What ruins individuals and nations are overdeveloped appetites, which we stimulate by the illusion that mankind has escaped the constraints of scarcity. Government has nourished this illusion. It has tried to be all things to all people, or at least as many things to as many people as possible, in order to spur consumption of governmental goods and services, and to satisfy the most voracious interest groups. Progressives fault government as “unresponsive.” Actually, government today has a hair-trigger responsiveness to intense, organized interests. Conservatives claim that government is too strong and overbearing. Actually, government is fat but pathetically weak. It does not have the strength to say “no” to determined petitioners.
Until the late 1970s, conservatives argued, as Barry Goldwater did, that many government programs, although popular, must be opposed because they take an intolerable toll on the freedom and character of the people. But the “Reagan Revolution” rested on the premise that Goldwaterite opposition to government programs was politically futile. So conservatives would attack taxes rather than the programs they support. This was conservatives’ accommodation to the fact that scores of millions of Americans are ideologically, meaning rhetorically, conservative, but are behaviorally liberal. So conservatives would “starve the beast,” limiting government growth by depriving government of revenues. This was worse than futile because it taught the beast to feed on borrowing.
Modern government—spending more than it taxes, subsidizing and regulating and conferring countless other blessings—is a mighty engine for the stimulation of consumption. Every government benefit creates a constituency for expansion of the benefit, so the servile state inflames more appetites than it slakes. It has fostered a perverse entrepreneurship, the manipulation of government—public power—for private purposes. It has eroded society’s disciplining sense of the true cost of things. This has accelerated what Moynihan called “the leakage of reality from American life.”31 The era of the servile state began during the last American experience of real scarcity. It began in 1933, when the governor of the then most populous state became president and altered the relationship between the citizen and the federal government. Today citizens receive more than ever from government, and government receives less respect than ever from them.
And one suspects that the citizens do not respect themselves as citizens. They must know, in moments of clarity, that they are in the grip of cognitive dissonance. They hold, with equal fervor, flatly incompatible convictions. They talk as Jefferson did in his first inaugural address: “wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”32 But Americans who talk like Jeffersonians vote for modern-day Hamiltonians, for those who will protect, and steadily endorse, a government that is omnipresent and omniprovident. The point of elections is to ensure that government has what Madison in Federalist 51 called a “dependence on the people.”33 The preoccupation of modern government, however, is to make more and more people, in more and more ways, dependent on the government. Tocqueville anticipated with foreboding that Americans would come to terms with comfortable dependency: “They console themselves for being under schoolmasters by thinking that they have chosen them themselves.… Under this system the citizens quit their state of dependence just long enough to choose their masters and then fall back into it.”34 In today’s context, conservatives need a sobering immersion in the realism of James Madison.
Irving Kristol’s 1944 description of E. M. Forster’s “moral realism” also describes the Madisonian and the conservative sensibility: “Though dissatisfied, of course, with the ways of men, it foresees no new virtues, but, at best, a healthier distribution of the old. It is non-eschatological, skeptical of proposed revisions of man’s nature, interested in human beings as it finds them, content with the possibilities and limitations that are always with us.”35 Notice the combination of dissatisfaction and contentment. The ability to hold those attributes in some sort of equilibrium is a mark of a mature mind. A conservative sensibility knows that the possibilities of politics, although limited, are not negligible. And it knows that although all the virtues are already known, a healthier distribution of them is a worthy and demanding project. The Founders bequeathed to us a political order founded on realism about human attributes, beginning with this truth: In human beings, interestedness is a given, but virtue must be acquired. Contemporary conservatism is resoundingly right when it argues that government itself has become inimical to the virtues essential for responsible self-government. Government has become inimical because it fosters both dependency and uncivic aggressiveness in attempting to bend public institutions to private factional advantage.
Do conservatives have the steely resolve required to tell the country the hard truth about how radically it has gone wrong in its thinking about, and expectations of, government? Today, conservatism senses, and is struggling to act on, the fact that human beings are biological facts, but citizens suited to self-government are social artifacts. Conservatism is not yet, however, sufficiently clear-sighted about how our constitutional order is supposed to contribute to the creation of such artifacts. And conservatism is not alert to the way its own tenets can complicate the creation of virtuous citizens. Let us be clear about what conservatism is not saying about citizens as social artifacts. Conservatives are implacably hostile to the idea that human nature has a history. The hostility is implacable because that idea is subversive of government based on respect for natural rights. If human nature has a history, then there really is no such thing as human nature, understood as something the essence of which is unchanging. The idea that human nature has a history—that human beings have only a malleable nature shaped by their time and place—has animated modern tyrannies. It has done so because people susceptible to that idea are also susceptible to the idea that self-government is a chimera—an impossibility—because the self is a fiction or, at best, a mere reflection of the individual’s social setting. To say that human nature is plastic is to open the way to governments that regard the creation of new, improved forms of humanity as the highest government project. Such governments are apt to unleash “consciousness-raisers” who use political power to extirpate “false consciousness.” Such people insist that, until proper consciousness is made universal, any consent necessarily arises from false consciousness and, hence, is not worth seeking or respecting.
