Tag: democracy

Book Review: The Village Notary, by József Eötvös

The Village Notary is no great pleasure to read, for the compelling moments of its plot are scattered between cynical diatribes. 

The diatribes are telling, at any rate. Here’s one on democracy:

“It makes me laugh to think that the very men who now divide the county trace their origin as political parties to an idle controversy on the uniforms of the county-hussars. Hence the yellows and the blacks. I am sure your Excellency would laugh if you had seen their committee-rooms. Rety’s head-quarters ring with high praises of his patriotism, for his having at the last election fixed the price of meat at threepence a pound; while in the next house you find all the butchers of the county for Bantornyi, the intrepid champion of protection and threepence-halfpenny. Just now, at the café, I overheard an argument on Vetsöshi’s abilities, which are rated very low, because he is shown to be a bad hand at cards. In short, your Excellency can have no idea of the farce which is acting around us.” (vol. 1, p. 175)

And here’s a pithy specimen on prison conditions:

The county gaol at Dustbury was, in those days, free from the prevailing epidemic of philanthropical innovations, which a certain set of political empirics are so zealous in spreading. The ancient national system of Austrio-Hungarian prison discipline was still in full glory; but as coming events cast their shadows before, so this venerable and time-honored system was every now and then attacked by the maudlin and squeamish sentimentality of modern reformers….In the gaol of a neighboring county, so fewer than six prisoners were dull enough top permit their feet to be frozen by the cold; and though the county magistrates gave them the full benefit of their attention, though their feet were amputated with a handsaw, though only one of the patients survived, and though such things were known to have frequently happened without any one being the worse for it, yet (so great is human perversity) a cry of indignation was got up against the worshipful magistrates of the said county, for all the world as if those honorable gentlemen had made the cold. (vol. 3, pp. 67-68)

Less pithy but more bitter is this eulogy of the book’s namesake protagonist, which amounts to a mockery of liberal learning itself, for its cruel inability to alter the individual’s destiny as fixed by birth:

The poor curate’s library contained but few books, but among them was a great treasure; namely, a copy of Plutarch….Jonas passed many hours in looking at the solemn faces of the classic heroes, nor was it long before he knew their names and actions….He was happy; for there is no greater happiness than the delight which a pure heart feels when thinking of great deeds and generous men. The childhood of nations and individuals idolizes all heroes, and thus did Jonas.

A child’s perceptions of distance are very weak: it is the same in the moral world. Children try to grasp any shining bauble which strikes their eyes, no matter whether far or near. Life has not yet taught them to wait, to plod, and perhaps to be disappointed. The boy is equally ignorant of the bitter truth, that there is usually but one road which leads to the high places of the world, and that the ascent, though easy to some, is impossible to others, for from where they stand there is no path which leads to the top. (vol. 1, pp. 42-43)

The reader can perhaps detect in these lines the self-pity of the author, particularly if he too once imbibed the elixir of liberal learning, without heeding the country-club logo stamped on the cup.

Just as the romantic should avoid Don Quixote, the idealist should avoid The Village Notary.

Book Review: Northwood, or Life North and South, by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale

Written in open anticipation of the Civil War, Northwood, or Life North and South (1852) posits basic differences in character between Yankees and Southrons. Some character traits are caused by geography and climate, as in:

The universal necessity for constant labor or application to business, which yet happily exists in the New England States, contributes, perhaps more than any other cause, to preserve the purity of morals which distinguishes the inhabitants of that section of our country. Had the Puritans and their descendants been fed with manna and fattened with quails in their wilderness, they would, doubtless, long before this, have spurned the hand that bestowed the unsought favors. (p. 240)

In some cases, the climatic factor gives way to the social:

‘Your cool climate keeps your temperament cool; and the perfect equality subsisting in your society makes the controlling of the passions more indispensable than with us, where the overflowings of wrath may be poured out on the heads, and bodies too, of unresisting menials.’ (pp. 205-206)

The novel’s protagonist, Sidney Romilly, shifts back and forth between New Hampshire and South Carolina and thus tries both halves of the experiment on himself. The results he relates in a letter to an English friend:

