Civility Wars

Paul A. Rahe from the April 1995 issue

Democracy on Trial, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, New York: Basic Books, 153 pages, $20.00

Some years ago, when a friend reached his 40th birthday, I sent him a T-shirt emblazoned with the legend "Aging McGovern Voters for Reagan." Were I closely acquainted with the author of this slender volume, I would be inclined to draw her attention to the fact that a woman who once prided herself on her hatred for Nixon is now sounding some themes reminiscent of Newt Gingrich. I wonder, however, whether she would be amused.

Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago, is an academic left-liberal with impeccable feminist credentials. The five lectures that make up her latest publication were delivered at Massey College in 1993, broadcast on CBC Radio in Canada, and revised for publication during an extended sojourn at Harvard University. Although her book is written in a conversational tone and is accessible to anyone willing to plunk down $20, it is in fact directed at a particular audience--at academic left-liberals and their fellow travelers, especially at those inclined to think righteous thoughts when they hear the chant, "Race, Class, and Gender."

Elshtain is not a convert preaching to the converted. Nor does she make strenuous efforts to establish her bona fides with those to whom her remarks are addressed. Her lectures are, in fact, noteworthy for the near absence of cheap shots at those on the right. For the most part, she reserves her criticism for members of her own tribe. But Elshtain isn't a turncoat--a liberal turned neoconservative--at least not yet. She associates herself with Amitai Etzioni, Michael Walzer, William Galston, and others on the "communitarian" left, and there is every reason to suppose that she cheered William Jefferson Clinton's latest State of the Union address.

But like neoconservatives of a slightly older generation, she is a liberal who has clearly been mugged by reality. In her preface, she tells us that she has "joined the ranks of the nervous," and her book, graced with a title that, as one senior colleague observed, has "a very 1940s ring to it," is an attempt to explain why.

To begin with, Elshtain is a firm friend to the family. Her study is dedicated to the memory of her father; in its preface, she draws attention to the fact that she is herself now a grandmother. She worries that "the America" which her granddaughter "will discover a mere fifteen or twenty years from now" will not possess a political "culture worthy of endorsement and engagement." Above all else, she fears what I will call the postmodern mentality, which is marked by what she calls "the pernicious corrosion of resentment."

As she puts it, "The language of opposition now appears as a cascading series of manifestos that tell us we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified clans who demand to be 'recognized' only or exclusively as 'different.' Think about how odd this is on the face of it: I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. This demand is rapidly becoming a shared civic zaniness that threatens to implode our culture. We are in danger of losing democratic civil society. It is that simple and that dangerous, springing, as it does, not from a generous openness to sharp disagreement--democratic feistiness--but from a cynical and resentful closing off of others."

Pluralism she embraces: The "aim" of her book is, as she puts it, "to reach disagreement," and she is perfectly prepared to honor and even celebrate "our distinctions, as peoples of a particular heritage and individuals of particular gifts." What worries her is multiculturalism, which she defines as "the current construction of 'difference' as a form of group homogeneity that brooks no disagreement or distinction within and can maintain itself only as a redoubt against threatening 'enemies' from without."

One consequence of multiculturalism's hegemony is that the world of the university is now balkanized, and scholars "whose tacit Hippocratic oath commits them to thoroughness and fairness in inquiry" no longer "bother to hide" the fact that they think in quasi-inquisitorial terms of "apostasy" and heresy while searching "for guidance on the interdiction of a text."

If Elshtain had followed up on her eloquent introductory remarks by providing her readers with a sustained analysis of our postmodern predicament, this would have been an important book. Unfortunately, however, her lectures are disjointed and episodic, and her book is slender in more than one way. Where one looks for a coherent, focused argument, one finds instead an extended commentary on a pastiche of quotations drawn from the great and the good: from luminaries such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Vaclav Havel, Milan Kundera, Pope John Paul II, Hannah Arendt, and many a lesser light. What no doubt worked on stage and even on the radio is far less effective when presented on the printed page.

The thrust of Elshtain's remarks is generally sensible. Early on, in the first lecture, she cites E.J. Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics and draws attention to the incoherence marking both liberal and conservative thinking with regard to markets and morals. Liberals, she notes, try "to tame the logic of the market in economic life" and then "celebrate a nearly untrammeled laissez-faire in cultural and sexual life"; their conservative opponents think it possible to introduce "constraints and controls in the cultural and sexual sphere but embrace a nearly unconstrained market." She then draws attention to academic studies of the manner in which preferential hiring programs have stoked racial resentment, and she notes the tendency for federal programs to create "a 'client-compliance culture' that is much at odds with the possibilities for adult citizenship." Again and again, she emphasizes what is obvious to most Americans but incomprehensible to those within the academic counterculture: that there is a close correlation between poverty and juvenile delinquency on the one hand and being the offspring of unmarried parents who failed to complete high school and had a first child before reaching the age of 20 on the other.

In the same lecture, Elshtain quite rightly traces many of our difficulties to the substitution of a notion of rights as entitlements for the older, liberal understanding of rights as immunities. And in attacking "the logic of statism," she sensibly observes that "government cannot substitute for concrete moral obligations."

She sounds an elegiac note when she considers "the loneliness of the aged, the apathy of the young, the withering away of churches and communal organizations, the disentangling of family ties, and the loss of family rituals and rhythms." Although she stops short of simply blaming statism for these phenomena, she warns that "a bureaucratic, top-heavy state that numbers among its tasks defining populations by their 'needs' and targeting them for various policies based on assumptions about such needs, really cannot help moving in the direction of a 'social engineering' that exists in tension with democratic freedom, civic sociality, and individual liberty."

In similar fashion, Elshtain attacks the Violence Against Women Act, which incorporates "gender motivation" into the law and "presumes to see in rape--a crime of violence--the paradigmatic, indeed normative, expression of male dominance." It is, she observes, a "distressing spectacle" to find "an assault on civil liberties, coupled with a perfervid ideology of victimization." Four paragraphs thereafter, she launches an attack on court intervention in "wedge issues," such as the question of abortion, arguing that "the juridical model of politics" freezes out "citizen debate" and deepens "a politics of resentment." And she concludes her lecture with a call for "a new social covenant," the meaning of which, in subsequent lectures, she fails to spell out.

Elshtain's failure in this regard is a shame--for while it is difficult to find the thread that holds the individual pieces of her first lecture together, there is a logic evident in some of what she says. In the manner of the Anti-Federalists and Alexis de Tocqueville, she regards centralization as suspect, and she wants to reinvigorate families, churches, schools, and local governments. But she does not do a very good job of relating these concerns to her critique of the postmodern mentality. And when commenting on the recent debate concerning "the ability of the police to make unannounced sweeps of housing projects where danger is a pervasive presence," she displays a measure of the left-liberal myopia that elsewhere she quite effectively attacks.