The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

If we do not step up and repair our politics, the results will damage us more than we can imagine.

  THE LONG JOURNEY OF POLITICS

  So let’s begin by defining what we mean by politics. To the ancient Greeks, the term meant “the affairs of the city.” Today we understand it to refer to the activities associated with governing, including the debates and conflicts among individuals or parties battling for power. Politics can mean choosing our politicians and running our government, but it can also denote bigger, more fundamental choices about what kind of government (and therefore what kind of society) we will have.

  Politics is also about more than policy and problem solving, essential though these are to answering real human needs and concerns. Politics is how we live together and, in a free society like ours, how we ultimately govern ourselves at every level. No successful human society has lived without government, which itself underscores how vital politics is. That was what Aristotle meant when he said, famously, that man is a political animal. Humans have engaged in politics from their first day on this planet.

  But our understanding of politics didn’t spring out of thin air. Neither is it a static thing, unchanging, frozen in amber. Politics has evolved over time, adjusting to different circumstances, adding and subtracting concepts along the way, sometimes making things better and sometimes worse. We can’t know how to heal our politics without understanding a bit of the long journey that has gotten us here.

  You will be glad to hear that I will not offer a history of political philosophy since it’s well beyond my expertise and beyond the scope of this short book. So what follows is a broad overview of the terrain, essential if blessedly quick.

  When I consider the ideas that have shaped and inspired us, three towering figures in particular come to mind: Aristotle, John Locke, and Abraham Lincoln. These are not just individuals from the distant past, the answers to test questions in a high school social studies course, of interest only to historians and biographers. We live in the world they shaped; and every day, knowingly or not, we rely on their insights and discoveries, their words and their works. Articulating their distinctive contributions provides a principled foundation for American politics.

  Aristotle

  It was Aristotle who won me my first job in government. Sort of. The reason Bill Bennett had heard of me was that I had written an op-ed in the Washington Times—sent in over the transom, unsolicited—on what I understood his agenda as secretary of education to be: education should not just be measured by higher test scores and graduation rates but by the goals of education expressed by Aristotle, meaning the cultivation of excellence in human character. This caught Bennett’s attention. He called me the morning it was published to express his gratitude.

  To suggest that the new secretary of education, who had earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Texas, would draw his inspiration from an ancient Greek philosopher was not so odd, really. That’s how utterly formative Aristotle’s outlook has been for our politics.

  Born in 384 BC in northern Greece, Aristotle was a much more systematic thinker and far more empirically and practically minded than his mentor, Plato. (He studied medicine before enrolling in Plato’s Academy in his teens, and his scientific cast of mind never left him.) Aristotle was a collector and cataloguer of a huge body of knowledge, deeply curious, a person who prized moderation and warned against extremism and excess.

  Over the course of his life, Aristotle showed an amazing mastery of an extraordinary range of subjects, including politics, philosophy, logic, physics and metaphysics, poetry and rhetoric, biology, and psychology. He authored more than two hundred works (most of which have been lost to us), was a tutor of Alexander the Great, and founded his own school at the Lyceum—a friendly rival to Plato’s Academy—where he lectured, taught students (often while walking), and wrote his treatises, including most importantly for our purposes, the Politics.

  Maybe the first thing to understand about the Politics is that it was preceded by the Nicomachean Ethics, which focused on what it means to live well. The Ethics deals with subjects like friendship and contemplation, the pursuit of virtue, pleasure, and human happiness—happiness meaning, for Aristotle, not just joy but human flourishing and deep fulfillment. Aristotle didn’t treat ethics and politics as separate categories; instead, he saw the latter as an extension of the former. The connection between the political community and human fulfillment was intimate and essential. For Aristotle, as for many of the ancient Greeks, the proper end of human beings was virtue, good character, and moral excellence, culminating in various kinds of friendship—including that among fellow citizens.

  The Politics, a classical work of political theory and practice, is an effort to organize and systematize the study of politics—in this case, by examining and classifying the constitutions of 158 states. Aristotle views politics very much as a practical rather than an exclusively theoretical discipline, a means to find unity among people who have different interests. He is wrestling with how the state could function well and how to pursue the common good given the inherent defects in human beings. Aristotle didn’t treat politics like a mathematical equation; rather, he understood its complexities and contingencies, which require adjustments and accommodations while holding to core principles and ends. We must, he writes, be content with the precision that is “in accordance with the subject-matter.” Answers regarding what is good for particular individuals or states are no more universal and unchanging than answers in the area of medicine.

