So-Called 'Conservatives' as Government Centralizers

I'm reading a very interesting but little known book by Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams, Harvard UP, 1964. There are many interesting things about the book but what I want to emphasize here is how mistrustful of the unpropertied masses Adams was. Recall that Adams is nearly universally recognized by conservatives as their prime exemplar in American history, so we get a look at what the biases of 'conservatives' in America are.

While I see Joseph Ellis' book on Jefferson, American Sphinx, as an unfair hatchet job on our third president, reading Handler suggests that if one wanted to, which Handler does NOT, one could write a fairly critical and unempathic view of Adams quite easily. Adams used arguments in support of our war for independence which he later contradicted when opposing the French Revolution. But my primary point here is that Adams was so mistrustful of 'the great unwashed' that it is easy to see how he would have been a centralizer of government power. That he certainly was so is demonstrated by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts during his administration:

The Sedition Act says anyone "opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States" could be imprisoned for up to two years. It was also illegal to "write, print, utter, or publish" anything critical of the president or Congress.

Oh boy, would Cheney and Bush love that law. I think if you look at the types of political attitudes held by so-called American 'conservatives', whether it be Adams, Hamilton, William F. Buckley, or the 'neo-conservatives' of today, you will find them far more friendly to centralized government power than their rhetoric would like you to believe. They preach checks and balances and divided government, they profess reverence for our Constitution, but in practice their anti-democratic tendencies show in their readiness to support central authority and sacrifice civil liberties whenever they see fit.

Did the Framers Work to Avoid "Hypertrophy" of National Government?

I'm looking at yet another book by conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, based upon his 1988 Jefferson Lecture to the National Council of Humanities for which he was invited in the Reagan era by the then Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities, Dr. Lynne V. Cheney (yes that Lynne Cheney--this gives an idea how the ideological right got such a foothold in the Reagan-Bush 12 years). In this book Nisbet is imagining what would most strike the Framers if they could see the America of today. His imagination leads him to guess they would be most struck by the "prominence of war in American life", "the Leviathan-like...national government", and how "loosely attached to groups" of kinship and community instead of by "the cash nexus."

This list gives an idea why I tend to see Nisbet as in many ways a genuine conservative but one whose analytic powers were blunted by his recognition by and association with modern right-wingers like Reagan and Lynne Cheney. His analysis is suggestive of the themes of a genuine conservatism but he fails to really draw the conclusions an authentic conservative like Peter Viereck would draw because he was too busy consciously or unconsciously protecting his modern sponsors. His mention of "the cash nexus" as the main glue of contemporary America should have led him to oppose someone like Reagan who absolutely glorified business and the search for profit, indeed, the 1980s were dubbed the era of 'greed'. A genuine Burkean conservative would have to be a thorough-going critic of America's devotion to revolutionary industrial capitalism which was the prime force that destroyed local face-to-face groups and made the 'cash nexus' one of the sole social connectors in modern America. If one is worried about the prominence of war in modern America who is more to blame than super-patriotic, hyper-nationalistic Ronald Reagan who devoted so much money to the 'defense' and 'security' establishment? And it is probably the growth of the power of 'defense' and 'security' that have contributed most to the growth of our "Leviathan-like" national government.

Here I want to stress just one point that Nisbet made which I think is flawed: in writing about the "hypertrophy" of our national government (p. xi) he said: "The Framers had worked most diligently to prevent any future hypertrophy of the federal government." Having done a lot of reading lately about the Constitutional period this strikes me as a rather partial and inaccurate generalization. The very purpose of the Constitution was to create a more powerful federal government because of the disatisfaction of 'the Framers' with the perceived decentralization of the Articles of Confederation. Many, if not most, of the arguments at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were over just how strong and centralized the federal government would be. Recall that it was "Federalist" centralizers vs. "Anti-Federalist" decentralizers that marked the parties of that era and it was the "Federalist" centralizers, with a lot of help from 'republicans' like James Madison who won out. In Leonard D. White's The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History he wrote (pp. 13-4):

The event which was seldom absent from memory [in the minds of the Framers at the Constitutional Convention] was Shays' rebellion. The ruling consideration was not the revolutionary ardor of the 1770's but the sober necessity of order, commercial recovery, and fiscal rehabilitation.... A strong executive was attained in the Convention only by the hardest and most persistent fighting. At the outset Edmund Randolph had proposed an executive of three, in order to represent the major geographical divisions and to put the "remote parts" on an equal footing with the center.

