The Conservative Sensibility Page 13
Wilson regretted Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution, which prohibits sitting members of Congress from serving in the executive branch. At one time he favored having the president’s cabinet composed of members of the majority party in Congress—even if the president and that majority were of opposite parties. He correctly understood that his notion of government efficiency required dismantling the wall of separation between legislative and executive functions, the better to perform government’s primary function as, in Pestritto’s words, “a coordinated extension of the organic will of the people.” Which brings us to a central oddity of Wilson’s thought.
As a conscientious democrat, he wanted government to allow, and in some sense to embody, the clear and, contrary to the Founders’ preference, direct expression of public opinion. But being a progressive, he did not want to sacrifice on the altar of public opinion the government’s efficiency, its “wieldiness” in performance of its obligation to “superintend” the lives of citizens. After all, if public opinion is presumed to be enlightened concerning the intricacies of modern society, administration of society by progressives would not be so urgently needed. The defining dichotomy of Wilson’s thinking was his distinction between politics and administration. The fact that Congress could not cope with its myriad tasks in the twentieth century “is its misfortune, not its fault.” That this might be the fault of progressives, with their ambitions for the regulatory, administrative state, did not occur to Wilson, or if it did, it did not trouble him. “There is,” he said, “scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple which is not now complex; government once had but a few masters; now it has scores of masters.” These masters are majorities that, with what Wilson considered impertinence, are constantly intruding on government and presuming to direct it: “Majorities formerly only underwent government; they now conduct government. Where government once might follow the whims of a court, it must now follow the views of a nation. And those views are steadily widening to new conceptions of state duty; so that, at the same time that the functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number.”121
Note a contradiction in progressivism that has become steadily more severe in the century since Wilson wrote. Progressivism has no objection to the steady enlargement of the “conceptions of state duty.” Quite the contrary, such enlargement is the progressive agenda—the expansion of the central government’s supervision of society’s complexities. But as solicitous government permeates society with its superintending, society responds in an inconvenient way. As government’s interests multiply, so do interest groups. As government seeks to supplement and even supplant market forces in the allocation of wealth and opportunity, there is a corresponding and commensurate multiplication of factions determined to influence the actions of activist government.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, after a full century of progressivism’s extensions of the reach of the regulatory state, progressives are dismayed by the predictable result of these extensions. At least they were predictable to Madisonians, with their clear-sighted understanding of the interestedness that is sown in human nature and with their rejection of sentimentalism about history imposing harmony on the welter of self-interestedness. People will pursue their interests, and like-minded people will join together to pursue their shared interests. And the more things government touches, the more people will have interests in touching, and wheedling, government. Progressives purport to be scandalized by modern Washington, which is indeed an unlovely maelstrom of interest groups maneuvering to maximize their rent-seeking. This is, however, the Washington that progressives should have known they were making. But they only could have known this if they had a keen Madisonian sense of political sociology. And if progressives had had this, they would have had to reconsider their premises.
Instead, progressives, who are scandalized by the clamorousness of modern politics, have recently responded not by pruning the government’s interventions in the disposition of money, but by trying to regulate the spending of money to influence elections that determine the composition of government. It is, however, an iron law: The more government does to influence the flow of money, the more money will be spent to influence elections. Talk about treating symptoms: Progressives advocate using campaign finance regulations to limit political spending, thereby supposedly somehow reducing the amount of rent-seeking. Unfortunately for progressives, the Supreme Court has noted the obvious: Almost all campaign spending is for the dissemination of political advocacy. The court has come to the obvious conclusion that many limits on such spending violate First Amendment protections of free speech.
Wilson cannot fairly be faulted for not foreseeing how fast and how far the administrative state would metastasize and how unlovely would be the political culture that this metastasizing would produce. And if some particularly farseeing contemporary had warned Wilson about this, he might well have replied that he could forestall the emergence of such unseemly politics. He would do so by making politics more democratic but simultaneously diminishing the importance of politics. Wilson believed that democracy is history’s destination, but it should be democracy of an attenuated sort. His two instruments for accomplishing this attenuation would be presidential leadership and the science of public administration.
