Charles R. Kesler, Editor, Claremont
Review of Books
Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of
Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in social studies and his A.M. and Ph.D. in
government from Harvard University. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute
for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and a recipient of the
2018 Bradley Prize, he is the editor of several books, including Keeping the Tablets: Modern American
Conservative Thought(with William F. Buckley Jr.), and the author
of I Am the Change:
Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism.
The
following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September
27, 2018, during a two-week teaching residency as a Eugene C. Pulliam
Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.
Six
years ago I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern
American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, would
either go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I
predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an
increasingly post-modern form of leadership.
Today
it is doing both. As we saw in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the youngest
generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly—something that would have
been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on
the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the
keys to being and meaning. In the #MeToo movement, for example—as we saw
recently in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle—the credo is, “Believe the
woman.” In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process
weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to
the will of the more politically correct. “Her truth” is stronger than any
objective or disinterested truth.
In
the Claremont Review of
Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold
civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a
good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the
fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two
cultures, two ways of life.
Political
scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics. Normal
politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns
means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate
is simply over means. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for
what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system
itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together
as a people? I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and
entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our
political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between
two contrary visions of the country.
One
vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the
Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence,
the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted
to us with significant Amendments—some improvements and some not—but it is
recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may
call this “the conservative Constitution”—with the caveat that conservatives
have never agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many non-conservatives
remain loyal to it.
The
other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now,
have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original
Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain
relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with
new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To
cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to
circumvent the structural limitations that the original Constitution imposed on
government.
As
a doctrine, the living Constitution originated in America’s new departments of
political and social science in the late nineteenth century—but it was soon at
the very forefront of Progressive politics. One of the doctrine’s prime
formulators, Woodrow Wilson, had contemplated as a young scholar a series of
constitutional amendments to reform America’s national government into a kind
of parliamentary system—a system able to facilitate faster political change.
But he quickly realized that his plan to amend the Constitution was going
nowhere. Plan B was the living Constitution. While keeping the outward forms of
the old Constitution, the idea of a living Constitution would change utterly
the spirit in which the Constitution was understood.
The
resulting Constitution—let us call it “the liberal Constitution”—is not a
constitution of natural rights or individual human rights, but of historical or
evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian,
after Isaac Newton, and that of the new Constitution Darwinian, after Charles
Darwin. By Darwinian, Wilson meant that instead of being difficult to amend,
the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and
adjustment. To paraphrase the late Walter Berns, the point of the old
Constitution was to keep the times in tune with the Constitution; the purpose
of the new is to keep the Constitution in tune with the times.
Until
the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living
Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of
slow-motion evolution. But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned
evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old
Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to
America’s first principles. By seeking to revolve back to the starting point,
conservatives proved to be Newtonians after all—and also, in a way,
revolutionaries, since the original meaning of revolution is to return to where
you began, as a celestial body revolves in the heavens.
The
conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution
gained steam as a campaign against the gradual or sudden disappearance of
limited government and of republican virtue in our political life. And when it
became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going
away, the cold civil war was on.
Confronted
by sharper, deeper, and more compelling accounts of the conservative
Constitution, the liberals had to sharpen—that is, radicalize—their own
alternative, following the paths paved by the New Left. As a result, the gap
between the liberal and conservative Constitutions became a gulf, to the extent
that today we are two countries—or we are fast on the road to becoming two
countries—each constituted differently.
Consider
a few of the contrasts. The prevailing liberal doctrine of rights traces
individual rights to membership in various groups—racial, ethnic, gender,
class-based, etc.—which are undergoing a continual process of
consciousness-raising and empowerment. This was already a prominent feature of
Progressivism well over a century ago, though the groups have changed since
then. Before Woodrow Wilson became a politician, he wrote a political science
textbook, and the book opened by asking which races should be studied. Wilson
answered: we’ll study the Aryan race, because the Aryan race is the one that
has mastered the world. The countries of Europe and the Anglophone countries
are the conquerors and colonizers of the other continents. They are the
countries with the most advanced armaments, arts, and sciences.
Wilson
was perhaps not a racist in the full sense of the term, because he expected the
less advanced races over time to catch up with the Aryan race. But his emphasis
was on group identity—an emphasis that liberals today retain, the only
difference being that the winning and losing sides have been scrambled. Today
the white race and European civilization are the enemy—“dead white males” is a
favored pejorative on American campuses—and the races and groups that were
oppressed in the past are the ones that today need compensation, privileges,
and power.
Conservatives,
by contrast, regard the individual as the quintessential endangered minority.
They trace individual rights to human nature, which lacks a race. Human nature
also lacks ethnicity, gender, and class. Conservatives trace the idea of rights
to the essence of an individual as a human being. We have rights because we’re
human beings with souls, with reason, distinct from other animals and from God.
