TRADITIONS AT WORK WITHIN THE AMERICAN FOUNDING: THE FOUNDERS’ LEGACY TO CIVIC VIRTUE By CATHERINE ANN HELGE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division of Ohio Dominican University Columbus, Ohio in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES APRIL 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To those who encouraged and supported this journey: my children, my parents (who also provided last-­‐minute editing), and most of all my husband Chuck, I owe the deepest gratitude. Many thanks are also due the faculty at Ohio Dominican University, foremost among them my longtime advisor Dr. Ron Carstens, who remained, possibly unaware, a mentor in the many years between my first and last classes with him. My studies would have been sorely lacking were it not for Dr. Stephen Thomas, who suffered through my thesis edits, and Dr. Kate Riley, both of whom much enriched my education. To them also, I offer my thanks.
Table of Contents Introduction The Constitutional Path Civic Virtue in a Federalist World The Anti-­‐Federalists and Civic Virtue The Constitution Itself The Constitution: Issues The Constitution: Effects Persuasion to Force: An Inevitable Shift? From Persuasion to Force: A Natural Progression? Is There a Remedy? 1 2 9 12 16 18 22 25 26 38 Traditions at Work within the American Founding: The Founders’ Legacy to Civic Virtue Civic virtue, as a combination of political and moral concepts that understand free government to be reciprocal with citizens’ moral development, held different meanings for the American Founders, who split into two major camps—the Federalists and the Anti-­‐
federalists—with regard to the implications and practical extensions of the concept. Each camp articulated, then applied, its own interpretation of the concept during the writing and the ratifying of the Constitution. In their efforts to establish a “more perfect union” which would promote the common good, the Founders had at their disposal all of Western history and philosophy, the political thought from Plato to the Enlightenment as well as their own often contentious perspectives and political views. Although parties were not yet officially recognized, there were two separate camps within the Constitutional Convention of 1787: those that (in his absence, since he remained in France during the process) tended to follow Jefferson’s ideal of an agrarian-­‐based, more decentralized government, one not terribly different from the failed Articles of Confederation, and the Hamiltonians, who, on the other hand, could not see success without a strong central government and who preferred that the states have little more than administrative powers (Nelson and Loewenheim 1964). Deriving from these two distinct views of civic virtue—the Federalists’ liberalism and the Anti-­‐Federalists’ republicanism—was a series of events one of which, according to Wilson Carey McWilliams, involved a shift from persuasion to force. This shift coincided with the displacement of faith from what had been its delicately balanced interaction with reason and virtue, effecting a tilt away from civic virtue toward individualism, which in 1 turn affected the pursuit of the common good (McWilliams 2011). How the legacy of the traditions at work (and sometimes at odds) with regard to civic virtue during the Constitutional proceedings factor into McWilliams’s belief that a third tradition, one in which faith was given a seat at the table with reason and virtue, might restore the balance that has been lost can be addressed through a discussion the times in which the Founders lived, how the two sides viewed representation, how those views played out in the Constitution, and how McWilliams’s proposed third tradition could mitigate the effects of those views. The Constitutional Path Reviewing the progression from the American Revolution to the Constitution aids in understanding both McWilliams’s and the Founders’ points of view. The men who assembled the Constitution—many of whom had helped write not just the Declaration of Independence which had justified the revolution against Great Britain but also the failed Articles of Confederation—were well educated in the liberal arts. To varying degrees they had studied philosophy, political thinkers, historians, and scientists (Dunn and Woodard 2003). How exciting and yet daunting that cloud of ideas, concerns, solutions, that kind of perfect storm as it were, involving virtù and virtue; virtue and corruption; republic and empire; land and commerce, and public and individual liberty must have seemed as they strove to apply the “sociology of liberty to legislation in the sense of actual state-­‐founding” (Pocock 2003) in order to create a government that would protect and promulgate the common good even as it protected and promulgated individual liberty. It is helpful, necessary even, to revisit not just the classic Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, but the mind of Machiavelli as well as the thought of more recent 2 philosophers like Burke and Hume when reviewing the ancestry, as it were, of the Constitution. The “perfect storm” that resulted in the Constitution was the end product of millennia of trial and error, discussion, debate, theory, philosophy. The Founders in an immediate sense were looking for an answer to the ills under which they chafed as colonists of Great Britain, and the Bill of Rights was pretty much a relief to those ills by protecting, among other things, freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the press as well as freedom from the forced quartering of soldiers. Wanting to avoid the pitfalls of Britain’s monarchical system with its king and bicameral parliament, as well as those of past failed republics, they sought to establish a system of government which would prevent its own demise (Pocock 2003). Historically republican forms of government had followed a cycle that saw a sometimes explosive rise in prosperity fall prey to the corruption that seemed part and parcel of the process (Pocock 2003). The same passion, it seems, that was virtuous to the extent that it pushed men1 to pursue the common good became corrupted by the financial gain that turned men toward their personal interests. Republic became empire. The Founders’ political inheritance from Britain included the tension between virtue and corruption regarding the haves and the have-­‐nots, with the authority and power of the aristocratic ruling class being checked by those it ruled, thereby (theoretically) maintaining virtue (Pocock 2003). An aristocracy in the New World, though, was anathema, and so while holding onto Britain’s classically republican system of rotating offices and a distribution of power (Pocock 2003), the Founders looked beyond their former motherland 1 When speaking of a history created, if only ostensibly by men, “men” will be interchanged with “humans,” “persons,” etc. 3 to the ancients and the early Greek democracies. The fatal flaws in those democracies seemed to be two-­‐fold: human nature and human nature’s inclination to collect those with similar agenda into political groups, whether they are called parties, factions, or associations. According to the Founders, the problem with human nature is that while the majority of people are born good but flawed (Bellah 1999), some choose their own interests even at the cost of the common good and unscrupulously prey upon their fellow humans. Although laws and prevailing mores can regulate this, when the unscrupulous secure political office, a tyranny is not unlikely, and the Founders understood the devastation such a tyranny posed to any society. Their solution was to hope, as expressed in James Madison’s Federalist 10, that the number and variety of factions or parties in the new country would grow so large and so varied that even similar factions banding together would be prevented from establishing a majority stranglehold (Madison 1787-­‐78). The framework designed by the Founders borrowed from Montesquieu’s idea of a separation of powers. By vesting police and executive authority in one branch, and legal authority in another, with legislative authority in the third, and by providing a system of checks and balances, the Founders hoped to protect against tyranny from any quarter of government or from powerful factions, even as their framework allowed people to pursue virtue and the common good in the sense of using moral virtue to attain excellence and happiness (Miller 2012). This was well and good, but it is important to consider that against the backdrop of both classical and modern ideas of virtue, corruption, authority, and power, centuries of political thought took stage only to collide with other ideas that included a new concept of 4 liberty as private as well as public, the relationships between virtue and virtù, republic and empire, and land and commerce. From Machiavelli came his understanding of virtù as a quality not necessarily aligned with social morality but with the political power necessary to the survival of the government, positing virtù against the Aristotelian concept of virtue. As used by Machiavelli, Pocock argues, virtù was “self contained and secular, identical neither with Christian communion or a social morality founded on purely Christian values” (Pocock 2003), and was a means to the end of successful and sustained power. His advice in The Prince, Pocock suggests, was pragmatic and although devoid of social morality, poses solutions to the problem of sustaining power, especially in light of the ever-­‐fickle Fortuna, or Fortune. For Machiavelli, the combination of virtù and wisdom were necessary in order to prepare against Fortuna’s whims, in fact, virtù enabled princes to respond adequately to whatever fortune cast their way (Pocock 2003). Machiavelli’s