We are Engaged in a Great Civil War

The depth of our political divide in America constitutes a civil war, the one side preserving the regime and the other side working to overthrow it. But thankfully it's a cold war, not a shooting war. All that we need for preserving the republic against it's progressivist overthrowers is to re-school the American public in their heritage of liberty.

I have been writing recently about the movement of American government in dangerous directions toward a subtle, seductive, but very real form of despotism. Most recently I published "The Temptation to Dictatorship" at WORLDmag.com, a further reflection on what I wrote here in "The Dictatorship of Hope and Change." We hear Tom Friedman and Andrea Mitchell musing openly on Meet The Press about the public benefits that would result from allowing Barack Obama and his soul-mates in Congress to suspend the Constitution for a day and really put things right. This was not a careless thought. Friedman was just following up on what he stated in one his recent books. But only Paul Gigot expressed shock and incredulity. When he did, the political cognoscenti around him just blinked and went on.

This dangerous indifference to the institutions of liberty is not limited to a few reckless talking heads on a Sunday news show. It pervades the liberal establishment. And if it were only indifference, we would be in better shape than we are. George Will has drawn national attention to the principled hostility toward our very form of government that has characterized the Democratic Party for almost a hundred years, and which Barack Obama has raised to the level of mortal struggle.

Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of "progressivism," was the first president critical of the nation's founding. Barack Obama's Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake's rejection of limited government.

In my WORLDmag.com column today, "Our Present Civil Cold War," I continue Will's train of thought to what I think is its implied but unstated conclusion. (Michael Lind at Salon.com responds to Will's thesis here.)

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What Wilson began, the Great Depression interrupted, but Franklin Roosevelt took it up again with great energy in the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson carried it forward with the Great Society, and now Barack Obama has raised this war against limited, constitutional government to the level of mortal struggle.


Now we are engaged in a great civil cold war. It is a political war between the advocates of limited and unlimited government, between those who support the Founding and the Constitution as amended and the self-described progressives who, by definition, reject what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us in favor of what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Will takes his prompt from a new book by William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. In the progressive view of politics, there is no limiting principle for government. Writes Voegeli, “Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is.” We can see this in President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” speech, in which he declared the commitment of his government to, among other things,

...the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.

Thus rights become government entitlements that don’t limit government, but instead empower and expand it.

For progressives, the purpose of government is not to protect certain natural rights that in turn limit the government itself. This is the political theory of the Founding and the Constitution. Rather, government’s job is to discover new rights that come to light as we morally evolve, i.e., as we progress.

Our choice is between two very different forms of government. Limited government stands opposite progressive government of unlimited reach. Individual liberty stands opposite federally guaranteed personal security. Our system of checks and balances stands opposite the popularly unaccountable and trans-political bureaucracy. In the Great Civil War, we fought—as Lincoln put it—for “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This new struggle is a domestic cold war for that same understanding of freedom. We need to be clear that there is a fundamental difference between these politically divergent ways of life, and that the choice is now clearly before us. Otherwise we will simply slip peacefully into what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” the way a freezing man welcomes the embrace of death like a comforting lover.

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Reading List:

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, The Federalist Papers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America.

Walter McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History (HarperCollins, 2004).

R.J. Pestritto. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007).

Matthew Spalding, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future (ISI, 2009).

William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter, 2010).

James Caeser, Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard UP, 2008).

Also, anything by Martin Diamond, Charles Kesler, Forrest McDonald, or Herbert Storing.

You should also explore through these websites and catalogues the considerable labors that thoughtful patriots have undertaken over that past two generations or so in the re-schooling of America in its education for liberty.

Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
The Constitution Society
The Federalist Society
The Founders' Constitution
The Heritage Foundation
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Jack Miller Center
Lehrman American Studies Center
Liberty Fund

Doing Our Individualism Together

In the recent issue of The City, the fine journal that comes out of Houston Baptist University, Wilfred McClay reflects on what cities mean for our souls ("The Soul and the City;" it's not accessible online but you can and should subscribe for free). Large urban centers are not unambiguously good things, but they are also far from unmitigated evils, or what Benjamin Rush compared to, "abscesses on the human body," which is to say, "reservoirs of all the impurities of a community." After first reflecting on the shape of our surroundings which not only we have shaped, but which then have shaped us in turn, he backs up and asks a fundamental question: Never mind cities; why do we bother with each other all?

