Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition
that all men are created equal.
-Abraham Lincoln,
Gettysburg
Address
We're all familiar with Winston Churchill's adage about the need to be liberal in youth and conservative when mature, and many, many folks do follow that pattern. Most notoriously the entire neoconservative movement is made up of former liberal intellectuals who shifted to the Right during the 60s and 70s. Then in the 80s and 90s a second wave--including David Horowitz, William Henry, Harry Stein, Jim Sleeper, Nat Hentoff, and Christopher Hitchens--followed suit, to one degree or another. Against this tide swam only two significant figures of the 60s Right--Joan Didion and Garry Wills. Ms Didion, who seems to have been radicalized by personal experiences in Central America, promptly stopped writing anything worth reading, churning out anti-Reagan hackwork instead. But Garry Wills retained his full power--if not all his prior wisdom--and is today one of the Left's very best polemicists. More than that though, he seemingly set himself up as a one man Shadow Government, systematically taking on the topics and personalities most dear to the Right--thus his screeds against Ronald Reagan and John Wayne and his attacks on gun rights and the like. In Lincoln at Gettysburg he tries to adopt the iconic Republican, Abraham Lincoln, for the cause of liberalism and to attack the idea that the Constitution must be read as written.
The book contains much that's interesting and worthwhile about the mechanics by which Lincoln wrote and delivered the Gettysburg Address and it shows how contemporary funerary practices and transcendentalism influenced the address. But all of this seems secondary to his real purpose, which is to challenge one of his old colleagues at National Review--Willmoore Kendall--who accused Lincoln of sneaking the idea of equality into the Constitution through the backdoor of the Declaration of Independence and the rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address. Mr. Wills, borrowing Mr. Kendall's argument but turning it into a positive, says that:
The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative
expression of the American spirit--as authoritative as the Declaration
itself, and perhaps
even more influential, since it determines how we
read the Declaration. For most people now, the Declaration means
what Lincoln told us it
means, as a way of correcting the Constitution itself
without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this
intellectual revolution,
that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to
some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states' rights
may have arguments,
but they have lost their force, in courts as well
as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, its
concept of a single people
dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed.
Because of it, we live in a different America.
Unfortunately, while we can concede that this is what the Left would like us to believe, Mr. Wills fails to demonstrate that this is actually how most of us now read the Declaration, or that it would be a good thing if we did, or that it is a good thing that courts have sometimes reward it so, or that the opposing arguments actually have lost any of their force.
The following blog post touches on the main issue of equality as an American political goal:
THE ESSENTIAL MENCKEN:
Mencken
and Orwell, Social Critics With Little (and Much) in Common (EDWARD
ROTHSTEIN, October 26, 2002, NY Times)
Mr. Teachout shows that Mencken's influential assault
on the genteel tradition included opposition to the very idea of democracy--
not just to democratic taste but to the notion of
equality itself. This was accompanied by racist comments and Mencken's
allegiance
to his family's Teutonic origins. Before World War
I, Mencken wrote about the "race-efficiency" and "superbly efficient ruling
caste"
in Germany. During World War II, Mr. Teachout shows,
an eerie silence was more the rule than Mencken's half-hearted declarations
that Hitler was a boob.
But Mencken was reacting to a tension latent in democratic
life - the fear that it can level cultural life instead of allowing it
to flourish,
that it can even turn majority rule into tyranny.
And yet as Mencken did not realize or did not care to, tyranny also looms
in the act of
rebelling against democracy.
Orwell, like Mencken, was not all that keen on American
life, but the tyranny trap worried him. A tension between the claims of
democratic
liberty and socialist equality may have haunted
him, as well as those who followed him on the left. Could state power be
used to bring an ideal
society into being without leading to the oppressive
regime of "1984" (which he called INGSOC - English Socialism)? And if the
Soviet Union
had already become such a regime, as Orwell believed,
how was it to be opposed and what forces could be marshaled against it?
Orwell was torn, uncertain; his novels were clearer
that his essays. But the need to confront that regime was what the cold
war was all about.
Now the issue returns in a slightly different way
as new forms of tyranny are faced. That is why Orwell still matters and
why Mencken may
not.
This is, I believe, quite wrong. Mr. Mencken continues to matter precisely because even so great a critic of society as George Orwell could not in the end face the truth that Mr. Mencken never ceased speaking, that democratic freedom contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, chiefly in the ease with which it can be turned into an egalitarian leveling force. Woe are we if we ever forget the warning that has echoed from Burke to de Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset to Mencken to Willmoore Kendall to...ah, but who will say it now?...that equality is the enemy of freedom.
