THE PREVALENCE OF LIBERALISM IN THE UNITED STATES
On the first of June 1784 the American Army numbered seven hundred men under the command of Major General Henry Knox. Six months earlier the Revolution had come to an end; Sir Guy Carleton had evacuated New York; Washington had said farewell to his officers at Fraunces’ Tavern. The seven hundred men were the only regular military force in the United States, the last remnant of the Continental Army. On June 2, 1784 the Continental Congress, agreeing with Elbridge Gerry that “standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican Governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism,” ordered the disbanding of this remnant:
Resolved, That the commanding officer be and he is hereby directed to discharge the troops now in the service of the United States, except twenty-five privates, to guard the stores at Fort Pitt, and fifty-five to guard the stores at West Point and other magazines, with a proportionate number of officers; no officer to remain in service above the rank of a captain . . .
Having thus reduced the regular army to eighty caretakers, the Congress then requested the states to furnish it with seven hundred militia to garrison the western frontier.
A little over 131 years later, in the autumn of 1915, the Acting Secretary of War, Henry Breckinridge, was summoned to the presence of Woodrow Wilson. He found the President “trembling and white with passion,” holding in his hands a copy of the Baltimore Sun. The President pointed to a story in the paper reporting that the General Staff was preparing plans for the eventuality of war with Germany. When the President asked him if this were true, Breckinridge replied that he did not know. The President then directed him to investigate, and, if he found that it was true, to relieve every officer on the General Staff and order him out of Washington.1
These incidents together illustrate two basic points concerning the American political mind. First, liberalism dominated American thinking from the Revolution through the first half of the twentieth century. Second, liberalism does not understand and is hostile to military institutions and the military function.
The universality of liberalism in the United States and its essentially static quality contrast with the variety and dynamism of ideologies in Europe. The Frenchman has had firsthand experience with aristocratic conservatism, revolutionary democracy, Bonapartism, clericalism, monarchism, liberalism, socialism, communism. The American knows only liberalism. The political outlook of the Englishman today, be he socialist or Tory, is fundamentally different from that of the average Englishman at the end of the eighteenth century. The political ideology of Woodrow Wilson was essentially the same as that of Elbridge Gerry. Liberalism in the United States has been unchanging, monotonous, and all-embracing.
The American colonists inherited their liberal ideas from the English tradition of Locke. The dominance of liberalism in America, however, was the product not of inheritance but of economic expansion and international isolation. Steady economic growth diluted class conflict. There were few struggles over the distribution of the pie because the pie was always growing larger. No nascent group ever developed a radical ideology challenging the established order: it was always too quickly assimilated into that order. Nor did any established group (with two exceptions) ever develop a conservative ideology defending its interests against radical onslaught. The oncoming wave always evaporated short of the gates of the castle. Radicalism and conservatism were equally superfluous. Incipient and established groups both adhered to liberalism. In the absence of European feudalism, European classes, and a European proletariat, political struggle in America was restricted to squabbles for limited objectives among interest groups all of whom shared the same basic values.2 The great political controversies of American history with a few exceptions have been between two or more varieties of liberalism. The isolation of the United States from world politics in the nineteenth century reinforced the dominance of liberalism. National security was a simple given fact — the starting point of political analysis — not the end result of conscious policy. What need was there for a philosophy to explain America’s relation with the rest of the world and to suggest the proper course of conduct in international affairs? Not only did every group in American society normally feel economically secure but also American society as a whole normally felt politically secure. American awareness of the role of power in domestic politics was dulled by the absence of class conflict. American awareness of the role of power in foreign politics was dulled by the absence of external threats.
The pervasiveness of the liberal doctrine in the United States has been commented upon by foreign observers from De Tocqueville to Myrdal. Liberalism permeated American society and created a uniformity of belief among the American people which would be the envy of a totalitarian dictator. Even those institutions which inherently seem to be most illiberal capitulated before its influence. Organized religion is normally a conservative force. In America, however, Protestantism was refashioned in the liberal image and even Catholicism was significantly influenced by the liberal environment. More than a century separated Jonathan Edwards from Henry Ward Beecher. While the conquest of religion was perhaps liberalism’s most significant victory ideologically, its acceptance by business was much more significant politically. The ideology of American business — that peculiar mixture of Enlightenment rationalism, liberalized Protestantism, Social Darwinism, and orthodox economic individualism — was liberal to the core. Along with the other groups in American society, business never felt impelled to develop a conservative ideology. It joined with the churches, the universities, the professions, and the labor movement in adhering to the liberal creed of individualism, rationalism, and progress.
