Recommended Reading

One way to spend discretionary reading time – which you have, during vacations – is with our specialties. Or we can just seek entertainment. But I like to read slightly outside of my usual focus. Knowing what our intellectual neighbors have written is a healthy corrective to preoccupation with our intellectual families. May I suggest that students, in the social sciences and history especially, consider the following books?

The Righteous Mind  by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is brilliant and often fun. Although fairly long, it could have gone even deeper and still held readers’ interest. Its subtitle, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, has a non-academic tone but makes a measurable claim. Does the author succeed in showing us “why”? Largely, yes. In conversational yet careful prose, he makes a seemingly major addition to our understanding of the Red-Blue divide. Haidt—an active defender of intellectual diversity who has since co-founded worthy projects called Heterodox Academy and OpenMind Platform—made his widespread reputation in political psychology with this 2012 book, which draws partly upon his own research on the differing “moral foundations” people have.

Haidt says our political convictions are rooted in emotion far more than reason, but that emotion results from natural evolution and is ultimately functional, not dysfunctional. And that we can, realistically, commit ourselves somewhat more to reason than we normally do. The convictions associated with the Left and the Right are based to a great extent on differing moral foundations in our minds. Liberals, i.e. “progressives,” focus very largely on Care or preventing Harm (in the term’s basic humanitarian meaning) and on maintaining or establishing Fairness or Equality. Libertarians, Haidt shows, are quite another breed than Conservatives because they have their own moral foundation, obviously Liberty, that greatly overshadows all other foundations despite some concern among them for Fairness/Equality. Conservatives have by far the broadest range of seriously felt moral foundations. To concerns about harm and fairness, they add strong attachments to Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity (which need not be religious in the usual sense). Far from dismissing these distinctive features of conservative public morality, Haidt is quite respectful of them from his own slightly left-of-center perspective.

Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon could, perhaps, be read with special profit in conjunction with The Righteous Mind. Published a full generation ago in 1991, it shows, from what might be called a compassionate-conservative perspective, that the concept of absolute or nearly absolute rights can be a cold and sickly thing. Glendon argues effectively, with a good range of examples, that its long-growing dominance tends to impoverish our communication with others, including empathy for their inconvenient concerns—thus, too, inhibiting and flattening deliberation in government about the public good.

Sadly, the excessive “rights talk” and the closely-associated aggrandizement of legalism—relying on the law for everything—have resulted, she says, in a “law-saturated society.” They have become simplistic, selfish substitutes for moral reasoning in our public life. Truer words were never spoken, and they’re even truer today.

The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (2017) can be read as a counterpart to an even more recent book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency. The latter’s author, Stephen Knott, a professor of national security affairs, tries to show that the office has sunk into demagoguery during our republic’s odyssey and how it might be healthily renewed. The problem, he preaches, is “not … the ‘imperial presidency’ but the populist presidency.” Historian Jeremi Suri is troubled by popular pressures on the presidency too, and he can’t stand Donald Trump either. But The Impossible Presidency follows in the non-philosophical tradition of political scientist Richard Neustadt, who argued plausibly in 1960 that the presidency is a fundamentally “weak” office—strong only, or sometimes strong, when a president assiduously exercises the complicated skills needed to make it so.

Suri differs most significantly from Neustadt in stressing not the limits our system puts on our chief executive, and the virtually limitless modern demands on the office, but what he considers our presidents’ runaway agendas and their unproductive compulsion to deal with crises as extensively as they do. The Impossible Presidency can, among other things, help explain to people who vehemently oppose Trump why they needn’t have been so fearful of him—and, to his staunch supporters, why they shouldn’t have expected so much.

The ten presidents whom Suri discusses, concisely but not superficially in this notably well-written book, are given chapter titles with varying degrees of creativity. One of the better ones is Poet at War, for Lincoln. The book also analyzes the National Healer (Franklin Roosevelt), the Frustrated Frontiersmen (Kennedy and Johnson), the Leading Actor (Reagan), and the Magicians of Possibility (Clinton and Obama).

Finally, I recommend a tome published in 2013 by political scientist and historian Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is commendable, first of all, for its theme: the New Deal plus World War II plus the early Cold War – periods that Katznelson plausibly insists should be viewed as a single era, defined by a series of radically new, disorienting challenges and thus by fear.

