The Conservative Sensibility Page 12

  In 1883, Wilson began his graduate education at Johns Hopkins University where, Pestritto writes, he had teachers who were “all educated in Germany and in the tradition of German state theory and philosophy of history.” These teachers were steeped in Hegelian modes of thought, the essence of which was Hegel’s disavowal of any attempt to “construct a state as it ought to be.” Comprehension—or perhaps interpretation, a word we shall encounter again in Wilson’s thoughts about presidential leadership—is, if not everything, at least sufficient: “To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that any individual can overleap his own age.”99

  To a historicist like Hegel, the idea of willful individuals changing the world in a premeditated manner is mistaken, even ludicrous. Hence America’s elemental understanding of itself as a nation consciously created at a Founding is not merely wrong, it is intellectually childish. The world changes, but history sees to that. People may think they are propelling the process, but Hegel knew better than to emphasize the idea—the fiction—of human agency. The world that people live in supplies the furniture of their minds; it gives them the categories by which they think. The rare “world-historical individuals” can perhaps accelerate history’s progress, but they do so only because they embody, in especially vivid and concentrated form, the spirits of their ages.100

  Wilson basically agreed, and probably thought of himself as such a history-accelerating individual. “Human choice,” he said, “has in all stages of the great world processes of politics had its part in the shaping of institutions,” but those great “processes” are so powerful, so autonomous, that human choice “has been confined to adaptation.” It is “altogether shut out from raw invention.”101 Wilson’s belief was that individuals can choose to adapt to what history’s unfolding produces, or they can be consigned by history to oblivion. As another historicist, Leon Trotsky, said when he denounced the Mensheviks who walked out of the Second Congress of Soviets on October 25, 1917, “Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history.”102

  There was nothing novel about Americans acknowledging the power of events to circumscribe the efficacy of human choices. “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” wrote Emerson in 1846, during the tumult surrounding the war with Mexico.103 During a later, larger war, Abraham Lincoln said: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”104 Another president, William McKinley, wrote that “the march of events rules and overrules human action.”105 But American history is replete with instances of people putting saddles—and bridles and snaffles—on events. And when Wilson had to come to terms with the undeniable example of an individual who certainly seemed to have wrenched history from its predetermined path and put it on a new path, Wilson’s historicism turned murky, which is to say theological. George Washington, Wilson wrote, “was neither an accident nor a miracle.” In his next sentence, however, Wilson turned Washington into something very like a miracle: “Neither chance nor a special Providence need be assumed to account for him. It was God, indeed, who gave him to us; but God had been preparing him ever since English constitutional history began.”106 For a historicist, the ways of God only seem very odd to the untutored eye. A large event, such as the appearance of a George Washington on the stage of history, may seem random and hence astonishing. But when we have a historicist such as Wilson to act as our docent in the museum of history, we learn that ripeness is all: Washington came about because history had summoned him as the man to suit the moment. Theology was brought in to rescue Wilson’s historicism from the awkward fact of what seemed to have been a history-making individual.

  Wilson melded theology with a kind of racialism that was then common among intellectuals. The fact that America had progressed so far, and had done so with a decentralized and unwieldy government and without reliance on potent executive leadership, was proof of Providence’s kindly attention: “Unquestionably we believe in a guardian destiny! No other race could have accomplished so much with such a system.” With, that is, a defective system that was retrograde in its reliance on a limited government. Fortunately, “the battle of life progresses and the army of Saints ever gains ground under divine generalship.”107 Such rhetoric blurs, to the point of erasure, the distinction between history and God. Wilson’s tendency to associate God with his, Wilson’s, hopes and policies would eventually infuse him, as president, with an unbending righteousness that wrecked his greatest dream, American membership in the League of Nations.

  Wilson thought that societies could shrug off obsolete social norms and institutions, and that the advanced societies of his time had done so, thereby escaping “inexorable custom.” Except Wilson did not think it was inexorable after all.108 No individual can, however, stand outside his age and criticize the state because the state is, and what is embodies reason. Hence it is odd, even unintelligible, to want to do what America’s Founders did—place limits on the state. The Founders’ emphasis on the separation of the government’s powers expressed a nonsensical suspicion of the state. The logic of Wilson’s progressivism was that the spirit of the age is in the saddle, riding humanity. Historicism, with its strong flavor of determinism and inevitability, blurs, even annihilates, the distinction between public and private. It does this because it thoroughly embeds the individual in the “age”—in a social context that no individual can “overleap.”