virtù is not the civic virtue the Founders sought to establish and hoped would be nurtured by way of the Constitution. Believing as they did that what Tocqueville later called “self-­‐interest rightly understood,” (Tocqueville 2004) would happen within the parameters of the Constitution, the Founders subscribed to the Aristotelian idea of virtue as a passion for pursuing the common good and corruption as the failure to “transform lesser passions (into virtue)” (Pocock 2003). By constraining the government, by writing a constitution against party, the Founders acknowledged Cato’s belief that passion, not principle is the overriding determinant in human choice. (Pocock 2003) In forging a new government for a young country, another concern facing the Founders was the emergence of a concept of private liberty distinct from the ancient public concept around which ancient republics like Greece were founded. Within the historical, 5 philosophical, and political influences of that perfect storm that had settled above and around the Founders, the men at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 faced fears of monarchial or parliamentary tyranny which competed not just with ideas of passion, virtue, and corruption, but also with this emerging concept of liberty as both public and private. Although other changes in society, especially the transition from labor as necessity for subsistence to labor as a means to the end of upward mobility, were challenging the authority found in the hierarchical system involving both the relationship between the landed gentry and the commoners as well as relationships within families (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992), the increased importance and liberty of the individual vis à vis community would become problematic, as Tocqueville would note just decades later (Tocqueville 2004). This emerging notion of liberty as individual rather than public demanded the Founders’ attention. In ancient times, times to which men of the Enlightenment looked for so much of their political thought, family and other hierarchies afforded no freedom in private life: families were organized in such order that one’s place was always understood. Challenging the hierarchy, if dared, was a kind of voluntary excommunication from society (Constant 1988); it just wasn’t done. America though was not just different but exceptional, offering an environment that allowed people to challenge not only the authority of European hierarchy but those very hierarchies, the ancient ones, whose traditions had continued from the time of Plato. This exceptionalism manifested itself by way of the colonies’ geography, which afforded a natural defense, providing them, as Tocqueville would later note, more freedom to focus on internal rather than external affairs (Tocqueville 2004). Also, the very way colonial society had come to be was different because from the first, colonists had come to North America from different backgrounds, 6 different cultures, and for different reasons. What would someday be called a melting pot was indeed just that—Catholics, Puritans, other varieties of Protestants, English, Irish, Scotch: all looking for salvation whether temporal (gold and fortune) or eternal (heaven). While colonial society had its failings like slavery and poverty, prospects were not so wretched for the colonists as for those trying to eke out an existence in in the bowels of French and English cities (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Out of this colonial society emerged a middle class both into which and out of which the plucky might climb. Britain’s system of landed gentry in which work was labor and done only out of necessity took a turn in America. The landed gentry system just didn’t work so well in America—the elite still found it necessary to work alongside their hired (or un-­‐hired) help in the effort to sustain their style of living (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Others who would have been doomed to nothing but labor in other lands found that they could get ahead and make more than they needed for their basic needs. Labor in the sense of something done only out of necessity became work done in order to provide for more than life’s basic needs. In other words, it was no longer out of the question for a chambermaid to work and save to procure the Irish lace formerly reserved only for the aristocracy (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). This led to a breakdown in traditional hierarchy: the idle rich found themselves working to afford leisure and the working poor found themselves working their way out of their present station and into a better one. It seemed there was no end to what some combination of hard work, ingenuity, and drive could accomplish (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Add education and this new working class, fueled with the convictions of the Sons of Liberty and having seen first hand the opportunities available to 7 them, became a force with which the Founders had to reckon. The checks put upon the continental aristocracy by those it served became moot – these new working class Americans had tasted equality and had begun to question the authority of the old hierarchy. This in itself would prove problematic: those free from, in Jefferson’s words, “the casualties and caprice of customers” (Wood, Democracy and the American Revolution 1992) had been either landed gentry or farmers who, Jefferson and others believed, had less difficulty separating personal interest from the common good. The ideas of the revolutionary leaders had been thoroughly republican in their concept of political leadership, which meant a belief in virtue rather than in traditional family and kinship as qualification for public office. Some like Jefferson even believed that in order to separate the public from the private interest office holders should serve without salary (Wood, Democracy and the American Revolution 1992). Equality was contagious, though, and opened the door of public office to those without family or kinship in their heritage; this meant opening the doors, period. As James T. Kloppenberg notes, the “principles of autonomy and popular sovereignty had been enshrined and they exerted a powerful hold on the American imagination” (Kloppenberg 1987). Enter yet another variable into the mix of a new working class, its culture and its eagerness for equality, the Founders’ past experience with British rule, and their political and philosophical backgrounds: religion. Although the earlier colony at Jamestown had been established by fortune hunters, Plymouth was the result of people who wanted the freedom to believe as they thought best and the freedom to live directed by that faith. Established religions had dominated not just British but American culture: the towns that had sprung up in New England were centered around the Pilgrim-­‐Puritans’ brand of 8 Protestantism; Baltimore was founded as a haven for Catholics, and men like Roger Hooker struck out into untamed lands like Connecticut in order to worship as they pleased. The potential problem of religion was resolved much as the problem with parties or factions had been—until the Bill of Rights forbade any state-­‐established church, the Founders did not address it in the Constitution, believing that people would create many different churches and sects, thus preventing any single religion from holding sway over the entire country (Madison 1787-­‐78). As Gordon Wood argues, a system that would “allow enlightened and virtuous leaders to transcend” (Wood, Democracy and the American Revolution 1992) the heterogeneity of the states included the above themes, as well as the influence of the different approaches to republican government articulated best by the Federalist and the Anti-­‐Federalist camps. The themes and the effects of the two camps would affect not just the final draft of the Constitution but the young country’s direction. In some ways, Jefferson’s emphasis on virtue and limited government bespeaks a positive view of human nature as flawed but good, while Hamilton’s contempt for popular rule is reminiscent of a view that human nature is damned from the start and in need of salvation (Bellah 1999). All of the above factored into the forging of the Constitution, with the Founders differing views on civic virtue playing decided roles. Civic Virtue in a Federalist World The Federalists’ belief in John Locke’s liberal tradition that “human beings are by nature free, independent, and engrossed in private aims, especially the desire for self-­‐
preservation,” (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011) was accompanied by their conclusion that human beings were all too often “narrowly self-­‐