Katznelson is thought-provokingly critical of the New Deal enactments and America’s rise to superpower status. But he views them as a success story, and indeed a democratic success story, while stressing their moral complications and compromises – including, prominently, certain New Deal compromises with racism. Although it’s heavy reading, Fear Itself is very intelligent, excellently researched by a truly independent mind, and a good investment of time.

David Frisk is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and the author of  If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement (ISI Books, 2012). A longer version of this piece was published at the Law & Liberty website last year.

COVID and Reading

Living under all the pandemic restrictions forces students to make many adjustments—some of them, perhaps, still being discovered in these early weeks, others not fully expected when you returned to the Hill. The loss of so many activities and interactions should lead to an especially keen focus on reading, on “your books,” what you are assigned. Doing all of the reading, and more intensively. Some of this may be involuntary. But much of it’s up to you.

 There are differing opinions about what is most fundamental in a class. But in many fields, a good case can be made that the readings are the heart of the course. This year is an especially good time to take that possibility more seriously—and, as a result, to begin a lifetime’s habit of consistently careful reading. Which would also be likely to improve, and continue to improve, your writing.

 Truly careful reading must generally be slow. And, especially in college, with a sophisticated dictionary immediately available—which you’re willing to use at any doubtful point. When Alexis de Tocqueville says, in Democracy in America, that he sought “the society of priests” in order to learn more about religious life in this country, he doesn’t mean that he got in touch with an association of them. He means that he associated with clergymen, talked with them.

 Such examples of possible misinterpretation in college-level reading are endless. Even simple words will often have two or more wholly different meanings, even in current books. The importance of this verbal complexity in a liberal arts education, as both a challenge and an opportunity to grow your understanding, is hard to overstate.

For a very long time in undergraduate education, it has been a commonplace, even something like an orthodoxy, to say “you learn so much from discussion” with other students. Probably all of us have learned much from discussion, from those around us in classes and elsewhere. If it’s done right, with patient, conscientious listening, it’s essential. But careful reading can be a discussion too—even though it’s the most socially distanced kind imaginable.

 Books are, after all, the work of actual people, usually one person. The author is often somebody about whom a book (or parts of a book) or articles have been written, or at least an interview, or a speech or talk, published or recorded. The book probably also has a preface or introduction, and may well have an acknowledgements section, with personal material. You can, therefore, get to know the author to a meaningful extent without much extra effort. And the book, or much of it, is often saying what this usually dedicated and talented person wants most to say. In addition, it’s often what they have prepared for decades to say, investing many years in acquiring the knowledge, and ability, to make their books or articles professionally credible.

 It is therefore reasonable, and may be quite intellectually enabling and quite motivating, to regard your books as not just words, but very consciously as speech on a page by a real human being. And indeed, in many cases, strongly felt speech, even if the style is moderate and controlled. To which you can, of course, and sometimes should, respond silently as you read. Responding, though, as if the author hears you—and can agree or disagree with your comments. No masks required.

 Dr. Frisk is a Resident Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute (AHI) in Clinton.

Sanders and the Ticket

The Democratic party’s dilemma this year is simply stated but difficult. It can take back some of Donald Trump’s voters by nominating Senator Bernie Sanders, or it can keep the recently won support of anti-Trump former Republicans (or people who formerly tended to vote Republican) by choosing almost anyone else. It cannot, broadly speaking, do both. Although it isn’t clear which course of action would be more likely to win the presidency, a party should always consider the down-ballot consequences. And there, a Sanders nomination looks like a net minus.

Although Trump is not an extremist in policy terms, he seems extreme to many people who might accept a president with the same views who talked and acted differently. He also blatantly repudiates the moderate style that has long (almost always, really) been dominant in Republican presidential politics. Most of his supporters love that, and his opponents hate it. Trump is a name-caller and uses unprecedentedly aggressive language in other ways as well. Some of his opponents cite these characteristics in condemning him and are sincerely offended by them, but they are no loss to the Republicans since they vote Democratic regardless. But others find them deal-breakers, and this rather than policy is the main reason why they’re against Trump. Although a significant source of new support for the Democrats, they cannot be taken for granted.