  In 1891, when Wilson was a professor at Princeton, he drew up a list of books he deemed essential for students of politics. The list included works by Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot, James Bryce, and two of his own, Congressional Government and The State. While writing the latter, he said, he “wore out a German dictionary.”109 The list included no works from the founding era, such as The Federalist. Burke was hostile to the natural rights thinking that fueled the American Revolution, with which Burke sympathized. But this sympathy was negligible compared to his antipathy for the French Revolution. He thought natural rights theory begat the social compact theory of the origins of governments, and that this theory begat, as America’s Founders thought, the idea of a right to revolution. This was an affront to Burke’s evolutionary conservatism, which stressed that political institutions are akin to organic entities growing in response to stimuli in their particular social environments. What seems to have most offended Wilson about the social compact theory of the origins of government is that it presupposes this: The natural, meaning the original, condition of life is individual autonomy. To begin political theory with an emphasis on this autonomy, and on the exercise of autonomy in conjuring the state into existence, gives rise to what Wilson considered a fundamentally misguided belief in the efficacy of human choice.

  Wilson’s evolutionary progressivism asserted that the evolution of society involves the domestication of passions, which henceforth would pose a steadily diminishing threat to the social order. A society formerly driven by conflicting passions had evolved into one with a “common consciousness”: “Our life has undergone radical changes since 1787, and almost every change has operated to draw the nation together, to give it the common consciousness, the common interests, the common standards of conduct, the habit of concerted action, which will eventually impart to it in many more respects the character of a single community.”110 Wilson was evidently unimpressed by the 1886 Haymarket riot, the Pullman strike of 1894, and myriad other signs that the rapidly industrializing nation was not quite drawn together into a common consciousness. Wilson was, however, correct in identifying a foundational tenet of modern politics: Consciousness is in play, and shaping it is the primary purpose of politics. Suddenly the stakes of politics could hardly be higher.

  Wilson was not against passionate politics in the service of this consciousness-raising objective. The “
national consciousness” had been “cried wide awake by the voices of battle” in the Civil War. The “sweep of that stupendous storm” had swept away the last remnants of the world the Framers knew. The purpose of the Constitution they drafted in 1787 was no longer the protection of individual rights; rather, its new purpose was to empower “the passionate beliefs of the efficient majority of the nation.”111 A jurist whose thinking was forged in the fires of the Civil War would become a hero of progressivism by his emphatic majoritarianism. Explaining his disposition to defer to the legislative branch when considering challenges to the constitutionality of its acts, he said he did not weigh the wisdom or, in any meaningful sense, the constitutionality of those acts: “If my fellow citizens want to go to hell I will help them. It’s my job.”112 So said Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1920, the last full year of President Wilson’s administration.

  As early as 1889, Wilson identified the era in which he lived as “this modern time of history’s high noon when nations stand forth full-grown and self-governed.” For a historicist, this language was awkward. At high noon, the sun is directly above. But it does not stay there. And for things that are full-grown—Wilson considered government a living, organic thing—the future holds decline, even decrepitude. Governments that are living beings must be created and regulated by living constitutions. “Constitutions are not mere legal documents: they are the skeleton frame of a living organism.”113 But as shall be argued in Chapter 4, it is unclear how a “living” constitution, which derives its life from the spirit of the age, can, in any meaningful way, constitute a polity.

  That, however, did not deter or detain Wilson, whose aim was to remove impediments to the freedom of majorities to work their will. This aim is, strictly speaking, anti-constitutional, in two senses. It rejects the very idea of a constitutional democracy, which must have something to do with limiting, inhibiting, and tempering the demos. And it rejects the American Framers’ goal of protecting individual rights—a spacious sphere of individual autonomy—from infringement by overbearing majorities. To this end, the Framers applied the principle of the separation of powers. To Wilson, this was not merely unwise, it was absurd because, as Pestritto paraphrases Wilson, “a living thing cannot have its own organs offset one another.” In the modern age of history-produced harmony, Wilson thought, majorities could be trusted to wield power vigorously. And given this harmony, the liberty of individuals should be understood as their free participation in a government controlled by majorities. Majority-made law is the will of the state made manifest, “the external organism of human freedom.” The collectivism implicit in Wilson’s thought became unpleasantly explicit in The New Freedom (1913), a collection of pronouncements from the 1912 presidential campaign that included his vision of the end of history “where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.”114

  It would be wise for politicians to eschew insect metaphors when explaining the role of the people in the paradise the politicians envision. Analogies between the body politic and the human body also are problematic. “Justly revered as our great Constitution is,” Wilson wrote, “it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth clothed in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws.” If so, why is the Constitution “justly revered”? If constitutions are so readily replaceable, why would any one of them stand forth as “great”? Wilson seemed to think that epochs come and go with great speed, and therefore constitutions, or at least their meanings, should, too. In the presidential campaign of 1912, he said: “The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life.” It was perhaps understandable that someone alert to the advances of applied science at the time—Marconi, Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, et al.—would have an exaggerated sense of the velocity of events and their supposed constitutional consequences. Still, if constitutions must be plastic under what Wilson called “the sheer pressure of life,” the question about constitutions becomes: Why bother?115

