Letters from an Ohio Farmer

E Pluribus Unum

To My Fellow Citizens:

In August 1790, Moses Seixas, Warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote a letter to President George Washington, welcoming him to the city. "Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens," Seixas wrote, "we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship:—deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine …." Seixas continued, expressing thanks for "all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration."

President Washington replied three days later, appreciating the sentiments and explaining something about the principles that give rise to the blessings of civil and religious liberty: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States … requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

The idea of America's "enlarged and liberal policy" is that all "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." The government that extends the invaluable rights of free citizens to those heretofore deprived of them does so because it believes it can follow no other course if it wants to be a just, legitimate government. Certain natural rights are unalienable according to the Declaration of Independence, and governments are instituted among men to secure these individual rights. The indifference to ethnic and religious distinctions that had caused wars around the world for centuries is a byproduct of this understanding of what government must and must not do.

Our first president, then, was addressing what we would today call the problem of "diversity" in a way that made it sound like it wasn't really much of a problem. Or, as the 40th president liked to say, it was a problem whose solution was not necessarily easy, but was simple: As long as people were good citizens, the government would recognize and protect their rights, strictly refusing to calibrate that duty by taking into account different religious affiliations or national origins.

What's at stake, however, is not just the relationship between citizens and state, but the nature of the relationships among citizens. Washington concludes his letter to the Hebrew congregation by alluding to the Old Testament book of Micah: "May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid." A diverse nation can work if its members strive conscientiously to be worthy of one another's good will, and to be generous in extending that good will to all who have earned it.

We usually understand "E Pluribus Unum"—From Many, One—as a call to make federalism work. The colonies that formed the 13 original states, plus other states subsequently admitted to the Union, were supposed to remain distinct political entities while composing a viable whole. From the beginning, however, there was the parallel awareness of the need for the people to form one nation, even as the states formed one country. The first design for the Seal of the United States included, in addition to "E Pluribus Unum" and the shields of the 13 colonies, six symbols for "the Countries from which these States have been peopled": England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, and Germany. Virginians and Georgians would be Americans but so, too, would Englishmen and Germans.

The need to accord adequate scope and respect to "oneness" and "manyness," while at the same time reconciling them, is not just an American problem. It is a fundamental political problem, always and everywhere, since all encompassing human assemblages must find a workable balance between the centrifugal force of Pluribus and the centripetal one of Unum. The circumstances under which America has addressed this problem have been uniquely challenging, however. The population of the United States in 1790, when Seixas and Washington exchanged their letters, was 3,894,000, less than half the number of New York City's inhabitants today and about one 80th of the present U.S. population.

Moreover, we are not only far more diverse in 2012 than America was in 1790 as a matter of fact, but as a matter of principle. We use "diversity," that is, as a prescriptive as well as a descriptive term. Those for whom diversity is a cause insist justice demands new and greater efforts to honor and accommodate our plurality. These demands include many particulars, such as: public signs and official documents written in Spanish as well as English; successful lawsuits against displaying Christmas trees or the Ten Commandments on public property; same-sex marriage; and affirmative action programs that are supposed to assist not only the members of minority groups who are admitted to colleges or hired by organizations, but the entire student body or workforce that benefits from a widened range of experiences and perspectives.

Turning diversity into an ideology does not make the many/one problem disappear, however. In fact, as the list of particularities America is asked to encompass grows indefinitely, the unifying ideas and sentiments become all the more important. Thoughtful advocates of diversity increasingly recognize that any Pluribus worth celebrating is made possible only by the great American Unum—the central idea from which Abraham Lincoln said all his political sentiments radiated: the self evident truth that all men are created equal. Under today's circumstances, it has been thought most fitting and helpful in this series of letters to emphasize this American Unum and to articulate its meaning and profound implications. We trust, however, that a fair-minded review will find the series a not unworthy monument to the mystic chords of memory that make an enduring and beautiful harmony of the American Unum and Pluribus.

Ohio Farmer

A Statesman in Congress

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

This Friday marks the 160th anniversary of the death of Henry Clay (June 29, 1852). With only a few years excepted, Clay served in the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1803 until his death almost 50 years later. When he died, he was the most famous American of his day and received many, many eulogies. One of them came from a little-known, former one-term Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln, who eulogized Clay as "my beau ideal of a statesman."

In calling Clay a "statesman," Lincoln chose his words carefully, and he used a term we don't hear much anymore. But it's one we must recapture if we are going to understand the kind of people we need in public office to revitalize the American experiment in constitutional self-government.

To recapture the idea of the statesman, we must, among other things, recall how to distinguish it from the idea of the "leader" bequeathed to us by the Progressive Movement over a century ago. "Leader" is an old word with a respectable heritage—Thomas Jefferson referred to George Washington, for example, as "our great leader."  But the Progressives, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, poured new wine into this old bottle, and our public discourse has been drinking this Progressive vintage ever since.

Progressives who talk about "leadership" also talk about "vision."  They mean that a leader somehow must have a vision, a vision of the future into which he will lead his followers. A progressive leader moves people away from where they are toward some new goal divined by the leader—actually, toward goals that must constantly be renewed as we make endless "progress" into an always receding future. To lead the country into the progressive future requires leading it away from the supposedly outmoded goals, principles, and institutions of the American Founding.

The statesmanship of Clay (and Lincoln after him) was guided by the goals set out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: to protect the "unalienable" rights of every individual to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"; and "to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."  A statesmanlike pursuit of these goals requires "vision," too, but vision of a sort very different from the progressive variety.

Statesmanlike vision is part of the virtue that Aristotle called prudence. Prudence does not mean "caution"; it means knowing what the right goals are and seeing how to move toward them in the particular circumstances that you face. The prudent statesman has great political vision, like a great quarterback who can see the whole field and make adjustments at the line of scrimmage. Having that kind of larger outlook can be hard in Congress, where there are so many particular interests and passions always trying to narrow your view. But, as Lincoln said, Henry Clay had that broader statesmanlike perspective: "Whatever Mr. Clay did, he did for the whole country. In the construction of his measures he ever carefully surveyed every part of the field, and duly weighed every conflicting interest."

