The Conservative Sensibility Page 3
Sensibility as well as philosophy, and more frequently than philosophy, shapes the contours of a nation’s political practices. People embrace a conservative or liberal agenda or ideology largely because of something basic to their nature and nurturing, meaning their temperament as shaped by education and other experiences. Broadly speaking, there are conservative and progressive conceptions of human nature, conservative and progressive assumptions about how history unfolds, and conservative and progressive expectations about how the world works. Few people have systems of ideas that can be properly called political philosophies. Most people have political sensibilities, meaning sensibilities with political relevance and consequences. All human beings, however, have feelings, and human beings are the only animals capable of feeling melancholy because only they can compare what is with what might have been. Among the nations, the United States is especially susceptible to national melancholia because it was begun with such glittering aspirations for what it should become. The fact that it has been and remains, on balance, a tremendous success does not immunize Americans from recurring bouts of uneasiness. We are experiencing one such now.
At the risk of depressing readers prematurely, I want to advise them that what follows does not contain a comprehensive agenda for political reform and social improvement. Although some recommendations for action are explicit and others are implicit in the analysis, one lesson of conservatism is that many problems are more or less intractable, for reasons relating to an abundance of politics or a paucity of knowledge. Consider three matters. First, the nation’s most destructive social problem, which is discussed in Chapter 6, is family disintegration. No one understands what opaque tangle of factors has caused this, which is one reason no one knows what public policies might ameliorate it. Second, the nation’s most ominous governance problem is the unsustainable trajectory of the entitlement state because of the unfunded promises that have been made regarding pensions and medical care. Everyone understands what must be done: a mixture of increases of taxes and reductions of promised benefits. Everyone also knows that there is insufficient political will for either part of this remedy. Third, the fundamental cause of the public perception—which is not mistaken—of a corrupt national political culture is the fact that the federal government has promiscuously involved itself in every aspect of American life. As this government has become ever more important in the allocation of wealth and opportunity, it has become an ever more enticing target of rent-seeking factions, which are incited by the government’s interventionist behavior. The necessary, and probably sufficient, cause of this misuse of government was the death of the doctrine of enumerated powers. Its principle was that, as Madison said in Federalist 45, the powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are “few and defined.” That principle is dead as a doornail. The powers have turned out to be, effectively, undefined and for that reason too numerous to be enumerated.
These somewhat bleak judgments are, however, not sterile. Understanding the limits of the possible is a prerequisite for avoiding misplaced confidence, of which there has been an abundance in the last half century of governance. Such confidence sends people careening off on tangents that make matters worse. And by understanding the price we have paid, and continue to pay, for abandoning certain political principles and practices, we can slow the pace of mistakes and minimize disappointments. And perhaps even make some improvements that do not make matters worse. That many supposed improvements do make matters worse is a truth that is not, alas, self-evident.
Before long, the nation will be a quarter of a millennium old; soon thereafter, its Constitution will be. This is, therefore, a good time to appraise the American project as it is, as it might have been, and as it might become. In 1948, when postwar politics were in ferment and conservatism was beginning to stir as more than a particular flavor of cultural criticism, one of its texts was Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, could actually have said that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. There then were, however, those who considered “conservative ideas” an oxymoron. “In the United States at this time,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Trilling worried that “it is not conducive to the real strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field alone.”15 That is one worry that liberalism has been subsequently spared. In the past sixty or so years, conservatism has grown from a small homogeneous fighting faction in an unconverted country into a persuasion with sufficient political muscle and intellectual firepower to contest progressivism’s ascendency. Conservatism’s growth as a force in electoral politics accelerated ten years after Trilling wrote what he did.
The unlikely accelerant was a politician who never pretended to be, or aspired to be, an original thinker. Arriving near the end of, and hastening the end of, the hegemony of New Deal progressivism, he was gifted at distilling, and unapologetically espousing, sentiments that were then more widely shared than they were frequently expressed in political discourses. He did not have a finely articulated program, but he did have a broad judgment about how conservatism could contribute to the good life. So, let us here take a brief stroll down memory lane to meet this person, for whom I cast my first presidential vote and to whom this book is dedicated. The stroll will illustrate the persistence of the vocabulary of limited government in American politics.
