The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  Near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson confessed, “As to the general principles of liberty and the rights of man in nature and in society, the doctrines of Locke, in his ‘Essay concerning the true original extent and end of civil government,’ and of [the seventeenth-century English theorist Algernon] Sidney in his ‘Discourses on government,’ may be considered as those generally approved by our fellow citizens of [Virginia], and of the US.”14 (Jefferson went even further in declaring, in his 1789 letter to John Trumbull, that he considered Locke, along with Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, to be among the three greatest men who had ever lived.15)

  Where Locke perhaps most decisively split with Aristotle—and where as a general matter the modern philosophers differ from the classical ones—was regarding whether it is wise for politics and governments to take up the task of shaping souls and the inner lives of citizens.

  Locke thought not. In A Letter Concerning Toleration, he wrote:

  But idolatry, say some, is a sin and therefore not to be tolerated. If they said it were therefore to be avoided, the inference were good. But it does not follow that because it is a sin it ought therefore to be punished by the magistrate. For it does not belong unto the magistrate to make use of his sword in punishing everything, indifferently, that he takes to be a sin against God.

  Locke went on to say:

  Covetousness, uncharitableness, idleness, and many other things are sins by the consent of men, which yet no man ever said were to be punished by the magistrate. The reason is because they are not prejudicial to other men’s rights, nor do they break the public peace of societies. Nay, even the sins of lying and perjury are nowhere punishable by laws; unless, in certain cases, in which the real turpitude of the thing and the offence against God are not considered, but only the injury done unto men’s neighbours and to the commonwealth. And what if in another country, to a Mahometan or a Pagan prince, the Christian religion seem false and offensive to God; may not the Christians for the same reason, and after the same manner, be extirpated there?16

  It’s important to underscore here that Locke wasn’t indifferent to the moral law, the need for an ethical society or a virtuous citizenry. For him it was a matter of appropriateness and efficacy—about whether soulcraft was an appropriate task for government, and even if it was, how well the state could do the job, and at what cost.

  Alan Ryan writes that Locke’s purpose was to

  deny that government has any concern with spiritual matters; “property” is the shorthand term for our “external” goods—security against attack, the ability to make a living, freedom of movement, and the like—and sharply distinguished from a concern with our immortal souls. The latter is more important than the former, but Locke wants to protect our inner lives and our spiritual allegiances from the coercive interference of the state just because they are the most important parts of our lives.17

  The reach and authority of government, then, should be circumscribed, at least for many of the key figures of the Enlightenment, the intellectual architects of classical liberalism, and the central figures in the first century of America’s existence.

  In summary, then, these are the political principles we gained from John Locke and classical liberalism:

  Human beings are born free and equal, and these qualities are inherent and therefore do not derive from the state.

  The power of government rests on the consent of the governed; as a result, restraints on government are required to maintain its proper functioning.

  Government is measured by how it protects the individual and her rights—and because arbitrary and unrestrained state power is a threat to the individual, government should be limited in its power.

  The state should not be engaged in the business of shaping souls.

  There exists an ongoing tension, and hence a political debate, in assessing when the proper limits on the power of government are transgressed.

  Regarding the last principle, this question was never simply settled. And the place of moral questions—and of matters of character and virtue—in politics remained a source of tension and dispute in the practical political life of every free society, very much including ours. When social conservatives and progressives, in their different ways, argue that government cannot avoid legislating morality, it is Locke they are arguing with.

  In fact, core moral questions proved inescapable in the political life of our country, in no small part because the question of slavery in America remained unsettled in the wake of the founding and was a moral stain on the life of the early republic. As American politics came gradually to grasp that this question would prove unavoidable, the nature of the difference between political and moral questions itself became a heated controversy.

  No one approached this controversy with greater depth of thought and care than Abraham Lincoln.

  Abraham Lincoln

  One of my favorite responsibilities as director of “strategery”—as we referred to the Office of Strategic Initiatives in the White House—was to organize meetings for President Bush with public intellectuals, biographers, and historians, including several Lincoln scholars.

