The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  For Locke, the category of “property” encompassed not just land and other material possessions but also one’s self, meaning one’s life and the liberty to make use of it. This is how he meant “government has no other end but the preservation of property.”29 So a draft of the Declaration of Independence said it is “self-evident” that “among” humanity’s unalienable rights are those of “life, liberty and property.” Some people consider this significantly different from, and inferior to, Jefferson’s final formulation “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Actually, it is neither, for two reasons. First, in eighteenth-century usage, individuals were said to have, as Locke believed, property in themselves—in their bodies. Second, this usage was and is sensible because when government protects private property it protects the property owner’s zone of sovereignty. Possession is not a trivial thing, be it possession of a house that provides privacy, of a car that confers mobility, of clothes that express individuality, or of the ability to undertake travel that educates and entertains. And consumption is not peripheral, let alone inimical, to the personal fulfillment that is a goal of life and hence of politics. Property is the result of the individual’s planning and aspiring, of his or her choices and exertions. As such, it is a signature of individuality expressed in the zone of sovereignty in which one is able to behave as one chooses. This is not restful; freedom in a market society does not just allow striving, it requires it. And the social churning that is a consequence of this dynamism can, and usually does, take a toll on security, and hence on serenity. Hence Tocqueville’s contrast between American society and Europe’s “calm and immobile” societies with their rigid hierarchies of classes.30

  Modernity’s decisive break from the ancients’ understanding of politics, and modernity’s great gift to the politics of liberty, is its idea of new possibilities for “individuality.” It was modernity’s insistence that the individual can be and ought to be pulled forward from his social background and should not be envisioned merely as clay comprehensively and passively shaped by immersion in social relationships and duties. Modernity gave birth to individualism by painting a picture of man that mankind then came to resemble, a picture of a restless, competitive, striving, and acquiring person. Rousseau overstated things when he declared that “no people could ever be anything but what the nature of its government made it.”31 It is, however, true that the nature of a regime, and the values the economic system necessarily embodies and encourages, shapes the people raised under the regime. What Adam Smith, Rousseau’s contemporary, called “universal opulence,” meaning wealth broadly dispersed, is the aim, and eventually the achievement, of a sensibly governed society.32 And it is the aspiration of economic theory when melded with political philosophy, the former giving the latter a democratic inclination. Commerce always results in inequalities of outcome, and always should result in unequal rewards because different people have different abilities and desires to add value to the economy. It is, however, also true that commerce, which is based on contracts between equally consenting buyers and sellers, insinuates throughout society an egalitarian ethos that is subversive of aristocratic status.

  When Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle awoke from his twenty-year sleep that began before the Revolution, he was amazed: “The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.” A society of deference, and the habits that both produced it and were reinforced by it, were being shucked off as the cake of custom crumbled under the assault of energies let loose in an increasingly market-driven commercial society where social hierarchies would, presumably, be based on merit.

  One of contemporary conservatism’s services to society has been to refocus attention on an elemental fact that the Founders understood: Society is a crucible of character formation, and a capitalist society does not merely make us better off, it makes us better. Human beings are political, meaning social, beings, fulfilled in and through voluntary associations. Government can damage associational life, and big government can do big damage. This nation’s party system was born of an argument about the action of American society on itself and on the character of Americans. Hamiltonians wanted a society of high-velocity commercial energy and restless, striving individualism in order to produce national greatness. Jeffersonians aimed to promote other virtues, particularly simplicity and the serene independence of the self-sufficient yeoman. Such Americans would, Jefferson thought, avoid the degrading dependence of the urban manufacturing workers who, Jefferson said, must live “on oatmeal and potatoes” and “have no time to think.”33 Americans have never stopped worrying and arguing about national character and how the economic system affects it.

  In his Report on Manufactures, Alexander Hamilton connected his vision of commercial dynamism with the encouragement of various human types. A commercial society, unlike the mostly agricultural society envisioned by his rival Jefferson, would provide “greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions which discriminate men from each other,” thereby generating a distinctive mentality: “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted…”34 Hamilton is most remembered for his praise, in Federalist 70, of “energy in the executive.”35 His more fundamental and comprehensive objective, however, was energy in everybody.

  His idea that public policy should incite the animal spirits of the wealthy investor class for the betterment of society as a whole has come to be called, with stigmatizing intent, “trickle-down economics.” But there also is an American tradition of “trickle-up economics.” William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential nominee, said, “The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon it.”36 The trickle-down and trickle-up hypotheses are more or less testable, even allowing for the inability to control the relevant variables in the laboratory of a modern society in a globalized world. To a considerable extent, however, trickle-down is not optional: The rich will always be with us, and their entrepreneurial talents will gather large reservoirs of financial resources, which they will have a steady incentive to put to productive use.

