The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  More than a century after Wilson said this, the degradation of American government is writ large in a semantic shift. The Declaration says government is instituted to “secure” rights that pre-exist government. But more and more of what government does consists of transferring wealth to members of groups that the government has decided are entitled to transfers. And the word “rights” is coming to be used interchangeably with “entitlements.” Hence the unspoken but unmistakable supposition is that the more entitlements people enjoy, the more rights they have—and that rights, like entitlements, trickle down from government.

  The Founders hoped that some potentially disruptive passions might be tamed by being diverted from factional politics into commerce. They hoped that dangerous energies would be sublimated in wealth-creation and acquisition. But what was to prevent acquisitive people from coming to regard government as just another arena in which they could strive for material well-being? Nothing was to prevent that, because the nation was to abandon the Constitution’s underlying ideas and because some new ideas were to encourage actively the conception of government as deliverer of material well-being.

  In October 1932, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee said, “I have…described the spirit of my program as a ‘new deal,’ which is plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of Government toward economic life.”134 By the time of his 1938 State of the Union Address Franklin Roosevelt would say, “Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship.”135 Thus was the final responsibility for much of life removed from private life to the public sector—and to the banks of the Potomac. And thus was the “well-being” of the citizen defined with reference to material conditions and without reference to the citizen’s character or virtues or responsibilities. In his January 1944 State of the Union message, President Roosevelt proclaimed a government “duty” to establish “an American standard of living higher than ever before known,” and he said: “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” This was a summons to permanent discontent on the part of citizens and government. This bestowed on government a roving commission to define civic health solely in terms of the material standard of living, yet also to add to the growing list of citizens’ entitlements an entitlement to a mental state: a sense of security. Roosevelt said political rights would no longer suffice to insure “equality in the pursuit of happiness,” so there must be a “second Bill of Rights.” It would include rights to “a useful and remunerative job,” “adequate” food and clothing and recreation, “good” education, “decent” homes, a “decent” living for farmers, “adequate” medical care, and a right to freedom from “unfair competition” and from “the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”136

  All these rights, and myriad others that would be enumerated as the years rolled by, were necessary, Roosevelt said, because “necessitous men are not free men.”137 Therefore, government’s new task would be nothing less than the conquest of necessity. And so, twenty years later, in 1964, at the Democratic convention, the presidential nomination was accepted by a man who had been in Washington since Roosevelt was president and who planned to complete Roosevelt’s project—the elimination of necessity from Americans’ lives. Lyndon Johnson said to the 1964 convention: “This Nation—this generation—in this hour, has man’s first chance to build the Great Society—a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.”138 It was going to be hard to top that entitlement—the entitlement to meaningfulness. And twenty years after that, the Democratic Party gave its presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, perhaps the last nominee to adhere to New Deal liberalism, or at least the last not to disguise his adherence. In his concession statement after losing forty-nine states, Mondale said his thoughts were with all those in need of caring government, including “the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless, and the sad.”139 Sadness, too, like necessity, qualified as a public concern.

  How did it happen that liberalism annihilated all sense of limits on government’s responsibilities and competence? In President Johnson’s 1965 speech at Howard University, which adumbrated the rationale for what has come to be called affirmative action, he said “men are shaped by their world.” That is certainly true. Johnson also said people are shaped by “a hundred unseen forces.”140 That also is true. But what was new was the idea that government could and should master those forces, the unseen and the seen, and, for that matter, should master “the world.” The planted axiom was that, because government frames society, government is complicit in, and hence morally responsible for, all social outcomes and should make them come out right.

  This, however, erases the distinction on which classical liberalism—the liberalism of Locke and the American Revolution—was founded and which today’s conservative sensibility cherishes. It is the distinction between the public and the private spheres of life. On this distinction, freedom depends. About this, progressivism says: Never mind. Government should undertake to “level the playing field.” This recurring phrase is revealing: Playing fields are leveled by bulldozers, which are not nice emblems of government. The result of government’s equalizing aspirations is a paradox—power wielded by elites claiming expertise in the manufacture of equality. In its attempt to equalize “well-being,” progressivism came to exalt one virtue: compassion. Which is a passion. And compassion is a capacious concept. It can mean the prevention or amelioration of pain, of discomfort, of insecurity, or even of sadness. However, the frustration of desires is uncomfortable and can make people sad. So compassionate government must toil for the satisfaction of all desires. If a desire unfulfilled is painful, or even discomforting, fulfilling that desire is a duty of compassionate government. Such government believes that the pain of unfulfilled desires makes fulfilling the desires necessary. So the desires are upgraded to necessities. People suffering disappointed desires are therefore necessitous people, and, according to Franklin Roosevelt, they are not free.

