Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
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In political science, the difference between the state and the government is a technical one. The state includes all of the population and its territory and is permanent, while governments may come and go. For instance, France has had five republics, but there has always been the French state. In the U.K., the prime minister is the head of government, but the monarch is the head of state.
However, this is not the distinction that is relevant here.
Among conservatives and some libertarians, the distinction between the government and the state is fairly clear, if rarely articulated. The Constitution creates a government along Lockean lines, an institution designed to protect the liberties of the people. It is the product of a social contract that recognizes that natural rights are prior to the government. The government by this definition has no right to violate the rights of the people or any individual person (save, perhaps, in extreme and extraordinary circumstances). The state, however, is an all-inclusive institution that has rights and interests that must come first. For such thinkers as Albert Jay Nock and Franz Oppenheimer, the state was founded in oppression and conquest—i.e., the stationary bandit model discussed earlier—and is thus a much older phenomenon than government.15
For a libertarian like Nock, it was easy to talk about how the state is an enemy but government is a necessary good. “The nature and intention of government…are social. Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go,” Nock writes. “The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.”16
One doesn’t have to buy Nock’s view that the state is no better than a criminal enterprise, however. That’s certainly not how statists themselves see it. Statists—who never go by that term, preferring “progressive” or “liberal” or, in more extreme forms, “Marxist”—subscribe to the French Enlightenment view of the state as an active participant in guiding the direction of society. Government is the stuff of the English garden discussed earlier. The state is a guiding hand of the French garden. Politically, culturally, and philosophically, the idea of a powerful and intrusive state rests on various versions of “the general will” and nationalistic arguments. The state should reflect the values and nature of the people as a whole. So if “the people,” collectively, do not want, say, democracy or capitalism or free speech, it’s fine for the state to ban such things, because the state is the fullest and most natural expression of the authentic will of the people. Every dictatorship rests on an argument that follows this basic form. But so do plenty of “social democracies,” which maintain many liberties while curtailing others, mostly economic ones. The idea that the state should go to great lengths to stamp out income inequality, for example, is wholly consistent with statism in the tradition of Rousseau but antithetical to the idea of government in the tradition of Locke. Throughout Europe, where the monarchy had been both a religious and a civil institution, guiding and directing the people for thousands of years, it seemed only natural that the modern state would continue intervening in the lives of the people. In America, this was a foreign concept. Indeed, it was a concept we fought a revolution to overthrow.
Many, probably most, historians locate the birth of the state in America in the New Deal. And that is largely true in the sense that the New Deal made the state a permanent fixture of American life. “Before the New Deal,” observed the late economist Edward M. Bernstein, a prominent member of FDR’s Treasury Department, “the only business a citizen had with the government was through the Post Office. No doubt he saw a soldier or a sailor now and then, but the government had nothing to do with the general public. After Roosevelt, the public felt that government was then an active part of everyday life.”17
But the truth is the birth of the state begins a little earlier, during the Progressive Era, specifically in the Democratic administration immediately prior to FDR’s (and one Roosevelt himself served in). In the next chapter, we will look at the rebirth of the state and what should properly be understood as the second American Revolution.
8
THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
The Birth of the Living Constitution and the Death of Liberty
The incredible explosion of wealth in the United States, complete with a supposedly new economic ruling class, aroused profound unease. Millions of Americans had left their rural, agrarian hometowns and poured into cities. Cut off from traditional communities and let loose in the world of capitalism, they felt exploited and alienated, cast adrift in a world of strangers. And even though common people were indeed getting richer and forming new, vibrant communities, one can only sympathize with the sense of vertigo they must have felt. Capitalism seemed all too chaotic, disorganized, unfulfilling, and, at times, cruel for those lacking in financial or social capital. Nostalgia, homesickness for an imagined time of security and spiritual comfort, was in the air. The philosophy of “individualism” was too small to give meaning, or the sense of belonging, so many yearned for. And while they struggled for security as much as wealth, the ruling classes seemed to be unjustly rich in both.
A new group of American philosophes emerged, arguing, much as Rousseau had, that there has to be a better way. America needed a new imagined community, bound together by a new civic religion, which, like Rousseau’s, claimed to be Christian in form but was really nationalistic and Spartan in substance.
The task for these self-anointed philosophes, these new priests of modernity, was to refound America on new principles that, if put into action, would create a new society that would fill the holes in the American soul.