As Pestritto notes, Wilson’s fascination with the presidency was apparent in the earliest of Wilson’s political writings, from his undergraduate years, which advocated making training in rhetoric an important part of Princeton’s curriculum. Arthur Link, the Princeton historian who was Wilson’s biographer and editor of Wilson’s collected writings, thought that Theodore Roosevelt’s “revivification of the presidency” influenced Wilson’s turn toward an emphasis on the presidency as the representative of what Wilson called the nation’s “oneness of personality.” Because only the president “represents the people as a whole, exercising national choice,” he is the “spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country.” In 1897, Wilson wrote an essay on the presidency of Grover Cleveland, who had retired in Princeton after leaving the White House in 1897, and who died there in 1908. (The Gothic tower over the Graduate School is Cleveland Tower.) Today, it might seem strange that Wilson was fascinated by the personality of Cleveland, whom contemporaries would not have called charismatic, had that term then been in use. Wilson nevertheless insisted that Cleveland’s personality restored the presidency to its proper centrality in American politics. It was, Wilson thought, a progressive development that, under Cleveland, American politics began “waiting for [the president’s] initiative, and how the air at Washington filled with murmurs against the domineering and usurping temper and practice of the Executive. Power had somehow gone the length of [Pennsylvania] avenue and seemed lodged in one man.”122
Wilson’s celebration of the “popularization” of the presidency as the nation’s voice was related to his animus against federalism as a subtraction from the nation’s unity. His apotheosis of the presidency also came at the expense of Congress, which he disparaged as not really part of “the government.” The essential business of governing was done by the presidency wielding the new science of public administration. The president could speak for the nation by speaking to the nation, infusing it with its latent spirit by articulating that spirit. This is the meaning of Wilson’s cryptic proposition that “leadership, for the statesman, is interpretation.” As a president uses transformative rhetoric, he will eclipse and marginalize Congress, so the real business of government can proceed through a new class of nonpartisan, apolitical administrators. In 1878, when he was still one of them, he said that “if the thirty thousand young men who are pursuing studies at the different colleges of this country” would “throw off the party spirit” and form opinions “intelligently and independently,” America’s future could be entrusted to them.123
A properly rhetorical presidency, combined with a disinterested class of administr
ators, could overcome what Wilson considered (in Pestritto’s words) “the forced fragmentation of the founders’ constitutionalism.” A Wilsonian president could “instruct and persuade a multitudinous monarch called public opinion.” Allowing himself to be carried away by the thought of rhetoric powerful enough to carry men away, Wilson said: “Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.” Steeped in historicism, Wilson fell easily into the language of teleological history: A leader sees the “road” society is on and discerns the “direction” a nation is heading. His job is not to pave new roads or choose new directions; rather it is to “discern and strengthen the tendencies” history has imposed. “Where all minds are awake,” he said, “some minds will be wide awake.” The latter, including the minds of the 30,000 collegians, are the minds of leaders alert to history’s “tendencies.”124
Wilson became murky, in a Hegelian manner, when he insisted that it is not the leader’s “business to judge for the nation, but to judge through the nation as its spokesman and voice.” But the implication of Wilson’s mystical voice of presidential and other leadership is clear enough. Wilson, like the leaders he envisions, is history’s handmaiden. When a real leader takes the field, “Resistance is left to the minority, and such as will not be convinced are crushed.” Hegel, too, had said that a leader must “crush to pieces many an object in its path.” Pestritto emphasizes that “for both Wilson and Hegel, leadership is ultimately connected to history, which is an irresistible force of progress.” Pestritto says the “crucial difference” between Hegel and Wilson is that whereas “Hegel’s World-Historical Individual is more of an unconscious tool of world history,” Wilson’s leader “has to some degree a vision of where history is going.” Notice, however, the hedging—“more of” and “to some degree”—that Pestritto, a judicious scholar, finds necessary. But he might be making a distinction without much difference. Both Hegel and Wilson consigned leaders, and the led, to the tides of history; neither believed that tides could be resisted or deflected for long.125
The words “leader” or “leaders” appear thirteen times in The Federalist, once with reference to those who led the Revolution and twelve times in a context of disparagement. The Founders, apprehensive about the people’s potential for irrational passions, were wary of leaders who would seek to ascend to power on waves of such passions. Wilson, surveying America from the pinnacle of progress where history had placed him, was untroubled by the threat of demagoguery. “Great passions,” he said equably, “when they run through a whole population, inevitably find a great spokesman.” Both the passions and the spokesmen are churned up by history. With presidential leaders speaking to, through, and for—all those prepositions apply—the nation, Congress, in Wilson’s analysis (and aspiration), is marginalized and reduced to giving only the most general directives to the real government. It consists of the class of educated, disinterested, apolitical experts recruited from those 30,000 young men Wilson hoped to summon from campuses to public service to practice the new science of public administration. As Hegel wrote in The Philosophy of Right, conferring on a civil servant a secure place in a bureaucracy would purge from that individual the temptation of self-interestedness. For Wilson, the eclipse of Congress was desirable; progressivism, which produced the administrative state, made the eclipse inevitable.126
The Constitution’s Framers planned for conflict between the branches, which are supposed to be jealous rivals. Today this no longer is, if it ever was, a fair fight. They are not equal in the competition for control of the modern state. The playing field tilts more and more against the legislative branch. In notes made for some Princeton lectures in the 1890s, Wilson wrote: “Administration cannot wait upon legislation, but must be given leave, or take it, to proceed without specific warrant in giving effect to the characteristic life of the state.” Note well: “or take it.” That makes the idea of the rule of law blurry, and the actual rule of law attenuated. “In the case of the Historically Normal Government,” Wilson wrote, “we may say that, in the absence of specific legal developments to the contrary, the presumption is in favor of the principle, that the sphere of administrative authority is as wide as the sphere in which it may move without infringing the laws.”127 Now, there was an interesting twist on Hobbes’ idea that freedom depends on “the silence of the law.”128 The administrative state is free to do whatever the legislature, through legislation, has not proscribed. This was Wilson’s extension of Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of presidential “stewardship”: The administration of things supplants meaningful governance, or even supervision, by elected representatives.