  What moderation, what temperance, what restraint can there be in government animated by the idea that freedom, understood as emancipation from necessity, is the gift of comprehensively compassionate government? Such government has metastasized recklessly, and one of conservatism’s missions is to temper such government’s hubris and overreaching. This can be accomplished only by shifting the winds of public opinion. So the central political problem for conservatives is to get the public to consent to government that refuses to fulfill many of their desires. But in order for popular government to be strong enough to say “no” to popular desires, it must be respected. And if our constitutional government is to be respected, the Constitution must be regarded as something more, something grander, than a mere framework for competing forms of willfulness. The conservative agenda of governmental restraint depends on government having the strength that comes from respect, which is never accorded to the servile.

  Franklin Roosevelt’s most famous speech was his first as president, his inaugural address reassuring an anxious nation that it had nothing to fear but fear itself. But his most nuanced, revealing, and portentous speech was delivered forty-six days before he was elected, on September 23, 1932, at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. It was more radical than his more vituperative speeches of the 1936 campaign (about “economic royalists” and so on), and it foreshadowed, and explains, a less-remembered portion of Roosevelt’s first inaugural address. In San Francisco, he approached his startling philosophical point obliquely, by taking sides in a defining American rivalry. He associated himself with Jefferson, apostle of American individualism, rather than Hamilton, the first powerful advocate of an energetic central government in the service of organized financial power. Roosevelt delivered a barbed compliment, calling Hamilton “the most brilliant, honest and a
ble exponent” of the belief that “popular government was essentially dangerous and essentially unworkable.”141 This was a meretricious description of the author of fifty-one of the eighty-five Federalist papers, and of his argument that the Constitution, properly understood and faithfully adhered to, would make popular government safe and functional. But Roosevelt’s presentation of Hamilton served Roosevelt’s purpose of reminding his listeners that the nation had much experience with Hamiltonian measures, and with what might be called Hamiltonian men, the embodiments of commercial dynamism.

  In a trenchant argument intended to discomfit his largely business audience, Roosevelt correctly noted, “It has been traditional, particularly in Republican administrations, for business urgently to ask the government to put at private disposal all kinds of government assistance.” Tariffs were imposed first for the ostensible purpose of protecting so-called infant industries, and then were retained because vested interests had become comfortable relying on them. Also, “railroads were subsidized” with money and grants of land that included some of the nation’s most valuable oil lands.142 The merchant marine was subsidized with direct monetary grants and with mail subsidies. Roosevelt did not enumerate these entanglements of government with willing business interests merely in order to tweak the commercial class for its situational ethics regarding laissez-faire. Rather, he did so to set up his larger point about how the sweep of history had brought humanity to an inevitable and potentially wholesome dependence on a strong state.

  “We are,” he said, “likely to forget how hard people have worked to win the privilege of government.” Europeans developed strong central governments in order to “impose peace upon ruling barons.” Strong government became in Europe “a haven of refuge to the individual,” and it could and should become such a haven in America, where the likes of European barons existed in the form of what Roosevelt, quoting his cousin Theodore, called “malefactors of great wealth.” Society had decided to give wide latitude to these men of “tremendous will and tremendous ambition” as long as America’s population “was growing by leaps and bounds,” and as long as the nation had an abundance of free land as a “safety valve” for those who needed a second chance after losing out in the turbulent scramble of our congested cities. However, “Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand.”143

  In seeing administration as the essence of governing, Franklin Roosevelt placed himself firmly in the Wilsonian tradition. Said Roosevelt, “The day of enlightened administration has come.” He saw a future of scarcity requiring a strong state to regulate the allocation of scarce things. “We are not able,” Roosevelt said, “to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people.” This, and the supposed fact that “some six hundred odd corporations” controlled two-thirds of the nation’s industry, set the agenda of strong government. And this required a new understanding of the American contract.144 Herewith Roosevelt’s real revolution, which he mildly called “a re-appraisal of values”:

  The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of government in terms of a contract. Government is a relation of give and take, a contract, perforce, if we would follow the thinking out of which it grew. Under such a contract rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.145

