Lecture delivered at “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The American Founding.”
Hoogland Center for Teaching Excellence Seminar
DeLand High School, DeLand, Florida
June 4, 2004
To understand the presidency as the American Progressives reconceived it, we need to track two themes: first, the ideational underpinnings, the moral foundations, of the American regime and their radical revision by the Progressives; second, the institutional structure of the modern state, carefully delineated and constrained by the Founders but substantially elaborated and expanded by the Progressives.
I can illustrate the first theme by reminding you of the first phrase of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events….” I ask my students, ‘Why don’t they say, “When in history…”? Wouldn’t that be simpler, less wordy? It would, but that’s not the way the Founders thought of ‘history.’ To them, ‘history’ meant a literary genre, namely, a factual narrative. Thucydides’ “History” of the Peloponnesian War means Thucydides’ narration of the course of events during that war. One writes a history in order to understand the course of events. The course of events never stands still; the course of events is ‘one damn thing after another.’ Because the human mind cannot understand something that changes constantly, because the human mind needs fixed points of reference, the historian, in attempting to understand a course of events, and in order to commend his understanding to others, must set down the course of events in a story or history. Then, at least the words on the page will go nowhere, and our minds can begin to see the order of the events, understand the course as a course, as a stream that goes somewhere, adhering to a knowable pattern. This pattern might not be rational; the course of events might proceed in largely unpredictable ways. Yet, once fixed on the pages of a history, it could be understood precisely as an illustration of the interaction between human reasoning and human unreason, with no little spice of randomness thrown into the resulting stew.
Not long after the Declaration, philosophers and lesser writers began to use the term ‘history’ to refer to the course of events themselves. Such writers—call them ‘historicists’—claimed to have discerned laws that govern the course of events. Although the persons making ‘history’ might act with no knowledge of those laws, no ability to predict the future on the basis of historical laws, the laws govern in spite of the irrationality of the actors. Moreover, just as the Founders derived natural right from the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the historicists derived their moral and political principles from the ‘laws of history.’ Why this shift in the source of morality?
If one rejects, as the European Enlightenment did, moral and political authority founded upon God’s revelation; if one further rejects nature as the foundation of right (a rejection founded upon the claim of many Enlightenment materialists that nature, including human nature, consists of nothing more than matter in motion, with no purpose beyond itself), then the discovery of laws of history might become the sole source of authority. Without God, a sort of providence remains, now reduced however to the human quest for freedom. By ‘freedom’ historicists mean the liberation from the restraints imposed by God or natural right. Freedom then means the progressive conquest of nature for whatever purposes human beings set down—typically, comfortable self-preservation and a favorable reputation. The domination of nature by human effort comports with science, especially a secularized con-science (inner knowledge), now called consciousness. The fully free human being, a fully free nation, and finally a fully free humanity, will enjoy ‘consciousness’—entirely transparent knowledge of the terms and conditions of its own domination of nature, including its own nature.
Thus man will be a creation not of God, or a product of nature, but finally a creation of himself. In the terminology of G. W. F. Hegel, the first and in many respects the greatest of the historicists, the Geist or Absolute Spirit that is full, rational consciousness, replaces the Holy Spirit. One understands, achieves consciousness, of history (redefined as the course of events) by looking back over that course from its end, the ‘end of History’ first achieved in the mind of Hegel himself. From that authoritative vantage point of full consciousness, one sees that all previous historical epochs were relative to the end of History, the full development of Geist. Each epoch thus can be seen to have had a Zeitgeist, a ‘spirit of the time’—partial and blinkered in comparison to the end of History, but each an advance toward that end, each a stage of progress toward the end or purpose of the course of events. In addition, each nation has its own geist, its own ‘spirit,’ and the Absolute Spirit brings one nation forward to dominate a given age: the Hebrews in one epoch, the Greeks in another, the Romans next, until finally the German usher in the end of History.
Historicist philosophy therefore breaks sharply with natural rights philosophy. To historicist eyes, the American Constitution’s merit rests in its advancement of human freedom, conceived as the mastery of nature, from the English Constitution of the day. The American Founders would have said, on the contrary, that their constitution’s merits lay precisely in its adherence to nature, specifically, the principles of natural right—the laws of nature and of nature’s God. They would not claim that the American people or nation embodied the spirit of the age, much less the end of history, only that the representatives of the American people had invented a set of ruling institutions as part of a new kind of regime which more closely approximates the universal and permanent principles of natural right than existing regimes had done. Political science or knowledge of nature had advanced, but this had nothing to do with some metaphysical principle playing itself out in the minds of the Founders. At most, they would express gratitude to God’s providence for leading them to these discoveries.