“ALL RIGHT, DAMN IT, I’LL DO IT”
It is commonly but wrongly said that the 1960s was a decade of dissent begun on campuses and on the left, with the first spark struck in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement in Sproul Plaza on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Actually, a more consequential dissent began in July 1960 in Chicago, when Arizona’s junior senator strode to the podium of the Republican National Convention. Seething with the ancient (by American standards) and accumulated grievances of the American West against the American East, Barry Goldwater growled to the convention, “Let’s grow up, conservatives. Let’s, if we want to take this party back—and I think we can some day. Let’s get to work.”16
“All right, damn it, I’ll do it” were, three years later, the reluctant Goldwater’s words of surrender to those in the conservative movement who had been importuning him to seek the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nomination.17 He understood that the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John Kennedy reduced the value of this nomination: Americans, he knew, would not choose to have three presidents in fourteen months. Goldwater, however, knew the campaign could still serve a long-term purpose. He would use it to breathe new life into an old political vocabulary, one that had been neglected during the long ascendency of New Deal premises. Doing so, he would reinvigorate a political tradition that had become dormant and inarticulate. In this sense, Goldwater won in 1964—it just took sixteen years to count the votes. This book, written at a moment when conservatism is again a persuasion without a party, is, in part, an attempt to do what Goldwater attempted—to revive a worthy tradition.
Or perhaps one might say a worthy persuasion. Six decades ago, the historian Marvin Meyers published a seminal book, The Jacksonian Persuasion, about how the Jacksonians thought and spoke in the rough-and-tumble of politics and policy-making. Meyers’ subject was, he said, “not a consistent doctrine, not a finely articulated program but a persuasion: a broad judgment of public affairs informed by common sentiments and beliefs about the good life in America.”18 Meyers was writing more than intellectual history, he was distilling a political philosophy from its intimations in political practices. My portrait of American conservatism as I think it should understand itself deals with some doctrines and programs. It is, however, especially concerned with sentiments about how the world actually works. And with beliefs about how America would work if it avoided making matters worse whi
le trying to make the good life more attractive and accessible.
In 1964, the Goldwater persuasion carried only six states but enabled conservatism to capture the levers and pulleys of the Republican Party’s machinery. This sealed conservatism’s Republican victory in an internecine struggle that had simmered and sometimes raged since 1912, when a former Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, challenged an incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, for the party’s nomination. TR represented progressives, Taft represented conservatives. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who became a national political force by giving a nationally televised speech for Goldwater in October 1964, was elected president. The conservatism of both Goldwater and Reagan was colored by the libertarianism of the American West of wide-open spaces.
When I visited Goldwater at his home in Phoenix a few years before his death in 1998, he said he had built his house on a hill to which, when he was young, he would ride his horse and sleep under the stars. When he was a boy, about 100,000 people lived in the Valley of the Sun. When Goldwater died, the population of one suburb of Phoenix—Mesa—was larger than St. Louis. Today, the population of the Phoenix metropolitan area, the nation’s sixth largest, is approximately 4.7 million. So, you must remember this: Goldwater was a conservative from, and was formed by, a place with precious little past to conserve, and with an unlimited impatience with the idea of limits.
Westerners have no inclination to go through life with a crick in their necks from looking backward. When Goldwater became the embodiment of American conservatism—partly by his own efforts and partly because he was conscripted by others for the role—this guaranteed that the mainstream of American conservatism would be utterly American. The growing conservative intelligentsia would savor many flavors of conservatism, from Edmund Burke’s to T. S. Eliot’s, including conservatisms grounded on religious reverence, nostalgia, and resistance to the permanent revolution of conditions in a capitalist, market society. But such conservatisms would have been unintelligible, even repellent, to Goldwater, if he had had time or inclination to notice them. Goldwater was a man of many parts—politician and jet pilot, ham radio operator and accomplished photographer—but no one ever called him bookish. And if anyone ever had, Goldwater, a man of action and of the West, might have said—echoing the protagonist of the novel that invented the Western, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902)—“When you call me that, smile!”19 Then Goldwater would have smiled, because although he could be gruff, he could not stay out of sorts. He was well described (by the New Yorker’s Richard Rovere) as “the cheerful malcontent.”20
As America approaches the quarter-millennium mark it is neither cheerful nor content. Its discontents arise, in part, from the fact that for a century progressivism has been ascendant in the nation’s political thought and practices. Many of the nation’s disappointments and difficulties stem from the resulting repudiation of the principles of the nation’s Founding. Many thoughtful progressives have articulated what they consider the necessity of this repudiation, which they say is grounded in improved understanding of modern social conditions and in fresh understanding of the human condition. The progressives’ premise is that whatever is fixed in human nature is and ought to be less determinative in the construction of social arrangements than the possibility that social forces can shape new forms of human material. This is so, they think, because the most important characteristic of the human material is its plasticity. This progressive premise means that Americans, whether they know it or not, and regardless of whether they want it or not, are engaged in a new episode of an old debate.
