The Liberal Search for a Usable Past

...Were the agrarian populists heirs to the noblest traditions of American democratic radicalism or did they stand in the way of industrialization, as progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson believed...

...in the other, the building of the nation-state follows, and results from (or threatens) the spreading of democracy...

...It is rather embarrassing for pro-labor liberals to recall now that the Asian exclusion acts were the first great political triumph of American labor...

...The racism of white workers was often vicious and even assumed violent forms...

...But their fear that white capitalists were using contract laborers from China, India and elsewhere to undercut wage workers was legitimate...

...The man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country, just as he did in fixing the power of the central government in the development of nations...

...Over the years, I have had many occasions to engage in debates with members of the libertarian movement (all of whom, I am delighted to report, regard me as an incorrigible "statist" in the mold of the hated FDR...

...Take "nativism," one of the bugbears of American political mythology...

...You could make a checklist of current liberal positions and go back through American history assigning grades...

...What separates the pseudotraditional propagandist from the sincere member of an intellectual tradition, I think, is the fact that the former, unlike the latter, claims all of the nation's history for his cause...

...While it can provide alibis for historic crimes, it can also rescue us from the trap of grading our predecessors by their success or failure in anticipating our own values...

...The propagandist is free to quote any historical figure out of context to support his tenets...

...The ex-Communist Johnny "Appleseed" Rossen's Little Red, White and Blue Book of the '60s featured quotations from Thomas Jefferson and Eldridge Cleaver...

...Thinking Aloud THE LIBERAL SEARCH FOR A USABLE PAST BY MICHAEL LIND I recently took part in a conference at the University of Virginia that addressed the question, "Does America Have a Democratic Mission...

...Lacking agreed-upon foreign models of a working future, many liberals— not only in the United States—are seeking to ground their values in the history of their own country...

...They correspond loosely with the two enduring party coalitions—the alliance of Northern Yankees, Germanic Protestants, blacks, and, more recently, Jews...

...The Jacksonian Democrats get an A for egalitarianism but an F for racism...

...but they did build railroads, and we have them today...

...The nationbuilding monarchs "were often cruel in their methods, but they did strive steadily toward something that society needed and very much wanted, a strong central state able to keep the peace, to stamp out civil war, to put the unruly nobleman in his place, and to permit the bulk of individuals to live safely...

...The alternative view would see modern nationalist and statist liberalism as the outgrowth of the older anti-statist Jefferson-Jackson tradition, with the Populist movement marking the shift toward the use of "Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends...

...The impulse of most liberals will be to side with yesterday's workers against yesterday's bosses...

...Hardly anyone confuses Left with East anymore, and the fiscal problems of the social democratic nation-state have made it more difficult to equate Left with North (Sweden...

...The first includes the Federalists, Whigs, Republicans, Progressives, and today's mostly Northern Democrats...

...To my mind the most remarkable enunciation of this kind of theory by an American is to be found in candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt's address to San Francisco's Commonwealth Club in 1932...

...It ignores the possibility that our predecessors were not necessarily immoral or irrational when the policies they favored did not agree with present notions of social justice...

...History shows, though, that both the Hamiltonian Northern party and the Jeffersonian Southern party engaged in campaigns to restrict or eliminate immigration—at different times, for different reasons, and with regard to different peoples...

...That worries about unfair competition in the labor market were paramount is evident from the fact that many labor leaders went on to campaign against European immigration and convict labor...

...Of course, we are not all Federalists and Republicans (nor, pace Richard M. Nixon, are we all Keynesians now...

...Similarly, from the confident appeals to American lore of many neoconservative disciples of Leo Strauss you would never know that their guru was an emigré German academic philosopher who paid little attention to the intellectual norms of his adopted United States...

...In the suite of offices where the executives worked, however, there was a giant, idealized painting of their true god: Friedrich von Hayek...

...That this can be a useful political expedient is evident from its having been employed by three of the four Presidents I mentioned...

...A theory of progress permits one to approve the consequences of the actions of individuals, elites and nationalities without approving their motives...

...Along with the Free Soil Party, the American Party was a product of the Whig Party's disintegration...

...But it should be recalled that there was once a flag-waving Old Left, and the bulk of it dutifully followed Stalin's command during the Popular Front era in the 1930s to ally itself with "progressive" elements of various national bourgeoisies...

...The question can be asked of the Right as well...

...Tocqueville won...

...The Hamiltonians built a centralized nation-state that liberal political movements could inherit, and they created a world-class industrial economy that provided the basis for the liberal social market...

