This would have been an appropriate place for indicating the sort of reforms that a reinvigoration of local responsibility might entail. In this connection, Elshtain might have explored a proposal recently advanced by Robert Cottrol of the Rutgers School of Law at Camden that the heads of households within such projects be armed and drilled as a militia, that they be deputized as a posse comitatus, and that they be given considerable responsibility for cleaning up their own neighborhoods.
Instead, she criticizes the lawyers and editorial writers who worry about the civil liberties of those who live in the projects, and she launches an assault on the opponents of gun control. It never seems to cross her mind that, within the Whig political culture from which the American regime takes its origins, there is a connection between adult citizenship and the bearing of arms and that, in our larger cities, the housing projects are dangerous precisely because the people who live there are passive adherents to "a 'client-compliance culture,'" are disorganized, and have been denied the means of self-defense. Would it not be appropriate for "a new social covenant" to include within its provisions the presumption that individuals within a given locality should bear some considerable responsibility for their own security?
The second of Elshtain's five lectures is the most interesting and coherent of the lot. In it, she argues that the feminist insistence that "the personal is political" contributes mightily to the corruption of both public and private life, to the extension of "the therapeutic powers of the state," and to the emergence of a quasi-totalitarian ethos within the society at large. In this connection, she quotes to good effect Milan Kundera's contention that there is a "magic border" between "intimate life and public life...that can't be crossed with impunity," since anyone "who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster...without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life. For example, privately to you I can say of a friend who's done something stupid, that he's an idiot, that his ears ought to be cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his mouth. But if the same statement was broadcast over the radio spoken in a serious tone--and we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious tone--it would be indefensible."
America is not pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, Elshtain is quick to remark. In it, there is nothing precisely equivalent to the sort of "terror" that Kundera had in mind. Our officials do not tape remarks made over the kitchen table for subsequent broadcast on the radio. But the current hysteria concerning battered women points in a similar direction: "Mandated counseling, even behavioral conditioning of violent or 'potentially violent' men, coupled with compulsory punishment and no appeal, are common parts of the panoply of interim proposals that have been made."
In these proposals, Elshtain finds echoes of the social-hygiene movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which attempts were made to police and restrict feminine sexuality to "certain standards of class and ethnicity," and black men were accused of "reckless eyeballing" while Italians were suspect as "seducers" and Chinese were regarded as potential "white slavers."
In the same spirit, Elshtain points to the dangers inherent in the sort of "identity politics" practiced by the gay liberation movement in which "one's private identity becomes who and what one is in public, and public life is about confirming that identity." This is, she points out, a recipe for civil war, for "those who disagree with my 'politics,' then, are the enemies of my identity." That "the word of choice" in the polemics launched by those demanding public confirmation should be "enraged" is only logical--for what is at stake when politics is understood as "an eruption of radical feelings" is nothing less than everything.
It is consistent with "the politics of democratic civility and equity," Elshtain argues, for society to accord "all citizens, including gays,...a right, as individuals, to be protected from intrusion or harassment and to be free from discrimination in such areas as employment and housing." It is not consistent with that form of politics for a gay or for anyone else to demand "full public sanction of his or her activities, values, beliefs, or habits."
The quest for public validation causes such an individual to put "his life on display" and it gives rise to an "expressivist politics" in which he opens "himself up to publicity in ways that others are bound to find quite uncivil" since "the boundary of shame" is breached. There is, as she puts it, a real distinction between "flaunting one's most intimate self" and "arguing for a position, winning approval, or inviting dissent as a citizen." Public deliberation presupposes civility, and that in turn depends on the maintenance of an atmosphere of restraint defined by shame, privacy, and concealment.
In her subsequent lectures, Elshtain examines multiculturalism with an eye to radical egalitarianism and to the defects of our affirmative-action policies. She surveys earlier discussions of democracy in Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, and on the left and right in more recent times. She explores what she calls "democracy's enduring promise." But she does not rise again to the level that she attains in her second lecture, and it is not difficult to see why.
Missing from Elshtain's argument is clarity concerning the ends and purposes of politics and government. Her vague references to the need for "a new social covenant" cut off discussion right where it should begin. Elshtain rejects the illiberal politics of premodern times because it was predicated on a failure to distinguish what is properly public from what should remain private--it presupposed that it is the task of government to shape character and identity.
But she is also unsatisfied with the old liberal understanding that restricts politics to the protection of life, liberty, and property. Nowhere in her lectures does one find anything like the sentence in Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address praising as "the sum of good government...a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." Nowhere does one read anything even remotely comparable to the passage that Jefferson inserted in his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, arguing that "confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism," that "free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence," and that "it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power." Indeed, nowhere--in a book chiefly concerned with the state of American democracy--is Jefferson even mentioned.
In the place customarily accorded the author of the Declaration of Independence stands Martin Heidegger's student Hannah Arendt. Elshtain makes much of the contrast that Arendt drew, in her book On Revolution (1963), between the French and the American Revolutions, and she follows Arendt in asserting that the former was concerned with "generic, unlimited 'rights of man'" while the latter was launched in pursuit of "the rights of freedom and citizenship" and was sustained by the conviction "that power comes into being when 'people...get together and bind themselves through promises, covenants, and mutual pledges'" and that "'only such power, which rests on reciprocity and mutuality,'" can be "'real power and legitimate.'"
Such a historical claim cannot be defended. To entertain it, one must act as Arendt did: One must resolutely ignore the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence, one must deny the crucial role played during and long after the American Revolution by the notion of the natural rights of man, and one must avert one's gaze from the influence exercised by Thomas Jefferson and the American example in shaping the French national assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Much can be learned from a comparison between the two revolutions. The differences are quite significant and go far toward explaining the subsequent history of the countries in which they took place. But they do not turn on the issue identified by Arendt, and Elshtain's error in this particular is indicative of the confusion underlying her inability to articulate what her "new social covenant" involves.
"Political power does not explode out of the barrel of a gun or flow from the dripping blade of a guillotine," Elshtain informs us. "Rather, it comes into being when men and women, acting in common as citizens, get together and find a way to express their collective hopes and possibilities." For Elshtain, the crucial example is the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Its politics cannot, she insists, be confined to the political issues it explicitly addressed. To understand what took place, one must focus on the achievement of "freedom as collective liberation from bondage" and on what one historian calls the "necessary transformation of the self experienced by those actively engaged in direct action." Elshtain is persuaded that it would be a blunder to "see such solidaristic freedom and self-transformation as merely peripheral to 'the explicit goals of liquidation of racial discrimination and black disenfranchisement,'" for to do so would be "to lose the ethical power and historic complexity of the civil rights struggle."
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