9 interested, parochial, and shortsighted” (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). They therefore sought to limit democracy in their efforts to protect liberty, as J. W. Peltason and Sue Davis note (Peltason and Davis 2000). Therefore, the Constitution which aimed to provide a government strong enough to protect its people from tyranny and to promote the common good, initially afforded those very people only limited popular participation, and is grounded more in Lockean liberalism with its sense self-­‐interest and consent than in the republican principle of public virtue (Peltason and Davis 2000). Popular participation was limited to popular election of the House of Representatives and local judges because Federalists like Hamilton did not have faith in their fellow citizens. Hamilton demonstrates this in a 1775 letter to John Jay, referring to “the unthinking populace,” as not having a “sufficient stock of reason and knowledge” to guide them beyond mere passion. Further, he declares, “It is not safe to trust to the virtue of any people” (Papers of Alexander Hamilton Digital Edition 2011). Therefore, furthering the “objective, collective interest,” or the common good, meant finding a way to obviate special interests and controlling individualism (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). The aristocratically-­‐minded Hamilton’s contempt for what Gordon Wood refers to as the “vulgarity and selfishness of business culture” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992) coupled with his pessimism about the virtue of the American people, led Hamilton back toward the very monarchical system from which his country had only recently emerged. Wanting, as did other Federalists, glory and power for the country, it is not surprising that he would seek to bring some aspects of monarchical society into the United States, setting up a hierarchy of interest and dependence to substitute for what he 10 perceived a lack of the natural human virtue (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Other Federalists, like James Madison, echo Hamilton’s sentiments without acceding to the idea of a monarchical system. Madison, too, questioned whether left to their own devices men would act virtuously. In April 1787, he notes that those who wish to govern do so either from ambition, personal interest, or the public good, and generally from one of the first two. He asks, “How frequently will a repetition of the same arts and industry again prevail on the unwary to misplace their confidence?” (Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition 2010). Further, Madison laments that, “A still more fatal if not more frequent cause lies among the people themselves,” (Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition 2010) because the majority in a republican government are ultimately the lawmakers. There are only three motives, he says, through which a majority avoids a tyranny over minorities: a regard for the common good, respect for character, or religion, none of which Madison believes is strong enough to succeed. In a precursor to the Federalist #10, he says that, “...an enlargement of the sphere (causes society to be) ...broken into a greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions, which check each other, whilst those who may feel a common sentiment have less opportunity of communication and concert” (Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition 2010). Where in all this pessimism, in the Federalists’ focus on promoting individual rights and interests without much optimism about how humans will behave if left to their own devices, is any consideration of civic virtue? McWilliams believes it is there, that the Framers—those responsible for crafting most of the Constitution and then promoting its ratification, i.e. the Federalists—understood the need for “some element of moral and civic 11 virtue” (McWilliams, “Science and Freedom” 2011) in order for both private and political liberty to flourish. Given the Federalists’ inclination to believe the worst of human nature, they did not believe virtue would persevere unless some kind of moral and civic education was provided. This, McWilliams notes, creates yet another conundrum, since the Framers were distrustful of allowing government to provide civic education and because it was “incompatible with the dignity of a regime devoted to reason and freedom” (McWilliams, “Science and Freedom” 2011). Another author, John P. Diggins, while not questioning whether the Framers believed in the importance of civic virtue, discusses the difficulties inherent in creating a government for people who were not, the Framers believed, truly free due to their passions and interests. Diggins says the Framers “sought to render power safe by institutionalizing political resistance to man’s sinful tendencies, ” (Diggins 1986) with the effect of creating “a government with no need for men committed to civic humanism” (DelGaudio 1986). It seems fair to conclude that while the Federalists believed in virtue, they did little to establish to a means for it through the Constitution. The Anti-­‐Federalists and Civic Virtue The Anti-­‐Federalists who, contrary to the appellation did believe in federalism, would have much preferred to be called Federalist Republicans, even as they believed that small republics and that founding their new government on the ideas of community, active participation, liberty, and the common good would allow civic virtue to flourish (Storing 2008). They questioned whether the Federalists’ ideas about representation in a large, far-­‐
flung country would prevent either tyranny of the majority or malfeasance in office, believing that representatives ought to know and be closely connected to those they represented. 12 Although Thomas Jefferson, as ambassador to France, was out of the country during the Constitutional Convention and did not align himself with any party—“If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all” (Jefferson 1789)—a consideration of that part of his thought upon which the Anti-­‐Federalists drew helps illustrate their position. As the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, with its famous and essential reference to the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as to the “right of the People to alter or to abolish” government should it neglect these rights, Thomas Jefferson was a kind of neo-­‐republican, one who believed in the republican idea that a virtuous government is the result of civic and virtuous citizens. Despite keeping slaves he was also a man who put his faith in a kind of equality that Federalists like Hamilton, noting the “amazing violence and turbulence of the democratic spirit,” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992) feared. Jefferson further believed, Pocock suggests, that an agrarian life is the precondition to virtue, and that virtue thus predicated exceeds that found in nature or sin the relationship of a natural aristocracy to a natural democracy. (Pocock 2003) Jefferson is sometimes inconsistent, echoing Britain’s Country Party in his belief that commerce was a source of corruption even as he agreed with what would later be Noah Webster’s notion that a growing agrarian society had the capacity to absorb commerce despite the fact that however vast it might seem, land was a limited commodity in North America. (Pocock 2003) As a man of the American Enlightenment, Jefferson shared the concept that men were equal, although born into different circumstances. This led to an expanded sense of humanity, one in which virtue is not reserved only for the wealthy and in which men can control their environment—a sense of humanity that allowed for the possibility that, being 13 born equal, all could, through education, desire, and work control their own destinies. (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992) This notion of equality is one of the things that found Jefferson pitted against Hamilton when it came to the size, strength, and organization of the central government. By more than a decade, he echoed John Adams’s earlier sentiments that a title did not make the man and that (although there are notable ambiguities in their actions) people are basically all the same. If all are created equal and if, practically speaking, each person has the ability to become someone more than the station to which he is born, a kind of benevolence could be attributed to human nature (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). The implications of this naturally occurring benevolence, coupled with Jefferson’s already liberal and Lockean point of view (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992), made him a proponent of a more democratic and more popularly representative government than the Federalists believed prudent. Jefferson held firm to his conviction it was only within republicanism, not liberalism, that the public interest would be considered and that “virtue and natural sociability of people were (the) best social adhesives” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Jefferson believed the dangers of a strong government sufficiently real as to require limits on government’s power and a strengthening of individual rights. His idea that people would practice virtue, eventually making government unnecessary through the spread of “affection and benevolence” is not one that made it into the history books (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Although he feared the possible tyranny that could come from a government stronger than the one created under the Articles of Confederation and believed the 14 document could have been re-­‐worked into a successful form, with just “three or four new articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabric...” (Kammen 2006), Jefferson, nonetheless, once the document had been ratified, threw his support behind the Constitution, calling it “unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men” (Kammen 2006). If Jefferson was at times at odds with other Anti-­‐Federalists, this was not out of the ordinary according to Herbert J. Storing, who maintains that the Anti-­‐Federalists, while holding some basic beliefs in common, disagreed on many points and did not have a unifying agenda. Storing prefers to consider not their “extraordinary heterogeneity” (Storing 2008) but their underlying fear that the Constitution might be directing the United States down a path it ought not to be taking—a path that heralded a departure from the Declaration of Independence (Storing 2008). Others, like Pauline Maier, note that the Anti-­‐
