The city of Washington that Jefferson fled in 1809 has, in our time, become an agency of dependency. So a sensible first step would be to restore the wrecked equilibrium of our federal system. From Jefferson’s era until well into this century, political debate in Washington about what Washington should do about this or that usually began with examination of the question of whether Washington should do anything—whether the federal government was constitutionally entitled to act. Some people will say that the constitutional question is firmly closed. They will say that for many decades now the Constitution has been consistently construed to emancipate the federal government from any serious circumscription of its latitude for action. That is true. By construing the Constitution in a way that enables and encourages the federal government to act everywhere, we have taught Americans to think that it is natural and right for the federal government to take custody of every problem, to organize the provision of every need, and to satisfy every want.
This author knows a stark fact when he sees one; he can face facts of constitutional construction even when he regrets them. So what now needs to be developed is not a constitutional but a prudential inhibition on the central government. After all, it is not as though the federal government today has surpluses of energy, intelligence, and money, or is conspicuously successful at its undertakings. So it would be an act of fidelity to the Founders to revive the idea of states’ rights—and states’ responsibilities. Some people wince when you hear the phrase “states’ rights.” But consider a story.
Shelby Foote, in his history of the Civil War, recounts an episode concerning a Virginian, General George Thomas, who served in the Union Army. Immediately after the bloody assault on Missionary Ridge in the battle of Chattanooga, Thomas discerned an attractive spot for a military cemetery and put a detail to work on the project. The chaplain in charge asked Thomas if the dead were to be buried in plots assigned to the states their units represented, as was done at Gettysburg, where Lincoln had briefly spoken at a cemetery dedication a few weeks earlier. General Thomas lowered his head in thought, then shook it decisively. Making a tumbling gesture with both hands, he said, “No, no; mix ’em up. I’m tired of states’ rights.”49
Americans old enough to remember America’s great domestic conflicts over race relations in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s may well say, as Thomas did, that they want to hear no more about states’ rights. But it is well to remember that an idea should not be discredited merely by the fact that it has been put to ignoble uses. It is also well to remember that in 1800, when the nation still had not spilled westward over the Alleghenies, Jefferson wrote: “Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government.”50 So let us send more political power back to the state and local levels. Even more important, let us move politics as much as possible to the periphery of American life, where Jefferson wanted it. To do so we will have to reverse powerful tendencies in modern history, tendencies that tend to recur. The mind of the West has long been haunted by the fear that history is, or will be if we are not careful, cyclical. The fear is that powerful forces, even the very logic of social development, propels societies into cycles of decay and—if society is resourceful and lucky—regeneration. Decay is more probable than regeneration. Although America’s Founders were firm believers that history could be linear, they knew that progress was not inevitable. Just as there can be a “cultural contradiction of capitalism,” there can be a political contradiction of democracy: The very responsiveness of democratic government to the popular will can corrupt the popular will. The more that government tries to satisfy the appetites of particular groups, the more group appetites are inflamed, and the more groups organize to make their demands felt. So the very virtues that democracy presupposes—individualism, self-restraint, and self-reliance—are subverted, over time, by the very responsiveness of democratic government.
We have not been properly mindful of warnings about the tendency of government to swell. Or about the tendency of the central government in a federal system to absorb other governments’ responsibilities. Or about the tendency of politics to permeate life and constrict the private sphere of life. These tendencies are, however, only tendencies, not inevitabilities. Americans are a relentlessly forward-looking people, but they can yet learn to live looking back to the Founders for guidance.
