The Conservative Sensibility Read online

  Madison was, in the words of a colleague, “no bigger than half a piece of soap,” which might be one reason why there is no monument to him in Washington.53 There is a tall, austere monument to the tall, austere man for whom the city is named, a man of Roman virtues and eloquent reticence. There is a Greek-revival memorial to Madison’s boon companion, the tall, elegant, eloquent Jefferson, who is to subsequent generations the most charismatic of the Founders. But there is no monument to the smallest (five feet four inches) but subtlest of the Founders, without whose mind Jefferson’s Declaration and Washington’s generalship could not have resulted in this republic. Until 1981, there was not even a government building named for Madison. Then, however, the Library of Congress, which began with Jefferson’s donation of his library, needed a new building and named it after the most supple intellect among the Founders—the James Madison Memorial Building.

  Madison’s rival Alexander Hamilton possessed the conviction, and the brassy indifference to delicacy, to write (in Federalist 6) that “the uniform course of human events” and “the accumulated experience of ages” demonstrate that men are “ambitious, vindictive and rapacious.” Madison was, characteristically, more measured. He was less provocative than Hamilton without being less wary when he wrote (in Federalist 55), “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”54 A portion that requires institutional precautions. And as will be argued in Chapter 4, today these precautions must involve, more than Madison could have comfortably accepted, the judiciary.

  Political philosophy begins with an assertion of the natural—with, that is, a delineation of what is given, meaning permanent, about human nature, and hence the human condition. Or perhaps we should say that political reflection begins with a decision: Should we assume that anything is permanent because it is natural? If so, political philosophy begins with human beings prior to society—before society makes its marks upon them. Human beings are social creatures because, as Thomas Paine wrote, their needs, material and immaterial, “impel the whole of them into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a center.” Paine’s recourse to the Newtonian vocabulary, which was natural to the eighteenth century, made the point that sociability and society are not optional, not choices. So when he said “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he was saying we can restart the world of politics and government, but not society.55 A century on, progressivism’s project would be to subordinate society to politics and government.

  In 1955, at the high tide of the academic consensus about “consensus” being the central theme of America’s political development, political scientist Louis Hartz wrote, “Locke dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché.”56 To which conservatives now say: If only that were true. As William James said, we live forward but understand backward. So, if we are to understand the arguments that are shaping America’s unfolding future, it is essential that we understand the past from which comes the Founders’ vocabulary of our politics. The fact that this vocabulary is increasingly anachronistic and decreasingly controlling is a measure of the steady, more than a century-long ascent of progressivism. To that we now turn, tracing the path of progressivism to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1934 speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. Exactly thirty years after which, in “The Speech,” as conservatives came to call it, the nationally televised one that Ronald Reagan gave in October 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy, Reagan was not wrong when he said: “Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government.”57

  Chapter 2

  THE PROGRESSIVES’ REVISION

  An Emancipation (from Natural Rights) Proclamation

  What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.…

  Woodrow Wilson

  The New Freedom (1912)1

  In 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Manhattan resulted in the deaths by suffocation or jumping of 146 workers. The building had only one fire escape, and many doors were locked, supposedly to prevent pilfering of materials by employees. Watching in horror from the streets was a young social worker, Frances Perkins, who twenty-two years later would become, as President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, the first woman in a president’s cabinet. She served on the commission that studied the Triangle disaster and advocated many of the health and safety laws that defined an emerging kind of liberalism that wielded government to regulate enterprise and shape society’s allocation of wealth, opportunity, and security.2