Federalists’ opinions on the Constitution fell along the spectrum from complete opposition to conditional approval (Maier 2010). The general approach of the Anti-­‐Federalist to civic virtue was not utopian, McWilliams argues, but was ancient, following the belief that “just as the soul's excellent qualities have a natural title to rule over base impulses, public spirit is entitled to govern private interests” (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). For such public spirit to work properly required, the Anti-­‐Federalists believed, the best government had to be one that was entirely popularly decided. They realized though, McWilliams notes, that a representative government was more prudent for the eighteenth-­‐
century United States. “Anti-­‐Federalists were convinced that republics depended on a strong form of representation, a kind of representation in which a representative's voice 15 and vote would commit his constituents even where important sacrifices were called for” (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). For this kind of representation to work, representatives not only needed to have much in common but they had to have a kind of political friendship with those who elected them, which then required small, intimate districts. The common threads and political friendship would then allow representatives not only to work for their constituents’ common good but lessen any antagonism should the representative have to decide against his constituents’ interest (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). While their the lack of cohesiveness within their own agenda kept them from mounting a truly concerted attack on the Federalists, and although the size of voting districts within the United States is certainly far larger than they believed practical, the Anti-­‐Federalists nonetheless did leave their mark, as McWilliams notes, through their acceptance of the ideas of parties as being a mitigating factor between what he called natural aristocrats and natural democrats and their competing ideas about equality and interest (McWilliams, “The Anti-­‐Federalists, Representation, and Party” 2011). The Constitution Itself “... to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...” What, then, is the Constitution? In the simplest terms it is the structure of a government designed to check and balance itself and to guard against the tyranny of the majority, with addenda that protect specific individual rights and freedoms. In its whole, it is a remarkable document designed to provide a free space within which people have the 16 liberty to pursue whatever defines happiness for them. Seemingly simple, yes, but therein lies the rub. J. Pocock, referencing the work of John Millar, notes “the historical forces that produce virtue...[produce] distraction of the personality.” In other words, the movement toward liberty exposes society ever more to corruption (Pocock 2003). With popular election only of lower court judges and the House of Representatives, its form expresses the Federalists’ less optimistic view of human nature in contrast to the Anti-­‐Federalists’ rose-­‐colored outlook. Yet despite their very polar convictions as to the best form of government for the struggling United States of America, despite closed doors and windows in the heat of the Philadelphia summer of 1787 to keep the progress or lack thereof secret, and despite more than a few delegates packing up and going home for harvest or other reasons, the men at the convention forged a plan of government that would be ratified by nine states within the year to become the official law of the land (Peltason and Davis 2000). Vague in parts, the Constitution specifies how the government might operate without getting bogged down in an attempt to spell out every possible scenario, making it not so much a code of law as a set of rules (Peltason and Davis 2000). Although phrases like “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” do not appear within the Constitution, its organization provides such limits, through designating the police or enforcement arm of government as executive, the law-­‐making arm as legislative, and the court system as judicial (Amar 2012). Here, then, was the Constitution whose end was the common good achieved through the combination of protecting against tyranny and mob rule while encouraging political involvement, albeit initially mostly the involvement of the upper classes. 17 The Constitution: Issues The Federalists, though, overlooked a crucial reality: the American people were neither interested in nor willing to return to the aristocratic hierarchy they had overthrown fewer than fifteen years earlier. The same group of men, Wood argues, who had “sought to construct a society and government based on virtue and disinterested public leadership” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992) soon realized that the opportunities for prosperity and the sense of equality that liberalism promoted had created a citizenry in which the search for the common good was being replaced by self-­‐interested individualism. What had happened to the dreams and ideals of the Founders? As with most everything about the American Founding, there were a myriad of influences in play, from the reality of official duties and the kinds of men who were being elected to office to the unprecedented opportunity both within America’s cities as well as in her wildernesses. The Founders’ concepts of public office and the liberty necessary to conduct politics were grounded in ancient Greece and Rome and formed by the subsequent centuries of political thought. Although the Federalists and the Anti-­‐Federalists may have disagreed about the degree to which different classes ought to be involved in politics, there was a consensus that politics was an obligation requiring education and virtue. This consensus left out the working classes since, until mid-­‐eighteenth century, American labor had been equated with necessity, and education had required a leisure ordinary laborers did not have. At the same time, as previously noted, the hierarchy of family life disallowed any concept of personal liberty; liberty was to be found among equals in the public sphere. From Greek democracies and Roman republics to the British monarchy, the hierarchy of authority remained firmly welded in place. Liberty remained a part of the 18 public sphere. And there remained a fixed set of vertical relationships (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Authority is clearly defined but, as James Wilson noted in 1775, authority is reciprocal with protection and allegiance carries with it the sense of a voluntary action: the monarch had authority to the degree he served his people. Although the Founders fell at different points along the spectrum of liberalism and republicanism, they very much believed that a contract of sorts existed between the governed and those who governed. When the colonists rebelled, it was more against King George III than it was against Britain and Parliament. They considered themselves, as Gordon Wood puts it, in a “private bargain” with the king, who was “the great connecting principle,” of the British Empire (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). The American Revolution obliterated many of the bases, like patriarchy, kinship, and patronage, upon which colonial society had rested, leaving a vacuum the Founders believed would be filled by new bonds, ones that would hold this new horizontally organized society together: “love, respect, and consent” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Disinterested leadership and virtue would become the foundation of a new society; one, Wood says, the Founders believed would inspire a sense of fraternity and, therefore, a desire to work for the common good. The common good would be the goal of citizens who put service above self and who spend their time in pursuit of the common good rather than their own interests. This would be problematic for a number of reasons: the men of leisure, the landed gentry, could not afford to maintain their lifestyles without pursuing their own interests, that is, without working and many of those who pursued public office were already self-­‐interested and not so well educated as the Founders had expected. Add the human tendency for self-­‐interest into the mix and there is little wonder that the Founders 19 became disillusioned (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution 1992). Tocqueville echoed their sentiments in 1835 in his Democracy in America. Liberalism, with its focus on the individual—his rights, his property, his equality and his freedom to act—helped create a society in which people began to withdraw from public life in order to further their own interests. The republican ideal of the public person metamorphosed into the reality of the private person who put self-­‐interest above the common good; men were inclined to retreat into their private circles and to leave larger society to fend for itself, becoming in the end egotists whose love of self was so pervasive they related only to themselves and preferred themselves to all others—a vice that “shrivels the seed of all virtues” (Tocqueville, 2004). It was more than mere self-­‐interest, though: Tocqueville notes that democracy in America walked hand in hand with equality, the form of which not only leveled the playing field but led toward mediocrity and in a tendency to avoid the exceptional, to strike down that which stood out from or above the crowd. If everyone is equal, then it might be falsely inferred that no one is better than anyone else and, by extension, that no one’s ideas are any better either. Americans, he said, while not hating the rich, feel little to no benevolence toward them, having little use for anything exceptional. “In general, one finds that anything that rises up without the support of the people has a hard time winning their favor” (Tocqueville, 2004). In