Elected officials also move in herds, with fellow office-holders instead of making independent judgments: As U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn told members of Congress: “To get along, to along” to get anything done. In corrupted democracies like ours, there have often been donors to “go along” with to have any hope of getting elected at all. Surviving and succeeding requires more finessing than Burke required, even against the daunting odds of his own time.
Yet there have always been “Profiles in Courage,”Profiles in Courage – Wikipedia as Senator John F Kennedy’s 1956 book by that title showed in the cases of eight senators who defied their party leaders, colleagues, and constituents to follow their consciences and principles, risking and sometimes suffering political defeat for taking a wiser and longer view of their obligations and options against the odds.
Joe Biden presented such a profile until this past weekend, defying the polls, pundits, big donors, strategists, and masterful colleagues such as Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer. Maybe he’s following only his doctor’s advice now and is quitting the race because of physical and cognitive frailties. But until we learn more, my hunch is that the political pressures overwhelmed his resilience, which might have proved stronger and wiser than we were being told by baying “news” hounds whose own herd-like stampedes (into Vietnam, into Iraq, and much more) reflect a decay in their own capacities and performances more severe than Biden’s. Whose decline is more severe: Joe Biden’s or the news media’s? – The Berkshire Edge
Whatever my doubts about Biden’s integrity and judgments as a senator or vice president (and even as President, when he blundered in backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel), for the most part he’d risen to Edmund Burke’s heights as a leader and remained there ever since the Charlottesville riots of 2017 bared President Donald J. Trump’s Profile in Pathology as a sickness so severe and contagious that the republic may not survive it.
Democrats who’ve surveyed the odds and pressured Biden to quit – and especially Democrats now bidding to take his place — will have to transcend their own weaknesses as well as Biden did his before his colleagues, donors, the media, and too much of the public enveloped and devoured his prospects. I’ll support any Democrat against Trump; I’ll suppress my doubts about how members of the groups I’ve just mentioned handled old Joe; and I’ll hope that the day never comes when they’ll have to eat the words they used during the past few weeks.
The answers are older and deeper than many of us know.
By Jim Sleeper Oct. 2, 2024
Israeli soldiers in June, 1967 at the Western Wall, a remnant of an ancient retaining wall of biblical Israelites’ Jerusalem temple, whose site Israel has controlled since the “Six Day War” for the first time since losing it to the Roman Empire in 70 C.E.
Author’s preface:
Israel invaded and destroyed Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient “undercurrent events” ever really happened, let alone that they still drive current events that divert our attention from the older, deeper realities. The following essay, revised and updated from one that I wrote for Salon on March 31, 2024, doesn’t track current events in Israel/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long running undercurrents that have shaped the conflict.
The original Salon essay was picked up and re-posted by the international website Reset.doc, which also translated it into Italian. It was excerpted and assessed on The Hannah Arendt website at Bard College. When I wrote it early in 2024, charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were plausible but debatable, and it was possible to question protestors’ ideological motives. But by mid-summer, Israel’s strategies had become genocidal in effect and, for some of the strategists, in intent.
Anyone who might think that I’m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify current events would be misreading this essay. More than a few commentators and editors have seemed inclined to dive under their desks or jump out of windows instead of reporting or sharing what I actually say here. Fortunately, others are commenting in ways that can enhance our understanding of what’s developing.
For example, the head of a private school who also teaches in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay “a fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers…. But if we are ever to escape the binary thinking of every political and civic argument that plagues us currently, we need historically nuanced analyses like Sleeper’s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn’t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) — its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its ‘manifest destiny’ brutality.”
A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me, “Thanks for sending this amazing piece. I devoured it immediately. I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England’s elimination of America’s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me. I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz. Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here. I hope you keep developing this line of thought.”
Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets, but America’s increasingly warlike divisions, some of them deepened by the Israel-Palestine conflict, are forcing many of us to bear realities that we haven’t borne so heavily before. These include an animus against Jews that Eliot himself held and that may have become menacing again — as have some Jews’ frantic efforts to suppress antisemitism, in ways that may only prompt more of it. Other, far-more-powerful eruptions of hatred in America’s increasingly uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism, and not even mainly by global riptides of capital and technology that are prompting desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms. They’re being driven by beliefs and practices that figured in Israel’s ancient origins and, later, in 17th Century Puritans’ importation of those origins into America’s conflicted, now-fragmenting political culture.
Such undercurrents are converging and prompting not only today’s headline-making news but also biblically resonant upheavals that grip people who aren’t religious at all. Even Donald Trump, along with his evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish supporters, is riding those currents toward a civic implosion. Belligerent Jewish nationalists who currently govern the State of Israel are accelerating a doom-eager Zionism that biblical Hebrew prophets anticipated and condemned.
Few of us acknowledge or even know that these conflicting realities began with Jews’ “origin story,” in Genesis 12:1, in which God tells Abraham to “Go from your country [Ur, in Mesopotamia] and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Since then, Jews have often unsettled and uprooted themselves, or they’ve been unsettled and uprooted by others, in ways that have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned. In effect, they’ve been a “tribe” that negates a lot of what’s usually tribal while developing an enlarged mentality across communal boundaries. The word “Hebrew” —ivry — means “He passed over,” as in crossing borders that are metaphysical and cultural as well as geographical, to pursue universal knowledge and justice across time as well as space.
Many of us consider such pursuits essential to the Enlightenment, not to a religion or a tribe. Yet in the Genesis myth, Abraham’s tent and hospitality are open in all directions, to all comers, and his grandson Jacob demands to know the terms of the tribal mission, wrestling with an angel all night for an answer until the angel releases him at dawn without one, naming him Yisrael, which means, “He contends with God.” That has been “too much reality” for many people and peoples to bear — Jews as well as non-Jews. Yet that reality has driven American civic culture in ways and for reasons that I want to sketch here.
The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England and Virginia, and whose legatees participated in founding and extending the American republic, pursued strategies strikingly similar to those of today’s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and military invaders of Gaza who claim a divine mandate or a nationalist “manifest destiny” to impose the Hebrew-derived, ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime Palestinian inhabitants.
Although the ”settler-colonial” accusation that progressives hurl at Israel did fit Puritans who settled and seized lands to which they had no ancestral claims, the Puritans went even further by appropriating ancient Israelite claims to a divinely promised Zion to justify their own ventures in America. So doing, they seeded America’s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive its messianic inclinations and some Protestants’ and Jews’ preoccupations with Israel’s presence in the Middle East.
In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been ‘copying’ today’s Israeli Zionists 300 years ahead of time, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification.
I experienced that convergence of Hebraic and Calvinist mythologies in the 1950s while growing upin Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an old Puritan town whose public-school teachers passed on to us some echoes and remnants of its origins. My fourth-grade teacher Ethel Smith didn’t merely look at us 9-year-olds; she looked into each of us, as if arraigning our souls before something awesome. At that same time, I was learning biblical Hebrew two afternoons a week in a nearby synagogue and, later, in eight years of Jewish summer camp.
