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My Own Rotten Borough
Success. After all these years of voting in every election, however minor, I have finally achieved my life-long ambition of being voter #1. The election this time was the party primary elections held in New Jersey on Tuesday. Even voting as late as 8:00 AM, I was the first person to vote in the Republican primary in my ward. I would not have been completely surprised if I had voted at 7:00 PM and still been the first Republican.
The great issue of the day was the selection of candidates for the gubernatorial election in November. Both of the major Republican candidates, Chris Christie and Steve Lonegan, were statesmen of the caliber who have done so much to put the Republican Party nationally where it is today. I voted for Lonegan, who at least had the merit of not being the candidate of the infernal New Jersey Republican machine.
He lost. Incumbent Governor Jon Corzine is about as popular as jury duty, but he is still likely to beat Christie in November. Several persons in addition to me will vote in that election, however, so it’s hard to say.
* * *
President Obama is moving up and down the world, I see, and back and forth in it. Though everything the president says is of incalculable fascination, I was particularly struck by this recent comment which he made in connection with his current trip to the Middle East:
”The danger I think is when the United States or any country thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture," the president told the [BBC].
But he stressed: "Democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion -- those are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries, but rather what I believe to be universal principles that they can embrace and affirm as part of their national identity.”
The president no doubt meant “foisted” rather than “hoisted,” though the latter would suggests an intriguing metaphorical image. In any case, we may usefully compare these remarks with this snippet from President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address:
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
The assumption behind both remarks is essentially Kantian: the only really acceptable world is a world of liberal republics. The difference is the first remark states a principle that allows for no contradiction, while the second remark proposes a project that the speaker expects to be disputed.
It rarely pays to emphasize the discontinuities in American politics.
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Continuity is little apparent to Mark Steyn, however, as we see in an essay-review, The State Despotic:
Paul A. Rahe’s new book on the subject is called Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, which nicely captures how soothing and beguiling the process is...Today, the animating principles of the American idea are entirely absent from public discourse. To the new Administration, American exceptionalism means an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending.
Strong words, but not really true. As we saw above, there is not much difference between President Obama and his predecessor on key features of the American project, except that President Bush understood that it was American and his successor believes it to be the atmosphere. What has changed lately, perhaps, is a relaxation of the Master-Slave dialectic as it has operated in American history.
Readers will recall that this dialectic refers to the supposed long-term interaction of superiors and subordinates in such a way that superiors tend to raise the status of subordinates in order that the subordinates’ esteem night be worth having, while subordinates seek to raise their status so that they no longer suffer from the disabilities of subordination. The strong form of this Hegelian notion, as it was reformulated by Kojčve and disputed by Strauss, is not a very good model of history: it is not the case that history tends toward the complete equality of all classes of persons in all respects. However, it is true that history tend to erase historical accidents. That is why irregular verbs tend toward regularity over time, for instance, and why the bewildering variety of types of legal claims in English jurisprudence eventually collapsed into the two great categories of tort and contract. It also explains in part why classes of citizenship and differing levels of personal freedom have gradually tended to be abolished or minimized.
The great engine of equalization in Anglo-American history was not class conflict, or a mania for rationalization, but crime control. If I may quote my review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Demoralization of Society:
If you need an example of a society in a state of moral and social collapse, you might do worse than to study England in the second half of the eighteenth century. Cities were growing in an almost unregulated fashion as the impoverished peasantry were driven off the land. The capital was intermittently in the hands of a mob bent on revolution. Crime was so common that the hundreds of capital offenses on the books were no longer considered sufficient deterrent, so the transportation of criminals to Australia was begun. The national government was corrupt to a degree that would have embarrassed Boss Tweed. Parliament was the tool of aristocratic factions. The aristocracy itself was violent, promiscuous and ruthless. The Church of England, though blessed with a few great apologists, served mostly as a source of undemanding careers for less gifted younger sons. The country was obviously in a chaotic condition, but its rulers had no plans to put it back in order, or even any clear idea of what was wrong. Though hardly unprejudiced observers, the American Founding Fathers tended to assume that the British Empire was about to go the way of the later Roman Empire.
It was not the rulers of Britain who saved the nation, but the pious middle class. Led most famously by John Wesley and his Methodists, the English evangelicals and nonconformists (i.e., people belonging to non-Anglican protestant churches) began a program of moral reform that, within a century, had transformed society almost as much as technology had transformed the economy. It was a moral revival. Its mechanism was the dissemination of virtues in churches, in schools, and, where applicable, whenever the state met the citizenry. The revival was a long march through all the institutions of the nation. It took four generations, and it was one of the most successful social enterprises in the history of the world.
In the 19th century this enterprise was at least as active in the United State as it was in Great Britain. Its central features were universal education and the promotion of the nuclear family. The latter, though always an ideal, was so honored in the breach in 18th-century Britain that most people may never have been married in a way that the state felt obliged to take notice of. As is the case today, improvised family structure tended to correlate very strongly with poverty, and with crime, and with low productivity.
Public authorities set their face to combat ignorance, poverty, and irregular personal behavior not so much from compassion as in the interests of public order. Almost as an afterthought, this created a social trajectory away from caste and class and toward uniformity: of income, folkways, and education; and even of ethnicity, to the extent that it facilitated miscegenation and discouraged immigration. The process continued into the 20th century, where it incarnated first as an aspect of the Progressive Movement and then, as Douthat & Salam have reminded us, as central feature of the New Deal.
For better or worse, the Victorian Reform had been remarkably successful by about 1950. The remarkable thing about today is the precipitous retreat from that accomplishment, and not an eclipse of the splendor of the Founders.
There are several ways to understand to understand the gay marriage campaign, but the most illuminating may be the recognition that upper class Americans no longer care to try to impose their own folkways on the rest of society. The old correlations still hold; the higher up the income scale people are, the more likely they are to have family structures close the historical ideal. The ancestors of these people fought to universalize their own ways of living, and especially of raising children, because they feared the formation of castes below them they would be incapable of democracy but prone to criminal activity. Today’s elites are no longer troubled by the prospect of permanent immiserated castes congealing lower on the social ladder. The attitude is of a piece with the nearly bipartisan political-class attitude toward open borders. When George Friedman recently endorsed a future with a permanent alien proletariat, he was simply repeating commonplaces among policy makers. For the first time since the Civil War, caste has its its advocates.
This is the objective meaning of diversity. Hegel would not have been amused.
* * *
The matter is important for several reasons, not the least of which is that alteration in the content of "American democracy" has insufficiently appreciated implications for the effectiveness of American foreign policy. Certainly one might argue that the American brand is no longer without possible rivals:
The Communist Party, which has long regarded Confucius as a feudal thinker, has made a flip-flop, tacitly approving a state comeback for Confucianism, and even promoting it as a key aspect of an alternative political model for China.
"Confucianism has quietly come back," said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, "and the communist leadership has been exploiting it to help fill the ideological vacuum and improve morality. It is a low-key revival, but it suits their needs to find a new cohesive force at a time when Marxism is dead but democracy is absent."
The point has been broached in this space before, chiefly in the entry A Culture Worth Dying For. Principles of government like due process of law and the freedom of the press really are intuitively attractive, in much the way that President Obama supposes. For most of America’s history, even its political controversies have been attractive; that was true during the civil rights movement and even as late as the Reagan deregulatory program. Today the controversies have less universal appeal (such as gun rights) or are globally repellant (such as the marriage issue) or are just slightly crackers (like the right to be free of health insurance).
The beginning of wisdom is the recognition that the United States has an image problem, and it’s not the one the president imagines he is fixing.