As we know this proposal of a three person executive was defeated because the Federalists believed that conflicts and animosities between the three would make for too much conflict and result in inaction. James Wilson "preferred a single magistrate, as giving most energy, despatch, and responsibility to the office [White, p. 14]." Roger Sherman of Connecticut argued (p. 14) "An independence of the executive on the supreme legislature was, in his opinion, the very essence of tyrrany...."

In other words, many at the Constitutional Convention argued against a single executive who would be too independent of the legislature because they feared that would lead to "hypertrophy" of central power and to "tyranny". The power and relative independence and "energy" with which the President might act were precisely the issues fought over at the Constitutional Convention and, as we know, the relatively more centralizing views of the "Federalists" prevailed. This history, it seems to me, cannot support Nisbet's careless generalization that: "The Framers had worked most diligently to prevent any future hypertrophy of the federal government." If they had been diligent about hypertrophy they would have kept the Articles of Confederation or at most amended them (which is actually what the Convention's original instructions requested; they decided themselves to write a whole new Constitution). Or they could have accepted some of the many suggestions made at the Convention which would have weakened the executive and truly tried to "prevent any future hypertrophy of the federal government."

What Does ‘Conservative’ Really Mean?, Part 2

As I said in Part 1 I wish to describe the basic themes and concerns of a genuine, authentic conservatism. My previous efforts at this have been too brief and sketchy. Perhaps some will be surprised to learn of the key tenets of genuine conservatism, especially if you've become used to the pseudo-conservative ideology successfully sold to Americans since the 1950s under the misappropriated terms ‘conservatism’ and ‘conservative.’ The primary concerns of modern political conservatism hark back to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution first published in 1790; Burke is named by most as the father of modern, self-conscious conservatism. In this post I will present some of the views of Claes Ryn’s book, America the Virtuous.

As I stated in Part 1, perhaps the primary belief of conservatives is that human beings are possessed of base impulses and these need to be controlled if we are to have a civilized society. Such impulses include arrogance, pride, a desire for power over others, selfishness and self indulgence, belligerence, ruthlessness, etc. Conservatives see religion, morality and traditional social institutions as teaching and encouraging control of these baser motives. A morality emphasizing self-control is seen as essential to civilized life. In America the Virtuous Claes Ryn, whom I consider an authentic American conservative, wrote (p. 18) that Enlightenment writers like Rousseau, through a “denial of a darker side of human nature—what Christianity sometimes discusses in terms of ‘original sin’—undermined the ancient belief that checks, internal and external, must be placed on individual and collective action.” Much of modern conservatism is highly critical of the positive view of humans expressed during the Enlightenment and is especially critical of Rousseau. Ryn argued that the Founding Fathers who fashioned our representative, constitutional democracy were for the most part conservatives in this sense. “Constitutional democracy assumes a human nature divided between higher and lower potentialities and sees a need to guard against merely self-serving, imprudent, and even tyrannical impulses in the individual and the people as a whole (Ryn, p. 50).”

Ryn continued (p. 55): “In the West, the decentralized society is deeply rooted in Christian ideas of community and virtue, which are akin to earlier Greek ideas…. The individual’s primary moral responsibility is to make the best of self and to love neighbor. This is a demanding notion of virtue, for nothing is more difficult than overcoming one’s own selfishness and behaving charitably toward people of flesh and blood at close range.” Ryn is distinguishing the latter charity from an abstract commitment to the betterment of people who live at a great distance and are not experienced personally like ‘the downtrodden’, ‘mankind’, ‘the proletariat’, or ‘the poor.’ Ryn wrote that (p. 57): “the effect of the old morality of character is to build self-restraint and respect for others… and to reduce the danger of conflict. The emphasis on curbing arrogance, greed, and other types of self-indulgence increases the chances for harmonious relations.”

Frankly, it’s difficult for me to see how this premise of conservatism can be denied, i.e., the base impulses described definitely do exist and are strong in humans; civilization does require control of such impulses. Perhaps some might differ about precisely which institutions are best able to teach such self-control, but the need for it should not be controversial.