Only two significant groups in American history failed to adhere to the liberal ideology. Both were genuinely conservative and both existed before the Civil War. The Federalists had their roots in the New England and Atlantic coast commercial and manufacturing interests in the period roughly from 1789 to 1812. Their conservatism derived from both internal and external challenges. At home they believed themselves to be the party of the “rich and well born,” and the more extreme Federalists feared a social revolution on the French model by the propertyless elements of the cities and the back country farmers of the frontier. The Federalists were also responsible for the conduct of American foreign policy during the first twelve years of the Republic when European interests still threatened the infant nation. The United States was surrounded by French, English, and Spanish territory, and by the British fleet. They thus had a legitimate concern for the national security. The conservative ideology of the Federalists was reflected in the writing of Hamilton and John Adams, the general temper and attitudes of Washington, and the judicial statesmanship of John Marshall. The domestic source of Federalist conservatism disappeared, however, when the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800 turned out to be a false alarm. The diluting principle was already at work; there were no mobs in the streets, no confiscation of private property, no guillotines. Class distinctions blurred instead of hardening and eventually melted in the Era of Good Feelings. John Quincy Adams, of impeccable Federalist heritage, was elected President by the Jeffersonian party, thus fulfilling its founder’s inaugural dictum that “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans.” Externally, the Treaty of Ghent marked the withdrawal of Europe from America and the beginning of eighty years of splendid continental isolation on the part of the United States. As the threats at home and abroad disappeared, conservative Federalism vanished also.
The second exception to liberal dominance was the ante-bellum South. The causes of Southern conservatism were primarily domestic. The Southern social system was an illiberal island in a liberal society. In self-defense the Southerners, like the Federalists before them, demonstrated their conservatism by creative and original political speculation. Paradoxically, America, the land of liberalism, never produced an outstanding liberal politi
cal theorist. Unchallenged at home and from abroad, American liberalism suffered from the absence of competition; liberal writers were content to repeat eighteenth-century formulas. Conservatives, forced to justify themselves in a hostile society, however, were driven to political theory, and the Old South produced notable conservative expressions in the work of George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun. Unlike the Federalists, moreover, the Southerners had good grounds for their domestic fears. The slaveowners were the only significant social group in the history of the United States ever to be forcibly dispossessed of their property. The Civil War settled the fate of Southern conservatism. After 1865 liberalism reigned unchallenged on the American scene.*
The American liberal approach to military affairs was hostile, static, and dominant; the conservative approach of the Federalists and the South sympathetic, constructive, and thwarted. It is no coincidence that the two statesmen who displayed the most penetrating insight into military policy and the deepest appreciation of the military function were the two great spokesmen of the conservative groups: Alexander Hamilton and John C. Calhoun. They stand in sharp contrast to liberal leaders not just in their views on military policy but in their interest in military affairs. In more than a hundred and fifty years American liberalism never produced a governmental leader with comparable ability and interest in military matters. Hamilton and Calhoun, however, were isolated from the mainstream of American intellectual and political development. Their military policy, like their political philosophy, was never popular with the American people. The avalanche of liberalism brushed them aside into a discredited cranny of history.
THE LIBERAL APPROACH TO MILITARY AFFAIRS
What I come to is a sense of suddenly being left in the lurch, of suddenly finding that a philosophy upon which I relied to carry us through no longer works . . . The contrast between what liberals ought to be doing and saying if democratic values are to be conserved, and what the real forces are imposing upon them, strikes too sternly on my intellectual senses.3
These words of Randolph Bourne six months after America’s entry into World War I poignantly expressed the futility experienced by a sensitive and acute observer as he tried to apply the philosophy of liberalism to the problem of war. The stubborn fact facing Bourne was simply that his philosophy did not furnish means to think about war, peace, and international relations. These problems were, to use the phrase of E. F. M. Durbin, “the greater, excluded question” of liberalism. Magnificently varied and creative when limited to domestic issues, liberalism faltered when applied to foreign policy and defense. This failure was characteristic of liberalism in Europe as well as in the United States, but in Europe its implications were not so obvious. Each European country had other philosophies competing with liberalism which furnished more competent ways of dealing with national security. The dominance of the liberal mind in the United States, however, meant, first, that the absence of a conservative or other more useful philosophy on foreign affairs was much more keenly felt in the conduct of American foreign and defense policies, and, secondly, that American liberalism, unable to evade responsibility in this area, tried far more extensively than European liberalism to create a liberal approach to interstate relations. On the other hand, American experience also tended to reinforce and magnify the principal elements in liberal thought which contributed to its incapacity in international relations. These elements of American liberalism were (1) its indifference to international affairs, (2) its application of domestic solutions to international affairs, and (3) its search for objectivity in international affairs.