The right kind of compromise is often part of the statesman's prudence. On at least three occasions (the last in 1850), Henry Clay cobbled together a deal in Congress that held a shaky country together. For this he earned the title "The Great Compromiser"—not because he gave in on his fundamental principles but because his compromises preserved the Union and kept the spark of liberty alive. His deals had their critics, and some of their criticism is not off the mark. But Clay was willing to make imperfect compromises because he knew that in politics consequences matter. It's not enough simply to have good intentions: the right action is also the one that has the best possible results. The statesman's compromise is one that, without violating the larger principles at stake, gets as much good as possible out of imperfect circumstances.

To achieve what Clay achieved in his long career required qualities that set him apart from his sometimes more seemingly successful political competitors. As Lincoln said:

Even those of both political parties who have been preferred to him for the highest office, have run far briefer courses than he, and left him, still shining high in the heavens of the political world. Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Polk, and Taylor, all rose after, and set long before him. The spell—the long enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle. Who can compass it? It is probably true he owed his pre-eminence to no one quality, but to a fortunate combination of several. He was surpassingly eloquent; but many eloquent men fail utterly; and they are not, as a class, generally successful. His judgment was excellent; but many men of good judgment, live and die unnoticed. His will was indomitable; but this quality often secures to its owner nothing better than a character for useless obstinacy. These then were Mr. Clay's leading qualities. No one of them is very uncommon; but all taken together are rarely combined in a single individual; and this is probably the reason why such men as Henry Clay are so rare in the world.

Statesmen like Henry Clay are rare, but sometimes our Republic needs them. They don't try to lead us to a new political ideal; they help us see how to return to the principles of our Founding and Constitution. They know that the people are supposed to lead themselves by adhering to the Constitution they set up, not by following a leader as he envisions the next goal revealed to him by the always progressing "living constitution." In helping to keep our Founding principles alive in the minds of the American people, they render a noble and glorious service both to our country and to all mankind.

They come to "belong to the ages," as someone said less than a generation later of the little-known Congressman who once eulogized Henry Clay.

Ohio Farmer

 

Liberty or Soft Despotism

To My Fellow Citizens:

In an earlier letter, I remarked that Alexander Hamilton's view of a commercial republic has, for the most part, prevailed in the United States. Hamilton believed that such a commercial republic was the best means of protecting the natural rights of its citizens to their lives, liberty, and property, which constitute the very basis of prosperity.

Hamilton's view was largely adopted by the Whig Party in the 1830s and was the cornerstone of the economic program advocated by Henry Clay, whom Abraham Lincoln, an ardent Whig during his early political career, called his "beau ideal of a statesman" (on a forthcoming anniversary, we will reflect on the statesmanship of Clay in his many years as an American legislator). For Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln, the key to prosperity is freedom. In his eulogy on Clay, Lincoln observed that:

Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—a strong sympathy with the oppressed everywhere, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion. Subsidiary to this was the conduct of his whole life. He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that free men could be prosperous.

The basis of the commercial republic that Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln envisioned was a just, generous, and prosperous system of free labor that "opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all." The genius of free labor, Lincoln held, was that "when one starts poor, as most do in the race of life ... he knows he can better his condition."

Lincoln conceded that not all individuals are able to improve their lot in a commercial republic. But "if any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune." The fact is that a system of free labor "allow[s] the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else" and "leave[s] each man free to acquire property as fast as he can."

Such a system has a place for government action but one that is limited in scope. "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities," e.g., national defense and the maintenance of good domestic order (the military and police functions); the administration of justice, including protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts (the court system); and limited investment in and maintenance of "public goods." Such a government leaves to individuals "the sacred right to regulate their own family affairs" and to "communities ... [the right to] arrange their own internal matters to suit themselves" without undue government interference. "The proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own" was for Lincoln the very foundation of justice.

Lincoln saw free labor as the antidote to the great problem of the time: slavery. While a system of free labor was based on the assumption that industrious, honest, and sober men would freely pursue their own interests, slavery was based on the assumption that the vast majority of laborers were indolent and without ambition, "that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor."

Contrast the view of republican independence advanced by Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln with the story of "Julia," a cartoon figure made famous in the country in recent weeks to demonstrate what a female citizen today—if we can call her that instead of "subject"—owes to the benevolent policies of the modern American government. "Julia" represents what Alexis de Tocqueville called "soft despotism." Tocqueville understood that democracy is susceptible to a certain form of tyranny: the rule of a "benevolent" government, catering to the public's needs and whims in exchange for their freedom, which creates a servile people dependent on the largesse of government, happily acquiescing in the loss of liberty as long as the government fulfills their material desires.

The United States stands at a crossroads. Will we choose the path to prosperity represented by the commercial republic based on a just, generous, and prosperous system of free labor? Or will we succumb to Tocqueville's "soft despotism" and the servility it entails?

Ohio Farmer

Equality and Race Continued

To My Fellow Citizens:

In a recent letter we discussed the challenge of making republican government succeed in a racially plural republic, a challenge most Americans before 1860 considered insurmountable. One of the long arcs of American history since then is the growing recognition that while sustaining such a nation was daunting, all the alternatives to it were impossible. Thus, America would have to find a way to make it work as well as it could be made to work.

The beginning of this arc can be seen in Abraham Lincoln’s experience. He had become a nationally prominent politician in the 1850s, by insisting that America’s founders had meant to place the institution of slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction,” a course from which the nation must not depart. “Ultimate,” however, is an elastic term. In his fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln conceded, “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least….” 

This was a reflection, among other things, of Lincoln’s estimation of American public opinion. In a country founded on the consent of the governed, it is impossible for a democratic politician peacefully to do more than he can persuade his fellow citizens to join him in doing.  That Lincoln’s election was considered an intolerable provocation by the slave-holding states that seceded from the Union demonstrated just how far public opinion had to move in America before slavery could be extinguished “in the most peaceful way.”  As Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, who would become vice president of the Confederate States of America, said in 1861, “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

When war was forced upon him by the seceding slave-holding states, Lincoln took the occasion of the war to make the ultimate extinction of slavery much more immediate. As a measure of military necessity he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, less than two years into his first term of office, declaring that all slaves in states rebelling against the federal government were “forever free.” This was one step toward the ultimate extinction of slavery; the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery throughout the nation, was the next.

