Co-authored with Paul Eidelberg

Published Spring 1981

 

Upon becoming a born-again foreign-policy `realist,’ then President Jimmy Carter confessed his astonishment at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Those who had tried to achieve with words what the Soviets achieved with action–not the conquest of Afghanistan but the arousal of Mr. Carter from his dogmatic slumber–could honestly say they had told him so. Others, long-time proponents of détente with the Soviet Union, disingenuously complained that everyone always knew the Soviets are like this–that they are, as one genteel analyst understated it, “not nice people.” But that knowledge, they usually added, never stopped us from dealing with the Kremlin before, so aren’t we overacting, causing “war hysteria,” now?

It is useless to note that the Soviets do not wax hysterical over war, they make it. Facts leave the faithful undaunted, which leads us to wonder: What is it about some Americans that causes them to believe their enemies may metamorphose into friendly enemies if baptized in the miraculous waters of American good will? The question lingers, for while Mr. Carter has left his high office, his intellectual and moral kin-especially numerous in government, the media, and the academy–remain vociferous and unchanged.

One customarily refers all important questions concerning American politics and society to Tocqueville. For only the obtuse regard Democracy in America as a mere historical document, a portrait of a simpler time and place. We recognize ourselves in Tocqueville’s Americans, despite industrial development and the abolition of slavery.

Still, one does not usually refer questions concerning foreign policy to Tocqueville. Do we not live in a unique `nuclear age,’ a time in which the isolation Tocqueville described as “providential” has disappeared forever? We can no longer say, with Tocqueville, “The foreign policy of the United States is eminently expectant; it consists more in abstaining than in acting.” This notwithstanding, the end of our isolation, while transforming our circumstance, has not significantly transformed our national character. Nor has it entirely transformed our political institutions. We remain democrats and Americans. We can still learn from Tocqueville.

Tocqueville sees equality or “equality of conditions” as the “primary fact” in democratic America, meaning by this that there are no rigid class distinctions here: no one is bound by law or custom to the station of his birth, and all may ascend the social or economic ladder. America is the land of opportunity. This is what gives equality its power, its “charms,” which “are every instant felt and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most vulgar souls exult in them.” So pervasive is the power of this equality that it affects the mentality of Americans, the educated no less than the uneducated. Tocqueville, then, regards democracy as inevitable not because `History’ makes it so, but because it appeals to human nature.

With democratic egalitarianism come two principal characteristics–one moral, the other intellectual. Morally, egalitarianism emancipates the individual so that, thrust upon himself, he becomes animated not by class interests–class affiliation having lost its compelling character given America’s lack of a strong hereditary European-style aristocracy–so much as by self-interest. At the same time, however, his very independence renders him virtually powerless. Accordingly, he must combine with others, moderate his egoism, and learn the give-and-take of democratic life if he is to pursue his interests intelligently. Democracy thus cultivates what Tocqueville calls, famously, “self-interest rightly understood,” a middling or mediocre virtue which, like the charms of equality, “lies within the reach of all capacities.” Unlike virtue pursued spontaneously and for its own sake, self-interest rightly understood consists of thing that one serves one’s own material interests by practicing such modest virtues as self-restraint, honesty, and regularity. The pursuit of this kind of self-interest serves the community, if indirectly. And the community takes note of it, deploying such slogans as “Drive safely, the life you save may be your own.” Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, self-preservation, along with comfort, is at the heart of American foreign policy.

Intellectually, democracy cultivates what Tocqueville calls the “philosophical method” of Cartesian skepticism, which moves the individual “to evade the bondage of system and habit, of family maxims, class opinions, and, in some degree, of national prejudices; to accept tradition only as a means of information, and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing otherwise and better; to seek the reason of things for oneself, and in oneself along; to tend to results without being bound to means.” Of these characteristics–and note how they describe contemporary pragmatism–Tocqueville points to one “which includes almost all the rest,” namely, that in which most of the operations of the mind each American appeals only to the individual effect of his own understanding.” “Think for yourself” is indeed a democratic-American imperative. It correlates with, and is essential to, the morality of restrained self-interest for the pursuit of which democracy cultivates that “homely species of practical wisdom… that science of the petty occurrences of life which is called good sense.” This, too, les within the reach of all, or almost all capacities.

