Jeffrey A. Becker: Ambition in America: Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
Originally published in Law & Liberty, August 10, 2014.
As the ambit of modern life expands, like a gas, serious political ambition dilutes. We range more widely, but in a scattered way—a molecule of attention here, another over there. The time and care needed for real (as distinguished from Facebook) friendship and citizenship evanesce as we learn to think and feel in short bursts. Because worldwide, the Web is flimsy, thin-spun; building character takes time, but any twit can tweet. Citizenship requires patriotism, love of one’s own; one loves nothing so ephemeral as virtual reality. Statesmanship takes sustained thinking; the distracted mind sustains only nervousness.
This is the Tocquevillian problem, updated–the problem of what he called “democracy,” by which he meant social egalitarianism. The new technologies exaggerate this; they didn’t invent it. The love of general ideas—ideologies among them; the inclination to retreat to a cozy, private life (try getting children away from their devices); the complacent materialism to go with that foggy idealism; the irritable nationalism; the monotony of petty agitation: the vices of Tocqueville’s America has pervaded the world’s mind-space. A few of the old American virtues also have survived, such as the ability to organize civic associations for mutual help. Nonetheless, a flash mob can’t stay organized for long, even if the video of it gets a million hits among the yahoos.
Jeffrey A. Becker joins a large company of thinkers considering this problem, and he’s read his predecessors’ writings attentively. Becker argues that ambition rightly understood means self-government not only in personal but in public life. Because the flame of political ambition burns brighter in a Cromwell or a Napoleon than it does in your average voter, political regimes need to accommodate but also discipline these exceptional souls. How can a regime with no aristocracy do this? Tyranny founded upon social egalitarianism shows how badly such societies can go. Can republics do better? Becker thinks they can, but for the most part have not done as well as they might. It’s not a matter of celebrating other-regarding community action, either. “Citizen participation [in political life] and civic attachments will mean little unless people can translate that participation and those attachments into the formal expression of political power through governing.” If republicans don’t get the ruling institutions right they will continue to entangle themselves in a web stronger than the Internet with which they are entertaining themselves—”the soft despotism of an administrative state,” described unforgettably by Tocqueville decades before it reached America.
Although Becker recognizes the partial truth in Carl Schmitt’s description of political life as conflict between friends and enemies, he prefers Aristotle’s understanding of human nature as social and political, regarding this as a better foundation for democratic politics. This preference for a particular regime, democracy, pervades the book, although Becker initially takes care to associate it with the trans-political or natural principle of human equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He criticizes the Puritan founding as aristocratic. While recognizing the equality of all postlapserian humans and establishing a tightly-unified community guided by the principles of justice and mercy, this very unity and moral perfectionism divided sheep from goats in this world, replacing an Old-World aristocracy of birth with a New-World aristocracy of grace. The “benign vision of political leadership, where political power exists to cultivate and encourage a moral vision of the good community of model citizens”—a vision the Puritans shared with such ancient peoples as the Spartans and the Israelites, albeit with very different criteria for membership—”become authoritarian—and undemocratic—when members of a polity, bent on enforcing their moral vision, divide the community into a moral ‘is’ and an immoral ‘them.'” If such a regime holds elections to select its rulers, those elections will result in “moral polarization,” “foster[ing] a more narrow and reflexively intolerant social mindset.” Here, Becker obviously glances at contemporary American politics, especially on the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’ extremes of the spectrum. He especially deplores “claims to moral certainty”—specifically, claims to rule based upon moral certainty—which “lead people to label one another either good or bad.” Such a “mindset” leads to “authoritarianism,” away from democracy.
It might also lead away from morality altogether, towards moral relativism or egalitarianism—quite evidently a danger in any regime, inasmuch as one cannot make claims about justice without labeling some people and behaviors good, others bad. Democracy may risk cultivating an atmosphere of moral relativism precisely because it makes so much of equality, extending that principle beyond equal natural rights to the extent that pervades moral judgments altogether. Becker hopes to fend off this problem by deploying moral uncertainty in the service of a virtue, moderation, and of a politics that requires citizens to “give reasons for private opinions,” whereby citizens “may learn to appreciate the moral shades of gray involved in reaching agreement about political questions.” This, he hopes, may give us a greater inclination to humility, “self-awareness,” and “compromise about public questions.” In effect, Becker makes Rousseau’s move, aiming to replace “loyalty to, and active defense of, abstract moral principles” with “a compassion for the well-being of other citizens,” “loyalty to the welfare of people as the mark of moral integrity.” More concretely, he prefers Social Gospel Christianity to Christianity as understood for nearly two millennia before Walter Rauschenbusch brought us that new gospel. He admires Abraham Lincoln, but not the Lincoln who upheld what Lincoln himself called an abstract principle, equality of right; he prefers the Lincoln of Progressivism, of Herbert Croly, the Lincoln who ‘was’ a Progressive avant la lettre. As the real Lincoln might well have observed, however, without some principled criterion of right, what do such notions as “well-being” and “welfare” actually mean? Becker uses the term “the practical welfare of the people” as his criterion, but he needs a principle—indeed, an abstract principle—to define it. That’s what a definition is, as no less an epistemologist (not to say moralist) than Bill Clinton once had occasion to remind us. While acknowledging the Founders’ principle, natural right, Becker drifts instead into the territory of pragmatism and of historical progress—although, by his own account, we are neither especially pragmatic nor advanced at the moment.