Liberalism originated in the assertion of the rights of the individual against the state. Liberal thought focused upon the relation of the individual to the state and the relations among individuals within a society. Liberalism never questioned the existence of the state. Instead it presupposed the state’s self-sufficiency and external security. In his classic work on European liberalism, for instance, Ruggiero assigned three functions to the liberal state: the political function of adjusting and synthesizing the interests within society; the legal function of guaranteeing the rights of the individual; and the economic and social function of broadening the opportunities for individual self-development. He did not give the liberal state a security function. It was presumed to exist in vacuo. Concerned with the defense of the individual against the state, liberalism was ill-equipped to justify the defense of one state against another. Liberal parties in both Europe and America typically neglected foreign policy and defense problems. Few liberals attempted to cultivate the diplomatic and military skills. The assumption of a state in a vacuum was particularly relevant to American liberalism because for almost a century American reality approximated the liberal image. The applicability of the liberal assumption to the United States settled it all the more firmly in the American mind and created problems all the more difficult to solve when the vacuum began to break down.
A second aspect of liberalism in relation to security problems was its application of domestic policies to international affairs. The issues of foreign policy involve the distribution of power among nations. Unable to tackle this problem directly, liberalism tried to reduce foreign policy and defense issues to domestic terms where it could deal with them effectively. This again was particularly characteristic of American liberalism because of the tremendous success of liberal solutions within American society. From the liberal viewpoint, the absence of serious social conflict in the United States was the product of a distinctive legal system and a distinctive economic system. In other countries, where the legal system was not above controversy or where the economic system was not so spectacularly successful, the tendency toward this approach was not so strong as in the United States. But Americans successively urged the adoption of a whole series of domestic reforms as the solution to international problems. The universal acceptance of the republican form of government, international free trade, the industrialization of backward areas, the elimination of poverty, arbitration treaties, the World Court, the outlawing of war, open covenants openly arrived at, intensified cultural contacts among nations, were all proposed at one time or another as essential to American foreign policy. In advocating these reforms, American liberalism attempted to transpose its domestic successes to foreign relations.
A third aspect of the difficulties of American liberalism in foreign affairs was its search for objective standards and ideal goals. Liberalism tended to judge nations by an absolute standard: the extent to which they maximized freedom for the individual. The application of this standard to foreign policy tended to produce a curious sense of detachment and objectivity. For the liberal, to be consistent, had to judge his own nation by the same standard that he applied to others. Consequently, he normally felt alienated from the struggle for power among nations. Liberalism was not a philosophy of involvement. It has always had an Aristotelian air about it. It originated as the philosophy of the middle class, and viewed itself as the rational mean between the extremes of aristocracy and proletarianism. In the twentieth century the liberal came to think of himself as the vital center between communism and fascism. Until recently, this aspect of liberalism was enhanced in the United States by the fact that the United States was detached from the operation of the European state system. The liberal philosophy of the middle of the road accurately described the position of the United States in world politics. The immediate reaction of our first President to European war was a proclamation of neutrality. Only when its neutral rights were violated or when its position as the balancer was threatened did the United States enter the wars of Europe in 1812, 1917, and 1941. The position of the liberal, detached from society and judging it in terms of an ideal standard, coincided with the position of the United States in world affairs. Just as the liberals were willing to fight for their ideals but seldom for their institutions, the United States by virtue of its noninvolvement in the balance of power was able to pursue foreign policy objectives defined in terms of universal ideals rather th
an in terms of national interests.
AMERICAN AMBIVALENCE TOWARD WAR. The American attitude toward war has fluctuated widely and yet preserved an underlying unity. The American tends to be an extremist on the subject of war: he either embraces war wholeheartedly or rejects it completely. This extremism is required by the nature of the liberal ideology. Since liberalism deprecates the moral validity of the interests of the state in security, war must be either condemned as incompatible with liberal goals or justified as an ideological movement in support of those goals. American thought has not viewed war in the conservative-military sense as an instrument of national policy. When Clausewitz’s dictum on war as the carrying out of state policy by other means has been quoted by nonmilitary American writers, it has been to condemn it for coldblooded calculation and immorality. Americans have enshrined much of Washington’s Farewell Address in the national ideology, but they have never accepted his view, so similar to that of Clausewitz, that the nation should be able to “choose peace or war as its interests guided by justice shall counsel.” The relatively detached, realistic, unemotional attitude toward war which this advice embodies has been distinctly alien to the American mind.
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