Note: This was posted on TPM on April 27, 2008, the same day as Wieseltier’s review of Martin Amis’ The Second Plane. It takes awhile for this essay to shift from reviewing that review to considering the political and personal dimensions of Wieseltier’s work.
If Martin Amis is the self-styled bad boy of English letters, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the rabbinic scourge of “fine” writers who stray into public intellection. No surprise, then, that in the April 27, 2008 New York Times Book Review, Wieseltier condemns Amis’The Second Plane, a collection of essays, reviews, and stories about September 11 written across six years and re-published in America now in a slim volume.
But Wieseltier’s review is itself so preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack, proving little more than that it takes one to know one. Anyone who’s read Amis’ book as well as the review will know that Wieseltier isn’t as brave or honest as his often-stumbling target. The faults in Amis’ book are manifold, but Wieseltier’s puzzling envy and not-so puzzling bad faith are borne of a bad conscience about his own continuously bad judgment about how to respond to September 11. Amis has gotten under his skin, as bad boys will, because his very badness embarrasses Wieseltier, who actually shares many of his views but loathes and envies Amis’ brazenness in flaunting them.
Wieseltier shows (as I did in the Los Angeles Times) that Amis is too often grandiloquent and self-regarding, his virtuosity outrunning reason and even reporting. But Amis has to be credited with two kinds of courage. First, by making few revisions in these pieces, he lets us watch him learning about September 11, fitfully, over time — as we all did — through under-informed, over-determined generalizations and contradictory, fragmentary insights that sometimes became hobby horses. His courage to be messy would seem exhibitionist only to the compulsively tidy and self-regarding.
Second, Amis is brazen as well as brave in shoving our snouts into harsh realities which he thinks too many readers have sanitized or ideologized away, in excesses of political correctness, or have simply forgotten with the passage of time.
So determined is he to make us taste suicide bombing’s depravity, for example, that he sketches the perpetrators’ psycho-sexual perversities, their “self besplatterment,” the bloody “pink haze” forming above the bodies of World Trade Center victims plunged to their deaths. His review of “United 93” credits that film for making viewers feel the passengers’ “state of near-perfect distress — a distress that knows no blindspots. . . . the ancient flavor of death and defeat. You think: this is exactly what [the terrorists] meant us to feel.” Amis makes you ashamed of trying to feel anything else.
This affronts the dark prophet of unblinking confrontation with malevolence. “What is gained by preferring ‘horrorism’ to ‘terroism’, except perhaps a round of applause?” Wieseltier complains. “Amis is the sort of writer who will never say ‘city’ when he can say ‘conurbation.'”
But Read Amis’ book and Wieseltier’s review, and decide who strains more for virtuosity. If you’re looking for sober depth, tell me whether the following wisdom about dealing with Islamist terrorists was offered by Martin Amis or by Leon Wieseltier:
“We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.”
It is by Amis, actually. And Wieseltier nearly admits to feeling upstaged as much as affronted, but only after nearly 2000 words of insults:
“Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.” “What we have here is a hormonal unbeliever.” “Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right.” “Amis seems to regard his little curses as military contributions to the struggle.” “I wish only to suggest that the simpleton’s view of the world that Amis is angrily promoting contributes not very much to the study of the passions that are scalding the planet.”
Only after all that does Wieseltier acknowledge “the complication” that “there is considerable justice on Amis’ side:
“[Amis] is correct in insisting upon the moral and historical primacy of the battle against theocracy and terror. He is correct that… that the defense of western conceptions of freedom and equality is not an exercise in ethnocentrism. He is correct that the skeptical discussion of religious ideas and practices must not be abrogated by the skinlessness of multiculturalism…. He is correct that opinions that seem not only spectacularly false, but also lethally false, do not have to be intellectually respected even if they have to be politically tolerated. He is correct that in Islamism the many doctrines of antimodernism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism are one doctrine.
“I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful,” Wieseltier concludes – or nearly does, leaving himself room for a dig at the egregious and, here, irrelevant Nicholson Baker, whose Checkpoint drove Wieseltier into paroxysms of rage against anti-war liberals four years ago in a ranting review for the same New York Times.
