Members of the first broad-based American reform movement, the Jacksonian Democrats, were right that America wasn’t as democratic as it might be. But under the leadership of their bloody-minded, Indian-murdering, slave-trading, pigheaded sour grape of a president, their wanton leveling led to the destruction of the prototype of the Federal Reserve, the financial destitution of the country, and the elevation—paradoxically for the democratic-minded—of the chief executive to the office of mob boss.
The Radical Republicans of the Reconstruction period were wholly right in their attempt to provide freed slaves with enfranchisement and equality before the law. But they let their self-righteousness provoke them into impeaching President Andrew Johnson for opposing them in a fully legal manner. Cambridge historian Hugh Brogan makes the following point.
Had Johnson been ejected, it would have been for nakedly political reasons, and the whole basis of the Constitutional system would have been overthrown: the principles of coexistent, mutually independent powers; of checks and balances; of laws, not men.58
The agrarian-based populist movement of the late nineteenth century, which would come to be led by William Jennings Bryan, was right that high tariffs increased the price of manufactured goods and benefited monopolies and that artificially high interest rates burdened mortgaged farmers. But the populists were so pleased with themselves for pointing out wrongs that it never entered their heads that they were all wrong about righting them. The populists favored debasing the currency, creating inflation, shortening the work day (a hard thing for farmers to do, absent nuclear winter), government confiscation of “excess” land owned by corporations and all land owned by aliens, nationalization of railroads and telegraph and telephone systems, and restrictions on immigration.
The progressives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who are with us yet, were intent on finding “scientific” methods of fixing every problem you can think of and some you can’t. The attitude of the progressives toward the poor was, says Brogan, “betrayed by the word they used to describe the philanthropic centres they established in the slums, ‘settlements’: to them the cities were wildernesses, the inhabitants alien savages and the new settlers were bringers both of superior techniques and superior ideas.”59 And, incidentally, bringers of the urban concentration camps we call low-income housing.
One of Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite books on politics, The Promise of American Life,60 by Herbert Croly (first editor of the New Republic, among his other sins), averred that Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America would be achieved by the up-to-date means of centralization and federal cooperation between business and government.
The progressives were important in national politics, especially during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover, when they prepared the way for the New Deal and liberalism as we know it. But progressives were also important in local government, particularly as big-city mayors such as Hazen Pingree in Detroit (1890–97) and Tom Johnson in Cleveland (1901–9). New York’s Fiorello La Guardia (1934–45) fit the mold, and Chicago’s Richard J. Daley (1955–76) liked to pretend that he did.
A core thought of progressivism was expressed by Samuel M. “Golden Rule” Jones, mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897 to 1904. Jones was a millionaire turned political reformer who’d made his money building oil well pumps at the Acme Sucker Rod Company (really its name). Jones said in his book The New Right,61 “The Competitive system is the cause that constantly horrifies us and shocks our finer sensibilities with its outrages upon the weak and incapable brothers of society.”
Who is to mediate this unfair competition and meliorate its unjust outcome? Woodrow Wilson had the answer in his book Constitutional Government in the United States.62 Even before Wilson was the president, Wilson knew it was the president.
Let him once win the admiration and the confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people.
And thus political reformers elevate the chief executive to something more than mob boss and closer to führer.
Individual politicians can’t save us either. Democracy means electing people. Politicians are the people who get elected. I’ve spent some time with politicians. I like politicians. I’m friends with politicians from both sides of the aisle. Politicians are fine until they stick their noses into things they don’t understand, such as most things. Then politicians turn into rachet-jawed purveyors of monkey doodle and baked wind. They are piddlers upon merit, beggars at the doors of accomplishment, thieves of livelihood, envy-coddling tax lice applauding themselves for giving away other people’s money. They are lapdogs of demagoguery returning to the vomit of collectivism. They are pig herders tending that sow who eats her young, the welfare state. They are muck-dwelling bottom feeders growing fat on the worries and disappointments of the electorate. They are the ditch carp in the great river of democracy. And that’s what one of their friends says.
What’s bad for us is good for politicians. They line up to lick our wounds. They love it when we’re hurt. Politicians resemble my fellow journalists and me in this respect. A few years ago I was in a shopping center and a local TV news crew ran in the door looking excited. I asked what was up. They told me there was a large propane tank across the way and it had sprung a leak. I said, “Well, I guess this wouldn’t be the moment to step outside and have a smoke.”
And the cameraman said, “Please, go ahead. We worship different gods than you do.” Politicians worship different gods than you do.
Politicians lie to us. But it’s not as if they have a choice. Think what the truth would sound like on the campaign stump, even a little bit of truth. Think what would happen to the candidate who said, “No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t inadequate funding or overcrowding or teachers’ unions or lack of computer equipment in the classroom. The problem is your damn kids.”
And yet one of our abiding problems with politics is that we insist on blaming our political problems on those politicians. We think lousy politicians are what’s wrong. We got rid of George W. Bush, and we have peace in Afghanistan, love in Iraq, and the unemployment rate is at 2 percent.
