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American Democracy Core Documents Thomas Paine Madison, Hamilton, Jay: Patrick Henry, et.al. Thomas Jefferson: De Tocqueville: Constitutional Amendments
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VALUES AND POLITICS
We recognize that politicians deal with serious problems, but if we believe that the problems are real and that the politician is addressing them sincerely, we say that he is not engaging in "politics." We reserve the term "politics" for problems and policies that are created, in whole or in part, with an eye to electoral advantage. "Nixon's trip to China," one major newspaper told us, "was, in large measure, political." I would have thought that it was all political; at least, I hoped that Nixon did not go just to see the sights. But that story, like another which described President Carter as handling Middle Eastern problems with an "eye to politics," reduced
politics to a concern for one's standing with the electorate. Politics, in this view, amounts to the use of public problems to satisfy private desires, especially the wish to be noticed and admired.
Consequently, politics is necessarily two-faced, even if politicians deceive themselves along with the public. It is also base, since it prostrates great concerns to petty ambitions. Given this image, politics
is tolerable only when confined to unimportant matters. If we wish to address serious problems in a serious way, we do not want them dealt with "politically." We want to refer them to Administrators are "experts," but we do see their skills as logically subordinate to those who make policy. At the highest level, we hope for great statesmen who are "above" politics, leaders who by moral strength transcend "political" things. When General Eisenhower returned to contest the Republican nomination in 1952, he was much applauded when he declared that if he became President, the only test of a public measure would be "is it good for America?" People admired this banal remark because they knew what Eisenhower meant. He was saying, "I will not ask whether a policy is Democratic or Republican. I will not ask whether it will help me win elections. I will transcend these political divisions and categories. I will be a leader above politics." In 1976, President Carter adroitly presented himself as both an expert administrator and a statesman. Repeatedly, he urged his The deprecation of politics and the desire to be rid of it are deeply rooted in American political culture. If we have lost politics, it is in large measure because we wanted to, not because politics was misplaced or stolen. If we are to recover politics, we need a different, truer, and more positive understanding of politics and political life. In the early history of the Republic, such an idea coexisted, uneasily, with the view which prevails today. "I am not a politician." Andrew Jackson once declared, "but if I were I would be a New York politician." In denying his "political" vocation, Jackson was observing the proprieties. But his admiration for New York politicians is more puzzling. By the standards of the time, New York politicians were a seamy lot, ruled by the "Albany Regency," a political machine guided by Martin Van Buren, the "Little Magician" who was reputed to be the master of political chicanery. Jackson admired them because they were loyal to their friends. They had discipline. They were devoted to the cause of party. They were, in other words, not simply self-seeking; they were committed to something larger than themselves. Jackson intended to draw attention to this other kind of politics. He was telling Americans that he, Jackson, was not a politician in the conventional sense. But, he meant to say, I admire that other kind of politician who is concerned about and devoted to something larger than his private ambitions and desires. That implicit, inarticulate idea of politics is also planted deeply in American political culture. It derives from the very foundations of our political thought. Aristotle argued that politics is the effort of human beings, in common, to obtain the good life. We are drawn, Aristotle told us, by some notion of what we take to be the good life. We attempt to do what we believe will be good for us. Consequently, we are drawn to politics even if we do not recognize the attraction, because only in politics can we find the good life. Human beings, the great theorists of Greek antiquity observed, are political animals. The good life cannot be lived by an isolated individual, by separate families, villages or tribes. It requires political society in at least two ways. First, if we think only of material goods, the relative plenty and variety, we think of essential to a good life are the products of skilled labor and specialization. No individual could master so many skills. Moreover, without political society no individual could develop his or her unique talents. In the family or the village, it is impossible to specialize very much. In fact, it is impossible to get very far beyond a concern for survival. Hawthorne discovered that in a small, utopian community like Brooke Farm, one does not write much poetry. Planting potatoes takes up too much of one's time and energy. And it is because someone plants the potatoes that others can cultivate the fine arts. Individuality is a product, not an antecedent, of political society and is always dependent on the order of political life. Second, we need political society in a psychological as well as a material sense. We need to feel that we shape and make the choices that determine our lifes. We want self-governance, autonomia; we want to make laws for ourselves. Being self-ruled is not possible alone. We lack the strength to shape the alternatives which define our choice. Moreover, families, villages and tribes are limited by the parochiality of their vision if not by their physical weakness. For quite good reasons, the family, the village and the tribe tend to cling to the rule of custom. Human beings in the family are not free