Wieseltier allows that even “Martin Amis would despise” Baker’s new book, Human Smoke, yet he finds the two writers “peculiarly alike” in that they treat “the most fundamental matters of politics and philosophy… as occasions for the display of artifice and the exhibition of temperament.” But it is not only Baker and Amis who fill that bill. There is a third writer, the one who is obsessed with them.
Although Wieseltier has just informed us that Amis has principles, he can’t stop insisting that Amis is “untouched by the atrocity” because “he is still busy with the glamorous pursuit of extraordinary sentences.” Knowing that he’s writing in bad faith, Wieseltier is even busier than Amis at comforting himself with alliterative cadences:
For Amis, he insists, “the ingenuity of the image is an interruption of attention, an ostentatious metaphorical digression from the enormity that it is preparing to reveal, an invitation to behold the prose and not the plane.” Here Wieseltier invites us to behold his prose and not his point.
Seldom has a reviewer hoisted himself on his own petard so shamelessly with so many grasps at faux paradoxes, sustained by his telltale, compulsive alliteration:
“Nothing creates confidence like catastrophe.” “[Amis] has a hot, heroic view of himself.” “In Amis’ universe, you are either religious or you are rational.” “The results of Amis’ clumsily mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage can be eccentric, or worse” “For this reason, such writings will have more impact than influence.” “[Amis] appears to believe that an insult is an analysis.”
Yet it is Wieseltier, we’ve seen, who delivers more insult than analysis. He sounds like one who is rather too enthroned in the seat of judgment, but you can trace the rudiments of an analysis among the insults, in three parts.
First, as we’ve seen, Wieseltier rules that virtuosity has overcome virtue in Amis’ writing.
Second, he decides that Amis is monocausally obsessed with the terrorists’ frustrated libidos and warped masculinity, the polluted wellspring or mainspring of Islamism. Wieseltier tells us that Amis “believes that 2,992 more people would be alive today if 19 Middle Eastern men had only found some satisfaction of the flesh.”
Wieseltier doesn’t actually believe that Amis believes this. He has written the sentence for effect. That points us back to the first part of his “analysis,” in which the pot calls the kettle black.
Only a few paragraphs later, Wieseltier decides, thirdly, that Amis’ problem lies less in an obsession with sex than with religion — with the fact that Amis’ “antipathy to Islamism is based upon a more comprehensive antipathy to religion.
In Amis’ universe, Wieseltier decides, you are either religious or you are rational.” And perhaps, after all, then, not so sexual.
What’s in Wieseltier’s own clumsily mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage? There is, of course, that gift for prophetic scourging, nowhere more evident than in a column he wrote in The New Republic just after September 11:
“Is it a little laughter that we need now? Then behold the contrition of yesterday’s frivolous, the new fashion in gravity. The man who edits Vanity Fair has ruled that the age of cynicism is over. He would know. I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz. The papers are filled with hip people seeing through hipness, composing elegiac farewells to the days of Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez. The on dit has moved beyond the apple martini. It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in. So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony.”
This is the rod of instruction, which Wieseltier’s forefathers and mine brought forth out of the land of Egypt and passed on to the prophets and jeremiadic Puritan divines and that arose often in the homiletics of my own childhood rabbi, Samuel H. Dresner. Wieseltier wields it well against a cohort of lost, preppie gatekeepers from Exeter and Yale and their sweaty sycophants at The Times, The New Yorker and hipper Manhattan and online publications, most of them staging and watching debates more for entertainment than to satisfy any craving to clarify our fog-bound horizons.
There is another ingredient in the cocktail: Wieseltier, a child of Holocaust survivors who grew up in Brooklyn as it was changing racially in the 1950s and ’60s, pulls insights about identity and atrocity from out of his innards, as did the black writer Shelby Steele before he, too, grew comfortable in a seat of judgment funded by others. In The Closest of Strangers I was grateful to be able to quote an insight of Wieseltier’s that fit both the defensive Jews and the angry blacks I was writing about:
“The memory of oppression is a pillar and strut of the identity of every people oppressed…. [It] imparts an isolating sense of apartness… Don’t be fooled, it teaches, there is only repetition. …In the memory of oppression, oppression outlives itself. The scar does the work of the wound. That is the real tragedy: that injustice retains the power to distort long after it has ceased to be real. …. This is the unfairly difficult dilemma of the newly emancipated…: an honorable life is not possible if they remember too little and an honorable life is not possible if they remember too much.”