These American philosophes were a diverse lot, but they are best lumped under the banner of progressivism. And while not all progressives were hostile to every feature of the American order, as a group their goal was to discredit and replace that order with a new one. Princeton historian Thomas C. Leonard identifies two core assumptions of progressive intellectuals: “First, modern government should be guided by science and not politics; and second, an industrialized economy should be supervised, investigated, and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state.”1
If the original Founders were products of the Scottish Enlightenment, the new founders were products of the new German renaissance, the awakening of German social science. Many of the American sociologists, philosophers, and economists who created their fields and schools of thought in America had attended German universities or studied under those who had. (When the American Economic Association was formed in 1885, five of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year.)2
In the nineteenth century, German air was thick with Marx, Hegel, and Herder. All of these thinkers fed into the broader worldview known as the “historical school.” Devotees believed that all economic facts are relative and evolutionary, contingent upon their time and place. Descendants of German romanticism, they saw the state as an expression of the spirit of the people (Volksgemeinschaft) and, in turn, they believed the state had not only a right but an obligation to forge a new general will.
Richard T. Ely, the first president of the American Economic Association and the founder of the “Wisconsin School” of progressivism (which served as a kind of think tank for the Progressive Era in the first third of twentieth century), earned his PhD at the University of Heidelberg under the historical economist Karl Knies. “The most fundamental
things in our minds,” he recalled of his generation of intellectuals, “were on the one hand the idea of evolution, and on the other hand, the idea of relativity.” And men like Ely would use these ideas to wage unremitting war on capitalism.3
Indeed, the most vital ingredient in this German intellectual cocktail was Darwinism. Darwin’s theory of evolution injected a new scientific credibility into the old anti-Enlightenment philosophies of nationalism and identity. Darwinism not only made biological racism possible. It also dealt a devastating blow to notions of natural rights while breathing new life into the idea that the state was not just an expression of the people but should also guide the continued “evolution” of society. The idea was that the nation and the state and all of the institutions within it were part of a single organic whole, evolving together, with the state serving as the brain, controlling and regulating all of the other organs. Individuals were little more than cells in the body politic. Herbert Croly, the founder of the New Republic, said society was just “an enlarged individual.” Edward Alsworth Ross, possibly the most influential sociologist of his day, believed society is “a living thing, actuated, like all the higher creatures, by the instinct for self-preservation.”4 The chaos of capitalism was antithetical to this vision: Organs cannot compete against each other; they must work in harmony.
I do not want to make it sound like American statism began as a mental virus that escaped some German laboratory. American intellectuals made their own original contributions as well. The two most important were the “social gospel,” a novel reinterpretation of an ancient interpretation of Christianity, and eugenics, the belief that weeds of the unfit had to be pruned and plucked by the state.
In an echo of Rousseau, the social gospel held that spiritual redemption was—or must now be—a collective enterprise. Saving souls retail was a fool’s errand. The state, according to Ely, was “a moral person.”5 But the state was also God’s divine instrument. “God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution,” Ely wrote. It “takes the first place among His instrumentalities.”6 Social gospel preacher Samuel Zane Batten thought that one of the most pressing questions of his time was: Would the state “become the medium through which the people shall co-operate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness?” (He hoped it would.)7 And the essential task in the pursuit of social righteousness was the war on capitalism and doctrines of individualism. “Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life,” Walter Rauschenbusch, the leading social gospel preacher and intellectual of his time, insisted.8 “Unless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order, back we shall go to Capitalism…” Such an eventuality was unthinkable. So he proclaimed, “The God that answereth by low food prices, let him be God.”9
Without this theological backdrop, eugenics could never have caught on. Telling the full story of eugenics in America would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that eugenics was seen at the time as cutting-edge science, and there was a large, if not total, consensus that weeding the garden of humanity of the unfit was essential to social progress. In The Promise of American Life, the bible of American progressivism, Herbert Croly insisted that the state had an obligation to “interfere on behalf of the really fittest.” Richard Ely insisted that progressives must acknowledge the “superiority of man’s selection to nature’s selection.”10 Letting free people reproduce freely—presumably an integral part of the pursuit of happiness—was folly. Such freedom is just too likely to give us unfit men. But a society guided by the expert hands of science “gives us the ideal man,” he explained. “The great word is no longer natural selection but social selection.”11