Lincoln’s assassination, less than two months after the start of his second term, means that we can only speculate about the further steps he would have taken towards establishing a democracy that included freed slaves. In his last public speech, given four days before he was assassinated, Lincoln spoke favorably about readmitting Louisiana to the Union, based on its newly adopted state constitution, “giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man.” For Congress to reject Louisiana’s application, Lincoln argued, would be to say to that state’s blacks, “This cup of liberty … we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how.”

The previous month, at his second inaugural, Lincoln had urged Americans to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves.” It became apparent in the years after Lincoln’s death, however, that there was a profound antagonism between the goals of racial unity and sectional unity. Southern whites, defeated and humiliated, made clear that they were implacably opposed to federal policies that would guarantee blacks’ civil and voting rights. For the first years of Reconstruction the policy of the Republicans who controlled Congress was to confront and overcome this opposition. Federal troops remained stationed in the defeated states, protecting blacks’ rights and allowing legislatures with black representatives, sometimes comprising majorities, to convene.

Southern resistance, manifested in the rise of paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, forced northerners to decide whether they were prepared to commit troops and resources, to the extent and for the duration required, until southerners finally accepted former slaves as equal citizens. In the aftermath of the election of 1876, a decade after the end of the Civil War, northerners threw in the towel: Reconstruction ended with the abolition of slavery, but also with the federal government acquiescing in white southerners deciding how and whether southern blacks’ rights would be recognized. The imperative of sectional reconciliation had triumphed over the imperative of enforcing the Constitution, explicitly color-blind after the ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments. As Lincoln had feared, blacks’ hopes for realizing liberty were postponed to some vague and undefined when, where, and how. It took most of the ensuing century before the Civil Rights movement impelled the nation to make its commitment to color-blind citizenship specific and immediate. A future letter will examine the democratic principle of equality in the wake of that historical watershed. 

Ohio Farmer

Equality and Race

To My Fellow Citizens:

Recent controversy over the killing of a black teenager in Florida reminds us that America’s racial dilemmas did not end with the election of our first black president; they evolved. The episode is the latest intersection of equality, the general principle of democratic politics everywhere, and race, the particular issue that has been the greatest political challenge throughout America’s history.

Abraham Lincoln, who thought more profoundly than any figure in our history about the intertwined questions of equality and race, took the questions up in 1857 in a speech criticizing the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. The Court, and politicians like Lincoln’s great opponent Senator Stephen Douglas, who defended the Court’s decision, argued that when the American revolutionaries famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” they did not mean to include black men (this is a view still widely insisted on by many academics and intellectuals who write on these subjects).  Lincoln denied this.  As he said:

Chief Justice Taney … and [Senator] Douglas argue that the authors of [the Declaration] did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another.

It is worth quoting Lincoln at length explaining what the authors of the Declaration of Independence did mean:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".… They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Establishing a true understanding of equal human rights in the public mind was—and is—a mountainous challenge in itself. Giving the best possible effect to that truth in the “circumstances” in which the country finds itself at any given time can be an even greater challenge. Lincoln wrote that the Founders intended the enforcement of Americans’ equal natural rights to “follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” As he said repeatedly throughout the 1850s, this meant, among other things, that the Founders intended to put slavery in the “course of ultimate extinction.”

In Lincoln’s time, he and Stephen Douglas were politicians competing at the highest levels of American politics for the same mid-19th century voters, who were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly opposed to sharing their political and social rights with blacks. To gain advantage with such an electorate, Douglas—in Lincoln’s words— sought to exploit the “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” He did this by saying of those who, like Lincoln, affirmed that the declaration’s “all men are created equal” meant all men, that they “do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!”

Appealing to the same voters, Lincoln protested “against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” The only “preventive”—if there was any preventive—for amalgamation of the white and black races, he said, was the “separation of the races.” The only way—if there was any way—to effect the separation of the races was “colonization,” transporting “the African to his native clime” or to some other foreign parts that he would consent to go to.

With such appeals, Lincoln got himself elected president.  Secession and Civil War followed. The circumstances of the war made it possible for Lincoln to promote the immediate abolition of slavery; this led, quickly, to the constitutional guarantee of black citizenship and voting rights and, slowly, to the federal enforcement of those guarantees. After a century of the uncertain and painful unfolding of circumstances, in1964 Congress outlawed the local ordinances and private practices that required blacks to eat in separate sections of restaurants and sleep in separate sections of hotels. Three years later the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that legal restrictions on marriage, if based on race, were unconstitutional.

Nothing changes circumstances like war. By the time the Civil War ended it became clear that all the options Americans had been exploring were dead ends. We were not going (though the rebelling states tried) to split into two countries, one free and one slave. We were not going to exist in perpetuity as one country in which we agreed to disagree about slavery. A house divided against itself, half-slave and half-free, could not stand, as Lincoln had predicted. And we were not going to end slavery only to send the descendants of Africans who had been brought here against their will throughout the 17th and 18th centuries back to Africa or on to some other part of the world. The only option left was the one that most white Americans before the Civil War considered morally intolerable and practically impossible: find a way to make American democracy work in a nation where different ethnic and racial groups formed one people. Some thoughts on the course of that endeavor will be the subject of a future letter.

Ohio Farmer

 

Preserving the Constitution and the Nation

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

These letters hope to find, in the continually arising, pressing political questions and choices of the moment, those principles or observations that have always been and will always be necessary to our deliberations as a free people.  We think there may be a good occasion for this in the President's recent decision to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

For some of the voters who were most enthusiastic about Barack Obama in 2008—those who have since then been disappointed by the President's decisions about enhanced interrogation, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and warrantless wiretapping, for example— this was the last straw. After first threatening to veto the bill, President Obama signed it into law, despite warnings from fellow Democrats, such as Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, that it would "essentially authorize the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges." The New York Times editorialized against its "terrible new measures that will make indefinite detention and military trials a permanent part of American law."

These are minority positions, however, even among Democrats. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid joined John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in voting for NDAA. A liberal Democratic president, supported in the main by his party, has taken a position on calibrating civil liberties in light of national security imperatives that affirms more than it repudiates his conservative Republican predecessor's policies.

One explanation of this quasi-consensus in favor of giving the government the power to circumvent normal criminal procedure and circumscribe peacetime civil liberties is that national security is a hard, grave business. Candidates who spoke as glibly as bloggers and editorialists about respecting boundaries regardless of the consequences become far less categorical when they're in important positions of national power and must confront just how horrific those consequences might be.