Why does this change matter in practice as well as theory? This question leads to the second theme to consider, the character of the modern state. The modern state, invented by Machiavelli, consists of the centralization of all political authority in the hands of one prince or of ‘the many,’ i.e., a republic. Gone will be the sort of political bodies seen, for example, in England prior to Henry VIII: political communities with a variety of authorities in a sort of colloidal suspension—the arrangement of ‘feudal’ societies. Sixteenth-century England, like almost all large political communities hitherto, featured a king, a good selection of aristocrats, common-law judges, clergymen, city magistrates, all in (sometimes tense) relations with one another, but none deriving his authority from the others. The statist project, founded by Machiavelli and elaborated by Hobbes, makes all authority derive from one central source: either monarch or parliament/national assembly. The government is said to be ‘sovereign,’ and all lesser forms of government derive their powers from it. Thus Henry VIII rids himself of the Roman Catholic Church, enriches himself with its properties, and establishes the Anglican Church as the state church of the English. Thus too could Henry’s philosophic contemporary, Francis Bacon, conceive the modern scientific project of the conquest of nature (the logical corollary of Machiavelli’s project, the conquest of chance or fortune) as both guide and purpose of the modern state, which controls that part of nature called the territory of England along with that part of humanity called the English.
With the help of modern science, the discipline of cartography could produce precise maps, delineating clearly the borders separating one state, one territory ruled by prince or parliament, from another. Eventually, the sovereign state would develop a new kind of governmental organization, to reinforce its centralism: modern bureaucracy, wherein rulers deriving their authority from their participation in the modern state itself owe their loyalty not to the persons of God, monarch, or lord (as had the bureaucrats of ancient China, and those of the Catholic Church) but to their functions within the rationally-ordered system that is the state itself. Eventually, the State would take over the Church’s function of charitable ‘good works.,’ putting these on an ostensibly scientific basis.
As mentioned in a previous lecture, the American Founders sought the advantages of the “new science of politics” while also seeking to avoid the snares of Machiavellian statism, as shown in George III’s actions in attempting to extend and tighten the rule of the English state to the American colonies. By making the people, not the government, sovereign they avoided the tyranny of the Machiavellian prince; by dividing governmental powers, and by separating the sovereign people from the direct exercise of power by the institutions of representative government, they equally avoided the tyranny of ‘the many,’ or democracy. Insofar as the Founders instituted modern bureaucracy, they kept it primarily on the level of the local governments, the townships or municipalities; the national government employed a very small number of bureaucrats. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, the Americans had instituted political centralization—lawmakers, executives, and judges in a capital city—but no substantial administrative or bureaucratic centralization.
The office of the presidency, in particular, needed institutional safeguards to make it both effective and safe for republicanism. Tocqueville considered the seeming weakness of the American president, in contrast to the power of the French monarch, that exemplar of statism. After remarking the constitutional differences between the two offices, he shifted his attention from structures to circumstances:
“If the executive power is less strong in America than in France, one must attribute the cause of it perhaps more to circumstances than to laws.
“It is principally in relations with foreigners that the executive power of an nation finds occasion to deploy its skill and force.
“If the life of the Union were constantly threatened, if its great interests were mixed every day with those of other powerful peoples, one would see the executive power grown larger in opinion, through what one would expect from it and what it would execute.
“The president of the United States is, it is true, the chief of the army, but that army is composed of six thousand soldiers; he commands the fleet, but the fleet counts only a few warships; he directs the affairs of the Union towards foreign peoples, but the United States has no neighbors. Separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, still too weak to wish to dominate the sea, it has no enemies, and its interests are only rarely in contact with those of other nations of the globe.
“The president of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives, which he has no occasion to make use of, and the rights which, up to now, he can use are very circumscribed; the laws permit him to be strong, circumstances keep him weak.”
It follows that the president’s role would change, ‘in degree if not in kind,’ if circumstances changed so as to require a more forceful and regular exercise of executive authority. The president would still be no sovereign, but his exercise of power in behalf of the sovereign people would become more vigorous and extensive.
Theodore Roosevelt. By the 1890s, Theodore Roosevelt and others saw that American circumstances had changed, that industrial capitalism, technology (especially military and communications/transportation technology), and bureaucracy had combined to enable modern states to project economic, military, and political power throughout the world. Thinking in terms of geopolitics—literally, world politics—now made sense. As assistant secretary of the Navy, vice president, president, and finally as an ex-president who never lost his ambition to regain the presidency, Roosevelt did not only ‘think globally’ but also insisted that Americans accustomed themselves to presidents who would act globally, exercise executive power in a world inhabited by rival empires, rival efforts at geopolitical preeminence.
In domestic politics Roosevelt saw similarly large forces, particularly the rival, national and international forces of industrial capitalism and urban, factory labor, contending with one another for control of local, state, and national governments. Roosevelt warned Americans of “the Scylla of mob rule” and “the Charbydis of subject to plutocracy.” Both factions threatened self-government.