his The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom expands Tocqueville’s observations, adding that although each person, being equal, has the right to follow his own heart, living in society requires compromise and accommodation. Eventually, this compromise and accommodation leads to an aversion to being different or to being excellent. Further, if it were true that no one person’s ideas are better than the general 20 consensus, then the majority, absent any vigorous grounds opposing it, will not only prevail but will become all the more dangerous. As Bloom also notes, this tyranny of the majority “breaks the inner will to resist because there is no qualified source of nonconforming principles and no sense of superior right” (Bloom, 1987). Bringing such an understanding of equality into the American political and social equation meant turning away from traditions rooted in either American aristocracy or religion—neither of which in a democracy, Bloom notes, had a party or faction that could speak to its interests. It might be said that such an equality eliminates any associations that, by providing “a place for dissenting opinions to flourish” (Bloom, 1987), could help stave off mediocrity and what Tocqueville calls the “envy in the human heart” developed by “democratic institutions” (Tocqueville, 2004). The effect, then, of equality upon political office is to discourage those who are best suited to lead, thereby opening the way for those who have a personal agenda or who possess fewer if any of the required qualifications, whether practical like the knowledge of history and political theory or essential like virtue. Indeed virtue, so important to the pursuit of the common good, seems to be a casualty of the leveling effect of equality and democracy. Although the Founders had written a “constitution against party,” believing that virtue stood a better chance if it did not have to compete with interests, the lack of interest in and withdrawal from public life of qualified, virtuous men who were willing and able to set aside their self-­‐interest for the common good means that the less honorable, who stand to profit through public office and the patronage they manipulate to their own ends, or the ends of their friends, become the ones in charge. Wielding the power of their office, they are able to claim that public opinion is on their side, leading to yet another danger about 21 which Tocqueville had warned, enslavement to public opinion (Bloom, 1987). This is cyclical—those in office could claim to represent the common interest (if not the common good) and the very act of being in office lends credence to this claim. The Founders well understood that self-­‐interest is a part of human nature, engrained in the core of human beings and necessary to their survival. They also fervently believed in liberty, and they were in the midst of an age wherein they looked both to the ancients and to the future, contributing to what would be known as the American Enlightenment and what Thomas Paine would call The Age of Reason. Returning to the perfect storm, perhaps it is not that the Founders ignored virtue and religion, but as Wilson Carey McWilliams suggests, that they didn’t believe rules concerning virtue belonged within the Constitution (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). If the Founders consciously left matters of faith out of the Constitution and still believed in the necessity of virtue, what in American society would protect and nurture virtue and thereby the common good? There are several possible answers: one may be Tocqueville’s belief that self-­‐interest rightly understood would involve virtuous people who as they seek to get ahead do not trample upon others who are likewise trying to move up the ladder (Tocqueville, 2004). Others, like Wilson Carey McWilliams, argue that religion, or faith, is the proper authority to ensure virtue and a continued pursuit of the common good (McWilliams,” A Case for Government” 2011), while still others noted that sometimes the vice of interest is what drives the ambition necessary for progress (Pocock, 2003). The Constitution: Effects Despite the competing ideas for ensuring virtue and the common good, there came to be in the young United States a new framework of law—the Constitution—intended to 22 protect the liberty of the individual even as it guards against tyranny of any sort—whether from a monarch or a majority. It all could have gone well. And in some respects it did—
there are few governments still working under republican guidelines established more than two centuries ago, and fewer still who have seen an orderly, non-­‐violent turnover of power every two to four years. But in other respects, the country is polarized, seemingly rich against poor, one race or religion against another, Democrat against Republican. What happened to the time when a man, like Alexander Hamilton, could entirely dislike and disagree with another, like Thomas Jefferson, but still vote for him because Jefferson was the better man for the job (Thomas 2013)? What has happened to the common good, to doing what is the best thing for the country and for each other regardless of one’s self-­‐
interest? Where is the United States of America headed when a person votes for a candidate who is opposed to almost everything that person believes, but “without him I might lose all my (welfare) benefits?”2 Robert Bellah, in his article on the common good, asks why it is so hard for Americans to understand, much less focus upon, the common good. Why has the common good been by and large replaced by the common interest (Bellah, 1999)? What has happened to the hopes of the Founders who believed that in their new country would be born a civil religion that would preserve and nurture virtue and thereby, since people of virtue cannot help but work for the common good, the common good (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011). What exactly is meant by virtue? Here, virtue might be defined as a quality that humans perfect by practice. In 2 Direct quote from a relative illustrating the disconnect between the common good and individual interest. 23 general, discussions of virtue include what in the Catholic intellectual tradition are the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, wisdom, and courage. Could this disconnect between the American public and the common good have come about because virtue as a positive political attribute has fallen out of favor? Tocqueville would argue that it goes back to the notion of equality. There is a suspicion among equals, Tocqueville notes, of anyone who aims higher than the norm. Higher is equated with better, and better is too connected with the very aristocracy mid-­‐18th century folks were all too happy to eliminate. To be exceptionally good, much less great, even in matters of leadership, is suspect (Tocqueville, 2004). The problem articulates itself: virtue is necessary in the preservation of liberty and equality, but the latter two inevitably combine to displace the first. How then, does a people go about protecting virtue while preserving and treasuring liberty and equality? However fine a document the Constitution might be, while it can limit situations in which abuse of power might occur, it can’t promote virtue any more than a law can legislate morality, for the very reason that the human conscience is inviolably free. John P. Diggins, in fact, affirms this, according to Julian DelGaudio, holding that The Founders created a government with no need for men committed to civic humanism. The constitution they created represented the eclipse of political and moral authority and the legitimation of pluralism, individualism, and materialism, the very forces the humanist tradition identified with corruption and the loss of virtue. The Founders created a weak government whose center had no compelling moral ballast (DelGaudio, 1986). Diggins, further, believes like Bellah that Americans do not have a sense of the common good, of community; he believes that neither individualism, self-­‐interest, 24 pluralism, nor the Constitution is sufficient for the task of promoting the common good (DelGaudio, 1986). This raises the question, “what then?” Believing that the loss of the common good as a staple in the lives of Americans coincides with a shift from persuasion to force, a shift that happened with the artillery fire over Fort Sumter April 12, 1861, McWilliams asserts in “A Case for Government” that the absence, however intentional, of virtue—especially the virtues of faith and fraternity3 —in the Constitution all but ensured both a people less motivated by the common good than their own self-­‐interest as well as a government which operates by force rather than persuasion. Moving below the surface, McWilliams considers the effects of the virtues of faith and fraternity upon the young nation, arguing that while they were in play, force was less necessary (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Persuasion to Force: An Inevitable Shift? Because the issue of virtue, faith, or fraternity does not exist in a vacuum, it is important to include two other major forces which acted upon the lives and minds of 18th century Americans—equality and liberty. Virtue is a good thing. Equality is a good thing. Liberty is a good thing. The Declaration of Independence espouses all three, and the argument can be made that the Constitution does likewise. But the three of them do not seem to play well together. Tocqueville sums up the issue in his closing comment in the chapter on honor in Democracy in America, “...it is dissimilarities and inequalities among men that created honor; the importance of honor fades as those differences diminish, and it will presumably disappear when they do” (Tocqueville, 2004). 