east coast of Asia”; taken together with Africa, they constitute what geopolitical strategist Halford Mackinder called “The World Island.” This ‘Old World’ is much bigger than the New World, making “the balance of power in Eurasia…of intense interest to Americans,” inasmuch as a country or coalition of countries that dominated the World Island would confront the United States with “an overwhelming material threat to its existence.”

American interests overseas are more than military and political. As a commercial republic, America has “far-flung commercial interests and the desire for open markets.” Both the Quasi-War with France and the Barbary Wars—the “first congressionally authorized uses of force” under the 1787 Constitution—aimed at protecting U.S. commerce.

The sheer size of the United States, along with the extent of its commercial and military interests, makes it both powerful and vulnerable in international politics. More, the very proliferation of factions that benefits American regime (as shown by Publius in the tenth Federalist) can prove a handicap in international politics because it provides foreign powers opportunities to play divide-and-rule, as Americans also saw early on, when French agent Edmond Genêt fomented dissent against the Adams Administration. Rood understood the American Civil War geopolitically, as a struggle by the United States to prevent disunion, which would have caused the North to deal “with endless coalitions between the confederacy and any European powers with territorial ambitions in North America,” a likelihood illustrated during the war itself, when France attempted to install an Austrian prince as the monarch of Mexico. It was not until a couple of years after the U.S. victory in the war that Great Britain finally accepted “the viability of the United States,” as signaled by the British North America Act of 1867.

A good thing, too, for both countries, as the twentieth century saw. “The imperatives of strategy would eventually overcome the American notion of political and military isolation from Europe,” as “Germany’s war aims in 1914 clearly included domination of the European continent, which meant controlling the maritime approaches to Europe and dictating the terms of peacetime commerce with powers like the United States.” Further, as Rood put it, “one of the invariable indications that the United States is in for trouble with a foreign power is when that power begins open or clandestine operations in the Western Hemisphere,” as Germany did in the run-up to both world wars. In both cases, the main political challenge came from the reluctance of democratically-elected political representatives to contradict the intense desire of their constituents to stay out of the war; the average citizen doesn’t think geopolitically, and usually doesn’t want to.

Competing European empires had buffered the United States for decades because none was able to dominate Europe, much less the World Island. The collapse of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, and French empires left only one empire standing there. Soviet ambitions compelled the United States “to man the distant ramparts itself.” As Rood acknowledged, Nicholas Spykman had anticipated this circumstance during the war, calling the attention of readers of his 1942 book, America’s Strategy in World Politics, to the need to prevent hostile powers from controlling the “Rimland,” that is, the borders of Eurasia—areas containing most the world’s population and natural resources. The strategy of ‘containment’ followed from Spykman’s insights; Rood recommended U.S. efforts “to defeat probes or aggression by the communist bloc in the Rimland; to threaten to escalate the conflict locally if circumstances warranted; and to roll back marginal communist gains in the Rimland whenever the opportunity presented itself.” Hence his support for the American military intervention on the side of the non-communist regime in South Vietnam against the communist North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong guerrillas operating in the south. “If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Rood thought that the Philippines would be forced to reconsider its attitude toward China,” which is exactly what has happened. Rood also judged that withdrawal would risk “a later war with China when it had developed a full-sized nuclear arsenal, backed by the capacity to command the sea areas around the island shield of Asia”; the first has now happened, the second is in the works.

Since the Cold War never quite ended, as Russia regrouped and reprised many of its longstanding policies, Rood observed that “geography has not changed”: “Even a diminished Russia is still only a few hundred miles from the German border, while the United States will always be thousands of miles away.” Russia’s regime changed, but not into a commercial republic, ready to give up its extraterritorial ambitions and happily restrict its relations with the world to diplomacy, commerce, and cultural exchange. “Like Germany after 1918,” Russia “had not been occupied”; “in the mind of its leaders and people, it had not truly been defeated” but rather had been “cheated out of its rightful place in the sun by traitors and scheming foreign enemies.” Russia’s 2001 agreement to a “strategic partnership” with China underscored this point, a point underwritten not only by China’s growing military power but by the much-overlooked fact that “Russia remains the strongest military power in Europe,” as China does in Asia.

Rood’s welcome defense of the American 2003 intervention in Iraq reflects these concerns. Iraq was an ally of Russia; Russia wants the U.S. out of the Middle East. In defeating the Saddam Hussein regime, America had “accrued strategic advantages” by “remov[ing] a protégé of Russia” and a “disruptive force in the Middle East.” But although America “had neutralized Iraq,” it hadn’t “dealt with other hostile nations claiming leadership of the Arab world,” nor “resolved the terrible weakness of the Saudi regime in the face of Arab-Islamic terrorism.” The war in Syria illustrates this, although Rood did not live to see it.

Crouch and Garrity conclude their study of Rood’s strategic thought with a call for moral and political responsibility. “What if” America’s “apparent loss of direction is not merely the result of uncontrollable historical forces, and the limits of our power and human foresight, but at least in part is due to the strategic purposes and actions of others? What if these purposes are long-standing, going back not only to 1991 but well before that? What if others are patiently accumulating the sort of strategic advantages that will put us at grave disadvantage in a war, or at least in a major political crisis, while attempting to conceal those preparations. Are objective conditions bringing about an alignment of hostile powers?” Good questions, all. Who today is answering them?