The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  Wilson began from the jejune premise that there was “no historical foundation” for the supposition that government arose from a social compact among consenting individuals.78 Sounding a Burkean theme, Wilson said that far from being “a matter of contract and deliberate arrangement,” government “is an institute of habit, bound together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which has been deliberately placed.” Hence, as Michael Zuckert writes, progressives believed that “individuals and individualism are the result, not the cause of government.”79 They said that history and anthropology support this contention that individuals and individualism are not natural, pre-political facts, they are social and political achievements. This does not, however, alter the wisdom of the social contract schema for understanding the proper relation of the citizen to the state. If the individual and individualism appear not at the beginning of social and political life but as late achievements, then perhaps they deserve special admiration and deference. Wilson, however, did not think this way.

  He had the briefest career in public service of anyone ever elected president before 2016. His life in academia had not prepared him for the transactional nature of politics, with its bargaining and splitting of differences. In 1912, he likened constructing his “New Freedom” to erecting a “great building” in which “men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.”80 Human beings as bees? God wants this because, as Wilson also said to an associate in 1912, “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States.”81 God or History. This was a distinction without much difference when a Presbyterian’s sense of the providential was melded with a progressive’s belief in teleological history.

  Wilson thought that a national government competent for the challenges of the modern age could not exist without “wresting the Constitution to strange and as yet unimagined uses.” He chose an interesting word: To wrest something is to jerk it with some violence. “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician,” Wilson said, “I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”82 Yet during the 1912 campaign, Wilson said, “No man that I know and trust, no man that I will consent to consort with, is trying to change anything fundamental in America.”83 Traveling in Jacksonian America, Alexis de Tocqueville said that “what most strikes the European who travels through the United States is the absence of what is called among us government or administration.”84 He marveled that “the hand directing the social machine constantly slips from notice.”85 Wilson set out to make this hand much more visible.

  Wilson, and those thinkers and political practitioners who today are the legatees of his thought and policies, are, for conservatives, formidable adversaries whose arguments are serious and touch the largest themes in Western political thinking. Wilson was not the nation’s most intellectually gifted president; in originality and subtlety, he ranks behind Jefferson, Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and especially Madison. Wilson was, however, an intellectual; he was keenly interested in ideas, and he earned his living in the academic study of them. He was an energetic and gifted synthesizer of ideas advanced by more original thinkers. He was almost present at the creation of political science as an academic discipline—Professor Wilson of the Johns Hopkins University was the first president of the American Political Science Association—and he contributed much to the creation of the study of public administration. He came of age as a thinker in an era of intellectual turbulence involving the intersection of political philosophy and science. Wilson was the first president to criticize the American founding, which he did with a root-and-branch thoroughness. Few people nowadays recognize the radicalism of the Wilsonian and progressive repudiation of the Founders’ project. For progressives then as now, moving up from the Founders’ cramped, premodern, and unscientific vision of political possibilities is central to the very definition of progress.

  It is common, and not wrong, to emphasize a split among the Founders, the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, a rivalry that quickly produced America’s infant party system, with the Hamiltonian Federalists competing with the Jeffersonian Republicans. These two factions did indeed have important disagreements about what the nation’s regime should be, about the proper role of the central government, about the appropriate “energy in the executive” (Hamilton’s phrase), and much more.86 These disagreements were, however, less profound than Wilson’s disagreement with both, who shared the defect, as he saw it, of claiming universality for their most basic (and mostly shared) principles. Both subscribed to the principles Jefferson affirmed in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: There are universal political truths, some of which are self-evident; one is that all men are created equal in that they are equally endowed with certain inalienable rights; governments that are just are instituted to secure these rights, and derive their powers from the consent of the governed, and when a government becomes destructive of these rights, the people have the residual right to alter or abolish it. And so on. Wilson did not so much disagree with this or that provision of this American creed as he did with what he considered the static, “transhistorical” (Ronald J. Pestritto’s term) nature of the entire creed—the belief that these “abstract” truths, as Lincoln called them, were, as Lincoln believed, “applicable to all men and all times.”87

  The Founders’ conviction was characteristic of the Enlightenment and was crucial to their confidence in launching the Revolution. The purpose of politics, the Founders thought, is to cope with the problems inherent in unchanging human nature. A perennial problem of politics is how to cope with the disunity and conflict caused by factions. “The latent causes of factions,” said Madison in Federalist 10, are “sown in the nature of man.”88 This premise is, strictly speaking, anti-progressive, for two reasons. One is that it stipulates limits to the conditions beyond which humanity can progress. The second reason is that a just and durable regime will respect the rights of factions while limiting the toll they take on social harmony and the public’s welfare.