While I’ve focused on the roles of America and Germany, it should be noted that the ideas of the Progressive Era were truly part of a transnational intellectual awakening. For instance, positivism, a widely held philosophy largely invented by the Frenchman Auguste Comte, held that humanity had entered the third stage of history, the Age of Science. Essentially picking up where Condorcet had left off, Comte believed that human society could be directed, guided, and ultimately perfected by enlightened experts. That project, by its nature, would have to be collectivist in outlook. (He called individualism the “disease of the Western World.”)12 Comte coined the term “sociology” and helped create the discipline to achieve this end. Later he created a wholly secular “Religion of Humanity,” in which men of science would be the new saints. When Herbert Croly was born in 1869, his parents literally baptized him into Comte’s “Religion of Humanity.”13
Still, on a practical level, the influence of Germany, specifically Prussia, was especially significant because it was seen as a real-world example of how politics should work. It helped fuel a deep contempt for traditional notions of democracy. Prussia—where so many progressives had studied—at the end of the nineteenth century (1871-90) had been ruled by Otto von Bismarck, the authoritarian “Iron Chancellor,” who introduced what was then called “top-down socialism” run by professional civil servants. Bismarck’s Prussia was seen as state-of-the-art in governance by a new generation of American academics. One such academic, who studied under Ely and who was granted one of the first PhDs from the new Johns Hopkins University, the first major German-style research university in America, was Woodrow Wilson. He would later write that Bismarck’s Prussia was an “admirable system” and “the most studied and most nearly perfected” in the world.14
In the 1880s, Wilson had argued the “most despotic of governments under the control of wise statesmen is preferable to the freest ruled by demagogues.” Alas, America was a democracy, and, to counter that, Wilson wanted to limit “the error of trying to do too much by vote” by walling off as much policy making from the court of public opinion as possible. “Let administrative study find the best means for giving public criticism this control and for shutting it out from all other interference.”15 After all, he explained, “self-government does not consist in having a hand in everything, any more than housekeeping consists necessarily in cooking dinner with one’s own hands. The cook must be trusted with a large discretion as to the management of the fires and the ovens.”16 “Give us administrative elasticity and discretion,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1891; “free us from the idea that checks and balances are to be carried down through all stages of organization.”17
It is difficult to exaggerate Wilson’s arrogant and sovereign contempt for the system set up by the Founders. “The reformer is bewildered,” he whined, by the need to persuade “a voting majority of several million heads.”18 Elsewhere he scoffed, “No doubt, a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”19
Wilson’s views on democracy and the Constitution were relatively tame compared to those of many of his peers. But they capture the essential spirit of the progressive outlook.
Woodrow Wilson depended heavily on Darwin to argue for throwing the Constitution in the dustbin:
The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.” The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.20
Thus, for all practical purposes, was the insidious American cult of the “living Constitution” born. “Living political constitutions,” Wilson wrote, “must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanic
s; it must develop.”21
Contempt for the Founding became the hallmark of sophistication. The philosopher John Dewey, the most important philosopher of the Progressive Era, argued that the folly of the Founders lay in their belief that their principles would or should outlive their time. The Founders “lacked,” he explained in Liberalism and Social Action (1935), “historic sense and interest.”22 The Lockean ideal of government merely protecting the rights of the citizens and otherwise leaving the people alone was antiquated codswallop. Even the idea of individual rights was a bygone relic. “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”23 Rights can only be properly secured through “social control of economic forces in the interest of the great mass of individuals.”24 Humans were “nothing in themselves”25 for Dewey; the General Will was everything.
“Social expediency, rather than natural right,” argued Frank J. Goodnow, the first president of the American Political Science Association and a hugely influential professor of administrative law at Columbia University, must “determine the sphere of individual freedom of action.”26 “Changed conditions,” he added, “…must bring in their train different conceptions of private rights if society is to be advantageously carried on.”27
These views were no doubt sincerely held. But the supposedly “disinterested” experts and intellectuals who pushed them had an interest in doing so. They weren’t merely arguing in the abstract that experts should guide society forward; they were claiming that they themselves were the experts who should do so. “The period of constitution-making is passed now,” Woodrow Wilson huffed. “We have reached a new territory in which we need new guides, the vast territory of administration.”28