Morality & Politics
America’s Coup D’État
In the Making:
Deception and Self-Deception
By Claes G. Ryn
Following Plato, many moralists have associated political virtue with
a reluctance to pursue and exercise power. To want to rule others is to
be morally disqualified from doing so. The strong tendency in
traditional Western political thought to disparage a desire for power
has been unfortunate. Without some people governing others, basic social
order could not exist, to say nothing of effecting desirable change.
The prejudice against power-seeking has left politics too much to people
with the wrong kind of ambition, who want to rule as an end in itself.
The reason for observing that the pursuit of power need not be
immoral but can be a means to good is that this article will challenge a
particular manifestation of the will to power—one that finds expression
in increasingly influential arguments for boosting the prerogatives of
the American president and the federal government. The criticism that
will be directed here against that hankering for domination must not be
misunderstood as stemming from opposition to any and all efforts to
acquire power. What will be rejected is an inordinate and blatantly
partisan, and therefore perverse, craving to rule—a dream not just about
taking over the U.S. government but about dominating the world. The
people who have this desire attempt to conceal its real nature by
pretending that it comports well with the thinking of the framers of the
U.S. Constitution. It is in fact alien to that thinking. Would that
power of a different quality could prevail against it!
A merely self-serving desire for power cannot present itself as such.
It must portray itself as a wish to assist others. How best to argue
for giving you or your group great power? If you are able to persuade
others that the present world is grossly oppressive and destructive of
human happiness but that you can make it much better, those others may
support mobilizing massive power and placing it in your hands or the
hands of people like you. The more ambitious your scheme for benevolent
change, the greater the need for power.
Since the French Revolution, ideologies have been exceptionally
conducive to power-seeking. Jacobinism, Communism, and National
Socialism are alike in promising glorious change and assuming the
desirability of giving vast power to those who claim to know what needs
to be done. A few years ago, David Frum and Richard Perle provided an
all-purpose justification for unlimited power: putting “an end to
evil”—the title of their co-authored book. Now there is a noble and
ambitious goal! Power beyond the dreams of avarice would be needed to
realize it. That rooting out evil might be an endless task only
increases its appeal to a ravenous will to power. We are, of course,
supposed to believe that the connection between advocating sweeping
change and needing great power is purely coincidental.
Jacobinism and Marxism were openly revolutionary. They were the
ideologies of out-groups challenging existing elites. What this writer
has called neo-Jacobinism is the ideology of people on the inside,
members of America’s elites, who wish to make the military and other
might of the United States a more pliant and powerful tool and who are
attempting a creeping coup d’état from within. According to their
ideology, America is called by history to create a better world based on
universal principles. Virtuous American power must be unleashed. Their
main excuse at present for exercising extra-constitutional power is to
combat “Terrorism,” but any threat to their great cause is a potential
justification for setting the Constitution aside.
The rise of the huge, centralized Federal government and the
corresponding decline of limited, decentralized government resulted from
changes deep in the American mind and imagination. The new Jacobins
take advantage of the fading of the old ethos and hasten its
disappearance by advocating notions incompatible with it.
The old American idea of government was indistinguishable from the
commandment to “love thy neighbor.” That morality stressed the
importance of the person trying to control his own evil and weakness.
Strength of will—character—had to be built up so that the person would
become capable of more loving familial and local relationships and more
responsible citizenship. This morality made for strong communities and
self-reliance and minimized the need for government. Alexis de
Tocqueville pointed to the great reluctance among Americans in the early
19th century to give up power over their own lives to any distant
authority.
The Constitution rested on an unwritten constitution, which was
America’s religious, moral, intellectual, cultural, and social habits
and beliefs. Traditional America encouraged a strong attachment to life
lived up-close. It fostered self-restraint, modesty, respect for law,
and a willingness to compromise. It was this heritage that brought into
being the constitutional personality. Just as people were in the habit
of imposing internal checks on desire, so were they predisposed to
accept and respect external constitutional and other legal constraints.
Without such people, the Constitution could not work as intended.
But the self-understanding of Americans slowly changed. Throughout
the Western world a very different moral ethos was spreading that
shifted attention away from intimate associations and local community.
It rejected the old notion of original sin and of personal
responsibility for people up close. It found morality not in acts of
character toward particular individuals—neighbors—but in “idealistic,”
sentimental caring for unfortunate collectives and mankind at large. The
older personality, which the Constitution both assumed and required,
began to wither. Americans started to abdicate authority to
benevolent-sounding politicians far away.