Our reflections need to begin, then, with a consideration of what cities are, and are for, what they accomplish that can be accomplished no other way. Indeed, given the strong emphasis on the individual in our times, we would do well to begin with an even more fundamental question. Do we really need to dwell together?

That's easy: Yes, we do. It's a fundamental part of our nature. Aristotle argued that man is by nature a political animal, and that a man who lives outside of the city is either a beast or a god. For Christians, this emphasis on relationship is at the very foundation of things, because God Himself is, in the Trinitarian understanding, defined by relationship in his fundamental being. The Bible consistently relies on our human and natural relations to explain God's nature to us: as Father and Son, for example. Or as in the act of marriage, as laid out rather mysteriously in the Letter to the Ephesians, which explains and is explained by Christ's relationship with His Church, which is also His body, or the body of which He is the head. For our purposes, what this means is that relationship with others is not something we do but something we are--we may shape our relationships, but we are more fundamentally shaped by the need for them, and we cannot understand ourselves without reference to them (pp. 8-9).

Americans are individualists to their core, and, it seems, always will be. But that does not mean we are, or have always been, simply individualistic. Just as America has always been a mix of classical, Christian, and modern Enlightenment influences, though, as the United States, we were formed primarily by Enlightenment thought (Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu etc.), so too we have always thought and acted for the most part as self-reliant individuals, but humanized and civilized by Christian charity and classical notions of honor. As we have, on the one hand, thrown off Christianity, and on the other hand forgotten how to blush, our life together has become ever more unmanageably individualistic, resulting in both socially pathological solipsism and slavish submission to statism. Individualism needs the covenant life of Christianity as well as the ancient aesthetic appreciation for noble deeds and revulsion at what is shameful in order to correct it excesses and make its virtues sustainable.

Strangely, David Brooks wrote on the same topic in his column yesterday, "The Power of Posterity." Prodded by a blog he likes to read (Marginal Revolution), he attempts to think through the consequences of an imaginary pulse from the sun that sterilizes one side of the planet (let's assume it's our side). Essentially, it's nothing much at first, but with no hope of another generation to follow your children (if you have children), he reasonably projects that people would start living for the moment, i.e., for themselves. They would become ever more radically individualistic and for that reason unambitious. (We generally think for the most ambitious people being the most individualistic. But it's not simply so.)

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.
If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.
There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.

Aristotle gave classic expression to that organic view of the meaning of the life we live together. After more than 2,300 years, we continue to see sage insight in his statement that,

[I]t is evident, then, that the city (polis, political community) exists among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city through nature rather than chance is either a mean sort or superior to man....For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city....One who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of a city, and so is either a beast or a god (The Politics, 1253a1-28).

Passing from general revelation through the mind of the philosopher to the special revelation that God gave through his Apostles, Paul wrote to the church in Corinth regarding how the covenant community of Christians, God's redeemed community of new humanity, is to view the life of the body politic in Christ.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.

The seventeenth century poet, John Donne, wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" ("Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions").

Conservatives understand (I mean genuine conservatives, not just the surviving classical liberals among us) that if American individualism is not to undermine and defeat itself, then, as the Founders of our nation understood, we need to give proper attention to our natural and spiritual ties with one another, supplementing the commercial spirit and the concern for simple self-interest with biblical love for God and noble love for country.

America Is Mutable and Mortal

Contrary to Harold Kildow's concerns in the previous post (citing Charles Murray), David Brooks argues that "the United States will never be Europe. It was born as a commercial republic. It’s addicted to the pace of commercial enterprise. After periodic pauses, the country inevitably returns to its elemental nature" ("The Commercial Republic," New York Times, March 16, 2009).

There is a sense in which this is true. But there is a more alarming sense in which that commercial spirit is being ever more heavily burdened by government hyperactivity and that the manly spirit of American self-reliance is being ever more seduced into infantile dependence on the state. We have never recovered from Roosevelt's power grab in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Brooks passes over this fact.

"We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended....Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway...But if there is one thing we can be sure of, this pause will not last. The cultural DNA of the past 400 years will not be erased. The pendulum will swing hard. The gospel of success will recapture the imagination."