  According to Aristotle, “It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” The polis, or city-state, is not there simply to protect rights or preserve order; its aim is the moral improvement of citizens. Those cities, he says, that merely prevent acts of injustice or facilitate commerce are only cities “in a manner of speaking.”1 Politics should be (and cannot avoid being) deeply involved not simply in policy but in shaping souls. Aristotle time and again refers in his writings to the good life as the chief end of both the community and each of us individually. The state’s job includes encouraging goodness and moral improvement. (Aristotle is emphatic about this responsibility, but he is aware of how few states actually do it beyond what is necessary for the regime’s stability.)

  In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that the main concern of politics is “to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”2 Ernest Barker, an Aristotle scholar and a translator of the Politics, says that to understand how the Greeks viewed the state, we need to think of the church. “Political philosophy thus becomes a sort of moral theology,” according to Barker.3 The polis assumed the tutelary function we tend to ascribe, or once ascribed, to the church.

  Aristotle argues that beasts and gods don’t need the polis, but humans do—and just as the hand or the foot relies on the rest of the body, we rely on the polis. “Thus the individual needs the city more than the city needs any of its individual citizens,” explains Edward Clayton of Central Michigan University.4

  Greece’s supremely great philosophers always had in mind the ideal state, but unlike Plato in his Republic, Aristotle was realistic enough to explore the best attainable state. “For one should study not only the best regime but also the regime that is [the best] possible, and similarly also the regime that is easier and more attainable for all,” he wrote.5

  Some of Aristotle’s views (on women and slavery, for instance) can strike us as primitive and unenlightened; others as downright contemporary and familiar. One of his signal contributions to our modern understanding of politics, for example, is the emphasis he placed on the view that rulers are not above the law, and that leaders should be accountable. We might imagine that he helped set the stage for the rise of constitutional democracies like our own.

  But Aristotle held views very different from some key modern thinkers like John Locke, whom we will turn to shortly, when it came to the funda
mental relationship between the state and society. The role of politics and government was much more capacious than simply securing the rights and liberties of citizens and providing public safety. The conception of the ancient Greeks, when it came to politics, was that “it encompasses aspects of life which are today regarded as both beyond and beneath politics,” according to Carnes Lord, a scholar of Aristotle. “The Politics trespasses on ground that would today be claimed by the disciplines of economics, sociology, and urban planning, as well as by moral philosophy and the theory of education.”6 Aristotle goes so far as to discuss the proper age of marriage—eighteen for women and thirty-seven for men—and the proper size of each family.

  There’s one other area where Aristotle’s view of politics is quite different than ours: the seriousness with which the citizens of ancient Greece took their politics. According to the political theorist Alan Ryan:

  No Athenian believed that a Greek could be uninterested in politics. At the very least, self-defense demanded that a man keep a close eye on the holders of power; they understood what Trotsky observed twenty-five hundred years later. “You say you are not interested in politics; but politics is interested in you.” The uninterest in politics and the ignorance about both politicians and political institutions displayed by British or American “citizens” of the present day would have been incomprehensible.7

  The political scientist Kenneth Minogue said of the ancient Greek: “His very identity was bound up with his city.”8 As we are about to see, while later Western political thinkers built on some of what Aristotle bequeathed them, there was a significant and rather dramatic break with this particular vision of politics, rejecting the view that its highest and most defining purpose was to engage in soulcraft.

  The argument that the individual is ultimately best understood as part of the community, or the state, gets some important things right. It emphasizes that no state can be secure without a basis in morality and virtue—and without the support of strong civic education and a vibrant polity. Also, Aristotle was millennia ahead of his time in understanding that human beings cannot be understood merely as freestanding individuals, and that politics is not simply the interplay of individuals. We are born into tribes and polities, and even in our innermost thoughts we never escape their influence. Enlightenment philosophers of every stripe, from at least Hobbes onward, emphasized the individuality of humans. But Aristotle’s view that humans are inseparable from our tribes and communities is closer to where modern sociology and social psychology have brought us.

  On the other hand, Aristotle’s politics does not leave much room for individual freedom as we understand it, fundamental rights, and a politics rooted in consent that is ultimately most deeply rooted in equality. That tension between a politics of soulcraft and a politics of individual liberty has always remained part of our political tradition, and we see it in the newspapers every day. When liberals charge conservatives with selfishness, and when conservatives charge liberals with collectivism, they are debating Aristotle.

  To summarize, then, some of the political principles America learned from Aristotle:

  Politics is an essential moral enterprise structuring our public life to encourage virtue and moral excellence.

  Being part of a political community is necessary to achieve the good life. The state exists for the purpose of helping people acquire that virtue and moral excellence.

  Rulers are not above the law and need to be held accountable.

  Politics negotiates the ongoing tension between the needs of the group and the liberty of individuals.

  John Locke

  Like Aristotle, Locke was a man of prodigious interests and talents: an Englishman working in the midst of political tumult in the seventeenth century, he wore many hats—a political and moral philosopher, a physician and political advisor, a public intellectual who made the case for the reasonableness of Christianity and pioneered new ideas on religious toleration and the separation between church and state.

