Greg Weiner: American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 52, Number 4, July/August 2015.
An American Burke sounds like a paradoxical fellow. America’s most prominent recent Burkean, Russell Kirk, enjoyed some success insofar as he espoused a traditionalism he judged prudent. But of course Burke’s traditionalism was European, not American, and therefore aristocratic. One may repair to the countryside and a rambling old home, essay the squire’s life, inveigh against all encroaching vulgarity, and yet not ever achieve what the United States denies one: aristocracy itself, with its lineages that stretch forward into the future, its servants, its governing responsibilities. In America, the aristocratic pose will never shake a wilting touch of twee—quite unlike the real thing, the man himself.
Although colorful and by Washington standards even eccentric, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had nothing twee about him, and thus resembled the real Burke more than any literary/academic imitator could do. Like Burke himself, Moynihan was simply too Irish for twee-ness. The American Burke was a scholar and statesman, too, but he placed himself in the line of American liberalism, a line to which the well-born do not belong by right. Moynihan thought like an American; he figured he had the same rights as anybody else. A democrat and indeed a Democrat, his traditionalism came in with liberalism itself, which has as much of a pedigree as anything else in this country—even if this may not be saying much, as pedigrees go.
The character of American liberalism in Moynihan’s lifetime raises a different problem for a Burkean sensibility. While its advocates often trace their lineage back to Lincoln, to Jefferson, and even to Locke, they are inclined to esteem such worthies only insofar as their thoughts and actions can be made to appear to anticipate their own. Liberals of the twentieth-century or progressive stripe praise Lincoln as a strong president who ended slavery, Jefferson as a democrat (needing a good dose of Hamiltonianism to stiffen his spine), Locke as a man of enlightened modernity, and so on. More, they see themselves as representing one more step in this upward climb toward still greater social, political, and economic equality on the one hand, and maximal personal freedom on the other. But unlike traditionalists, who incline to look to origins, to the past, for moral and political authority, liberal progressives look to the future. And in so doing they mean to use the modern, centralized state as an indispensable trailblazer for getting there Burke didn’t do either of those things. Did Moynihan?
Here Professor Weiner steps in to help. He begins by observing that Moynihan endorsed the liberal-progressive aspiration for equality along with progressivism’s esteem for the modern state as a means for achieving a greater measure of equality than economic liberty alone seems likely to afford. However, Moynihan distinguished between a redistributionist state—seen, for example, in such New Deal programs as Social Security and unemployment relief—and a service-providing state that absorbed the traditional roles of family, church, neighbors, and the rich variety of civil associations so memorably described by Tocqueville (who, along with Burke, emerges as a Moynihanian hero). The state can encourage such personal relationships with tax policy and a variety of other strategies, but if the state itself provides services by employing paid professional social workers then it tends to transfer money not so much to the poor as to the middle-class service providers themselves, who have every reason to want to maintain and even expand their list of clients. In Moynihan’s thinking on this matter, Tocqueville meets the Catholic Church—specifically, its principle of subsidiarity, “the belief that a social problem should be addressed by the closest competent institution to it.” Burke is here, too—Moynihan loved his phrase, “the little platoons” within which we fight the battles of life.
This sensitivity to the strengths but also the limitations of government action explains Moynihan’s esteem for the New Deal but not the Great Society. “The New Deal offered amelioration, at which the government was good because government was good at raising revenue and cutting checks. The Great Society [by contrast] offered programs around which constituencies—often professional, middle-class groups with interests distinct from those of the people the programs were intended to help—accreted. They micromanaged; they agitated; they were envious of nonstate actors.”
And they were less than competent because trained as social scientists. A distinguished social scientist himself, Moynihan understood the limitations of his discipline. Social scientists know how to compile and ‘crunch’ numbers; neither they nor the social workers they train are adequate substitutes for parents, friends, pastors, or the guy at the bar who knows a good car repair shop. And the numbers social scientists compile and crunch tell them what worked, not what will work; they are retrospective, not prospective. They help us to cope, not to prophesy. Moynihan learned this the hard way, by experience, “arriv[ing] in John F. Kennedy’s Washington a political idealist and [leaving] Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration a chastened man”—among other things, ready for work in the Nixon administration and later as a United States Senator from New York. War on poverty, yes: but a guerrilla war, not a world war. “There were limits to the capacity of human beings to manipulate infinitely intricate social systems and limits to the ability of reason fully to comprehend them.” At this writing, in 2015, we’ve mapped the human genome but we still can’t cure diabetes or cancer; nature itself is a more complicated beast than the adepts of mechanistic science had supposed, and Moynihan would smile to see this acknowledged by practitioners of science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’
So, for example, social scientists can use statistics to show that family is the main—perhaps only—relevant ‘variable’ in educational ‘outcomes.’ It cannot show your mother how to read to you after dinner. Another Tocqueville apercu surfaces, here: In trying to persuade politicians and social scientists of this home truth, “the problem was the tendency of democratic peoples to insist on simplicity and to be willing to pay a high price to retain the illusion of it.” Moynihan admired what had become the old, but once had been the new science of politics, the political science of The Federalist, which stuck to the adaptation of social realities in securing our rights and, true to its name, structured a governmental system respectful of local self-government while strengthening central authority for well-defined purposes of self-defense and the regulation of interstate commerce. As a federalist, Publius turns out to be an advocate of the Protestant and Lockean form of Catholicism’s subsidiarity principle. Like Publius, and unlike contemporary libertarians and neo-Confederates, Moynihan did not propose federalism as a disguise for weaker government, but rather for more effective government at all levels.