  The worst cost of factions comes when they capture the state for rent-seeking—for the purpose of directing the state’s power for the benefit of themselves, and for the exploitation and even the oppression of others. But because this problem is “sown” in human nature, which is permanent, so, too, is the problem. Hence there can be no end—no conceivable end—to the need to limit government by circumscribing its powers that can be captured by factions. This is true even—actually, especially—when the power of the state is wielded in response to a majority faction.

  Wilson recognized that the Founders’ understanding of human nature—an understanding he thought was defective because it was unhistorical—was an impediment to a more open, unconstrained vision of government with a vast jurisdiction and grand uses. Hence the need to dilute—to refute, really—the Founders’ bedrock assumption of an unchanging human nature. If human nature itself could be, as it were, put into play—if it could become plastic to the touch of government—the stakes of politics could become exponentially greater. This is why as late as 1911, the year before he was elected president, when his convictions were no longer of merely academic interest but were of intense practicality, he said that “the rhetorical introduction of the Declaration of Independence”—that second paragraph—“is the least part of it.” To drive his point home he added: “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not read the preface.” Or read it as an interesting artifact, an archaic shard of a transcended past: “Every Fourth of July should be a time for examining our standards, our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness. That and that alone is the obligation the Declaration lays upon us.”89 That alone.

  It was, Wilson thought, a reason for rejoicing that in his day “grave, thoughtful, perspicacious, and trusted men all around us agree in deriding those ‘Fourth of J
uly sentiments.’” Retrograde people who cling to those sentiments were the sort whose “bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is going on today.”90 This was, for Wilson, a war to emancipate the nation from its enthrallment to the Founders’ fetish (as Wilson regarded it) about individual rights and the Founders’ anachronistic worries about majorities. So, once a year Americans should consider “afresh,” without reference to, let alone reverence for, the Founders’ philosophic patrimony, the principles they should adopt and by which they should live, at least until the next Fourth of July. Those truths that seemed self-evident in the eighteenth century should be deemed to have passed away with that century. The natural rights tradition must be scrubbed out of American history. To do so, Wilson had to radically reinterpret America’s greatest political thinker since the Founding: Lincoln.

  With an audacity that ignores Abraham Lincoln’s well-known words and deeds, Wilson celebrated Lincoln as a statesman whose greatness was related to his indifference to abstractions, such as natural rights theory: “What commends Mr. Lincoln’s studiousness to me is that the result of it was he did not have any theories at all…Lincoln was one of those delightful students who do not seek to tie you up in the meshes of any theory.”91 Wilson’s brazenness was breathtaking. He was draining Lincoln’s career of what makes it intelligible and noble. Lincoln’s greatness was commensurate with that of the Founders because his overarching purpose was to reconnect the nation with the Founders, and particularly with their vigorous affirmation of the natural rights tradition. By the 1850s, slavery had become an existential crisis for the nation because it had become a temptation to apostasy from the tradition that defined a nation dedicated to the Declaration’s great proposition. Remember Lincoln in Philadelphia at Independence Hall on February 22, 1861: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”92 Someone defending Wilson’s eccentric understanding of Lincoln could perhaps try to make much of Lincoln’s use of the words “feeling” and “sentiments” to buttress the contention that Lincoln lacked political “theories.” But surely many of Lincoln’s other words slam the door on such an argument.

  There are his words spoken in November 1863 at the dedication of a military cemetery 110 miles west of Independence Hall. But four years before that, in an 1859 letter declining an invitation to speak at a Boston celebration of Jefferson’s birthday, Lincoln had said: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”93 These are the words of a statesman “who did not have any theories at all”? Wilson, who surely was familiar with this well-known letter, was rebuked by it. Or he would have been, but for his implacable determination to recast America’s political premises. He would allow no facts to interfere with this enterprise. Lincoln was an enormous stumbling block for Wilson, one too large to be conjured away by ignoring Lincoln’s statements.