‘As a fair parallel I will mention Napoleon the Great. Like him I was taken from humble life, to be the heir of a sovereignty; make what exceptions you please to my use of the term sovereignty, the southern slaveholder is as absolute in his dominions, or plantation rather, as the grand seignior, and when I had become accustomed to command, and my mind was weakened by indolence and enervated by dissipation, I was suddenly thrown back to my former insignificance, and compelled to dig for my daily bread. “O, what a falling off was there!”…. [However,] the activity which we are compelled by our situation to exert…operates to dispel the gloom of grief. Employment is an excellent comforter, and fatigue the best opiate in the world. I never slept so soundly since my childhood, and my slumbers are most refreshing. I awaken in the morning without any solicitude save just the business of the farm. I have no appointments to keep or engagements to escape, no punctilios of honor or intrigues of love. In short, could I fairly forget the last dozen years of my life, I think I might now enjoy the best felicity of which mortal men can, on earth, be partakers.’ (pp. 324-326)

Northwood’s author, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, directly addresses the problem of slavery only toward the end of the book. While against the institution – as something that is bad for white people – she is equally against its violent overthrow and rather dreams, somewhat like Gandhi, of a swelling of (Christian) soul force that will compel slave-owners of their own accord to manumit their menials, educate and evangelize them, and then allow them to colonize and Christianize Africa. She holds no belief in racial equality (or amalgamation) and supposes black and white coexistence in America to be impossible.

Otherwise, Northwood is chock-full of little bits of wisdom I’m more prepared to accept. For example, it rebukes me for excessive romanticism by commenting favorably that a certain love-letter “was not an unmeaning rhapsody – alternately fire and frost; now breathing out his affections and now lamenting his destiny”… but rather addressed to the lady “as his friend and therefore entitled to his confidence – as a reasoning being and therefore able to understand his situation and assist him with her counsel.” (p. 207) It chides me too for my regrettable Machiavellian conception of respect, when it quotes Sidney’s report that “‘I am more respected and less feared; better, far better beloved, yet less flattered; have fewer followers and firmer friends.’” (p. 340)

In refutation both of Machiavelli and of the Chinese philosopher Han Fei, it supplies the Christian argument that love is superior to law: “Even God, reverently speaking, could not, by force, compel His rational creatures to be, in heart and soul, obedient to His law. Therefore, He sent His beloved Son to die for us, and thus, by His love, to move us to love, which includes obedience in return.” (p. 394)

Finally, the book has a few things to say about the general struggle between equality and aristocracy. On the one hand, it heralds the bitter reaction of the latter against the former that, in my humble opinion, has given rise to all totalitarian doctrine from Marxism to Nazism and that has constituted the chief driving force of history since the mid-nineteenth century:

‘Neither is it strange that the aristocratical spirit of the old world should be alarmed and revolt at the democratical influence which the new is so rapidly obtaining. We cannot expect those who pride themselves on an ancestry, whose pure blood has flowed through proud veins for many hundred years, will forget at once this fancied superiority, and look on what they call our plebian origin, without feelings of contempt.’

On the other hand – or perhaps on the same hand – these pages also note the development of a pseudo-aristocracy, arising among the plebians, that may, in spite of its origins, exemplify the reaction of the aristocratical spirit against the democratical one:

‘I do think the real English gentleman has more of dignity, and less of arrogance, than our purse-bound citizens. The Englishman is more proud, perhaps, but is free from that puffing consequence which is the most offensive part of the folly in our own countrymen. This may arise from the superiority of the former being established and acknowledged, whereas our own gentlemen are continually striving to maintain their precarious honors, and seem determined, by making the most of what they happen to possess, to indemnify themselves for the transientness of its continuance.’ (pp. 244-245)

It is ultimately the totalitarian, in his twentieth-century guise, who seeks to “maintain precarious honors” and indemnify himself against the transientness of democratical society by reimposing upon it a fixed hierarchial order, with himself at its apex.

