When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  The Great Dictator tells the story of a Jewish barber suffering from amnesia who is mistaken for a dictator he resembles, very clearly Adolf Hitler, known as Adenoid Hynkel in the film. The real Hynkel is mistaken for the barber and arrested, which brings the barber to the stage to make a speech, on which his own life and that of his friends will depend. After a stumbling start the barber finds inspiration and makes a passionate case for brotherhood and good will. ‘I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone … The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish … Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! … in the name of democracy, let us all unite!’

  Chaplin arranged for the film to be sent to Hitler, though whether or not he ever saw it we cannot be sure. The British government, during the appeasement period, said it would ban the film, though it was seen when the policy changed. The Great Dictator was, however, banned in occupied Europe, parts of South America and the Irish Free State. The film was, shamefully, the beginning of the end for Chaplin in America. The great satirist of dictatorship was labelled a communist by the frivolous but dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952. When Chaplin tried to return to the United States after going to England for the premiere of Limelight he was refused re-entry by the egregious J. Edgar Hoover, who called Chaplin a ‘Hollywood parlour Bolshevik’. It was a sorry personal end to the story, for a man who knew which side he was on, to be betrayed by a country he thought would know better.

  Liberal democracies need to maintain their confidence. As wildly imperfect as they are, part of the attraction of the open societies is that contentious things can be said without fear. A speech like Chaplin’s at the end of The Great Dictator would be permitted in all societies except those it satirises. It says more in a few minutes than every interminable hour of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro and the rest. The lesson of Chaplin’s speech is every bit as important as the lesson of his life, and we should not be tempted to conclude from the latter that Western liberal democracy is therefore a sham.

  The Revolution

  Every revolution turns full circle. The message of Camus’s The Rebel is that the revolution begins with a promise of liberation and ends in a tyranny. ‘Freedom, “that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm”, is the motivating principle of all revolutions,’ writes Camus. ‘Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel’s mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution.’

  The emergence of modern populism is not the same as egregious tyranny. It is not necessarily the first step on the road to serfdom. But the institutions of liberal democracies are more fragile than we might suppose. President Trump does not appear to understand or respect their norms. Across Europe there are political movements that want to turn back the progress they do not acknowledge. In Africa those democracies that do exist are, as yet, young and vulnerable. The same is true in Asia, where the largest of the nations, China, thinks it is teaching the world a lesson that there is another sustainable path to human happiness. Every generation needs to marshal the arguments for democracy and freedom, because the temptations offered by the Grand Inquisitor are always lurking and they always lead to the wilderness. Silence is not an option, as the example of Elie Wiesel shows. Indifference is perilous. As Camus puts it: ‘To keep quiet is to allow yourself to believe that you have no opinions, that you want nothing, and in certain cases it amounts to really wanting nothing.’

  We need to be clear about what it is we want and we need to speak up for it. We want the legitimate popular government defined by Thomas Jefferson. We should be prepared to defend it with all the tenacity and eloquence of Winston Churchill. We want a national community in which we take the same pride as Jawaharlal Nehru took in the midnight’s children of Indian independence. We want the recognition of the equal moral worth of all individuals that Martin Luther King expressed so beautifully, and we want, like Elie Wiesel, to live a life in the presence of hope. For all their manifold differences, and the terrible beauty of their rhetoric, the revolutionary cases of Robespierre, Hitler and Castro hold in common the dark truth that no rebel was permitted to speak. There was no licensed dissent and a sense of mission was allowed to replace a sense of history.

  This passage from The Rebel could have been written directly for Castro, who in the same year was defending himself in court: ‘In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career. Moderation, on the one hand, is nothing but pure tension. It smiles, no doubt, and our convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate apocalypses, despise it. But its smile shines brightly at the climax of an interminable effort.’ It is a reminder that politics is hard work and that there is no short cut. There is no need, no matter what the injustice on display, to suppose that there is a utopia over the rainbow which would be preferable. The utopia will turn sour, the revolution will go wrong when foolish old men, in the words of Camus, ‘forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the Eternal City, ordinary justice for an empty promised land’.