Roosevelt also saw the technological conquest of nature for the first time threatening the integrity of nature itself, and accordingly pressed for the conservation of wilderness lands. this was more than a concern for the survival of what we now call ‘ecosystems.’ Roosevelt feared that an entirely artificial, urbanized environment would cut off Americans from nature, weakening them physically and morally.
In Roosevelt’s opinion, this coalescence of forces justified his well-known “stewardship” theory of the American presidency.
Politically as well as individually, he wrote, self-government “is in its essence the substitution of self-restraint for external restraint.” As Lincoln saw, “in a self-governing democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy liberty must show that they know how to use it with moderation and justice in peace.” Citizens must display “self-control”; they must “learn from their mistakes.” They must also know how to fight for their liberties when foreign or domestic “malice” puts those liberties in jeopardy. Mutuality of service and mutuality of respect for service rendered, both founded upon “equality of opportunity as far as it is humanly possible to secure it,” are not only rights but duties, representing “the triumph of orderly liberty.”
Roosevelt sought to extend the power of the American national state. But he did not want to be understood as a statist. Not only are “vigorous forms of self-government in state and city” desirable, but the federal government itself must be democratized. “What is meant by the nationalization of the democratic method is the giving to the whole people themselves the power to do those things that are essential in the interest of the whole people.” Roosevelt, not Herbert Croly, originated the notion of using Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends. In 1906, three years before Croly published The Promise of American Life, Roosevelt said, “While I am a Jeffersonian in my genuine faith in democracy and popular government, I am a Hamiltonian in my government views, especially with reference to the need of the exercise of broad powers by the National Government.” Separation of powers, between states and the national government and among the branches of the national government itself, is less important than responsibility of governmental officials to the people. “What is normally needed is the concentration in the hands of one man, or of a very small body of men, of ample power to enable him or them to do the work that is necessary; and then the devising of means to hold these men fully responsible for the exercise of that power by the people.” That is true “self-government” and “good government.” “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use.” Concentrated power that is “palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account” will not compromise democracy but save it.
The empowered and responsible executive officer of the national government should be “the steward of the public welfare” and, in “great national crises,” “the steward of the people.” The steward of the people “is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.” This, Roosevelt claimed, is the model of the presidency followed by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, and it contrasts with the example of James Buchanan, who claimed that he could do none but those actions explicitly permitted him under the Constitution. Because the president “is or ought to be peculiarly representative of the people as a whole,” he should “take a very active interest in getting the right kind of legislation” in addition to performing his strictly executive work. He can do this “only by arousing the people, and riveting their attention” on what must be done—using the executive office as a “bully pulpit,” in Roosevelt’s signature phrase.
This conception of the executive presents a danger: It lends itself to a ‘routinization’ of emergency or, to put it more sharply, the fomenting and/or proclaiming of alleged national crises that cry out for bold management. A steward-president might engage in altogether too much crying out. Given Roosevelt’s own forcefully-stated reservations about popular sovereignty—specifically, the danger of majority tyranny, particularly as the result of demagoguery—what would prevent the self-proclaimed steward from playing the demagogue, riveting popular attention on himself? Given Roosevelt’s impatience with separation of powers, what institutional safeguards will impede such a president?
Understandably, then, Roosevelt’s theory of the presidency worried some contemporaries. Among the most prominent of these, his sometime friend and ally William Howard Taft, wrote: “The wide field of action that this would give to the Executive one can hardly admit.” By contrast, Lincoln, acting under “the stress of the greatest civil war in modern times,” “always pointed out the source of the authority which in his opinion justified his acts”—for example, the constitutional warrant for suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which was in the even confirmed by Congress, albeit after the fact. Although “there is little danger to the public weal from the tyranny or reckless character of a President who is not sustained by the people,” there is some danger from one who is. Fortunately, “this condition cannot probably be long continued,” as the people themselves will desert the would-be tyrant or overreaching democrat. The most that can be said in Roosevelt’s defense is that his conception of the executive cannot be separated from his conception of the right kind of political man who be the executive, nor from the right kind of private man and woman whom the executive will serve. A self-governing president in alliance with a self-governing people—in the full Rooseveltian sense of the term—will scarcely present a danger to minorities. But this drifts far from the Madisonian sense of the frailties of even the best public men, and the best peoples, the problem seen clearly both by Aristotle and by Christians, as well as the Founders.
This also drifts far from a clear appreciation of the problem posed by the modern state mentioned above: Already politically centralized, the state that centralizes administration as well could turn into a tyranny, ‘hard’ or ‘soft,’ as Tocqueville warns. Roosevelt’s attempt to avoid this result by sheer publicity—arousing the people, riveting their attention—fails to work out the relationship between the expanded administrative capacities of the executive branch and the public opinion he hopes will both energize those capacities and limit their abuse.