This morality has somewhat contradictory results. Tocqueville foresees that enlightened self-interest can yield “virtuous materialism,” the gratification of petty desires if not of extreme passions. Virtuous materialism “would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.” He also sees that the democrat’s restrained selfishness coexists with compassion, as egalitarianism causes the extension of one’s sensibility to all men, who, by the grace of democracy, “think and feel in nearly the same manner.” These tendencies toward selfish-but-restrained materialism and compassion persist in America today.

Intellectually, common sense combines with moral egalitarianism to produce superficiality. In day-to-day affairs, common sense is enough; we readily learn to be smart `consumers.’ Because most of the people we meet resemble us, we habitually consult our own thoughts and feelings as reliable guides to those of others. Transposed to the domain foreign policy, common sense, suffused with moral egalitarianism, yields what is known as `mirror-imaging.’ Disastrous consequences follow.

Mr. Carter came into office repeating the oft-heard anti-anticommunist refrain that the `Cold War’ is over. Exuding moral egalitarianism, he told the American people, most of whom dislike and distrust the Soviets, that “in every person there is something fine and pure and noble;” that “the great challenge we Americans confront is to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that our good will is as great as our strength, until, despite all obstacles, our two nations could achieve new attitudes and new trust.” The first of these statements could lead to the comforting conclusion that the Soviets are at heart decent folk, like Americans in general; the second to the self-deprecating conclusion that they have as much reason to distrust us as we have to distrust them. This democratic leveling of distinctions between an imperialistic oligarchy with global ambitions, one based on the primacy of force ad fraud and a regime inclined toward peaceableness if only because it is based on the primacy of consent rather than conquest makes it easier for the latter, especially when given to virtuous materialism, to pursue a policy of phased unilateral disarmament. And so Mr. Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber, shelved the MX mobile ICBM system and the neutron bomb, drastically reduced the range of the cruise missile, and postponed the production of other weapons systems, all in the hope that such demonstrations of American good will (however influenced by economic factors) would induce the Soviets to reciprocate. They didn’t.

The Soviets are not motivated by virtuous materialism. They are motivated by dialectical materialism, which puts class conflict ahead of feeling good about oneself. The Kremlin preens itself in claiming that they are the vanguard of the vanguard class, internationally, that the Soviet Union must impose sacrifices on its peoples in order to defeat the reactionary forces of capitalist America. With less than half of America’s GNP, the Soviet Union has continued to outspend the U. S. on strategic and conventional arms.

Mr. Carter’s mirror-imaging mindset toward the Soviet Union did not begin, nor can it be expected to end, with him. It may be traced back to 1946, to a most influential book sponsored by the Yale Institute of International Affairs under the title The Absolute Weapon. Written by academic strategic theorists, the book maintains that nuclear weapons have an “absolute” character in that there is no defense against their utterly destructive power. In nuclear war, we are given to believe, there can be no victor and no survivors. Hence war is no longer a “rational” policy. Moreover, in an era of absolute weapons, military superiority ceases to be meaningful. All one needs is enough missiles to be able to threaten a potential aggressor with unacceptable levels of destruction. Thus was born the American doctrine of mutual–actually minimum–deterrence, or what has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction. This doctrine, it should be noted, was concocted without reference to the character of the Soviet Union then ruled by Stalin. It was merely assumed that Russian Communists would think and feel like American democrats about nuclear war. As one contributor put it: “Neither we nor the Russians can expect to feel even reasonably safe unless an atomic attack by one were certain to unleash a devastating attack on the other.”