  Wilson was, of course, correct that Lincoln’s greatness as a statesman was inextricably entwined with the virtue of prudence. But Pestritto rightly says that prudence, as the ancient philosophers understood it, involves adherence to a universal idea of the good while applying it, however incompletely and imperfectly, in a particular historical situation. Wilson makes the ancient idea of prudence—fidelity to principles that transcend the moment, in the constraining context of the moment—almost disappear. He does so by arguing that the historical situation supplies its own principles. As Pestritto says, “the main tenets of Wilson’s thought” all required the “assertion of historical contingency over the permanent principles of American constitutionalism” and the “coupling of historical contingency with a faith in progress.”94 That faith was, at bottom, faith in history. The most portentous development in political philosophy in the nineteenth century—the century after the Founding and the century of Wilson’s intellectually formative years—was that history became History, a proper noun. In the hands of Karl Marx, this became a fighting faith with world-shaking consequences. But it was to one of Marx’s precursors, Hegel, that Wilson was intellectually indebted, for reasons similar to those Theodore Roosevelt was.

  Wilson understood that the task of refuting the Founders’ politics of limited government required him to postulate a social harmony that would drain politics of its dangers. If the basic political problem is factions, and if fractiousness arises from a permanent facet of human nature, then the solution is to postulate a historical process that will remove the roughness from human nature, or refute the idea of human nature. Wilson, amending Immanuel Kant, believed that from the crooked timber of humanity something straight enough can be made that we can put aside the fears that caused the Founders to favor a government of limited powers and limited objectives.

  A century after Wilson entered politics, “diversity” is, ostensibly, a progressive value. For Wilson and the progressive project, however, the diversity of interests in society was a problem—in a sense, the problem to be surmounted. Happily, or so progressives thought, history—aka History, aka progress—would take care of that. But first it had to refute Madison, whose mistake, as Wilson saw it, was in assuming that the problem of factions is a hardy perennial because human nature is an unchanging constant. History, Wilson thought, would produce unity in the public mind. Progress would pull the fractious public up from rival particularities, to a harmony that Madison, who was wedded to a static understanding of human nature, could not fathom. When mankind steps onto Wilson’s sunny upland of (in Pestritto’s words) a “unity of national sentiment,” mankind will have pretty much left politics behind and entered what Wilson serenely anticipated as the age of administration.95

  Here Wilson was resuscitating an old dream, that of Friedrich Engels who, echoing St. Simon and the Enlightenment rationalists, foresaw the “government of persons” being supplanted by “the administration of things.”96 In the epoch of unity—actually, a future of perpetual unity—that Wilson foresaw, the individual would no longer need to feel trepidation about the state. This ancient fear, from which modern liberalism arose, would be transcended. When the will of the people is unified, there will be no need to limit a government responsive to that will. Rather, the modern problem will become the opposite of the one that preoccupied the Founders. They aimed to limit government by means of an institutional architecture of separated and rival powers in order to keep government on a short constitutional leash. The modern problem, Wilson thought, was to unleash government so that it could be a properly efficient servant of the will of a harmonious people. It is telling that what Wilson hoped for in a government was “wieldiness.”97 Who is to wield it? Experts, as we shall see.

  The fatal failing of Madison, and of the Founders generally, was, Wilson thought, the ahistorical perspective that gave them misplaced confidence in their ability to enunciate timeless, universal principles. Wilson thought, with considerable justification, that he could affect a revolution in American political thought by convincing the country to put away the childish things the Founders thought and instead embrace this idea: All political propositions are products of a historical context, and their truth is no more permanent or universal than this perishable context. Would, however, this self-consciously modern moment itself be perishable?

  Wilson was an early exponent of an “end of history.”98 In the extraordinary year 1989, the two hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and so did, some people thought, history. They did not, of course, believe that there would never again be big events. They did, however, believe that events would not turn on big differences about big ideas. H
umanity had, they thought, truly reached the end of ideology. The last of the fighting faiths, socialism, was a spent force. Market societies were to be the last “wave of the future” because the future had arrived in the form of consensus about the broad parameters of sensibly organized societies. Wilson had arrived at a similar conclusion almost a century earlier. He thought: If history had shaped America into a harmonious whole, and henceforth the people and the state were fused in common understandings and purposes, what could put asunder this happy marriage? History? Surely not. That would be a retreat from progress, an unintelligible possibility. Progress meant an ascension to unity. History’s unfolding is progress.