The lost soul of American politics.

IT MAY NOT be the way most of us think of politics but, at least in the classical tradition, politics is a moral enterprise. This does not mean that politics is typically conducted in a morally elevated, or even morally acceptable, manner. It does mean that politics addresses questions of right and wrong. Politics deals with the public dimensions of the virtuous life. Or so Aristotle, for one, believed. He left no doubt that his Politics was an extension of his Ethics. According to Aristotle, the question with which politics begins and to which it ever returns is simply this: How ought we to live together?

We Americans have never been entirely at ease with this classical definition of politics. Some who fancy themselves realists claim that talk about morality only obscures the plain fact that politics is about the getting and keeping of power over other people. Others, usually of a liberal persuasion, say that American politics is a matter of brokering interests, of fine-tuning the countervailing forces from which, somehow, something like the common good will emerge. Yet others--some calling themselves liberal and some calling themselves conservative--are less impressed by the common good than by the evil that is common to our human condition. Politics, they say, has less to do with the pursuit of virtue than with the containment of viciousness. The genius of our Constitution, they claim, is that it recognizes the doleful fact of human depravity and establishes mechanisms for protecting us all from the general nastiness to which we are prone.

From the time of the Founding to the present, Richard Hofstadter wrote, America has been "a democracy of cupidity rather than a democracy of fraternity." In The Lost Soul of American Politics, a study of "the foundations of liberalism," John P. Diggins of the University of California at Irvine argues that there wasn't all that much difference between Madison and hamilton. "One expression of liberalism valued freedom, autonomy, and sufficiency of the individual, the other power, stability, and the efficacy of the state. Both identified happines with property and material pleasure; neither committed America to political ideals that appealed to man's higher nature. Individualism provided the means by which Americans could pursue their interests, pluralism the means by which they could protect them."

Compared with John Adams, for example, "Machiavelli emerges as a utopian moralist who expects too much of man," Diggins writes. Adams criticizes Machiavelli because "the Renaissance philosopher was not doing precisely what he has come to be celebrated for doing--telling the truth about humanity." In Diggins's telling of the story, the Founders played up "republican virtue" in 1776 in order to justify the war of independence. But, come 1787 and the serious business of putting together a constitutional structure, talk about virtue was "a luxury of political rhetoric [that] had to be exposed as a dangerous illusion." In this view, the Constitution has nothing to say about how human beings ought to live together; its sole concern is preventing human predators from doing one another in. It is not a morally elevated or elevating vision. It is politics without a soul.

Diggins offers a richly textured narrative that is sometimes distractingly luxuriant in literary and historical detail. His judgments are frequently revisionist to the point of seeming eccentric. Yet even when unconvincing they are almost unfailingly provocative. Least convincing is his conclusion that, with respect to "the lost soul of American politics," there is today--as a certain Southern governor might put it--not a dime's worth of difference between liberalism and conservatism. "Seeing no essential tension between interest and virtue, liberalism and conservatism alike seem to want to deny the reality of moral conflict and the grandeur of its responsibilities." Diggins believes there was a time of moral conflict and grandeur. His story of American politics is the story of the soul lost and found and lost, perhaps never to be found again.

The time of moral conflict and grandeur was definitely not the Founding period, according to Diggins. True, some of the Founders were mightly impressed that theirs was the first major attempt at republican government since the fall of Rome. But the Founders had also made a deal with Locke and liberalism, and the price of that deal was a sharp break with the classicial tradition. Therein, writes Diggins, "lies the dilemma of American politics": "Classical political philosophy aims to discipline man's desires and raise him far above his vulgar wants; liberalism promises to realize desires and satisfy wants." The result is that the satisfy wants." The result in that in the American tradition the meaning of virtue was turned on its head. Virtue no longer means self-restraint but self-satisfaction. This reversal is best exemplified by Benjamin Franklin's statement that a person acting "contrary to his Inclination is not practicing the reasonable Science of Virtue, but is lunatik."

"Ultimately," Diggins writes, "the idea of virtue had no determinative content, no transcendent quality that stood over and against the objective world of power and interests, no moral vision that inspired the individual to identify with values higher than his own interests. . . . Classical republican rhetoric could achieve little more than negative freedom, freedom from political power and public authority, freedom for man to pursue his own ends, individual freedom--in a word, liberalism." (And, Diggins would add, what today is called conservatism.) The Declaration of Independence included a doctrine of rights that had "ontological foundations" in the laws of nature and of God, or "classical foundations" in the ideas of Montesquieu and Machiavelli. But by the time we get to the Constitution, everything has been reduced to the question of power.

It is this alleged reductionism that Diggins deplores as the loss of soul in American politics. The rhetoric of republican turns classical politics on its head by distinguishing the private from the public sphere." Virtue is reduced to the "pursuit of happiness," and that pursuit, in turn, is confined to the private sphere. It is an enterprise that "government has no business defining, much less promoting." Politics is in no way regenerative or redemptive; it is not premised upon the possibility of virtue. John Adams wrote, "There is no man so blind as not to see that to talk of founding a government upon a supposition that nations and great bodies of men, left to themselves, will practice a course of self-denial is either to babble like a new-born infant or to deceive like an unprincipled impastor." Because its authors posited a citizenry incapable of or unwilling to defer to the general good, "the Constitution's mechanisms were so structured as to render men not so much virtuous as harmless." It is little wonder that John Adams believed that "We must therefore descend from the dignity of our nature when we think of civil government at all." Clearly, this is not the politics of moral grandeur for which John Diggins and so many others long.

