Max Eastman: A Life, by Christoph Irmscher, Yale University Press, 434 pages, $40
"It doesn't cheapen the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject," writes Christoph Irmscher, "to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism." What follows is the life of Max Eastman—poet, nudist, women's suffragist, war resister, socialist editor, and finally a self-described "libertarian conservative." William F. Buckley Jr. found his atheism unpalatable. But to a teenage Carly Simon, Eastman—by then in his 80s—was "the most beautiful man she had ever met." She was far from the only woman to feel that way.
Eastman's star burned bright for more than half of the 20th century, as he wrote his way to fame, traveled the world, translated Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, and ended up as one of the red faith's foremost apostates.
What kind of background produces a character like Max Eastman? One that begins with parents who were both Christian ministers. Max was born in Canandaigua, New York, in 1883. His mother, Annis, was ordained in 1889, but had for years already been assisting her husband, Rev. Samuel Eastman, with his sermons. Annis was emotionally close to her children, and they were close to one another. In the case of Max and his sister Crystal, two years older than him, they might have been too close. Crystal would be the adolescent Max's ideal woman; her letters home to him from college are full of flirtatious teasing.
"Max's previous biographer has suggested that Max and Crystal had an incestuous relationship," Irmscher notes. He doesn't leap to that conclusion himself, saying the mix of religious passion, motherly doting, and sibling affection that swirled around Eastman defies easy interpretation. In any event, Eastman seems not to have had much specifically sexual confidence or experience until after he graduated from Williams College.
Appropriately enough, his first step toward becoming a public intellectual was made possible by one of his sister's boyfriends, who happened to teach at Columbia University. He got Max a job as a teaching assistant in the philosophy and psychology department, where Max fell into John Dewey's orbit. Crystal also drew her brother into progressive politics; soon he was a leading speaker in the Men's League for Women's Suffrage.
The Columbia connection—Eastman was sometimes erroneously identified in the press as a professor—and his success as a speaker eased his path to becoming a noted writer too, and not just on suffrage. He published as a poet as well. And in 1913, he was offered the editorship of a small socialist magazine, The Masses, which under Max would become, as Irmscher puts it, "the only artsy socialist magazine the United States had ever had." Max's plan was "to make The Masses a popular Socialist magazine—a magazine of pictures and lively writing" rather than a vehicle for dogma.
The magazine made Max an outspoken champion of left-wing causes, including labor and, most fatefully, opposition to World War I. Max's editorial criticisms of the war earned the magazine harassment from Woodrow Wilson's government, which ultimately forced The Masses to close. In its place, Max and Crystal launched a new magazine, the Liberator. As the conflict drew to a close, it endorsed the war aims "outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson." Max and several former colleagues from The Masses were put on trial for having attempted to "unlawfully and willfully obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States." Two hung juries saved Max from a prison sentence.
Max's love life at this point was a contrast with the intense familial emotional engagement of his youth. He had married the feminist activist and poet Ida Rauh in 1911 and had a son with her. But he neglected both. At first he didn't even tell his parents or Crystal that he had wed. Ida cared for their child at the home they owned in the small town of Glenora, New York, while Max worked in New York City when he wasn't traveling and lecturing. He took an interest in other women; the couple fought; eventually he left her, claiming he'd never loved her. He became involved with a young silent-movie starlet, Florence Deshon, who was more sexually uninhibited than Max was at that point. This relationship too was doomed, and so was she. Max made the mistake of introducing her to Charlie Chaplin, who became his rival for her affections. Meanwhile, as Florence's career deteriorated, so did her state of mind. In 1922, a little more than five years after she had met Max, she died in what was probably a suicide.
Troubled by her death, Max moved to Italy, where he covered an international peace conference, and then to the Soviet Union, where he would see the fruits of the Bolshevik revolution for himself. His socialist credentials made him welcome in the USSR, but in Italy he acquired a credential of another kind: romance with Eliena Krylenko, a secretary to the Soviet foreign minister and the sister of Moscow's chief revolutionary prosecutor (though Eliena herself was not a Communist Party member). She would become Max's second wife.
Eastman's experiences in the USSR led to a disillusionment. Ordinary Russians he encountered did not necessarily describe themselves, when they were free to speak, as better off than they had been under the tsar. The death of Lenin portended a loss of idealism even before Stalin rose to supremacy. Max courted Leon Trotsky and was successful enough that Trotsky entrusted him with writing his biography and translating his monumental History of the Russian Revolution. But Max could not accept Trotsky's Marxist dogma.
There would come to be a powerful personal dimension to Max's disenchantment with Soviet Communism as well: Eliena's brother not only ran show trials but eventually was the victim of one. She also fell under suspicion, fleeing the country with Max. Exit saved her life: "Under Stalin's rule," writes Irmscher, "Eliena's entire family, including her sisters Olga Drauden, Vera Krylenko, and Sophia Meyer, along with their children, and her other brother, the mining engineer Vladimir Krylenko, vanished."
The American left did not welcome Max's break with Communism, and his radical bona fides were in doubt in other respects too. As a poet, Max tackled provocative subjects—including the biblical story of Sodom, which he reinterpreted to present the righteous man Lot as a misogynistic theocrat—but his style was considered old-fashioned. He found journalistic outlets closed to him, including the Liberator, which had come under Communist control. Yet Max was an expert on Soviet Russia and an established writer and lecturer, albeit one whose market was no longer what it had been. He felt ideologically displaced, and he felt like a failure.
But new opportunities would arise, both in the burgeoning anti-communist movement and through new media—in this case, radio. Max became the host of a show called Word Game on CBS, and his writing became a mainstay of Reader's Digest, whose anti-communist owner paid Max handsomely even while dumbing down his prose.
His ideological odyssey cost him friends, and the new ones he made among allies on the right did not always endure. He appeared on the masthead of National Review from its first issue in 1955 until 1964, when he came to find the magazine's religious framing of the struggle against communism to be too much, and editor William Buckley found Max's atheism too intransigent. Max had shed his faith by the time he left college. He did not fit in with the rather Catholic intellectual atmosphere of National Review. But he did not have an obvious ideological home anywhere else, either. He came to call himself a "libertarian conservative." He was not trying to establish a school of thought—just explain himself concisely.
There is more to Max Eastman's story. He matched wits with Freud—whom he met in Europe and cor-responded with for a time thereafter—and matched muscles with Ernest Hemingway, who took personal offense at a critical review that Eastman had written. (They brawled in the prominent book editor Maxwell Perkins' office.) He took more lovers, with Eliena tolerating Max's philandering out of unshakable devotion to him. He married a third time, to Yvette Szekely, after his second wife's death. And on August 3, 1969, Max died. His only son, Daniel, the child he had with Ida, followed six months later, unreconciled to his father.
All this is well told by Irmscher, a professor of English at Indiana University, who has produced in Max Eastman: A Life a thorough scholarly biography. It will not be to every reader's taste—the focus is on Eastman himself, and for all the sex and communism that enliven the story, Eastman's life was less interesting than his times. He failed to make the mark he aspired to, either as a poet or as a thinker. Yet Max Eastman remains a figure worth knowing, one of the last century's many pilgrims from the left to a kind of libertarianism.
The post Sex and Communism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America's Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest, by Walter A. McDougall, Yale University Press, 408 pages, $30
Never mind the First Amendment; the United States has an official religion after all. It's a civil religion, and the deity's role is to bestow blessings on the state. The "Supreme Architect," "the Almighty Being," "the Infinite Power," and "the Being Who Regulates the Destiny of Nations" are just a few of the sobriquets that Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison gave to the nation's nondenominational guardian spirit.
For some the civil religion might be mere symbolism; others might conflate it with Christianity. Either way, it helps give the nation a sense of purpose, or so historian Walter McDougall contends.
In The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy, McDougall traces how changes in the American civil religion (or "ACR") have shaped the country's attitudes toward war and peace. From the founding until the Spanish-American War of 1898, what McDougall calls the "Classical ACR" (or "Neo-Classical ACR" after the Civil War) prevailed. It was a faith of national expansion on the North American continent, but it did not, in the words of John Quincy Adams, "go forth in search of monsters to destroy" overseas. A new faith took hold in the last decade of the 19th century: the "Progressive American Civil Religion," which became an even more firmly entrenched "Neo-Progressive ACR" during the Cold War. This was a militant faith that conceived of the nation's mission as being, in George W. Bush's words, to "end tyranny in our world." Today a third faith, the "Millennial ACR," aspires to unite the world through a global economy and regime of universal rights. It too has roots in the Cold War, though McDougall identifies it primarily with presidents Clinton and Obama.
You'll notice a pattern. Each civil religion has a "neo" phase that emerges when its original formulation runs into trouble. The basic impulse—toward staying at home, asserting American primacy in international affairs, or uniting the world—stays the same, but the rhetoric gets updated. And the progression from one civil religion to the next is not strictly linear: After World War I, for example, the Progressive ACR was partly discredited and the broadly non-interventionist Classical ACR enjoyed a slight return. Similarly, the globalist Millennial ACR was knocked back by the 9/11 attacks and the wars of the George W. Bush years, which brought the Cold War–style "Neo-Progressive ACR" back into fashion.
McDougall, who teaches history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, is a zestful writer as well as a meticulous scholar. He sometimes writes like a prophet—not in the sense of foretelling the future, but in relying on compact insight rather than step-by-step logical argument. He covers the sweep of U.S. foreign policy over some 200 years in a little more than 350 pages. Hang tight and enjoy the ride.
McDougall is at his best when zooming in on the details of history and revealing the truth to be rather different from what other writers have led us to believe. The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy is, among other things, a rejoinder to Robert Kagan's 2006 book Dangerous Nation, which argues that America has always aspired to remake the world in the image of its own values. McDougall shows that Abraham Lincoln, for one, never supported wars to promote revolution or to spread liberalism through empire building. Lincoln's son Robert made a rare public statement to denounce an attempt by then–President Theodore Roosevelt to link his father's name to an imperialist foreign policy.
Peopling the continent—even when it already had quite a few other people—was the great mission that America's first civil religion endorsed. God wanted America to grow. But projecting power into Europe or Asia, acquiring bases or imperial possessions overseas, was not part of the divine plan. "Manifest Destiny remained a blessing (or curse) exclusive to North America," writes McDougall.
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe did not try to tip the balance of power between France and England or join in the wars of national liberation that broke out in the early 19th century. The Edinburgh Review in 1820 called for the U.S. to team up with the British empire to promote liberalism and oppose reactionary monarchism in Europe. In response to that call, John Quincy Adams gave a famous address insisting that America "is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
But by the 1890s, two movements had arisen that would drive America into the business of overseas empire. One was "advocates of the 'large policy,'" who, as McDougall writes, "wanted a network of strategic naval bases to command the approaches to Central America (where they hoped a canal would be dug); they wanted to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against European and Japanese interlopers and perhaps plant Old Glory somewhere in the western Pacific." The other force was "the advocates of ¡Cuba Libre!" who "wanted the United States to undertake a selfless humanitarian mission that involved little risk to itself, just ninety miles from its shores, against contemptible Spanish Catholic colonialists."
President McKinley "hesitated, delayed, agonized, even wept and prayed over what to do. It seemed even the religious lobby was calling on him to transgress" against the spirit of the old foreign policy. This was the beginning of the Progressive ACR, which would depend on church support in the century to come.
The year the U.S. entered World War I, the evangelist Billy Sunday declared: "Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms, and hell and traitors are synonymous." After the Second World War, McDougall writes, "Capitol Hill was buried with letters denouncing any postwar return to isolationism as un-Christian." During the Cold War, the Knights of Columbus campaigned to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, to heighten the contrast between God-blessed America and godless Communism. The U.S. government itself framed the Cold War in such terms. NSC-68—the national security document that outlined America's strategy against the Communists—described the enemy as "a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own."
Churches were far from alone in pushing American civil religion in a more interventionist direction. McDougall points as well to the importance of figures like Henry Luce and Walt Disney in developing the Neo-Progressive and Millennial varieties of America's civil religion. Presidents became high priests—reluctantly in the case of Dwight Eisenhower, who told Luce in 1952, "I would have nothing but contempt for myself if I were to join a church in order to be nominated President of the United States" but who got baptized anyway once he became president. In 1955, he told the American Legion's "Back to God" convention, "Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first—the most basic—expression of Americanism."
Other Cold War presidents followed suit, endorsing the national, nondenominational civil religion whether they were sincere churchgoers or not. The more visionary they became in looking beyond the Cold War, the more the Millennial ACR rose into view, an image of the world united in prosperity and freedom under one nondescript, universal deity. By the time Barack Obama came to office, 18 years after the liquidation of the Soviet Union, the Millennial ACR seemed to be on course to becoming a Global Civil Religion, despite the setbacks under George W. Bush. Certainly something like blind faith has to be invoked to explain how Obama came to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize before he had ended either of the wars Bush had started. (He never did end the war in Afghanistan.)
It's too soon to say what Donald Trump might mean for America's civil religion. Does his America First rhetoric promise a return to the Classical ACR? Or, like the last Republican president, will he turn out to be Neo-Progressive after all? Whatever the case, if we follow the pattern McDougall sets out, the third civil religion will eventually be reborn as a "Neo-Millennial ACR."
That worries McDougall. "What American Civil Religion retained from Christianity," he writes, "is universality, which in secular form can only mean world government." That in turn "can only reinforce the Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Rousseauian manifestations of the will to power." McDougall recognizes the utility of having a civil religion, which "can provide the emotional glue binding diverse groups to each other and to shared institutions and national interests." But he's a political skeptic, not a true believer. "Civil religion turns toxic," he concludes, "when twisted into a Jacobin creed and peddled to people at home through mythical history and forced down foreign throats at gunpoint."