In Roosevelt’s hands, it might be added, this is nothing much more than drifting. The vessel of Roosevelt’s though drifts from its moorings in natural right and American constitutionalism, but he never decisively cuts the rope. Roosevelt remains the most important link between the post-Civil War civil service reformers or “mugwumps,” who held to the principles of the Founders, and the Progressives, who advanced altogether new principles. For the full Progressivist understanding of the presidency, we must turn to Roosevelt’s rival, Woodrow Wilson.
Woodrow Wilson. Whereas Theodore Roosevelt understood self-government primarily in terms of human virtues, only secondarily in terms of institutions, Woodrow Wilson came to sight first as an ‘institutionalist.’ The young political scientist made his mark as a specialist in constitutional and administrative practice. But Wilson’s thought also has a strong spiritual side. Whereas Roosevelt concerned himself with Christianity mostly insofar as he judged Christians to be in need of toughening, Wilson throughout his life founded his conduct on Christian principles. One of the few major American presidents who was unambiguously Christian, he sought not only to rule himself but to be ruled by Jesus of Nazareth, and to extend the rule of Christ to others.
Knowing that the letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life, Wilson nonetheless insisted on the consonance of some political institutions and Christianity. His father had preached as a minister in the southern Presbyterian Church, teaching his son the ‘covenant’ or ‘federal’ theology of that denomination. Covenant theology emphasized the Pauline doctrine that acknowledge the world as a place lovingly ordered by a God Who carefully demarcates social and political boundaries, consent to which bespeaks a well-governed Christian soul. In the hands of his father’s generation, this authorized strict but kindly subordination of women, children, and slaves. Wilson’s own beliefs bore strong traces of this doctrine, but in tension with the notions of legitimate change that any ‘progressivism’ must entail. His transformed Presbyterian Christianity led him to venture a profoundly non-‘conservative’ challenge to American constitutionalism and to the established international order.
Wilson rejected the natural-right foundation of American constitutionalism. A young contemporary recalled that “he spoke of the inherent Rights of Man and he indicated his disbelief in such rights, when written in capitals”—that is, when understood as ideas in the Socratic sense. In his dislike of such ‘abstractions’ he could sound very much like Edmund Burke, whom he admired, but in affirming democratization and progress he embraced a historicism of the ‘Left,’ not of the ‘Right.’ Philosophic historicism comports well with covenantal Presbyterianism’s doctrine of election, which calls individuals to imitate Christ in the world, so to speak reincarnating Christ in order to serve and lead others. As a unique event, the incarnation at the center of Christianity resists intellectual-philosophic abstraction, reduction to a principle; as a personal event, however, it can be ‘generalized’ as imitation rather than as idea. The centrality of incarnation allows Wilson to write that “self-government [is] a very coarse, homely thing when alive” while preparing himself to be America’s most ‘idealizing’ president, to use the language of many scholars. But to speak of Wilson’s ‘idealism’ doesn’t quite give an accurate account of his task. If a Person, and a person reincarnating or imitating that Person, generates every true ‘ideal,’ then intellection and the rule of reason take on secondary importance. Self-government consists, then, of a spiritual re-enactment of the life of Christ, not the rule of natural reason in the human soul. At the same time, the addition of progressivist historicism to that re-enactment suggests that even if human sinfulness remains, an individual, a society, and even the world may overcome its sinfulness and achieve peace. This hope sharply distinguishes Wilson from his Calvinist forebears, and from the American Founders.
Wilson lived from before the Civil War until after the First World War. The immense changes that occurred during those years of course marked his own thought as a political man in academia and in government. His principal biographer, Arthur S. Link, contends that Wilson’s thought changed so much that any attempt to study Wilson’s thought as a whole must be doomed to incoherence. Only a periodicized treatment fits the facts. But Wilson’s covenantal Christianity, with the new, historicized conception of self-government he develops out of it, does give coherence to his enterprise, even as it explains the many apostle-like wanderings of Wilsonian policy. “[S]ince Wilson,” political scientist Robert Eden writes, “we have grown used to willing together,” grown used to speaking less of ‘statesmanship’ than of ‘leadership,’ used to conceiving of ‘liberalism’ as ‘progressivism.’ American Progressivism is liberalism historicized theoretically and institutionalized in practice by the insertion of an administrative state—a new, necessarily oligarchic element in the American regime. The person who connects theory to practice is the opinion leader. The young Wilson told his fiancée, “My heart’s desire [is] that I may become one of the guides of public policy by becoming one of the guides of public thought,” using “political science” “to the end that our forms of government and our means of administration may be perfected.” (This, incidentally, is quite the thing for a man to identify as his heart’s desire in correspondence with his wife-to-be, but let that pass.) Statesmanship as guidance or leadership, leadership as the leading edge of historical process, and historical process as the progressive incarnation of the will of a providential God, Whose operations are not easily distinguished from those of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit: All this revolutionizes the American understanding of what self-government should mean.
