Novus Ordo Seclorum/ Remembering Who We Are
McDonald, Forrest & Bradford, M. E.
BOOK REVIEWS .......................................................................................................................................................................... NOVUS ORDO...
...His title, for example, is charming, but the point it makes is perfectly straightforward: presidential campaigns are ultimately about issues and action rather than image and manipulation...
...Case in point: Novus Ordo Seclorum, the new book by Forrest McDonald, certainly the leading conservative historian of the Founding period...
...University Press of Kansas 329 Carruth, Lawrence KS 66045 Charge it by phone: 913-864-4154 20% discount to Name American Spectator readers Address City State 360 pages...
...Harvey Mansfield...
...Then why take the trouble to present such an elaborate catalogue of "systems" of political and economic theory...
...The making of Presidents is necessarily a weightier affair in the age of The But-ton...
...Pocock, have proclaimed as the moral of the story of the Constitution...
...State Dept...
...from municipal and state ceremonies that honor local heroes...
...There are many things to be savored in these overviews, not the least of which are the telling corrections he makes to Garry Wills's attempt to read John Locke out of the Founding...
...J. H. Hexter...
...If a leading conservative historian cannot find any support for it, who can...
...In some areas, of course, such as the distribution of powers between the national and state governments, there was no experience to go on, and the Framers had to rely on "common sense, their collective wisdom, and their willingness to compromise...
...as foreign 1 I language on I your own...
...but the Bicentennial season is just dawning, and with it the realization that the 1988 elections will be con-ducted right in the middle of the commemoration...
...In the last year of the campaign alone, they spoke millions of words and made thousands of appearances...
...He glimpses only tarnish in the "shining city on a hill" of Puritanism, and has no truck with "ideology" of any sort...
...and a case could certainly be made for extending the observance to the ratification of the Bill of Rights (1791...
...In the same way, the American Declaration of Independence justifies the freedom of our own people on the basis of a universal principle...
...Brookhiser modestly omits) to sit down and write about it afterwards with the kind of deconstructionist zeal that penetrates the woozy surfaces of stump rhetoric to isolate the hard nubs of fact within...
...The weakness in McDonald's otherwise fine book is that it wants a consideration of those ends (as ends, i.e., not as intellectual background...
...But this distinction—a theoretical martini that is two parts Oakeshott, one part Voegelin, but that can be made drier—would itself be completely foreign to a genuinely traditional polity, whichwould not know that its tradition is not true, i.e., that it is only one among many traditions...
...author of The Spirit of Liberalism "This is vintage McDonald...
...religion and politics, or Meese and Brennan on judicial activism...
...He is assertive without being combative...
...The Republicans will rally around Attorney General Meese's call for a return to the "jurisprudence of original intention," but this will quickly lead to confusion in the ranks, for whereas the liberal academics are nearly unanimous in their advocacy of the "living Constitution'—i.e., the Constitution that has no fixed ends or principles save its infinite adaptability to the dictates of the Zeitgeist, as interpreted by the divining class of judges—conservative thinkers are divided over not only what the original intention of the Framers was, but whether they had an original intention at all...
...As McDonald himself recognizes, "the political theories and ideologies at the command of the Framers were . . . of limited practical use...
...Although the book's subtitle is "Observations of a Southern Conservative," Bradford's point is that the original intention of the Framers embodied the highest traditions of antebellum Southern conservatism, and that by "remembering who we are," Southern conservatives may direct the country as a whole back to its Founding principles...
...Lawrence KS 66045 A History Book Club selection List price $25.00 Special price with this coupon $20.00 Send copies of Nor'us Ortto Sec/mum (rr' $20.00 plus $ 1.50 for postage/handling...
...indeed, "they used political theorists to justify positions that they had taken for nontheoretical reasons...
...that "all men are created equal" and are therefore endowed with certain natural rights...
...Consensus was the glue that held his position together...
...Sanford Levinson, coauthor of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking "What a splendid book...
...Two hundred million Americans, ultimately...
...It is difficult to convert intellectual history into political history, and that is the problem with his account of the convention: he has already boxed James Wilson, George Mason, James Madison, and the other Framers into intellectual corners—Wilson is a "court-party nationalist," a disciple of Hume, Smith, and Blackstone...
...for it is in that famous series of essays that "Publius" defends the principal institutional contrivances of the Convention not as mere products of experience or as jury-rigged compromises or as deductions from a systematic theory—but as "inventions of prudence...
...And (Mr...
...Brookhiser's sense of humor is more a mat-ter of overall lightness of tone than vigorous one-on-one headknocking...