Increasingly, doing good became perceived as the responsibility of
government, which alone could take on the large projects now said to be
demanded by morality. Governmental, collective action gradually replaced
individual, private and communal responsibility. The moral momentum
behind the old decentralized society weakened. Today strong, centralized
Federal power seems to more and more Americans not merely acceptable
but desirable. This is so because they are absorbing the
anti-traditional moral sensibility now dominant not only in the
universities, the arts, the news media, and the entertainment and
publishing industries but in many churches. Hence Americans say
increasingly to government: “Act for us!”
Much of the intellectual opposition to this trend has been confused
and self-defeating. A prime example is the way many conservatives,
thinking that they were shoring up traditional beliefs, attached
themselves to the ideas of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), whose disciples
became a major force in American academia and national politics. A
refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss taught for many years at the
University of Chicago. Because he appeared to defend a classical,
ancient notion of universal moral right, many did not notice that he was
actually discrediting respect for tradition. Strauss and his disciples
advocated an anti-historical, un-conservative notion of moral
universality.
According to Strauss, no real philosopher gives any credence to “the
conventional” or “the ancestral,” to use his terms. To respect them
represents the greatest of all intellectual sins, “historicism.”
Inherited ways are, he insisted, mere accidents of history. Respect is
owed solely to “the simply right,” which is ahistorical and rational.
Strauss sharply criticized Edmund Burke, who saw the possibility of
moral universality acquiring historical form. Strauss’s abstract notion
of natural right ruled out the idea that a particular tradition might,
despite inevitable flaws, embody the quest for moral universality and
be, for that reason, worthy of allegiance.
Strauss’s ideas were blithely absorbed by many Christians, not least
philosophically unsophisticated and naive Roman Catholics, who perceived
him as a defender of moral right. They did not realize that his
conception of universality was markedly different from that of
Christianity and related philosophical currents. They did not understand
or care that in rejecting tradition as a proper source of guidance
Strauss was attacking one of the pillars of their faith. They did not
comprehend that by sharply separating the universal from the particular
Strauss ruled out universality becoming selectively incarnate in history
and was striking at the very core of their professed beliefs.
Specifically, he was denying the possibility of the Incarnation, of the
Word becoming flesh.
Straussian political philosophy has sought to detach Americans from
their historically existing tradition of constitutionalism with its deep
and distinctive roots in history and to make them loyal instead to
abstract principles of Straussian design that have been attributed to
the founders. Straussians are not all alike—in a few, the
anti-historical prejudice is diluted to some extent by respect for
America’s actual past—but prominent disciples of Strauss such as Allan
Bloom, Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, who differ in some ways, all agree
that what is admirable about America is not its concrete, historical
self but the abstract principles of the founders. In the last few
decades, Straussian conceptions of Americanism, patriotism and virtue
have been widely advocated in academia, including America’s military
academies. That terms like these can be given a distinctly
anti-traditional meaning has been little noticed.
By propagating a rationalistic, anti-historical notion of moral right
Strauss and his disciples have created a deep prejudice against
cherishing America’s distinctive, historically evolved Christian and
British past. But this was the cultural heritage that nurtured the inner
and outer restraints of American constitutionalism. Because Straussian
anti-traditionalism has confused and weakened so many who wanted to
defend that heritage, it has been in some ways more destructive of it
than standard liberal anti-traditionalism.
Despite plentiful ceremonial praise for the Constitution and virtual
orgies of constitutional legalism, we are living through the progressive
dismantling of America’s proudest political achievement. One sign of
the precarious condition of the Constitution is that many imagine that
it could be restored by electing more politicians sympathetic to its
tenets and by having more “strict constructionists” appointed to the
U.S. Supreme Court.
But the old American constitutionalism is inseparable from the
moral-spiritual and other culture that gave it birth. Limited government
and liberty were made possible by people who, because of who they were,
put checks on their appetites, ran their own lives and communities, and
behaved more generally in ways conducive to freedom under law.
Restoring American constitutionalism would presuppose some kind of
resurgence of that old culture. Americans would have to begin viewing
life rather differently from how they are viewing it now. They would
have to rearrange their priorities and start acting differently, placing
more emphasis on family, private groups and local communities. They
would have to want to take back much of the power ceded to politicians.