  Not everybody read Hamilton that way. When Madison sought Henry Lee’s opinion of Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, he received a blast of the economic sociology that then was commonplace thinking. Madison relished Lee’s disapproval of what Hamilton, who was Madison’s rival, advocated. Lee said that whereas good Jeffersonians, like him, favored an agrarian economy that would shape the archetypal American as “a stout, muscular ploughman full of health…with his eight or ten blooming children,” Hamilton would populate the nation with “squat, bloated fellows all belly and no legs who can walk two miles in the hour and manufacture a little.”37

  In 1802, Hamilton, seething about President Jefferson’s rejection of Hamilton’s plans for a national highway system and other stimulants of economic dynamism, wrote acidly: “Mr. Jefferson is distressed at the codfish having latterly emigrated to the southern coast, lest the people there should be tempted to catch them; and commerce, of which we have already too much, receive an accession.”38 Jefferson, however, was not altogether hostile to the encouragement of social churning. He drafted Virginia’s legislation abolishing primogeniture (the right of a firstborn son to inherit the parents’ entire estate) and entail (the inheritance of property over a number of generations) in order to encourage conditions for social fluidity and the virtue of individual aspiration. But Jefferson’s palliative measures were no match for the social inertia created by slavery, as Alexis de Tocqueville discerned.

  Traveling down the Ohio River in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville noted that a traveler in the middle of the river navigates between two economic systems that produce two menta
lities—two kinds of people. From both the Ohio and Kentucky banks of the river stretched undulating soil that offered “inexhaustible treasures to the laborer.” The two states differed only in that Kentucky had slaves and Ohio did not. On the river’s left bank, where “the population is sparse,” “society is asleep; man seems idle.” On the right bank “rises a confused noise that proclaims from afar the presence of industry.” On the left bank, “work is blended with the idea of slavery,” hence it is “degraded.” There “one cannot find workers belonging to the white race, [for] they would fear resembling slaves.” So Kentucky men “have neither zeal nor enlightenment.” On the right bank, “one would seek in vain for an idle man: the white extends his activity and his intelligence to all his works.” Nature “has given man an enterprising and energetic character” on both banks of the Ohio, but two radically different economic systems result in radically different kinds of people.39

  The Founders intended the Constitution to promote a way of life, and they understood that to promote a way of life is to promote a kind of person. Consider the words of the Constitution’s first and greatest construer, John Marshall. In his biography of Washington he wrote: “[The] great and visible economic improvement occurring around 1790 [was in part due to] the influence of the Constitution on habits of thinking and acting, [which] though silent, was considerable. In depriving the states of the power to impair the obligations of contracts, or to make anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts, the conviction was impressed on that portion of society which had looked to the government for relief from embarrassment, that personal exertion alone could free them from difficulties; and an increased degree of industry and economy was the natural consequence of this opinion.”40 Marshall said the Constitution was designed to encourage particular habits of thinking and acting. From visible habits we make inferences as to invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore statecraft, as the Founders understood it, is soulcraft. Hence politics has a great and stately jurisdiction, and politics is an inherently dignified vocation, no matter how imperfectly practiced at any given time.

  Marshall understood that acceptance of the Constitution was an act of self-denial in the name of self-government. The Constitution deprived the states of certain powers that they had used licentiously under the Articles of Confederation. The states had produced what Madison tartly called “a luxuriancy of legislation.”41 Because the Founders understood the contagion of faction, they did not believe that the best government is always that which is closest to the people. Being unsentimental about the people, the Founders were not sentimental about state and local governments. As Marshall saw, by depriving states of some of their powers, the Constitution helped to equip citizens for the dignity of life without degrading dependence on government.

  The Anti-Federalists opposed the Constitution in the name of intimate government; the Founders framed the Constitution to provide effective government and to spare citizens the discomfort and dependence that comes from being too intimate with government. The Founders hoped that one effect of exalting the central government over other governments would be a diminution of the total amount of government—local, state, and national. This, the Founders thought, would encourage self-reliance in the pursuit of happiness, which was an important dimension of the argument for a strengthened central government. But this government was supposed to be strong within the strict limits of enumerated powers. We have not, however, had such a government for a long time. It can be argued that we never really did.

  From its first year, the national government has asserted powers proportional to national needs, and from the first, it has defined national needs in ways that did not produce government precisely, or even notably, limited in sphere or methods. Of the thirty-nine members of the House of Representatives who were present when the First Congress took up its first order of business, sixteen were Framers—they had been at the Constitutional Convention. Yet their first order of business was the enactment of tariffs. And they regarded tariffs not merely as revenue-raising devices but as instruments of what today is called “industrial policy.” Their aim was to pick winners and losers, to promote local or regional interests, and to purchase political advantage by protecting “infant industries.”