  Today, wise people, remembering a European nation galvanized by the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” flinch from Wilson’s trope about “the heart-blood of one people.” It is one thing to postulate that history will produce ever increasing social harmony; it is another and ominous thing to speak of society as “one people” in an organic sense. If society is supposed to be an organic unity because the laws of history’s unfolding say so, and if society is, as a matter of morality, supposed to be as united as the human body, then behold: Disagreements and factionalism become symptoms of bodily diseases. Such language greases society’s skids toward virulent intolerance of dissent, the sort of intolerance that gripped America during World War I and tarnished Wilson’s second presidential term. Wilson was, however, so thoroughly wedded to the conception of society as a single organism, his thinking could not accommodate even a flicker of the Founders’ anxieties about government being inherently dangerous, especially governments wielded by majorities. Such anxieties, which were present at the creation of classical liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seemed to Wilson not merely misplaced but illogical. As early as 1879, Wilson ridiculed those who denounce “the tyranny of partisan majorities” yet praise “true representative government.” Such people “do not dream that they are laughably inconsistent.” Ten years later, he reasoned similarly: “If society itself be not an evil, neither surely is government an evil, for government is the indispensable organ of society.”116

  Society can, however, pose problems without being “evil”; and government, without being “evil,” can be simultaneously indispensable and susceptible to becoming a threat to the happiness of the governed. Wilson envisioned for government a stupendous mission, so he could not countenance the Founders’ wariness regarding power. As we have seen, in 1885 he said the new role for the national government would require “wresting the Constitution to strange and as yet unimagined uses.” By 1908, the idea of “wresting” it had been softened to “a nice adjustment”: “As the life of the nation changes so must the interpretation of the document which contains it change, by a nice adjustment, determined, not by the original intention of those who drew the paper, but by the exigencies and the new aspects of life itself.” “The State,” Wilson said, “is an instrumentality for quickening in every suitable way…both collective and individual development.”117

  Well, then, who or what is to determine what ways might not be “suitable”? The answer must be the state itself, because it is the historically determined and “indispensable” expression of the social organism. In his 1887 essay “Socialism and Democracy,” he wrote that the latter “proposes that all idea of a limitation of public authority by individual rights be put out of view” and “that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will.” Erasing such a line, however, means the annihilation of the inviolable zone of individual sovereignty that is indispensable to—indeed, is—freedom. So, one might assume that Wilson was, as it were, clearing his throat for a robust denunciation of socialism. But he was not. Instead, he insisted that “the difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practical difference”: “In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom on the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Limits to the wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.” Note well: the community’s right is “absolute.”118

  The Founders’ republicanism was based on individual rights; Wilson’s democratic theory made those rights subordinate to collective rights, the rights of the community. The rights, t
hat is, of majorities, those potentially oppressive collectivities that the Constitution’s Framers tried to improve, tame, leash, and circumscribe. To underscore his point that differences between democracy and socialism are only matters of practicality, a character in his essay called the “democrat” who speaks for Wilson says to the “socialist”: “You know it is my principle, no less than yours, that every man shall have an equal chance with every other man: if I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance. But the means? The question with me is not whether the community has power to act as it may please in these matters, but how it can act with practical advantage—a question of policy.” And by “policy” Wilson meant administration. Were he convinced that the community could “superintend” every person’s life as minutely as necessary to serve progress, there would be no reason not to, no reason of political philosophy or constitutional propriety. If sufficient administrative expertise could be brought to bear, this should be done. No scruples rooted in anachronistic individualism should inhibit it. Wilson admired socialist government as a “revolt from selfish, misguided individualism,” an attempt “to bring the individual with his special interests, personal to himself, into complete harmony with society with its general interests.”119 Yes, complete harmony was Wilson’s goal.

  Wilson’s grand conception of the role of government was not grander than the role he envisioned for scholars such as himself. On December 28, 1898, he wrote in his personal journal, “Why may not the present age write, through me, its political autobiography?” To do so, the age would have to come to terms with the “radical defect in our federal system [which is] that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility as it does.” He was referring to the “mischievous” theory of the system of checks and balances. “It is quite safe to say,” he wrote in Congressional Government, “that were it possible to call together again the members of the wonderful Convention to view the work of their hands in the light of the century that has tested it, they would be the first to admit that the only fruit of dividing power had been to make it irresponsible.” But what made the Constitutional Convention so “wonderful” if the following century proved that its work was radically defective? This praise of the Framers was a perfunctory nod by Wilson to what he considered the regrettably obligatory pieties that he dismissed as “Fourth of July sentiments.”120