Sometimes political converts are quite zealous for their new party or cause. But not always. The Never Trump people who to one degree or another have left the Republican party may not be voting Democratic for long. Their votes for Democratic candidates in competitive congressional districts in 2018 are ones the Democrats cannot afford to lose. And they aren’t a constituency for Sanders.

There are two reasons for this. One is that they don’t want their country or themselves to be oppressed by the confiscatory levels of taxation and regulation that Sanders can be expected to push for as president. The other is that their disgust at gross incivility is bipartisan, and Sanders is far from a nice guy unless you’re completely on his side. His hostility to the American economic system and passion for iron-fisted government has a psychological equivalent in his arrogant closed-mindedness. Voters who are themselves civil and somewhat open-minded can easily recognize its opposite—except among the minority of politicians who are both good at concealing harshness and arrogance and wish to, a charmed circle that doesn’t include Bernie Sanders. Granted, Sanders is real. But in his case that can be a problem.

The presidential nominee need not define the whole party, of course, and freshman Democrats in previously Republican districts can signal their discomfort with Sanders to moderate voters. But that is a difficult tactic in a superheated political environment like this year’s. My sense is that Berniecrats would expect strong, not vague, support for their guy if he were the nominee. Some Sanders backers who would reluctantly vote for, say, Joe Biden in order to get rid of Trump won’t necessarily vote for “sellout” Democrats in order to keep them in office, even though they are the ones responsible for the party’s House majority. One problem for the Democrats’ more moderate incumbents in 2020 is that they are too easily, however unfairly, associated with a Democratic establishment and a “Clinton machine” that are widely detested on the left wing of the party. They cannot afford to be charged with such sympathies more often than they already are. Both the resulting need to placate left-wing Democrats and their own total opposition to Trump would, I suspect, lead non-leftist Democratic incumbents to support Sanders (if he’s the candidate) more clearly than they would prefer to. And that might lose them more than a few of the votes they won in 2018.

Dr. Frisk is a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute. His views are his own and do not represent those of the AHI.

A Special Kind of Political Scientist

There’s a reason why political science departments include political philosophy, and Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) is a good example of it. His work began with “theory,” then went on to examine how the American system functioned. The Founding and the Constitution held a special interest for Kendall as a way of fully understanding politics in his lifetime. And he certainly didn’t leave political philosophy behind.

Nor did he leave questioning behind—learned, relentless questioning. A sustained opposition to intellectual hypocrisy and complacency was among this remarkable political scientist’s main qualities. It has been aptly noted that Kendall had “no time for sentimentality, woolly thinking, or self-serving ideas.” Going along to get along, suppressing major concerns in the interest of careerism or friendship, were simply foreign to him.

And so, it seems, were intellectual closure and finality. “Perhaps Kendall’s greatest virtue,” one scholar has suggested, “is that he constantly argued with himself; more than once in his mature years, he had the humility to ‘start over,’ changing his intellectual position in response to some challenge to his habits of thought.”

Kendall was also a profoundly political man who aimed to make his fellow American conservatives more effective. He hoped for the conservative movement’s success despite some differences with it, especially on the size and scope of government. Kendall thought seriously about how he might help to clarify leading principles for conservatives—in part because he thought the right’s other leading intellectuals were mostly “false teachers” and a “poor lot.”

Along with his sophisticated learning in political philosophy and his in-depth study of our country’s constitutional traditions, Kendall felt a strong identification with Middle America. He would, I think, have understood both the current crisis in our polarized polity and the right’s current base quite well.

While Kendall’s intellectual life had an indomitable integrity, his life in general, as the historian of American conservatism George Nash has remarked, was one of “restless eccentricity.” Yet despite his combativeness, his drinking problem, and his tendency to spend too much time writing letters and the like (it isn’t hard to imagine him on social media), what Kendall did publish was excellent.

He did not produce a major work of his own, except for his highly original and much-respected doctoral dissertation on Locke. But more directly relevant to American politics were such articles as “The People Versus Socrates Revisited,” “The Two Majorities” (presidential and congressional), “The Social Contract: The Ultimate Issue Between Liberalism and Conservatism,” and “Conservatism and the ‘Open Society.’ ” They all, and others, could have been the basis for entire books. In reading these essays, you sense that the issue has been rigorously analyzed and brought to a fresh conclusion or restatement. Kendall’s prose was elaborately constructed yet unpretentious, clear, often colloquial.