The conclusion of the Yale study eventually became official American policy. In 1965, when the United States had roughly four times as many ICBM launchers as the Soviet Union, it decided to stop their production and allow he Soviets to achieve parity so as to encourage them to engage in strategic arms limitations talks. The Soviets caught up in 1969, the talks began, and, three years later, SALT I was produced-by which time, however, the Soviets had 1,618 ICBMs while the United States had 1,054. Henry Kissinger, the chief architect of SALT I, was merely translating into policy the mirror-imaging and non-ideological mentality  of the authors of The Absolute Weapon. As he said iat a news conference, “What in God’s  name is strategic superiority? What do you do with it?” Or as he explained while still an academic: “The traditional mode of military analysis which saw in war a continuation of politics but with its own appropriate means is no logner applicable.” Exit Clausewitz.

But not from the Soviet Union. This may be seen in the November 1975 issue of Communist of the Armed Forces, the USSR’s foremost military journal: “The premise of Marxism-Leninism on war as a continuation of policy by military means remains true in an atmosphere of fundamental changes in military matters. The attempt of certain bourgeois ideologists to prove that nuclear missile weapons lead war outside the framework of policy, and that nuclear war ceases to be an instrument of policy, and does not constitute its continuation is theoretically incorrect and politically reactionary…. The description of the correlation between war and policy is fully valid for the use of weapon of mass destruction.” Unlike mirror-imaging American strategists, Soviet strategists do not consider nuclear war as `unthinkable’ or as `unwinnable.’ In the words of Colonel A. Sidorenko, one of the Red Army’s leading theoreticians, “Pre-emption in launching a nuclear strike is expected to be the decisive condition for the attainment of superiority over [the enemy] and the seizure and retention of the initiative.” The Soviets regard the doctrine of mutual deterrence as “bourgeois pacifism.” The aim of Soviet military is to win by means of a first strike on the United States, a strike that would preclude the United States from launching a retaliatory strike.

They are working hard to achieve this outcome. The vast sums of money they devote to research and development in strategic arms confirms this. So does their billion-dollar-a-year civil defense program, which includes the dispersal and bomb-resistant construction of industries, the stockpiling of food and fuel, civil defense training for all Soviet subjects, and the organization of cadres for evacuating key urban centers within 24 hours. None of this means that, once such a capacity for a preclusive strike were achieved, the Soviets would necessarily launch their missiles, but what they would “do with it,” in Mr. Kissinger’s phrase, could easily be to tell the United States to jump, and to expect a docile response of `How high?’ Or else. Moral egalitarians given to mirror-imaging might be reminded that those who rule the land of the Gulag Archipelago do not have the same regard for human life as, for example, George F. Kennan, the scholar-diplomat whose influence on academic thinking and official attitudes toward the Soviet Union is second to none–Kennan, who could say that statements about communist brutality and aggressiveness “impute to Soviet leaders a total inhumanity not plausible in nature.”

Clearly, the influence of egalitarianism on the intellect and sentiments of Americans extends to `realists’ and `idealists’ alike. the absence of hierarchy in American society inclines us, over time to level or simplify the thinking of intellectuals as well as that of the man on the street. The formulation of foreign policy is simplified if the people on the `other side’ think and feel as we do. In fact, to the extent that most Americans do concern themselves with foreign policy, they usually harbor doubts about foreigners. This common sense, although superficial, may impute to Soviet rulers the inhumanity denied by Kennan, the implacable hostility piously obscured by Carter, and the goal of world conquest ignored by Kissinger.

Nevertheless, common sense will not suffice in the domain of foreign affairs, especially when rendered more superficial by another aspect of democracy revealed by Tocqueville. Because Americans find themselves in an egalitarian but competitive society where everything is in motion, a society that assigns to no one a permanent place but instead requires each to be many things in many places in one lifetime, such persons develop relatively broad but hurried minds, minds which care “more to know a great deal quickly than to know anything well.” “The habit of inattention must be considered as the greatest defect of the democratic character.” Tocqueville thus anticipates the familiar lament that Americans have short political memories, suggesting that we do not remember partly because we do not really pay attention in the first place. In addition, we often refuse to take unpleasant facts seriously–something that requires more than common sense–as this might entail burdens and sacrifices beyond the capacity of virtuous materialism. Common sense, which “suffice[s] to direct the ordinary course of society,” does not always suffice to direct “relations with foreign nations.” Tocqueville continues, “a democracy can only with difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience.” Despite the homogenization of mankind throughout much of the world, foreigners remain foreigners–peoples not fathomable by simple introspection and common sense.