  His most important achievement, however, was as a father of classical liberalism. Today when we hear the word liberal, we understand it as a political or cultural or intellectual camp opposed to the conservative camp. But that is not what is meant by classical liberalism, the movement that created the foundation for American democracy and that both camps fit squarely within. For these reasons, no other individual played so great a role in shaping the views of the American founders as John Locke, who has fairly been called “America’s philosopher.”

  Born in 1632, Locke attended the prestigious Christ Church, Oxford, and became the personal physician and close counselor to Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftsbury, one of England’s most prominent politicians. Shaftsbury not only allowed Locke to be at the center of political life; he played a vital role in Locke’s intellectual journey away from political and religious authoritarianism and the near-absolute authority of kings toward liberalism and tolerance.9

  Locke was an empiricist, an honest and balanced thinker, a man of moderate sensibilities. “He was a religious man; but he had no sympathy with fanaticism or with intemperate zeal,” according to intellectual historian Frederick Copleston. “One does not look to him for brilliant extravaganzas or for flashes of genius; but one finds in him an absence of extremes and the presence of common sense.”10

  His common sense, however, led him to some revolutionary conclusions. One of those, from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is that knowledge comes mainly from our senses and our experience. That may seem obvious today, but it could—and did—help propel and justify the scientific revolution.

  It also propelled a political revolution. Locke believed that knowledge is accessible but our capacity to know is not limitless, and on matters about which we have no certain knowledge, “we ought to regulate our assent, and moderate our persuasions.” In other words, we must make room for ongoing debate and disagreements on matters for which we cannot gain certainty. He believed, further, that while human beings are rational and capable of moral excellence, they are also driven by appetites and detestations, so laws are important checks on both. These concepts helped ground his views of politics. Locke knew that the understanding one has of human nature and human knowledge has profound practical effects. He was not building “a Castle in the Air,” to use his words, but rather a foundation upon which politics must be based.

  Which brings us to Locke’s most important political work, his Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government in 1690. In it Locke argues that (1) human beings are born free, (2) government should be limited in its power, and (3) the power of government rests on the consent of the governed. In our democratic age, it is easy to miss how radical these principles sound, but in an age led by monarchs and aristocrats, these were both challenging and courageous views to espouse. According to Locke, sovereignty rests with the people, and political leaders are accountable to them. Only God, not earthly governments, is deserving of absolute authority in our lives. No mere human being can have the faultless knowledge or perfect inspiration that could justify a natural right to rule others.

  All of these concepts are commonplace today, but in Locke’s time they were revolutionary. He redefined the purpose of government by rooting it in human equality. Government was not designed to enact the will of the aristocracy for its own designs; instead government is for the sake of the people administered by the government. For Locke, equality was a premise, not just an aspiration. All human beings are free and equal to begin with. A legitimate government is one designed to reflect the fact of human equality and to protect the rights that naturally flow from that fact. Equality and those rights precede the state. They are inherent, not granted by government; governments exist to protect and secure them. It is therefore in relation to the individual that the state is ultimately measured. In this respect, Locke marks a sharp break with Aristotle’s political vision, which assessed regimes based on whether they were directed t
oward the common good, and points the way toward the kinds of political principles we now take for granted.

  How does Locke reason his way from his seemingly simplistic premises to a robust and complex vision of government? He begins by going back in time before the creation of politics. Men and women resided in a state of nature before they consented to live under a government.11 In this state of nature, we were ruled by the laws of nature, not individuals with the power to enforce civil law. Eventually, though, we came to see—because of defects in human nature, because of the accompanying vices, because of the need to regulate commerce—a need to give up some of our freedom in order to preserve what Locke referred to as life, liberty, and property. “The great and chief end . . . of men’s uniting into common-wealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property,” Locke writes.12 By property he meant all the basic prerogatives of life, not just material possessions. Without government and political society, liberty slips away.

  Power is transferred to government, then, as a way to preserve the rights to which we are all equally entitled, but at the same time, there are strict limitations on the power of the state. That was the balance society needed to get right: government needed to be empowered but not all-powerful. Arbitrary and unlimited power is an even greater threat to individuals than the state of nature, according to Locke.

  Not only are the powers of government limited, however; they are revocable. In the words of the political scientist C. B. Macpherson, summarizing Locke: “The authority of any government is conditional on its performing the functions for which it was entrusted with power.”13 And when the proper limits on the power of government are transgressed, then it is the government, not the people, that is in rebellion. This was precisely the ground in which the American Revolution was rooted.

  It’s difficult to overstate Locke’s influence on the American founding. His commitment to ideals such as unalienable rights, limited government, and the separation of powers is plainly reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as in how the founders viewed human nature and political society.