  These temptations can be avoided, but only if we restate, in the finest words that can be uttered on a public podium, the strength and beauty of the political virtues. Camus’s manifesto for the rebel is a description of the great service done for politics by all the progressive voices in this book, but it calls to mind, in this context, Havel and Wiesel in particular: ‘we all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.’ It has been done before, triumphantly and resoundingly, as the rhetoric in this book has shown, and it will need to be done again, and then again. The effort is interminable but it can be done. It must be done.

  At the conclusion of the Grand Inquisitor’s long speech Christ, who has been silent throughout, kisses him gently on the lips. The Inquisitor then releases Christ into the Seville streets and implores him never to return. The implication at the end of Ivan’s long speech is that freedom is still out there somewhere. It need not be entirely smothered by the power of authority. As Elie Wiesel says in his final words, there is, even amidst profound fear, the presence of extraordinary hope. That hope we give the name of politics.

  EPILOGUE

  WHEN THEY GO LOW, WE GO HIGH

  Barack Obama may be the best male speaker in living memory and the second-best speaker in his own family. At the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia in 2016, Michelle Obama found a resonant phrase to summarise the responsibility of the liberal democracies in their battle against populism: When they go low, we go high.

  Obama’s speech was a reflection on eight years as First Lady and an endorsement, forlorn as it turned out, of Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States. It was, at least on the surface, an address of beautiful anxiety about the fame, in the flashbulbs and footlights of public life, that she and her husband the president had imposed on their daughters: ‘I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just seven and ten years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those men with guns. And with all their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, “What have we done?”’

  The argument turned on the public versus the private, a serious question for the American republic, a serious question for any democratic republic. The distinction comes from John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government locates legitimate authority in the consent of the governed. Government gives public security so that people can pursue their private concerns. This distinction is a foundation stone of liberal democracies. Dystopias like Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty
-Four and Zamyatin’s We are frightening precisely because they erase the border between public and private. For Winston Smith there is no privacy. Big Brother is always watching.

  Obama’s speech is a claim that a voracious popular appetite for publicity is a threat to political life. The reach of social media platforms will produce, if we are not careful to insist on a separation, a panopticon in which everything is visible. The result would not be perfect transparency. It would be an intolerable intrusion in which, as Obama said, Hillary Clinton, a secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president, was subjected to a barrage of criticism about her appearance. Obama emphasised, by relaying her advice to her daughters, that the culture of modern politics has become trivially aggressive: ‘How we urged them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.’

  The height to which she was asking people to raise themselves was the summit that is reached by politics. The question at hand, said Obama, is the issue of all republics: ‘who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives’. She spoke of the capacity of politics, pointed in the right direction, to be the champion for every child who needs it: ‘kids who take the long way to school to avoid the gangs. Kids who wonder how they will ever afford college. Kids whose parents don’t speak a word of English, but dream of a better life’. This is the use of public authority to procure a better life in common. Obama’s speech was much more than an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. It was an endorsement of politics: ‘The presidency is about one thing and one thing only. It is about leaving something better for our kids.’

  The echo of Martin Luther King is audible in Obama’s conclusion. Her words call to mind, surely deliberately, King’s extraordinary image of the little black boy and the little white boy joining hands, and his moving demand that his children be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. It is a historic event that, in the city where segregation in the federal government was introduced, to his shame, by Woodrow Wilson in 1913, the Obama family spent eight years in the White House. Michelle Obama’s conclusion is the very story of political progress: ‘That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful intelligent black young women, play with the dog on the White House lawn.’