Yet his book provides at least one ray of hope: American leaders before 1898 had the opportunity to meddle in the world, but they chose not to. Americans still have a choice, and they might yet rediscover that old-time civil religion.
The post That Old-Time Civil Religion appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the first essay below, Contributing Editor Kerry Howley argues for a wider vision of human liberty, one that acknowledges government is not the only threat to freedom. In a reply, Todd Seavey says fighting for property rights is difficult enough without taking on cultural baggage. In another response, Daniel McCarthy agrees that culture and liberty are linked but suggests that freedom demands a more pluralistic view of acceptable cultures than Howley's vision might allow.
Freedom is about more than just the absence of government.
Kerry Howley
"It was amazing to me how quickly she overturned the power structure within her family," Leslie Chang writes in Factory Girls, her 2008 book on internal migration within China. Chang is marveling at Min, a 17-year-old who left her family farm to find work in a succession of factories in the rapidly urbanizing city of Dongguan. Had Min never left home, she would have been expected to marry a man from a nearby village, to bear his children, and to accept her place in a tradition that privileges husbands over wives. But months after Min found work in Dongguan, she was already advising her father on financial planning, directing her younger siblings to stay in school, and changing jobs without bothering to ask her parents' permission.
Chang's book is full of such women: once-obedient daughters who make a few yuan, then hijack the social hierarchy. Even tiny incomes cash out in revolutionary ways. With little more than 1,000 yuan (about $150) in Min's pocket, it becomes possible to plan a life independent of her family's expectations, to conceive of a world where she decides where to live, how to spend her time, and with whom.
I call myself a classical liberal in part because I believe that negative liberties, such as Min's freedom from government interference, are the best means to acquire positive liberties, such as Min's ability to pursue further education. I also value the kind of culture that economic freedom produces and within which it thrives: tolerance for human variation, aversion to authoritarianism, and what the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek called "a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead."
But I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I encounter among my fellow skeptics of government power. This is the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach of government ends. It was tradition, not merely government, that threatened to limit Min's range of possible lives. To describe the expanded scope of her agency as merely "freedom from state interference" is to deny the extent of what capitalism has achieved in communist China.
As former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs can tell you, it's possible to be an anti-government zealot with no interest whatsoever in individual liberty. If authoritarian fundamentalist compounds are your bag, the words personal agency will hold no magic for you, and Min's situation will smack of social chaos. But libertarians for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun.
Convention creates boundaries as thick as any border wall and ubiquitous as any surveillance state. In Min's village, women are constrained by a centuries-old preference for male descendants. (Men are also constrained by this tradition, as families are less likely to permit their valuable sons to migrate to the city.) Most people will accept their assigned roles in the village ecosystem, of course, just as most Americans will quietly accept the authority of a government that bans access to developmental cancer drugs while raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. A door is as good as a wall if we cannot imagine walking through it.
It ought to seem obvious that a philosophy devoted to political liberty would concern itself with building a freedom-friendly culture. But the state-wary social conservative flinches when his libertarian friends celebrate the power of culture itself to liberate: the liberty of the pill, of pornography, of 600 channels where once there were three. The social conservative will refer to these wayward anti-statists as "cultural libertarians," by which he means libertines. And it will always be in his interest to argue that the libertarian, qua libertarian, should stay mute on issues of culture.
"True libertarianism is not cultural libertarianism," the philosopher Edward Feser wrote on the paleolibertarian website LewRockwell.com in December 2001. This statement was immediately preceded by a call for the stigmatization of porn, adultery, divorce, and premarital sex—in other words, an argument for a particular kind of culture. Feser claimed that small government and an ethos of "personal fulfillment" were incompatible, and he argued for the former over the latter. In the guise of an attack on cultural libertarianism, Feser demanded that libertarians espouse different patterns of cultural behavior.
As it turns out, all libertarians are cultural libertarians. We just don't share the same agenda. Some prefer to advance their agenda by pretending it doesn't exist: that social convention is not a matter of concern for those who believe in individual liberty. But when a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content—has nothing to say, for instance, about society's acceptance of gays and lesbians—he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state.
This prioritization can be difficult to confront because it is most often expressed in strategic silence or casual conversation. The tendency to dismiss feminist complaints about social pressure as "self-victimization," for instance, is not something one is likely to encounter in a philosophical meditation on the centrality of property rights. It emerges in the choice to write about one freedom-limiting aspect of the world rather than another, bubbles up in Internet chatter, and spills over into informal interactions.
Still, if too many people who group themselves under the libertarian banner pursue a vision of liberty restricted to resisting state coercion, libertarian intellectual history has something to do with that outcome. Founders of modern libertarianism, giants who helped shape the self-conscious movement's argumentative styles and emphases, tended to focus their firepower almost exclusively on the state. Murray Rothbard, the anarchist economist and philosopher who was a guiding influence on nearly every existing libertarian institution, limited his vision of liberty to the security of private property; any depredation that couldn't be traced to an assault on or theft of someone's justly owned property was not, in his view, the libertarian's concern. Milton Friedman's popular writings about choice looked at areas where choice was being restricted by agents of the state with explicit threats of force. Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy did look beyond the state, to the forces of conformity and altruistic moral suasion. But her vision of rationality was so demanding that readers could be forgiven for thinking that life in a welfare state might be less restrictive than life lived as a model Randian.
Libertarianism in the early 1970s still had countercultural energy to burn, but the institutions that grew to define the modern movement during that decade and the next—reason, the Cato Institute, and the Libertarian Party— focused largely on areas of economic disagreement with the left, such as tax levels, government spending, the flexibility of labor markets, and the regulation of international trade. While libertarians agreed more with a roughly defined left in a few areas, such as military policy and the drug war, they repeatedly missed opportunities to connect their concerns about authoritarianism with the left's analysis of less overt, more deeply embedded restrictions on individual agency.
Feminist consciousness, for example, came to be seen by libertarians as inseparable from statism, despite the fact that it arose in response to very real social and state pressures that restricted the autonomy of half the population. In a different context, libertarians might have seen that certain feminist critiques—particularly those having to do with the social construction of gender—were necessary to any serious consideration of individual liberty. Thoughtless conformity has rarely been the libertarian's friend. But against a backdrop of feminist assaults on free speech and calls for workplace regulation, social constructionism seemed to many merely another justification for government coercion, a denial of the very concept of personal agency.
In turning so definitively from the left, libertarians denied themselves a powerful vocabulary with which to engage discussions of individualism. To take a very basic example, at mid-century 5.5 percent of Americans entering medical school happened to have female bodies. This number may well have reflected women's limited interest in pursuing medicine as a career. But that level of interest also reflected a particular view of women in positions of authority, a certain range of social spaces that girls could imagine themselves inhabiting. Norms that positioned women as wives and mothers obviously functioned as constraints on identity formation. None of this has much to do with limited government, but it has everything to do with individuals struggling to assert themselves against a collective.
Libertarians are usually sensitive to the political implications of social norms when those norms are fostered by an overzealous state. Universal state surveillance, libertarians often worry, breeds passive adults with no expectation of privacy. Smoking bans encourage people to accept the diminution of their choices uncomplainingly. Ever-expanding executive power encourages further president worship, preparing the ground for the next executive power grab. The more the state does, the broader most people think its natural scope to be.
The inconsistency of the libertarian who believes that smoking bans create automatons but scoffs at the social construction of gender troubles the Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long and the libertarian writer Charles W. Johnson. "Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them," they note in a 2005 essay on libertarian feminism, "but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains." Liberty—from government, from tradition, from prejudice—must be taught, capacities developed.
Beyond the realm of social psychology lie more obvious markers of social pressure—brute, external restrictions on freedom maintained by intolerance or cultural inertia. Libertarians will agree that laws requiring racial segregation and prohibiting victimless, though controversial, sexual practices are contrary to their creed. But if the constraints on freedom of association suddenly become social rather than bureaucratic—if the neighborhood decides it does not want black residents, or the extended family decides it cannot tolerate gay sons—we do not experience a net expansion of freedom. If a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, so too is a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom decrees that no one will hire him. If a gay couple that cannot legally marry is being wronged, so too is a couple that must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is not living a free life, even if no one has bothered to codify the rules in an Important Book and call them "laws."
None of this is to say that it is the state's place to force a family to accept its children, a church to welcome all comers, or a sex worker to embrace all lonely hearts. There is a difference between emotional coercion and physical force. But it is the role of someone who professes to believe in the virtues of individualism—and emphatically the role of someone who believes that social persuasion is preferable to legal coercion—to foster a culture that is tolerant of nonconformity.
Property rights are more than the conclusion of an academic argument; they are themselves a matter of culture. If they are useful to us it is because they govern our conduct and lend structure to everyday life. I may not help myself to the contents of just any wallet, take off in just any car, walk into just any house. A drop-dead argument for the authority of these constraints may exist in pure reason, but they are meaningless without a broadly shared sense of their legitimacy. Absent friendly social forces, property rights are an impotent abstraction. Rights come alive through convention. Culture makes them breathe. Strip away the context in which property rights are respected, and nothing much remains. Yet cultural context, in all its messy inexactitude, is exactly what propertarians wish to resist.
Culture also is where libertarians should focus if they wish to gain more than tepid enthusiasm for their unorthodoxy. A thin philosophy attracts thin support. It certainly didn't take long for former President George W. Bush to abandon the logic of his professed small-government principles; the pull of moral utopianism was stronger than that of rational calculation. Rand inspires millions not because she writes so passionately about property rights but because she writes so passionately about individuality in a world of suffocating conformity. Her books change their readers not because they idealize small states but because they depict large men.
Leslie Chang, another author who surveys the damage wrought by cultural conformism, includes a conversation with her Chinese relatives in Factory Girls. Chang wants them to share the stories of their lives, their individual encounters with the Cultural Revolution and all the devastation that followed. But each relative of a certain age insists that she has nothing to say, brushes over life events, and retreats to the safety of specific dates rather than tracing the arc of a life. They cannot disentangle their stories from those of the nation, and Chang eventually gives up in frustration.
"The women in the factory towns of the south did not talk this way," she finds. "In a city untroubled by the past, each one was living, telling, and writing her own story; amid these million solitary struggles, individualism was taking root. The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these young women told me their stories as if they mattered."
Libertarians like to mock liberals who attribute all good things on this earth to the virtue of benign governmental forces—the bureaucratic Tinkerbell who ensures that their food isn't poisoned, that their roofs don't fall, that the sun rises on schedule. What an irony that so many avowed anti-statists, their eyes firmly affixed on Washington, cannot see freedom beyond government's absence.
Contributing Editor Kerry Howley (KHowley@reason.com) is a writer in Iowa City.
Defending property rights is difficult enough without cultural baggage.
Todd Seavey
Kerry Howley accuses property-focused libertarians—which I had hoped meant all libertarians—of having veiled cultural agendas, whereas hers is open, forthright, and beneficial to boot. Quite the contrary: Like countless young "Third Wave" feminists, Howley insists we see the specific, early-21st-century cultural agenda she's pushing as a neutral blank slate, filled with endless possibilities and with no limitations on individuals and their boundless potential. By contrast, any conventions and cultural norms at odds with that vision are "walls," like guard towers, seemingly backed by the threatening power of police truncheons.
The big question is why adherence to cultural norms is not itself an exercise of one's freedom. Amish opponents of statism might think liberty grows more organically out of their highly traditional way of life than it does out of Howley's just-do-it attitude. Meanwhile, fighting against social norms often includes opposition to such libertarian-approved bourgeois social norms as commerce and respect for property. Storefront-smashing anti-globalization activists are a good example of the dangerous paths that groovy cultural iconoclasm can take.
This is not to say that I know our current batch of social norms is ideal. (I'm an atheist, so there are obviously going to be some social conventions with which I disagree.) I'm just not convinced that Howley has the power to spot which ones are bad and thus weed them out of the ongoing, dynamic, evolutionary process that is civilization.
She mentions, for instance, that 5.5 percent of medical students, decades ago, "happened to have female bodies." She concedes briefly that discrepancies in gender roles "may" result from psychological inclinations or voluntary behavior patterns rather than oppression, but she gives us no reason to believe that she has special skills enabling her to decide better than the rest of us when the sorting processes of society have yielded acceptably "free" results and when they have yielded unacceptably gendered ones. That's why libertarians traditionally focus so much on the physical-coercion litmus test: Other tests are as hopelessly ambiguous as the bickering of democratic socialists.
There's a vast universe of moral and philosophical judgments beyond libertarianism, and one of the beauties of the philosophy is that it leaves people free to debate those countless other matters without breaking the minimal ground rule of respecting one another's rights. Trying to cram all of philosophy and culture into the tiny footnote that is libertarianism is precisely the kind of political overreaching that drives people away from radical philosophies, not a form of richness that aids recruitment.
It's hard enough to sell people on the idea of property rights already without adding a host of "rich" moral baggage to the idea. Does Howley predict greater success if we tell people they have to give up traditional social norms, gender roles, and religious views at the same time? Do you think the metric system would have been an easier sell in Europe if bureaucrats had said everyone also had to adopt, say, Portuguese cuisine and androgynous clothing?
Most libertarians would say that once the side constraint of property rights adherence is established, people have a right to engage in whatever social patterns they wish to follow so long as the property side constraints are not themselves undermined. Howley mentions "fundamentalist compounds" dismissively, but isn't the whole point of liberty that people are free to construct fundamentalist compounds, sexist strip clubs, respectable female-run corporations, gender-indifferent science labs, or all-male hunting lodges as they choose, so long as they do so voluntarily?
If not, we can be forgiven for wondering why someone who thinks like Howley would embrace the basic political stance of libertarianism in the strict property-defending sense at all. If people telling you "fat chicks should be shunned" is as oppressive as being hauled off to jail, why not pass laws banning anti-fat-chick discrimination? Why not endorse affirmative action laws? Why not tell Catholic-run charities they must hire gays? The traditional libertarian answer is that rights violations are fundamentally different from behavior that merely strikes you as narrow-minded.