  Contrary to the caricature popularized by his critics, President Bush was a voracious reader, especially of biographies, and during his presidency he read fourteen biographies of Lincoln alone. He once called me to discuss Richard Carwardine’s Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, which captivated the president, and he became friends with at least one of the Lincoln biographers I introduced him to, Ronald C. White. On the space on the wall in the Oval Office reserved for the president’s most influential predecessor, Bush hung a portrait of Lincoln. And understandably so. “The life-story of Abraham Lincoln became one with the life-story of the American people,” Lord Charnwood wrote in his masterly 1917 biography of Lincoln.18

  That life story is by now familiar to many Americans. Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky before his family eventually made their way to Indiana and then Illinois. A man of very little formal education—less than a year all told—Lincoln was an autodidact, a voracious reader of the King James Bible and John Bunyan, the poetry of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, Shakespeare’s plays and Robinson Crusoe, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law, and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For him, it has been said, “literature and life were inseparable.”19 He became a successful lawyer but eventually entered the profession he loved, politics, where he served in the House of Representatives for a single two-year term.

  After a hiatus from politics, Lincoln was motivated to reenter it in response to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which permitted the extension of slavery into all the new territories of the Union. He ran for the Senate in 1858 as a member of the newly established Republican Party, challenging Stephen Douglas. It was an election that centered on and clarified the most urgent issue facing the republic: whether slavery would be accepted or abolished. Douglas argued for acceptance, under the banner of “popular sovereignty”; Lincoln argued for eventual abolition, insisting that slavery was incompatible with the self-evident truth and defining moral principle of the American founding: all men are created equal.

  Lincoln lost in a close race, with the state legislature, dominated by Democrats, deciding the outcome. But Lincoln impressed people with the way he conducted himself during the campaign, and he was glad he had entered the contest since “it gave me a hearing on the great and durable questions of the age.”20

  Against long odds and with a notably short resume, Lincoln ran for president in 1860, winning with less than 40 percent of the popular vote in a fractured field. Speaking to journalists the day after the election, he told them, “Well boys, your troubles are over now, mine have just begun.”21 Within three months of Lincoln’s election, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union. And within a month after his inauguration, South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter.

  Describing the lead-up to the Civil War, Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, put it
this way: “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.” Victory for the North, and the abolition of slavery, came only after many more years and far more bloodshed than anyone, including Lincoln, had anticipated.

  After easily winning reelection in 1864, Lincoln was assassinated the following year by John Wilkes Booth. His death was met by an outpouring of grief, even in parts of the South, and Lincoln immediately entered, and has never left, the American pantheon.

  Lincoln was a complicated and deeply impressive human being: magnanimous and generous, compassionate and incorruptible, seemingly free of personal pettiness and maliciousness. “He did not mark down the names of those who had not supported him, or nurse grudges, or hold resentments, or retaliate against ‘enemies,’” according to the Lincoln biographer William Lee Miller. “Indeed, he tried not to have enemies, not to ‘plant thorns.’”22 Neither personal nor professional scandal ever touched or tainted his life.

  Lincoln was blessed with wit and a sense of humor, even as he was cursed with melancholy. He was a marvelous storyteller and charming raconteur—it was said Lincoln would “brighten like a lit lantern” in conversation23—but also inward looking, intensely ambitious, enigmatic. “Though he was an indefatigable conversationalist, could be excellent company, and dominated gatherings through his storytelling,” according to Richard Carwardine, “even his near friends encountered reticence and secrecy, and most judged that he ‘never told all he felt.’”24

  Lincoln was also given the gift of a brilliant, retentive mind. “His reasoning through logic, analogy and comparison was unerring and deadly,” according to his law partner William Herndon.25 Arguably, too, he was the greatest of all American writers. While he never wrote a book or even kept a private diary or journal, his words are literally etched in stone at the west end of the National Mall in Washington, DC.

  What matters most, however, isn’t the beautifully crafted eloquence of Lincoln’s words but their content. He put forward a set of arguments about the true nature of the American Revolution, arguing that the Declaration of Independence and its claim of equality were the “sheet anchor of American republicanism,” the embodiment of the American creed. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” Lincoln admitted.26

  To those, like Stephen Douglas, who argued that free citizens in the territories could vote for slavery if it was an expression of the popular will, Lincoln said, emphatically, no. As the historian Charles Strozier put it, “Popular sovereignty was a valid democratic practice, but not if it is contradicted by fundamental law. Basic human rights could not be voted up or down by a majority.”27

  The question America was forced to grapple with was whether the nation was at its core a procedural democracy or a polity committed to certain ideals. Lincoln insisted on interpreting the Constitution, which is primarily a procedural charter, through the lens of the Declaration of Independence, which put forward a philosophical and moral proposition. The pace and the precise manner in which slavery would be put on the “road to extinction” was a prudential matter, but Lincoln never budged from his belief that slavery could not extend into new territories and that slavery was a moral evil.