After the Founders passed from the scene, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day, the voices of various “realists” gravely warned that because society’s problems were more daunting than ever, old principles must yield to new realities. Hawthorne, however, kept his head. It was time, he said, to consult “those respectable old blockheads who still…kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.”51 All of America’s yesterdays recede with the speed of the nation’s pell-mell plunge into the future. The nation’s oldest tradition is its eager embrace of the new, so a young man from St. Louis, unenthralled by this feature of democratic culture, went to England in search of a more palpable past. T. S. Eliot spoke not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. A useable past will not be present, however, unless conservatives make it so. Their challenge is to make the Founders constantly consulted as the nation approaches its quarter-millennium mark. Thoughtful Americans who revisit the great arguments of their nation’s political tradition will be rewarded by a richer sense of their home. The man from St. Louis understood at least this:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.52
Americans cannot regain what they do not recognize that they have lost, which is the Founders’ exhilarating sense that social possibilities can continue to expand into the openness and ferment of the natural rights Republic that came close to being extinguished on a field near Princeton.
In 1913, three years after Woodrow Wilson left the president’s room in Nassau Hall, and while he was occupying the White House Oval Room, as it was then called, a seventeen-year-old from the upper Middle West arrived at Princeton. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald would publish The Great Gatsby, which is a snapshot of the 1920s, but much more than that. It is suffused with melancholy and regret. These are discordant with the supposed American penchant for optimism and cheerful ignorance of life’s tragic dimensions. Among the most famous paragraphs in American literature, those that conclude the novel convey chagrin. Standing on a lawn on the shore of Long Island Sound, looking across the water toward East Egg, the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, imagined Dutch sailors seeing the “fresh, green breast of the new world” at a moment when “man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent…face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder”:
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.… And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.53
What was this “last and greatest of all human dreams”?54 Fitzgerald’s answer is implicit in two words: The pure “presence” of this continent that the first European visitors experienced as “fresh,” when it had been green with now long-vanished trees. The dream was of a fresh start of a sort hitherto unimaginable—of an uncircumscribed future that Americans would be uniquely free to shape by choices not constrained by the viscosity of history. So the last and greate
st dream was nothing less than perfect freedom, a state of nature on a continent that seemed to be a blank canvas on which to work.
It is tempting, and not quite wrong, to think of America’s Founding as a transitory enchanted moment. Yes, of course, we know—historians, intent on “unmasking this” and “desacralize” that, delight in telling us so—that the Revolutionary War was America’s first civil war, with all the savagery that usually attends protracted fratricide. The military battles during the eight years from Lexington and Concord, Trenton and Princeton, through Yorktown were remarkably few and relatively small: Just twenty-three soldiers on the American side and 156 on the British side died at Yorktown. Away from the battlefields, however, there was a maelstrom of violence, frequently opportunistic and often sadistic. Nevertheless, the American Founding was a luminous moment, a hinge on which world history turned, because of the ideas it affirmed and then translated into constitutional institutions and processes.
The fact that the nation had a uniquely inspiriting creation has become dispiriting. The past has become a reproach, judging the present for its departure from the Founders’ blended patrimony of philosophy and prudence. So the question now is: Can we get back, not to the conditions in which we started, but to the premises with which we started? Note Fitzgerald’s plural pronoun in the paragraph above: It is “we” who beat on, in boats—plural. Fitzgerald’s summation pertains, surely, not just to the individual characters in his novel but to our national project. We cannot escape the challenge of living by the exacting principles of our Founding, so we should beat on, boats against many modern currents, borne back ceaselessly toward a still-useable past.
Acknowledgments
Without Sarah Walton, the organizer of my office and my energies, this book could not have come about. Jessica Cruzan and Elayne Allen, the most recent in a long line of my assistants, continued their high standards of diligence and accuracy in helping the preparation of this book. In turning a manuscript into a book, Paul Whitlatch and the other superb professionals at Hachette did what Joe DiMaggio did, making the difficult look easy. One suspects that they have done this before.
What I have written is the distilled wisdom, as I understand this, that I have acquired from half a century in Washington, my home, which I love. So I should acknowledge the enjoyment that I have had there. As readers of this book will detect from my numerous references to him, having Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a friend was an instructive privilege. He served his country brilliantly and exuberantly, having a good time all the way, demonstrating that debating about the proper trajectory of our splendid nation is a high calling and tremendous fun. To him and the many good men and women of American governance, I gratefully acknowledge the pleasure of their company and the value of their example.
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