In the meantime, the pseudo-aristocrats of Northwood, are described by Hale consistently as people of fashion. Examples of her use of the term are almost beyond counting:

His appearance, rank, and fortune, made his alliance a prize not lightly to be rejected by people of fashion. (p. 182)

Thus gently and almost imperceptibly, Stuart was loosening the chains which fashion had twined around our hero and restoring him to the freedom of that rational enjoyment which his soul was formed to appreciate but for which the Circean cup of luxury had nearly destroyed his relish. (p. 237)

Now he must put forth his own strength and depend on his own exertions. Yet strange as it may seem to those who connect felicity only with wealth, splendor, and distinction, he was never, in the proudest moment of his prosperity, when he was the star of fashion and minion of fortune, so cheerfully and equally happy as now, while confined to labor and living in obscurity. (p. 323)

He whispered to Sidney in great confidence that he fancied Miss Redington’s accession of wealth had already begun to make her dissatisfied with a residence in that unfashionable place and that he presumed she would soon depart for Boston. (p. 332)

I’ve always found fashion to be imposingly hierarchial, a ready means by which even Americans, who lack a true aristocracy, strive to concoct a false one. It’s therefore confirming to see how often Hale presents fashion as the antithesis of New England’s virtuous, egalitarian simplicity.

Book Review: Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer

As our republic is ground to nothing between the boulders of socialism and populism – the abyssus abyssum invocat of our two-party system – it seems pointless except as an act of masochism to read anything about its founding and early history. Our institutions of freedom have been so glibly discarded that books about them can amount only to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, immersion in which would make anyone weak and weary indeed.

Neverthehoo, old habits die hard, and this year, with a gap in my reading list and with July Fourth approaching, I decided to re-read David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, which I’d assigned myself as a morale-booster in the years after 9/11. (External blows stimulated my interest in the history of American freedom; self-inflicted ones killed it.) I’d remembered Fischer’s book for its stress on the ideological aspect of the Revolution and can now report that my memory was in this case true. Washington’s Crossing illustrates how different people (not just British, Germans, and Americans but different groups of Americans such as New Englanders, Virginians, and backwoodsmen) took different views of freedom and related it differently to ideals of equality and social order. My favorite players in this story are the Philadelphia Associators, radical egalitarians, who went so far as to design their uniform to “level all distinctions.” (p. 27)

An important subplot of the book details how George Washington, accustomed to believe in “liberty [within] a system of stratification” (p. 14), became general of an army composed of men (like the Associators) who saw freedom in a different light. As such, Fischer’s book is a study of leadership. Now, leadership today has become something of a fetish, with a cottage industry of how-to courses and its own section in the bookstore. Understood vaguely, leadership can encompass both democratic and undemocratic modes of motivation. Washington’s stereotypical embodiment of leadership is something that should be subjected – as it is in this book – to careful analysis, to yield a more precise conception of how it should function in a democratic society. Fischer’s book starts with an image of Washington as leader – the one in Emmanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware – in which he is shown with a telescope, symbolizing “a statesman’s vision.” (p. 2) Someone who leads by virtue of his unique sense of vision calls to mind Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which Socrates opines that only he with the true view of reality is qualified to be king. Indeed it was quite common in the before time to believe that kings were crowned by a special endowment such as vision, and I hope that readers of this review know that such a belief is as obsolete as kings are themselves.

Thankfully, Fischer uses the picture of Washington as the true-seeing leader only as a starting point and argues in the rest of his book that the real Washington was a leader of a different sort. At one point, he distinguishes democratic leadership from its non-democratic cousins by quoting Washington himself: “A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove.” (p. 6) At another two places, Fischer draws important distinctions in his own words, remarking that Washington functioned “not only as a leader but a comrade in arms” and “more as a leader than a commander.” (pp. 251, 366) Elsewhere, Fischer employs a qualifier (“consultative leadership”), provides an example (“It was typical of Washington’s style of leadership to present a promising proposal as someone’s else’s idea”), and uses words besides “leading” to describe what Washington was doing (“listening, responding, encouraging, persuading.”) (pp. 265-266)

