Our Divided Political Heart (41 page)

It would be tragic if conservatives and Republicans sacrificed their great traditions on the altar of an individualism that disdains government, downplays communal obligations, and sees the economic market not simply as an efficient mechanism for the production of goods but also as the ultimate arbiter of what should be valued.

Although the 2012 Republican primaries seemed to push the party
ever farther to the right, I would like to think that these fears are misplaced. If nothing else, pure pragmatism and electoral calculation may eventually militate against the dangers I see now. There have been signs in the polls of rising opposition to the Tea Party, and this may nudge the realists among our conservative politicians toward a new appreciation for moderation and balance. They might begin to soften the edges of their individualism and to remember their communal impulses. Perhaps they will decide that the American social insurance system is too popular to be overturned and that modern capitalism is too complicated to be allowed to run with minimal supervision and few safeguards.

What I do know is that we will not restore our greatness as a nation or heal our political wounds unless we acknowledge both sides of our national character. Our history is compelling, after all, because we are neither a simple nor a single-minded people.

At the end of a book insisting that no single trait can be seen as defining us, some readers might be tempted to write off Americans as philosophically contradictory and hopelessly opportunistic in our values and commitments. But to do so would be to misread both America and human nature. Most Americans are aware of their contradictions. The dualities of the American creed and the balances we seek to strike reflect an underlying realism about our conflicting desires and hopes—and about the difficulty of arriving at any settlement that can permanently resolve these tensions. We refer to the “American experiment” for a reason: we are an experimental people constantly searching for provisional answers. The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has argued that “
the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realized
” is both “incomprehensible” and “conceptually incoherent.” Americans have largely been saved from the idea that we could create a perfect world. But we have also been saved
by
the idea that we can create a better one.

It was my interest in the Tea Party that led me on a recent July 4 to sit down and read our Declaration of Independence in its entirety. What
became abundantly clear from Jefferson’s words is that our forebears were not revolting
against
taxes or government as such. On the contrary, they were making a revolution
for
self-government.

In the long list of “abuses and usurpations” the Declaration documents, taxes don’t come up until the seventeenth item, which is neither a complaint about tax rates nor an objection to the idea of taxation. Our Founders remonstrated against the British crown “for imposing taxes on us without our consent.” They were concerned about “consent”—that is, popular rule—not taxes.

The very
first
item on their list condemned the king because he “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Note that the signers wanted to
pass
laws, not repeal them, and they began by speaking of “the public good,” not about individuals. They knew that it took public action—including effective and responsive government—to secure “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Their second grievance reinforced the first, accusing the king of having “forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance.” Again, our forebears wanted to enact laws; they were not anti-government zealots.

Abuses three through nine also referred in some way to how laws were put in place or justice was administered. When the document finally does get around to anything that looks like big-government oppression, its language against the king is delightful (and far above the norm for the typical anti-government screed in American politics these days): “He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” Note that the Founders don’t even get to this until grievance number ten.

All of us—from the Tea Party’s most resolute supporters to its most ardent foes—praise our Founders annually for revolting against royal rule and for creating an exceptionally durable system of self-government. We can lose this inheritance if we forget our Founders insisted upon a representative form of national authority robust enough to secure the public good. Our institutions are still perfectly capable of doing that if we turn our attention to making them work again.

If we do not accept responsibility for our own democracy, if we pretend
instead that we are living in Boston in 1773 and facing an obdurate king who rules far from our shores, we will draw all the wrong conclusions and make some remarkably foolish choices. If we wish to end our fears of decline and honor our character, our history, and, yes, the Founders themselves, we will learn to love and appreciate both yearnings of our political heart.

To suggest at a time of crisis that Americans need to return to their history might seem strange to those who would define our problems in terms of the global military balance of power, the necessity for new departures in domestic policy, the need for innovation in the marketplace, or the imperative of balancing the federal government’s books. Of course, all these things are important. But it is precisely at moments when so much is at stake that we need both inspiration and instruction from those who came before us.

As I said at the outset, the Tea Party is right in having an intimation about the importance of the past. If my reading of our history differs from theirs, our disagreement rests not on the question of whether our story is a noble one, but on why the United States has, to this point, been successful. We did not succeed because our institutions were perfect from the outset. They were not perfect, and in truth never will be. Our Founders were gifted, but they were not free from the interests and the passions that affect us all.

They were, however, bold and visionary, prepared to think and act anew at a time when much of the world was skeptical about the possibility of republican government and self-rule. Our task is to follow their example, not to engage in an inevitably futile effort to parse every word they wrote and spoke to discover how we must act now. Their approach was daring, but also balanced, moderate, and temperate. They had confidence that government could be made to work and that it could accomplish great things, but they were always wary of deifying the state and those who ran it. They hugely valued individual freedom, but they were steeped in principles that saw the preservation of freedom as a common enterprise. They were influenced by the Bible and the Enlightenment, by liberalism and republicanism.

Those who came after always understood the imperative of keeping competing goods in balance—and also the need to guide the American
system in a steadily more democratic and egalitarian direction. Our history is one in which populists of various stripes have always challenged elites, in which private wealth has always been seen as carrying a social mortgage, and in which public action has always been subject to accountability and searching criticism. We cannot learn all we need to know from our history. But we can learn how to keep faith with a promise that we still have an obligation to keep.