It is a debate that has dominated Western political philosophy for many centuries. It is a debate about whether, or to what extent, nature contains standards, or whether it is mere material to be subject to human willfulness. The stakes could hardly be higher. If our rights are natural, they are discernible by reason, which is constitutive of human nature. Such rights also are natural because they pre-exist acts of collective human will and cannot be nullified by such acts. If rights are natural, so, too, is limited government. If rights are natural, government’s legitimating function is, in the most neglected word in the Declaration of Independence, to “secure” these rights.
The Founders believed, as did almost every political philosopher before them, that there is a permanent human nature and that the task of statesmanship is to devise a political system that is conducive to human flourishing because the system accords with certain permanent human capacities, aspirations, passions, and tendencies. These are not all manifested at all times, but they are always part of the raw material of politics and must enter the calculations of statesmen who design regimes and wield power. Progressivism, which began as a forthright rejection of the Founders’ philosophy, embraced and brought into political thinking the modern sense that everything is in flux, always and everywhere. Progressives argue that there may be, in a sense, various human natures at various historical moments, and in particular social contexts. Human nature, however, is always in a state of becoming. If it is the nature of human beings to have no fixed nature, then a political project inevitably flows from this fact. If what is called human nature is characterized by its historicity, if it is merely the consciousness derived from the shaping forces that produced it, then the jurisdiction of politics will inevitably include mastering and comprehensively directing those forces. If human nature is malleable under the pressure of the social context, then the content of that context can be, indeed must be, a political choice. The politics of consciousness is a European import into, and discordant with, the original civic discourse of our nation, which was born in battles fought to secure the founding of a nation with premises unique among the nations.
On July 4, 1776, the United States contained less than 2.8 million persons, 80 percent of whom lived within twenty miles—a day’s ride—of Atlantic tidewater. Today the nation has 330 million residents and extends from the Atlantic to a state that reaches to within fifty-five miles of Russia. Another state is 700 miles closer to the capital of Japan than to the capital of the United States. Yet considering the pace and scale of American change, there is, as Michael Barone says, an astonishing continuity in our politics.21 We have been holding congressional and presidential elections for almost 250 years, a process not interrupted even by the Civil War. The Democratic Party emerged as a vehicle for mass mobilization in the 1830s, the Republican Party exploded into existence in 1854 in reaction against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and these two parties have organized American politics ever since. By the time of the election of 1800, the United States had political parties, which just thirteen years earlier the Framers of the Constitution had neither anticipated nor desired. Ratification in 1804 of the Twelfth Amendment, bringing the presidential election process into line with the existence of parties, attested to the swift and irrevocable acceptance of government by parties.
Today, however, the conflict between conservatives and progressives reflects the most durable and consequential discontinuity in American politics. The conflict is between the Founders’ vision and the progressives’ explicit repudiation of this, a conflict that is now a century old and showing no signs of abating. Indeed, it is intensifying as both sides, their convictions honed in debate, acquire sharpened understandings of how fundamental their differences are. It is an exhilarating time to be engaged in America’s civic discourse because engagement immerses participants in the unmatched drama of this nation’s history. The argument begins as the nation did, with some truths that were then considered self-evident.
Chapter 1
The Founders’
Epistemological Assertion
They Knew What Can Be Known
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature…
Alexander Hamilton1
On February 22, 1842, the 110th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday, Abraham Lincoln, then
thirty-three, addressed the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois. He criticized attempts to reform the intemperate by addressing them “in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation.” To expect this to be efficacious was, Lincoln said, “to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be reversed.”2 With those words, which were a rhetorical flourish not intended to say anything novel, the man who would become the nation’s sixteenth president expressed a foundational assumption of the first president and the rest of the nation’s Founders. Today, it is conventional wisdom that there is no knowledge, only opinion, about moral questions, and that this is so because human beings have no nature other than their capacity to acquire culture. They supposedly acquire it much as soft wax passively acquires the marks of whatever substance presses upon it. The thirtieth president did not think so.
On July 5, 1926, President Calvin Coolidge, who was born on the Fourth of July, 1872, spoke in Philadelphia to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Coolidge was more learned than his cultured despisers know and more learned than most of them are. He translated Dante’s Inferno as a wedding gift for his wife, he read Cicero in Latin, and there is no extant evidence that he ever said “the business of America is business.” That day in Philadelphia he spoke “to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.” The founding of the United States, he said, represented a “new civilization…a new spirit…more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual” than any in Europe. Coolidge said “life in a new and open country” had given rise to “aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position.” These aspirations, “decreed by the very laws of human nature,” testified to the fact that “man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.” The Declaration’s “great truths were in the air” Americans then breathed.3