...J. P. Morgan and Samuel Gompers shared an interest in seeing the defeat of William Jennings Bryan...

...This suggests that in searching for a usable past, American liberals can choose between two theories of historical progress...

...In the 1840s, the original "Know-Nothings" of the American Party (the term refers to secret party membership, not ignorance) tended to be high-status Northeast Protestants—the ancestors of the very college-educated elite who currently use the term "Know-Nothing" to mean what Mencken meant by the "booboisie...

...A Marxo-Fundamentalist Right naturally searches for authority in the form of a book, like the Bible or Kapital...

...The difficulty liberal thinkers face in identifying with one of these traditions is that both, by contemporary standards, have been "progressive" in some ways and "reactionary" in others...

...At the time it was said that it was easy to spot an American Communist—he knew all the words to the national anthem...

...The game is no fun because it is too easy...

...In the same way that the FBI referred to "premature antifascists," we might refer to "premature liberals" or "premature democrats" in earlier eras...

...The repatriation of the American Left is not a surprising phenomenon...

...Most members of both parties agreed that slavery and Catholicism were evil...

...their disagreement was over priorities...

...In one, the building of the American nation-state precedes the spreading of democracy...

...reserving their "esoteric" teachings for a small coterie of initiates...

...But the question can be debated—and it needs to be debated if the liberal Left's search for a usable past is not to degenerate, like the moderate Right's, into a search for a usable quotation...

...As propaganda it may be persuasive or unpersuasive, but it can never be interesting...

...The omnibus New Deal was essentially the old Southern/ Catholic alliance, enlarged by a group of Greater New England progressives who had broken with Northeastern business...

...Once the nation-states were created, they had to be liberalized and democratized, and the tycoon-built industrial order also had to be subject to a constitution: "Just as in older times the central government was first a haven of refuge, and then a threat, so now in a closer economic system the central and ambitious financial unit is no longer a servant of national desire, but a danger...

...The search for a usable past for 2lst-century American liberalism becomes still more difficult when questions of political economy are involved...

...The factions emphasized, respectively, the sin of Southern slavery and the danger of Catholic immigration...

...The growth of the national governments of Europe was a struggle for the development of a centralized force in the nation, strong enough to impose peace upon ruling barons," FDR explained...

...I think that it is easier to democratize a nation-state than it is to nationalize a democracy...

...we are all Republicans...

...Is it a politics that grows out of genuine and major American traditions, or is it merely the American franchise of an abstract secular religion that would be given different packaging in France or Japan...

...For those of us in the beleaguered New Deal/Cold War Liberal remnant who never saw any contradiction between social democratic liberalism and American patriotism, the displacement of the flagburning New Left by a flag-waving Newer Left is something of a vindication...

...Likewise, a Rooseveltian liberal might argue that it was in the longterm interest of all Americans that the industrialists, their paid politicians and their allies in the courts broke the back of agrarian resistance to industrialization...

...As Edmund Burke observed, "It is easier to graft a republic onto a monarchy than to graft a monarchy onto a republic...

...The Southern Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Northern Catholic group favored social and political equality among whites—but strict subordination of blacks, American Indians and Asians...

...The sole candidates in the American tradition were The Federalist and Tocqueville's Democracy in America...

...the second runs from Jefferson's Republicans through the Democrats to today's Southern and white ethnic Republicans...

...The other speakers, authors and academics from across the political spectrum, included Louis Menand, Sean Wilentz, Mark Lilla, Todd Gitlin, James Ceaser, David Rieff, Fareed Zakaria and Lawrence Eagleburger...

...At one eminent libertarian think tank in Washington, portraits of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson were prominently displayed up front in the public area...

...The two figures who have been most abused in recent years are Tocqueville and Lincoln...

...For equally apparent strategic reasons, working-class white Democrats in the Jefferson-Jackson tradition welcomed white immigrants from Europe after the Civil War, while denouncing the importation of Asian contract laborers...

...and the alliance of white Southerners with white ethnic Catholics in the North, especially Irish Catholics...

...The cult of Tocqueville can only be understood in the light of the mentality of the American Right, which is a weird mix of the dogmatism of repentant Leftists and American Protestant fundamentalism...

...Someone taking this line might even try to rehabilitate some of the proslavery Southerners and their Northern working-class allies, whose denunciations of heartless Northern capitalism and praise for the supposed paternalism of slavery sometimes sounded almost Socialist...