Even when “Puritans” like Miss Smith looked into us sternly, they sometimes did so caringly. In December, 1956, she told me and another boy to stand as she announced, “Jim and Richard are Jewish boys, and they don’t accept our Lord as their savior, and they won’t be celebrating Christmas. But I want you all to know that the Jewish people is a noble and enduring people, and our Lord himself was a Jew. You may sit down now.” Disoriented though I was by that introduction to my classmates at age 9, I sensed from Miss Smith’s gentler-than-usual tone that she meant well in a way that has never quite left me. Later I would realize that for her then, only eleven years after the Holocaust (about which I knew nothing), we Jews weren’t pariahs but sacred librarians, keepers of foundational texts.
When I entered Yale nine years later, in 1965, in the twilight of its Puritan ethos, I understood the significance of the Hebrew phrase that the college’s founders had put on its seal — Urim v’tummim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony” — and I knew that the university’s president during my student years there, Kingman Brewster Jr., himself born in Longmeadow, was a lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster, the minister on The Mayflower that had carried Puritan pilgrims from England to Massachusetts in 1620, in what they considered their Exodus from slavery that fulfilled “the type of Israel materially,” according to Cotton Mather, their most-prominent tribune and chronicler at the end of the 17th Century.
Seal of Yale University
At my opening freshman assembly at Yale in 1965, a thousand of us mostly white young men in dark suits rose and sang (or read and mumbled) a hymn composed by Yale Divinity School Professor Leonard Bacon in 1833 that rendered Yale founders’ “Exodus” from their English Egypt to their “Hebrew Republic” in New England:
1 O God, beneath Thy guiding hand Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, And when they trod the wintry strand, With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee.
2 Thou heard’st, well pleased, the song, the prayer; Thy blessing came, and still its pow’r Shall onward through all ages bear The memory of that holy hour.
3 Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God Came with those exiles o’er the waves, And where their pilgrim feet have trod, The God they trusted guards their graves.
At Yale’s 1964 commencement, three months before my freshman assembly, Brewster, the legatee of the Puritan “Exodus,” had presented the university’s honorary doctorate of laws to Martin Luther King, Jr., who at that time was telling America’s lords of segregation to “Let my people go,” as Moses had told pharaoh, and was leading American Blacks to what King, echoing Exodus, called “the promised land.” As Brewster presented Yale’s degree, their handshake reached across time and space, summoning Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the Exodus myth in ages past.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. at the 1964 Yale Commencement
Like the Hebrew prophet who “lives out a myth that may be dead in us and for us, whose fruitfulness cannot be known except by exposing it (and himself) to possible failure,” as political theorist George Shulman puts it, King and Brewster used speech-acts in the ceremony to revivify an ancient, sacred past and to make moderns do a double take on their own limitations. Yale’s civic poetry still had enough power to inflect Authority as decisively as Congress did by enacting the new civil rights laws of 1964 and ’65.
When those biblical undercurrents resurfaced again a few years later in a war between Hebrews and Egyptians in what Jews called their “promised land,” they also resurfaced in me: Early in June, 1967, you would have found me standing in line at the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, hoping to register as a noncombatant supporter of Israel in the Six-Day War. Not yet 21, I needed parental permission, which I didn’t get, so I didn’t go. But two years later, I was in Haifa and the Galilee with the small Movement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation, holding intensive conversations with Palestinian citizens of Israel, as I’ve recounted in The New Jews, an anthology of essays by young American-Jewish activists of that time that I co-edited with the late scholar of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz. It may be worth noting my expression in that book of my doubts about Jewish nationalism and Zionism, even as an idealistic young supporter of Israel.
My own experiences matter here only because they exposed me to origins of today’s controversy that are overlooked or mishandled by many Christians and Jews, including secular liberals and ardent progressives. The mythic origins matter because, as King and Kingman demonstrated, they go a long way toward explaining why Jews have figured disproportionately in Americans’ civic reckonings and international interventions. Their handshake at Yale in 1964 demonstrated that Hebrews’ uprooting from Ur and their disruptions of conventions in other times and places still figured in Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation of clean breaks and fresh but covenanted starts. It figures now, even as the country is becoming less Hebraic and covenantal and more gnostic, agnostic or libertarian. Americans’ preoccupations with the Gaza war continue to divert our attention from larger, more lethal wars.
So let me make a few more observations about the original Jewish break from other traditions, and then about how New England Puritans transported that break into what has become this country’s fraught, disintegrating civic-republican culture. A different but no-less powerful intervention in American political culture was made by Spanish Catholics who colonized Florida and the American Southwest, as well as Latin America, but in this essay I trace the Calvinist/Hebraic origins of what became the classically liberal “Protestant Establishment” that governed the United States well into the 20th Century. Today there are so many other variants of evangelizing and proselytizing in America that some readers may be tempted to misread this essay itself as yet another variant of the same. It’s not. I’m not propagating or preaching anything in what follows but recognizing its continuing, problematic power in America’s political culture and public life.
Jewish sublimity and its discontents
In the Genesis myth as interpreted in Midrash Genesis, one of the rabbinic commentaries on that book, Abraham smashes Ur’s idols as he’s leaving, and he even prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac at the command of his hidden but omnipotent Interlocutor. Yet that command to sacrifice Isaac is rescinded even as Abraham binds his trusting son and raises his hand to strike the fatal blow. His grief and loneliness are broken by the angel Gabriel, who brings a ram to substitute for Isaac in the offering. Yet Abraham has other disputes with God — for example, against God’s decision to obliterate the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing many innocents. And Yisrael contends with God ever after.
Such biblical accounts of humans’ separation from with what seemed naturally ordained demonstrate not only human independence in thought and action but also its futility: A central prayer in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, originated the claim that “man’s origin is dust, and his destiny is dust,” depicting every individual’s life “as a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as the fleeting shadow, as the passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the floating dust, and even as a dream that vanishes.”
Such a scourging awareness of human fragility projects the faithful into a vast unknown between them and a ubiquitous but hidden God. It prompts yearnings like Jacob’s to discover God’s will and to justify their often-flailing efforts to transform a world that isn’t wholly impervious to their efforts to displace tribal insularity with missions across time and space: “The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,” the German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich explained in 1938:
“It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. … It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death, it is beyond tragedy. The people of time … cannot avoid being persecuted, because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction. The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.”
Afraid, indeed: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” wrote Blaise Pascal, a French contemporary of the Puritans. Jews have negated much of what’s tribal yet haven’t disappeared as a “tribe” themselves, at least in many other people’s minds: “How odd of God to choose the Jews,” quipped journalist William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration that they’ve provoked ever since Judaism prompted its “axial” break in Western consciousness. You don’t need to “believe in” that break in any religious sense to notice that Jews have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned.
‘How odd of God to choose the Jews,’ quipped William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration they have provoked ever since Judaism prompted its ‘axial’ break in Western consciousness.
Judaism’s derivative religions, Christianity and Islam, adopt Hebraism’s separation of spirit from nature: “We are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners,” intoned Robert Cushman, a contemporary of the Elder William Brewster and an organizer of the Pilgrims’ ‘Exodus’ to Massachusetts, in a sermon he gave in 1622. Three-hundred-fifty years later, the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the “paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: ‘Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul’ (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature.” Somewhat analogously, Islam commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac in its holiday, the Feast of the Sacrifice, which honors Abraham’s obedience but celebrates Isaac’s release.