Since Fischer takes such pains to define Washington’s mode of leadership so narrowly, to the point of having to find better words for it, the reader may conclude that it scarcely warrants the term. (As for Washington’s using other people’s ideas, Fischer reports that the plan to attack at Trenton may have originated with Washington’s adjutant, Joseph Reed, and that the campaign that led to both second Trenton and Princeton was opened by the Associators – and not the officers but the men. If true, these cases stretch the definition of leadership about as far as it can go. [pp. 201-203, 265]) In fact, leadership has long been understood as a paradox, something so dependent on subtlety that it only functions in the absence of its assertion. Laozi’s injunction to “preside yet not control” (Daodejing, ch. 10) is typical of this paradox and seems to anticipate Washington.

The issue with Washington was that he initially failed to grasp leadership’s paradoxical nature and was thus forced to learn on the job. The first part of Fischer’s book is a catalogue of his slowness to learn. He ordered his troops not to plunder farmers, to no avail. He forbade them from visiting prostitutes, with the same result. He insisted that the Connecticut Light Horsemen get rid of their mounts and serve as infantry, causing them, after a brief period of conditional obedience, to leave the army (thereby depriving it of their service as scouts).  (pp. 85-86) Encountering a group of militiamen fleeing the British at Kip’s Bay, Washington beat their officers and dashed his hat on the ground. (p. 104)

The main crisis occurred on the eve of second Trenton, when many soldiers’ enlistments were set to expire. Washington’s expression of vexation on the occasion is interesting for its repetition of the word liberty, once as a cause and once as a curse: “‘The great and radical Evil which pervades our whole System & like an Ax at the Tree of our safety, Interest, and Liberty here again shews its baleful influence – Tomorrow the Continental Troops are all at liberty.’” (p. 270)

“If Washington hoped to remain in the field,” Fischer notes, “he had to persuade some of his veterans to stay with him.” In the event, Washington resorted to bribery and begging, authorizing a ten dollar bounty for an additional six weeks of service (another idea borrowed from someone else) and imploring his men,

‘My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected; but your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. You have worn yourselves out with the fatigues and hardships, but we know not how to spare you. If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country, which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.’

Two such appeals were necessary, and even then the deciding factor was individual soldiers encouraging each other to stay. As Fischer summarizes, “Only a few days before, Washington was infuriated with these men and ready to clap some of them in irons. Now he was leading them in another way. This gentleman of Virginia was learning to treat a brigade of New England Yankee farmboys and fishermen as men of honor, who were entitled to equality of esteem.”  (pp. 271-273)

There’s at least a little bit of American exceptionalism operating here. For a gentleman to address once-thought-of inferiors as fellow gentlemen and to give up commanding in favor of entreating them was truly extraordinary. (Fischer discusses the evolving use of the term gentlemen and shows that the deemphasizing of formal status and prevalence of consultative leadership would have been unthinkable in British ranks. [pp. 273, 315-316, 331]) Washington could only resign himself to egalitarianism in a polyglot Yankee society in which no one was entitled to tell another what to do. Others were forced to accommodate as well. The immigrant officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben wrote home to a Prussian friend, “You say to your soldier ‘Do this and he doeth it’; but I am obliged to say [to the American soldier]: ‘This is the reason you ought to do that’: and then he does it.” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/baron-von-steuben-180963048/) Sometime later, we are told, Abraham Lincoln, as a militia captain, once issued an order, only to be told to go to hell. (https://www.historynet.com/black-hawk-war)

For this reminder that, in spite of everything, Americans can’t be driven like cattle (and often, as we are daily reminded, speak out of turn), I’m grateful for my Fourth of July reading.

Book Review: Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, by Ronald J. Pestritto

In this book, Woodrow Wilson emerges as a relentless disparager of constitutional governance and an advocate for the modern administrative state. Viewing the Constitution through the prism of German historicism, Wilson asserted that it was merely a product of its time: The supposedly axiomatic conception of human nature that informed the founders’ drafting of it had become obsolete. Specifically, Wilson argued that the danger of faction, which the founders had taken to be ever-present and never-ending, had in fact passed and could no longer justify the checking and balancing of the state’s power. It was appropriate, therefore, for constitutional government to be superseded and replaced by an administrative apparatus capable of carrying out the people’s will more efficiently.