agents. The family follows a set of givens, automatic rules without choice. That is the attraction of the family. The child born to a family does not want to think of his or her parents as having a
"choice" about caring for the child. It is scary enough being a child. The family and the tribal community are essential to basic security and survival. For that reason, they cannot be genuinely
self-governing. A family which discussed the "great issues" of family policy, debating questions like "Do parents have duties toward their children?," Self-governance requires a kind of society different from the family or the tribe, where the bond of citizen to citizen is more personal and is based more on the needs of the adult than the needs of the child. As one grows up, the shortcomings of the family become obvious. The family has to love you, but it does so because of your genes, not because of who you are. Compelled to love you, the family does not have to like you. Most of us have been visited by relatives who come knowing that we have to let them in, but who also want to be assured that we like them for themselves. Such visits are often a strain because it is likely that we do not like them for themselves, and our efforts to reassure them make our communications anxiously insincere. A political society, by contrast depends on relationships which are chosen. Civic loyalties are, in a broad sense, bonds of friendship. My ties to my fellow citizens are founded, however imperfectly, on my personality, not my genealogy. They derive from my thoughts, hopes and beliefs--from what I take the good life to be. That sort of personal bond dictates the attempt to make choices consciously and rationally, not by unconscious passion or the automatic rules of custom. In both cases, in relation to material goods and the division of labor or to the ideal of self-rule, individual freedom (and even the idea of individuality itself) is not possible without political society. To be alone is to be enslaved to grinding, miserable necessity; to live solely in the tribe or family is to be trapped by the impersonal categories of blood or custom. Individualism and privatism do not lead to individuality or to the development of one's skills and powers. Ouite the contrary, any genuine
individuality requires political life and public loyalty. It was in that sense that Aristotle meant his teaching that the polis, the city-state, is prior in the order of nature to the individual. Before there
can be fully human beings--and hence, any truly human individuals--there must be political societies. Outside these societies, there are no real human beings at all; there are only gods and beasts, and there are
not many gods in If, by contrast, I demand or use my civil liberty, I am not defending myself or my private good against the community. Civil liberty implies that I want to be part of the community; I want to inform and be informed; I want to influence the decisions which shape my life. Politics, then, to this older understanding, is a search for the good life. Individuality, in any human sense, is possible only in a political society. Hence, the common good has precedence over the individual and over the private good. This view of things points us to three aspects of politics that our contemporary speech tends to slight or ignore. The first is that politics involves a kind of rule. Each regime prescribes rulers: aristocracy asks for rule by the "best," just as democracy asks for rule by the people or by the many. The citizen is in some sense a ruler, and not only because he or she votes or has rights. If we are in a truly political society we will feel that we are rulers of people who matter, whose opinions count, and who share in the governing of others. No polity is ever perfectly self-governing. All political societies are limited by nature, which sets limits to all human ambitions, and by
foreign policy. Our ability to rule ourselves is dependent on what outsiders do. No one needs to be told, these days, that a great many of our choices in the United States are constrained by the Soviet Union or
various oil-producing states. That sense of being a ruler requires, traditional teaching told us, that political society be limited in size, because if we are to rule; we must participate in politics. We have to live in a world in which we matter, in which we are known by others and in which we know them, in which people care about us and in which our actions can affect decisions. In large societies, we do not all matter and only a small fraction of us can really participate. Political scientists sometimes refer to the
"Chairman's Problem" to illustrate the point. If you have In large societies, there is no third alternative. If we are to be rulers in any real sense, political society must be limited in size. We cannot hope for a universal political society because only a tiny fraction of humanity could be genuine citizens of a world state. Participation does not refer to activism alone. We can be citizens and rulers without giving a speech or holding an office. Obeying and listening are forms of ruIe if we decide to obey or elect to listen. Obedient, listening citizens make no small contribution to the common good. Perhaps the worst side of the large state is that it robs obedience of its dignity. Since the great majority of us are compelled to listen in any case, the large state deprives us of any real choice to do so. The great state makes the citizen who obeys rules, who decides that he or she respects the law, indistinguishable from the citizen who obeys only because he or she is too weak to do anything else. And I no longer