In Judaism’s judgment, Christianity and Islam go too far to relieve humankind of having to bear “too much reality” in this fallen world. In Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews, the late Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel notes that Christians have depicted God “as a suffering, agonizing man, but thereby… transformed a human need into a theological principle that ends with an illusion” and “a false consolation.” For two millennia, Christians have intoned, “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Baptized in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek,” yet they’ve reigned from golden thrones over armed states whose national identities are rooted even more deeply in ties of sacred “blood and soil” than Jewish “tribal” identity has been.
Yet the Hebrew Bible also depicts Hebrews as no less terrified of existential uprootedness than Blaise Pascal or any Christian king. Even as the Book of Exodus recounts God revealing the terms of His covenant to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, His chosen people are busy fabricating and worshiping a Golden Calf at the foot of the mountain. Later they turn to kingly and materialistic protections against wandering. Zionism appears in several historical periods as an attempt to return to and possess the promised land, the latest attempt provoked in the 20th Century by Jews’ urgent need to escape rising persecution and even extinction.
But returning doesn’t guarantee succeeding. For three millennia, Jews celebrating the Passover holiday have invoked poetically and ritually their “return” to Jerusalem and deliverance from exilic, often ghostly, wandering. At times, they’ve actually returned to the biblical land and to what Tillich called “the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.” In the Book of Samuel, Israelites importune its eponymous judge to “Give us a king to rule over us, like all the other nations.” Although that demand displeases Samuel, he and the Israelites commit genocidal assaults against neighboring Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines:
“Remember what the Amalekites did to you… [when] they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” [Deuteronomy 25]
“Then Samuel said, ‘Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites.’ Agag came to him cheerfully, for he thought, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” But Samuel declared: ‘As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.” [1 Samuel 15]
Eight centuries before Christ, and 28 centuries before the Netanyahu government waged war against Hamas in Gaza, the prophet Amos said, “For the three transgressions of Gaza, Yea, for four, I will not reverse [its punishment]: Because they carried away captive a whole captivity [of Israelites] to deliver them up to Edom. So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour the palaces thereof; … and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, Saith the Lord.”
The militarized nationalism of today’s Zionists can be understood as another such reversion or “return” to the promised land, reinforced in 2018 by the Knesset’s “Basic Law” declaring that Israel is “the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” and greatly diminishing it as a liberal democracy.
Such contradictory, conflicted uprootings and re-rootings have given Jews their mobility, marginality and occasional magnificence and malfeasance, breeding tough, defiant spirits not only in Moses and Jesus but also in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb and self-avowed “destroyer of worlds.” The Jew as interloper, living marginally in homogeneous societies but flourishing and sometimes predominating in pluralistic and open ones — agile, entrepreneurial, walking on eggshells and thinking fast – has sometimes seemed most “at home” in media of exchange, whether of information, social commentary, money, merchandise, music, math, medicine or scientific discovery. Confirmation of their prominence in those realms is presented sociologically and lyrically in anthropologist Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century.”
That Jews, unlike “settler-colonial” Puritans, actually do have ancestors in their “promised land” was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of scrolls, transcribed in Hebrew that I can read with little more than my “Hebrew school” and summer-camp training, that had been buried in caves near the Dead Sea seven centuries before Jews’ millennia of exile from the area and before Islam existed and Arabic was spoken in the region. The scrolls themselves had been in those caves for almost a thousand years when the Roman Emperor Hadrian coined the name “Palestine” for the land in the second century C.E., to elevate its Philistines at the expense of rebellious Israelites, whom his legions had recently defeated and forced into exile. Although Jews were mostly absent from Palestine for the ensuing two millennia, the “settler-colonial” paradigm that applies so clearly to English Puritans applies only ambiguously to Jews, especially to the half of today’s Israeli Jews whose ancestors never left the Middle East after the Roman Empire’s conquest of the Jewish kingdoms but settled in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ethiopia for millennia and have never set foot in Europe.
Yet the biblical passages transcribed on those ancient scrolls include the prophetic warnings that Israelites’ territorial claims were contingent on their keeping the covenant sealed at Sinai — or, as we might put it now, on their transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher, more universal standard. If Israelites failed to do that, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies: Here is the prophet Amos again, sounding almost like a protester against Israel today:
“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! …. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, … who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” [Amos 6]
Isaiah, another reluctant but overwhelmed biblical prophet, warned that God would punish Israelite elites’ arrogance by destroying their Zion “until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”
How America’s Puritans became the ‘New Israel’
The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images/Bettmann)
It’s remarkable how closely Puritans’ and their legatees’ strategies in their American colonies prefigured those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza. In 1637, Puritan soldiers surrounded a major settlement of Connecticut’s Pequot people as Puritan leader John Mason “snatched a torch from a wigwam and set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon ablaze,” according to James Truslow Adams’ 1921 Pulitzer-winning “The Founding of New England”:
“In the early dawn of that May morning, as the New England men stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women, and children were slowly burned alive.” Ministers of Christ saluted one another “in the Lord Jesus,” some of them profiting directly from selling surviving Pequot boys and girls into slavery.
In 1676, future Harvard president Increase Mather urged and then celebrated a genocide of the Narragansett people, declaring, in his chronicle of “The Warr with the Indians in New England”:
“The Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun…. And we have reason to conclude that salvation is begun [because] there are two or 3000 Indians who have been either killed, or taken, or submitted themselves to the English…. [T]he Narragansetts are in a manner ruined… who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England, and the most formidable Enemy which hath appeared against us. But God hath consumed them by the word, & by Famine and by sickness …”
Gregory Michna, a historian of that war, writes that “Just as [the biblical] Canaan was wrested from the hands of heathens through sacral violence… the Rev. Joshua Moodey advocated infanticide as a wartime strategy, writing that ‘The Bratts of Babylon may more easily be dasht against the Stones, if we take the Season for it, but if we let them grow up they will become more formidable, and hardly Conquerable.’”
It’s remarkable how closely the early American Puritan strategies, including mass murder, anticipated those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and the IDF in Gaza.
Indigenous people made retaliatory attacks against the English, including in an infamous raid in 1704 on Deerfield, Massachusetts that destroyed that settlement — by the measures of its time, nearly as horrifying as Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The devastation of Deerfield has figured deeply in my own moral imagination ever since a February morning in 1957, when my fourth-grade class in Longmeadow — including some of my classmates who were descendants of the town’s Puritan settlers — sat on the floor, with the lamps turned off for effect, as Miss Smith stood before us in the pale, wintry light, telling us that on another cold February morning, 250 years earlier, howling, hatchet-wielding “Indians” had slaughtered nearly 20 English settlers of Deerfield, 40 miles upriver from us, and then force-marched nearly a hundred more through the frigid wilderness to captivity in Canada.
The captives included Deerfield minister John Williams and his family. Two of his children were killed in the attack, and his wife, Eunice, became weak on the trek north and fell down a ravine, tumbling into a river that swept her away. Williams’ account of that personal and communal calamity, all the more harrowing for its self-sacrificing affirmations of faith amid crucifixion, was published as “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion” soon after he and his son Stephen were returned to Massachusetts in a hostage exchange. For a while, his account rivaled John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a parable and primer for the Puritans’ holy but dangerous errand into the “howling wilderness,” as the historian John Demos recounts in The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America, highlighting Williams’ daughter’s refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world.