...For the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the ends of government were well known, and had been proclaimed, in lapidary prose, in the Declaration of Independence...
...To construct an answer, McDonald shuttles back and forth between "principles" and "interests," only to decide that the compromises between them were governed mostly by "experience, both their own and that of the mother country," inasmuch as experience was, in John Dickinson's words, "a better guide than reason...
...his politics is an appreciation of the American tradition as it existed before the Great Emancipator "derailed" it, to borrow Willmoore Kendall's term...
...C Free atalog' Call (203) 453-9794, or fill out and send this ad to Audio-Forum Room 230, On-the-Green Guilford, CT 06437 State/Zip I am particularly interested in (check choice): ^ Spanish ^ French ^ German ^ Polish ^ Greek ^ Russian ^ Vietnamese ` 0 Bulgarian ^ Turkish ^ Hausa ^ Other `— ti a^Iws00 THE OUTSIDE STORY: HOW DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS REELECTED REAGAN Richard Brookhiser/Doubleday/$16.95 Terry Teachout UI1O—EI1%p THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 37...
...It is more likely to come from private sources—whether the researches of good scholars (often sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities) or the faithful and voluntary efforts of good citizens...
...But this wisdom did not amount to a theoretical "system," and so McDonald concludes that "it is meaningless to say that the Framers intended this or that the Framers intended that: their positions were diverse and, in many particulars, incompatible...
...It deals authoritatively with topics no student of America can afford to ignore...
...Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana is exemplary...
...It is in many ways a scrappy and courageous book: Bradford has never been one to back away from a fight, and there is a zest to his polemics that shines through even when he (rarely) does not seem to be enjoying them...
...Cuomo had found, in consensus and prudence, a way of having religion when he wanted it and not having' it when he didn't...
...for while saying he will ne'er consent, he consents...
...Sometimes it inheres in an essentially serious piece of analysis...
...This willingness to take his own tradition seriously, to see it as the indispensable starting point for political reflection...
...But what we have here is a logical fallacy—the false dilemma—for it is untrue that the alternative is either "experience" or a "system" of theory...
...This commemoration will stretch out over at least three years, honoring the drafting (1787) and ratification (1788) of the Constitution, as well as the commencement of government (1789) under it...
...Mencken wrote brilliantly on the subject in Making a President, but it is increasingly hard for readers to sympathize with a point of view so comprehensively nihilistic as to dismiss the entire political process as a peculiarly virulent species of buncombe...
...The nose was also the place from which his voice emerged, about a quarter of the way down the bridge by the sound of it, where the bone ends and the cartilage begins...
...Brookhiser to write a book about the 1984 campaign based not on background interviews and astonishing revelations a la Deep Throat but on the simplest method of all, "to focus on what the candidates and their supporters say and do in public...
...She referred to them for the same reason Baudelaire wrote about sin, or Thomas Wolfe about Asheville: it was all they knew...
...to leave the green room and the wings and go out front, and attend, with respect, to the performance...
...personnel in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, ' Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Learn Italian, more...
...The book is subtitled "The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution," and true to his title, McDonald takes us on a tour of the intellectual background of the Framers—the principles of English law, "systems of political theory" and "systems of political economy" that were familiar to them, as well as the lessons they had learned from the experience of the Revolution and of life under the Articles of Confederation...
...The Tall Ships were majestic, and splendidly out-of-date...
...salute his achievement as not merely an intellectual feat but also an unparalleled act of service to the Republic...
...And what a pleasure to read history that gets to the heart of the ideas directly...
...On his hair and on his grin, which could light up his face—except when he was trying to be funny...
...It is this view of the political process that has led Mr...
...No book is more likely to demonstrate . . . the sheer excitement that can still be generated when a first rate mind confronts one of the monumental events of modern history...
...What McDonald—as well as most of the parties to the debate over the Supreme Court—overlooks is the virtue of prudence, the practical (not theoretical) wisdom of the political man who knows how to deliberate well, that is, who knows what is the best thing to do under the circumstances...
...Conservatives in particular should...
...More often it is simply a single component of his first-rate journalistic skills, a not-so-simple matter of taking in the obvious and finding it revealing...
...Still, there is a certain asymmetry between McDonald's expansive intellectual history and his cramped interpretation of the Constitutional Convention, which forms the second half of the book...
...What we have seen lately, then, is simply the opening round of the battle over the interpretation of the Constitution that will, one way or an-other, color the entire 1988 campaign...