Wilson’s belief in the unified public will is evident in his understanding of the Civil War, which, to him, had “disclosed the real foundations of the Union; had shown them to be laid, not in the Constitution, its mere formal structure, but upon deep beds of conviction and sentiment.” (p. 103) However, he also noted that “there has been from the first a steady and unmistakable growth of nationality of sentiment” (p. 117), suggesting a development that antedated the Civil War.

Of course, Wilson’s vison of American history was shaped by wishful thinking. When he wrote that “The nation [after the Civil War] could not return to the thoughts or to the life that had gone before [it]….The motives of politics, the whole theory of political action, the character of the government, the sentiment of duty, the very ethics of private conduct were altered[,]” he was saying more about his own hopes than he was about the results of the Civil War. We will leave aside the fact that President Lincoln was a scrupulous constitutionalist who had urged a return to the “transhistorical” principles of the founding (p. 109), and we will also refrain from discussion of how the idea that the world was turned upside down by Union victory in 1865 was a reactionary as well as a progressive starting point. The issue here is that Wilson’s interpretation of American history was heavily colored by German historicism, according to which, “history brings about a unity or objectivity of will, and that it is this implicit will that must govern the direction of society.” (p. 71) Since the popular will had been unified, Wilson reasoned, there was no longer any risk that a majority would seize the government and oppress a minority; hence, the limitation of government power had become unnecessary. (p. 127) Indeed, the doctrine of the separation of powers was injurious, in his appraisal, because it prevented government from carrying out the national will effectively. (pp. 123-124)

The argument that “limiting the power of a democratic government can only have undemocratic results,” is not unappealing. Your humble reviewer often indulged in it as a lad and used it to launch such epic oratory as “Why should one branch of the government, elected by the people, act as a check upon another branch of the government, also elected by the people?” Maturity and topical reading, however, have shown me that the argument is both weak and dangerous. Its faulty basis is the notion of the unified popular will so celebrated by Wilson. While government of the people, by the people, and for the people is indeed a sacred thing, in comparison to governments of, by, and for various elites, it is nonetheless unwise to exalt the people in the abstract or to ascribe to them any supernatural capacity for unanimity or communal thinking. It was John Stuart Mill who took direct aim at this idea of popular absolutism, in the first pages of his essay On Liberty. After laying out the argument rhetorically – “The nation [does] not need to be protected against its own will. There [is] no fear of its tyrannizing over itself” – Mill proceeded to take it apart:

Such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘the power of the people over themselves,’ do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those that succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. (The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill, eds. Schneewind and Miller, 2002, pp. 5-6)

Mill’s words are quoted here at length because they seem to have anticipated Wilson with remarkable prescience. No doubt, Wilson was keenly aware of the similar admonitions of the founders, especially James Madison in his Federalist No. 10, where he argued “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” (The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, 1961, p. 79) In fact, it was just this claim to timeless truth on the part of the founders that roused Wilson to palpable irritation and sarcasm. “This democracy – this modern democracy,” Wilson insisted, “is not the rule of the many but the rule of the whole….Childish fears [to the contrary] have been outgrown.” (p. 69) As he further protested, “The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way – the best way of their age – those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of ‘the laws of Nature’ – and then by way of afterthought – ‘and of Nature’s God.’ And they constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery.” Alas, the founders’ science was static and Newtonian, but the age now belonged to Darwin and to evolution. (p. 119) Wilson looked forward to the day when the blueprint of the founders’ orrery, the Constitution, would be cast aside. (pp. 75, 122)

Wilson mocked the “blind worship” of America’s founding documents (p. 122), using similar language as some people do today, when they chide advocates of limited government for treating the Constitution as a “sacred document.” Perhaps the reader is familiar with this tactic. It amounts to caricature – I don’t know anybody who crosses himself whenever mentioning the Constitution – and should be counted as a rhetorical covering attack. Anyone who criticizes others for “blind worship” of the Constitution is betraying his own conviction that it is a mere scrap of paper – “mere formal structure,” as Wilson called it above.