While dealing with foreign countries, democratic politicians must also deal with three groups in their own country, aside from fellow-politicians and the general public. Corporate business owners, who partake more of virtuous materialism than of compassion, intellectuals (academicians and bureaucrats) who aspire to partake more of compassion than of virtuous materialism, and soldiers, who are expected to partake of neither, all reflect the moral and intellectual habits Tocqueville describes.

Taking the businessmen first, it is fair to say that Armand Hammer’s dealings, beginning in Lenin’s time, have attracted the most comment from critics of American corporate relations with the Soviet Union. But in an interview given to U.S. News and World Report, Mr. J. Paul Lyet, Chairman of Sperry Rand Corporation, revealed the assumptions behind such dealings more openly than Hammer has done. Asked about “proposals that we should use trade generally to weaken the Russians,” Lyet replied, “I’m no politician”–which, we must interject, is a humble-seeming rhetorical self-pat heard all too frequently in business circles. “I’m just a businessman trying to make a living–so you may think this is self-serving–but I would think that trade builds bridges. When you think back to the situation in the `40s and `50s at the height of the Cold War–well, it’s a lot better. I don’t subscribe to the Russian system. But eventually there’s going to be a coming together–peaceful coexistence, if you want to call it that. I think that the more their people see our system and how it works, the more it’s going to moderate their views. There just somehow seems to be more freedom in nations where economic freedom is stressed. I would like to assume that economic growth in the Soviet Union will lead–even if slowly–toward more freedom for the people of that country as well as a more accommodating attitude toward world peace.” As Mr. Lyet tries to make his living, limping along on his six-figure salary, he rightly notices that trade builds bridges; he might add that it also builds trucks with which to invade Afghanistan. Things are indeed a lot better now than they were in the `40s and `50s–for Mr. Lyet, if not for our military planners, Americans generally, and the free world. As for the prediction of increased if gradual Soviet moderation, liberalization, and peaceableness, this hoped-for embourgeoisement of the Kremlin has hit a bit of a snag, lately.

We can’t say Tocqueville doesn’t warn us. He observes that the en who constitute America’s so-called ruling class are, for the most part, the sons of wealthy men born of poor or middle-class origins: “born, it is true, in  a lofty position, but their parents were humble; they have grown up amid feelings and notions which they cannot afterwards easily get rid of.” These feelings and notions are commercial ones, and they remain so even if the manners of commerce are rejected for more elegant customs and more refined tastes: “Commerce is naturally averse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until oblige by the most obvious necessity.” Tocqueville is thinking of domestic revolution–the unlikelihood of it–but his suggestion applies to foreign policy as well. Tocqueville fears not revolution but stagnation in democracy, the development of a people who “so entirely give way to a cowardly love of preset enjoyment as to lose sight of the interests of their future selves and those of their descendants and prefer to glide along the easy current of life rather than to make, when it is necessary, a strong and sudden effort to a higher purpose.” The average American today, the average businessman, has yet to reach this state of moral torpor, but the tendency persists.

Above all, it is a tendency that brings with it the decline of honor. Tocqueville contrasts the sense of honor cultivated among the feudal aristocracy with democratic honor. Aristocrats honor military courage, loyalty to one’s leaders, the pride that finds satisfaction in vast enterprises, and a liberality based on magnanimity, greatness of soul. Democrats replace military courage with what can only be called commercial or economic courage: risking one’s capital or the brave endurance of financial loss. They replace loyalty to leaders with patriotism and substitute for grand pride the smaller pride in lesser achievements. They base their liberality not on magnanimity but on compassion (at best) or expediency, honoring “all those quiet virtues that tend to give a regular movement to the community and to encourage business.” “The American lauds as a noble and praiseworthy ambition what our own [i. e., European and aristocratic] forefathers in the Middle Ages stigmatized as severe cupidity, just as he treats as a stupid and barbarous frenzy that ardor of conquest and martial temper which bore them to battle.” If that American is a contemporary international businessman, he is less given to patriotism than to insisting that he is just trying to make a living and that trade builds bridges. His sense of honor gradually becomes more obscure because the social distinctions between men which gave rise to aristocratic honor have faded–`ruling class’ or no `ruling class.’ Meanwhile, he real ruling class in the Soviet Union follows the example of the principal secretary of Alexander the Great. Plutarch tells us that Eumenes made it a practice to borrow money from his enemies, because an enemy would then “confide in him and forbear all violence to him for fear of losing his money.” Bridge-building, indeed.