Drawing the lines and rightly understanding the nation's exigencies is not merely a post-9/11 problem. The most famous example in our history is Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus – first by executive order, later according to congressional enactment – as secession and civil war consumed the nation in 1861. He defended his actions in a message to Congress: Are "all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the [president's] official oath [of office] be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?"  Lincoln elaborated his point in 1864:

My oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government – that nation – of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation.

Of course, the government might mistakenly or cynically claim that the preservation of the nation mandates otherwise unconstitutional actions. In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sending over 100,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps after Pearl Harbor, a policy implemented by two of the great liberal heroes of the last century, President Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but at the time the governor of California. Eight years later, however, the Court ruled that President Harry Truman had exceeded his constitutional and statutory authority when, during the Korean War, he issued orders nationalizing the steel industry to prevent a strike by the United Steelworkers from shutting down the mills.

The "war on terrorism," unlike the Civil War or World War II, is not going to conclude with a formal surrender. Since we won't know when it's over, we have reason to wonder if it will be over. The idea that otherwise unconstitutional measures might, because of an existential threat, become lawful means to preserving the nation requires a bigger, more difficult investment of citizens' faith if the existential threat is not an episode but an open-ended state of affairs.

Even if we're not at war in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that killed thousands of Americans in a single day, we all know we're at … something. There is no tidy formula that defines the circumstances under which otherwise unconstitutional actions may be rendered permissible, especially in the treacherous, uncharted waters we must navigate. In the absence of such a formula, the position of ardent civil libertarians is that the only way to avoid a slippery slope to tyranny is to insist that there are no circumstances, ever, where grave national threats justify ordinarily unconstitutional government actions.

A more comprehensive but less clear-cut position is that the idea of eternal vigilance being the price of liberty works two ways: First, we must be vigilant against all enemies, foreign and domestic, whose threats may sometimes require the government to preserve the nation by taking actions that would ordinarily be impermissible. Second, we must be vigilant against the government, especially when it claims that grave dangers justify extraordinary actions. There are no guarantees, but the continuous exercise of both kinds of vigilance gives us our best hope for preserving our freedoms, and the political order in which they are embedded. This dilemma is a permanent feature of the challenge to make an experiment in self-government succeed.

Lincoln asked 150 years ago, "Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?  Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?"  Our experiment in freedom, it seems, has always been and will always be in part an answer to that question.

Ohio Farmer

Our Promissory Note

To My Fellow Citizens:

Next Monday will mark the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. With the opening of his monument on the National Mall, Americans now have a day and a place to honor King's public life and legacy.

We can benefit ourselves on this occasion by taking a moment from our busy lives to call to mind King's most famous address, the 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It has many memorable thoughts and phrases, but all of them are framed within the context of the opening lines, which declare:

we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

King's anchoring of his speech in the principles of the Declaration of Independence would make perfect sense to the Declaration's author. In the last significant letter Thomas Jefferson wrote less than two weeks before his death on July 4, 1826, he talked about the Declaration and his hope for America. Jefferson had been invited to come to Washington, D.C., for a 50^th anniversary reunion with the last remaining signers of the Declaration. He had to decline because of his poor health, but the invitation gave him one last chance to explain the significance of the Declaration: 

May it be to the world [he wrote] what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the Signal of arousing men to… assume the blessings and security of self government…. All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them....

For Jefferson, the principles of the Declaration were not just the historical foundation of our break from Great Britain. They were the moral foundation for our future, which was to be the story of the unfolding and deepening of the Declaration’s principles in American society and politics. America, Jefferson hoped, would become more and more "Declarational" over time.

But that would only be possible if we continued to re-learn the "self-evident" truths on which our country is built. Those truths need to be learned and re-learned by every generation, precisely because they are "self-evident." This familiar phrase does not, as we are usually inclined to think, mean "obvious."  It does not mean "innate":  you don't just know a self-evident truth by being alive. If we did, how could we explain the fact that no society in history had been fully based on those truths until 1776?

"Self-evident" means something that contains the proof of its truth within itself. It is something that is obvious once you have been enlightened to it. For example, the familiar Pythagorean theorem in geometry ("a" squared + "b" squared = "c" squared) is a self-evident truth: you understand it once you've studied it in geometry class. Before then, it is incomprehensible. After that, it is clear and easy. 

The truths of the Declaration are like that. Our Founders were enlightened to them by experience and the study of great thinkers, and we have been enlightened to them by learning and re-learning them in each succeeding generation. That is both hopeful and fearful. It is hopeful because it means that anyone can in principle learn these truths; they are not limited to a particular time, place, or culture. They can be discovered and implemented by anyone at any time and in any place. It is fearful because every generation must be enlightened to them or they will be forgotten even by those who once knew them.

Abraham Lincoln understood these facts. Inside the Memorial in front of which King spoke are the famous words of the Gettysburg Address. In that address, Lincoln began by invoking 1776, when "our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal.'"  Lincoln called equality a "proposition," rather than a "self-evident" truth because in the years before and during the Civil War, many people had forgotten or denied the principle of equality; some even called it a "self-evident lie."  For Lincoln, the great purpose of the Gettysburg Address and of the Civil War itself was to restore in the public understanding the self-evidence of those truths—to restore the promise of freedom for all. That is what he meant when he called for a "new birth of freedom": freedom was born in the Founding and had to be re-born during and after the war.

One hundred years after Lincoln's efforts, Americans still faced the challenge of restoring the American promise of freedom. As King said, he had come to redeem the "promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Like Jefferson and Lincoln before him, King called us to remember and re-learn the meaning of our Founding principles. This is something each generation needs to do, if we are to preserve and perpetuate the great American promise of freedom to all. So this coming Monday, let's honor the American life and legacy of Martin Luther King by using the day to "refresh our recollections" of these principles and restore our "undiminished devotion to them."  

Ohio Farmer

 

Constitutional Lines

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

We have observed in these letters that the recent debt ceiling debate reflected deep divisions in Washington, D.C., but that those divisions, in turn, reflected the citizenry’s ambivalence about how big government should be, how much it should do, and how much it should tax, borrow, and regulate.  The first phase of the debt ceiling debate ended with legislation to raise the nation's legal borrowing authority by $900 billion and to cut planned federal spending over the next decade by a little more than that amount.  Thus, Congress and the president achieved Speaker of the House John Boehner's goal to match any debt ceiling increase, at least dollar-for-dollar, by deficit reductions.