A second prime value of conservatism emphasizes the importance of concrete, local, face-to-face groups such as families, small groups, and local communities. Ryn wrote that (p. 52): "Constitutional democracy assumes a decentralized society in which the lives of most citizens are centered in small, chiefly private, and local associations, what the late Robert Nisbet called ‘autonomous groups.’ These can exercise independent authority. In the decentralized society there are many centers and levels of power. Political authority is widely dispersed, enabling regional and local entities to decide for themselves…. People tend to define their own interests not as discrete individuals but as members of the groups that they most treasure, starting with the family and other associations at close range. By the ‘people,’ then, constitutional democracy does not mean an undifferentiated mass of individuals….”

This is an important and possibly little known conservative tenet. In the 1950s there were a great number of social analyses published heralding the coming of a ‘mass society.’ This was a society where small, local, face-to-face relationships were eroded and replaced by centralized authority that was distant from and less influenced by individuals and their small, primary groups. As the natural authority of small, local, ‘autonomous groups’ was eroded, society was said to be “atomized” and individuals had fewer and fewer local ties with one another; they became more and more an undifferentiated mass. With the spread of urbanization and the consequent shrinkage of locality accompanying a less rural society it is hard to deny that this is true to some considerable extent. Usually such analyses (see Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, first published in 1953) have emphasized the state as sucking up the powers of localities and creating the mass society. I suspect this is because in America it is relatively rare to read mainstream academics who are willing to criticize American industrialization leading to huge centralized corporations as a primary factor in creating atomized ‘mass’ individuals whose primary function is to consume in a self-indulgent fashion. My guess is the two primary motives to growth in the central government in America have been (1) the growth of huge corporations in the late 19th century requiring central government as a 'countervailing power' and (2) the huge increase in government due to a more and more massive 'defense' and 'security' presence (the latter probably due in significant part to the growth of American imperialism beginning in the late 19th century, see Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq).

Okay, this post is getting too long! I'll continue in Part 3.

Is Central Government a Neutral Arbiter?

In yesterday's post I raised the question of what a commitment to 'individual freedom' means if the state is not a neutral arbiter, that is, if it does take sides and does not simply ensure the framework within which individuals pursue their individually defined goals. I'm reading a book by historian Leonard Richards called Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle; it certainly contributes an answer to the question of the neutrality of the Massachussets State government in the 1780s. Richards discovered a list of 4000 signatures of those involved in Shays's rebellion and thus was able to do research on the actual social composition of the rebels; previously no one had gone to the trouble of deciphering the handwriting and doing this research. The book was published in 2002, two hundred fifteen years after the rebellion.

Richards' research makes it clear who the rebels were, what their motives were and how they managed to attract so many followers. The book makes it clear that the Massachussets legislature at this time was dominated by Boston merchants and speculators and their privileged allies. After the passage of a new constitution written primarily by that love object of 'conservatives', John Adams (who probably does qualify as a genuine conservative), the legislature passed laws ensuring that all the notes of indebtedness of Massahchussets would be redeemed at face value and interest would be paid. While many of these notes were issued as 'pay' to Revolutionary War soldiers they had never been redeemed and thus many if not most of the soldiers sold these notes to buy necessities for themselves and their families; the primary purchasers of the notes were more well off Boston speculators who could afford to buy them at 10-25% of their face value and wait or trade them in the Boston securities market. When the legislature, representing the interests of these Boston merchants and speculators, passed legislation redeeming these notes at a cost to state government about twice as high as any other state, the state had to figure out how to pay for this. Thus, they sharply raised taxes which regressively fell unequally onto the farmers of the backcountry of Western Massachussets. Thus, while many of the ordinary soldiers who fought in the war received relatively worthless notes as pay and were forced to sell these to speculators, these same soldiers were going to have pay a heavy burden of taxes to redeem these notes with interest so the speculators could profit. Moreover, the notes were not accepted as payments of taxes, the latter had to paid with hard money which was scarce and difficult to acquire.

These were the primary reasons that back country Western Massachussets farmers and their allies took up arms against the state government. Richards also makes it clear that the rebellion was a major motivator for the 'great men' of the Constitutional convention to get together and write our national Constitution. Most of the 'founding fathers' were relatively wealthy property holders who were made afraid by Shays's Rebellion and wanted, among other things, to be able to have a national government which could easily raise an army to put down popular rebellions. Indeed, that is precisely what President Washington did in 1794 when he amassed 13,000 troops to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

Does it really further the freedom and dignity of the individual to support a state if that state is not a neutral arbiter?