Williams’ son Stephen later became the minister of Longmeadow’s Congregational church, which stands 100 yards from the classroom where Ethel Smith told us about his captivity. The great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards visited him there in 1740, and a year later Stephen Williams rode the five miles south from Longmeadow to Enfield, Connecticut, to hear Edwards preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”and write an eyewitness account of its listeners’ writhing reactions.
My belief that this matters may be overdetermined by the fact that, 215 years later, I bicycled along Williams Street every weekday, passing the church where Edwards had visited Williams, on my way to and from Miss Smith’s classroom. (Fifty-eight years after that, in 2014, I wrote a quasi-puritanical jeremiadfor Salon about the American republic’s dimming prospects. I wasn’t thinking of Edwards at the time, but The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg tweeted in response,“ Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture — and that’s a compliment.”)
Miss Smith didn’t tell us that the English had included some rogues, swindlers and mountebanks who drove the expulsions and massacres of Pequots, Pocumptucs, Mohawks, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Abenakis. Despite the settlers’ proclaimed good intentions, their land hunger generated duplicitous trade and land deals, alongside pious missions to convert indigenous people into “praying Indians.” James Truslow Adams explains that
“as the whites increased in numbers and comparative power, and as their first fears of the savages, and the desire to convert them, gave place to dislike, contempt, spiritual indifference, and self-confidence… it was no longer considered necessary to treat with the Indian as an equal…. [T]he lands of the [Indians] gradually came to be looked upon as reservations upon which their native owners were allowed to live until a convenient opportunity, or the growing needs of the settlers, might bring about a farther advance.”
Today’s Israeli settlers on the West Bank might take note and take caution. So might “old stock” Americans, proud descendants of the intrepid Puritans who prefer not to remember these and other awful precedents for our present civic-republican crisis. Even Stephen Williams, the redeemed Deerfield captive who had followed his father into the ministry, wound up owning Black slaves as his house servants in Longmeadow, as recent Harvard graduate Michael Baick recounts in a fascinating senior essay. It would be wrong for today’s faltering, “mainline” Congregationalists, Presbyterians and other Protestants to displace onto today’s Israel their own discomforts with the fraught aspects of their Puritan history and with the soulless neoliberalism – and, in some white-nationalist evangelists, the reactionary tribalism — that it has spawned. If we could reweave older, stronger covenantal threads into our civic-republican fabric, we might remember that that its strength has depended on premises and practices that armies and wealth alone can’t nurture or defend. Puritans placed the Hebrew approximation of “Illumination and Testimony” on Yale’s seal because they decided to ground their salvation-hungry faith in covenanted, earthbound communities of law and work whose model they called “the Hebrew republic.” And some Jews would learn from them, as I did in Longmeadow and at the “old” Yale, to cherish its then-still-“Protestant” personal and moral introspection.
Even when Puritans held New England in their thrall, slaughtered native Americans, and hanged 40 witches, they sometimes knew better than to forgive themselves as casually as many Americans do now when they excuse or even valorize their country’s collective hysterias and brutalities. In 1697, a conscience-stricken Judge Samuel Sewall, who’d presided over the Salem witch trials five years earlier, stood penitently in Boston’s Old South Meeting House one Sunday as the pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from Sewell confessing his “guilt contracted… at Salem” and his desire “to take the blame and shame of it, asking… that God… would powerfully defend him against all temptations for Sin, for the future: and vouchsafe him for the efficacious saving conduct of word and spirit.”
Who among American’s current and recent leaders desires to take such blame and shame for enabling the killing or unjust incarceration of thousands of innocent young black men? Who begs forgiveness for opening floodgates of slaughter in Vietnam and the Middle East or enabling the official brutality on our streets and the subtler but no-less decisive dispossession of hard-working but under-informed Americans from their homes and jobs? Who takes blame for designing and operating the powerful engines and marketing sensors that grope and titillate lower viscera which Puritans like Edwards probed and restrained?
Against the present conventional presumption that globalization has flattened the world for the better, Puritans would warn that our “flat” world has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that a good society needs to plumb those depths in ways spiritually potent enough to face down the demons in them and in ourselves. Abyss-plumbing requires caring as well as discipline — a tall order, and a humbling one, as Judge Sewall made clear by “humiliating” himself, in the old usage of that word, and as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did by drawing on Puritan remonstrances and metaphorical remnants.
I got a clue to what abyss-diving requires in 2015, when I attended my Longmeadow High School class’ 50th year reunion, three weeks before the publishing industry commenced a huge promotion of Stacy Schiff’s energetically researched, dazzlingly narrated, ideationally empty The Witches: Salem 1692 with a 500-person Manhattan armory gala, dinners up and down Park Avenue, a book tour rivalling Odysseus’ travels or David Niven’s in “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and four feature pieces in The New York Times. I’ve had my say elsewhere about what was wrong with the coronation of Schiff’s (and our) self-servingly damning assessment of Puritans. But not until that reunion in 2015 did I begin to understand how growing up amid remnants and echoes of Puritan ways may have sharpened my reckonings with our civic-cultural crisis.
Probably the only public “sin” we Longmeadow High School students committed came in painting “LHS ’65” in huge white letters on a tobacco barn just across the town line in Enfield. But soon enough we committed sins of the heart and lower viscera that Edwards would have probed. So I was surprised at our reunion to discover that I owed something better to classmates whose Puritan descent had seldom crossed my mind. There I learned for the first time that the family of my classmate Will Thayer, one of our football stars, had come to Massachusetts in the 1630s and that he had become a minister in the Congregational Church, the original Puritan church, and that he’d spent years working with poor residents of Brooklyn’s beleaguered East New York — a neighborhood that, in an unlikely coincidence, I, too, had come to know well.
How had seeds like that been sown in both of us in arboreal, funereal Longmeadow? Talking with Will and other classmates — Susan Shepard’s family, I learned, donated part of the land that is Harvard Yard; I discovered that Clark Shattuck, a deeply reflective, artistic composer, had an ancestor, John Shattuck, who drowned in the Charles River in 1675 while returning from a battle in King Phillip’s War and another ancestor who’d fought in Lexington in 1775; and Barbara Hubbard showed me that her mother’s lineage goes back to William Bradford, first governor of the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony — I found myself awash in memories of growing up as a stranger among these kids half a century earlier. And, with due allowance for the fact that the Longmeadow I’d grown up in wasn’t the Longmeadow of its Puritan founders, I understood how wrong we are to psycho-dramatize, satirize, and commercialize the Puritans.
Long before they’d lost their ecclesiastical and judicial grip on New England early in the 18th Century and had settled into becoming the Yankees I’d known in the 20th, descendants of Puritans had had a legacy worth living up to. If we now nervously satirize, demonize, and commercialize them, we may only be displacing blame for our own darker side. Would it disorient us unbearably to imagine that some of them knew more about the human heart than we assume that they did? Have we enough courage to assess them without seeing them, as the historianJane Kamensky rightly rapped Schiff for doing, “in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces.”? We have apps and algorithms that Puritans never dreamed of, but do we have their wisdom and will?
How American republic’s founders invoked biblical Hebrews
In 1771, the young James Madison, then a future framer of the republic and president, stayed on for a year at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton), to study Hebrew and Puritan theology.
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposedthat the great seal of the United States depict “Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.” (The Continental Congress chose instead the Masonic-inspired seal that’s now on every dollar bill.)