3 Because fraternity may be an outdated word for what McWilliams is trying to express, let it be understood not literally as the common ground of love and friendship only among men but as shorthand for a common ground of true humanity among all people, i.e. the virtue of charity or love. 25 How then does a people treasure and preserve liberty, equality, and virtue? Can virtue be written into law? How limiting are the effects of equality on virtue and liberty? McWilliams’s case for inserting the virtues of faith and fraternity in order to establish an ordered liberty based on equality and the common good can be traced through his discussions of the Constitution’s role in the shift from the persuasion to force, and a consideration of the effects of equality upon virtue and by extension liberty. From Persuasion to Force: A Natural Progression? How does McWilliams think U.S. citizens were more persuaded than forced between the time of the American Founding (1776) and the Civil War (1861) in a world where force was generally the accepted means of maintaining order and control? Echoing Tocqueville, McWilliams argues that it was due in part to the physical nature of the new country and of its economy in which there was not the widespread abject poverty and despair of the French peasants (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Further, as Thomas Jefferson had noted, beyond the general ability to make a living wage and provide for themselves in their old age, Americans also had space—they were not constantly falling over one another, suffering the resulting frictions that, festering, may erupt in riot or revolution.4 It was also, McWilliams contends, partly due to the nature of the times in which the United States was founded, when citizens had not yet entirely retreated into their self-­‐interested lives, had not yet put a such a high premium on the material world vis a vis contemplative thoughts of the common good (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). The nature of the times begged for argument and persuasion, for the shaping of 4 McWilliams acknowledges the issue of slavery as the contradiction in terms it presented even as he concedes that the American Founding was far from perfect. 26 ideas through conversation and discourse; he notes that even the Declaration of Independence relies on persuasion: “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world...” (McWilliams“A Case for Government” 2011). This era—which was admittedly fraught with other perils to the still-­‐young United States of America, perils like war with England over impressment and other issues, disagreement over taxes and protests like the Whiskey Rebellion, not to mention the internal political strife stirred up when presidential elections, unable to be settled by the Electoral College, were thrown into the House of Representatives—moved forward more and more under the cloud of slavery. The gulf between the free and the slave states, as well as the distancing of opinions along the spectrum of options, widened to the point of war. McWilliams says that the Unionists, headed by Abraham Lincoln, saw no option but to preserve the Union, at any cost. The Union did survive, but not, as McWilliams notes, because of the “‘mild and salutary constraint of the law’ and (not) because we persuaded anybody of anything, or because of science...it’s because the Union Army conquered the South” (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005). That resort to force, he maintains, ushered in a shift in the national imagination toward the conviction that the end justifies the means; it was a shift from argument and persuasion to force and coercion (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005). In an overall sense if not a strictly temporal one, this shift that McWilliams describes parallels the shift from the political citizen to the fortressed individual. As the United States grew in size, power, and overall prosperity, its citizens worried less about the common good and more about their own interests. Tocqueville saw it coming, this withdrawal into one’s immediate circle of family and friends, a kind of stratification and stagnation in a 27 society obsessed with equality; he pointed out that even as the American economy and culture reached new heights on the tide of the spirit of individualism, the same individuals who drove prosperity were at the same time withdrawing from public life (Tocqueville, 2004). Commerce and materialism drove men beyond their desires to live the good life, drove them into a life in which there was never enough, in which one had to work unceasingly to stay on top. McWilliams further explains: The political process is an effort to unite men in the pursuit of a common goal and vision. Politics, then, involves two questions: the question of “with whom,” and the question of “for what.” Furthermore, it involves these questions in precisely that order. Liberalism, alternatively, reverses the priority of these questions, or more precisely still, eliminates the former consideration and thus leaves only “for what” as the reigning concern of politics – a fact that mightily elucidates many contemporary predicaments, particularly our inability to live collectively within our means (McWilliams, “Uncle Sam Vanishes” 1961). McWilliams believes the political question “with whom” – the friendship and fraternal sense of community – involves a case for making private life subordinate to the common good (Deneen & McWilliams, 2011). This fraternity, he claims, is essential to the well-­‐being of any state; when it is absent the idea of self-­‐interest warps into egoism—self-­‐
interest without consideration for the common good. Rather than be the social and political beings they are by nature, rather than engage in their communities and with each other, people increasingly direct their efforts toward private rather than public interests, at individual gain over the common good. The result is the shift from “equality of spirit” to isolation and an “idolatry of self” (Knepper, 2013). 28 Unable to legislate virtue, the Constitution may be more directly responsible for the atmosphere in which people turned from the public toward the private life. The Founders’ case for government authority rested in part on its constituents’ need for the protection of civic rights and equality as well as the people’s self-­‐interest in their own safety and security; in other words, authority rested upon the consent of the people, who were persuaded to behave as they ought. Citizens in this time, McWilliams believes, took a greater interest and believed it a duty to participate in politics and society. In the young United States was a fairly ideal environment—by and large a political nation—but the Framers saw the potential for trouble from political parties. Given this, McWilliams argues that while Madison was correct when he predicted that a plethora of interests would prevent the tyranny of majority rule, the system set into place by the Constitution had another effect: by institutionalizing equality it eventually distanced people from politics, which in turn led to political apathy (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). The resulting political apathy further paved the path from persuasion to force. This raises the question whether equality will always destroy liberty and limit virtue or whether there is a way for them to co-­‐exist and even promote each other. Wilson Carey McWilliams proposes an alternative to the traditions of individualism, self-­‐reliance, and equality that are considered the bulwarks of American ideas and ideals. Not a tradition that runs entirely counter to them, but one that trails alongside and, if allowed, complements and completes them, so that the hopes of a society not foundered in self-­‐
centeredness but grounded in a sense of community and the common good might prevail (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011). McWilliams’s two-­‐part solution is faith and fraternity (McWilliams, “Civil Religion in the Age of Reason: Thomas Paine on 29 Liberalism, Redemption and Revolution” 2011). McWilliams posits that the government of the United States, begun as one of persuasion, has become one of force, that even its Constitution, designed to move society from self-­‐centeredness to community, had nonetheless allowed instead the move into a world of individuals more concerned with themselves than the common good, individuals unable to see that the common good was at heart the primary concern (McWilliams,” A Case for Government” 2011). McWilliams argues that fraternity (call it humanity, friendship, or love) is the answer to a self-­‐reliance which has metamorphosed into an unhealthy disdain for community; his notion of fraternity within the political process harkens to an idea that pre-­‐