But Brooks underestimates the profundity of this President's radical antipathy to the American political culture that sustains that commercial spirit. Furthermore, in referring to our "cultural DNA" and "elemental nature," he underestimates the conventionality and thus fragility of our commercial and entrepreneurial spirit. It's an expression of character, not nature. Whereas nature is immutable, character is corruptible. For that reason, civilizations are mortal, and every regime must give thoughtful attention to the principles of decay inherent in it, and thus what is necessary for its perpetuation. (On the rise and fall of different regimes, or forms of government and their political cultures, read Book VIII of Plato's Republic.) This is the problem to which Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln turned their profoundly insightful attention.

Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator is not as sanguine. Read "Destroying the Country To Save It" below.

In Harold's post, "We're All Europeans Now," he quotes Dick Morris as foreseeing Obama's New America being "a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes. Obama will accomplish his agenda of 'reform' under the rubric of 'recovery.'"

George Newman in the Wall Street Journal shows us where we are heading as Obama shifts the country's organizing principle more squarely on what he calls "fairness," "economic justice," "redistribution of wealth," and "empathy." I lay it out in "Obama's Coming Economic Justice." It is pillage as public policy, and it leads beyond Europe to the kleptocracy that is Africa, but democratized. Now there's a model!

Consider how entrenched all these changes will become once Obama shifts the entire tax burden to a minority of the voting population, brings millions of illegal immigrants onto the voter rolls, empowers ACORN to universalize voter fraud, and fiddles the census so that left wing majorities become mathematically inevitable for generations to come. Think of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation writ large. Under such circumstances (watch them unfold), removing these overlords from power would take a critical mass of economic, political, and social crises so severe that it is horrifying to contemplate it.

Let me echo Quin Hillyer: "Rhetorically, organizationally, financially, and politically, [Barack Obama] must be stopped. Must."

Great Lectures on Great Ideas and Great Deeds

Harvey C. Mansfield lecturing

One of the rich benefits of my graduate education at Boston College twenty years ago was the monthly lecture series organized by Ernest Fortin and sponsored by the Bradley Foundation. So in addition to the outstanding faculty at the college itself, I was able to sit under the teaching of Allan Bloom, Werner Dannhauser, Nathan Tarcov, Ralph Lerner, and Walter Berns.

But now the internet allows access to similar privileges no matter where you are and whatever your circumstances (but without the dinner and discussion following).

A treasure trove of such fine lectures may be found through iTunes.

The best of these comes from the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a lecture series organized by Princeton's Robert George. (From the iTunes program, go to iTunes Store >podcasts > education > higher education > the Princeton University podcasts icon.)

You should also set some time aside for these lectures in video format.

Clifford Orwin (Univ. of Toronto), "The First Democracy at War: Athens in the Pages of Herodotus." Professor Orwin is distinguished by his work on Rousseau and Thucydides. He is introduced by Prof. Susan Shell for this lecture at Boston College.

Robert Bartlett (Emory Univ.), "Aristotle's Inquiry Into Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics." Prof. Bartlett is the Arthur Blank/National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor at Emory University.

Harry Jaffa (Claremont McKenna College), "Natural Law and the American Founding." Professor Jaffa, like professor Mansfield, has been the teacher of great teachers, and most distinguished by his work on Lincoln's political thought.

Charles R. Kesler (Claremont McKenna College), "The Declaration of Independence and American Democracy." Professor Kesler edited the Federalist Papers for Signet Classics, and contributes regularly to the Claremont Review of Books.

Thomas L. Pangle (Univ. of Texas, Austin), "The Great Debate: the Federalist Response to the Anti-Federalist Challenge." Professor Pangle, formerly at University of Toronto, has translated Plato's Laws and written extensively in political philosophy and on the American Founding.

Harvey C. Mansfield (Harvard), three lectures on "Tocqueville's New Liberalism." Professor Mansfield is the translator of Machiavelli and Alexis de Tocqueville, and most recently the author of Manliness.

After all of this, you should end with Harvey Mansfield's 2007 Jefferson Lecture, "How To Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science." The print version appeared in First Things. You may select and view the lecture on the Lehrman American Studies Center website as Mansfield delivered it at the Lehrman Summer Institute.

As a "chaser," and a suitable one to follow Mansfield's lecture on thumos, here is the always judicious Robert Faulkner (Boston College), reading from his book, "The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics." His other outstanding works cover John Marshall, Richard Hooker, and Francis Bacon.