In 1790, Jews’ own hope for a fully “enlightened” citizenship in America that they hadn’t yet achieved in Europe was ratified in George Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, which affirmed the new republic’s full tolerance of “the stock of Abraham”.
In 1809, John Adams, a descendant of New England Puritans and by then a former president, wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.” Adams employed that “instrument” to advance something like the Hebrew covenant, writing, in what is still part of the preamble to the Massachusetts constitution, that “The body politic is … a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”
Note what that entails: Covenants require extralegal agreements, or traditions of trust, even among their competing participants, as much as they require laws that can too-easily be undercut by the laws’ own enforcers unless they also rely on a strong, nourished consensus favoring the rule of law itself. That relies, in turn, on an overriding sense of trust, even amid substantive disagreements. A civic-republican society can’t rely on imagined ties of sacred “blood and soil,” the shorthand for ethno-racial, quasi-familial bonds that sustain a sense of intimacy among people who share what historian Benedict Anderson called “Imagined Communities.” Rather, a civic-republican society is based on a covenant, a semi-spiritual agreement among autonomous individuals to hold one another to certain public virtues and norms that neither the liberal state nor free market alone can nourish or defend. Something additional, or foundational, is required: a civil society that reinforces the kind of “social compact” sought by Adams. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A civic-republican society is secured not only by institutional and legal authority but also by understandings that cannot be legislated. Such a social compact cannot be rooted ultimately in ties of blood and soil.
In 1869, the British criticMatthew Arnold observedthat Protestant Americans had internalized Hebraism’s scourging demands for “conduct and obedience” and “strictness of conscience”:
“To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number… who say and do not, to be in earnest – …. this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism…. [T]he intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — this energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.”
“From Maine to Florida and back again, all America Hebraizes,” Arnold wrote, and Hebraic intrepidity and prickly fidelity indeed characterized the training of many American leaders and followers at college-preparatory schools like the Groton School, whose founding rector Endicott Peabody was a descendant of Puritans – ironically, of a Puritan rogue, John Endecott, whose brutality toward indigenous peoples thankfully wasn’t sustained by Peabody or by a later relative — Endicott “Chubb” Peabody — who was governor of Massachusetts in my own lifetime. One of the Groton School rector Peabody’s students, Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued to correspond with him from the White House. In 1912, FDR’s older cousin Theodore Roosevelt, another of Groton’s founders, had challenged the presidency Woodrow Wilson, himself a latter-day Puritan,by thundering, at the Republican National Convention, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!” (By comparison, the loudest “thundering” at the 2024 Republican National Convention came from the theatrical wrestler Hulk Hogan.)
In 1987, the historian Shalom Goldman discovered that George W. Bush’s great-uncle five generations removed, the Rev. George Bush, was the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University in 1835 and the author of a book on Islam, “A Life of Mohammed,” which pronounced the prophet an imposter. In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote “The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived,” interpreting the biblical Book of Ezekiel to prophesy the return of the Jews to Palestine.
I don’t know if George W. Bush has read his ancestor’s exegesis, but Barack Obama cited Ezekiel in his 2008 speech on race, recalling that at his Trinity Church in Chicago (a branch of the Puritans’ Congregational Church), “Ezekiel’s field of dry bones” was one of the “stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope” — that “became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears.” Obama seemed to want to weave back into America’s civic-republican fabric some tough, old threads of the Abrahamic, covenantal faith that had sustained Kingman Brewster Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. Now that we’re looking through gaping holes in that fabric, the republic is faltering, as is its founders’ hope that it could rely on “strictness of conscience” and citizens’ inner beliefs as strongly as on their outward performances.
Some of the founders’ hopes, visions, and ancient origin stories still animated the civic culture during my childhood in Longmeadow, but that culture has gone missing in the 70 years since Miss Smith implanted some Puritan and Hebraic discipline in an impressionable nine-year-old. Even John Adams’ covenantal, civic-republican culture seems to have given way to narrowly personalistic strains in evangelical Christianity and in the republic’s Lockean premises, now commercialized and technologized beyond recognition
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Wherefore? Where to?
Jewish youth rescued from the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp show their camp tattooes on their forearms on board the refugee immigration ship Mataroa July 15, 1945 at Haifa port. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images)
Many Jews of my American generation grew up withphotos like this, not as historical curiosities but as reminders of what we ourselves might not have escaped had we been born a decade or so earlier in the Europe of our grandparents, instead of in postwar America. (That was true of me, born in Worcester, MA, in 1947 to parents whose Lithuanian-Jewish parents had emigrated to the U.S. shortly before World War I. Had I been born in 1937 in my paternal grandfather’s village of Dusiat, I wouldn’t have survived what happened there in the summer of 1941.)
Jews who’ve facilitated but sometimes challenged modernity’s dislocations have been targets of others’ resentments, owing to what George Steiner called their role as “a moral irritant and insomniac” — and what Assaf Sagiv, in a formidable essay, “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem,” — characterized as Jews’ function as an interlocutor “of the darkest impulses of man.” Steiner considered that status “an honor beyond honors,” but some Jews who’ve been persecuted, or haunted by memories of persecution, have resorted to sinuous subservience to established powers, especially in times of populist frustration and backlash. The Jew as fixer or apologist for the powerful — suspicious and opportunistic, legally and commercially underhanded, contemptuous of detractors – has been a stereotype too often earned by Jews such as Trump’s former henchman Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg, who’ve acted as if such behavior would serve them in societies presumed hostile to progressive, humanitarian hopes and even to Jews.
And not only Jews. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a Roman Catholic who became a Trump acolyte and chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Republican Conference, also became a self-appointed alarmist against American antisemitism when she spearheaded a Dec. 5, 2023 House committee hearing on what she claimed was “the rot of antisemitism” in student protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza. She demanded that university presidents seated before her at the hearing answer “Yes or No” to her accusation of anti-Gaza war campus protesters: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” So saying, Stefanik struck a politically decisive blow not only against the presidents of Penn and Harvard, whom she admonished to resign because of their equivocal responses, but also against America’s civic-republican culture.
Although some of the protesters who shout “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Globalize the intifada!” and who hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ violence are historically uninformed and politically immature, they haven’t been “calling for the genocide of the Jews,” as Stefanik insisted. They’ve been accusing Jews of committing genocide. Stefanik likely understood that they had a plausible, if debatable, case, but she flipped the protestors’ script to make their own intentions seem genocidal against Jewish victims and to make university presidents seem their enablers. (Not incidentally, Stefanik also bolstered conservatives’ long-running campaign to blame liberal university leaders for ruining liberal education.)
Ironically, only two years before Stefanik urged Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign, Stefanik herself had been asked to resign from the advisory board of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics because she’d supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election with her “public assertions about voter fraud… that have no basis in evidence, and… public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect,” in the words of the school’s dean. When Stefanik refused to resign and was removed by the board, she departed gracelessly, claiming that it was a “badge of honor to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested, and canceled by colleges and universities across America…. The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience.”
Protesters who shout ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Globalize the intifada’ may be historically uninformed or politically immature. But they’re not ‘calling for the genocide of the Jews.’ They’re accusing Jews of committing genocide.
An honest investigation of what’s infantilizing some campus protestors would examine rising “free-market” pressures on colleges to instrumentalize students’ expectations of higher education and to incline university administrators and faculty to train them to become indebted buyers and sellers, not citizens who subordinate self-interest at times and interrogate conventional arrangements instead of just facilitating them.