  American politics can be considered a tale of three liberalisms,3 the first of which, classical liberalism, teaches that the creative arena of human affairs is society, as distinct from government. Government’s proper function is to protect the conditions of life and liberty, primarily for the individual’s private pursuit of happiness. This is now called conservatism. Until the New Deal, however, it was the Jeffersonian spirit of most of the Democratic Party. FDR’s New Deal liberalism was significantly more ambitious. He said that until the emergence of the modern industrial economy, “government had merely been called upon to produce the conditions within which people could live happily, labor peacefully and rest secure.”4 Now it would be called upon to play a grander role. It would not just provide conditions in which happiness, understood as material well-being, could be pursued. Rather, it would become a deliverer of happiness itself. Government, FDR said, has “final responsibility” for it.5 This “middle liberalism” of the New Deal supplemented political rights with economic rights. The New Deal, the modern state it created, and the class of people for whom that state provided employment led to the third liberalism, that of the 1960s and beyond. This “managerial liberalism” celebrates the role of intellectuals and other policy elites in rationalizing society from above, wielding the federal government and the “science” of public administration, meaning bureaucracy. This liberalism promises that government’s mastery of economic management will end business cycles, thereby guaranteeing a steady flow of revenues for building more than a merely good society, but a Great Society.

  The path liberalism has taken to the present began with Woodrow Wilson, passed through the presidency of the man who first came to Washington as Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy, and culminated with the first president to have spent most of his adult life in Washington: Lyndon Johnson, who in 1935, at age twenty-six, began his long climb up the ladder of American politics when he was named by FDR to head the National Youth Administration in Texas. Thirty years later he was president and able to pursue a grandiose agenda because the 1964 election—the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater—produced in Congress the first liberal legislative majority since the coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats emerged after voters in the 1938 elections reproved FDR for his plan to “pack” the Supreme Court by enlarging it. Harry McPherson, one of Johnson’s senior aides, described how LBJ envisioned the nation as a patient whose pathologies were to receive presidential ministrations: “People were [seen to be] suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well-to-do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; fathers, working at ‘meaningless’ jobs
, or slumped before the television set; sons and daughters desperate for ‘relevance’—all were in need of community, beauty, and purpose, all were guilty because so many others were deprived while they, rich beyond their ancestors’ dreams, were depressed. What would change all this was a creative public effort.”6 It is a wonder America did not wind up with a Department of Meaningful Labor, a “war on anomie,” and an Agency for Stimulating and Friendly Suburban Afternoons.

  LBJ promised a Great Society “where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”7 The progressive impulses unleashed after the 1964 election were in their infancy fifty years earlier. In 1914, when Walter Lippmann was helping to launch The New Republic magazine, his and its progressivism was of crystalline purity. He wrote: “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberatively, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned.” We can, he said, “break up routines” because “the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.”8 Lippmann was wrong to suppose that hitherto no generation had considered dealing “deliberatively” with life. And it was not unprecedented for reformers to aim to break what Walter Bagehot called “the cake of custom.”9 What was, however, distinctive to American progressives early in the twentieth century was the sweep of their serene confidence that science, including and especially political science, now enabled the benevolent control of “life”—all of it.

  If, however, life were to be submitted to progressives’ intentions “in endless ways,” one impediment had to be removed. Human life could not be made sufficiently malleable until human beings were disabused of the idea of human nature. The philosophy of natural right, which was the Founders’ philosophy and the Republic’s foundation, rests on one premise: There is a universal human nature. From that fact, by way of philosophic reasoning, come some normative judgments: Certain social arrangements—particularly government by consent attained by persuasion in a society that accepts pluralism—are right for creatures of this nature. Hence the doctrine of natural right and the idea of a nation “dedicated,” as Lincoln said, to the “proposition” that all men are created equal. Progressivism rests on a historic and, in its way, heroic negative.