...The Northern Hamiltonians took a philanthropic interest in the sufferings of blacks, American Indians and Asians—but opposed extending suffrage to working-class and poor whites in the 19th century and, as Progressives, sought to purge the voting rolls of lowstatus whites in the 20th century...

...The financiers who pushed the railroads to the Pacific were always ruthless, often wasteful, and frequently corrupt...

...yet what is one to make of the farmers, who were a majority of the American population until the late 19th century...

...Realizing the potential of industrial capitalism, FDR further noted, "required use of the talents of men of tremendous will and tremendous ambition, since by no other force could the problems of financing and engineering and new developments be brought to a consummation...

...What particularly struckme, though, were the presentations by the conference's two organizers, the philosopher Richard Rorty and the writer Paul Berman...

...He usually contends that everyone present-day Americans venerate—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR—belonged to the same tradition, and it happens, not coincidentally, to be his own...

...Whether sinister (as in the case of Old Left Stalinist Americanism) or merely trivial (as in the case of conservative citations of Tocqueville or The Federalist), the manipulation of national tradition in the service of an ideology is less taxing on the mental muscles than efforts to define and refine a national tradition of political ideology...

...One may legitimately wonder whether a patriotism of the Left is the real thing...

...Ironically, much of the patriotic iconography the Republican Right has so effectively coopted, such as Aaron Copland's folkinfluenced music and idealized cinematic images of Arcadian America, was the work of Communists or fellow travelers...

...FDR declared himself to be in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, while centralizing government and deploying American power in the world with a boldness that would have astounded Hamilton and his successors...

...There was a time in the 1980s and early '90s when it seemed that every conservative writer, in the middle of an argument for tax cuts or SDI, would suddenly quote or paraphrase some resounding banality from the French visitor's study: "As Tocqueville observed, Americans are a sociable people...

...The first view would find the "objective" precursors of 21 st-century American liberalism in the Hamiltonians of the 18th and 19th centuries, snobs though many of them were, rather than in the populist Jeffersonians and Jacksonians...

...But if this is what is meant by the search for a usable past, then it is merely an exercise in anachronism...

...Fair enough...

...Popular Front history has an exoteric side, too, that camouflages esoteric doctrine...

...FDR maintained that both absolutist monarchs and robber barons promoted the interests of Western society at different stages of its evolution...

...FDR's theory implies that in, say, 15th- or 16th-century Britain, constitutional and parliamentary restraints on monarchical power might have impeded progress, which required consolidation of the nation-state...

...The Whig-Republican Lincoln sought to win over Jacksonian Democrats by torturing Jefferson's Declaration of Independence into a justification for smashing secession...

...Rorty argued that the American Left (here meaning liberals, not radicals) should jettison both reflexive anti-Americanism and an attenuated cosmopolitanism in favor of some kind of liberal patriotism...

...Jefferson himself famously pronounced, "We are all Federalists...

...Strauss believed most philosophers spoke in an "exoteric" manner for the public...

...Most of us were raised believing that wicked people called "nativists" had struggled through the ages to keep out our virtuous immigrant ancestors...

...Berman made the case for a tradition of democratic radicalism he claims to find in the intellectual legacy of Walt Whitman—the Whitman of Democratic Vistas, as much as the Whitman of Leaves of Grass...

...So who was more "liberal," the Northerners who wanted to free the slaves and deny the vote to Irish immigrants, or the Southerners who wanted universal white male suffrage and perpetual black subordination...

...There are two great political traditions in American history, the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian...

...In addition, the American Right's success in appropriating the language and iconography of patriotism has prompted left-of-center thinkers and politicians to engage in what Van Wyck Brooks called the search for a "usable past...

...It is easier to answer such questions when one has some theory of historic progress comparable to the Marxist theory that the British colonization of India, though undertaken for base motives, "objectively" furthered progress by shattering the old Indian social order and creating an infrastructure in the subcontinent...

...The theory of history that Roosevelt sketched out was a radical departure from Herbert Butterfield's "Whig theory of history," or its American versions tracing the ancestry of the Declaration of Independence to the Magna Carta, that contract imposed on a weak king by rebellious barons...

...Although the fear of a papal threat to U. S. democracy was a phantom, the concern that Catholic immigrants would diminish the political prospects of Northern Protestants was justified, given the relationship between the Southern Bourbons and Tammany Hall...

...Otherwise progressive Northern Protestants like Samuel Morse and Henry Cabot Lodge had reason to shudder at the thought of boats full of potential political adversaries arriving...