The prophetic truth is there, and it should be acknowledged and treasured. But there is also an almost-incapacitating pain in it that predisposes Wieseltier to monitor the suppressed or misdirected pain of others. That predisposition has its uses, too, and it has certainly been useful to upper-middling thinkers and editors who’ve found in Wieseltier’s prose a kind of deliverance — gravitas for hire.
At his best, Wieseltier keeps and sometimes rouses our consciences. For example, in the New Republic column on 9/11 linked above, he scourged some “fine” writers, such as Adam Gopnik and John Updike, who’d responded to “atrocity with sensibility.” Quoting Updike’s “Smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface,” Wieseltier noted that “such writing defeats its representational purpose, because it steals attention away from reality and toward language. It is provoked by nothing so much as its own delicacy. Its precision is a trick: it appears to bring the reader near, but it keeps the reader far. It is in fact a kind of armor: an armor of adjectives and adverbs. The loveliness is invincible.”
But so is Wieseltier’s own tidy prose, lovely as the Rose of Sharon even when justice is not on his side. For there is something more, or less, than prophecy and personal pain in Wieseltier’s curiously mixed cocktail of rhetoric and rage, something that you can sense as he rummages through his old grab bag of suffering to condemn Amis in what seems at best a retread of a past jeremiad: “After the mind breaks, it stiffens in the aftermath of grief, it lets in only certainty. In a time of war, complexity is suspected of a sapping effect, and so a mental curfew is imposed. From the maxim that we must know our enemy, we infer that our enemy may be easily known.”
Amis does not infer any such thing, and Wieseltier, as we’ve seen, will eventually admit that Amis is not simple but complex. His inability to stand by his own grudging admission suggests the deeper problem in his review of Amis’ book.
Here is that problem: Even as Ground Zero lay smoking, Wieseltier signed a letter to President Bush, dated September 20 and written by neoconservative Field Marshall Bill Kristol on the letterhead of his Project for the New American Century. The letter’s 42 well-known neoconservative and Vulcan signers informed Bush that ”even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
It wasn’t by fluke that Wieseltier signed. He is as comfortable with Kristol’s crowd as he is in the seat of literary judgment. In 2007 he wrote one of 200 letters urging clemency for his friend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney who had been convicted on charges of lying, perjury, and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame affair.
In his letter, the scourge of preeners preens, departing from his testimony for Libby to assure the judge that “I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest. I am, to the contrary, the kind of liberal who many neoconservatives like to despise, and that’s fine with me.”
It would have been fine with the court, too, surely, had Wieseltier forgone such stylized bleating on his own behalf, but he did have tracks to cover after serving with Richard Bruce (Dick) Cheney, Carl Christian Rove, and others as an unlikely member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a now-defunct cousin of Kristol’s PNAC and the American Enterprise Institute.
Wieseltier is an “adversary” of neoconservatives, then, only in the way that he is an adversary of Martin Amis: He wishes these bad boys would stop embarrassing him by saying so brazenly what he would say blamelessly.
Wieseltier is nowhere more dishonest about this than when he tells us that Amis “writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate.” Wieseltier knows well that the essay in which Amis quotes Lewis and Larkin — “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind,” written on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 — pivots on Amis admiration for the insights of Paul Berman, whose Terror and Liberalism he quotes more often that the work of Lewis or Larkin.
Yet, to acknowledge this, Wieseltier would have to credit Amis with the discernment that he himself thinks he showed in publishing Berman’s excoriations of liberals’ “naïve rationality” about terrorism in The New Republic. Wieseltier cannot condemn Amis honestly without condemning himself . So he condemns him dishonestly. And his writing assumes the flat, vacant intensity he imputes to Amis.
The only credible explanation for this dirge-like denunciation of a mere bad boy is that, since 9/11, it is Wieseltier who has stiffened. The Holocaust, the horrors in Israel and Palestine, and the horrors of his own misbegotten crusading after 9/11 have become scar upon scar, opening an ancient and terrible wound. Here is a man who will wander through life intoning his epitaph wordlessly as well as wordily:
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