In and out of government, our intellectuals present a different aspect of the same American mindset. Tocqueville correctly predicted that “If the entire existence of the Union where perpetually threatened, if its chief interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations”–if America were in Europe–“the executive government would assume increased importance.” With the invention of self-powered ships and aircraft, rapid means of communication, and all the other technological devices that effectively shrink the distance between the United States and foreign powers, we have indeed developed such an executive, aided by a pseudo-aristocracy that deals with foreign policy–one that, if nothing else, rarely stands accused of limiting itself to democratic common sense. Selected, not elected, it thrives in the university and the bureaucracy, protected by that quasi-aristocratic institution, tenure.

Like our corporate `oligarchs,’ our foreign policy `aristocrats’ have democratic origins and tastes, regardless of the invincible snobbishness cultivated by some of them. Historically, they are heirs of Woodrow Wilson’s politics of compassion–Wilson, the eminent political scientist who imbued them with the ideal of “a government rooted… in the pains and sufferings of mankind… a government which is not pitiful but full of human sympathy.” The egalitarian compassion of these `aristocrats’ assures them of their righteousness, which only reinforces their snobbery. Indeed, their snobbery owes much to the feeling that they are plus populaire que la populace, members of ever-progressing `History’s’ enlightened and enlightening vanguard.

This accounts for their mortification in the late 1960s. Ridiculed as hypocrites and timeservers by the New Left, not only did progressives lose their belief in themselves as a vanguard unchallenged by all except `reactionaries’ and communists; they also lost much of their faith in progress itself, the foundation of their legitimacy. Having lost that faith, they could no longer support anything so stern as a war against communists in Vietnam. So, while the progressive-liberals of the 1940s could easily excoriate those who opposed involvement in the world war as cowards and/or fascist sympathizers, they could not bring themselves to charge the moralists of the New Left with cowardice; they ceded that task to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and other groups and persons which the liberals themselves had long dismissed as Neanderthals. In the `60s, those who did not move to the left or the right became self-doubting apologists for a failed dream. By 1968 they were divided against one another, ready to assist their own defeat.

Once again, Tocqueville anticipates this sort of thing. In his time, American universities were church-affiliated, and seriously so. The intellectual class, if not entirely religious, was noticeably shaped by religion; even men like Jefferson, who had died only a decade before Tocqueville’s visit, retained many of the sturdier qualities that religion fosters: discipline, perseverance, wholehearted dedication to a cause. From Puritanism on, Americans had found in their religion means of both spiritual and temporal satisfaction. By “giving men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to eternity,” religions reveal the great secret of success” in this world; they teach men not to “turn from day to day to chase some novel object or desire,” but to “have settled designs which they are never weary of pursuing.” The social stability provided by the belief in eternity served as ballast for a ship that otherwise would have swayed uncontrollably in the unpredictable gusts of democratic opinion.

For “no sooner do [men] despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist for a single day.” This is the moral and social dilemma caused by the apparent liberation of what’s come to be called secularism: “In skeptical ages it is always to be feared… that men may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires, and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm…. In those countries in which, unhappily, irreligion and democracy coexist, philosophers and those in power ought to be always striving to place the objects of human actions far beyond man’s immediate range.” Not for nothing did Charles de Gaulle, more than a century after this, hold before his countrymen the lure of la grandeur–re-founding French republicanism, establishing a foreign policy independent of the two `superpowers.’ Tocqueville would oppose the indulgence of fickle appetites with discipline and spiritedness. He would have democracies “teach the community day by day that wealth, fame, and power are rewards of labor,” and arrange things so that no greatness should be of too easy acquirement.” Tocqueville hoped thus to achieve the effect of religion without the strict rule of religion seen in the aristocratic Europe of the Old Regime; he suggests that these practices might even bring an irreligious people back to religion.