listen so attentively in a society where I do not have any choice in the matter. In the nineteenth century, people were accustomed to gather in That kind of listening is barely remembered today. Taken out of the small community, the passive forms of citizenship and rule--obedience, law-abidingness, listening--lose their dignity and tend to attenuate. And with them goes much that is essential to sound public life. Second, the traditional understanding indicates that politics is a kind of knowing. Those who are to be political--and in a democracy, that includes the great mass of citizens--must be able to know everything that is essential to the making of political decisions. Our presumption today is that the great mass of citizens are not competent: political scientists often say so baldly, the polls show widespread misinformation, and few of us feel comfortable with the complexities of more than a few public issues. Citizens do not need to have mastered the details of a new bomb or ballistic missile, of course, to make good political decisions. But do American citizens know what they need to know? Among other things, citizens need to know their leaders well enough to distinguish real leaders from charlatans crooks or demagogues. We need to know who can be trusted, and we need to give our trust to those who merit it. In modern America, the knowledge of who can be trusted is hard to come by, and the gift of trust is rare indeed. Even Nixon fooled us, though almost no Americans really trusted him: even his enemies were shocked and surprised to discover how trivial, inept and shabby Nixon really was. Without trust, it is impossible to allow government to govern in any sensible way. The late Peter Odegard used to tell a story about the days when Franklin Roosevelt gave Britain fifty overage destroyers in return for a number of bases in the Caribbean. Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, was confronted by Rep. John Voorhis, who asked him, "Mr. Morgenthau, is it your opinion that the President can do this? Can he do this within the Constitution?" Morgenthau said he believed the President had acted Constitionally. Voorhis persisted: "Well, could he just give away the Navy?" Morgenthau answered, "He can, but won't You know, Mr Voorhis, the President could take off all his clothes and ride upside down on Pennsylvania Avenue, but he won't. You have to put your trust somewhere." Before Nixon became President, I told this story with more confidence. Can we trust our leaders enough these days? We are certainly aware that what we know is very limited indeed, confined for the most part to images derived from the mass media--and those images are only too likely to be carefully contrived. If Americans believed, in 1976, that Jimmy Carter would never lie to them, it was because they wanted to believe it, not because they knew Carter to be trustworthy. (Still less did they ask whether a President who would never lie to us would be worth trusting.) But the problems confronting us grow more complicated and more unpredictable, part of a world of bewildering, interconnected and rapid change. We must give our leaders discretion if we are to deal with that world. In fact, the need for trust increases when the possibility of confidence declines. Politics also depends on another kind of knowledge, the sense that we know our fellow citizens well enough to trust them, and particularly, to trust their judgment enough to allow them to rule when we are in the minority. The less we know about our fellows, the less possible it is to have confidence that we share basic moral standards, and the less willing we will be to trust the majority. We will, consequently, try to create obstacles to and restraints on majority rule which will tie us up when we are in the majority and are very likely to damage the common good. The liberal community, over the last dozen years, has helped create more and more barriers to the exercise of public power. Since liberals are,
on the whole, advocates of changes which depend on public power, this has been self-defeating. But the liberal course is understandable: liberals lack more than a peripheral trust in their fellow citizens
Consevatives, in their own peculiar ways, have even less trust. The traditional view of This is not much of a surprise. How could we learn to trust our fellow citizens, especially in a society as large as America? Confidence is the product of experience and of testing. We learn to trust one another when we have room for experimenting with trust, where we can take the risk that our opposite numbers will prove untrustworthy. We are going to make mistakes. Publics learn by trial and error; where they cannot afford to err, they will not make the trial, and where they do not try, they do not learn. This society, environed as it is by monstrous dangers and perils Finally, politics requires a kind of moral awareness. Politics requires that citizens prefer the common good to private goods. We must know, then, that our habits, our convenience, our interests and even our lives may have to be sacrificed for the public good. To refer to giving up one's life is dramatic, of course, but that sacrifice itself takes only a moment. It may be even more difficult to sacrifice one's habits and one's conveniences. To be told that we must conserve fuel, that we must buy smaller cars and use them less, that we must plan our travel more carefully and our lives with more forethought--all of these things, in an automobile-based society, will involve sacrifices and annoyances,not for a time only but for something close to a lifetime. We will not "unlearn" our habits in anything less. But that is what the common good requires. Indeed, the common good can require some very difficult things.What do you do, for example, if your children break the law? In the United States, we are