In his “Study of Administration,” which did much to launch the academic field of public administration, Wilson argued that the development of a mature bureaucracy would cause the public to abandon its anxieties about almost-autonomous administrators wielding extraordinary power and exercising vast discretion—much of it, but by no means all of it, expressly delegated to it by Congress. By consigning Congress to the chore of expressing public sentiments and leaving to professional administrators the codification of these sentiments in regulations—the flesh on the skeleton of sentiments—the problem of modern democracy would be solved. Remember Wilson saying, “The problem is to make public opinion efficient without suffering it to be meddlesome.” Wilson granted that there are instances in Europe where bureaucracy had become utterly severed from democratic control and put to oppressive uses. America, however, could emulate the virtues while avoiding the vices: “If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots.” Or as he said more pithily: “We borrowed rice, but we do not eat it with chopsticks.”129 Would that things were so simple.
The constantly multiplying tasks of government, and government’s constantly thickening layers, are, in Wilson’s telling, rather like strata of geological sediments, the product of ineluctable processes proceeding without much regard to conscious planning. Government’s new tasks, he said, are those “the State has had laid upon it by reason of history, through Law, which is the product of history.”130 His use of the capital letter is supposed to confer a certain status, but the nature of that status is unclear, as is the reason why he capitalized the L in law. Having done so, why did he not capitalize the H in history?
One interpretation of Wilson’s thinking is that before becoming president he was a Southern Jeffersonian who opposed the more robust Hamiltonianism of his principal opponent in the 1912 presidential race, Theodore Roosevelt. But the pressures of events during Wilson’s presidency drove his New Freedom in a direction similar to the unapologetic centralization of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. Pestritto’s interpretation of the evolution of Wilson’s thought is that it did not evolve very much. He argues that “what united Wilson and Roosevelt was far more substantial than what divided them.” The exigencies of winning the Democrats’ 1912 presidential nomination compelled Wilson to try to differentiate his thinking from Roosevelt’s. Wilson was nominated on the forty-sixth ballot of the Democratic convention in Baltimore, where he won by winning the support of the party’s three-time nominee, William Jennings Bryan. “Central to Bryan’s populism,” Pestritto writes, “was a fear of national executive power and a deep distrust of business interests in the Northeast.” Whatever Jeffersonian tone Wilson gave to his 1912 campaign was, as Pestritto says, a politically driven “anomaly.” Once elected, Wilson quickly and emphatically reverted to his long-held and clearly stated principles of centralization.131
FROM WILSON’S STRADDLE TO FDR’S CONTRACT
Even before the election he was in an ideological straddle. During the 1912 campaign, in a speech to the New York Press Club, Wilson declared that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” That is liberty’s h
istory. But what of its future? Two weeks later Wilson said: “While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible.… But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”132 This is rather like someone saying: “I am a Marxist, except for the foolishness about the class struggle being the motor that drives history.”
Wilson was a follower of Jefferson, except for the essence of Jeffersonianism. His reason was that “life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions.” But Wilson’s rejection of Jefferson’s thinking was actually more radical than that: “It is his speculative philosophy that is exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial note through all his thought. It was un-American in being abstract, sentimental, and rationalistic, rather than practical. That he held it sincerely need not be doubted; but the more sincerely he accepted it so much the more thoroughly was he un-American.” Of Wilson’s four derogatory adjectives, the most telling is “speculative.” He was referring to natural rights theory. Hence he is judging Jefferson’s, and America’s, Declaration of Independence “un-American.”133