  The Louisiana Purchase, and restrictions on the expansion of slavery, were supposed to guarantee a vast inland empire of small farmers perpetually renewing the young Republic’s yeoman virtues of independence and self-sufficiency. But the nature of nineteenth-century America—huge tracts of land to be cultivated and a scarcity of labor—spurred the mechanization of agriculture. This increased production, and price fluctuations, and debts, and defaults. Farmers saw their economic, political, and social standing decline. Their independence and self-sufficiency were, by other names, loneliness and vulnerability forced upon them by bad roads, bad communications, and cycles of overproduction, declining prices, failure, and foreclosure. This is why big, activist government was not only, or initially, a response to urban industrialism. Forty years before the New Deal, rural populism was America’s first powerful political movement to insist that the federal government should acknowledge broad ameliorative responsibilities. Government responded with rural free delivery, rural electrification, paved roads (as late as the 1920s, most of South Dakota was impassable during rainy springs), regulation of railroads and grain elevators, and the then-radical policy of commodity price parity—an economic entitlement, a harbinger of the welfare state, which migrated to urban America from down on the farm.

  So big government did not fall out of the sky, unbidden, like hail in Kansas. And it was not foisted on a reluctant public. It grew for many reasons. One use to which the Interstate Commerce Commission was put after its creation in 1887 was to keep certain east-west freight rates low in order to encourage commerce that would strengthen the national union. The federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which initiated federal inspection, did not come about simply because the nation’s stomach was turned by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, which depicted, with shocking accuracy, life in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The federal government began regulating that industry because the industry wanted it to be regulated: States’ regulations were so unreliable that some European markets were being closed to American meat.

  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, incantations praising minimalist government are part of the liturgy of America’s “civic religion,” avowed but not constraining. Government grows partly because of the ineluctable bargaining process among interest groups that favor government outlays that benefit them. And government grows because knowledge does, and knowledge often grows because of government. Knowledge, said Moynihan, is a form of capital, much of it formed by government investment in education. And knowledge begets government. Time was, hospitals were simple things. Then came technologies—diagnostic, therapeutic, pharmacological—that improved health, increased costs, and expanded government’s involvement in the allocation of access to health care that was becoming increasingly valuable because medicine was increasingly competent. When I was born in 1941, the principal expense of most hospitals was clean linen. This was before MRIs, CAT scans, electron microscopes, laser surgery, and many other costly technologies.

  THE FATAL CONCEIT

  “Political economy” once was, and should still be, the name for the academic study of economics. To study economics is to study how the production and exchange of goods and services, domestically and among nations, is shaped by customs, mores, laws, and governments, and by social aspirations concerning equity. A mature capitalist economy is, inevitably, a government construct. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society’s soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantees, among much else, transparency, meaning a sufficient stream—a torrent, really—of reliable information about the condition of markets and the conduct of corporations. Karl Polanyi, the Austrian-born economic historian, famously
pointed to a paradox when he said that “laissez-faire was planned.”42 Markets freed from government control are a creation of governments. Laws that shape, and are shaped by, social norms are necessary. Politics is not everything, and everything should not be politicized, but much of what makes life congenial and rewarding, from fulfilling work to stimulating culture, depends upon the functioning of a sound political order. And one of the most important attributes of such a political order is knowing what is not—what cannot be—known.

  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as part of the rapid growth of American higher education, and especially of graduate schools and PhD programs, the academic discipline of economics acquired the confidence of a scientific profession. After the prodigies of industrial mobilization that produced victory in World War II, President John Kennedy exemplified the serene postwar confidence in the management of the economy. Addressing Yale’s graduating class of 1962, Kennedy said, “What is at stake in our economic decisions today” is not a passionate clash of ideologies but just “the practical management of a modern economy,” a “basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.” This, he said, “is basically an administrative or executive problem.” Which meant, to Kennedy and his like-minded listeners, it was not much of a problem, and certainly not a political problem. America’s economic challenges, Kennedy said, demanded “technical answers, not political answers.”43 In his 1969 inaugural address, Richard Nixon, as though announcing a universally understood truism, serenely said, “We have learned at last to manage a modern economy to assure its continued growth.”44 Thirty-one months later, he was sufficiently flummoxed about the problem of “managing” the economy that he ordered wage and price controls, the most aggressive peacetime expansion of government power over the economy in American history. Within fifteen years of Kennedy’s Yale commencement address, the nation would be suffering from a phenomenon that economic theory said was impossible: stagflation, the simultaneous afflictions of stagnant growth and an inflation rate that reached 13 percent in 1979.