Two years before he ran for president, Wilson summarized his political credo. “Politics is the very stuff of life.” “[I]ntensely human, and generally intimately personal,” political relations are not amenable to rational understanding on the basis of “principles that are fancied to be universal.” What gives personal politics its coherence is not a set of universal principles but the “large movement of it all which is independent in some strange way of time and place and accidental elements.” Political ‘science’ therefore misnames political knowledge, which requires “insight and sympathy and spiritual comprehension.” “Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great field upon which men like himself struggle, with unflagging pathetic hope, towards better things. He is a man big enough to think in the terms of what others than himself are striving for and living for and seeking steadfastly to keep in heart till they get. He is a guide, a comrade, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.” Leader and political ‘scientist’ alike should study the people “not as congeries of interests, but as a body of human souls,” attending to facts, to be sure, but to facts “spiritually perceived.”
Talk of ‘natural right’ must go. Even the citizen of the ancient world did not need natural right; he “bounded his politics by common sense, and so dispensed with ‘the rights of man.'” In modernity, in America, “French doctrines of the ‘rights of man’ crept in through the phrases of the Declaration of Independence”; they are the stuff of demagoguery. “[T]he only standards that are universal, the only standards that have borne the test of long experience, the standards that underlie the very processes of civilization and furnish the genius of human liberty” come from Christianity, form its “proposition,” its “discovery,” that “one man’s soul is of equal value with another man’s soul.” The thumotic passions of the political man find their true character in the honor of the Christian leader “willing to offend his fellow men in order to serve something that is greater than he is, and greater than they are, something that they will ultimately honor.”
When modern Zeitgeist meets Christian providence, when the Absolute Spirit meets the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian leader, self-government takes on a metaphysical dimension not contemplated by any previous American president. Church and state move closer than they had been for more than a century, but without reconstituting the politics of ‘throne and altar,’ of Church establishment, rejected by the American Founders. Wilson would save self-government—in the Christian as well as the political sense—inn a historicized world, a world ‘conscious’ of its own historicity, a world moreover buffeted by such seemingly uncontrollable forces as industrialism and geopolitics. Only the power of God can successfully resist such forces. In the iconography of the day, General Washington was Moses, the leader; President Washington was Cincinnatus, the civilian ruler ready return to private life after his public duties were done. Wilson, the Christian spiritual warrior, never stopped being Moses, the leader, the type of Christ. “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion.”
Wilson’s progressivist historicism and his incarnational theology express themselves in organic metaphors, images of growth, rather than in images of balanced mechanism. His organicism makes it more difficult to distinguish ‘levels’ or ‘concentric circles’ of his political thought, as one can do so readily in Washington’s thought. If Wilsonian thought suggests concentric circles of self-government, they resemble rather the growth rings of a tree, marks off individual and national self-development. ‘Self’ blends into ‘state,’ ‘political economy’ into ‘foreign policy,’ and so on—all growing together as elements of a self-developing world guided by divine providence and immanent laws of historical unfolding.
How does this work in practice? To lead, a leader needs a political party. Politics conceived as providential historical progress centers Wilson’s attention on the president as party leader. A vigorously-led political party embodies the vital, growing tissue of the national organism.
National, democratic self-government becomes party government. “I am interested in any one individual in politics only in proportion as I can see in him the candidate serving more other individuals, only in proportion as I consider him the representative, the great representative, of a great body of my fellow citizens who have a cause at their hearts.” For American progressives, ‘ideals’ are indeed causes both in the sense that they are creeds by which men and women act and in that they make things happen. As it had existed in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, party government had been run by bosses for their own self-interest. Such parties are “savory with decay and rank with rottenness,” “ready for no service but to be served” and “to debauch public morals, to corrupt and use the people.” It is time for public opinion to become the political boss of America. The mild reformism of post-Reconstruction America, reform as advanced by the mugwumps, will not suffice. “[M]ugwumps look for a man, not for a party. Would it not be better if, in finding a man they become a party—by winning, not a representative merely, but a leader as well?”