As religious faith declined among the intellectuals in the latter half of the nineteenth century and was replaced by faith in science and social progress, institutional Christianity metamorphosed. It did not disappear but became secular, materialist, with a worldly compassion and a worldly paradise replacing caritas and Heaven. Woodrow Wilson, his father a preacher, was already heading in this direction, and many of his contemporaries (John Dewey the most important) were already there. Still believing in a sort of eternity–the end of `History’–the intellectuals could discipline themselves and find the courage to fight for something.

But simultaneously, other intellectual trends undermined the liberalism of historical progress. Existentialism questioned the grand narrative, and indeed rationalism itself. In recent years there has been an attempt to synthesize Heidegger (after all, a Nazi) with some sort of `Left’ ideology. But the most important intellectual preparation for the weakening of progressive-liberalism and the rise of a new Left was moral relativism. Tocqueville comes very close to anticipating this phenomenon. This may be seen by recalling his description of the “philosophical method” of the Americans. He notes that, under conditions of equality, not only does each individual seek the reason of things by himself alone, but equality tends to invade the intellect in such a way that the individual becomes the “source of truth.” Relativism reflects this form of egalitarianism, for it consists in believing that there are no objective standards for determining whether the way of life of one individual, group, or nation is superior to that of another. To admire a Socrates or a Charles Manson; to condemn PLO terrorists or to call them `freedom fighters’; to prefer liberal America to Soviet Russia–all these so-called value judgments are deemed `subjective.’ Relativism thus regards all moral principles (which it calls `values’ as opposed to `facts’) as theoretically equal. Relativism dovetails with the esteem for science, described by its advertisers as `value-free.’

Visible not only in the writings of the most ardent proponents of détente, moral relativism appears in writings by men now regarded as `hawks.’ Here are Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington in their 1963 book, Political Power: USA/USSR: “We are students of politics; we write this book in that capacity. And here we are concerned not with vices and virtues but with strengths and weaknesses. Moral judgment have been passed often enough–an with predictable results–on both sides of the Iron Curtain.” Such talk obscures the fact that virtues and vices are strengths and weaknesses, depended upon and routinely exploited by every politician, ever person, who ever lived. It also reflects the partial moral relativism of numerous contemporary intellectuals, `left’ and `right,’ who imagine an `end of ideology’ in what Brzezinski later would call the “technetronic era.” According to his teachings, we must abandon our prejudices about individual, group, or national superiority and enter a period of universal toleration and–no surprise–egalitarianism. Marxism, too–which Brzezinski, reflecting Tocqueville’s observation about the superficiality of the democratic mind, links to a variety of humanitarianism–has contributed and will continue to contribute to the eventual convergence of all nations into–what?

Into, as it turns out, theologian Harvey Cox’s “Secular City,” which “provides a setting in which a hodgepodge of human purposes and projects can thrive because each recognizes itself as provisional and relative.” The secular city is a vaguely and indeed groundlessly humanitarian place which President Carter may have had in mind when he predicted, during his trip to Poland in January 1978, that East and West will someday transcend their ideological differences. After all, any “posture based on ideological considerations” has become passé in the estimation of his National Security Adviser, Dr. Brzezinski. In view of the impossibility of sustaining any humanitarianism, however vague, on terms of moral relativism, this posture will likely consist of bending over backwards.