Conservatives acknowledge that individuals are not entirely autonomous and unconditioned, but warn that people who believe there is no human nature must believe that no rights are natural rights. If there is no human nature, then rights are just appetites cloaked in “rights talk” in order to acquire momentum for respect. Conservatism seeks equilibrium, arguing that nature has political claims and that nurturing has a political role. Nature’s political claims rise from this fact: The idea of human nature involves the idea of essential human qualities that are conducive to excellence and happiness. And the task of political nurturing takes its bearings from that idea of excellence. Wise conservatives take that task seriously. The Founders understood that popular government would be an exercise in continuing education; self-government must be a formative experience, for better or worse. They thought that popular government, properly constituted, would be good for our souls. Today, however, conservatives correctly argue that our government has become a deforming force, corrupting the country’s character. They say government has become a bland Leviathan, confirming Tocqueville’s warning that government can “degrade men without tormenting them.”36
In his second inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said our “system has never failed us, but for a time, we failed the system. We asked things of government that government was not equipped to give.”37 Perhaps, however, the system failed us by allowing us, even prompting us, t
o become, over time, a people with unreasonable expectations and importuning desires. The more educated a nation becomes, the wealthier it is apt to become. The wealthier it becomes, the more benefits its government can dispense. The wealthier citizens become, the more they pay in taxes and the more benefits they expect from government. So, although prosperity makes people confident and assertive and gives them the means to be self-sufficient, it is not conducive to small government. Government grows because of the bargaining process among interest groups, none of which has an incentive to opt for unilateral disarmament in the scramble for benefits from government action. Jonathan Rauch believes that both liberals and conservatives have become unreasonably dyspeptic about government because they are all “governmentalists,” in the sense that they define themselves—their passions, their stances toward life—“in relation to government”: “Liberals hunt for a governmental solution for every problem; conservatives hunt for a governmental cause for every problem.”38
Societies of all sorts are always replete with problems, and governments, even the best of them, are always characterized by inefficiencies and transaction costs in trying to cope with problems. This is because governments—especially the best of them, democracies—are not supposed to be efficient. They are supposed to be more or less prudent, more often than not, and generally just and safe. These are modest goals and attributes that do not cause pulses to race. But surely the American nation could stand to have a steadier, slower pulse rate than it recently has had.
Today, saturation journalism, reporting and commenting on the politicization of almost everything, has society, or at least a conspicuous and articulate portion of it, at a constant boil. But politics matters, now more than ever, because the problem of confining politics to a proper sphere is a political problem and arguably the most important project for politics. Addressing a labor audience during the first of his four Senate campaigns, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said with a mixture of weariness and exasperation, “Look, there’s this particular fringe, and their one fundamental problem is they simply never accepted the New Deal.” Moynihan added: “Didn’t Franklin Roosevelt settle this issue once and for all? I mean, do we really have to go over it again?”39 To his plaintive question, the answer was, and is: Yes and no. Roosevelt—with the subsequent help of the man whose political apprenticeship was as a New Deal functionary, Lyndon Johnson—did indeed extinguish the argument that the federal government’s powers are, as Madison insisted, “few and defined.”40 But Americans are less than pleased with the performance and trajectory of this government.
In 1964, Americans emphatically rejected the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who carried just six states while warning voters: “A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.”41 In that year, 77 percent of Americans said that they trusted the federal government to do the right thing “just about always” or “most of the time.” In 2017, a Pew Research Center poll found that just 20 percent felt that way. It is, surely, not a mere coincidence that this hemorrhaging of trust coincided with “the leaking of reality” from American life. The decline of trust occurred during a half century in which the government became markedly bigger as it expanded its attempts to ameliorate society’s imperfections with ever more ambitious programs of distributive justice. On January 19, 1997, the day before the inauguration of President Bill Clinton for a second term and a year after he had proclaimed in a State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over,” a Washington Post report of an interview with Clinton carried this headline: “Clinton Sees End of Fight over Government’s Role.”42 That ending certainly would be momentous news: An argument at least as old as Plato’s Republic was coming to an end. Of course the argument was not, is not, and never will end. It is a hardy perennial, varying in intensity, and just now it is notably intense. This is why Moynihan was so fond of using William Butler Yeats to remind his fellow Democrats and progressives not to exaggerate the power of politics to transform life:
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man:
Ireland shall get her freedom
and you will still break stone.43
Which is to say: Regimes are important, but not all-important. “This,” said Moynihan, “is the knowledge life gives us, and it is indispensable to politics. And yet how alien to it.”44 Alien because politics often offers intoxicating promises of sweeping transformations, and because, especially in democracies, politics tends to be an ongoing auction whereby parties bid for the allegiances of majorities.