Anti-antisemites are right to insist that Hamas’ intentions toward Jews are genocidal and nihilistic and that Hamas is a despotic, destructive force for Palestinians under its rule. But that doesn’t cancel the historical reality that English settlers who founded Harvard and the American republic were as genocidal as the biblical Hebrews upon whom they modeled themselves. Condemning student protesters for excusing or defending Hamas yet ignoring the murderous extremism of Israeli settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza only intensifies the pathologies of both Holocaust-traumatized Jews and Nakba-traumatized Palestinians. What the writer Adam Shatz has called “vengeful pathologies” inflame not only those who are tied ancestrally or materially to one side in this war; they also inflame people who have no such ties but who seem more enraged by this war than by other regional conflicts that are as devastating and a hideous as the IDF’s killing of more than 30,000 Gazans, including many women and children, and destroying their homes, schools and hospitals. Unless we’re truly unable to “bear too much reality,” as T. S. Eliot surmised, we’d also have to note the sadism of Hamas leaders who’ve maimed countless Palestinian dissenters and of Hamas fighters’ whose body-camera footage depicted their murders of Israelis who were forced to watch their own children or parents being butchered just before being slaughtered themselves.
Some young Americans protesting the Gaza war are indulging in an ersatz politics driven by zeal to “prove themselves” in moralistic posturing and ideological position-taking. “This concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption,” Shatz wrote in The Nation in 2014. “Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third Worldists…: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons…. Palestine is still ‘the question’ because it holds up a mirror to us. ‘Too many people want to save Palestine’ one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine.”
The “all-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel,” Shatz continued, has left some progressives “strangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can’t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena.” Since progressives champion freedoms of speech, of conscience, of sexual identity, and of reproductive choice, why don’t they champion hundreds of millions of people who are denied those freedoms by chanting, “From Tehran to Tripoli, Muslims will be free!”?
My criticism of the left on such grounds doesn’t excuse the Zionist movement and Israel’s degrading and now, yes, genocidal assaults on Palestinians. Since at least the 1930s, some Zionist leaders such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky have been unapologetically racist. Yet I cannot condemn Israel uniquely, when it is blamed or valorized by Americans whose ancestors destroyed Indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans. “Forgetfulness, and… historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation,” noted Ernst Renan, the 19th-century scholar of Semitic languages and civilizations. Equally “essential,” it would seem, are demagogic leaders who safeguard their own nations’ false memories by ginning up moralistic condemnations of other peoples’ vengeful pathologies. A wiser, more effective strategy might begin by acknowledging with Renan that no nation’s emergence has been morally innocent, and by seeking honest explanations and answers, even when they’re painful. Several courageous American Jewish writers have tried to do this.
Former liberal Zionist Peter Beinart has held instructive public conversations with young Palestinian activists and thinkers such as Ahmed Moor. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has held reflective, informative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli thinkers such as Amjad Iraqi and Yossi Klein Halevi. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has explained why changes in the nature and dimensions of war have ended its plausibility as a “solution” to conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
Whenever religion presumes to rule with state power, as the Puritans did and as today’s Christian nationalists intend to do, it becomes odious no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, our society will wither and die.
These and other Jewish writers exemplify another irony: Jews’ ancient, proto-cosmopolitan breakthrough still drives even secular, liberal Jews who are passionate about America, not just because some of their own forebears escaped the European nightmare but also because America’s Puritan-Hebrew emphasis on communal covenant has figured so strongly in its civic-republican ethos. Free now of Calvinist preoccupations with personal salvation, and also largely free of rabbinical constraints, the secular Jews whom I’ve mentioned are more “Jewish” than ever in striving to strengthen a covenant that entwines personal renewal with public progress.
“The past is never dead; it’s not even past,” noted the novelist William Faulkner. From the biblical Abraham breaking Ur’s idols to Abraham Lincoln forcing a bloody “new birth of freedom,” and from Kingman Brewster’s and Martin Luther King’s handshake in1964 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for a “New Covenant” to Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in,” America’s political culture has often invoked a past whose threads would now need to be re-woven somehow if the republic is to be kept from dissolving into a neoliberal free-for-all or tumbling into a Trumpian abyss.
Such a re-weaving would require acknowledging that the vagaries of finance capital and intrusive consumer marketing have hollowed out the civic-republican culture that was planted problematically by the Puritans but that sustained what G.K. Chesterton would later call “a nation with the soul of a church,” which indeed it still was when I sat on the floor in Ethel Smith’s classroom — a “church” that expected its citizens to be faithful but that didn’t impose a particular ecclesiastical doctrine. If a religion presumes to rule with state power, as Puritans certainly did and as today’s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, religion may become odious, no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, a society will wither and die.
Such a challenge often takes pundits and politicians by surprise, but democratic renewal can’t be conjured up in newspaper columns. blog posts, cable commentaries, and tweets. It has to be cultivated patiently in early social education, civic organizing, and political outreach worthy of the ethos envisioned by John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and others. The American civil-rights movement that made possible that handshake between Brewster and King at Yale was decades in the making, struggling to find moments of opportunity to discomfit comfortable whites with what the late Rep. John Lewis, himself a former seminarian, called “good trouble” that prompted sympathy for Rosa Parks.
Plutocratic investors and managers can’t nourish such faith and action. Who might? One wintry morning in 1968, my junior year at the old, all-male, nearly all-white Yale, I was plodding along on my way to a class when I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three seniors and the university’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the seniors was speaking against a gusting wind and, it seemed to me, against fear. “The government claims we’re criminals,” I heard him say as I leaned in to listen, “but we say it’s the government that’s criminal in waging this war.” He and the others were handing Coffin their draft cards, identical to the one in my wallet, and they were refusing conscription upon graduation six months hence.
Coffin was there to bless a courage that few of us who were watching fully understood. “Believe me, “he said, smiling, a strand of his graying hair flying in the wind, “I know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin’ at a millstone.” Although his Calvinist theology was conservative in many ways, it was revolutionary in carrying forward the Hebraic axial break with ancient Ur’s idols and its conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Something in us grasped at that convinced energy, because we were scared: As far as we knew, these guys were about to be arrested and sent to prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example. Something in their bearing of that reality made them as deeply prophetic as Rosa Parks was when she refused to move to the back of the bus. As the quiet dignity of her performance credited her white oppressors with some integrity, even while exposing their shortcomings, it had reconstituted civic life instead of trashing it. Now, too, as the seniors before us took grave risks to resist the United States government in the name of a civic nation transcending “blood and soil” and even capitalism and Cold War ideology, American civil society seemed to have risen from slumber and to be walking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. As I watched, the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe.
One might consider these students’ gestures foolish, even elitist. But the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called their acts of witness “constitutional patriotism,” and he marveled that Americans were resisting the state on behalf of a civic-republican experiment testing whether republics that rely on a higher, deeper faith can endure. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon reminds us that Rome slid almost imperceptibly from republican self-governance to imperial rule when Augustus sensed that “people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”
As we deplete the stored-up moral capital of the country’s original, Hebraic-Calvinist covenant, we’re losing the faith that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Let’s give the biblical authors credit for taking the sublimity of our loss straight up instead of chasing false consolations. Our best hope of transcending realities that seem too much to bear may come from seeing them for what they are, not for imagining them as we wish them to be.