The legislation also sets in motion a second phase, where a "super committee" of six members of the House of Representatives (three from each party) and six senators (also three from each party) will endeavor to reduce the nation's deficit spending over the next ten years by a further $1.5 trillion.  If the committee agrees on a plan by November 23, 2011, Congress approves it in an up-or-down vote without the possibility of offering amendments by December 23, 2011, and the president signs it, the debt ceiling will be increased by $1.5 trillion.  If the committee can't agree on a plan, or submits one the Congress votes down or the president vetoes, the debt ceiling will be increased by $1.2 trillion, and automatic reductions of federal spending by the same amount over the next decade will take effect – spending cuts evenly divided between discretionary domestic programs and national defense spending.

It is remarkable that, three years after the Democrats' across-the-board victories in the 2008 elections, deficit reduction has become the top item on the national political agenda.  The most important cause of this change in the political weather is the emergence of the Tea Party movement, which took shape in 2009 and propelled Republican gains in the elections of 2010.  That movement remains disparate – it has no headquarters, no single leader, and no agreed upon platform.  Yet some core ideas do connect all of the Tea Party's factions and actions. One friendly observer described the Tea Party essence as "populist constitutionalism," since its "divergent groups agree that the federal government has, over the last several decades, stepped further and further outside of the bounds of the Constitution."  Some of the movement's prominent figures describe themselves as "constitutional conservatives."

The endeavor to re-establish limits to the government's sphere of action and authority is highly laudable, and fully consistent with the logic and spirit of the American founding.  That undertaking will, however, be an intellectual challenge.  Reasonable patriots may disagree about the location of the line the authors of the Constitution drew separating what the government may do from what it must not do.  They may disagree, as well, about whether the logic of the Constitution countenances informal adjustments to the location of the government's boundaries over time, or demands formal adjustments only, using one of the procedures for amending the Constitution specified in its fifth article. 

For example, the power of Congress to declare war, specified in Article I, has fallen into disuse.  America hasn't declared war against any nation since 1941, yet has been involved in a number of wars over the past 70 years, some of them large and prolonged.  Does constitutional conservatism, rightly understood, entail retroactively designating all of these wars – including Korea, Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan – illegitimate for never having been formally declared?  If so, then either Congress must declare war to authorize future martial actions, or the nation must amend the Constitution to give explicit legitimacy to the kinds of authorizations Congress has come to rely on, such as the Tonkin Gulf resolution that was the legal basis for the war in Vietnam.  If not, then resolutions and authorizations that fall short of formal declarations of war have acquired a de facto constitutionality: They aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, seem not to have been envisioned or favored by the Constitution’s authors, have not been the subject of any constitutional amendment, yet have gained acceptance as the way the federal government arrives at decisions about military actions.

The fact that there are disputes about the location of the line between what the government may and may not do, and about whether that line is bright and tight, or wide with shades of gray, does not invalidate the constitutional conservative argument that erasing any such line renders America a very different kind of republic.  James Q. Wilson, one of the preeminent American political scientists of the last half century, helps us understand this. The ultimate meaning of the triumph of the New Deal, according to him, is the collapse of the "legitimacy barrier."  Since its fall, he argued, "political conflict [has taken] a very different form.  New programs need not await the advent of a crisis or an extraordinary majority, because no program is any longer 'new'—it is seen, rather, as an extension, a modification, or an enlargement of something the government is already doing.  Since there is virtually nothing the government has not tried to do, there is little it cannot be asked to do."

The correct label for the alternative to limited government is not big government, but unlimited government.  The destruction of all legitimacy barriers creates a new constitutional logic in which government grows, not just very big, but limitlessly big.  All the forces – political, economic, and judicial – that might constrain it are rendered ineffectual.

This deformation of our republic has gone on so long, and acquired so much inertial strength, that the Tea Party movement's mission is politically as well as intellectually audacious.  We have had occasion to note in these letters Abraham Lincoln's argument that "public sentiment is everything" in American democracy: "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.  Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.  He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed."

The ultimate goal of constitutional conservatism is to mold public sentiment into a broad, durable consensus in favor of rebuilding legitimacy barriers in American government.  This is not a task that will be accomplished by one legislative fight over the debt ceiling, or in one or two election cycles.  Conservatives, constitutional and otherwise, sometimes speak as though the establishment and perpetuation of the New Deal is the result of some kind of coup d'état.  The fact is, we have this bloated government because we, the people, have shown our favor to the expansion of government's activities far more reliably than to their contraction.  The success of constitutional conservatism will depend on exercising the statesmanship that carefully leads the people to set aside their acquired tolerance for a government that purports to have a program for every problem, and rediscover their older apprehensions that any government strong enough to give you anything you want is also strong enough to take away anything you have.

Ohio Farmer

Words and Politics

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

Everyone across the political spectrum has been rightly celebrating the one grace note of the recent protracted battle in Washington over raising the debt ceiling—the moment when Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords appeared on the House floor, still recovering from her grievous wounds, to cast a vote on the climactic legislation. 

Giffords' welcome presence revived discussion of "civility" in our political life, a respectable term that had been deployed in the most uncivil way against raucous Tea Party activists in the moments after Giffords' shooting in January.  Then in the heat of the debt ceiling battle, leading journalists and office holders who have been most sanctimonious about civility called the Tea Party "terrorists." It should go without saying that civility is important to "civil society," but it should be equally noted that a high rhetorical pitch is especially endemic to democratic forms of government that put a premium on serious public argument over essential questions of justice and policy.  There is an opportunity here for the Tea Party to turn this attack on its head, and to break new rhetorical ground in Washington.

The fervency of Tea Party rhetoric about potentially tyrannical government is nothing especially new or different in American politics; nor is there anything new in critics using extreme language to attack the Tea Party's supposed extremism.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who first fought each other with extreme bitterness and then conducted one of the most edifying correspondences between statesmen in human history, might well find the current discussion of civility in politics to be frivolous and unserious.  Jefferson's supporters charged Adams with wanting to refasten British monarchy on America, while Adams' supporters alleged that Jefferson's election would mean the importation of the French guillotine and the blood of revolutionary terror running through every American town. 