  For Lincoln, the black man was a man; all men are created equal and have an equal claim to just treatment; just treatment is based on intrinsic worth; and our intrinsic worth is based on being made in the image of the Creator. Lincoln not only claimed those beliefs as his; he insisted that they reflected the views of the American founders as well. After quoting the “all men are created equal” line in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said:

  This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.28

  The degree to which Lincoln correctly interpreted the views of the American founders remains a point of debate among scholars. Some, like Garry Wills, argue that Lincoln essentially refounded the nation—that he “revolutionized the Revolution”—while others, like Harry Jaffa, believe he clarified the intent of the founders.29 In any event, America was a profoundly different nation—politically, philosophically, and morally—because of Lincoln.

  What can be said about Lincoln, which can’t be said about either Aristotle or Locke, is that he was a statesman who faced a most extraordinary crisis. He wasn’t primarily a philosopher, though his mastery of political ideas was profound. He was primarily a practitioner of politics, who translated principles into action and gave them the force of arms. He took certain philosophical concepts—some from classical Greece (e.g., prudence), some from the Enlightenment (equality), some from Judaism and Christianity (intrinsic human worth)—and engrafted them so as to fit the circumstances and meet the challenges of his time. Lincoln is revered by most, and cursed by some, because he was preeminently a man of action. He would not allow the nation he led to exist in the service of false ideals.

  Though Lincoln’s words and ideas were important, perhaps as great a legacy is the manner in which he practiced politics and comported himself. He combined strength with forbearance, a ferocious will to win the war with restraint in victory. Lincoln fully understood the moral stakes involved in the Civil War even as he resisted the temptation to treat Southerners as lacking in any human dignity or human worth.

  Lord Charnwood, arguably Lincoln’s greatest biographer, said of him:

  For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an astounding strength.30

  Having prevailed in a great struggle, he showed humanity and eschewed casual cruelty. He was willing to concede that his side was not perfect and the other side was not unmitigated evil.

  It’s hard to imagine anyone but Lincoln saying at the beginning of the war, “We are not enemies, but friends,” and by the end being able to say, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” We could surely use those sensibilities in our time, when such grace and largeness of spirit are in such short supply.

  At the end of his biography, Lord Charnwood wrote, “His own intense experience of the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar experience of later times have been likely to do so.” He was too much of a patriot for that.

  Lincoln’s contribution to American politics, then, includes the following:

  The US Constitution and our laws and traditions are built on the foundation of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

  The heart of the Declaration of Independence is expressed in its second sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

  Fundamental human rights should never be decided by majority rule.

  Passionately fighting for a just cause and treating enemies of that just cause with dignity and forbearance are not incompatible.

  Lincoln lived in a much more riven and difficult time than ours, yet he refused to give up on his belief that politics co
uld right certain wrongs. He didn’t withdraw from public life. He didn’t become consumed by hatred or cynicism. He never stopped seeking the better angels of our nature, in himself and also in his opponents.

  Neither should we.

  PREVENTING RUIN

  People get involved in politics for all sorts of different reasons. Some like the challenge of campaigns. Others feel a strong affinity to a political party, which connects them with like-minded people in pursuit of a common purpose. Still others are drawn to politics because they enjoy the adulation of the crowd. Some are attracted to power. And many do it because they care about a set of issues that politics can advance. Often it’s a combination of many of the above.

  One of the main attractions of politics for me has been the power of ideas to shape history. I have always been intrigued by people who respect ideas and take them seriously, by those who sought to “reopen the channels of communication between the world of thought and the seat of power,” in the words of John F. Kennedy. Aristotle, Locke, and Lincoln not only inhabited both worlds; they deepened our understanding of them.

  Aristotle, Locke, and Lincoln lived in different centuries, social circumstances, and historical settings. Like all of us, they were to some degree imprisoned by the moments in which they lived, reacting to the challenges and opportunities that defined their times. But they also saw farther than that, and so offer us far more than insights on their day. They offer timeless wisdom about politics, and the combination of their three very different visions in particular can help us see more deeply into our society and our time.

  One of the things I have learned from studying their lives is that politics is an art, not a science, and that the application of human ideals to human society is an immensely complicated task. No one ever gets it exactly right.