Read more from Jim Sleeper on free speech and history:
(Written by Jim Sleeper and posted in 2009. Rescued and posted again on February 21st, 2024)
(Author’s Note: You’re about to dive into an Orwellian Memory Hole. The following was posted at Talking Points Memo in 2009, but you won’t find it there now. Along with several other writers’ columns concerning Israel, this one disappeared from TPM. The site’s founder and editor, Joshua Micah Marshall, told us that a technical snafu had disrupted the site and its archive. I had saved all of my columns, so I sent them to him, but they never were restored. Other websites’ links to my own and some other writers’ TPM columns about Israel now take you only to TPM’s homepage, not to the relevant columns, which TPM has not restored.
So I’ve restored one of mine, here below. The irony, if it is an irony, is that the following column, which Marshall posted for me on TPM in 2009, was so prescient about Israel’s 2024 war in Gaza that large portions of what I wrote then can be read now, almost uncannily, as if I’d written them in 2024. Very occasionally in what you’re about to read, I’ve inserted a brief editorial note, in italics, to update a fact or simply to remind you that what you’re reading was indeed written in 2009, not yesterday. Send your reactions to jimsleeper12@gmail.com, and re-post the column or share it with your list.)
(Posted on Talking Points Memo, January. 13, 2009, but then disappeared:)
How and How Not to Assess Israel’s Moral Self-Destruction
Israel’s blind, crushing, doomed war on Gaza has ended the Jewish people’s 65-year-long reprieve from anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, a reprieve that encompassed most of our lifetimes, during which even dedicated Jew-haters bit their tongues.
No more. Amid a cacophony of justified condemnations of Israel, you can hear strains of an older, creepier chorus. It’s not too much to say that Israel has brought this upon itself, but it is also not too much to say that some rather perverse people have wanted and tried to orchestrate the cacophony to the detriment of Jews.
I don’t mean that strong critics of Israel should quiet down. It’s long past time to break the taboo in the U.S. media on talking about Israel’s blunders and outrages at least as frankly as many Israelis themselves famously do. But I do mean to say that Israel’s conduct of this war (Note: in 2009), would be hideous and heartbreaking enough without the encouragement it’s getting from Israel’s impassioned defenders as well as from some of its critics who don’t know their history and sound as if they don’t want to know.
And there is a deeper political problem: Like the bloody combatants of the IDF, Hamas and Hezbollah, the armchair warriors on all sides don’t see that the odds of winning justice through state violence and wars of “liberation” have sunk since World War II. Yet many commentators’ blindness is as willful as the armed warriors’, and it’s as fateful, not only for Palestinians or Jews.
Look briefly at an accomplished writer on each side of this war — Chris Hedges, a scourge of Israel, and Jeff Goldberg, a sinuous defender. Then look at how Abraham Burg and Jonathan Schell argue, far more constructively and from no less experience, that although human nature hasn’t changed, the costs and consequences of violence have, as have the most effective ways to defeat tyranny and secure human dignity.
You may not think that we need to hear from dreamers at a moment like this. But Burg and Schell are the realists. Historic shifts in freedom’s always-cloudy prospects have confounded not only grand strategists and their apologists in national-security states (Britain, the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and fortress Israel), but also guerrillas and supporters of national-liberation movements in China, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Palestine. Neither group seems aware that better movements, led by Gandhi, King, Mandela (after prison), Havel, Michnik and Northern Ireland, have re-constituted political power away from violence, sidelining established tyrannies and even the would-be tyrants and nihilists within their own movements. Writers and observers can help this transition if we believe that creative, disciplined non-violence isn’t merely a dream of chumps, naifs, or schlemiels. Tough, savvy veterans of conflict have shown that we don’t have to rush into the dead ends toward which the combatants and enablers of IDF and Hamas are beckoning us.
In 2002, amid the war on terror and the run-up to the Iraq war, Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent in Bosnia, Latin America, and Israel, published his mordantly titled book War is a Force That Gives us Meaning. More recently, he has published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and a torrent of articles about injustices perpetrated by elites at home and abroad, not least through and by Israel.
A Characteristic of Hedges’ torrent of condemnations is this passage from “The Language of Death,” a Jan. 12 [Note: 2009!] post in Truthdig:
“The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth.”
Hedges may well have read a cooler but otherwise wholly compatible assessment of Israel’s 42-year mishandling of Gaza which I showcased here on January 4, by Darryl Li, a former public information officer for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. But I think that Hedges and Li could do more to advance justice if they’d help us answer questions about violent resistance such as the following:
Is it true that Hamas is what it is mainly because Israel’s policies are what they are? Or is there more to learn about how and why Zionism and Palestinian nationalism arose at the same time?
Would Hedges and Li prefer a two-state solution, or Israel’s absorption into a bi-national, democratic state whose majority would be Palestinian? If the latter, would human rights and civil rights fare better there than they have under Israeli occupation and within Israel’s 1967 borders, for the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel within those borders? What new balance of Israeli responsibility and Israeli-Palestinian interdependency might release these enemies from their degrading mutual loathing?
When Israelis say that they see no Palestinian or Arab disposition to serious self-government, to what extent are they right? To what extent are they just being racist? To what extent are they rationalizing their obsession about their own security at the expense of everyone else’s? Have Israelis been devoured by war as a force that gives them meaning? Won’t peace depend on getting the balance of truth right as much as it does on condemning the fighting?
Finally, does Hedges, who often recounts his firsthand witness of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children for sport, think it inevitable that every drop of blood drawn by the oppressor’s lash will be avenged with blood drawn by the Arab sword, perhaps until Israelis are driven into the sea, having brought their destruction upon themselves? Does Hedges also accept the 19th-century blood-and-soil presumption that Jews never belonged in the Middle East any more than they belonged in Europe? Or does he see a more complex truth and a better way to reconcile power and justice?
I’ve read much of Hedges’ and Li’s work, but I haven’t yet found their answers to such questions.
Chris Hedges Doesn’t Hedge
I do know that the passage I’ve quoted from Hedges is about more than Israel and Palestine; it’s also about his justified but not-so-well-focused rage at injustice and hypocrisy in the world, especially when it’s sown by the American national-security state and its apologists. Hedges has become a volcano, erupting in Truthdig, Harper’s, and other venues. Recently, for example, he wrote with molten fury of the supercilious disdain he’d experienced at the hands of preppies and parvenus while in college. He has also laced into “America the Illiterate,” the Christian right, Bush’s nuclear apocalypse, fellow war correspondents, and more.
Hedges grew up in Maine and in rural parishes in upstate New York, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. He comes from a tough, old, working-class Yankee culture for which I have a fond if somewhat testy regard. A one-time Harvard Divinity School student, he erupts along the venerable if somewhat predictable lines of a New England Puritan jeremiad, the denunciatory sermon whose purpose, in the hands of latter-day Puritans such as the 19th century abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe, has been to blast open new pathways to redemption on earth, if not in heaven.
America would be poorer and meaner without these prophets. They strengthened Lincoln’s melancholy commitment to the divine inexorability of bloody justice, steeling him to fight the Civil War to its bitter end. But who is the equivalent of “The Union” in Palestine, and who are the rebels? Israel in Gaza now resembles the Union General Sherman’s rampage in Atlanta, but if you look around a bit, you find that Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have been playing a long, slow game to turn the tables and do the same. They’re tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, and the demographic and moral odds may soon favor their theocratic, blood-and-soil vindication.