...And the alternative has previously seemed to be that starchy, humorless species of liberal punditry of which Theodore White and Elizabeth Drew are the most flagrant practitioners...
...By a typically American miracle, however, we get a second chance to turn two hundred, though this time we celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution rather than of the Union...
...Orders must be prepaid or charged to VISA or MasterCard...
...Beneath the fluffy meringue of an adroit journalist at work, The Outside Story is actually predicated on a vision of American politics which sounds at times uncannily like the rational-choice models of James Q. Wilson or Charles Murray: In the course of the 1984 campaign, eight men sought the nomination of one of the major parties...
...And besides, there are contradictory elements in every tradition, and memories are always faulty and partial...
...When, before Notre Dame, had he made a resonant statement of his personal opinion of abortion...
...To justify his refusal to appeal to universals he must make a universal argument: he appe,.ls to the distinction between "nomocratic" and "teleocratic" polities, between polities that live by, and for, their customary ways, on the one hand, and those that are "purpose-oriented," that have abstract or universalistic ends, on the other...
...and perhaps even from the speeches of our leading politicians...
...People don't take it all in uncritically...
...E. Bradford...
...To figure this out, he must know what is the best thing to do simply, so that he may discern how best to get there, insofar as it is possible, from here...
...and his prose never fails to engage, even if it has a quirk or two...
...but how much do we really learn about the Convention by being told, for example, that "the Randolph plan had called for a fundamentally Montesquieuan separation of powers, and on one occasion Randolph cited Montesquieu in sup-port of his argument for proportional representation, and on another he utTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 35 tered a dictum of Montesquieu's without attribution...
...and to the notion of the supplanting of citizen virtue by bourgeois self-interest that numerous scholars, from Herbert Storing to J.G.A...
...writing in The National Review "An important, comprehensive statement about the most fundamental period in American history...
...Brookhiser is very nearly up to the supremely high standards of his model...
...Bradford refuses stubbornly to leave the horizon of his own tradition, and rather than following the Declaration's prudent path from America to universal principles and back to America, he rejects any attempt to justify conservatism on universal grounds...
...In the end, memory is no match for reason because men want to know that what they remember—their tradition—is good, not just that it is theirs...
...In any event, what were the "nontheoretical reasons" that guided the Framers...
...This is a realistic, tough-minded book about the role of ideas among practical men of affairs at a pivotal and difficult moment in human history...
...25.00 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 1 philosophizes with a hammer, smashing away at the most sacred idols of the American political tradition—Lincoln, the "myth" of equality in the Declaration of Independence, the apocalyptic strain in American presidential rhetoric...
...M. E. Bradford's new book is something else again...
...On the whole, though, Mr...
...Somehow he finds angles to work that no one else has seen or seen so well...
...tial that even he seems weary of squinting at it...
...But this lightness never obscures the integrity of Mr...
...Given that omission, it is understandable that his volume stops well short of an interpretation of The Federalist, the greatest exposition of the "original intention" of the Constitution...
...In The Outside Story: How Democrats and Republicans Reelected Reagan, Richard Brookhiser has taken as his model a more modest brand of political journalism: the kind of colorful, personality-oriented writing of which A.J...
...The official national commemoration of these stirring events will be directed by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, comprising twenty-three (part-time) members and about twelve million dollars' worth of staff, who will direct (in the first year) five million dollars' worth of programs, no doubt along the lines of preliminary staff proposals for bumper stickers, I kid you not, announcing "I Love the Constitution" and "Thank You, Founding Fathers...
...is a healthy reminder of the political philosophy of the classics, of that inheritance of thought that antedates America by two thousand years and that stands today as the principal antidote to the nihilism that begins in rootlessness and ends in cosmopolitan tyranny...
...But the classics, although they began with their own city or their own political tradition, were not content to remain there, because the claim that their tradition made to be respectable, to be worthy, to be right, required for its own validation an inquiry into the universal question of right...
...fortune and high school football (at which he excelled) a nose that looked like a failed design for a can opener...
...And if the Framers were entitled to draw their own lessons from experience, why aren't our newfangled judges...
...to Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood's exaggerated emphasis on the Opposition tradition...
...Without the ability of practical reason to deliberate on such means to moral ends, it is impossible to have any moral or political intention properly so called, much less an original one...
...So much, it seems, for the "jurisprudence of original intention...
...Michael Kammen, author of A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and Historical Imagination "A magnificent recreation .. . The next two years will see the publication of literally dozens of books on the history of the, Constitution...
...Who provided the consensus on abortion...