This book is built on two forms of indebtedness: personal debts I have accumulated thanks to advice, guidance, and help from a long list of friends, and intellectual debts to the many historians whose work has shaped this account. Some people fall into both categories, but a large number of historians whom I have never met were essential to this work. You might say that I have come to
feel
as if I know some of them, simply because their books and essays were so important to me. I have tried in both the text and the endnotes to honor all my sources. But I’d like to offer a brief bibliographic essay to call attention to particular works and writers who were especially important to me as I wrote this book.

I fell in love with American history when I was young, and I begin by thanking two exceptional high school American history teachers, Jim Garman and Norm Hess, who nurtured that affection. They taught me early on that there are competing accounts of the American story, that we can view ourselves through many prisms, and that there is ample room for argument about core events in our past, including the choices our forebears made, both individually and collectively. Books that Jim and Norm encouraged me to read had a lasting influence, perhaps none more so than William E. Leuchtenburg’s
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Leuchtenburg taught me how a graceful writer could bring politics to life, and his account of FDR and the Depression helped set me on a path toward a practical kind of liberalism that still largely defines my view of politics.

Encountering Richard Hofstadter’s work for the first time was thrilling. His wry and tough-minded view of American public life and his skill at getting behind the masks of publicly proclaimed ideologies were liberating for historical writing. He inspired in me a lifelong affection for the ironies of politics. It’s hard to forget those paradoxical chapter titles in
The American Political Tradition
: “John C. Calhoun: The Marx of the Master Class,” “William Jennings Bryan: The Democrat as Revivalist,” “Theodore Roosevelt: The Conservative as Progressive,” and “Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Patrician as Opportunist.” I have often wondered what subtitle Hofstadter, who died in 1970 at the age of fifty-four, might give to an essay on Barack Obama: “Technocrat as Preacher”? “Progressive as Centrist”? “Professor as Movement Builder”? “Unifier as Polarizer”? Once Hofstadter’s paradoxes take hold of you, they don’t let go.

As is clear from what I’ve written, I have come to disagree with Hofstadter on a number of questions. Yet anyone who writes about political or historical subjects can only hope to emulate the elegance and energy of his prose, the clarity of his thought, and the ratio of insights per page in every one of his books. Arguing that Hofstadter’s
The Age of Reform
“is the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America,” Alan Brinkley concluded that it is “a book whose central interpretations few historians now accept, but one whose influence few historians can escape.” I certainly have not escaped its magic, and I remain inspired by Hofstadter’s ennobling view of history’s role. “In an age when so much of our literature is infused with nihilism and other disciplines are driven toward narrow and positivistic inquiry,” Hofstadter wrote in
The Progressive Historians
, “history may remain the most humanizing among the arts.” So it should be, and so it was in his hands. In light of these contributions, lovers of American history should be grateful to David S. Brown for his excellent 2006 intellectual biography of Hofstadter.

I was excited in the late 1960s by the historians of the New Left, and I still treasure my battered paperback copy of
Towards a New Past
, the 1967 collection of essays by dissenting left-wing historians edited by Barton Bernstein. I remember pondering what the exotic idea of a “new past” really meant. It was intriguing to see Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt treated as conservatives (which in important ways they were), and
bracing to see abolitionists and African Americans rescued from an earlier historical approach that was tinged with racism—a saga in American historiography that plays an important role in these pages. On the whole, my views are less radical than those of many of the dissenting historians, yet our collective understanding of who we are is more honest because of them.

Of course, historians of many different philosophical hues—conservatives and liberals no less than radicals—have been vitally concerned with the politics of their own moments, and the histories they offered were shaped and informed by their own political commitments. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s magnificent work on Jackson (and, of course, on FDR himself) cannot be understood apart from his unabashed and un-apologetic sympathies for New Deal liberalism. Forrest McDonald’s writing about the Founders, particularly Alexander Hamilton, was enlivened by his own conservative disposition. In the preface to his Hamilton biography, McDonald quotes fellow historian Carl Becker, who nicely captured the tendency of all of us to seek reinforcement for our own views from our reading as well as from history itself. “Generally speaking,” Becker wrote, “men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept.” I don’t pretend to be immune to this temptation, though I try to fight it.

I should also declare my gratitude to Sean Wilentz, one of our era’s premier historians. His essential book
The Rise of American Democracy
was an inspiration to me as I wrote this one. It conclusively demonstrates the importance of politics: the United States did not start out as fully democratic, and it became more so over time only after difficult arguments, great exertions of organizing, and sometimes bloody struggles. Although my own contemporary political views tend to run Sean’s way, I also found enlightenment in Daniel Walker Howe’s treatment of an overlapping period,
What Hath God Wrought
, and in his indispensable
The Political Culture of the American Whigs.
Howe’s work highlights the inventiveness and entrepreneurial energy of a religiously inflected American spirit and focuses on the “communications revolution” between 1815 and 1848. If Wilentz writes with considerable sympathy for Jacksonian
democracy, Howe offers a helpfully sympathetic view of the Whigs. One might say that Wilentz and Howe help us understand the whole story by telling rather different stories. Reading Wilentz and Howe reminded me of my own overlapping allegiances—to Jeffersonian democracy, Jacksonian equality, and Hamiltonian-Whiggish nation building. Abraham Lincoln, it might be said, sought to bring these together and build on them, and so did Franklin D. Roosevelt. (So might Barack Obama, if he finds success.)