Politicians, by their nature, seek opportunities for political power. They search for problems that only politics can solve. Throw them out the door of social justice and they climb down the chimney of climate change. And see how “global warming” has been deftly transformed by politicians into “climate change,” in case the globe fails to warm up. Politicians will be needed in every kind of weather.
If it happens that no problem exists, this acts as a stimulus to political problem solving. The puzzle of public policy making, when public policy isn’t needed, spurs a politician to find a more complicated puzzle solution.
America is much richer than it was in 1970. Our per capita gross domestic product (in constant 2000 dollars) was $18,391 forty years ago and $38,262 in 2008. Therefore, obviously, we require fewer federal subsidy programs. Requirements, as you may have noticed, play no part in politics. In 1970 there were 1,019 federal subsidy programs; in 2008 there were 1,804.63
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has been lobbying, politically, for tougher firearms purchase and registration laws for a quarter of a century. The Brady Campaign rates states according to how tough those laws are. In 2008 Utah, Alaska, and North Dakota were involved in a tie for forty-third place. California was rated number 1. New Jersey was rated number 2. The number of murders committed with firearms in California in 2008: 1,487. The number in New Jersey: 236. Utah: 19. Alaska: 13. North Dakota: 0.64 Considering the number of reasons there are for shooting people, I’d say Alaska, Utah, and North Dakota need more and cheaper guns.
Lest you think that the political business of brewing trouble, no matter the lack of ingredients, happens only in America’s oddball poli
tical system, I give you a December 20, 2009, New York Times story about our sister democracy France. A Frenchwoman posted an online comment about France’s secretary of state Nadine Morano, calling Morano a liar. The punworthy Morano subpoenaed the Frenchwoman’s Internet protocol address, discovered her identity, and sued her for “public insult toward a member of the ministry,” an offense punishable by a fine of up to $18,000.
In response to the Frenchwoman’s protest at her treatment, Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary head of France’s ruling party, the bowelishly named Union for a Popular Movement, said, “The Internet is a danger for democracy.” How to cope with the likes of Copé the people of California seem to know, the Brady Campaign be damned.
The best politicians can be victims of their own moral overreaching, even if they avoid the pitfalls of reform ideology and the other pits that politicians fall into. But individual politicians are, after all, individuals like the rest of us and should be judged individually. It would be wrong—very tempting, but wrong—to think of them all as simply bastards. (Although the occasion for temptation is so great that, if we had to make a general rule about politicians, we should probably give in to the tempting.)
In fact, Hazen Pingree, Tom Johnson, Samuel M. “Golden Rule” Jones, and Fiorello La Guardia were good mayors for their time and place. Ronald Reagan was a good enough president. Margaret Thatcher was a good enough prime minister. Mikhail Gorbachev himself, by Russian standards, had something to recommend him in declining to kill people in wholesale lots.
In the 2,500-year history of democracy since ancient Athens, a few politicians have arisen who more or less could be trusted with great powers, up to a point, briefly, in times of dire crisis, sort of. There were Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and maybe somebody else but I can’t think who.
We mustn’t expect, or desire, a single politician who will extract us from our political difficulties. The semilegendary Cincinnatus of fifth century BC Rome is often held up as a model politician. An impoverished farmer, though aristocratically born, Cincinnatus was twice given a dictatorship when Rome was in danger and twice, when the danger had passed, promptly resigned the dictatorship and returned to his plowing. Our politicians should return to their plowing—usually of campaign aids. But Cincinnatus is also recalled as an opponent of the plebeians (us) and as a man who resisted enactment of a code of law applicable equally to plebeians and patricians.
We shouldn’t go looking for heroes in our politics, although finding an occasional decent man and sticking him into office is no bad thing. To give an example, a politician who I think is okay is John Sununu, my former New Hampshire senator and the son of previously quoted Governor Sununu. I think Sununu is okay not because I agree with him on political issues, though I mostly do, but because of his political philosophy. For starters, he has one. “But it’s not,” he told me in an interview in 2008, “something I have written down on an index card.”
He then proceeded to give me a political philosophy that could be written down on an index card: “We are a free people who consented to be governed. Not vice versa.”
If we want to fill the other side of the index card, Senator Sununu said: “In most parts of the world there never has been an appreciation for that perspective. Governments have evolved to provide greater freedom, to reduce the power of monarchies, to reduce absolute power.”
When they have evolved at all. I asked Senator Sununu if other politicians in Washington have political philosophies. “There are many,” he said, “that would make the argument that they have a core set of values. But these values don’t reflect a philosophy. Rather, they reflect a personal goal. ‘I believe government should be fair and just,’ ‘I believe government should represent both the strong and the weak in America.’ They’re describing characteristics of what they’d like the government to be. They aren’t describing principles of organizing a government.”
Did Senator Sununu have to compromise his principles to get elected? He said, “Voters are intelligent enough to understand that they can’t agree with you about everything. What people want is someone who’s thoughtful, direct, and able to explain. Reagan reveled in explaining. Was he ‘too simplistic’? He was as deep and thoughtful as any of his contemporaries.”