Howley's thinking is potentially authoritarian (in a way that being passively bourgeois is not) because other people's patterns of behavior will always limit your options one way or another and thus prompt demands for redress. Howley singles out a few hot-button, familiar issues such as race and gender, but the truth is that every time your fellow human beings decide, say, to be sports fans instead of talking about entomology with you, or to leave town en masse for the Bahamas (causing you to feel lonely), their actions have altered your life options. Tough luck. That's called "other people exercising their freedom," not "people oppressing you."
And their freedom includes their right to heap criticism upon you, not just your right to speak freely. They may even express arbitrary preferences in their criticism, unless Howley is asserting that only others' objective, rationally defensible statements should be allowed to affect my life. It is not an enhancement of libertarianism but instead a grotesque subversion of it to say that other people are behaving freely only if they're being nice and supportive of your decisions and behaviors. This is not to say that their voluntary actions and words cannot be, as Howley rightly suggests, more damaging to you than a property violation such as a fine or a burglary. But we recognize in their nonviolent actions an inevitable aspect of freedom in the real world, lived with other free people. The property violations, by contrast, can be policed and minimized.
Just as theater critics who hound a writer into abandoning his work have not committed coercion in the morally or legally relevant sense of the term, generations of people expressing their cultural preferences in ways that put you at odds with them are not committing coercion. They are living free lives that you are welcome to ridicule, despise, or oppose, but you should not claim to be doing so in the name of libertarianism or liberty. You're simply expressing your preferences, and they're expressing theirs.
The larger problem with Howley's view is that she has no more idea than the rest of us what social norms will come to be seen as most beneficial centuries hence, absent legal coercion. She may feel deep in her bones that the future is destined to be a funky, libidinous, free-spirited, gender-neutral dance party. But ongoing scientific revelations about gender differences in the brain and the perpetual quest for more efficient ways of carving up the division of labor may in fact yield a world more "sexist" than anything routinely seen in America in the early 21st century. Similarly, people may come to think that a quiet life of media avoidance, monastic contemplation, and predictable routines creates vastly more happiness than being a Howley-style individualist. We simply don't know how dense tradition—or other even more rigid social norms—will be (and should be) in a free future after more centuries of learning.
In the short term, I can't help noticing that at the recent Tea Party protests against government spending that I've attended, there were a lot of conservatives and Christians. Should we tell those right-wingers they're hindering the fight for freedom? Is the real battle being waged by fans of Herbert Marcuse? The Marcuse fans I've met tend to love government spending—and hate capitalism, not to mention bourgeois individualism—as do most of the leftist culture theorists from whom Howley thinks we have so much to learn. Thinkers who (however accurately) point out that morality is more than just the market have a tendency to favor regimes that leave us with less than a market.
Libertarians should stay focused on shrinking the government's role in our lives and our economy. The other culture wars are endless, and we have no clear stake as libertarians in their outcome. By adding still more items to the libertarian agenda, we will not enrich our philosophy, only render it muddled, more demanding, more partisan, and still less popular.
Howley is entitled to prefer whatever cultural norms she likes. We are in turn free to criticize, ridicule, and shun her.
Todd Seavey (toddseavey@earthlink.net) blogs at ToddSeavey.com.
Tolerance is important but difficult to define and easily subverted.
Daniel McCarthy
Libertarians ought to support a culture of liberty. But what does that mean?
Many scholars of liberty—the sociologist Rodney Stark, to name one—have argued that Western Christianity is the original culture of liberty. It ended classical slavery, improved the status of women, recognized the sanctity of the individual soul, and set the stage for a proliferation of private property rights and the spirit of enterprise throughout Europe as nowhere else. From all that, it may not follow that Christian culture is still the womb of liberty today. But conservatives and culturally right-wing libertarians believe it is.
Progressives and culturally left-leaning libertarians tell another story, in which Christianity is a seedbed of intolerance and repression—often violent repression. Libertarians of all stripes are comfortable enough condemning aggressive violence categorically. (Though even here questions arise: Who defines aggression? Is violence against a fetus in the womb aggression, or is it a defense of your right to your own body?) What kind of culture leads to minimal aggression and maximum freedom is a matter of contention. Tolerance is probably an important attribute of any culture of liberty, but tolerance is harder to define than liberty itself.
Consider: If McCorp fires John Doe because he voices support for gay marriage, a libertarian who subscribes to a progressive view of the world might say McCorp has committed an act of intolerance against Doe. But if Cold Harbor Laboratory fires a molecular biologist (let's call him "James Watson") because he states a belief that Africans have weak cognitive abilities, the same progressive libertarian may not believe any act of intolerance has occurred—or, if one has, that Watson is the guilty party. After all, can you foster a culture of liberty in a society polluted by views like Watson's? If that example seems too easy, consider the case of an otherwise qualified professor denied tenure because he's a creationist, or because he's a Republican.
Must a free society treat those who hold irrational or bigoted opinions the same way it treats those who have enlightened views? To do so, Herbert Marcuse warned, amounts to "repressive tolerance," a kind of tolerance that allows fascist personality types to flourish and thereby undermines freedom. Right-wingers have their own list of views that must be suppressed (by force or by social stigma) in the name of freedom. Willmoore Kendall, for example, believed that public orthodoxy ought to trump free speech, since all liberties rest upon a cultural consensus. Thus, according to Kendall, Athens was right to execute Socrates, and 1950s America ought not to tolerate Communists. For disciples of Marcuse and Kendall, freedom really isn't free.
Maybe a true culture of liberty has nothing to do with left-wing or right-wing orthodoxies. Rather than taking sides in culture wars over race, religion, sex, and subversion, libertarians —so this line of thinking goes—ought just to affirm a culture that supports property rights. In this case, the libertarian position regarding John Doe or James Watson should be to support employers whenever they fire anyone, since (unless a contract specifies otherwise) an em-ployer always has a right to dismiss subordinates. But even this culturally neutral standpoint does not have an uncontested claim to be the pure libertarian view. Those who take their cues from John Stuart Mill will argue that expressive liberty is at least as important as property rights. We therefore ought to defend employees with unpopular views against arbitrary dismissal, regardless of whether we find their opinions righteous or repugnant.
If Mill is patron saint of the expressive libertarians, Murray Rothbard is the champion of the propertarians. Kerry Howley's essay makes the case for a substantive left-libertarianism. She suggests the Ed Feser of 2001 as spokesman for the culturally right-wing libertarians. Today Feser, who has continued to move rightward, or at least stateward, is not a libertarian at all, which might seem to prove Howley's point. But I held views not far from Feser's in 2001, and I have followed a different trajectory. That Feser and I can move in different directions from similar cultural presuppositions might prove the point I want to make: that there is no one true culture of liberty.
The idea that only traditional attitudes, never progressive ones, can be oppressive strikes me as naive. Cultural progressives are as apt as anyone to make the leap from stigmatizing to persecuting their enemies. Scapegoating has been as useful for the authoritarian left as for the authoritarian right: Witness the hysteria about white separatists and right-wing militias that recurs every time a tolerant Democratic administration succeeds an intolerant Republican one. Randy Weaver, no less than Matthew Shepard, can attest to the consequences of demonizing misfits.
Nor do progressive attitudes toward sex and race necessarily lead to a culture of liberty. In the 1920s the Soviet Union was less racist and more sexually open than the United States. Divorce and abortion were legal and readily available, and more than a few Bolsheviks practiced as well as preached free love. Yet that did not make Russia a more fertile soil for liberty. Workers' orgies were no defense against the power of the Soviet state, which soon revoked the moral license it had granted.
To point out the inadequacies of cultural progressivism is not to excuse the flaws of cultural conservatives. Either side may be more or less libertarian in practice. Paradoxically, the nonlibertarian qualities of the mutually antagonistic left and right sometimes entail unexpected benefits for freedom. Some of the most effective centers of resistance to state power over the centuries, after all, have been nonindividualistic institutions such as labor unions, churches, guilds, and extended families. Conversely, when libertarians attack these organs of civil society in the name of freedom, they may only succeed in empowering the state—not always, but sometimes.
If some libertarians won't tell you what freedom should look like beyond the absence of the state, don't assume that these people must subscribe to a crabbed idea of liberty or else are smuggling their values behind a veil of cultural neutrality. These anti-statists may refuse to define the cultural content of libertopia because they believe deeply in the pluripotentiality of freedom—that freedom can mean the freedom to be a Mormon housewife as well as to be a postgendered television personality. Freedom, they realize, may even mean the freedom not to be free. Libertarianism does not demand that everyone subscribe to the same idea of the good life. By extension, libertarianism also should not demand that everyone subscribe to the same idea of liberty.
Thoroughgoing anti-statists understand that politics is not culture, even if culture—that is, how people live their lives—shapes politics. What follows from this is that in letting culture remain diverse, anti-statists accept that politics will be diverse too and will not always lead to outcomes that all libertarians like. The political theorist Chandran Kukathas explains this well in his paper "Two Constructions of Libertarianism." In what he calls the "Union of Liberty," everybody has to interpret the rules in the same way, under one centralized libertarian government. In the "Federation of Liberty," there is a "meta-tolerance" toward different understandings of tolerance and liberty because it is understood that other people interpret political rules, including the fundamental libertarian rule of nonaggression, in different ways.
The danger of the Federation of Liberty is that it permits violations of liberty, perhaps even outright slavery. The danger of the Union of Liberty, however, is much worse. The trouble is not only a universal state but a universal orthodoxy, a tyranny of the supermajority that threatens to destroy the individual personality. In culture, even tolerance, justice, and liberty can be carried too far. One must be permitted some room for error, psychological space for entertaining thoughts other than "libertarian" thoughts.
Consider the plight of Alex in the Anthony Burgess novel and Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. By any standard—left, right, Millian, or Rothbardian—Alex is no libertarian. He's a vandal, a murderer, a rapist (ipso facto a misogynist). He's guilty of every crime. So why do so many of us sympathize with him? Our feeling for Alex derives from something deeper than mere horror at his eyes being pried open in the film's famous torture scene. We have a right to, or better still a love for, what is inside our own skulls. If mental content, even good values like nonaggression, can be poured into Alex's conscience as if he were nothing more than a vessel, the same could happen to any of us. Not only the state but also our culture must not press its demands so far into the individual conscience, whether by "justified" coercion (in the case of the killer Alex) or by any other means.
Our moral imperfections are our last guarantee of liberty against the benevolent system builders who would have all men and women speak with one voice and assent to one idea. Cultures of liberty tend to be bric-a-brac, full of unresolved tensions between competing ideas. Freedom does not depend upon universalizing the "right"—or left—values. It's the other way around: A clash of values is what makes even mental liberty possible.
Daniel McCarthy (mccarthydp@gmail.com) is senior editor of The American Conservative.
The capacity to choose must be learned.
Kerry Howley
Earlier I suggested that not all threats to liberty are threats from the state, that power is distributed throughout society by nature, accident, and convention. Daniel Mc-Carthy echoes my thoughts in his description of "a universal orthodoxy, a tyranny of the supermajority." My point is that such orthodoxy is of concern, if not to all self-described libertarians, then to those who are in the game because they care about freedom broadly construed.
My co-discussants conceive of a world in which human beings spring from their mothers' wombs fully equipped with the psychological armor required for individualism, at which point they choose among an array of possible lives. "Shall I be Amish or Wiccan?" the ready-made individual asks. "Shall I be a child bride or shall I enroll at Miss Porter's?"
Missing from Todd Seavey's and Daniel McCarthy's responses is an acknowledgement that human beings acquire a respect for individual rights and a consciousness of their individuality. We aren't born knowing that prosperity flows from property rights; indeed, it's somewhat counterintuitive. And we aren't born knowing that it's dangerous to defer unthinkingly to your peers.
Our choices are rather more constrained than Seavey and McCarthy allow, and cultural pressure is one notable limitation. Resistance to this pressure is a developed skill, if it is developed at all. Clearly some are never given the tools to do anything but acquiesce. A pluralistic society requires a delicate balance between the freedom to raise children in whatever manner you please and some assurance that growing human beings will encounter conditions under which individuals may act as individuals and come to exercise freedom in a meaningful way.
In the abstract it is easy to pretend, as Seavey does, that no one loses out when authoritarian cultures thrive unmolested. Specifics are messier, darkened by the reality of trade-offs and fraught with the vulnerability of young minds. An Afghan kid who never gets the chance to go to school—not because the state prohibits it, but because her culture does—will find her range of options profoundly constrained. She may not even conceive of other ways of living: As McCarthy reminds us, "psychic liberty," too, is subject to constraint. "Tough Luck," says Seavey. "That's called 'other people exercising their freedom,' not "people oppressing you.'?" But if we care about choice, perhaps we should care about encouraging the capacity to choose.
Seavey's libertarian can have no complaint, qua libertarian, so long as property rights, conceived along the lines of a certain kind of idiosyncratic libertarian theory, are observed. One may be a racist, an anti-Semite, a raving nationalist interventionist, or all three, but libertarian one may remain. Fair enough. Someone inclined to endorse libertarian property rights, but who thinks there is more to liberty than the allocation of property rights, should thus be no more objectionable than, say, a property-rights-respecting xenophobic militarist. Yet the idea that social structure and cultural norms also matter to liberty is taken to be, for reasons unknown, "potentially authoritarian." Xenophobic nationalism is a matter of indifference to the property-focused libertarian. But an expansive concern for liberty? Well, that's the first step down the road to serfdom. Or the second, after feminism.