Is that likely to happen? If not, the Constitution may not be
salvageable.
The time has certainly come to consider what might take the place of
American constitutionalism. That so many admirers of the old
Constitution are prone to nostalgic dreaming and elaborate defenses of
what is long gone is a sign of moral and intellectual paralysis.
But there are people who have thought for a rather long time about
what should replace the Constitution of 1789. They include leading
Straussians and neoconservatives who have masked their agenda by
pretending to defend what is being lost. It is only fair to add that the
strategic designs of secretive and obfuscating leaders are not always
obvious to the rank and file.
Straussians and neoconservatives have warned against the consequences
of abandoning America’s “founding principles,” but they are not
referring to the ways and beliefs of the founders but to abstractions of
their own devising that they falsely attribute to revered historical
figures. Those principles are more reminiscent of the French Jacobins
than of the founders.
Straussians and neoconservatives have also warned of the consequences
of the “closing of the American mind”—the title of Allan Bloom’s 1987
best-selling book—but the mind that they want kept open is not the old
American mind but what they would have preferred it to be, their own
version of the Enlightenment mind.
The same people have warned of American cultural decline, as measured
some years back by William Bennett’s “cultural indicators,” but what
they want is not the old American virtues of neighborliness, localism,
self-control, compromise, and the rule of law, but the purported virtue
of vigorously asserting universal principles in the world. The new
Jacobins disdain moral hesitation and ambiguity, demanding what they
call “moral clarity.” You are either on the side of good, spreading
“democracy” or “freedom,” as they understand them, or you are siding
with the enemy.
The new Jacobins have a double message. On the one hand, they tell
Americans that their society is in great danger: It is threatened
domestically by fragmentation caused by lack of virtue and patriotism,
by moral nihilism, historicism, and multiculturalism. It is threatened
from abroad by Terrorism and “Islamofascism.” But, on the other hand,
the new Jacobins want to be reassuring: Be not afraid! We, the patriotic
champions of American principles, are here to protect you! We promise
you order and security and an America committed to right in the world.
Their notion of America reveals its alien origins even in strange-sounding language, as in the name “Department of Homeland
Security.” They are popularizing un-American ideas of governance,
notably the so-called “unitary” executive—the notion of the preeminence
of the president, who is to be as little constrained as possible by
checks and balances and the rule of law. Their goal is wholly at odds
with the constitutionalism of the framers.
Lest too many worry about the expansion and centralization of federal
power, the neo-Jacobins do not let Americans forget even for a day the
great and acute danger of Terrorism. A country that spends almost as
much on its military and national security as the rest of the world put
together has to tremble continuously before possible threats. People who
resist the progressive erosion of American liberties are portrayed as
unpatriotic and a threat to national security.
Those who would protect us are advancing the coup from within by
teaching us to associate American security and virtue with the
leadership of a strong man. Here, as in other ways, Straussian and
neoconservative ideas have blended with and hardened standard liberal
thinking. In the mid-20th century it was academics like James MacGregor
Burns who inspired a cult of the presidency. Burns, who eventually
became president of the American Political Science Association, was the
quintessential modern American liberal. He advocated popular rule
through strong presidential leadership in the Roosevelt-New Deal mode.
He knew well that this notion flatly contradicted the framers. They
opposed “democracy” and assumed that if any branch of the U.S.
government were preeminent, it would be the Congress. Now it is
Straussians and neoconservatives who most extol strong executive
leadership and more generally muscular federal government. They see the
powers of the executive as trumping the powers of the other branches,
especially at a time of national emergency. Then the president must
embody and express the will of the nation as he sees fit.
Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield is the intellectual figurehead of those attempting to justify the creeping coup from within. In The Wall Street Journal
(May 2, 2007) he has stressed that, now more than ever, America needs a
“strong executive.” Basing his argument on a strained and transparently
unhistorical interpretation of the framers, he contends that the rule
of law has drawbacks, “each of which suggests the need for
one-man-rule.” For one thing, the law can produce only what is mediocre,
“an average solution even in the best case.” For another, the law lacks
“energy.” In a crisis, government must put forth “energy,” and “the
best source of energy” is “one man.” What America needs today, Mansfield
declares, is “a wise man on the spot” with freedom to act for the
whole. To “subordinate” the president to law and the legislature is
“dangerous.” Then “he could not do his job.” Not only is a strong
executive needed to deal with emergencies, Mansfield contends. It must
also be able to overpower domestic opposition, “oppose a majority
faction produced by temporary delusions in the people.” Americans admire
strong presidents not just in politics but also in corporations, he
argues.