Tocqueville would understand. Social egalitarianism inclines minds and hearts toward moral egalitarianism, which yields self-interest rightly understood. Self-interest rightly understood, unchecked by discipline and spiritedness, yields virtuous materialism, which yields moral enervation. As long as a strong religious faith (a precious legacy from aristocratic times, Tocqueville calls it) or even a strong secular faith inspires a people, democracy thrives; when the faith declines to the level it reaches in Cox and Brzezinski, discipline and spiritedness will be difficult to arouse. The keepers of a lukewarm faith cannot appeal to positive belief alone, whether it be the deference seen in aristocratic societies, he religious man’s faith in in God, or the democrat’s faith in his country; they must, rather, urge us on by means of the disspiriting lure of moral relativism. We are to pursue, with good will toward friends an adversaries alike, a morally neutral or non-ideological foreign policy, a policy which, by definition, can only be motivated by material interests. How far such `even-handedness’ will take progressive-liberal America vis-à-vis communist Russia is not difficult to see. As a censor at the USSR Press Department confided to Malcolm Muggeridge, “Those who are not against us are with us.”

As Tocqueville would have understood, in America, appeals to moral relativism almost always serve the appellant’s desire for comfortable self-preservation–comfortable self-preservation for all if he is an `idealist.’ Brzezinski himself sees the practical, if not the theoretical problem with this: “subjectivism may not suffice to meet the challenge of subjective activism,” foreign or domestic. Nevertheless, both he and Huntington reject what they derisively refer to as the “black-and-white” image of the Soviet and American political systems. Writing sixteen years after the first edition of their text (and eleven printings later), Huntington began to see that he and his co-author had taught such lessons all too thoroughly. In an article titled “American Foreign Policy,” published in The Washington Quarterly in autumn 1979, Huntington reported that “the more educated people are, the less likely they are to think that communism is the worst form of government, and the less likely they are to see communist governments in Japan, Western Europe, Africa, or Latin  America as threats to the United States.” The same university-educated respondents were also less likely to think that the United States should be stronger than the United  States, and were more favorably disposed to cutting the defense budget. These results may be attributed, in part, to the neo-Marxism infecting American campuses, but more significant is the doctrine of moral relativism which has long dominated higher education in the democratic world, a doctrine which cannot but level moral distinctions and thereby undermine commitment to liberty.

If corporate business owners and intellectuals are susceptible to moral relativism, what about the soldiers? The left points to Tocqueville’s chapter, “Why democratic nations naturally desire peace, and democratic armies, war,” wherein he argues that the same desire for personal advancement which leads the majority of democrats into peaceful commercial pursuits also inclines the minority who are military officers to desire war, which brings their advancement. The left ignores Tocqueville’s prescription, which is not to weaken the army and to make civilians fear it, but to educate citizens to “a manly love of order” that inclines them to “freely submit themselves to discipline.” Such men, “if they follow the profession of arms, bring into it, unconsciously and almost against their will, these same habits and manners…. Teach the citizens to be educated, orderly, firm and free and the soldiers will be disciplined and obedient.” This was George Washington’s course, and in large measure it has worked, although the left has advocated exactly the reverse for decades.

And not only the left ha ignored Tocqueville’s further warning: “If the love of physical gratification and the taste for well-being, which are equally suggested to men by a state of equality, were to possess the mind of a democratic people and to fill it completely, the manners of the nation would be so totally opposed to military pursuits that perhaps even the army would eventually acquire a love of peace.” Contrary to pacifist doctrine, “nothing is more dangerous for the freedom and tranquility of a people than an army afraid of war,” because “such an army no longer seeks to maintain its importance and its influence on the field of battle, [but] seeks to assert it elsewhere.” To prevent this, Tocqueville recommends that the love and habit of liberty combat the love and habit of virtuous materialism. In this he follows Pericles, who praised the non-egalitarian virtues of honor, courage, and glory by invoking the democratic love of liberty. Liberty requires the moderate spiritedness that underlies self-assertion, but does not necessarily contradict discipline freely submitted to.

Confronting a strong and determined Soviet Union, our politicians–no less American, for better and for worse, than our businessmen, intellectuals, and soldiers–must assess democracy’s strengths and vulnerabilities along with the ongoing reassessment of America’s military and economic strengths and vulnerabilities. The ones who conducted the Vietnam War evidently overestimated American capacities, including their own. The ones who conduct détente may well underestimate those capacities by assuming that Americans won’t fight at all. They will fight, politically and economically now, and militarily if needed–but not if their leaders misunderstand their character. That character has changed little since Tocqueville’s day, and politicians will find him a prudent counselor.