Parties directed by bosses are irresponsible, impediments to popular self-government. For decades, their deal-doing helped to hold together a governmental system that had no real nation behind it. But their time is long over, now that the North has won the Civil War and forcibly unified America. Partyless mugwumps cannot replace the bosses because the people do not back the mugwumps. “A living people needs not a master but a leader.” A master is a sovereign, and “there was never any sovereign in the United States,” whose citizens are their own guardians, not the wards of the government. But “great passions” “when they run through a whole population, inevitably find a great spokesman.” Leaders are the spokesmen of “constructive and handsome” popular passions. Thus the Christian Wilson concurs with the decidedly un-Christian historicist, G. W. F. Hegel, who writes, “Nothing great can be done without passion.” Paul Eidelberg charges that “Wilson’s project to unify political power so as to render it responsive to popular majorities is precisely what Madison feared most,” namely, “ideologically disciplined political parties acting under presidential leadership”—”the most efficient means of facilitating what Madison defined as majority faction.” This is a sober, well-taken warning, provided that it is understood that Wilson defines ‘passion’ differently than Madison does, and does so on the basis of a Christianity that Madison does not view with much confidence as a partisan political force. Party politics for Wilson parallels the principled sectarianism of Christianity, which broke from institutionalized Judaism and conquered the Western world.
Leadership is necessary because “what we really mean when we say that the people govern is that they freely consent to be governed, on condition that a certain part of them do the governing.” The people govern “in proportion as they produce the stuff out of which governors and kings are made.” This means that the regime question takes on less urgency for Wilson than it did for the Founders: A self-governing people might be ruled by a monarch, so long as he has been drawn from the people he rules.
Also in keeping with his organicist anti-structuralism, Wilson claims that the advantage of democracy over monarchy and aristocracy has nothing to do with the Madisonian-Montesquieuian separation and balance of powers on the governmental level; “in these points aristocracies and monarchies have often proven superior to democracy.” Rather, democracy’s advantage over other regimes consists in its superior “variety and symmetry of development,” its capacity for organic growth. “A people, not self-directed, but directed by its boldest, most prevalent minds”—so long as those minds are representative, expressive of the best popular passions—will grow with the most vigor. Progress in civilization consists of a material element, “assured mastery over nature,” and an immaterial element, “an assured and equitable order” brought about by the discipline born of struggle, the “ideals of duty” born of religion, and the enlightenment born of education. In this process the people are “passive.” “Progress works upon them, rather than by means of them.” Thus what at first sight appears to be a ‘from-below’ conception of self-government, an expression of the people’s will, turns out to be leader-driven. This suggests that Wilson’s thought on self-government must center on the national state, the prize of great parties and their leaders.
Wilson defines a state as a people organized by law within a definite territory; the state’s object is to rank and harness individuals and social groups to accomplish a common object. The state is necessary but dangerous; if too powerful, it will “dominate the variety and crush the spontaneity of the individual,” the center of the vitality of the state; this retention of ‘individualism’ separates American Progressivism from such collectivist historicisms as Marxism and its derivatives. Limited or constitutional government “can exist only where there is actual community of interest and of purpose, and cannot, if it be also self-government, express the life of any body of people that does not constitute a veritable community,” that is, a nation. “Self-government is the last, the consummate stage of constitutional development.” Self-government in America results from a long historical process, originating in medieval England. Self-government in England for most of the time was not democratic. Self-government with respect to the state does not mean democracy or republicanism but the “participation by non-official persons in the conduct of affairs.” Under feudalism, this meant men appointed “because of their importance in the locality, and not because of their connection with the national government,” men “who were not officers of the central government in the sense that modern administrative officials are.” This “imperative lay voice in affairs” required publicity of government action, freedom of opinion, and freedom of “concerted public agitation.” To work well, self-government requires “a clear experimental understanding of Rights,” social and economic conditions sufficiently equal to foster “community of feeling,” education and experience in public affairs, and “a habit and spirit of civic duty.” National self-government means government by representatives; it subordinates local self-government within legal limits. Under national self-government, local self-government becomes “self-direction” within those limits.
The state, then, is as natural as the nation, “the eternal, natural embodiment and expression of a higher form of life than the individual”; here is where Wilson departs from liberal individualism, settling on a democratized version of Hegelianism. “Each nation has its own State, i.e., its own form of organic life…produced by its own development, expressive of its own character.” The state’s purpose should be to “quicken” that development. Government is “the executive organ of society,” making the will of the society operative. The constitution of the government is “a vehicle of life, and its spirit is always the spirit of the age,” the “great world-historical processes of politics” as filtered through national life forms.
Wilson’s historicist vitalism causes him to stress continuity in political development. He makes one exception: the transition from antiquity to feudalism. There is no continuity between paganism and Christianity, and this may be seen in modern politics, where sovereignty—”the will of an organized independent community”—inheres in the power of legislation—extending state power to private as well as public affairs—exercised finally by the people, not an aristocracy. The legalism of the Old Testament and the populism of the New Testament combined with the self-conscious, self-directing rationalism of the Renaissance to produce the modern state. “Peoples [became] old enough to govern themselves.” Although Wilson sometimes asserts that the modern state serves the individual, not the individual the state, and also ranks society over the government that should “serve,” not “rule or dominate it,” finally individual and society both serve as sources of authority. They are not themselves authoritative.