If it is suggested that there is a connection between a strong
executive and imperialism, Mansfield regards it as better to err on the
side of imperialism than isolationism. The difficulties of the war in
Iraq arose, he writes, “from having wished to leave too much to the
Iraqis, thus from a sense of inhibition rather than imperial ambition.”
It seems apposite that Mansfield, the advocate of muscular executive
power capable of enforcing its will at home and abroad, should also be a
champion of what he calls “manliness,” the topic of his recent book.
The many proponents of the theory of the “unitary” executive include
John Yoo, now a professor of law at the University of California,
Berkeley. As a Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration,
Yoo, formerly at the American Enterprise Institute, famously defended
broadly discretionary presidential power and the use of torture in the
war against terrorism. Michael Goldfarb, previously at the Weekly Standard
and now deputy communications director for the McCain for president
campaign, has asserted that the framers “sought an energetic executive
with near dictatorial power in pursuing foreign policy and war.”
Voices calling for unleashing allegedly virtuous American power have
long been heard in the electronic media, the major newspapers—Washington Post and New York Times
prominent among them—the big news magazines, and the leading opinion
periodicals. Long before 9/11 Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post
that America must take advantage of being the only superpower to create
a world to its liking. How should it accomplish this goal? “By
unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will” (March 5, 2001). Why
should virtuous America not be “implacable”? Robert Kagan wrote in the
same newspaper that “America . . . can sometimes seem like a bully on
the world stage.” “But really, the 1,200 pound gorilla is an
underachiever in the bullying business” (November 3, 2002).
The handwriting is all over the wall. It is becoming clearer with
each passing day that neo-Jacobinism and related currents, which may
have seemed innocuous and “merely academic” to some, have provided
ideological cover for an ever more grasping and ruthless pursuit of
power. People of great ambition who want to exercise the power being
abdicated by Americans are trying to make us accept and even welcome the
final disappearance of American constitutionalism and its culture of
modesty and self-restraint.
As already mentioned, some earlier assaults on traditional Western
civilization were launched by openly radical agitators who saw
themselves as on the outside of their societies. Their justifications
for seizing power were revolutionary doctrines like those of Marx and
Trotsky. Today’s rolling, gradual coup is engineered by already powerful
people who want to consolidate and expand their power. Wishing not to
antagonize too much those who still identify with an older America and
still wield some power, they try not to appear too radical and so often
present themselves as “neoconservatives” or even “conservatives.” As
should be clear from their own words, that does not make them friends of
traditional America.
Needless to say, neo-Jacobin ideology, though long a potent force, is
not the only way of justifying the coup from within. Those working to
centralize power are strongly entrenched in both major parties and in
other influential American institutions, and they employ different ideas
and symbols to woo and co-opt different constituencies.
Given the growing problems of the United States, why not welcome
these efforts to rethink the ways of traditional America? Because they
are inspired by highly dubious motives that color the proposals for
change. Though those trying to impose a new power structure often speak
in the name of America and their rhetoric is sometimes faintly
conservative, they are not inspired by a desire to protect and
reconstitute the best of the Western tradition. By changing the meaning
of words, they are rather trying to reconcile us to the demise of that
heritage and its replacement with their own enlightened and virtuous
regime. Their response to the crisis is aggravating the crumbling of the
American constitutional order. Their prescriptions contain the outlines
of tyranny and must fill the friends of traditional American and
Western civilization with trepidation.
What is ominous about these, our purported saviors, to repeat, is not
that they want power. It is that they represent a conceited and
self-absorbed special interest and have an obsessive desire to rule
others—a desire that cannot be concealed by feigned benevolence toward
Americans and all mankind. It is necessary to expose their false
solutions to what are real problems and to explore by what measures the
best of our civilization might, despite daunting odds, be given a new
lease on life.
Claes G. Ryn, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, is chairman of the National Humanities Institute and editor of Humanitas.
He also is president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. A
shorter version of this article entitled “Power Play” appears in the
October 6, 2008, issue of The American Conservative.