At any rate, here once again is Wilson’s argument: that the unification of the national will has made limited, constitutional government outmoded. Now it is time to subject his argument to the test of evidence: Has faction disappeared? Have Americans forgotten their differences and come to sit together at the national table? Do divergent economic interests no longer exist? Are Americans agreed on religious, social, or other public issues? Do the two main political parties regularly coalesce in national unity governments? Are elections contested with respect and good faith, and are their results greeted with universal satisfaction?

Is the president of the United States, as Wilson claimed, “at once the choice of the party and the nation”…“the only party nominee for whom the whole nation votes”…“the spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country”? (p. 168)

As Alexander Hamilton would have said, such assertions, and their author, were “far gone in Utopian speculations.” (p. 127) As one of our millennials would say: “WTF!” Wilson spent most of his career arguing against the founders and their prudent attitude concerning man’s immutable nature, and now all that needs to be done is to decide if the founders were right or if Wilson was right.

The reader having, I trust, pronounced the correct verdict upon Wilson’s utopian speculation, it still behooves us to delve beneath its surface. Wilson’s assertion of a unified national polity did in fact contain one caveat. He did mention one minority class by name, according to Pestritto, and that minority class was the wealthy. (pp. 118-119) Since the wealthy form a minority that garners no sympathy from anyone, it makes sense that Wilson could get away with advocating the removal of constitutional limits on powers that could be used against it. The wisdom of mulcting the wealthy will not be debated here; but it is interesting to consider that whenever a utopian dreams of a unified people, he usually disqualifies the wealthy from peoplehood. Today’s world contains a few people’s republics, or dictatorships of the proletariat, and they all claim to have put the people in charge, with the understanding that the “national bourgeoisie” are not included among them. Apparently, Wilson’s people’s republic conforms to this rule.

Other qualities of Wilson’s utopianism that warrant deeper probing are its Continental provenance and the classist prejudice associated with it. German historicism is described in this book as “idealistic” and “romantic” in that it imagined that history was leading humanity toward a perfect end-state (which ironically would be marked by reason and objectivity rather than by idealism and romance). Significantly, this historical evolution needed to be orchestrated by “world-historical individuals,” men with vision and understanding, presumably the historicist philosophers and academics themselves. (pp. 8, 15-16, 37) To reprise and continue Pestritto’s elucidation:

Wilson adopted an important theme of German idealism – that history brings about a unity or objectivity of will, and it is this implicit will that must govern the direction of society. The implicit will of a modern society is not equivalent to majority opinion, which exists merely at a surface level and is often beset by contending passions. A true, modern democracy is governed not necessarily by popular majority but by a leadership that can best discern the implicit, historically conditioned will that lies beneath ordinary political competition….Wilson’s model of political leadership requires, above all, that the leader hold visionary qualities that enable him to read the historical spirit and discern what the true, objective will of the people really is. Wilson’s essay ‘Democracy’ explicates the distinction between rule by majority opinion and rule by the implicit, objective will of society. Wilson called it merely an ‘assumption, still more curious when subjected to analysis.’ that the will of majorities – or rather, the concurrence of a majority in a vote – is the same as the general will. He further explained that ‘the will of majorities is not the same as the general will: that a nation is an organic thing, and that its will dwells with those who do the practical thinking and organize the best concert of action: those who hit upon opinions fit to be made prevalent, and have the capacity to make them so.’

Wilson conceded that his conception of modern democracy – where leaders must discern the implicit will of society – did not comport with the traditional understanding of democratic government. (pp. 71-72, shameless emphases in the original)

A truer concession was never made. The reader will note that Wilson’s low opinion of constitutional protections for minorities did not, evidently, indicate a preference for majority rule but was designed instead to facilitate the rule of the visionary few. The ideological unanimity of today’s intelligentsia is easy to understand too, because it indicates only an agreement that the intelligentsia should be in charge.