Our tender censors of political discourse would exhaust their vocabulary of outrage if faced with the harshness of public discourse at earlier periods of our history, not to mention the ways the hot tempers of political argument spilled over into actual violence.  The famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was a rare but not unheard of thing in the early years of our republic; as nastily as our politicians can speak today, at least no one has been assaulted in a Capitol chamber like Senator Charles Sumner in 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sumner savagely with a cane in the heat of the bitter debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Nor have we seen mobs descending on newspaper offices and shooting editors as occurred in Alton, Illinois in the famous case of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837—the event which inspired the teaching of Lincoln's first great speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum the following year.

It may not simply be a lack of historical perspective, however, that has led to the current focus on civility in politics.  There is no doubt that changes in modern mass media have amplified our political discord.  In two generations we have gone from a media world of mostly print and radio to 24-hour television news and the always-on, unfiltered anarchy of the Internet.  Perhaps this may amount to a qualitative change in the effect of political rhetoric, just as the invention of movable type 500 years ago was a socially and politically disruptive mass media technology.  Like movable type and cheap books five centuries ago, our all-encompassing high tech mass media world is here to stay.  As the kids say, deal with it.

There is one aspect of political rhetoric, however, that office holders have within their power to change, and that change might help remove the sense many citizens have that our political class is remote from us.  When elected officials arrive in Washington, they very quickly pick up a way of talking that is not found in any other walk of life.  It comes in two forms.  First is the language of "comity," the way in which our senators and representatives habitually refer to their bitter political opponents as "my good friend from the great state of Colorado," and so forth.  In a few cases, this language expresses a true friendship across party lines, but it is usually a lie, and everyone watching on C-SPAN knows it is a lie. 

This language probably is an import from the British parliamentary procedure of referring to the "right honorable gentleman from Blaby," or some other specific constituency, in the House of Commons debates, but the formality of assuming honor in one's opponents is a different thing than asserting friendship where none exists.  This language of comity probably serves a useful purpose in keeping political discourse more temperate, but why not drop the pretence and use more neutral language—"the representative from New Jersey," "the senator from New Mexico," even "the honorable representative from New Jersey"?

Second, elected officials in Washington always lapse quickly into a Capitol Hill jargon that subtly reinforces some bad tendencies of modern government in ways that are almost unnoticed, but which contribute to the peoples' dislike of our political class.  Members of the House, in particular, speak of "my constituents" back home in the district.  But speaking of your fellow citizens as "constituents" abets the notion that your primary job is to pry as many goodies from Washington as you can for your "constituents." If the Tea Party caucus really wants to mark themselves out as a different kind of political force, they should think about banishing the term "constituents," and instead speak of citizens—a term which emphasizes our political equality.  (By the way, like the "right honorable gentleman" usage, this particular formulation is also an import from Britain, and it conveys the sense that our elected officials are our masters more than our representatives.)

In a similar vein, Tea Party caucus members should try not to use Capitol Hill jargon, which most members, especially new ones, adopt to convey the air of insider-sophistication.  Some of the special terms of art on Capitol Hill, like "budget reconciliation" and so forth, are unavoidable, but other phrases could benefit from Chruchill's rule of linguistic simplification.  For example, don’t speak of using an "expedited process" to consider budget issues; instead, say "fast track." Then the fact that nothing is ever fast in Congress will be revealed with some embarrassment for the process-oriented insiders.

If Tea Partiers actually speak differently as well as thinking differently, it will mark them out even more as a reforming force in Washington.  And if they do that, their critics will continue to call them names, mostly short, non-jargony names that are easy to make out.  That will be another sign of their impact.

Ohio Farmer

Novus Ordo Seclorum

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

America will always have the honor of being the first nation on earth to dedicate itself to the self evident truth that all men are created equal, as it did in declaring independence on July 4, 1776. In that dedication truly was created a New Order of the Ages—a Novus Ordo Seclorum as we say on the Great Seal of the United States. Let us take the occasion of this Independence Day to continue our reflections on what this means. What does it tell us about the foundations, forms, and purposes of American politics? What does it require of us—deserve from us?

Lincoln called the idea of equality the central idea of the American political experiment, from which all its other ideas radiate. It is, he wrote, “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times”; it is a philosophical idea about human nature and the just relations of each human being to all others. The revolutionary and founding generation of Americans expressed this idea of human equality in a variety of ways. The familiar language of the Declaration of Independence is "that all men are created equal." To express the same idea, the Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776) stated that "all men are by nature equally free and independent." The Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (March 2, 1780) stated that "All men are born free and equal."

To say that all men are by nature equal is to say that human beings are not naturally subordinated one to another: Whatever the many differences may be among human beings, no man is by nature a master; no man is by nature a slave. This is what Jefferson’s vivid metaphor meant, which we quoted in the last letter: "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God." Of this revolutionary idea, at the heart of the Declaration and at the heart of the American experiment in self-government, Lincoln wrote on the eve of Civil War, “that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” And so it has proven to be: a powerful rebuke and a stumbling block to every form of tyranny and oppression—whether of race, class, or religion, whether home grown or foreign born—that has raised its head over the past two centuries.

Human beings, then, are naturally free as they are naturally equal. It is from this human equality and freedom that the founders derived the idea that government could only be justly founded on consent. Because human beings are not by nature subordinated to one another—that is, because they are equal and free—their consent must be obtained before any human being may rightfully exercise authority over them. It is the voluntary consent of the people that gives authority to government. Only a being possessing reason—a being who can distinguish right from wrong—is capable of voluntary consent. This is why the deepest root of American politics is in the fact, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, “that Almighty God hath created the mind free.”