Favorable in his early years toward a radically democratic majoritarianism and in some respects a radical leftist, Kendall after World War II grew increasingly conservative and in particular more committed to the Constitution’s checks and balances, to its implicit requirements for geographically dispersed and durable—not nationwide and short-term—majorities in order to enact major public policy. He also preferred congressional, as against either presidential or judicial, power.

Another major theme was public virtue and citizenship. Rejecting the behavioralism that he feared was already predominant among political scientists in his Yale department and elsewhere, Kendall similarly came to reject the widely held view that the American founders envisioned self-seeking, mutually frustrating clashes between factions or interest groups as the essence of politics. He argued that the Founding was more communitarian, envisioning (imagine!) “a virtuous people” rather than a merely pluralistic and self-interested one.      

Also central to Kendall’s work was his belief in something called “public orthodoxy.” As he wrote: “by no means are all questions open questions; some questions involve matters so basic … that the society would, in declaring them open, abolish itself, commit suicide … ” He warned that a nation’s total ideological openness to the extent advocated in, for example, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty would make politics descend “into ever-deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can conduct its affairs by discussion, and so into the abandonment of the discussion process and [thus] the arbitrament of public questions by violence and civil war.”

Willmoore Kendall remains a compelling figure. There is a special timeliness in his personal story (one reason I’m writing a biography of him) and his dynamic thought.

Dr. Frisk is a Resident Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute.

Democratic Theory at the AHI

Hamilton College, believe it or not, isn’t the only institution of higher education in Clinton—which at one time was nicknamed Schooltown, and for more reasons than the college. An important part of the Alexander Hamilton Institute’s activity is little-known on the Hill: classes that are open to the public. 

How does democracy work best, and what do its great principles mean? Our current continuing education course at the AHI, “Majority Rule and Equality: The Challenges of Democracy in American History,” covers these questions. About 50 people from nearby communities attend, and comparable numbers have enrolled in our other recent classes on “Liberty: The History of an Idea,” government and science, the career and principles of Abraham Lincoln, the Roosevelt and Reagan presidencies, the process and strategies of presidential elections, the culture and politics of the 1960s, and the roots of America’s “red/blue” divide. 

For an instructor, designing a class is one especially interesting part of teaching. Certainly it’s always interesting for me. There are so many possible sources to choose from. Next, within those books or articles, there tend to be many different discussions worth selecting as part of our necessarily limited number of assigned pages. Which are most central or valuable? There’s also the lesser but still significant task of organizing the syllabus. For this class, I came up with six themes: Majority Rule, Equality and Participation, Political Diversity and Conflict, Accountability, Self-Interest and Public Virtue, and Democracy and Leadership. All to be read about, lectured about, discussed in just thirteen weeks plus an introductory session.

Each of these terms obviously calls for rigorous attempts at definition. “Majority” is perhaps the easiest to define, but even that isn’t necessarily simple. The meaning of “Rule” is more difficult, since in any genuinely democratic context, we mean something other than raw power. And the meaning of “Equality” is likely even more complicated. The readings are chosen for their informational value plus their ability to help us better understand the meanings and implications of the course’s topics. We’re also thinking—without making rigid assumptions or reaching firm conclusions—about how both “Challenges” cited in the course title are affected by the course’s several themes. I noted on the first evening that the word “Challenges” is meant as a gentler word for “problems”—adding that problems aren’t necessarily bad, since the word can simply mean alternatives that we must weigh. (As the wise political commentator James Burnham used to remind colleagues at his magazine, National Review: “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”) Then too, so many modifiers can be attached to the term “Democracy.” As one of our readings notes, there are or have been, among other types: “ancient democracy,” “Christian democracy” as in certain nations’ Christian Democratic parties, “competitive elite democracy,” “deliberative democracy,” “direct democracy,” “industrial democracy,” “liberal democracy,” “participatory democracy,” “people’s democracy” (i.e., communism), “pluralist democracy,” “representative democracy,” and “social democracy.” Some of these types are mutually exclusive. And many are not.