We’ve finally arrived at the administrative state, which is justified by Wilson’s contention that “governance by educated experts is democratic in a much higher sense.” (p. 72, ironic emphasis mine) Wilson’s belief that individual bureaucrats would be above politics (p. 72 again) echoed his belief in the unity of national opinion. (The two assumptions are equally naïve. On p. 240, Pestritto cites another scholar, Charles Kesler, who reminds us that the administrative class itself forms a political interest.) In fact, Wilson argued for a separation of politics and administration (p. 232, amid copious discussion by Pestritto) that would supposedly make the latter more embodying of the “objective” national will. The “State,” in the view of the “French and German professors” whom Wilson followed in place of the founders, organically possessed a fourth power, administration, anterior to the Constitution and independent of it. (pp. 231, 234-235) “Administration…” Wilson said, “serves the State, not the lawmaking body in the State, and possesses a life not resident in the statues.” (p. 241, verb tense altered)

It’s interesting to consider that in imposing such a foreign and glibly unconstitutional doctrine upon American life, Wilson was engaged in a game of wordplay that continues to this day. The distinction he sought to draw between politics – or government – and administration in his own time has echoes in our current hairsplitting concerning laws and rules. What does administration mean if not government, and what is a rule but a law? Is it reassuring to be subject to an unconstitutional government, provided we call it administration? Should we feel better being bound by laws enacted from outside the legislature, provided we call them rules? Of course, the answer to both questions is no; but Wilson was one of the first to employ this sort of doublespeak in order to dull our senses and make us accept the unacceptable.

The worst part of Wilson’s administrative scheme is its monarchial manifestation, the “modern president” who sat, and yet sits, at its apex. Wilson described him in terms that were more antique than modern:

Once and again one of those great influences which we call a cause arises in the midst of a nation. Men of strenuous minds and high ideals come forward, with a sort of gentle majesty, as champions of a political or moral principle. (p. 213)

And:

The leader of men must have such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men in the mass….Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader[!] (p. 208, italics in the original, exclamation mine)

Switching from flowery to guilty language, Wilson defended his proposed administrative apparatus as follows:

If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots. (p. 232)

Furthermore:

The purpose of [administration] has been the execution of the will of a tyrant, again the execution of the will of the governed. But the organization for the one purpose may, if effective, serve – at least as a model – for the other. (p. 233)

Alexander Hamilton had expressly denied that any administrative system would be acceptable as long as it was effective and had, rather, insisted upon a constitutional grounding of it. (p. 237) But what did Wilson care about Hamilton? Wilson’s hero, according to Pestritto, was

Frederick the Great of Prussia, who understood the monarchy as the embodiment of the unified public will. Monarchy thus understood serves as the starting point for the ideal executive leader, to which Wilson added the mechanism of election by the people. Wilson’s vision of the reformed presidency is grounded in a democratized monarch, whose indivisible will is ideal for representing the unified will of the people. (p. 215)

The crowning irony, as we know only too well, is that Wilson’s “democratized monarch,” so far from representing any “unified will of the people,” has fractured it appallingly. When Wilson “enthroned public opinion” (p. 231), he set the stage for today’s constant struggle, by the opinionated public, for control of the throne, a perpetual civil war punctuated every four years by vicious battles, waged among friends and within families, truly a tragedy of brother against brother. “There’s too much at stake,” we tell ourselves as we charge into the fray, and indeed we are right. The modern president of the United States, refashioned by Wilson into an elected king and in command of a Prussian bureaucracy, wields way too much power. With so much power up for grabs every four years, we the people have become obsessed and desperate. Everything is politicized. We howl with delight when our king is elected, and we howl with despair when the other party’s king wins. It is a mockery of self-rule.

If there is one man who can be blamed for the wretched state to which we have sunk, it is Woodrow Wilson.

Pestritto’s book is essential reading, along with James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? for anyone wishing to understand contemporary politics.

Book Review: The Mighty Revolution, by Charles Lewis Wagandt

My purpose in reading this book was to learn more about the revolution of popular opinion against slavery that took place before and during the Civil War. The abolition of slavery by the adoption of a new state constitution in Maryland would count as a critical example of this shifting in opinion, presumably an inspiring one.