Seavey worries that libertarianism will be even less popular if we point out the confluence between it and other philosophical leanings. This is silly. I write this response from a café in southern Guatemala, where you can't walk into a Catholic church without being confronted by Mayan animist iconography. Unimpeachably devout Catholics cart booze and cigarettes to an effigy of Maximón, a badass, cigar-smoking saint I promise you will not find in the Vatican.
The most successful missionaries did not come to Guatemala and insist that their religion had nothing whatsoever to do with the lives of those they sought to convert. They tried to convince the locals that they had been Catholics in spirit all along. Every evangelist on earth knows his task is to find connections between old, entrenched beliefs and whatever newfangled doctrine he is looking to sell.
Perhaps it would be instructive to consider a hypothetical conversation between Seavey and a potential libertarian.
Potential Libertarian: What's libertarianism?
Seavey: A philosophy of freedom and property rights.
Potential Libertarian: Oh, right. Freedom like civil rights?
Seavey: No, not that kind of freedom.
Potential Libertarian: Oh. Freedom like the freedom to be openly gay?
Seavey: No. That has nothing to do with liberty.
Potential Libertarian: Oh. Um…
Seavey: Let's talk about easements!
Daniel McCarthy's erudite critique outlines some ambiguities over which libertarians have always argued—the many, differing conceptions of tolerance, aggression, and property rights. He is right to claim that "libertarians should not demand that everyone subscribe to the same idea of liberty," but it is a mistake to assume that given the inevitability of disagreements, any consensus is impossible and undesirable. Tolerance itself is a consensus position, demanding a certain measure of agreement. Like all rights, property rights depend on some measure of concordance. Sometimes an appeal to the impossibility of agreement is merely an excuse for quiescence.
People come together to undertake all manner of projects in a free society, and resisting pervasive cultural constraints is one of them. The status quo reflects a natural, but not inevitable, proclivity to defer to authority, and a natural, but not inevitable, desire to bow to the tribe. A culture of liberty would indeed beget the raucous, plenitudinous hodgepodge McCarthy speaks of. And I would call that world a better one.
The post Are Property Rights Enough? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After seven-plus years of George W. Bush, conservatives find themselves in a civil war. Bush partisans and neoconservatives have ditched "compassionate conservatism" and"national greatness conservatism" as slogans, but they still believe in a more vigorous, active government than did the right-wingers of yesteryear. Deficit hawks, libertarian-leaning conservatives, Barry Goldwater acolytes, and a great many rank-and-file Republicans, on the other hand, continue to profess something closer to Thomas Jefferson's creed that the government which governs best governs least.
In Grand New Party, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two twenty-something bloggers affiliated with The Atlantic Monthly, add their voices to the growing chorus of conservatives urging the GOP to embrace big government. Their book joins recent volumes by Bush speechwriters David Frum (Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again) and Michael Gerson (Heroic Conservatism) in arguing that if it wants to return to power, the Republican Party must shed whatever libertarian scruples it retains and commit to an activist state. What the country really needs, apparently, is even more federal programs such as No Child Left Behind and public-private partnerships such as Bush's faith-based initiatives.
Douthat and Salam advocate paternalistic government for the good of the working class, which, they say, "wants, and needs, more from public policy than simply to be left alone." American workers suffer from "anxiety amid affluence, economic stress amid stock market highs." And since "too many on the Right seem to have confused the American tradition of limited government for an ahistorical vision of a government that does nothing at all," Douthat and Salam offer a program to keep Uncle Sam busy, doing everything from subsidizing summer schools to building an information superhighway on the scale of "Lincoln's transcontinental railroad or FDR's rural electrification program." Who says the era of big government is over?
Douthat and Salam rest their case on two premises. First, the working class ("Sam's Club voters") holds the key to a permanent political realignment. America is "a fifty-fifty nation, waiting for a new majority to emerge," and if the GOP can win the workers, it will have a lock on national power for decades to come. Second, blue-collar Americans are facing "a crisis of insecurity and immobility, not poverty, and it's a crisis that has as much to do with culture as with economics." Divorce, single parenthood, and misplaced educational priorities are just a few of the forces that Douthat and Salam believe are dragging Sam's Clubbers down.
An "ideologically innovative conservatism" that can "win working-class votes, craft a political majority, and redeem the promise of American life," Douthat and Salam say, will give Republicans a grasp upon power like New Deal Democrats had between 1932 and 1964, "an era of unprecedented political consensus, social equality, and cultural solidarity."
So just who is this "working class"? Douthat and Salam provide no consistent definition. On page 2, it means "the non-college-educated voters who make up roughly half of the American electorate," which would include the poor. But four pages later the authors have narrowed the term, asserting that "working-class voters aren't poor" and "if you're a Sam's Club voter today, you're more likely to belong to a family that makes $60,000 a year than one that makes $30,000." That would make Sam's Clubbers solidly middle-class; according to the Census Bureau, median household income in 2006 was $48,201. Yet Douthat and Salam insist "the working class of today is defined less by income or wealth than by education—by the lack of a college degree and the cultural capital associated with it."
Americans without college degrees are indeed about half the electorate. But Americans without college degrees who are more likely to have household incomes of $60,000 than $30,000 are a much smaller demographic. Douthat and Salam decline to say just how small it is. According to the Census Bureau's historical income tables, in 2006 the median income for householders age 25 and up whose highest educational attainment is a high-school diploma was $39,426. Those households, we can safely say, are more likely to be making $30,000 than $60,000.
An uncharitable reader might want to accuse Douthat and Salam of cheating—of using wider or narrower definitions according to what's most useful for their argument at a given moment. But Grand New Party is more sloppy than dishonest: The vague, inconsistent definition of working class is of a piece with the book's lack of footnotes, endnotes, and bibliography. The authors cite some of their sources in the text, providing references for quotes but often not for statistics and qualitative claims about the working class. This method of argument, assertion without evidence, is not likely to convince anyone who does not already accept Grand New Party's thesis.
There are many difficulties with Douthat and Salam's central premise. A minor one is that they don't consider how many voters the GOP would lose by courting the working class with various wage subsidies and tax favors. How many wealthy Americans would desert the party as a result? How many poorer Americans would demand a bigger place at the trough for themselves? The latter question raises a more important problem that Douthat and Salam do not address: how Republicans can expect to outbid Democrats in showering government largesse on the mythical Sam's Club bloc. Any subsidy the Republicans can propose, the Democrats would be willing to double or triple. Certainly Democrats have no compunctions against tilting the tax code to buy votes. The GOP would have to jettison every last vestige of limitedgovernment principle just to keep up.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson is one of Douthat and Salam's role models for rethinking government. Thompson's "neoconservatism in action," as they call it, doubled state spending but cut the welfare rolls; he "managed the unexpected feat of sharply increasing public spending on the poor while also increasing working-class support for poverty-fighting programs." And he stayed in power for 14 years! But Thompson produced no electoral realignment. Far from it: The Republican who filled out his last term as governor after Thompson joined the Bush administration was defeated as soon as he came up for election. So much for working-class loyalty to the GOP.
Douthat and Salam are quick to blame Republican failures on small-government conservatives. "Unelectable fidelity to [government-cutting] principle…doomed Goldwater in 1964 and Gingrich 30 years later," the authors contend in one puzzling passage. Gingrich was not doomed in 1994, of course; that was the year Republicans, running on a largely anti-government message, won control of Congress for the first time in four decades, making Gingrich speaker of the House. Republicans could use a little more "doom" like that.
Conversely, the authors attribute Republican pick-ups in the 2002 elections to "compassionate conservative" programs such as No Child Left Behind. A skeptic might suggest that 9/11 had a little more to do with it. Douthat and Salam try mightily to redeem Bush's early domestic agenda, but they don't mention that his approval rating hovered around 50 percent—hardly the stuff of realignment—until Al Qaeda slammed airplanes into the twin towers and the Pentagon. Before Bush was a failure as a war president, he was a mediocrity as an education president.
Grand New Party leaves a lot to be desired as a road map for Republican political victory. If anything, its advice would be more apt to lead to realignment for the Democrats, who could be confident of holding on to their majorities for decades to come while the Republicans pushed a me-too platform. But what about the other side to Douthat and Salam's book, their argument that the working class is suffering a prolonged anxiety attack?
"Rising inequality and increasing risk aren't immiserating Sam's Club voters," Grand New Party tells us, and in fact "working-class voters aren't poor. They're relatively prosperous." Yet these voters fear losing their health insurance and are troubled "by stagnating wages, by high out-of-wedlock birth rates, by mediocre high schools and the hard road to a college degree." Douthat and Salam cite the liberal journalist Garance Franke-Ruta's summary of the plight of the Sam's Club class: "Lower- income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like."
All that is unfortunate, but does it amount to a "crisis," as Douthat and Salam say? It's hard to tell—just as it is hard to say, without a more precise definition of working class, whether the upper income brackets of the Sam's Club vote are suffering the same maladies as the lower strata.
In any event, Douthat and Salam offer several policy suggestions, some sound and some not. More vocational education in public schools is an unobjectionable idea, for example, and the authors are right to point out that skilled trades such as plumbing and carpentry provide very healthy salaries and reasonable job security. There's no way to outsource fixing a leak in Poughkeepsie.
The authors' plans to make the tax code family-friendly are more problematic. They endorse one revenue-neutral plan that would vastly expand the per-child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000. The catch, of course, as with any revenue-neutral plan (as opposed to an honest-to-God tax cut) is that the money has to be made up somewhere. There is an air of political unreality to much of Douthat and Salam's tinkering; they suggest, for example, restricting the home mortgage deduction to "lowincome individuals and families with children," a proposal not likely to find favor with politicians who need votes from higher-income individuals and people without children as well.
Beyond tweaking the tax code, Douthat and Salam would have government at the federal and state levels create many new programs and regulations to help the Sam's Club class. They propose wage subsidies to augment the income of "less-educated single men with low-paying jobs" and "Summer Opportunity Scholarships" to give "poor elementary-school students a voucher to pay for a six-week summer enrichment program." They want the government to directly create "job opportunities for the working class and in particular for young men from inner-city backgrounds" by "hiring thousands of new police officers," and they propose the establishment of national or state-level credentialing examinations for high school students.
Douthat and Salam's statism comes through most strongly not in their particular proposals but in their overall philosophy. Theirs is not a world in which the social order is best left alone but one in which government "supports innovators and self-starters of all stripes, and always takes the side of the common man." They praise the "maternalist," profamily spirit of New Deal programs such as Social Security, yet they seem oblivious to the ways in which government policies have created much of the instability that now afflicts workers and everybody else. Medicare and Medicaid have made health care far more expensive, even as vast federal subsidies to higher education have made college much less affordable by enabling schools to charge more for tuition than the market would otherwise bear. Social Security, whatever its maternalist intentions, helped to sever ties between the generations by making old people more independent from their families. It has had the additional effect of taxing younger and poorer people to support older and wealthier Americans, which is hardly good for family formation.
Douthat and Salam never look at government with skeptical eyes, only with eyes full of hope. They never consider what unintended consequences might arise from their benevolent planning, or what happens when ivory-tower populism meets hard political reality. Not only would their proposals be more likely to create Democratic majorities than Republican ones; they would also harm the very working-class voters Douthat and Salam aim to help—and would certainly harm everyone else by making government more expansive and expensive. Grand New Party is less a blueprint for reinvigorated conservatism than yet another dewy dream of social democracy, where a loving government allegedly looks out for the little guy.
Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.
The post The Republican Civil War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Starting in 1939, when Barry Jr. was born, Goldwater pere intermittently kept a private journal. At first the idea was that the stray thoughts he recorded might be of some use to his son: a guide to business matters in case Goldwater died before his offspring could learn the family trade of managing a chain of Arizona department stores. From the beginning, though, Goldwater included much more than just business advice. He filled the journal with his observations and feelings about the land and people of Arizona. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in World War II. Most important for history, he put down his inner thoughts about his political career: 28 years in the U.S. Senate, interrupted by the most influential failed presidential bid in American history.
Goldwater's 1964 campaign transformed America more profoundly than many a successful White House run. It propelled the conservative movement into national politics (putting to rout the GOP's big-government Rockefeller wing) and won the senator a place second only to Ronald Reagan in conservatives' hearts. Not a few libertarians got their start in the 1964 campaign as well. If they sometimes blanched at Goldwater's saber-rattling Cold War stances, they nonetheless admired his anti-socialist, small-government rhetoric, which was backed up—not always, but often enough—by his Senate votes.
Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. "Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause," he wrote in his journal, "and that freedom was not given to us by government." In another entry, he declared, "The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should."
John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. have excerpted the journal and packaged their selections with a smattering of Goldwater's letters, speeches, and other literary remains. Pure Goldwater is so called because it presents Goldwater's own words, unscripted and (mostly) unpolished. The book also includes lengthy passages from Goldwater's testimony in the 1968 libel suit he brought against the journalist Ralph Ginzburg, who in 1964 had published a psychiatric survey that purported to find the senator paranoid, sexually insecure, suicidal, and "grossly psychotic." (Goldwater won the suit, although the jury awarded damages that covered only his legal fees.) In their introduction, Dean and Goldwater Jr. describe Pure Goldwater as "a scrap book of important thoughts; it is more nuggets than narrative."
That's all too true. Goldwater's journal doesn't cover every key period of his life; there is virtually nothing in it about the 1964 campaign, for example. Dean and Goldwater Jr. do not plug this astonishing gap with much supplemental material: There are just two items here from 1964, a letter and a press statement, both of them complaining about the media's biased reporting. For the rest of the story, the editors suggest books like What Happened to Goldwater?, by Goldwater adviser Stephen Shadegg, and A Glorious Disaster, by campaign treasurer J. William Middendorf II. As abundant as the literature about the '64 race may be, that campaign is a hell of a thing to omit from any book about Barry Goldwater.