private-regarding people; most of us would try to protect our children. We ought to know, however, that in a virtuous democracy, our choice would at least be ambiguous and probably, as citizens, we ought to prefer the law. Of course, the family is a difficult case, which is one of the reasons why Plato argued that the best state would eliminate the private family for rules, hoping to limit the unjust tendency of people to prefer their own children to more deserving others. The tension between family and law, however, illustrates how difficult it is to prefer the public to the private good. Politics and the common good are not a matter of feeling. Political society, probably more than any other human association, demands control and discipline of our most profound feelings. After all, our deepest feelings are related to our senses, and our senses are private and self-referential. We are limited by how far the eye can see, how far the hand can touch, and how far the ear can hear. We are at the center of a web of sensations whose hub is always "me" and not "you." We may talk about politics or the things we share; we can never feel things in common. At best, we have similar or complementary, but still private, feelings. We can never get closer to feeling than a sort of touching fingertips, an encounter at the border of things which only emphasizes that physically we are strangers. Commonality must be discovered through talking and teaching, through things that transcend sensation and feeling. Politics requires the governance of reason or of right opinion to set limits to the claims of private feeling. Devotion to the common good requires a capacity to govern ourselves, to rule our passions by public standards. As Aristotle remarked, learning how to be ruled is the prerequisite of learning how to rule. That need to govern one's self points, ultimately, to an even higher obedience which accepts that there are limits to what politics can do which are set by the nature of humankind and the world, and that human happiness depends on our allegience to the laws of nature. How might we try to recover politics in America? We would need a government which attempted to strengthen or create the local places in which politics can happen, those small communities in which we have a sense that we matter and in which we can rule. We can no longer afford a government which is indifferent to local community, and in the same sense we cannot afford a regime which is indifferent to religion. All of those institutions which made local communities powerful and meaningful in human life will require the support of government because, buffeted by massive forces, those institutions are no longer able to defend themselves. The Framers assumed that local communities and institutions would furnish the foundation of government. That assumption does not fit our world. Mass society and mass media, technological change, an increasingly international economy all pose problems beyond the unaided resources of local communities and governments. We can no longer afford the moral price that we have exacted in our society by teaching people to prefer moving, getting ahead, following the job or individual opportunity to being loyal to their friends, their community, their church or their family. We ought to restore the primacy of the Deuteronomic rule, "It is good that thy brother should live next unto thee." Public Government ought to devote itself to creating the foundations of fraternity and local community. We also need to restore the vehicles by which those local communities can be drawn toward and educated in national government, and by which national government can be made accountable to local communities. I refer, obviously, to political parties. For all of this century, the logic of American legislation has been to destroy the political party, and the election "reform" laws of the last decade go a long way toward that end. The public financing of campaigns, for example, presumes that voters and citizens are followers of candidates, without any bond or loyalty to each other, crowds whose only reason for being is their chief. Party organizations deserve more support than candidates, because they reflect and foster in personal relations among citizens. In the same sense, there is every reason to oppose primaries--mass elections which tend to fragment and confuse voters--in favor of relatively open, local caucuses in which citizens can deliberate and in which they matter. For all of that, however, it also seems to me that the recovery of politics requires an intellectual change in America. We need to remind Americans that genuine freedom is civil, not private,liberty, that liberty which enhances our trust and our ability to act. The protection of private rights and our guarantee of justice lies in the moderation, decency and right opinion of our fellow citizens. If that sense of fairness and civility does not exist in our fellows,then we lack the foundation for a democratic society and we had best recognize it, substituting some system more suited to our political decay. Certainly, it is clear that we will be dependent on one another and that we will need collective effort to solve our pressing problems. It is no less clear that we will need to rethink the foundations of our common life. The energy issue illustrates both aspects of our situation. We can deal with the energy crisis only through public action and such action requires sacrifices more than freedom. Indeed, the energy crisis points us toward the teaching which is the core of the older understanding of politics: the recognition that humanity is, after all, the subject and not the master of nature, and that learning to be subject and to be ruled by nature is the first prerequisite of learning how to rule in political life. |
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