Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's 'pet dissenter,' on the 2012
election, the real cost of entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope.
By SOHRAB AHMARI Cambridge, Mass.
'We have now an American political party and a European
one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become
Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for.
They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency.
"Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how
democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the
eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield.
When it comes to assessing the state of the American
experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never
been one to mince words. Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at
the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the
university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at
an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century.
"I live in a
one-party state and very much more so a one-party
university," says the 80-year-old professor with a
sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks
the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I
am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter."Partly his isolation on campus has to
do with the nature of Mr. Mansfield's scholarship.
At a time when his colleagues are obsessed with trendy
quantitative methods and even trendier "identity studies," Mr.
Mansfield holds steadfast to an older tradition that looks to the Western
canon as the best guide to human affairs.
For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers such
as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren't historical curiosities; Mr. Mansfield
sees writers grappling heroically with political and moral problems that are
timeless and universally relevant."All modern social science deals with
perceptions," he says, "but that is a misnomer because it neglects
to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions.
"You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield
says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful
because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious
about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed
voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a
wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or
even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not
making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise.
"By that measure, the electorate that
granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president
achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The
Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was
attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on
your side' to the American people,
to those in the
middle.”
“No matter what comes next, this silence about the future
is ominous. At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the
progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr.
Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get
better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality.”
"It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign
progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved
or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are
the party of free condoms. That's typical for them.
"But Democrats' refusal to address the future in
positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an
entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and
renders them above politics.
" The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline
the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical
constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that
cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political
system—not the Constitution.
"It is a project begun at the turn of the previous
century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield
says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much
involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts
did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all
those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And
still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s
and victims.”
"The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into
subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims
come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated
differently. You push different buttons to get them to react.
"The threat to self-government is clear. "The
American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr.
Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live
under the American people.”
Harvey Mansfield Jr. was born in 1932 in New Haven, Conn.
His parents were staunch New Dealers, and while an undergraduate at Harvard
Mr. Mansfield counted himself a liberal Democrat. Next came a Fulbright year
in London and a two-year stint in the Army.
"I was never in combat," he says. "In fact
I ended up in France for a year, pulling what in the Army they call 'good
duty' at Orléans, which is in easy reach of Paris. So even though I was an
enlisted man I lived the life of Riley.”
A return to the academy and a Harvard doctorate were
perhaps inevitable but Mr. Mansfield also underwent a decisive political
transformation. "I broke with the liberals over the communist
issue," he says. "My initiating forces were anticommunism and my
perception that Democrats were soft on communism, to use a rather unpleasant
phrase from the time—unpleasant but true.”
He also began to question the progressive project at home:
"I saw the frailties of big government exposed, one after another.
Everything they tried didn't work and in fact made us worse off by making us
dependent on an engine that was getting weaker and weaker.”
His first teaching post came in 1960 at the University of
California, Berkeley. In California, he came to know the German-American philosopher
Leo Strauss, who at the time was working at Stanford University.
"Strauss was a factor in my becoming
conservative," he says. "That was a whole change of outlook rather
than a mere question of party allegiance."Strauss had studied ancient
Greek texts, which emphasized among other things that "within democracy
there is good and bad, free and slave," and that "democracy can
produce a slavish mind and a slavish country."
The political task before every generation, Mr. Mansfield
understood, is to "defend the good kind of democracy. And to do that you
have to be aware of human differences and inequalities, especially
intellectual inequalities."American elites today prefer to dismiss the
"unchangeable, undemocratic facts" about human inequality, he says.
Progressives go further: "They think that the main use of liberty is to
create more equality. They don't see that there is such a thing as too much
equality. They don't see limits to democratic equalizing"—how, say,
wealth redistribution can not only bankrupt the public fisc but corrupt the national soul.
"Americans take inequality for granted," Mr.
Mansfield says. The American people frequently "protect inequalities by
voting not to destroy or deprive the rich of their riches. They don't vote
for all measures of equalization, for which they get condemned as suffering
from false consciousness. But that's true consciousness because the American
people want to make democracy work, and so do conservatives.
Liberals on the other hand just want to make democracy
more democratic."Equality untempered by liberty invites disaster, he
says. "There is a difference between making a form of government more
like itself," Mr. Mansfield says, "and making it viable."
Pushed to its extremes, democracy can lead to "mass rule by an ignorant,
or uncaring, government."
Consider the entitlements crisis. "Entitlements are
an attack on the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "Entitlements
say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the country is when I get
it.' So it's like a bond or an annuity. What the entitlement does is give the
government version of a private security, which is better because the
government provides a better guarantee than a private company can."That
is, until the government goes broke, as has occurred across Europe.
"The Republicans should want to recover the notion of
the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "One way to do that is to
show that we can't afford the entitlements as they are—that we've always
underestimated the cost. 'Cost' is just an economic word for the common good.
And if Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as
irrevocable but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to
reform, then I think they can accomplish something.
"The welfare state's size isn't what makes it so
stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. "What makes government dangerous to the
common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never question what
expenses have been or will be incurred."
Less important at this moment are spending and tax rates.
"I don't think you can detect the presence or absence of good
government," he says, "simply by looking at the percentage of GDP
that government uses up. That's not an irrelevant figure but it's not
decisive. The decisive thing is whether it's possible to reform, whether
reform is a political possibility."
Then there is the matter of conservative political
practice. "Conservatives should be the party of judgment, not just of
principles," he says. "Of course there are conservative
principles—free markets, family values, a strong national defense—but those
principles must be defended with the use of good judgment. Conservatives need
to be intelligent, and they shouldn't use their principles as substitutes for
intelligence. Principles need to be there so judgment can be distinguished
from opportunism.
But just because you give ground on principle doesn't mean
you're an opportunist."Nor should flexibility mean abandoning major
components of the conservative agenda—including cultural values—in response
to a momentary electoral defeat. "Democrats have their cultural
argument, which is the attack on the rich and the uncaring," Mr.
Mansfield says. "So Republicans need their cultural arguments to oppose
the Democrats', to say that goodness or justice in our country is not merely
the transfer of resources to the poor and vulnerable. We have to take
measures to teach the poor and vulnerable to become a little more independent
and to prize independence, and not just live for a government check.
That means self-government within each self, and where are
you going to get that except with morality, responsibility and religion ? "So
is it still possible to pull back from the brink of America's Europeanization
? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. "The material for recovery is
there," he says. "Ambition, for one thing.
I teach at a university where all the students are
ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives." That is in
contrast to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to
see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people
so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource is the
Constitution."
Source: Wall Street Journal. Harvey Mansfield Interview Dec 1, 2012 By Sohrab
Ahmari, Cambridge, Mass.
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion
|