Despite the fragmentary nature of the journals, a bare-bones narrative does emerge. Pure Goldwater opens with a 1923 letter the 14-year-old Goldwater wrote to Thomas Edison telling the inventor about his interests in radios and electricity—interests that would prove to be lifelong. Selections from later recollections fill in the picture of Goldwater's youth: his work in the family department store as a boy; his father's death in 1929, which led the 20-year-old Goldwater to abandon his studies at the University of Arizona and return to work; his marriage in 1934 to Peggy Johnson, a young woman he met in the department store. The journal itself begins in 1938, when Goldwater was 29. Around the same time, he began writing guest editorials for the Phoenix Gazette, which reveal a confident young businessman adamantly opposed to the New Deal. "The worst thing about your labor plan," Goldwater wrote in an op-ed addressed directly to Franklin Roosevelt, "has been that you have turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital." That's pure Goldwater all right.
The early journal entries are less polemical, more personal. In 1939 Goldwater was glad when he could get away from business and politics, escaping into a weeks-long tour of the Arizona desert. Several sources (not just Ralph Ginzburg) have suggested that Goldwater suffered a nervous breakdown before embarking on this desert odyssey. Maybe it was nothing as dramatic as that, but in his journal Goldwater writes of getting himself "into such a stew that this trip became a necessity." In 1941 Goldwater, who had been an Army reservist since 1930, enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and a dozen journal entries from 1943 tell of his flight across the Atlantic from Delaware to Scotland by way of Greenland and Iceland in a single-engine P-47, part of an operation to fly fighters to Britain. Goldwater didn't see combat, but his trans-Atlantic jaunt and later Air Corps service in Asia had risks enough of their own.
After the war, Goldwater launched his career in politics, getting elected to the Phoenix City Council in 1949, managing the successful gubernatorial campaign of John Pyle the following year, and defeating Democratic Sen. Ernest McFarland, the Senate majority leader, in 1952. A 1949 journal entry expresses Goldwater's belief that campaigning and governing could be, and should be, "clean": "I think…that politics can be governed by the same set of laws or rules that govern our actions towards each other. I believe that things can be done outright and not on the sly cloak and dagger treatment politics have always carried. I think that people who work under [city] politicians, the clerks, the police, the engineers and all the others, they will work for men and women that they admire and trust much better than for those they fear and distrust."
"Clean politics" meant, among other things, that in 1964 Goldwater would not make a campaign issue out of Lyndon Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, who was arrested for homosexual activity in a YMCA bathroom. In the 1980s, the cause of clean politics led Goldwater to call for strict campaign spending limits; he even went so far as to propose a constitutional amendment to get around the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that Congress could not place limits on federal campaign spending. "The Court held that such a campaign lid is an invasion of the opportunity of individuals and organizations to exercise free speech," he said in a 1983 Senate floor speech included in Pure Goldwater. "My answer is that we should try again.… The success of our national experiment in self-rule is on the line." That's not to say Goldwater would have seen eye to eye with his Senate successor, John McCain, on campaign finance. For one thing, Goldwater opposed public financing of elections, warning "it could lead to a loss of all freedom, with the government gaining power to manipulate elections."
Clean politics is not a theme anyone would associate with Richard Nixon, but Nixon had campaigned loyally for Goldwater in 1964, and Goldwater returned the favor in 1968 and 1972. But the senator brooded extensively on the 37th president, well before Watergate. "Nixon was the most prevalent subject in his private journal," Dean and Goldwater Jr. note, "suggest[ing] that Richard Nixon was something of a puzzle to Goldwater, which he continued to work on until he gave up in disgust."
Goldwater was frustrated by President Nixon's reluctance to consult him for advice. Whenever the two did meet, Goldwater always told Nixon the same thing: The president had to rid the State Department and other government agencies of Kennedy and Johnson holdovers who were preventing Nixon from implementing conservative policies. Nixon, in turn, would always tell Goldwater that he wanted to meet with him more regularly, but he never did.
By the time the Watergate scandal erupted, Goldwater's patience with Nixon had frayed. At first he blamed the press and Nixon's staff for the affair, but he soon came to suspect Nixon as well. He wondered in his journal whether Nixon had engineered the downfall of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who resigned after being accused of taking bribes. "Many of us in Washington have felt for some time that someone was out to get the vice president," he wrote. "That someone could well be the president of the United States wanting to get rid of Agnew so he could replace him with either [Texas Sen. John] Connally or [former New York Gov. Nelson] Rockefeller…as the person to succeed him."
Still, as late as the summer of 1974, Goldwater did not believe Nixon should step down over Watergate. But on August 7, Goldwater and the Republican leaders in the House and Senate, Rep. John Rhodes of Arizona and Sen. Hugh Scott of Tennessee, told the president what he could expect from impeachment proceedings. "I told him I doubted if he would get as many as fifteen votes" in the Senate, Goldwater recorded in his journal, noting that he was unsure how he himself would vote. Shortly after their meeting, Nixon resigned.
Prior to Watergate, Goldwater had planned to retire from the Senate in 1974, and Nixon had offered to make him ambassador to Mexico—one of a few minor revelations contained in Pure Goldwater. Another nugget is that when Gerald Ford became president, he asked Goldwater whether he should appoint an African American or a woman as vice president—or even Goldwater himself. A black V.P. might work, Goldwater replied, if Ford "could find a competent black Republican," but the country wasn't ready for a female vice president, even though "women are excellent in politics." Goldwater, who elected to stay in the Senate post-Watergate to be a force of stability, didn't want the job himself. According to his journal, his desire to ensure stability was why he supported Ford over the more conservative Ronald Reagan in the 1976 Republican primaries.
Regrettably, Pure Goldwater tells us little about the senator's relationship with Reagan. The book's historical sequence breaks off after the Ford administration, and the last three chapters survey, in scattershot fashion, Goldwater's views on a handful of controversial issues: foreign policy, abortion, homosexuality, immigration, and campaign finance. The policy thought on display here and throughout the book will by turns delight and infuriate every part of the political spectrum. When he first came to the Senate, Goldwater abhorred France's colonial meddling in Indochina. "It seemed rather inconsistent to me, inconsistent certainly with the principles of this Republic," he wrote in his journal, "that we, who have fought so hard for freedom against Britain, would now be supporting openly a country like France with colonizing ambitions." Later he ardently supported the U.S. war in Vietnam—in the name of anticommunism rather than colonialism—urging Nixon to mine the harbors and bomb the dikes of North Vietnam.
His business experience and military service taught Goldwater to be skeptical of government spending, especially military spending. In his first Senate run, his statement of principles included a plank declaring, "The military is the greatest waster of money and manpower we have. They must be made to conduct their affairs in a businesslike manner." But during the Nixon years, Goldwater became a fierce advocate for a civilian aeronautical boondoggle: federal aid for the development of an American supersonic transport to rival the British-French Concorde and (believe it or not) a Soviet commercial SST. Goldwater's reaction upon seeing the instrumentation in the Russian prototype is a vintage slice of Cold War paranoia: "What I saw in the Russian 144 appeared to be very old and extremely unsophisticated but, frankly, no one knows what they had hiding under the floor."
Today's conservatives will balk at Goldwater's social views. He initially welcomed the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. "I think that abortion should be legalized," he wrote to a constituent in 1973, "because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done." He quickly adopted a vaguer stance, dropping his talk about legalization and telling constituents "the issue [is] squarely up to each state legislature." After leaving the Senate in 1986, however, he came out explicitly in favor of abortion rights. He also became an outspoken advocate of gay rights, not only calling for an end to the ban on homosexuals in the military but endorsing anti-discrimination legislation as well.
Decades earlier, Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act precisely on the grounds that its anti-discrimination clauses would infringe on states' rights and individual property rights. His turnaround on anti-discrimination legislation has never been fully explained, though a 1994 statement included in Pure Goldwater supports the idea that his reasons were more personal than philosophical. "My grandchildren and great-grandchildren are growing up in Arizona," he said. "Some of them are gay, some of them aren't. But because Arizona doesn't have a law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation, they may not all get a fair shake."
From any vantage point, Barry Goldwater was far from perfect and far from perfectly consistent. Yet he still finds admirers among conservatives, libertarians, and even liberals. If everyone can find something to object to in his record, nearly everyone also can find something to like. And imperfect though he was, Goldwater at least tried to live up to his ideal of clean politics. He wasn't always candid, but he shot from the hip often enough that voters could tell themselves they were hearing something like the truth.
No Goldwater fan can do without a copy of Pure Goldwater; but no one who isn't already a fan will get much out of it. This book is a stopgap at best, until the journal itself is published—assuming there's any more substance to it than what's on display here, which may or may not be the case. An edition of collected letters is much needed as well. But until those come along, readers can get their fix of the unscripted, unghosted conscience of a conservative from Pure Goldwater.
Daniel McCarthy is associate editor of The American Conservative.
The post Goldwater Unfiltered appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Kirk, a 34-year-old professor of history at Michigan State when The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, is an icon to traditionalist conservatives, an eminence so holy that he "often has been the subject of undue adulation and hagiography," as Russello admits. Even conservatives who don't think of themselves as traditionalists often pay lip service to Kirk's authority. Russello notes the irony in this: Kirk, who hated the first Gulf War in 1991 and was at most a lukewarm defender of capitalism, would find little in common with today's hawkish, pro-growth right-wingers. But even before his death in 1994, Kirk the symbol had become uncoupled from Kirk the man—a very postmodern turn of events.
Still, Kirk doesn't seem at first blush like a postmodern figure. Premodern would be more like it. Kirk assumed a "carefully crafted eighteenth-century persona," says Russello, along with an "antiquated style of writing." Even more than his style, his ideas echoed various dead white Anglo-Saxon males who defended established institutions of church and state. Postmodernists, by contrast, tend to embrace the marginal, the "Other," and the genuinely or putatively oppressed, while condemning the "cultural hegemony" of men and institutions that Kirk admired. Moreover, whatever similarities there might be between postmodernism and Kirk's attitudes toward liberalism, a more obvious benchmark for Kirk might be the sentimentally conservative side of the 19th-century Romantic movement. Kirk is in many ways a chip off the Walter Scott block, not only in his criticisms of progress and industrialism but in his predilection for things Gothic and medieval.
Certainly Kirk lacks many traits characteristic of postmodernists. Unlike them, he never evinced an obsession with theory, a keen interest in power relationships, a yen for the transgressive. But he did believe that America had entered a postmodern age, defined by the decay of classical liberalism, and Kirk was confident, as he wrote in National Review in 1982, that "the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives."
Defining postmodernism is a dodgy business, but Lyotard provides perhaps the best short encapsulation: "incredulity toward metanarratives," or skepticism toward grand stories like the Enlightenment account of scientific and moral progress. Traditionalist conservatives in the vein of Russell Kirk may or may not share that incredulity—depending on whether Kirk's belief that "society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life" counts as a metanarrative—but they find rationalistic system building equally distasteful, fearing that it strips the mystery and feeling from life.
Following the classical liberal economist F.A. Hayek, libertarians might make common cause with Kirk and the postmodernists against what Hayek called "scientism," the misapplication of the methods of the physical sciences to the ordering of human society. But postmodern and traditionalist critiques of objective reason and philosophical liberalism can easily be taken too far; after all, the pomo sociologist Michel Foucault's rejection of the Enlightenment led him to endorse, for a time, Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution (though by the time of his death in 1984, Foucault had come to a more temperate perspective on the Enlightenment and commended Hayek to his students).
Postmodernists and traditionalists alike run the risk of putting their loathing of the Enlightenment ahead of their love for liberty or justice. Luckily, even at his most anti-modern, and despite the evidence Russello marshals, Kirk was no postmodern radical, and he never went as far as the most extreme postmodernists and anti-modern reactionaries—though his attacks on libertarians and classical liberals certainly do not help the cause of liberty, a cause to which Kirk professed some allegiance himself.
Russello is a lawyer by trade, but his credentials as a Kirkian are 24 carat. He is the editor of The University Bookman, a quarterly founded by Kirk and now published by the Russell Kirk Center. Russello's book is outstanding in its insights into Kirk but often leaves something to be desired in its discussion of postmodernism. At times The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk seems scattershot. It is drawn heavily from work that appeared earlier in conservative and legal journals—Modern Age, The American Journal of Jurisprudence, and The New Criterion, among others.
Instead of constructing a master narrative of Kirk as postmodernist, Russello makes discrete arguments in each of his chapters, which tackle by turns Kirk's ideas about history, politics, and jurisprudence, and the general relationship between "Conservatism, Modernity, and the Postmodern." The fragmentary nature of the book might seem appropriate for a text about postmodernism. But Kirk put a high premium on narrative integrity, and the intermittently persuasive case Russello builds for Kirk as a postmodern thinker would have been more forceful if he had approached it systematically.
Indeed, the book's title notwithstanding, Russello's best sections are those that have the least to do with postmodernism. The introduction and the first chapter, on Kirk's "Life and Thought," are a case in point. Russello usefully shows that Kirk's conservatism was sui generis. Not only did it differ from the National Review conservatism that took root in the 1950s—which was shaped by the Cold War much more than Kirk's own thinking was, and which at times savored too much of classical liberalism for Kirk's taste—but Kirk's conservatism was distinct from the Southern agrarianism of many of his friends and followers as well. Kirk admired Abraham Lincoln, for example, unlike those in the latter group, who see Lincoln as a tyrannical centralizer.