Government among free and equal men is formed, the American Founders would say, by social contract or social compact. In the words of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: "The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people." The American body-politic is a voluntary association begun when, in the last words of the Declaration of Independence, "for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." This is the political community that new citizens enter into when they become citizens. To take on the responsibilities of such citizenship, it is necessary—for citizens old and new—to understand the principles on which this citizenship is based. So it is a useful tradition, as the Fourth of July comes around each year, to reflect again—and again—on the American political principles famously declared to the world on the original Independence Day.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote late in life, in drafting the Declaration of Independence he had not meant to proclaim any "new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of," but merely to express "the American mind." The Declaration contains a stunning summation of the principles of free government; but it was only because the American people already understood these principles that it was possible to establish a government based upon them. Similarly, only if we are capable of understanding these principles will we be able to preserve and perpetuate, maybe even to strengthen and improve, the free institutions—the Novus Ordo Seclorum—that began to arise from them in 1776.  For our own sake and for the sake of the cause to which our country was dedicated on that original Fourth of July, let us take this occasion to renew our dedication to that cause and its noble principles. No one else can do it for us. It will do a world of good. And it is a cause worthy of the last full measure of devotion.
Happy Fourth.

Ohio Farmer

A City Upon a Hill

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

 Is America exceptional? Is it unique among the nations? If so, what makes it so? And what are the implications of the fact? These are not policy questions, but questions about ideas and historical circumstances that are at the foundation of policies. They are the kinds of questions, it seems, that you and other elected and appointed public officials are often compelled for no particularly good reason to answer, as was the president a short time ago. Perhaps this may sometimes seem a tedious requirement of your job, especially when journalists asking the questions have no interest other than ginning up a headline. And so it is understandable if on occasion you reach for plausible sounding formulas in the hope that they will not cause a headline of an undesirable sort. But your answers can matter a great deal. They can be an opportunity to shape the public’s sentiments and opinions in a way that helps free government remain good government.  Answering such questions—even when they haven’t been asked—has in the course of our history given an opportunity for America’s greatest statesmen in small or large ways to strengthen the capacity of their fellow citizens to govern themselves. On the other hand, there is hardly a greater mischief that can be done to the people than to give them bad answers to such questions.

In my last letter I took the liberty of questioning the notion, recently espoused by some leading public officials, that America is exceptional because its principles give it a special right and responsibility to lead. This is a confusion, I argued, if an understandable confusion, of a genuine American exceptionalism that is older than America itself—namely, the idea of America as an example to the world—“a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop said to the future Massachusetts Bay colonists.  By 1776, when the thirteen colonies assumed their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth as the United States of America, they did so proclaiming principles that made America truly exceptional.  “We hold these truths to be self evident,” they declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No people on earth had ever based the authority of their laws on such an assertion. So the historic effort to establish government upon this principle was in truth an unprecedented and exceptional—a then unique—experiment in self government.

As Thomas Jefferson put it in his last surviving letter, written just before he died fifty years to the day after July 4, 1776, the American idea of equality meant “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” America was exceptional in founding our politics on what is least exceptional about us, on what we share with all other human beings at all times and in all places, rather than on any accidents of birth or circumstance that separate us.  For this reason, Jefferson thought that the principles proclaimed in the Declaration not only gave hope to all Americans but were “grounds of hope for others,” everywhere and always.

The experiment of living up to these principles is the American experiment—the effort generation after generation to rise to equality, as Lincoln put it. So long as America remains America, it will be the country first dedicated to this proposition that all men are created equal, and ever aspiring to rise to its demands. Lincoln, echoing Jefferson, called the American idea the “principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.”

The American experiment claimed to be an exceptional experiment not only because of its principles, but because conditions here in America were more favorable to the experiment in self-government than anywhere else in the world. The Founders’ America really was a land of opportunity as had never been known in the world before. The United States, as the saying then had it, became “the best poor man’s country on earth.”  Ordinary people, secure in their equal liberty and therefore full of hope and enterprise, could farm their own land and enjoy in peace the bread of their labor; and for the first time in human history, they or their children could aspire without limit to great things—even to the Presidency of the United States. If the experiment in self government fails here, our Founders thought, that failure might be taken as a strong proof that, contrary to American assertions, human beings are not made to govern themselves.

Just as Jefferson and Lincoln hoped, the example of America has helped spread the blessings of liberty to other peoples. Many countries now claim equality as the principle of their politics.  May they live up to those principles, as we hope to do ourselves!

Here in America, when we succeed in living up to our principles, we do something more important than establishing our right to lead.  We establish our worthiness to lead, whenever our interest guided by our justice should require. To rise to these principles, we must understand them. And since we are not born understanding them, we arrange as best we can to learn them from one another—sometimes by listening to our politicians talk about our country—and to hand them down to our children. Can there be a more propitious occasion to refresh our understanding than the annual approach of the Fourth of July?  Let us return to these themes next week.

Ohio Farmer

Political Success and Governmental Failure

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

In his first debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Abraham Lincoln said, "In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Seven score and 13 years after those debates we are now engaged in a great political contest over whether the welfare state established by the New Deal and built up continuously since 1932 can long endure. Its growth over the past eight decades and the financial crisis confronting it today suggest the need to qualify Lincoln’s rule: Public sentiment may ensure political success for a policy, but it does not rule out governmental failure.  Indeed, a policy can be a governmental failure precisely because it is a political success.

It is our pride as Americans that our government must answer to our consent. If we insist on consenting to bad government, it will be very hard for a democratic government to be good. When Lincoln was speaking of public sentiment, he knew that it was a public he had to persuade to do the right thing, a public with many strong inclinations to do the wrong thing. His point was that this is the most important job a politician has in a democracy—to persuade the people to do the right thing.

In a New York Times public opinion poll last year, 76 percent of all respondents agreed that “the benefits from government programs such as Social Security and Medicare [are] worth the costs of those programs.”  Even 62 percent of those who said they support the “tea party” movement thought so!  It’s hardly a surprise that public sentiment supports these programs, the mainstays of our welfare state.

The governmental problem is that the benefits of these programs are not only worth what they cost, but worth far more than they cost.  According to a recent study, a husband and wife, each born in 1915 and each earning the average wage during their working years, would have retired in 1980 having paid a total of $190,000 in Social Security taxes and $15,600 in Medicare taxes.  That couple could expect to receive, on average, $446,000 in Social Security benefits and $132,000 in Medicare benefits.  Depending on health and longevity, some couples received more and some less but the average benefits from the two programs would have totaled $578,000.