There are, of course, substantial conflicts between certain of our readings, as there would be conflicting readings in almost any good class in the social sciences. In an essay titled “Democracy and the Citizen: Community, Dignity, and the Crisis of Contemporary Politics in America,” Wilson Carey McWilliams says the practice of citizenship—of political participation reflecting certain public-spirited attitudes—is more central to democracy, more its “defining quality,” than is mere voting. “Common sense,” he maintains, “tells us that speaking and listening precede voting and give it form. Democracy is inseparable from democratic ways of framing and arguing for political choices. … democracy depends on those things that affect our ability to speak, hear, or be silent. … my notion of democracy includes things not considered ‘political’ by most Americans.” In some contrast to McWilliams, Judith Shklar rejects Aristotle’s definition of democracy, which involved a time-consuming direct participation in ruling. She also questions the role of public-spiritedness or public virtue in the citizen’s political choices. For Shklar, voting as a simple “expression of personal interests and preferences” is just as legitimate, respectable, and democratic as more public-spirited or deliberative voting. 

Conflicts or intellectually stimulating contrasts within a reading can be equally valuable. In an October 7 assignment on our syllabus, Robert Dahl, the late Yale political theorist, sketched an account of American political history wherein various changes since the Jacksonian era (including the prevalence of huge corporations and their undemocratic employment situations, a massive welfare-state bureaucracy, and a massive military establishment) have made true democracy increasingly difficult to actualize or maintain even though, over the same century-plus, more and more Americans were, rightly, included in the right to vote and the nation thus became far more democratic in that sense. Dahl’s essay, written more than 40 years ago, is titled: “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States.” 

Taking all of these impediments to democracy “into account,” Dahl writes, “political theorists need to begin a serious and systematic reexamination of the constitutional system much beyond anything done up to now … serious and systematic attention to possibilities that may initially seem unrealistic, such as abolishing the presidential veto; creating a collegial chief executive; institutionalizing adversary processes in policy decisions; establishing an office of advocacy to represent interests otherwise not adequately represented in or before Congress and the administrative agencies, including future generations; creating randomly selected citizens assemblies … to analyze policy and make recommendations; creating a unicameral Congress; inaugurating proportional representation and a multiparty system in congressional elections; and many other possibilities.” Dahl’s openness and sympathy toward the possibility of radical changes to the U.S. constitution and political system, though, is immediately followed by abundant caution. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “designing a constitution is very far from an exact science. It is questionable whether the best political scientists, or for that matter citizens drawn from any source, have the knowledge and skills to excel the performance of the framers” of our existing constitution. “Probably we do not even know how best to proceed toward the cultivation of the knowledge and skills of constitution making that we or our successors may one day be expected to provide.”

Then there’s equality. Democracy certainly requires equality in the sense of equal political rights. Does it also require more equality than that? It may. Yet as Giovanni Sartori notes in another reading, the laudable pursuit of more-than-political equality can become “a labyrinth” due to the word’s “Janus-like” or two-sided character and the “enormous oscillation” in its meaning. Equality is also inherently, not just circumstantially, difficult. “To have inequality, all that is demanded of us is to let things follow their course. But if we are to seek equality, we can never afford to relax. As Tawney wrote, echoing Rousseau: ‘While inequality is easy since it demands no more than to float with the current, equality is difficult for it involves swimming against it.’” A society “that seeks equality,” Sartori continues, “is a society that fights itself, that fights its inner laws of inertia … Equality symbolizes and spurs man’s revolt against fate and chance, against fortuitous disparity, crystallized privilege, and unjust power. Equality is also, as we shall see, the most insatiable of all our ideals.” 

How democracy was meant to and should work, especially in America, was the theme of a fascinating, often contrarian, always insistently independent political theorist named Willmoore Kendall, who taught at Yale (where he was a dissenting colleague of other political scientists, including Dahl) from the late 1940s into the early 1960s, at which point the administration “bought out” his tenure rights at his exasperated request. Teaching this particular AHI course is helping to sharpen my conceptual preparations for the biography of Kendall I am beginning to write—just as reading him would strengthen the conceptual grasp of any Government major. Kendall was often a disagreeable man, but many of the students thought he was great. He made them, and many readers, really think. He died too young of a heart attack in 1967, at his new academic home, the University of Dallas. Were Kendall alive today, I would be anxious about inviting him to address my AHI class, since he was that kind of guy—and that sharp a mind. But I would be even more interested in our hearing and talking with him.