If Kirk had his differences with Cold War conservatives and agrarian traditionalists, he actively disliked neoconservatives and libertarians. Kirk called neocons an "endangered species" and famously declared, "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." He denounced libertarians in equally vehement terms. The "representative libertarian," he claimed in a piece titled "A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians," is "humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull" and didn't know "which sex he belonged to." Kirk disdained classical liberalism in part because he believed it undermined its own religious and moral foundations. "The contract theory of society rested upon religious assumptions," he asserted in The Conservative Mind, "and as religious faith decayed among the liberals…the economic competition and the spiritual isolation which resulted from the triumph of their ideals provoked among them a reaction in favor of powerful benevolent governments exercising compulsions."
Yet Kirk admitted to a few areas of agreement with antistatists: "they do not believe that the United States should station garrisons throughout the world; no more do I," he wrote in the same essay, and he found libertarian resistance to collectivism and centralization laudable. Russello looks only briefly at Kirk's relationship to libertarianism. That's a pity, since the question of why Kirk felt such animosity toward a group with which he had a good deal in common (in practice, if not in theory) is an interesting one, and his attitude could be fruitfully compared with the disdain many postmodernists feel for capitalism and classical liberalism.
Russello's overview of Kirk's politics is insightful, and his take on Kirk's spiritual background is even more revealing. "Kirk did not have a particularly religious upbringing," Russello notes, and indeed "his Mecosta relations had a reputation for being 'spiritualists' and for hosting séances and other ghostly summonings at their house." Those formative experiences inspired in Kirk an early and lasting love for the Gothic and occult, which came through in his second career as a writer of horror stories. (Kirk's top-selling book was not The Conservative Mind but his 1961 "Gothick tale" The Old House of Fear.) When he married in 1964, Kirk converted to Catholicism, but before that he described himself as a "Gothic Jew," proclaiming "heterodoxy is my doxy, not orthodoxy." Postmodernism at its best has a sense of the playful, and Kirk had a lifelong playfulness about spooks and hidden powers.
Still, all that sounds more like an old Romantic than a contemporary postmodernist. Russello begins laying his claim for a pomo Kirk in his second chapter, "Participant Knowledge and History." There are three lines to Russello's argument. First, Kirk "was in accord with the postmodern reluctance to propose grand statements about the 'meaning of history.'?" Second, "like the postmodernists, Kirk displayed a certain 'presentism' when speaking about the past": He believed that living traditions in the present change the past, or at least transform how we conceptualize the past. Third, Kirk rejected the idea of entirely factual, objective history in favor of a belief in historians—and their readers—as participants in the construction of history. There's some merit to all these threads, particularly the second one. Kirk, like the postmodernists, did see history as unfinished and imaginative, something that could not be understood by piling up facts in chronological order. But this understanding of history is not peculiar to postmodernists or to Russell Kirk, and few contemporary historians would find much to argue with in Russello's other points. Who doesn't recognize perfect objectivity as a chimera? And among today's historians, who really believes history has an overarching "meaning"?
Elsewhere in the same chapter, Russello relates the dubious idea that Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which Russello says "struck a terminal blow to the idea of scientific objectivity," tells us something about historical knowledge. What does our inability to observe simultaneously the velocity and position of a subatomic particle have to do with our ability—or lack thereof—to understand what happened at, say, the Battle of Hastings? Even if there is uncertainty about both kinds of events, we are not talking about the same kind of uncertainty. We may not know whether King Harold was really killed by an arrow to the eye, but if he was, we can say with certainty that both the position and velocity of the arrow could have been observed simultaneously, if anyone had been in a position to do so.
There is indeed common ground here between Kirkian traditionalists and postmodernists. Both camps try to conscript the uncertainty principle, mathematician Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and Einstein's relativity into attacks on objectivity in other fields. The Kirkians and postmodernists share a fallacy, and ironically it is a species of scientism: They wrongly apply the ideas of advanced physics and mathematics to history. It turns out that when "science" casts doubt on objectivity, the otherwise science-skeptical Kirkians and postmodernists are all for it.
Missing from the chapter on knowledge and history, however, is any sustained discussion of the two very different elements that postmodernists and traditionalists find at the heart of historical interpretation. For the postmodernists, that element is power. For traditionalists, it is truth. Kirk was a realist: Objectivity may be elusive, he believed, but the truth is out there, whether we can grasp it fully or not. Postmodern theorists have tended to see the matter differently. Foucault, for example, was more interested in how knowledge, including historical knowledge, could be an instrument of power—not just state power but cultural hegemony. Russello cannot be faulted too much for not getting into this, since Kirk himself did not look very deeply at the nature of power and the ties between convention and the state, in part because that would have been a more theoretical discussion than Kirk, who abjured most abstraction as the sin of "ideology," would have wanted to undertake. Kirk was not a painstaking, analytic historian; he was more of a chronicler, a literary writer with an interest in political history and philosophy.
The chapters on Kirk's political thought and jurisprudence are on firmer ground than the chapter on history. Russello brings his talents as a legal thinker to bear in discussing Kirk's views on natural law, common law, and positive law. He clarifies a contentious issue among Kirkians: whether, and to what extent, Kirk was a natural-law thinker. Russello argues convincingly that for Kirk, the common law—built up over centuries upon the ad hoc decisions of judges and juries—should be preferred over consciously constructed legislative law or abstract natural law. He feared the revolutionary potential in natural law and disliked its absolute and rational qualities; he wanted it tamed and codified by common law or, failing that, legislation. There is a plausible pomo dimension to Kirk's thought here. The bottom-up and participatory common law does have qualities congruent with postmodernism—certainly relative to the rationalistic, top-down approach of legal positivism and the universalism of natural law.
In his final chapter, Russello deals most explicitly with the relationship of conservatism to postmodernism, particularly to Lyotard's "crisis of narratives"—the splintering of metanarratives into discrete, incommensurable stories. It is here that Russello insists that Kirkian conservatism and postmodernism do not simply have the same enemies but have common interests as well. Cultural decentralization and localism are two of the overlapping concerns Russello finds, and he notes parallel themes in several traditionalist and postmodern thinkers. In 1926 Bernard Iddings Bell, an Episcopal clergyman and friend of Kirk's, was "among the first ever to use the term postmodernism as a description of an age emerging from the collapse of Enlightenment rationality," Russello notes. Meanwhile, the postmodern theorist Hans Georg Gadamer came to a rather Kirkian understanding of, and respect for, tradition, arguing that it could not be understood by an objective, outside observer. "To stand within a tradition," Gadamer wrote, "does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible."
Yet even this final chapter leaves too much merely summarized and too much left unsaid. Gadamer, the postmodern figure whose approach to tradition seems most sympathetic to Kirk's worldview, is discussed only fleetingly, and the book never rigorously compares Kirk with any postmodernist intellectuals. At a little over 200 pages, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk only skims the surface of what might link Kirk to a figure such as Gadamer. As a prologue to a future, wider study of conservatism and postmodernism, it's valuable; there might be inspiration for a half-dozen doctoral dissertations within its pages. And as a book showing Kirk to be a more eccentric, unorthodox figure than most conservatives imagine him to be, the book is delightful. But for all the connections Russello finds between Kirk and postmodernism, the strongest impression it leaves is that Kirk and the pomos are at best allies of convenience against liberalism. And that may be the least attractive element in either camp's thought.
Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor to The American Conservative.
The post The Pomo Mind appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Something more than revulsion toward Bush has been at work in other quarters, however, as a number of journalists and academics have begun to re-evaluate the Reagan record. The Atlantic Monthly last year provided a measure of the strange new respect Reagan commands with the chattering classes when it ranked him as the 17th most influential American who ever lived. Not bad for a man once dismissed by respectable opinion as (in the words of the Democratic éminence grise Clark Clifford) "an amiable dunce."
Reagan was no dunce, and contrary to what many liberals thought in the 1980s—and what many conservatives seem to think now—he was no super-hawk either. Recent volumes of Reagan's speeches and correspondence, edited by Kiron Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson, have gone a long way toward dispelling the myth of his stupidity. Reagan's radio commentaries, written in his own hand, demonstrate his familiarity with the work of the Austrian economists F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Meanwhile, Paul Lettow's 2005 book Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons makes a convincing case for a surprisingly dovish Reagan. John Patrick Diggins' new book goes a step further, arguing that Reagan was virtually a libertarian, a political romantic who stood for "freedom, peace, disarmament, self-reliance, earthly happiness, the dreams of the imagination and the desires of the heart."
With language like that, Diggins, a professor of history at the City University of New York, might sound like a right-wing Reagan hagiographer. He's not. Twenty years ago, when the term had more pragmatic connotations, Diggins might have been called a neoconservative; his heroes are center-left turned center-right figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Sidney Hook. Diggins was no fan of Gov. Reagan in the '60s or President Reagan in the '80s, and his newfound respect for Reagan does not come without reservations. But he writes that "my respect for the man grew from appreciating his boldness in dealing with the three miseries of the modern era," namely "a suicidal nuclear arms race…an expanding welfare state that had made the poor helplessly dependent [and] a joyless religious inheritance that told people their kingdom was not of this world and they needed to be careful about pursuing happiness in case they came to enjoy it."
Diggins sets out to write an intellectual biography not just of Reagan but of his times, with special attention to the neocons who always urged the president to take a firmer line against the Soviet Union. The hawks in Reagan's administration assured him he couldn't reason with communists. One adviser, the historian Richard Pipes, told Reagan the Russian mind worked in ways fundamentally different from our own. The peasant mentality of the Russian muzhik, Pipes had written in 1977, held "that cunning and coercion alone ensured survival: one employed cunning when weak, and cunning coupled with coercion when strong. Not to use force when one had it indicated weakness." Reagan disagreed. Ignoring the advice of hard-liners like Pipes and the neoconservative strategist Richard Perle, Reagan preferred jaw-jaw to war-war. "We must and will engage the Soviets in a dialogue as serious and constructive as possible," he insisted in a 1984 address.
A nuclear close call in 1983, when Soviet early-warning systems wrongly reported American missiles on the horizon and nearly triggered a Russian retaliatory strike, reinforced for Reagan the imperative of building trust with the enemy. After that incident, "I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union and Russians had nothing to fear from us," Reagan later wrote in his memoirs. Negotiation was possible, regardless of what the hard-line "experts" said.
To an extent that no one really appreciated at the time, Diggins argues, the "dunce" Reagan actually inaugurated an era of highly intellectual politics in Washington: The Reagan years "so overflowed with think tanks and ideas it seemed there could be no policy without a set of beliefs or doctrines, no politics without a political theory." Reagan's own political philosophy matured long before he arrived in Washington; it was shaped by reading the classical liberal economists Frederic Bastiat and F.A. Hayek and the morose anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, as well as Reagan's clashes with Hollywood Reds as president of the Screen Actors Guild and campus radicals as governor of California. Perhaps the deepest influence came from his mother, whose relaxed Protestant religious views looked away from outside authority and to the inner self for guidance. Diggins argues that this inheritance infused Reagan with an Emersonian faith in humanity.
Not all those influences pulled in the same direction. Between the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Communist-turned-Quaker Whittaker Chambers lies a world of difference. Chambers, as Diggins reminds us, thought that in leaving the Communist Party he was joining the losing side of history. Reagan's neoconservative advisers in the 1980s had similar feelings, insisting right up until the Berlin Wall came down that America was losing the Cold War. Before Reagan's election, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz set the tone for the administration's hawks by warning of the "Finlandization of America," the collapse of American will to resist Soviet aggression.
Reagan didn't buy it. "A salient point" about Reagan's advisers, Diggins writes, "was their lack of faith in the American character. They believed that a native Protestant religion fed a flabby culture of consumption" that would be no match for the Soviets' will to power. But Reagan saw America's hedonistic ways as a virtue, not a vice—and not just in the struggle against communism. According to Diggins, "the genius of Ronald Reagan was, like that of Emerson, to persuade us that we please God by pleasing ourselves and that to believe in the self is to live within the divine soul." As Exhibit A in his argument, Diggins quotes a letter Reagan wrote to a friend in 1951, telling her "my personal belief is that God couldn't have created evil so the desires he planted in us are good." This thoroughly unconservative belief in mankind's innate goodness led him to trust both the American consumer and the Russian people—and ultimately Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to a dramatic de-escalation of the nuclear arms race.
Diggins has more faith in government than Reagan ever did. He's also a biographer of John Adams, and it's clear enough just from his Reagan book that he admires the strong-government Federalists much more than the anti-statist Jeffersonians. Like a good Federalist, Diggins also believes that the people, be they American or Russian, are an unruly mob whose liberties can only be guaranteed by sound government. This unabashedly elitist perspective distorts his account of the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev becomes a heroic figure, even though Diggins acknowledges (several times, in fact) that the Soviet premier wanted to save communism, not to bring the whole system crashing down. Yet Diggins insists that the fall of communism in Russia "offers no example of 'history from below'?"—of ordinary people rather than national leaders making history.
He's wrong. The Soviet Politburo didn't just decide to call it quits in the summer of 1991; instead, the USSR's own strong-government types seized power from Gorbachev in a coup, only to find mass protests in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad opposing them and calling for an end to communism. Certainly Gorbachev's reformist policies within Russia and his willingness to negotiate with Reagan on nuclear weapons contributed to the Cold War's end. But it's less than half the story.
The biographer is notably at odds with his subject on the role of popular discontent in the end of communism. But Diggins is right to credit Reagan—and, yes, Gorbachev—with scaling down the tensions of the Cold War, which seemed to be heating up in the early '80s with the Soviet war in Afghanistan and various proxy wars in the Third World. (Diggins mentions the Reagan-era "nuclear freeze" movement in the U.S. and Europe, but in keeping with his skepticism about history from below he believes Reagan's quest for disarmament sprang from sources peculiar to Reagan himself.) Diggins notes a paradox here: While Reagan reached out to Gorbachev in defiance of his neocon advisers, he gave the hawks what they wanted in Latin America and (to a lesser extent) places like Angola and the Philippines. Although he shines no new light on Reagan's involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, Diggins gives a convincing overall explanation for Reagan's seemingly contradictory behavior: However willing Reagan might have been to fight communism by covert means, the elimination of nuclear weapons was his overriding objective—his "dream," as he said more than once.