The fundamental tension within democratic conservatism is, has been, and will be the recognition that democracy is necessary but at the same time dubious, even dangerous. As Mencken put it:
I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic,
and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers,
frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up
is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it
inordinately wasteful,
extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form
of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is
rascality at the very
heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality
since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that
rascality is necessary
to human government, and even to civilization itself
- that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do
not know:
I report only that when the suckers are running
well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat
malicious man:
my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to
be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who
feels for and
with them, and is pained when they are debauched
and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
Conservatism's predicament is that it refutes utterly the idea that men are all equal in fact but espouses a political philosophy that demands that all be treated and listened to as if they were equal.
Now we are all familiar with the ringing statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal", and this was fine so long as it was understood to mean that men are equal at birth, each free to make himself into a greater or lesser man. But in what Mr. Kendall scorned and Garry Wills hails as a "giant, if benign swindle", Abraham Lincoln elevated the doctrine of equality in the Gettysburg Address and performed , again in Mr. Wills's words, a "daring act of intellectual sleight-of-hand" which has ever since made actual equality of station an end, if not <b>the</b> end, of government.
It is then the solemn and often unpleasant duty of conservatism to constantly remind the masses that they are not all equal, that, as Russell Kirk declared in one of his canons of conservative thought:
[C]ivilized society requires orders and classes.
The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at leveling
lead to despair,
if enforced by positive legislation.
The danger of allowing all men to think themselves equal and of allowing them to create legislation to impose this equality--the very need for which would seem to put paid to the idea that they are equal in the first place--was expressed by Mr. Ortega y Gasset, looking out across a Europe which had already succumbed to the dangerous notion:
European history reveals itself, for the first time,
as handed over to the decisions of the ordinary man as such. Or to turn
it into the active voice:
the ordinary man, hitherto guided by others, has
resolved to govern the world himself. This decision to advance to the social
foreground has
been brought about in him automatically, when the
new type of man he represents had barely arrived at maturity. If from the
view-point
of what concerns public life, the psychological
structure of this new type of mass-man be studied, what we find is as follows:
(1) An inborn,
root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without
any grave limitations; consequently, each average man finds within himself
a sensation
of power and triumph which, (2) invites him to stand
up for himself as he is, to look upon his moral and intellectual endowment
as excellent,
complete. This contentment with himself leads him
to shut himself off from any external court of appeal; not to listen, not
to submit his
opinions to judgment, not to consider others' existence.
His intimate feeling of power urges him always to exercise predominance.
He will
act then as if he and his like were the only beings
existing in the world and, consequently, (3) will intervene in all matters,
imposing his own
vulgar views without respect or regard for others,
without limit or reserve...
Conservatism, having recognized the potential for tyranny in government by the elite, counterbalanced the elite institutions by shifting power to the hoi polloi. But this sets up an inherently dangerous situation, for who will stop the masses once they get a wind in their sails? Thus, we need the Menckens--despite their irascibility and their bigotry--to whisper in our ears, like the slaves who followed Roman Emperors, that: Thou art mortal. It takes a Mencken to keep us humble, to try to constrain what will otherwise be a natural tendency to exchange an unequal freedom for an imposed equality. The Menckens help to keep us free men of the sort that Eric Hoffer described:
Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in
human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is
not perfect.
They know that basic human problems can have no
final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from
absolute,
and that the good life is compounded of half measures,
compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection
of
approximations and the insistence on absolutes are
the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
This is an unpopular message and one inevitably makes oneself unpopular in enunciating it--as witness Mencken--but it is vital nonetheless. It ensures that conservatism will always be a minority philosophy, but, just perhaps, if it's conveyed often enough, loudly enough, and as wittily as Mr. Mencken conveyed it, it may serve to preserve us as free men. But you wouldn't bet on it...
We need only add that Mr. Lincoln could not of course legally achieve
what Mr. Wills claims for him. It is not, in our system, left to
individuals, no matter their power or their greatness, to rewrite the Constitution
and its principles. One man can not "remake" a constitutional republic
and, where it is not openly hostile, the Constitution is silent as regards
the Left's goal of equality. It is obviously inaccurate to say that
a text which does not even count blacks as fully human and which extends
no rights to women has as its central function the pursuit of universal
equality. That the Left has been able to successfully claim that
egalitarianism is the purpose of our government was very clever on their
part, but can in no way be justified by the Constitution, the Declaration,
or the Gettysburg Address. In fact, Mr. Wills does not even bother
to try to show that the "sleight-of-hand" is anything more than trickery.
In this regard, Mr. Wills, as always, is better at getting conservatives'
goats than at producing well-reasoned argument. He presumably learned
the former during his stay on the Right, but in leaving the movement may
have sentenced himself to the latter. This book is thus highly readable
but ultimately its purposes are rather dishonest.
(Reviewed:28-Oct-02)
Grade: (C)