The Mighty Revolution certainly provides many of the facts attendant to this shift, but the presentation of them falls somewhat short of inspiring. Wagandt’s focus is the political realm of electoral hustings, factions, and patronage. The idealism is largely left out. There is more information here about schemes to capture the comptroller’s office than there are meditations on the meaning of freedom. Of course, idealism often depends upon pragmatism for its advancement, and The Mighty Revolution offers a detailed illustration of how ideas become reality in this country. We Americans should probably be grateful that we are able to alter our destiny by means of backroom deals and ambiguously-worded ballot initiatives, without recourse to the guillotine.

The narrative of The Mighty Revolution hinges upon three turning points. The latter two are elections: the November 4, 1863 election for state legislature and other offices that was marred by army interference; and the October 12-13, 1864 vote on the new constitution, abolishing slavery, that carried only after soldiers’ absentee votes were counted. Again, it’s not a very rousing story. The fact that the emancipationist effort succeeded in the 1863 election in part because of the lack of a secret ballot (the emancipationist party ballots were yellow, permitting the army to discard others) does not exactly inspire one to plan an additional Thanksgiving dinner — although it does say a lot about the commitment of the boys in blue.

The earlier and perhaps most important turning point is the April 20, 1863 mass meeting of the Union League at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, which does indeed herald the popular shift against slavery. “Never before in the war,” Wagandt writes, “had emancipation sentiments been advanced at a public meeting.” (p. 99) The Union League was “a civilian organization of obscure origins” that swelled as the war progressed. By 1863,

the Union Leagues extended their spheres of operations into the political arena….Preservation of the nation involved the fierce debate over slavery, a debate which found no sympathy in the conservative leadership of the Union Party [Maryland’s version of the Republican Party]. This created a need for some organized expression of aims among those who wished to move with, rather than against, the revolutionary times….Then there were politicians within the organization who tried to capitalize upon the League to further their ambitions.” (pp. 97-98)

The balance of Wagandt’s narrative describes the machinations of these ambitious politicians. As they “capitalized” upon the emancipationist sentiment of the League, they crystalized it and made it a reality. Such is the ugly beauty of our system.

Both in Maryland’s Civil War history and in Wagandt’s recounting of it, the focus on pragmatism over idealism affords only scattered suggestions that the white Marylander’s hatred of slavery translated into affection or even sympathy for the slave. In the early 1864 debate in the Maryland General Assembly that led to the constitutional convention, Henry S. Stockbridge, citing a letter from a former slave-owner’s son, asserted that abolition should be pursued because “it is right. Right between man and man – right before God.” (p. 194) A subsequent newspaper editorial called slavery “a great moral wrong, injurious to both master and slave.” (p. 203) A delegate to the constitutional convention named Frederick Schley voted in favor of the abolition article for reasons of “patriotism, justice, and humanity,” as well as for Maryland “honor” and popular “welfare.” (p. 225) Often it seems that Wagandt may be glossing over Marylanders’ anti-slavery arguments, perhaps in the belief that they are obvious and well-known, and perhaps because he’s more interested in the political maneuverings anyway.

For the most part, as emerges in these pages, the rationale behind Marylanders’ overthrow of slavery is couched in terms of class warfare and political jealousy. At their April 20, 1863 meeting, Union League members denounced slavery as “an instrument in the hands of traitors to build an oligarchy…on the ruins of republican liberty;” and they resolved “That the safety and interest of…Maryland, and especially of her white laboring people, require that Slavery should cease to be recognized by the law of Maryland.” (p. 99)

This refrain, that abolition was advanced as something that was good for certain white people, rings constantly throughout the book. No egalitarian sentiments are shown here to have been expressed, except in one ironic case:  Radical candidates from Allegany County in the vote on the constitutional convention on April 6, 1864 were said to have been “the real friends of the colored people” – by their opponents, and they subsequently spent much energy to deny the slander. (p. 217)

Still, for all the denial of common humanity that seems to have been necessary for its success, the overthrow of slavery was a success, and thus The Mighty Revolution should be counted as a valuable case study of the working reality of freedom.