Political intoxication is a constant susceptibility in a nation that vibrated like a tuning fork when struck by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s story still resonates in America’s heart because it is about freedom understood in a distinctively American way, as the absence of social restraints, and obedience to the promptings of a pure heart. Mark Twain, like Tocqueville, feared the invisible shackles of social conformity almost as much as he feared oppressive institutions. And Huck? He did not even take to new clothes, which made him “feel all cramped up.” And he took to the river when he found out “how dismal regular and decent the widow was” who was bent on “civilizing” him.45 Twain’s novel about this shrewd boy is for grown-ups but it has a childish notion at its core. The notion is that (in today’s jargon) “authenticity” and “self-realization” are achieved outside of, or against, society, not through it. Huck is an “alienated” fourteen-year-old. The American idea of freedom is Huck going down the Mississippi or Thoreau going up the Merrimack. To be free is to be footloose in a pathless wilderness, unbounded by geography or history, utterly unconstrained by social bonds. But why must we speak of “bonds” in a way that suggests ropes biting into wrists? Human beings are social animals whose capacities, including the capacity for virtue, can be realized only in a social setting, not isolated on a raft borne ceaselessly past communities where individuals acquire only burdens and bad consciences and cramping clothes.
By 1990, one century after the US Census Bureau declared the frontier closed, half of all Americans lived in metropolitan areas—thirty-nine of them—with populations of one million or more. We had passed a milestone on a journey from what we were once proud of being to what we never wanted to be. The superintendent of the 1890 Census reported, “The unsettled areas have been so broken by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”46 Time was, geography was America’s destiny. The abundance of Western lands explained the nation’s development, moral as well as material. It shaped our democratic values of egalitarianism, individualism, pleasure in physical mobility, confidence in social mobility, and faith in the possibility of rebirth through a fresh start out yonder, over the next mountain range. In short, it nourished optimism. But it was a peculiar optimism because it made the idea of progress problematic: If the “unspoiled”—by population—frontier was so fine, what was progress supposed to be?
Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis was that the pedigree of our values, character, and institutions ran not east across the Atlantic but west across the Alleghenies and then the wide Missouri. His thesis implied American exceptionalism, a uniqueness and exemption from many of the world’s woes and vices. It also implied, however, that Americanism was unexportable. But in the 1890s American energy leaped outward in “the splendid little war” with Spain that presaged America’s entry into world history. Turner’s theory called into question the Jeffersonian tradition, whose namesake said that government could be virtuous only “as long as there shall be vacant lands.”47 So what would become of us now, our saving spaces being exhausted? Turner said, “In the spirit of the pioneer’s ‘house raising’”—voluntary cooperation in the private realm—“lies the salvation of the Republic.”48 What would become of an America in which pioneering was a thing of the past?
Prior to the American Founding, the pedigree of republican institutions had been traced back to ancient ideas. But if American republicanism is actually ground
ed on the ground, in the vastness of the American land, the “geographical” understanding of American history makes the American future problematic. Early in the twentieth century, many thoughtful Americans—Herbert Croly for one; Walter Lippmann for another—thought individualism was no longer an answer to American problems, but rather had become a problem. This problem, they thought, had two facets. One was the weakness of government, so the challenge was to strengthen the state in order to enable it to tame the surging energies of industrialism. The problem was to weaken individualism so that a spirit of community could flourish. For these ends, the state has been expanding for more than a century.
Conservatives’ task is to build a society that nurtures individuals to self-sufficiency, including independence from politics. Now more than ever conservatives need to be focused on this nurturing because the related forces of urbanization and statism are exerting a powerful pull toward an enervating dependency. It is a dependency on large economic entities, and on government, for security. Ultimately, it is dependency on—and addiction to—security as the highest aim of life. This addiction produces, over time, a timid, fearful debased people erecting barriers against a competitive world and aggressively asserting an entitlement mentality, including an entitlement to government protection against uncertainty. This entitlement exacts a steep moral cost. Government that acknowledges such an entitlement becomes a bland Leviathan, administering a soft, kindly, but ultimately corrupting statism of benighted benevolence.
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