We’re not beasts, but we’re not God—we’re the in-between being. Conservatives
seek to vindicate human equality and liberty—the basis for majority rule in
politics—against the liberal Constitution’s alternative, in which everything is
increasingly based on group identity.
There
is also today a vast divergence between the liberal and conservative
understandings of the First Amendment. Liberals are interested in transforming
free speech into what they call equal speech, ensuring that no one gets more
than his fair share. They favor a redistribution of speech rights via limits on
campaign contributions, repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,
and narrowing the First Amendment for the sake of redistribution of speech
rights from the rich to the poor. Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party’s 2016
platform called for amending the First Amendment!
There
is, of course, also a big difference between the liberal Constitution’s
freedom from religion
and the conservative Constitution’s freedom of religion. And needless to say, the
liberal Constitution has no Second Amendment.
In
terms of government structure, the liberal Constitution is designed to overcome
the separation of powers and most other checks and balances. Liberals
consistently support the increased ability to coordinate, concentrate, and
enhance government power—as opposed to dividing, restricting, or checking it.
This is to the detriment of popular control of government. In recent decades,
government power has flowed mainly through the hands of unelected
administrators and judges—to the point that elected members of Congress find
themselves increasingly dispirited and unable to legislate. As the Financial Times put it
recently, “Congress is a sausage factory that has forgotten how to make
sausages.”
If
one thinks about how America’s cold civil war could be resolved, there seem to
be only five possibilities. One would be to change the political subject.
Ronald Reagan used to say that when the little green men arrive from outer
space, all of our political differences will be transcended and humanity will
unite for the first time in human history. Similarly, if some jarring event
intervenes—a major war or a huge natural calamity—it might reset our politics.
A
second possibility, if we can’t change the subject, is that we could change our
minds. Persuasion, or some combination of persuasion and moderation, might
allow us to end or endure our great political division. Perhaps one party or
side will persuade a significant majority of the electorate to embrace its
Constitution, and thus win at the polling booth and in the legislature. For
generations, Republicans have longed for a realigning election that would turn
the GOP into America’s majority party. This remains possible, but seems
unlikely. Only two presidents in the twentieth century were able to effect
enduring changes in American public opinion and voting patterns—Franklin
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. FDR inspired a political realignment that lasted
for a generation or so and lifted the Democratic Party to majority status.
Ronald Reagan inspired a realignment of public policy, but wasn’t able to make
the GOP the majority party.
Since
1968, the norm in America has been divided government: the people have more
often preferred to split control of the national government between the
Democrats and the Republicans rather than entrust it to one party. This had not
previously been the pattern in American politics.
Prior
to 1968, Americans would almost always (the exceptions proved the rule) entrust
the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Presidency to the same party
in each election. They would occasionally change the party, but still they
would vote for a party to run the government. Not so for the last 50 years. And
neither President Obama nor President Trump, so far, has persuaded the American
electorate to embrace his party as their national representative, worthy of
long-term patriotic allegiance.
Trump,
of course, is new to this, and his party in Congress is basically pre-Trumpian.
He did not win the 2016 election by a very large margin, and he was not able to
bring many new Republicans into the House or the Senate. Nonetheless, he has
the opportunity now to put his mark on the party. In trying to do so, his
populism—which is not a word he uses—will not be enough. He will have to reach
out to the existing Republican Party as he has done, adopt some of its agenda,
adopt its electoral supporters, and gradually bring them around to his “America
first” conservatism if he is to have any chance of achieving a political
realignment. And the odds remain against him at this point.
As
for moderating our disagreements and learning to live with them more or less
permanently, that too seems unlikely given their fundamental nature and the
embittered trajectory of our politics over the last two decades.
So
if we won’t change our minds, and if we can’t change the subject, we are left
with only three other ways out of the cold civil war. The happiest of the three
would be a vastly reinvigorated federalism. One of the original reasons for
constitutional federalism was that the states had a variety of interests and
views that clashed with one another and could not be pursued in common. If we
had a re-flowering of federalism, some of the differences between blue states
and red states could be handled discreetly by the states themselves. The most
disruptive issues could be denationalized. The problem is, having abandoned so
much of traditional federalism, it is hard to see how federalism could be
revived at this late juncture.
That
leaves two possibilities. One, alas, is secession, which is a danger to any
federal system—something about which James Madison wrote at great length
in The Federalist Papers.
With any federal system, there is the possibility that some states will try to
leave it. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have gone their separate ways
peacefully, just within the last generation. But America is much better at
expansion than contraction. And George Washington’s admonitions to preserve the
Union, I think, still miraculously somehow linger in our ears. So secession
would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that
it could lead, as we Americans know from experience, to the fifth and worst
possibility: hot civil war.
Under
present circumstances, the American constitutional future seems to be
approaching some kind of crisis—a crisis of the two Constitutions. Let us pray
that we and our countrymen will find a way to reason together and to
compromise, allowing us to avoid the worst of these dire scenarios—that we will
find, that is, the better angels of our nature.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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