  It rests on a refusal to accept that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material. The vehemence of political progressives’ recoil from the Founders’ philosophy is explained by the progressives’ investment in the idea that human beings are essentially blank slates on which pretty much anything can be written if the writers know the techniques for doing so. To the question “What most determines the trajectories of individuals, nature or nurture?” the progressives’ answer is that nature is negligible, or can be rendered so. Nurturing can be sovereign if it is sufficiently ingenious and determined. The theory that a properly organized and governed society can write progress on humanity’s blank slate radically raises the stakes of politics. It also increases the grandeur of government’s role, and the importance of governing elites, who are the progressive vanguards of a steadily perfected humanity. Because progressives invest history with a logic and lessons crucial to progress, historians are given special standing. One such, Richard Hofstadter, an intellectual luminary of the post–World War II era, boldly asserted that “no man who is as well abreast of modern science as the Fathers were of eighteenth-century science believes any longer in an unchanging human nature.”10 Hofstadter did not, however, explain what evidence modern science has provided for this conclusion. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what such evidence would be.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, academicians in the burgeoning new field of political science presented as a scientific necessity the repudiation of the Founders’ natural rights tradition. In 1903, the year the American Political Science Association was founded, the University of Chicago’s Charles Edward Merriam published A History of American Political Theories, which is still in print. His chapter on “Recent Tendencies” celebrated the turn, in the second half of the nineteenth century, toward a method of understanding politics that was “more systematic and scientific” than “the individualistic philosophy of the early years of the century.”11 American academics, going abroad in search of advanced degrees not yet widely available in their country, found in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century a bureaucracy that they thought of as what Hegel, in the century’s first half, had celebrated as the “universal class.” Because the bureaucracy’s mission was to apply experts’ knowledge, the bureaucracy was considered uniquely disinterested, and hence was not a class at all.12 American political scientists, “many of whom were trained in German schools,” had, Merriam wrote, “acquired a scientific method of discussing political phenomena.” This method discredited the concept of a “social contract” by which the sole source of government and political obligation is “a contract between independent individuals” that creates political society ex nihilo.13 The “state of nature,” from which mankind supposedly emerged by means of the social contract, is a fiction. So, therefore, are natural rights that pre-exist government and are independent of it. John Dewey, America’s most eminent philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote that natural rights “exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”14

  To this, America’s Founders might have replied: The purpose of postulating a particular kind of natural state in humanity’s distant past was to achieve a particular kind of not-so-distant future for humanity. Those flinty realists’ contention was not that the state of nature was a clear historical antecedent—an anthropological condition of which we have evidence. Nor was their contention that a social contract was signed at a spontaneous conclave in some meadow in the state of nature. Rather, the social contract was for the Founders a heuristic concept to illustrate two things. The first was man’s natural capacity—and need—for sociability, which is the basis of Aristotle’s definition of man as a political animal. Second, the concept illustrated the idea that certain rights are so natural, so essential to human flourishing, that governments are instituted to “secure,” not to bestow, them. This, of course, is the language of the most important paragraph in humanity’s political history, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

  The “present tendency,” wrote Merriam complacently, is to believe that all rights “have their source not in nature, but in law.” And government, which is the source of law, is not “the result of a deliberate agreement among men” but is “the result of historical development, instinctive rather than conscious.”15 To which the Founders might have replied by emphasizing that when they talked about the state of nature they were doing philosophy, not anthropology. They also might have directed Merriam’s attention to the first paragraph of the first of the Federalist Papers, in which Alexander Hamilton wrote that “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.”16

  What Merriam called “the modern school” had formulated “a new idea of liberty, widely different from that” of the Founders. The crux of the difference was that rights “have their source not in nature, but in law,” and that laws creating rights do not take their bearings from nature. The state is the “creator” of liberty because it makes liberty possible; the state is not only the “source” of liberty, it guarantees and protects it. Therefore, the state is entitled to determine liberty’s limits. Stripped of its status as a natural right, liberty is understood as obtained “only through the organization of political institutions.” There is an “inseparable connection between pol
itical liberty and political capacity.” The “‘protection theory’ of government”—that government exists to protect life, liberty, and property—is to be “broadened out” to encompass government doing for people what they cannot, or should not, or will not do alone. Hence “the only limitations on governmental action are those dictated by experience or the needs of the time.” Which were not really limitations, if Professor Woodrow Wilson was correct that society, and hence government, exists for the unlimited purpose of supplying “mutual aid to self-development.” Summing up the consensus of “modern thinkers,” Merriam said: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state, but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle.” So, there being no limiting principle, government is “limited” only by its own assessment of its own expediency.17