  The Shining City on a Hill

  This history of rhetoric has many important locations. It starts in Athens and develops in Rome. War is defined and made noble in speeches in London. The story of progress is told in Manchester and infamy of various kinds has been either fashioned or resisted in Berlin. The original American capital of Philadelphia, where Michelle Obama gave her remarkable speech, was where the words that brought America into being were uttered, and not far away, at Gettysburg, was where the popular republic was defined. But the most important city in the story of rhetoric is the one that Obama was speaking of: Washington DC. This was the city where, on 14 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was one of the five speakers in this book to be assassinated – Cicero, Robespierre, Kennedy and King are the others. More happily, this was where Thomas Jefferson called for equal and exact justice for all men, Woodrow Wilson set out his vision of international cooperation in a League of Nations and John F. Kennedy made his plea for citizens to do what they could for America. It was the place that heard Martin Luther King’s dream, Elie Wiesel’s warning of the perils of indifference and Barack Obama’s expression of hope.

  The shining city on a hill has become the staple metaphor of political rhetoric, although the original reference was to a city in the abstract. In 1630, an English lawyer of ardently puritan beliefs called John Winthrop gave a speech with the title ‘The Model of Christian Charity’. We cannot be sure whether Winthrop spoke in the dock at Southampton before boarding the Arbella to sail to the New World, whether he composed and delivered the speech on board, or whether he waited until his arrival in America, where he was to take up the position of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Wherever the location, the speech’s influence has earned Winthrop the title of the forgotten founding father of the American republic. That title is owed to one resonant phrase: ‘We shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.’

  Winthrop’s speech is a scripture of religious devotion. It is a call for brotherly affection and community identification as shared witnesses to the truth of God. There is, though, a secular meaning that can be extended to Winthrop’s ambition for his new settlement: ‘always having before our eyes … our community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace’. The cost of falling short, he advised, was that ‘we shall be made a story and a byword through the world …’ None of this would have won Winthrop’s speech a place in the anthology of rhetoric were it not for his borrowing from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, from the gospel of Matthew 5:14, which reads: ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.’

  The phrase entered the modern political lexicon when John F. Kennedy gave a speech of that name to the General Court of Massachusetts on 9 January 1961. ‘We must always consider’, he declared, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill – the eyes of all people are upon us.’ It was Ronald Reagan, though, who made it a commonplace. Reagan used Winthrop’s famous biblical line constantly on the campaign trail. He included it in at least two dozen speeches as president, most notably his address on the eve of the 1980 election, ‘A Vision for America’, which refers to the city on the hill, aglow with the light of human freedom. Since then it has been a standard metaphor for the speaker seeking to depict the republic as the paragon of democracy. Barack Obama regularly invoked the city, by now almost always shining. In Reagan’s farewell address to the nation on 11 January 1989, he said:

  I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

  The original city on a hill, where this story of democracy and rhetoric began, was Athens. The low hill north-west of the Acropolis is known as the Areopagus. It had been the meeting point for the earliest council of ancient Athens. In 355 BC Isocrates, one of the most influential Greek rhetoricians of his day, wrote a speech in which he argued for the return of power to the Council of Areopagus. Isocrates never intended to deliver the speech. It was written and published in rhetorical form, a common practice at the time. In 1644 John Milton borrowed the idea to publish his ‘Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing’, which he addressed to Parliament in defiance of the licensing regime which had been introduced to stop the spread of anti-royalist propaganda. It is the finest expression of the importance of free expression in the English language. It is known as the Areopagitica.

  Milton’s written speech was a broadside against government censorship of the free flow of ideas. He railed against the need for a state imprimatur, as government inspectors could never, he argued, attain the full knowledge required to do a tolerable job. But his main case was a passionate defence of free expression: ‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but
he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.’ It is through the exchange of ideas, says Milton, that men acquire character and arrive at the truth: ‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’

  The shining city on the hill is a dream of how politics might be. As John Winthrop warned, human beings are liable always to fall short. There have been plenty of examples in this book of democracies falling short and of the stuttering way they make progress. The liberal democracies remain, though, the world’s most extraordinary hope. The city on the hill is the place where the hope of utopia is embodied. It is here in the democratic republic that the political virtues can be protected, where men and women are free to define their political community. Those virtues, as John Milton argued, cannot be commanded by edict. They must derive from liberty, ‘the nurse of all wits’, and above all from the freedom that, in Areopagatica, Milton demanded: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’