Turning from the Puritans to the American founding, Becker faults Publius for regarding ambition so sourly and for setting up institutional barriers whereby the ambitious will counteract the ambitious. “Gridlock at the congressional level is by design,” Becker exclaims, perhaps more in sorrow than in anger. Although the Founders esteemed one form of ambition—the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds—they failed to “educate” citizens generally “toward higher aims.” Tellingly, he quotes Robert Eden, in his important study Political Leadership and Nihilism, who remarked the negative connotations of the term ‘leader’ in The Federalist, but he doesn’t say what Eden’s point was: The Founders associated ‘leader’ with military captians and military rulers generally, whereas the Progressives, replacing natural right with rights derived from the march of ‘history,’ esteemed leaders precisely because they were the ones who were bringing us closer toward the morally authoritative future. [1] This formulation can bring us to salute well-intentioned ‘idealists’ like Woodrow Wilson, but also to even more dubious enthusiasms, such as those evinced in Wilson’s contemporaries for the likes of Lenin and Mussolini. Again, without a firm criterion for what “higher” aims are, a political society will risk marching off the cliff it wants to march up. In line with these progressivist leanings, Becker charges the federalists with failing to provide sufficient play for citizen action. Representative government means that only a few of us can participate directly in governance. This overlooks the federalism of the federalists, who after all founded not only a republican regime but a federal state—just not one so states-centered as the one seen under the Articles of Confederation system. Americans had plenty of civic space for active self-government at the municipal, county, and state levels throughout the nineteenth century. It was the Progressives and their successors, the New Dealers, who changed that.
After a chapter criticizing the democratizing Jacksonians and Populists as ineffective democrats, he turns not to the Progressives—that would have required him to confront squarely these principled differences between the Founders and men like Wilson, John Dewey, and Croly—but to Franklin Roosevelt. Here Becker’s argument weakens to the breaking point. He begins by asserting that “Tocqueville recognized a need for political associations capable of cultivating ideals of excellence for democratic citizens,” ideals that “counterbalance democracy’s leveling effects.” What Tocqueville actually argued was that civil and political associations cultivate not “ideals” but habits of mind and heart that enable Americans to learn how to govern themselves by the very practice of governing—a practice that counterbalances not so much democratic leveling but the tendency of democrats to build over-centralized governments. Becker does see that such associations can serve a function within egalitarian societies similar to that served by the ‘vertical’ structures of aristocracies: cultivating the virtues of rulers, including self-rule. Becker’s omission of centralized government from Tocqueville’s argument makes sense rhetorically, however, because he wants to claim that Roosevelt displayed “Tocqueville’s aristocratic sensibilities in practice.” Roosevelt “used his aristocratic sensibilities to challenge an economic status quo and thereby reinvigorate more Tocquevillian democratic traditions and practices.” Becker makes FDR into the prototype of what one New York City wag called a “limousine liberal.”
What Roosevelt actually did with his “aristocratic sensibilities” was to build a centralized, administrative state of exactly the sort Wilson had admired; the government of party appointees gave way in part to a government of tenured, professional, supposedly ‘scientific’ administrators. Becker acknowledges that Tocqueville might have had his reservations about Roosevelt’s project, but contents himself by assuring us that Roosevelt himself shared concerns “about expanding government responsibility,” and that he didn’t really mean to establish a centralized bureaucracy. More, “the ambition to govern oneself was revived through the expansion of the administrative state,” Becker bravely avers, “though what it mean to be self-governing was made more complex by the Depression, global war, and an evolving interdependency between private industry and government.” That’s one way of putting it.
In his final chapters, Becker wisely retreats from such complexities and evolutions, offering some sensible suggestions about counterbalancing bureaucracy with reinvigorated political parties. Party government is indeed the principal realistic alternative to administrative government within the modern state. Becker sees that if the most ambitious among us can eschew parties and run campaigns based upon manipulating their own ‘images’—an opportunity opened by the Progressives, who tried to supplement the administrative state with more direct forms of democracy, such as candidate-centered elections, initiative and referendum, and similar devices of direct democracy—then you will get exactly the kind of ideologically-driven, uncompromising, polarized politics he deplores. Reinvigorated parties means candidate selection by experienced party bosses, men and (now) women with experience not only in elections but in government. In the past, “political parties were rooted in local organizations and relied upon the explicit power of face-to-face campaigning.” True, but this dovetailed with confederal republicanism and with party appointees to governmental posts, not with administrative centralization. “The common ground of the American character and the American soul was and remains citizenship,” he concludes. But actually the common ground of the American character was (but does not in practice remain) natural right, with citizenship as the protector of those rights. Replace natural right with ‘historical’ right under the modern administrative state and the American character must change. As it has.
Note
- See Robert Eden: Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1983.
Recent Comments