Moynihan also doubted the progressives’ faith in the march of progress. Not only did he dislike the regimentation such a metaphor implies; he also doubted that something called ‘History’ is necessarily going anywhere in accordance with laws discernible by social scientists or anyone else on this earth. “He believed a high and sustained measure of happiness was possible, just not inevitable.” What human beings can do is to structure their environment better, from better constitutions (as Publius showed us) to better public architecture. Both political institutions and public spaces guide our movements without denying our liberty to think and to act; they channel human energies without stifling them. Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington—with the Capital Building, not the White House, as its center—reflected what Moynihan called “a certain political literacy” which that architect shared with the political architects of the United States Constitution.
Only the spirit of those sorts of architecture could address the socio-economic condition of poverty in a fair and intelligent way. Moynihan wanted the federal government to spend more money to alleviate poverty; only such a national policy would short-circuit the states’ practice of underbidding one another with respect to benefits in order to get rid of the poor. Going beyond material benefits, however, he emphasized that “the unit of analysis” in any discussion of poverty must be the family, not the individual, and that poor families need money not services. Without an adequate income for the “male bread-winner,” the family will disintegrate. But as experience accumulated, Moynihan saw that family disintegration among the poor, and especially among poor blacks, continued to rise even as unemployment fell. “We have lost a family structure capable of disciplining young males,” Moynihan wrote in 1965. Under the Nixon Administration he advocated the Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an annual income for poor families, but it didn’t survive Congressional scrutiny. Worse, local experiments with the guaranteed income showed that family breakup actually increased when families received this benefit. Years later toward the end of his Senate career, he wondered, plaintively, “Who indeed can tell us what happened to the American family?”
Moynihan became a senator largely on the strength not of his reputation on domestic policy but because he became an eloquent defender of the United States as ambassador to the United Nations during the late 1970s—the post-Vietnam War period when many Americans felt not only disheartened by the bitterness of domestic politics but much-abused by foreign spokesmen in the General Assembly. The ‘East-West’ confrontation had crystallized at the same time British and French imperialism had lost its grip. Consequently, the Cold War saw a ‘North-South’ struggle in addition to the struggle of ‘East and West,’ with each of the rival ‘super-power’ regimes competing for influence in the poverty-stricken, highly nationalistic ‘Third World.’ By the time Moynihan got to the U. N. the United States held what amounted to the position of a minority party in Congress. He implemented “a vigorous ideological and political defense of liberty,” “refus[ing] to indulge the self-flagellating rhetoric of the 1960s American Left”—still heard in his own Democratic Party. Arguing that many of the rulers of ex-colonial countries formed their political opinions under the auspices of democratic-socialist professors in the European universities they’d attended years ago, “he assumed a posture not unlike Burke’s in response to the French Revolution: one man standing before the seemingly inevitable tide of history and, in the very name of prudence and armed with ideas, insisting on heroic resistance.” In defending liberal as distinguished from social democracy, in refusing to concede any ground to Leftish demands, and in generally eschewing the unreciprocated courtesies previously extended by the United States to its adversaries, Moynihan demanded that member nations adhere to the Charter of the organization they had joined and abide by international law.
Moynihan’s rhetorical defense of liberal principle did not entail his abandonment of good judgment. He never got carried away with his own Irish eloquence, but coldly assessed the prospects of the Soviet Union and found them bleak. Although the Soviets seemed to be gaining on the battle-weary and uncertain Americans, as early as the late 1970s Moynihan saw that the Soviet empire was weakening. As a specialist in ethnicity, he saw the way many captive nations within the empire had begun to push against their captors; although Moynihan does not seem to have said so, he evidently regarded Russia as a new version of Austria-Hungary: the unwanted ruler of a polyglot empire without the economic resources to hold on. Needless to say, he hoped that it would not take a world war to push it into its collapse. This is why, as a senator, he opposed the Reagan Administration’s ‘rollback’ strategy—the attempt to accelerate Soviet decline. Rather than a too-precipitous imperial collapse he hoped that a gradual (thus Burkean) replacement of Soviet rule with international law and international institutions could be worked out. he worried that the Reagan administration’s impatience with international law—seen, for example, in the invasion of Grenada—would add fuel to a smoldering fire. He went so far as to define political right as international law—a move never countenance by another of his intellectual heroes, Hugo Grotius, who looked to natural law as the foundation of political rights and of the law of nations.
He did not object to the use of force to buttress international law. The 1990 military alliance against Iraq—which had violated international law by invading Kuwait—was justified because Saddam Hussein had committed a crime. Moynihan voted against Congressional authorization of the war nonetheless because he objected to President George H. W. Bush’s Kennedyesque language about no price being too heavy to pay for punishing that crime. Here is a feature of Moynihan’s thought and practice derived not so much from Burke or Tocqueville, or even Grotius, but from Lord Halifax, “The Trimmer.” Moynihan like to lean against the wind because he wanted to keep his country balanced, morally and intellectually capable of prudential reasoning. Even if his personality could be described as extravagant, larger-than-life, he tried very hard not to speak or act that way, and he kept to that resolution.
Like Burke, then, Moynihan emerges from Weiner’s fine study as a reasonable man unimpressed with the grander ambitions of Enlightenment rationalism. He had no truck with Burke’s regret for the lost aristocracy, and indeed became skeptical of what Tocqueville identified as a new aristocracy that had embedded itself into the modern state and entertained too-high esteem for its administrative expertise. His challenge to conservatives was to show how a dismantling of the contemporary American state would not severely disrupt civil society in its very attempt to revive it. His challenge to liberal progressives and conservatives alike was to point out, as Weiner phrases it, that moralizing—if “untethered to experience”—”may be especially prone to abuse.” For Moynihan, morality appears to have derived from Catholic principles which (he would have ben the first to say) are not everyone’s principles. But the core (as it were Noachide) moral principles shared by most Americans and indeed most people wherever they are, provide firm guidance, if our minds remain open to the lessons of experience.
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