  The radically revised role that Roosevelt sketched in San Francisco for the central government became explicit 102 days later when, standing on the East Front of the US Capitol, the new president called for “engaging on a national scale in a redistribution” of population to rectify “the overbalance of population in our industrial centers.” For this and other enormous undertakings “we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” He spoke of “a sacred obligation” to embrace “a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.” Action on the scale he envisioned is “feasible” under the Constitution, which is “so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.” Then, however, he warned that this time “the normal balance of public procedure,” aka the Constitution, might not suffice: “But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.… I shall ask the Congress for…broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”146 The military imagery—another moral equivalent of war—signaled, and served, the eclipse of individualism, the supremacy of the collectivity in a transformed America.

  Invocations of martial solidarity should grate on free people. In Muriel Spark’s 1963 novel Girls of Slender Means, the membership of a women’s club goes to Buckingham Palace to celebrate V-E day on May 8, 1945. They joined in “the huge organic murmur of the crowd,” in which “many strange arms were twined round strange bodies” and “many liaisons, some permanent, were formed.” Then tomorrow arrived. “The next day everyone began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things. Many citizens felt the urge, which some began to indulge, to insult each other, in order to prove something or to test their ground.”147 Yes, where did they personally stand when the collective strenuousness of war subsided? Individualism must occasionally, in exigent circumstances, yield to solidarity fused by danger, as the New Deal faced. But such solidarity should not be a norm aspired to.

  The New Deal made, and was made possible by, something novel in American history: a sanguine estimation of the competence and trustworthiness of the central government. The New Deal frame of mind was presaged by this change: Eleven of the Constitution’s first twelve amendments added more restrictions to the federal government than those written into the document in Philadelphia in 1787. Six of the next seven amendments, however, enlarged federal powers. Still, from the Founding until the 1930s, the American premise was itself a formidable inhibition of the central government. That premise was that the function of government is to provide the conditions—ordered liberty—in which happiness can be pursued, but not to provide happiness itself. Since the New Deal, the government has become steadily more ambitious. Americans have not, however, become more content with their government.

  Historians have rightly seen significance in the fact that many of the leading lights of progressivism around the turn of the twentieth century—Woodrow Wilson, for example—were children of Protestant clergymen. The premise of Christian theology is that we are fallen creatures who either do not know what we want or want the wrong things (e.g., golden calves), and hence need to be governed by moral auditors. Robert Fogel, economist and Nobel laureate, argues that three religious “awakenings”148—changes in and intensifications of religious sensibilities—have shaped American history. The first, which began around 1730, presaged the American Revolution by fomenting skepticism about traditional forms of authority. The second, after 1800, stressed personal perfection and America’s mission to pursue social perfection. This fueled anti-slavery passions. The third awakening began around 1890, during urbanization, immigration, industrialization, labor unrest, and the ascent of the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson’s son, Thomas Woodrow. It preached that unreformed society, not inherent sinfulness, is the source of moral corruption. This encouraged a modernist or progressive agenda of material amelioration, culminating in the entitlement state. What began as an exercise of redemptive politics has, however, reached a point of civic sourness, and a sense that sprawling, interventionist government, by encouraging dependency and enabling rent-seeking, is making matters worse.

  The epigraph of this chapt
er, taken from Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 presidential campaign, uses an extended architectural analogy to explain his vision for a comprehensively remodeled America. More than a century later, the nation’s constitutional architecture has become ramshackle, incoherent, and incapable of protecting representative government, the rule of law, and liberty. This trifecta of failure is writ large in the subject of the next chapter: the swollen presidency atop the administrative state.

  Chapter 3

  PROGRESSIVISM’S

  INSTITUTIONAL CONSEQUENCES

  The Presidency Triumphant,

  the Administrative State Rampant,

  Congress Dormant

  If you have ever been to a formal dinner…in England, you will recall that after dessert and coffee, and before it is permitted to light a cigarette, a toast is customarily presented: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Queen.” And if you have ever been to a diplomatic function involving participants from England and the United States, you will recall that it is custom to reply to that toast with a toast “To the president of the United States.” Every time I hear that progression it strikes me that the comparison does not really work. The president is, to be sure, both our chief executive and our head of state, our prime minister and queen combined. But if one wishes to evoke the deep and enduring symbol of our nationhood and our unity as a people, it seems to me the toast ought to be ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Constitution of the United States.’ For that is…not only the token but indeed the substance of what continues to bind us together as a people.