Diggins provides good reason to think that Reagan meant it when he said in January 1984, "Reducing the risk of war—especially nuclear war—is priority number one." The author traces Reagan's concern over nuclear weapons back as far as his days with the Screen Actors Guild, and he notes the effect the 1983 television movie The Day After had on him. "It's very effective and left me greatly depressed," the president wrote in his diary. He came to have little patience for Strangelovian defense intellectuals who argued that a nuclear war could be won and that disarmament was a mirage. As he later wrote in his memoirs, Reagan was appalled by those advisers who "claimed nuclear war was 'inevitable' and we had to prepare for this reality. They tossed around macabre jargon about 'throw weights' and 'kill ratios' as if they were talking about baseball scores."
On the domestic side, Diggins corrects both the left's and the right's exaggerations about the Reagan economy. Did the rich get richer while the poor got poorer? No; everyone got richer, with the poor gaining more in percentage terms. Diggins cites Urban Institute figures showing that from 1977 to 1986, the bottom quintile of earners saw their incomes rise 28 percent, compared to 11 percent for the top quintile. On the other hand, there was no Reagan economic miracle. "In terms of productivity and national income, the Reagan eighties performed reasonably well," writes Diggins, "but no more so than the Kennedy-Johnson sixties had or the Clinton nineties would."
Yet Reagan did bring about a revolution in the nation's attitude toward wealth. His "spiritualization of capitalism," Diggins writes, "has had an enduring effect on America's political culture, having lasted longer than Roosevelt's New Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier, or Johnson's Great Society. Reagan allowed Americans to indulge the acquisitive instinct fully, to pursue avarice without angst." Diggins is ambivalent about this: He thinks consumerism is closely tied to middle-class entitlements and the Reagan-era deficit explosion, the common denominator being a belief that the American really can have it all. The public "would gladly accept lower taxes, but whether they would accept cutbacks in their benefits and entitlements was another matter entirely," he writes. "How to make good citizens out of grasping consumers?"
There's a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending "conservative" Reagan and the frugal "liberal" Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes "was as antistatist as Reagan" and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president's rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan's conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan's successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who "opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience." Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, "seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice."
Was this Emersonian Reagan a libertarian? Diggins connects Reagan with Tom Paine (whom the president was fond of quoting) and contends that "Reagan, like Paine, could neither bring himself to believe in the fall nor convince himself of any need for meaningful government." But he also argues that Reagan's unchecked spending planted the seeds of "big-government conservatism." As Diggins tells it, Reagan's failure to restrain the state arose from his unwillingness to rebuke the public for its addiction to entitlements, subsidies, and pork. Reagan had more of an anti-government vision than an anti-government program—something that might be said of contemporary conservatism as well.
Other areas that Diggins doesn't discuss, such as Reagan's escalation of the drug war, also complicate the picture of the president as a semi-libertarian or a "liberal romantic." And unfortunately, while he's very interested in the influence of Emerson and Paine on Reagan, Diggins slights the impact of Hayek, Mises, and other economists. He even confuses Hayek with Milton Friedman, telling us that "in the mid-1970s, Hayek won a Noble [sic] Prize in economics for his theory of monetarism."
It's a shame. Diggins has developed a compelling take on his subject, and Ronald Reagan is an engaging, thought-provoking, at times even lyrical assessment of the 40th president. But he can also be lazy and slipshod, given to overgeneralizations and unexamined assertions. Toward the end of his book, he makes the remarkable claim that communism could reform itself out of existence because it was a scientific doctrine and thus, unlike a religion, subject to "verification and revision." Was communism really more subject to verification than a religion? The Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko's Marxist genetics, which rejected the principle of heredity for doctrinal reasons, would seem to falsify that notion. For 70 years, Soviet communism was as resistant to innovation as any faith.
Ronald Reagan has some glaring faults. Yet the core of the book's argument rings true: Emerson proves to be an invaluable touchstone for understanding Reagan, and Diggins ably shows that the president was neither the idiot his enemies made him out to be nor the hard-bitten Cold Warrior of conservative myth. Reagan is a figure well deserving of re-evaluation from all sides of the political spectrum, and Diggins' book, despite its flaws, contributes usefully to that effort.
Daniel McCarthy is a contributing editor of The American Conservative.
Discuss this article online.
The post Revising Ronald Reagan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, by Damon Linker, New York: Doubleday, 304 pages, $26
The Christian Coalition was instrumental in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, but before long its power seemed to be waning. In 1996 Bill Clinton—the draft-dodging, pot-smoking, abortion-rights-supporting womanizer who embodied everything Christian conservatives abhorred—handily won re-election against Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Two years later, Republicans lost ground in Congress as they prepared to impeach Clinton, and Paul Weyrich, the man who had first suggested to Jerry Falwell the name "Moral Majority," adapted a phrase from Timothy Leary: It was time, he told Christian conservatives, to "turn off," "tune out," and "drop out."
Weyrich wasn't the only influential Christian conservative driven to rethink his movement's prospects in the late '90s. In the year of Clinton's re-election, a federal district court ruling to permit physician-assisted suicide shook the editors of the Catholic journal First Things so violently that they began to ask whether judicial tyranny had destroyed democracy itself. This led to the magazine's November 1996 symposium, "The End of Democracy?," in which contributors concluded that civil disobedience, even revolution, might soon be justified. "America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany," editor Richard John Neuhaus wrote, "but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here."
Times have changed. You won't find much sympathy at First Things for those who today use such language in the context of President Bush's war on civil liberties. And Christian conservatives no longer feel so despondent about democracy. The president has assiduously cultivated their support, an effort rewarded in 2004 when nearly 80 percent of evangelical Protestant voters and 52 percent of Catholics voters cast their ballots for Bush.
In the wake of that election we'veseen an avalanche of literature purporting to explain the revival of the religious right and its implications for the country. Patrick Hynes' In Defense of the Religious Right celebrates Christian conservatives' power, even while claiming Christian conservatives are harried and besieged, ever on the defensive against an encroaching liberalism. Damon Linker, on the other hand, argues in The Theocons that it's the religious right, and the First Things coterie in particular, that's doing the encroaching. Each gets only half the story right. Hynes fails to prove that Christian conservatives are the persecuted majority he thinks they are, while Linker is persuasive about the aggressive agenda of the religious right. But Hynes better explains where Christian conservatives' real power lies—not with a Catholic elite, as Linker would have it, but with the mass of evangelical voters loyal to the party of Lincoln.
Hynes is a campaign consultant—in the words of his dust jacket, "a hack with an impressive record of electing Republicans." According to his book, "the GOP is, perhaps, God's Own Party," not only because religious voters today prefer Republicans but because the party originally arose from the Second Great Awakening and the abolitionist movement. Abolition itself, he writes, "was the result of Christians imposing their moral values on their fellow Americans." Republican Christians, that is: Hynes emphasizes the typically Democratic affiliation of those Southern Christians who supported the peculiar institution, though he doesn't note that some of the denominations that once defended slavery have since become stalwarts of the GOP. To hear Hynes tell it, the modern religious right doesn't want to impose its values on anyone so much as it wants to defend those values against "a liberal Washington-Hollywood nexus that bookends American civilization." (He doesn't explain how Washington can remain part of that nexus when the party preferred by the Christian conservatives controls every branch of the federal government.)
Hynes is at his best discussing the demographics of the religious right and explaining its place in the Republican Party's base. By his calculations, churchgoing voters are as important to the Republicans as African-Americans and labor voters combined are to the Democrats. In 2004 Bush received "something close to 28 million conservative Christian" votes, almost half his total pull, while by Hynes' estimates approximately 11.8 million African-Americans and 16.7 million union members voted straight-ticket Democratic. (The "straight-ticket" qualification, of course, means Hynes isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.) "John Kerry destroyed Bush among the 15 percent of Americans who never attend church (62 percent for Kerry to 36 percent for Bush)," he writes, "Conversely, Bush (64 percent) beat Kerry (35 percent) by virtually the same margin among the 16 percent of the electorate who attends church more than once a week."
Hynes takes pride in this but doesn'tlook closely at all it entails. Just as the "gender gap" cuts both ways—men vote disproportionately for Republicans just as women go heavily for Democrats—the growing "God gap" also has two sides. What does it tell us that Americans who attend religious services as infrequently as Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan once did now overwhelmingly vote Democratic? And Hynes is evasive about whether today's Republican leadership is any closer to its followers' degree of devotion. Outraged by Bill Press' claim that President Bush doesn't attend church regularly, the most Hynes can say is, "President Bush reads the Bible and prays every morning at 6:00 AM."
He has other blind spots. Hynes shows that, contrary to stereotype, Christian conservatives are not overwhelmingly poor or Southern, and a majority of them are women. But while he professes surprise that the religious right is typecast as mostly male, his own book offers evidence of why that is: Almost every spokesman and leader Hynes talks to is indeed a spokesman or male leader. In this book, the women of the religious right are a silent majority.
The distaff side gets short shrift in his historical discussion, too. While claiming a common pedigree with abolitionists and even, to a lesser extent, the civil rights movement, Hynes neglects to mention another prominent example of religious involvement in American politics: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and its prohibitionist progeny. Which if any of these groups is the true forerunner of the modern religious right? A clue might be found in the persistence of "dry counties" in such bastions of the Christian conservative movement as Mississippi, Kansas, and Alabama—though Puritan-era blue laws keep many a heathen municipality in Massachusetts dry as well. As for abolitionism, readers might wonder whether doing away with the coercive institution of slavery is really "imposing values" in the same sense as most of the modern religious right's agenda.
"The Christian Right has donenothing to force its value on a helpless and unwitting public," Hynes insists. "The exact opposite is true." In support of his contention that "secular leftists are determined to remake American culture and society in their own warped image, to tear down traditional pillars of America's moral strength," Hynes cites a litany of court cases, legislative acts, and instances of civil disobedience: Griswold v. Connecticut (which effectively legalized contraception nationwide), the Stonewall riots (which launched the modern gay rights movement), 1960s New York and California laws legalizing abortion (the California law was signed by Gov. Reagan), and more.
Notably, Hynes is not making a states' rights or federalist argument. He sees Culture War aggression both when states pass laws he dislikes and when federal courts strike down laws he does support. He also blurs the difference between persuasion and coercion: Most of his examples of secular leftist aggression involve loosening legal restraints. When he writes of "the radical Left's assault on longstanding and long-accepted cultural norms," what he means is that too much moral legislation is being repealed, overturned, or voided. Presumably Hynes and company would like to bring those laws back. If that isn't "imposing values" on people, what is?
A few of his examples strike home. It indeed is ridiculous to, say, ban a schoolgirl from singing "The First Noel" at a Christmas pageant. But even if the left is as bad as he says, that doesn't mean the religious right is any better. It would be interesting to see a forthright defense of the religious right's views on everything from regulating gambling to kicking competent people out of the armed forces for being homosexual. It would be interesting, too, to see a defense of the religious right's foreign-policy enthusiasms, from evangelical Christian support for the Iraq War ("evangelicals are among the only voter subgroups left in the country to still support the president's foreign policy," Hynes notes) to the drive by such Christian conservatives as Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to intervene in Darfur. But little of this is in Hynes' book.
For Damon Linker, a former editor of First Things turned critic of that journal's political project, the danger of the religious right does not lie primarily with the evangelical Protestants Hynes describes but with a select group of Roman Catholic intellectuals whom Linker calls "theoconservatives." What these men lack in numbers they make up for in influence: "the overtly religious policies and rhetoric of the Bush administration have been inspired by an ideology derived from Roman Catholicism," Linker contends.
Who are these theocons? Three receive close scrutiny in Linker's first chapter—George Weigel, biographer of Pope John Paul II and expositor of a take on Catholic "just war" theory tailored to support Bush's foreign policy; Michael Novak, the Catholic radical turned outspoken champion of "democratic capitalism"; and Linker's bête noire and former boss (for whom he insists he has no ill will), Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. If Neuhaus commands more of Linker's attention than the other two, it isn't just because he knows him better. Even Novak's transformation from advocate of a "revolution in consciousness" and "religionless Christianity" to thoroughly bourgeois democratic capitalist can hardly compare with Neuhaus' political odyssey.
Early in the 1960s, Neuhaus, then a Lutheran minister, was pastor at Brooklyn's inner city St. John the Evangelist church, which under his leadership was a center for civil rights and antiwar activism. In 1965, he founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam with Catholic Fr. Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Neuhaus grew more radical with the times, in one sermon describing the Vietnamese as "God's instruments for bringing the American empire to its knees."
He also, Linker writes, "began to reflect on whether he should advocate an armed insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States," reluctantly concluding that the time was not yet ripe. Thirty years later, he would again entertain the idea of revolution—only by then, he had become a Roman Catholic priest, and the causes stirring his passions were not Vietnam and segregation but abortion, euthanasia, and a lack of religiosity in public life—what Neuhaus terms "the naked public square."
Because of their left-wing backgrounds, Neuhaus and Novak, the latter now ensconced at the American Enterprise Institute and serving as the War Party's semi-official envoy to the Vatican, are often designated Catholic neocons. But Linker points out an important difference between his subjects and neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz: "In the late 1960s, the men who went on to become the first neocons were moderate liberals who opposed the revolutionary ambitions of the counterculture. The proto-theocons, on the other hand, were leftist revolutionaries who proposed (in the title of one of their books) 'a theology for radical politics.'?" Linker understates the radicalism of some of the original neoconservatives—some started their careers as Trotskyists—but he has a point. The theocons were the sort of people the neocons had fled the left to get away from.