Just as clearly, Diggins is not happy with Tocqueville's alternative version of the genius of American democracy. And that is because Tocqueville shifts attention from the state to the society. He is less concerned about the formal polity and its philosophical legitimations than he is about the "habits of heart" by which Americans go about their everyday business of living together. In this view, Diggins complains, "the state could scarcely make its presence felt save as a threat to liberty." Tocqueville's Democracy in America attends to the poltical and legal structures of the country, but the emphasis is upon the diversity and voluntary associationalism of a people skeptical of state power. It is not political theory or authority but an understanding of social relations that explains American democracy, according to Tocqueville.

"What serves as a tie to these diverse elements?" Tocqueville wrote to a friend. "What makes of them a people? Interest. That's the secret. Individual interest which sticks through at each instant, interest which, moreover, comes out in the open and calls itself a social theory. We are a long way from the ancient republics, it must be admitted, and yet this people is republican, and I don't doubt it will long remain so." Tocqueville readily admitted that this "self-interest rightly understood is not at all a sublime doctrine." It does not aim at moral grandeur. But people can grasp it, and it is "wonderfully agreeable to human weaknesses": "By itself it cannot make a man virtuous, but its discipline shapes a lot of orderly, temperate, moderate, careful, and self-controlled citizens. If it does not lead the will directly to virtue, it establishes habits which unconsciously turn it that way."

Tocqueville's description of what makes American democracy work is, however banal, not unattractive, in Diggins's view. But, he says, Tocqueville's America did not last for long. To substantiate this claim, we are offered page upon page of Henry Adams's withering critique of industrializing America's materialistic corruption. "Self-interest rightly understood" has degenerated into commercial rapaciousness, we are told. The classical tradition of public virtue having given way to Tocqueville's alternative of democratic social relations, which had been discarded in its turn, the stage was now empty for a new statement of America's self-understanding.

Enter Abraham Lincoln, with Herman Melville by his side to provide metaphysical commentary. Lincoln supplied "the soul of American politics." He is "the conscience of liberalism." He elevated the vision of 1776 above the plumbing of 1787. "Not until Lincoln would religion be joined to politics to show how the Angst of spiritual passion can preserve the Republic." The abolitionism of which Lincoln became the instrument brought to the forefront of political debate what Madision had warned against--a politics of "principle" based on religious "zeal." Souls such as Lincoln and Melville realized that democracy is a moral proposition, attended by doctrines that Lincoln did not hesitate to call a "political religion": "In Lincoln the tension between classical politics and Christian values--between law and conscience, policy and magnanimity, an ethic of practical consequences and an ethic of ultimate convictions--would reach an apotheosis." "In attempting to do the impossible," Diggins writes, "to endow politics and economics with idealism in order to elevate both beyond the squalid reality of power and interests, Lincoln stands as a tragic hero who set out to sanctify the secular and profane. 'He who seeks the salvation of souls,' warned Weber, 'should not seek it along the avenue of politics.'"

Yet it is argued that the greatness of Lincoln, and the soul of American politics, lies precisely in the attempt to do that impossible. This despite Diggins's concluding and utterly self-contradictory assertion that "Lincoln recognized that in the struggle to survive, the statesman must restrain himself from seeing history as the battlefield of right and wrong, praise and blame, innocence and guilt." Until this point, Diggins has portrayed Lincoln, correctly, as a statesman who did, with singular wisdom and humility, see himself as an actor on such a battlefield of history. Despite his concluding statement about Lincoln, it would seem that Diggins wants politics to be moral drama, and his entire book may be viewed as an elegy for the last American leader to rise to the occasion.

The Lost Soul of American Politics is in many respects a powerful tale, but it goes out with conventional whimpers. The last chapter takes a few kicks at what the author considers to be the moral posturing of Ronald Reagan, laments conservative (read libertarian) and liberal refusals to face up to the tension between interest and virtue, and says the usual things about the squalid self-seeking habits of the American people. That chapter reads like the ending of a book much less interesting than this one. For whatever reason, the author does not follow through on what it might mean today to reconstitute politics as a moral enterprise. Perhaps he does not follow through because he has not thought it through. Perhaps he does not want to give offense or, God forfend, be mistaken for someone sympathetic to the concerns of those kooky moral majoritarians.

There are enprincipled conflicts in the public arena today--notably but not exclusively the abortion debate--which Diggins does not mention. The controversies of recent years over religion and politics are likewise ignored. It is as though the Civil War were the last time Americans reflected on the meaning of virtue and politics, morality and power. This reviewer will take second place to none in admiration for Abraham Lincoln, but we do not have another Lincoln and should not want another civil war. Politics can be engaged with moral seriousness short of "moral conflict and grandeur." And, Henry Adams notwithstanding, were may suspect that most Americans still live in Tocqueville's political world of a "self-interest rightly understood" that is conductive to those modest virtues required for republican governance. They are not indifferent to moral vision, although some authors may be indifferent, at best, to the visions to which the people respond--such as the vision of an American purpose as the vision of an American purpose advanced by Ronald Reagan. It is true, however, that their politics relate more to penultimates than to ultimates. Since most of these Americans already profess a religion, they, unlike John Diggins and too many others, are not looking for politics as a religion or the state as a church. The soul, they might tell Mr. Diggins, is too high a price to pay for restoring "the lost soul of American politics."