Senator Sununu didn’t claim to be proud of being a politician. “I’m intrigued,” he said, “by the notion that most of our country’s founders were suspicious of anyone who wanted to hold public office, e.g., Aaron Burr. The founders retained that suspicion even after they themselves held public office. They regarded it as an obligation, not an aspiration.”
Sununu had held office for a dozen years, first as a congressman, then as a senator. I asked, “Are you suspicious of yourself?”
“When the New Hampshire House seat came open,” he said, “I looked at the other people who had announced. I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t run, New Hampshire would be represented by another trial lawyer.”
The Democrat who defeated John Sununu in 2008, former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen, is not a trial lawyer—her husband is. Shaheen is a product of the only institution capable of making our lives more miserable than the law courts. She was a schoolteacher.
After the interview Senator Sununu took me on a tour of the Capitol building. There are actually two domes atop the Capitol, one inside the other, and you can climb up in between them, 288 feet, to a little terrace at the feet of the heroic scale figure of Freedom. The view seems to command the world. And sometimes American politics seems to try to do the same. This is not the best place to contemplate consent of the governed. But, on the way up, we’d stopped at the balcony that surrounds the base of the inner dome. I looked at Constantino Brumidi’s fresco Apotheosis of Washington, painted in 1865. I wondered if the tourists in the Capitol rotunda, 180 feet below, could see how fabulous the allegorical and mythological babes are who surround the Father of Our Country and hover over the proceedings of our democracy. Armed Freedom (Brumidi’s beautiful wife was the model) triumphs over Tyranny and Kingly Power. Enticing Ceres rides a mechanical wheat reaper while nubile Young America, wearing a liberty cap and little else, offers her encouragement. Alluring Aphrodite rises from the sea holding the Atlantic telegraph cable. And gorgeous Minerva imparts wisdom to Samuel Morse, Robert Fulton, and a frankly smitten Benjamin Franklin. The curvaceous arc at the apex of our national headquarters is covered in 4,664 square feet of rosy bosoms, shapely limbs, firm tummies, and concupiscent hips. We need to get closer to this.
What has to change in America is our minds. And our politicians need to sit down and shut up, devote their energies to the kind of thoughts that Minerva has Ben Franklin thinking. Meanwhile we should be cavorting with the nymphs of our freedoms and the equally attractive—in their mature way—personifications of our responsibilities, and not be asking favors from the Tyranny and Kingly Power of politics. Governance can be party time, as it is on the Capitol ceiling, but it’s BYOB.
The power of politics is based on a fallacious understanding of “rights.” We have to give up all our ideas of positive rights, gimme rights. To get rid of our positive rights we have to embrace our duties. The helpless and hapless don’t have a right to our assistance, but we have absolute, inescapable—unalienable, if you will—duties to assist them.
Why do we have these duties? If your conscience can’t tell you, I sure can’t. Even if the requirements of duty could be rationally explained, the elaborate logical justification for the necessity of duties would be blown to flinders by the thought of life in a world that didn’t have them.
What, exactly, are the duties that we have? And how much of them? The political process is one of the ways that we attempt to figure this out.
We are married to our duties. There’s no divorce. And, whether we like it or not, politics will always be involved in the execution of our duties. We can be charitable to the point of self-abuse and politics will still be involved. In a big country, and a bigger world, our political syste
m—our arrangement among persons—is such that those who need our help may be too distant in place or circumstance for us to know them the way we know our bum brother-in-law. Our fellow citizens may have to politically inform us of our duties, the way the abolitionists did in the nineteenth century.
Along with our duties of the loving kind, we have less tenderhearted duties to keep our trash picked up, our fires fought, our miscreants arrested, and our criminal and civil courts operating. Annoying as the government’s legal monopoly on deadly force can be, we really don’t want to privatize it. We’ve seen privatization of deadly force: 9/11. We can desocialize some other aspects of government but there are limits. It’s hard to imagine the advantage of competing networks of private sewer pipes.
Beside compassionate and quotidian duties, there are other responsibilities we need to accept. The adolescent ass who lives near me doesn’t have a “right to education.” No such right exists. And, personally, I don’t feel much of a duty to educate this jerk who, while playing “mailbox baseball” by leaning out the passenger window of a buddy’s car and swinging a Louisville Slugger, knocked my U.S. mail receptacle for a triple. But using my money to provide the drip with as much education as he can contain may allow him to put his talents to better use in the future. I’ll grant he has some. I myself, in 1964, leaning out the passenger window of a buddy’s car and swinging a Louisville Slugger, failed to remember that Mr. Norbert, next door, had put a cement block in his mailbox.
Educating the young is not a matter of rights or duties but it is a good idea, and it’s our responsibility to occasionally have one. Either we embrace responsibilities or they get turned over to the Committee Brain of politics.
As I write it’s committee brain season in New Hampshire. Town meetings are held in March, as are the meetings of most school boards. There’s nothing else to do this time of year, nevertheless few people in their right minds attend these gatherings. I guiltily confess we ought to.