Like all nations, the United States has developed over time. The United States government was founded by men guided by natural-rights social contract theory, and for most of its history “almost all the greatest statesmen of the Union have been constitutional lawyers,” fighting “the great battles of our politics…around the Constitution.” the Civil War ended the central battle, the battle over the constitutional authority of the national government itself. “The questions of the future are to be questions of internal national policy, of federal administration.” The Civil War force all Americans into nationhood, specifically, into a national economic network based on free rather than slave labor. Controversies over legal structure are now subordinate to controversies over national life. The old, contractarian understanding of the American Constitution had been inadequate, anyway. The Founders borrowed from Montesquieu, whose balance-of-power scheme fit the mixed regimes of Europe, not the popularly-based governments of the United States. Wilson eschews the clashing ambitions of officers lodged in separate governmental branches. He prefers coordination and unified control, again on the basis of organicism: “Governments are living things and operate as organic wholes”; “the whole art of statesmanship is the art of bringing the several parts of government into effective cooperation for the accomplishment of particular common objects—and party objects at that.” Wilson would replace what he calls the Newtonian mechanics of the Founders’ regime with evolutionist historicism. Separation of powers, “the central defect of American politics,” weakens the president by cutting him off from the Congress, which exercises the lawmaking power, the key power of modern government. Federalism, the attempted balance of national and states’ governmental powers, failed and eventuated in civil war.
In the years subsequent to the founding “patriotism was state patriotism,” the states being “the heart of self-government,” the “living, organic entities.” The Union was only an “arrangement.” Wilson judges John C. Calhoun and the other states’ rightists to have been correct according to the letter of the Constitution. They were mistaken in supposing that the contract could hold. Beneath the parchment document, a nation was forming, and “national sentiment” overrides contracts. national growth overtook the states’ growth. The Civil War “laid bare” the “ultimate foundation” of the contractarian structure, namely “physical force, sustained by the stern loves and rooted predilections of the masses of men, the strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every system of government”; Wilson here ignores the arguments of Lincoln. Contractarian illusions collapsed and “a citizenship of the United States was created.” The contractarian Constitution is a form of government “rather in name than in reality.” Self-government can only base itself on the reality of power, sentiment, and habit. The Newtonian balancing act of the 1787 Constitution obscures power and therefore obscures responsibility. “The times seem to favor a centralization of governmental functions such as could not have suggested itself as a possibility to the framers of the Constitution.” (In this, Wilson was mistaken: Many Founders worried about what they called ‘consolidation’ of powers, and of course the anti-federalists who rejected the Framers’ work accused them of effecting just such a centralization.)
Wilson would have America ascend from the hypocrisy of force-based contractarianism by reforming the Constitution in the direction of what he calls, following the English political scientist Walter Bagehot, government by discussion. Government by discussion means government by talk that is actually effectual. Effectual talk requires a certain level of civilization in the nation along with structural reforms to make the government more parliamentary—more English. Government by discussion is true self-government; its very verbalness conduces both to reasoning and to evangelizing. Government by discussion conduces also to progress; in Bagehot’s words, it “breaks down the yoke of fixed custom” and substitutes for it an “animated moderation.” In Wilson’s terms, government by discussion allows for the rule of “intelligently directed opinion.” “Common counsel is not aggregate counsel,” a matter of “counting heads,” but “a living thing made out of the vital substance of many minds, many personalities, many experiences”—the equivalent, on the national level, of the neighborhood talk that constitutes local self-government. But for all his verbalism, Wilson remains a ‘realist’: “It is the potential might rather than the wisdom of the majority which gives it its right to rule.” With no conception of natural right, Wilson must fall back on might as the ultimate arbiter, this side of God.
He is nonetheless confident that orator-leaders, in whom “are centered both opinion and party, will “elevate the whole people.” A party leader can also be a national leader if his party embodies the leading edge of historical progress—the way in which the nation will go. Under twentieth-century conditions, the executive and not the legislative branch has “the most direct access to opinion,” and therefore “the best chance of leadership and mastery,” unimpeded by the confusion and contradiction of debate. “[B]ecause he has the ear of the whole nation and is undoubtedly its chosen spokesman and representative, the President may place the House at a great disadvantage if he chooses to appeal to the nation.” As political scientist Jeffrey Tulis has observed, Wilson conceives of presidential authority as deriving not from the Constitution as the product of popular sovereignty but through popular sovereignty expressed as popular mandate—a mandate, moreover, shaped by the president’s own “interpretation” of public opinion. This ‘verbal’ aspect of leadership, so characteristic of Christian thought, does finally rest on force, precisely because and in the sense that public opinion finally rests of the force of ‘History.’ It is unkind, but not entirely inaccurate, to say that government by discussion eventuates in government by sermonizing, sermonizing on the president/preacher’s claim to interpret accurately the leading movement of the ‘spirit of the age.’