...M...
...Witness this cogent analysis of Mario Cuomo's Notre Dame speech on abortion: There was only one weak spot...
...author of On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History Publisher of the American Presidency Series University Press of Kansas 329 Carruth...
...This is certainly true of Bradford's recollections of Roman history, for example, which need to be refreshed by some attention to Roman texts, and of his reading of the Declaration of In-dependence, which.is so glaringly parModern American journalists have had trouble finding a via media between grimness and frivolity when it comes to covering presidential politics...
...He is learned, but wears his learning lightly...
...They will appeal for support to the great army of liberal historians, political scientists, and constitutional theorists ensconced in theuniversities and long-practiced in the arts of political power...
...If so, the Republican party had better either rethink its commitment to original intention, or abandon its tradition as the party of Abraham Lincoln...
...I auoia'FaRUm offers the best in self-instructional foreign language courses using audio cassettes — featuring those used to train U.S...
...In either case, until it can find a reasonable way back to the principles of the founding, its prospects for the future do not look good...
...Madison is midway between the two, "an ideologue in search of an ideology"—when suddenly they are brought on stage and asked to think and act on their own, rather than as captives of an intellectual inheritance...
...Mondale made it up Terry Teachout is associate editor of Harper's...
...In short, the serious commemoration of the Constitution is not likely to be the work of the Commission...
...because they are, in fact, different...
...The Democrats, to put it bluntly, are going to pose as the saviors of the Constitution from those right-wing radicals who would subvert religious freedom, judicial independence, and the equal protection of the laws for the poor and disadvantaged, as well as for the long-suffering middle class...
...Not that ideas are not important...
...Four achievements, one flop, a million draws: what could the Democrats offer instead...
...But wasn't Governor Mario Cuomo a prominent and respected one of them...
...Mondale recited his speech solemnly, like someone explaining the facts of life...
...All that was wanting was a form of government that would achieve those ends...
...To be sure, Bradford is not known for dwelling on the conventional pieties, and in this as in his other books he "Bristles with wit and intellectual energy" —CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution Forrest McDonald "A masterpiece .. . McDonald's status as an interpreter of the Constitution is unequalled—magisterial...
...If he is right, however, a return to the "jurisprudence of original intention" would mean returning to the view that only white, property-owning free-men are citizens under the Constitution, or in fact are equal human beings under the Declaration...
...If even a single one of them matches this one in insight and clarity, that will be an occasion for national rejoicing...
...Or rather, he fancies that he does...
...Surely they meant something by it...
...was the Declaration supposed to be, too...
...NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE CONSTITUTION Forrest McDonald/University Press of Kansas/$25.00 REMEMBERING WHO WE ARE: OBSERVATIONS OF A SOUTHERN CONSERVATIVE M. E. Bradford/University of Georgia Press/$15.95 Charles R. Kesler Ten years ago the United States threw itself a party to mark the two hundredth birthday of the Declaration of Independence—and to help forget Vietnam, Watergate, and Richard Nixon—in the course of which President Gerald Ford visited Old North Church, flags and fireworks bedecked our skies, and stately frigates sailed into New York harbor...
...Make checks payable to University Press of Kansas...
...To be sure, Webster and Hayne need have no fear for their reputations, at least not yet...
...Like all of his works, this one displays at once an encyclopedic learning and a biographer's sense of character that make his retelling of a familiar story always new, vital, and unexpected...
...Mason is a "republican ideologue," a follower of Bolingbroke and Montesquieu...
...It was great fun to watch, but like Ford's presidency, not much to think about...
...Brookhiser's argument...
...The winner and his running mate then took on the incumbents, the nominees of the other major party...
...Ferraro pegged her discussions of Lebanon and Central America to trips she had taken there as a congresswoman...
...on his hair—brown gone gray, smooth and handsome as a badger-tail shaving brush...
...And Mr...
...His set pieces on the various Democratic candidates, for example, are consistently sharp and amusing: Fortune gave Mondale baleful, fishy eyes...
...Although it hasn't been widely noticed, there is a boomlet of sorts in the making of serious speeches by national political figures—speeches that tackle, howsoever rashly, issues that are fundamental to American constitutional-ism: think of Reagan and Cuomo on Charles R. Kesler is assistant professor of political science and associate director of the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont-McKenna College...
...They choose, which means they choose differently...
...Remembering Who We Are is a collection of essays spanning twenty years, on subjects as various as Abraham Lincoln, Southern agrarianism, William Faulkner, and federal support for the arts and humanities...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