We shouldn’t be surprised that government programs become highly popular when, in effect, they hand out $372,400 checks rather than gold watches to new retirees. Being popular isn’t the same as being sustainable, however, and the popularity of Social Security and Medicare has gone a long way to help them become unsustainable.  The New Deal’s architects and advocates believed that rapid economic and population growth would make it possible to perpetuate social insurance programs’ large windfalls.  There’s no prospect, however, for the economic growth that would allow the federal government to pay out in the first half of the 21st century the kind of social insurance benefits that Americans came to expect in the second half of the 20th.  And as to population, everyone knows that people these days are having fewer children or, in many more cases now than in the past, none at all. As a result, we see the formation of a demographic bulge, with a disproportionately large number of older people receiving benefits from social insurance programs and a disproportionately small number of younger people paying taxes to finance those benefits.

We have no choice, then, but to address the financial imbalances built into our welfare state. The Democratic Party, defined since 1932 by championing the cause of an ever-larger welfare state, wants government spending to be the independent variable that determines tax levels.  The Republican Party, home to New Deal opponents in the 1930s and New Deal skeptics ever since, wants government spending to be the dependent variable determined by taxes.  Democrats hope that when push comes to shove, and we can no longer borrow our way out of the welfare state’s rickety financing, the people will come to the conclusion that large reductions in welfare state benefits are unthinkable, and they will support the large, widely applied tax increases that will certainly be needed to continue and expand our social insurance programs. Republicans have the opposite hope—that when voters come to realize the size of the tax increases needed to sustain our welfare state they will, at long last, be amenable to the kind of big reductions in government spending that have been ballot box losers for nearly a century.

America’s welfare state has grown for the past 80 years because people like its benefits.  There are two reasons it hasn’t grown even faster.  The lesser one is that people had some qualms, now largely forgotten, about the legitimacy of having the government redistribute wealth from some people to others.  The more politically consequential reason is that people like getting what the welfare state provides much more than they like paying for what it costs.

The Democratic Party has worked hard for many years to reassure people that generous welfare state benefits really are compatible with modest taxes, or ones that only very rich people and large corporations will have to worry about. There are two problems with this reassurance. First, it’s not true: a welfare state like the comprehensive ones in most European countries requires the kind of heavy, widely applied taxes common in Europe. Second, the fact that Democrats have always gravitated to the far-fetched argument that we can have New York’s social welfare system and South Dakota’s taxes suggests they’re afraid that most Americans won’t vote for the comprehensive welfare state Democrats advocate if the price is shown in big print on the first page, rather than buried in a footnote. Those fears form the foundation of the Republicans’ hopes that the welfare state we’ll end up with—if its costs are honestly reckoned and realistically shared—will be much smaller (and much smarter) than the one we have now.

We Americans celebrate our capacity to govern ourselves. Here certainly is a test of our capacity. The government can’t solve this problem without the help of the people, because the right government can’t get elected unless we the people are wise enough to elect those who are committed to make the choices that are necessary. Are we? Can we be persuaded to be?

Ohio Farmer

The Course of Human Events

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

How endlessly interesting and full of surprises is the course of human events. For the past two weeks, in hundreds of Congressional districts throughout the 50 states, we citizens witnessed lawmakers of both parties, on recess, engaging their constituents in conversations about the nation’s business in town hall meetings and other forums. The President was hosting his own town hall meetings, from Virginia to Facebook headquarters in California, and conducting interviews with local television stations in cities across the country. The central issue was the budget of the United States Government for the fiscal year 2012, and the conversation was shaped primarily by two competing proposals for that budget, the one put forward by President Obama on February 14, the other put forward in early April by the House Budget Committee chaired by Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and approved by the House on April 15. In light of the country’s debt and deficit crises, barring surprises in the course of human events, this looked likely to be the big issue of the coming months, leading up to the 2012 elections.

The issue is urgent and complicated (to say the least!) and the conversations were lively. For the most part, they seemed like a healthy spectacle of James Madison’s extended republic at work: a wide variety of contending interests and opinions jostling with one another in a robust American way, from which one might reasonably hope that eventually the “cool and deliberate sense” of the community would make some progress toward the public good.  Certainly—you not being angels, and this being free, democratic politics—one could witness displays among the lawmakers of what Publius called “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.” I needn’t name names here, and can put it down to an excess of zeal to please us, the people. And as for us citizens, in more than one instance, unfortunately, some of us became so animated that we had to be removed from the premises by the police.  In fairness to the parties involved in these cases, those who had to be removed seemed to be on one side of the issue. But similar behavior, certainly, could be attributed to those on the other side on other occasions. We are, after all, “the people,” and no more angelic than our elected representatives, and sometimes our democratic behavior does not reflect very well on our human nature.

One of the hopes of these letters is to connect our contemporary political conversation with the tradition of American political discourse that has enriched our politics for over two centuries. In this instance, it may be helpful to observe that, by our less than angelic behavior, we merely confirm Publius’s observation, that in “cases of great national discussion” we should not be surprised if a “torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose,” or that the opposing parties “mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.”  

Maybe our political passions will be calmed somewhat by the wise and beautiful lessons of moderation offered by Alexander Hamilton (a man himself perhaps not always moderate) in Federalist 1: 

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society. This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.

James Madison adds his own moderating wisdom in Federalist 37:

It is a misfortune, inseparable from human affairs, that public measures are rarely investigated with that spirit of moderation which is essential to a just estimate of their real tendency to advance or obstruct the public good; and that this spirit is more apt to be diminished than promoted, by those occasions which require an unusual exercise of it.

Our civic moderation might be further strengthened by the reminder we received on Sunday night that, whatever the lively differences among ourselves in our pursuit of happiness, we are at war—and have been ever since that surprising turn in the course of human events on September 11, 2001.  Whatever our differences, we join past generations of Americans, going back to the Revolutionary generation, in mutually pledging to one another "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." The sacrifices of many patriots teach us constantly that this is no vagrant commitment, that there is some enduring thing in our country for the sake of which Americans make such a pledge, generation after generation, each to all and all to each. They teach us to summon the better angels of our nature to our national conversations as we pursue our happiness in freedom.

A young Abraham Lincoln instructed a group of high school students over 170 years ago that "[w]e find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us." Like Lincoln, our generation of Americans inherited these blessings of liberty. There is no greater earthly bequest we can have received. It is our greatest duty and our highest honor as Americans to pass on this inheritance unimpaired—indeed, strengthened and improved in every way possible, to our children. This seems to me to be what our great national conversation is about.  Let’s rise to the seriousness of the question. 

Ohio Farmer