Government by discussion also eventuates in government by administration. The expansion of executive-branch power includes bureaucratization, the topic of one of Wilson’s earliest and most influential essays, “The Study of Administration.” Wilson intended to go beyond what he dismissed as the mere moralism of civil service reform, popular throughout his lifetime. Given the complexity of modern life, “it is getting harder to run a constitution than it is to frame one.” It is also getting to be impossible for the chief executive, “the most heavily burdened officer in the world,” to administer the nation’s business; men of “ordinary physique and discretion cannot be Presidents and live.” Without substantial administrative support, “we shall be obliged always to be picking our chief magistrates from among wise and prudent athletes—a small class.” Moreover, “there can be no science of choice or wisdom“: Ancient government, which consisted primarily of rule by judging, did not lend itself to a science of administration, which attempts, within the legal framework of modern constitutions, to “effect a systematic balance between private right and public power.” Modern science systematizes and ‘legalizes,’ understanding all phenomena under the governance of natural laws (which turn out to be ‘evolutionary’ or historical laws). Scientific administration accordingly rises more easily in a country like Bismarck’s Prussia, where the often-messy public opinion that rules democracies need not interfere with sovereign systematizers. Countries where public opinion counts politically—England, America—resist bureaucratization.
This fact involves Wilson in what must seem to us today as a somewhat quixotic project to make bureaucracy responsive to every-growing, ever-progressing public opinion as led by political men. Wilson introduces what the notion of the “elastic Constitution” to make that feasible. Far from being a stable law to be changed only by formal amendment, the Constitution must be “stretched” so as “to cover so great a giant as the nation has become.” The government’s “active, planning will” and “prevailing popular thought and need,” both at the service of “symmetrical national development,” do and should override constitutional forms, the letter of constitutional law. Leaders will guide this “statesmanship of adaptation.” Because the Supreme Court of Wilson’s time resisted such adaptations as Wilsonian progressivism commended, he tended to read the Court out of his project, referring constitutional matters to public opinion as interpreted by presidents and administrators. The one thing that might derail this project would be a popular feeling of what might be termed constitutional guilt over such confident stretching, especially if that guilt were coupled with the suspicion that elasticity might redound much more to the benefit of the governors than to the governed. Wilson bolstered popular faith and confidence by pointing to the charms of development, material and spiritual.
Conclusion. Severed from natural right, what does ‘self-government’ mean?
Through Lincoln, American presidents understood self-government as the rule of reason, a setting of limits on personal and popular passions. The reasonable or prudential government of the non-rational aspects of the soul, contractarian/constitutional government founded by prudent statesmen, the conduct of domestic and foreign policy by prudent statesmen or even, absent these, by statesmen acting within the reasonable limits set by the Constitution: Wilson rejects all of this as illusory. God and history, war and passion, drive the real world. The providential rule of the Creator-God, incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, makes of the world a system of transformative power. The leaders who align themselves with this power are saved from egoism by their conscious subordination to the God Whose power it is, by the selfless service commanded by Jesus, the Captain of our souls. Self-government becomes impassioned, personally and nationally; the national state and its government become more tightly integrated and forceful, les it succumb to other powerful forces in modernity, those of the great business corporations and the great foreign tyrannies. Right willing, agapic love, more than prudential judgment, redeems human power. Wilsonian enlightenment is an act of willing—the “Let there be light” of Genesis—not an act of thinking—the “Dare to know!” of the Enlightenment, much less the “Know thyself” of Socrates. This act of willing nonetheless knows where ‘History’ is going, and so can rightly guide the less knowledgeable souls of the nation at large, who feel what is right without quite being able to articulate it.
Power rules this world in ways great and small. To Wilson, education is a police agency that includes mental discipline, gradually growing into self-government. War is central to American and world history; in America, war brought on the power of the business corporations, unified the country, demonstrated the need for a living or elastic constitution under the might that is also the right of leader-directed public opinion. Out of the Great War, the most extensive display of power men ever engaged in, will come the perpetual peace enforced by the League of Nations—democratic-republican and perhaps even Christian nations.
Wilson’s historicism depends upon the God of the Bible to make it both real and right. But if God chooses to withdraw, Wilsonian self-government has no natural right to fall back on. If America ceases to be “a Christian nation” (as Wilson described it), if the world increasingly refuses to hearken to the Word of the Lord, then a less sublime apocalypse might loom. Severed from Christianity, Wilsonian self-government might collapse into some form of materialism. Wilson was confident that this would not happen, given the benign providentialism and historicism he embraced.
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