In any event, as the theocons tacked right they soon found common interests with the neocons, who indeed became Neuhaus and Novak's patrons. "The theocons piggybacked on [the] neocon network; they also used neocon connections to begin the long and arduous process of building their own independent infrastructure of influence," Linker writes. His second chapter traces the history of this neo-theo alliance, which paved the way for the creation of First Things—the journal in part grew out of an earlier publication, This World, that Irving Kristol turned over to Neuhaus in the 1980s.
Relations with the neoconservatives soured temporarily over First Things' "End of Democracy?" symposium of 1996. Neuhaus' old revolutionary rhetoric and his invocation of the Nazis led neocon eminentos Midge Decter, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Walter Berns to sever ties with the magazine. Yet "political expediency eventually led that rift to be healed," and whatever strain the "End of Democracy?" placed on Neuhaus' relations with neoconservatives, the brouhaha only boosted his and First Things' standing with the Protestants of the religious right. Focus on the Family's James Dobson lauded the symposium in all its zeal.
But Neuhaus has had his differences with evangelicals as well. Indeed, Linker finds the genesis of Neuhaus' theoconservative project in his belief, formed while still a Lutheran, "that Falwell and his followers were being unrealistic in supposing that their idiosyncratic faith, based on highly subjective 'born again' experiences, could serve as the religiously based public philosophy the country so desperately needed." Catholicism, on the other hand, had the natural law tradition, with its claims to objectivity and rationality. As well, in Linker's words, "there was the Church's long history of theological and political reflection, which made Catholics far more competent than evangelicals and other Protestants to take the lead in pressing religiously based moral arguments in the nation's life."
For Linker, these qualities make the theocon ideology more potent than that of the rest of the religious right. He points to the current or recent presence of several theocons on the President's Council on Bioethics as evidence of how respectable theocon arguments—against human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, for example—are becoming. But Linker may be overestimating Neuhaus' success at shaping policy by shaping the world of ideas. The President's Council on Bioethics has had so little influence on the stem-cell debate, for example, that theocon arguments failed even to keep the Senate majority leader from the president's own party (Bill Frist, a bona fide religious rightist himself) from approving federal funding of stem-cell research. And Bush's use of vaguely Catholic rhetoric did not stop him from approving the "morning after" contraceptive pill (and potential abortifacient) Plan B for over-the-counter sale in the face of theocon objections. On the electoral level: Rick Santorum, the theocons' poster child on Capitol Hill, is the Senate's most endangered incumbent this year. Linker's book is an engaging and invaluably informative account of the roots of theoconservatism, but its author could stand to borrow some of Patrick Hynes' political acumen.
All that is not to say the theocons have had no effect on the nation's politics. Perhaps ironically, considering Neuhaus' background, where they have been most successful is in shoring up conservative Catholic support for President Bush's foreign policy. Linker devotes a chapter to the "distinctive theocon approach to just war reasoning—ridiculing antiwar clerics for having forgotten the Catholic tradition and praising Republican administrations for keeping it alive." After the initial success of the Iraq invasion, Neuhaus wondered in print whether in the future it might be possible to consider "military action in terms not of the last resort but of the best resort." There's a curiously Jacobin streak in this now-conservative priest. In the '60s, in the '90s, and in Iraq today, Neuhaus has called for uprooting the established order in the name of justice and democracy. The results, as far as the rest of us can see, have not been encouraging.
So long as Catholics and Protestants were at odds, Linker concludes, both sides had a vested interest in minimizing the mixture of doctrine and state power. But now, "to the extent that they come to consider each other allies and to recognize their potential combined political clout, they will be tempted to view the separation of church and state as something less than a bargain—as an unacceptable sacrifice of their freedom to do everything they can to bring the country's public life into conformity with what they believe to be the truth proclaimed by Jesus Christ."
The religious right's ecumenical unity might not be as great as Linker, or Hynes, imagines. Bush lost the Catholic vote in 2000, and while much has been made of the fact that he won it in 2004—against a Catholic opponent—he did little better among Catholics than among the population at large. Churchgoing evangelicals are an overwhelmingly Republican bloc, but Catholics are only gradually being co-opted, beginning with those who attend services most often.
By themselves, the theocons may not be much of a threat to Americans' liberties. But together with the organized power of evangelical Protestants, they're a mighty force for the Republican Party, even if what they get in policy terms is not more morality in public life but merely more war.
The post Wonder-Working Power appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The libertarian journalist Albert Jay Nock once told the story of a friend who visited St. Petersburg in early 1917, when the Kerensky republic was in power and liberalization rather than Bolshevism still seemed possible for Russia. The proletariat was eager to hear any speaker who climbed a soapbox—even agents of the German government, with whom Russia was at war. Nock's friend asked one group of workers whether this was their idea of free speech, and whether they understood the difference between "liberty" and "license."
The workers didn't know these English words, so Nock's friend explained: Liberty is "when some perfectly respectable person gets up and says something everybody agrees to," while "license is when some infernal scoundrel, who ought to be hanged anyway, gets up and says something that is true." After conferring for a moment, the Russians decided they were not for liberty. They were for license.
So was John Wilkes—radical journalist, member of Parliament, outlaw, prisoner, lord mayor of London, and self-described libertine—some 150 years earlier. His life and career go a long way toward dispelling the superstition that liberty must advance hand in glove with order, guided by men of sterling moral character. Probably born in 1726 (the exact year is uncertain), Wilkes was a near contemporary of our Founding Fathers, and his clashes with George III and his ministers set an example for the rebellious colonists. But Wilkes, rake that he was, is in no danger of becoming an object of veneration for Americans today. In John Wilkes, his new biography, Arthur H. Cash shows us why that's so—and why lovers of liberty, at least, should celebrate this colorful Englishman. Cash tells his readers from the outset, "If you think the police have the right to arrest forty-nine people when they are looking for three, shut [this book] now."
Cash, a professor emeritus of English at SUNY New Paltz, argues convincingly that Wilkes helped lay the foundation for some of the most basic rights taken for granted in the United States and Great Britain: freedom of the press, the right to privacy, religious liberty. Most often Wilkes did this—at considerable risk to himself—by goading the government into overreaction and then suing the king's ministers and agents. Along the way, he conducted innumerable adulterous affairs, dabbled in dueling, accumulated debts he had no intention of paying—"I take the liberty to inform you that at present it is not my interest to pay the principal, neither is it my principle to pay the interest," he told one creditor—and published what some have considered the filthiest poem in the English language. (One sample couplet: "…life can little more supply/than just a few good Fucks and then we die.")
Cross-eyed and with a prognathous jaw that would put Jay Leno to shame, Wilkes entered Parliament in 1757 at the age of 31. He was the protégé of Thomas Potter, wealthy son of the late archbishop of Canterbury, who introduced the younger man to politics while encouraging him in his already pronounced womanizing. The two occasionally traded mistresses, and Potter brought Wilkes into "the Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe," also known as the "Hellfire Club" because of its supposed black masses, though on Cash's account it seems more like a cross between a bawdy dinner club and a by-the-hour hotel. Wilkes was married but had separated from his wife—their union was loveless, though it produced a daughter, Polly, whom Wilkes cherished above all else.
Once elected to Parliament from Aylesbury—his only opponent in the race withdrew after Wilkes bribed uncommitted voters, a common practice at the time—Wilkes aligned with the Whig faction of Pitt the Elder and Lord Temple, which soon found itself in opposition to the ministry (that is, government) of Lord Bute, a Whig of a very different sort. With the Whig Party ascendant, its internal divisions were as significant as its differences with the other great party, the Tories. Pitt's wing, sometimes called "Patriots," was nationalistic and (relatively) populist; Bute, on the other hand, sued for peace with England's enemies and was perceived as a staunch royalist.
Wilkes served his faction as one of its ablest propagandists, anonymously publishing a newspaper, the North Briton, that lampooned Bute as a friend of royal absolutism and enemy of English liberty. Wilkes especially damned the ministry's excise tax—not simply because it was a tax but because, as Cash argues, collecting it "would legitimate forced entries and searches of houses and barns, putting into the hands of politicians the means to harass and even destroy their opponents." This, says Cash, "was Wilkes" first expression of the right to privacy that he would later champion in the courts."
With the publication of North Briton No. 45 in 1763, the ministry—even with Bute himself now fallen from power—could tolerate no more and issued a "general warrant" for the arrest of anyone connected with the paper. Wilkes' authorship was an open secret, but the ministry needed firm proof to prosecute him for "seditious libel." The general warrant named a crime but no suspect, empowering the king's messengers, as the royal police were called, to round up anyone they pleased and seize anything that might be useful as evidence. Wilkes was arrested, along with 48 printers and other people involved with publishing issue 45, and his papers were confiscated.
The ministry's scheme backfired. The North Briton had won Wilkes a popular following. His arrest made him a martyr for civil liberties—an image he burnished by speaking out for the rights of all English subjects while defending himself in court. The Court of Common Appeals freed Wilkes on grounds of parliamentary privilege, but that would not satisfy him. He wanted a precedent that would shore up the liberties of ordinary Englishmen. So Wilkes sued the officials who had authorized the general warrant and seized his papers for trespass and property damage, and sued the king's messengers for false arrest.
He also encouraged the working-class printers who had been arrested to do likewise. "With his keen sense of public desires," Cash argues, "Wilkes understood that his power lay ultimately in offering purpose to the unorganized masses of people." But he was no mere opportunist; as Cash demonstrates at length, Wilkes came to see himself as fighting for a cause that was "transcendent."
Though it would take years, Wilkes' side won most of its legal battles. By the time he was through, the courts had declared general warrants illegal and limited the power of government to search and seize papers and other effects, establishing in law the principle that a man's home is his castle. Through all this, George III and his ministers feared Wilkes even more than they despised him; to retaliate against him would risk a popular uprising. Every setback Wilkes encountered, and almost every victory, was cause for his supporters to riot. (Just how integral rioting was to English and colonial American politics in this era is all too easily forgotten now, when street violence is commonly taken to be a feature only of backward Middle Eastern countries and immigrant communities in Western Europe.)
Before long, though, Wilkes handed his enemies an opportunity they could not pass up. This involved a ribald poem written by Potter—Wilkes' mentor, now deceased—and left in Wilkes' possession. Wilkes had added to and annotated Potter's Essay on Woman, an X-rated satire of Pope?s Essay on Man, which at first he had no intention of publishing. But he thought a small private edition might entertain his fellow Knights of St. Francis, so Wilkes began preparing one on his home press. A few pages of proofs came to the attention of the ministry, which seized on them as a pretext for prosecuting Wilkes anew. The charges of obscenity and libel that came of this, and of Wilkes' republication of the North Briton (this time his authorship could be proven), would see him expelled from Parliament, driven into exile—a fate mitigated by the company of his daughter and an 18-year-old Italian mistress—and imprisoned for two years upon his return to England.
From prison he again stood for Parliament, first in London, where he lost, then in Middlesex, where he won. This led to a farce in the House of Commons, which refused to seat Wilkes and called a special election for his seat—which Wilkes also won. The House called another special election, then another; each time the voters of Middlesex chose Wilkes. After three rounds of this, the House simply seated his opponent. Wilkes and his allies, including Edmund Burke, argued that this move amounted to allowing the legislature to select its own members. When Wilkes finally did return to Parliament after his release from prison, he succeeded in purging from the records of the House all trace of his incapacitation, overturning this baleful precedent. According to Cash, the Wilkes controversy informed James Madison's desire to set uniform requirements for holding office in the U.S. Constitution. Later still, in 1969, Chief Justice Earl Warren would cite the Wilkes case in ruling that the House of Representatives had acted unconstitutionally by excluding Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) while he was under investigation for misuse of congressional funds.
Cash ably relates many other contributions Wilkes made to the liberty of Englishmen, and not just Englishmen, in his day and beyond. As an alderman of London, Wilkes barred press gangs—naval recruiters who filled their quotas by kidnapping men and forcing them to enlist—from the city and protected journalists who reported on Parliament's proceedings, a crime at the time. He was so successful in the second regard that before long Parliament changed the law. As London's lord mayor, Wilkes intrigued with rebellious Americans and French diplomats to supply arms to the colonists. And in Parliament, though a sincere Anglican himself, he fought for the religious liberties of Catholics and of Protestants outside of the Church of England.
Endorsing one bill for religious tolerance, he declared, "I wish to see rising in the neighborhood of a Christian cathedral, near its Gothic towers, the minaret of a Turkish mosque, a Chinese pagoda, and a Jewish synagogue, with a temple of the sun, if any Persians could be found to inhabit this island and worship in this gloomy climate the God of their idolatry." At the time, as Cash writes, "Jews had no religious rights at all" and "it was specifically against the law to hold a Roman Catholic mass, and a Catholic who took in pupils or opened a school could be imprisoned for life."
Wilkes' stand for religious liberty led to an interesting role reversal: When anti-Catholic riots erupted in London and throughout the country, Wilkes was on the side of the militia called out to quell the unrest. As a city official, he even led some of them against the rioters. To the disappointment of some of his followers, he also decried the French Revolution late in his life: He thought monarchy a more humane form of government than republicanism.
Benjamin Franklin, who disliked Wilkes, believed that "had the King had a bad character and Wilkes a good one, the latter might have turned the former out of his kingdom." Wilkes, with his squinty eyes and protruding jaw, was hardly a pleasing sight, and the whiff of blasphemy and scandal that always accompanied him did not sit well with all of his supporters. But his commitment to liberty, especially for the lower classes, earned him a place of honor in the hearts of many of his countrymen. Even George III came to appreciate Wilkes, if not exactly to approve of his politics. Arthur Cash's appealing prose and mordant humor—along with his painstaking scholarship—do justice to his subject, which is about as high a commendation as anyone might ask.
The post In Praise of John Wilkes appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>