dates classic liberalism and “defines both human beings and their institutions by their ends rather than their origins” (McWilliams, “America's Two Voices in a World of Nations” 2011). A human being’s end, he says, is to complete himself or herself, to accomplish what human nature intends, which implies that “one has what one needs: one is self-­‐sufficient, capable of self-­‐rule” (McWilliams, “America's Two Voices in a World of Nations” 2011). McWilliams’s definition of self-­‐rule involves the concept that humans accept their place in nature and requires that they be ruled by nature. The degree to which humans are able to limit their passions also limits their ability for self-­‐rule. Since self-­‐interest seems natural, there is a constant tension between the private will and the common good. To manage this tension, McWilliams believes, requires education that teaches people to “accept the real self and the real condition of humanity” (McWilliams, “America's Two Voices in a World of Nations” 2011). Thus educated, humans have the opportunity to move out of themselves, identifying emotionally with the rest of their world, and connecting with each other to the extent even 30 of sacrificing themselves for the good of others. It is this environment, McWilliams believes, in which political activity thrives; it is in this kind of political society that love and friendship prevail. Further, he says, participation in this kind of political society “can teach us to be self-­‐ruled” (McWilliams, “America's Two Voices in a World of Nations” 2011). The very bonds tying one person to another become the instruments of freedom, or in the words of an old hymn, “Firmly bound, forever free” (McWilliams, “America's Two Voices in a World of Nations” 2011). On the other hand, a disdain for community—the withdrawal into an individualist isolation from one’s neighbors—undoes the very underpinnings of society. As men and women lose their connective-­‐ness to each other their common ground disappears, as does their dedication to political thought and to their community. This was not the aim of the Founders, who believed that political life is “natural, and God-­‐intended, necessary for human fulfillment” (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011). Their hope, rather, was that a society reinforced with civil education could find a sense of community and that citizens, endowed with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” would invoke self-­‐discipline as they sought to conquer nature, and that these citizens would move out of the “fortress of the self” toward the common good (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011). McWilliams finds that the opposite has happened and he pairs the loss of fraternity and friendship with the separation of faith and reason as cause. What happened in America, he says, is that Americans found themselves in the uncomfortable position of theorizing rather than relying only upon first principles, a position which forced them to face the 31 “fundamental discord between biblical religion and secular rationalism, the antiphonies of American culture.” (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011) What is curious about the relationship of religion in America to reason—and to the science and the technology that flow from reason—is that most of the brightest stars in the religious sky at the time rejected asceticism and welcomed scientific advances, provided that folks kept in mind Who was at the center of it all. Faith, it turns out, really had no issue with reason or science. Calvin himself maintained that “‘delight,’ when created by God, was meant to aid the soul” (McWilliams, “Science and Freedom” 2011), while John Wise maintained that it was God’s will that men “banish sordidness and live Bright and Civil, with fine Accomplishments” (McWilliams, “Science and Freedom” 2011). Indeed, the prevailing thought was that redemption and grace were the natural means by which to shape the political order – that through them a kind of “religious civility” (McWilliams, “Religion and the American Founding” 2011) would be established. Faith had no problem with science, but the new science moved away from any constraints. Indeed, McWilliams notes, this new science so entwined and interwove itself with the science of politics that Thomas Jefferson considered Newton, Bacon, and Locke to be a “secular trinity” (McWilliams, “Science and Freedom” 2011). It is not that the Founders did not have a place for religion, McWilliams says, but its place was not one of helping shape society through redemption or grace. Indeed, redemption was thought of as a kind of treason to the Enlightenment—after all, the Age of Reason placed responsibility for one’s life entirely (and only) on one’s own shoulders. The thought that an external force could save one became antithetical. But religion was the device that the Founders intended to use both as an enforcer and an educator since hell is a 32 highly motivating incentive to abide by the laws (McWilliams, “The Bible in American Political Tradition” 2011). McWilliams believes out that the fundamental differences between religion and liberalism lie in their foundations: Christianity is, he says, predicated on human nature, while liberalism is founded on the idea of equality (McWilliams, “The Bible in American Political Tradition” 2011). What is amiss in this difference is that Christianity, with its belief in the equality of souls before God, is often credited with introducing into Western Civilization the very idea of equality on which liberalism is founded, because from the premise that souls are equal before God another premise can be drawn, that these souls are sovereign, and from this the conclusion that people are equal with sovereign souls (Siedentop, 2014). How is it, then, that the two became estranged? Christianity believes in the equality of the soul; it holds that human law should be based on natural law, itself based upon eternal law, and that natural law admits the value of property ownership. Property ownership by extension admits private interest. None of these ideas runs contrary to liberalism. They part ways, however, because Christianity, as considered at the time of the American founding, required more than just equality and the efforts of human beings. It required redemption and grace, and as such recognized an omniscient, eternal, and omnipotent God Who is beyond human understanding (Carstens, 2014). And, with God in the picture, private interest by nature would be subordinate to a greater (or common) good. The Framers of the Constitution were men of the Age of Reason. Advances in science and technology seemed to point to a world in which all things could be known purely through the use and application of human faculties. Well aware that humans are far from 33 perfect, they recognized the dangers of self-­‐interest not properly understood. But there they were gathered, on the edge of an unknown, uncharted world, once again staking their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” on a giant experiment involving the futures of some three million people. As McWilliams put it, the United States was a test—a test “whether men can establish good government from reflection and choice” or whether they have to depend upon “accident and force” (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005). The Framers, he says, saw political science as a tool to secure reason, deliberation, and choice for the basis of a republic. Reason tells us that certain goals are appropriate to humans, goals such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Deliberation is the means by which reasonable men argue, by which they persuade others to their point of view and come to decisions without force. Choice is the liberty to make one’s own decisions via reason and deliberation (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005). As much as they believed in reason and in human potential, the Framers conceded that reason was not enough on its own. McWilliams says that while they believed science would provide self-­‐interest rightly understood, they knew that an appeal to people’s interests is also necessary in the formation of a successful system of government. And here, for all that these classic liberals turned away from faith as expressed by prevailing attitudes of Christianity, they looked to human nature—on which Christianity is founded—to learn about themselves and about each other (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005). They allowed for the constraint of law in order to guard against the “allure of the immediate” (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005), and to help citizens restrain themselves as they followed their own self-­‐interests. 34 The government—or regime, as McWilliams calls it—that they established followed classic liberal thought and protected individuals from the intrusion of the Federal government. McWilliams acknowledges that the Framers did not stop there, but “leaned on other, less economic virtues” (McWilliams, “Civil War's Effect on American Thought” Jan. 2005), such as the need for honor and for keeping one’s word. To that end they established a clause regarding contracts made between and among men. Other virtues important to them were not addressed in the Constitution, he says virtues like self-­‐sacrifice—that “readiness to subordinate the body and its goods to what the soul loves and regards as worthy” (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011)—are not articulated in the Constitution because the Framers believed that it was no business of government. They believed that these virtues as well as issues of morality—Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart”—were best taught and served in families, communities, schools, and churches and that the laws could be used to promote freedom. Faith, or religion, held sway in the sphere of morals and the private life, while liberty ruled the public sphere (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Thus, McWilliams says, Tocqueville’s “spirit of religion” and “spirit of liberty” were blended, although based on the conflicting ideas that under religion ...all are equally subject, all held accountable to the same standard by the same Divine authority and given duties to God and to neighbor; [while] the Spirit of Liberty holds that all are equally free, naturally subject to no one (and without claims on anyone), obliged by no standards to which one does not consent. (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011) The laws being decisively on the side of liberty, have, as Tocqueville predicted, edged out the spirit of religion (McWilliams, “Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights” 2011). He had hoped, though, that the spirit of religion would, while never ruling, 35 nonetheless provide a check on the spirit of liberty, that it would lend another side to the discussion of humanity and human ends and goals. Further, he thought that the attraction to “self interest rightly understood,” could be mitigated through political associations. These associations were founded in self-­‐interest, perhaps, but nonetheless drew together citizens for a common cause or a set of common beliefs. Tocqueville hoped and McWilliams believes, the effect would be to foster a habit of subordinating oneself to a common purpose. As such, associations, especially local ones, educated people in the workings and importance of politics even as the associations affirmed not just individual dignity but the value of individual voices. Associations could not only inhibit the “fragmentation implicit in democratic society” but would check the tilt toward tyranny of the majority” (McWilliams, ”A Case for Government” 2011). Unfortunately, not only did Americans become increasingly impatient and unwilling to consider long-­‐term goals and benefits, they centered their discussions and their lives around self-­‐interest, which McWilliams believes “underrates the virtues of democratic citizens” (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). This obsession with self-­‐interest not always “rightly understood,” has had many different influences, not the least of which, as already noted, is on views of human nature. But how is it, to use an example in the extreme, that the balance between the common good and self-­‐interest has tipped so far as for a CEO to accept millions of dollars in bonuses even as his employees are filing for unemployment? How do others who by all accounts are family and community oriented, who do good works and give to the less fortunate, and who through both words and actions affirm the dignity of the human person, reconcile the CEO’s actions with what is just? What editor effectively red-­‐lined “rightly understood?” 36 McWilliams saw a number of influences that helped land Americans at a crossroads, perhaps even a crisis, among them distance, impermanency, and a lack of trust, with a loss and a lack of faith overarching them all (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Distance—not only are Americans separated, coastline to coastline and boundary to boundary—by thousands of miles, there has been a disconnect between individuals, between employers and employees, between the governing and the governed. Technology, while in some ways providing more information more quickly than ever before, tends to overload the senses, resulting in sound bites that take the place of reasoned discussion and of conclusions supplemented by evidence and fact. Americans have become isolated within themselves and their private lives. Accompanying this isolation is the impermanency of modern life. McWilliams noted that the economic life of U.S. citizens is a network of dependencies which, even though it still “affords opportunity for personal differences and expression” (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011), no longer provides wage earners the security it once did. This loss of security—no longer does a person enter a workplace at 18 or 22 knowing that in twenty, thirty, or forty years he or she will walk out of it for the last time with a secure pension that allows for a comfortable old age—is exacerbated by other losses of stability. Between economic insecurity and divorce, there has been a loss of trust that life will be as it ought to be, as it was planned, as it was for parents (or grandparents). There has also been a loss of what McWilliams called “rootedness” (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). It’s no wonder that Americans are choosing superficial commitments and shallow roots given the almost incessant change and mobility. Few would question the lack of trust—the skepticism and even cynicism—of Americans. Lack of trust deeply affects American life and in many ways is the product of distance and 37 impermanency. As Americans become more and more remote from each other as well as from those who govern them, as they enjoy less and less stability, they begin to distrust their institutions, particularly the government and the political parties that run it. Politics and to some extent government, McWilliams says, are seen as “massive spheres of indignity,” with the effect that citizens withdraw even more into their private, isolated lives, eschewing politics and the political life as tainted and dishonest (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Is There a Remedy? Can equality, liberty, and virtue co-­‐exist, supplement each other, and even prosper? To effect an atmosphere in which they can and will, McWilliams offers suggestions for resolving the isolation, the distance, and the trust issues, adding that that the Federal government must, by strengthening its claims on consent, strengthen its “title to rule” (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). Many of his ideas for increasing the strength of this consent involve a return to earlier times. He calls for increasing the power of local parties and use of non-­‐media forms of campaigning, localizing institutions so that citizens once again can experience a level of involvement that habituates them toward continuing social and political participation in their community, and increasing the degree to which political candidates’ voices are heard, through an increase in media coverage of the candidates’ actual words. McWilliams also calls for reducing the influence of money and the media in politics, as well as reinforcing the political links between citizens and their government (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011). His proposals aimed at re-­‐connecting the American people with each other, their communities, and with their governments must, he insists, include a place at the table for 38 the spirit of religion (McWilliams, “Protestant Prudence and Natural Rights” 2011). McWilliams returns to his argument for an alternative tradition of faith and fraternity, and calls on these virtues, which he believes are the missing links, to complement and complete classic liberalism: In the American tradition, the “consent of the governed” presumes a prior consent to nature and to the order of creation, and hence, to that government beyond the city that is the ultimate foundation of human and of democratic life. (McWilliams, “A Case for Government” 2011) Faith restrains the liberty that moves people toward individualism, self-­‐interest, and eventual isolation. Faith combined with love, McWilliams believes, moves humans beyond themselves toward the common good. Throughout his life McWilliams made a substantial case for adding the spirit of religion and a spirit of love to liberalism, individual liberty, and self-­‐interest. It is in this way that citizens not just of the United States of America but of the world can live in communities where the end is the common good and not private interest (McWilliams, “Civil Religion in the Age of Reason: Thomas Paine on Liberalism, Redemption and Revolution” 2011).5 5 There are others, James Kloppenberg among them, who have a different approach and who believe that liberal ideas, Protestant Christianity, and classical republicanism “converged” twice, during the times of the American Revolution and the Constitution, diverging soon after. Kloppenberg believes that autonomy and popular sovereignty were the virtues of liberal republicanism, and that those very virtues amounted to vices when they evolved into the “irresponsible individualism and erosive factionalism” after 1800. Were Americans to revisit these virtues of autonomy and popular sovereignty in light of what he calls the classical republican notion, that of independent citizens protecting “fragile civic virtue against the threat of corruption represented by the extension of executive power...(with the) ideal of a community, in which individuals define their interests in terms of the common good,” (Kloppenberg, 32) they might find they can understand, although perhaps not recapture, that convergence of liberalism and republicanism. His is not a solution, though, more a call to consider returning to a different time and place, while McWilliams has identified a specific if intentional deficiency in the Constitution. 39 Common good and the virtue needed to protect and promote it are qualities. As such they cannot be legislated or written into any “law of the land.” The Founders understood this and did not try to write any kind of civic religion into the Constitution. Given the current apathy, as noted by Bellah, toward not just public service, community, but the common good as well, McWilliams’s case for finding a way to instill faith and fraternity into the customs and mores of the United States is a strong one. Whether it will happen will be written in future histories, but while there are troubling signs, not just the riots in Ferguson but the reasons that underlay them, there are also signs of hope, like the Giving Tuesday that was promoted across the United States and Canada December 2, 2014, or like the overwhelming outpouring of volunteer aid that happens during a crisis. McWilliams, probably, would ask how it is that the American people can be persuaded to put aside their not-­‐rightly-­‐understood self-­‐interest in lieu of a pursuit for the common good. 40 Bibliography Amar, Akhil Reed. America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live by. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2012. Banyan, Margaret. Civic Virtue. Web. 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