Hedges knows that his own ancestral Yankee Protestantism blessed the dispossession and slaughter of the inhabitants of the lands in New England that his family now calls home. He knows that that Protestantism drew heavily on the Old Testament to emulate and also encourage Zionism. The Rev. George Bush, a fifth-generation lineal antecedent of our President George W. Bush, was the first professor of Hebrew and Arabic at New York University in 1835. He wrote a long tract on the Old Testament’s Book of Ezekiel that foretold the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from all over the world for Armageddon.
If Hedges (and certain editors at Harper’s and Truthdig) can acknowledge even subliminally that their Puritan forebears have a thing or two to live down but that they displaced or projected it onto “the Jews,” the stars have aligned (Note: in 2009) to encourage his eruptions. Both Israel and Palestine may have to undergo their own civil wars or internal revolutions to defeat the fanaticism that is now driving them. but Hedges’ anger seems to have driven him to a somewhat reductionist analysis of the causes and consequences.
A similar moralism has sometimes led supporters of “national liberation movements” to look away when those movements become brutal, tyrannical and even genocidal in the very lands that they “liberate”. I cannot say that Hedges has gone that far, but he confines blame of Hamas to an elliptical line or two. He does give Israeli dissidents some credit, but he seems to hold no more hope for them than he does blame for Hamas.
Jeffrey Goldberg hedges, but only for one side.
On January 13, 2009, a few days after Chris Hedges’ condemnation of Israel appeared in Truthdig, the New York Times op-ed page ran Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas.” There, as in virtually every article of Goldberg’s I can recall, we learn that Goldberg — a Long-Island, New York-born and bred American, but also an Israeli army veteran — has often defied amazing personal dangers as a reporter in Africa, in Lebanon, in Gaza, and more. He has walked right up to and questioned people who, he lets us understand, would just as soon slit his throat as squint at him. In a variation on this theme, other Goldberg articles parade his easy familiarity with great leaders from Senator John McCain to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who for some reason talk to him as frankly they might talk in a private conversation with a brother-in-law.
I can’t pretend to account for how Goldberg accomplishes these journalistic feats, but I think I can take some account of what they accomplish. If Chris Hedges has become a volcano of denunciations of American imperialism and elitism and its spawn, Jeffrey Goldberg has become a geyser of irresistibly entertaining, informative, but cagey explanations for everything from the likelihood of a Saddam Hussein-Osama bin Laden connection to the fractured nobility of John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid and to Israelis’ damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don’t bravery in the face an Arab world that, we are assured, has wanted to exterminate them since long before 1948, let alone since 1967 or last month.
The one exception to Goldberg’s neo-con’ish propagandizing that I can recall is a chilling piece he wrote for The New Yorker in 2004 about fanatical Jewish settlers on the West Bank. He has not written for that magazine for awhile now and seems more comfortable with the crypto-conservative Atlantic Monthly, where he has a blog [Editorial note: He is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine].
It’s thanks to such editors that we have had no shortage of op-ed pieces by Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, or the American Enterprise Institute’s talking drone Danielle Pletka. They have certainly opened the gates to Goldberg (Note: Goldberg wrote for many publications in 2009 and was not yet the editor of The Atlantic, as he is now, in 2024). In yesterday’s Times op ed he reintroduced us to the late Hamas chieftain Nizar Rayyan — “husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing executioner,” an “important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him two weeks ago” – who in 2006, Goldberg tells us with feigned nonchalance, “confessed to me one of his frustrations.” Goldberg tells us that Rayyan confessed that he despised fellow Palestinians in Fatah as sell-outs to the Jews, who are descended from pigs and apes and are “a curse to anyone who lives near them.”
Ever self-dramatizing, Goldberg wants us to marvel that Rayyan even talked with him – and talked theology with him, no less. He makes clear that Hamas’ intractable beliefs discredit Israeli leaders’ expectation that “Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion,” Goldberg warns us. “It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.” Yet Goldberg hastens to add, on the evidence of the same fanaticism that he has so entertainingly presented, that “Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation,” either.
We are left to conclude that we might as well bomb the Palestinians. “The only small chance for peace today,” Goldberg adds somewhat airily, “is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States, and mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’ enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of [Hezbollah in Lebanon] and Nizar Rayyan.”
Does Goldberg really have any faith in this hope, which he twirls like a velvet cape to conclude his performance? Mightn’t this have been the moment for him to raise instead the possibility that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has discredited Fatah and its leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is now widely thought by Palestinians who are fleeing Israeli bombs to be the obsequious collaborator with Israel that Rayyan says he is?
Mightn’t this also have been the moment for Goldberg to note that Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, of America’s “Nation of Islam,” both subscribed to the same theology that considered whites, and especially Jews, as descendants of pigs and apes? Mightn’t he have noted that Malcolm X changed toward the end of his life (Note: Malcolm became somewhat more ecumenical and ‘peace’-oriented) and that, last summer, Farrakhan made a penitential, almost desperate endorsement of Barack Obama, who exemplifies for Muslims and Jews a peace-making way to campaign that Goldberg didn’t understand or expect would win?
No matter, for surely Goldberg’s Times piece has cajoled or scared at least some liberal readers into concluding that Israel must fight in Gaza to the bitter end. Maybe he’s right. Maybe his scoop on the thinking of Rayyan explains why.
Except that, on January 2, shortly after Rayyan was killed, Chris Hedges wrote, in Truthdig, that “I often visited Nizar Rayan [different spelling, same man]…who would meet me in his book-lined study….” Hedges is a lot more regretful than Goldberg that when Israeli F-16s attacked that house, Rayan “was decapitated in the blast. His body was thrown into the street by the explosions. His four wives and 11 children also were killed.”
Other reports, including Goldberg’s, inform us that two of the four wives were killed, but Hedges is engaging in literary protest as much as in reporting. When he acknowledges dark sides of Rayan that would lead most of us to conclude that Rayan had to be stopped, you know that a “but” is coming:
“Rayan supported tactics, including suicide bombings, which are morally repugnant. His hatred of Israel ran deep. His fundamentalist brand of Islam was distasteful. But as he and I were students of theology, our discussions frequently veered off into the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life. He was a serious, thoughtful man who had suffered deeply under the occupation and dedicated his life to resistance. He could have fled his home and gone underground with other Hamas leaders. Knowing him, I suspect he could not leave his children. Like him or not, he had tremendous courage.”
The rest of Hedges’ “but” is his description of Gaza City itself. Here he rises briefly to great reporting that Orwell might have given us, on the deprivation and squalor Israel has forced upon Gaza. He doesn’t question whether recruiting suicide bombers is an effective response, any more than Goldberg questions whether Rayyan’s fanaticism justifies Israel’s destruction of Gaza City.
There are Other, Better Voices
Both Hedges and Goldberg know of Avraham Burg, the former Knesset Speaker and head of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization. As an officer in the paratroop corps, Burg became disillusioned during Israel’s Lebanon war of 1982. In1983, he was wounded by a grenade, not in Lebanon but in a Peace Now demonstration he’d joined in Jerusalem. Both Hedges and Goldberg need a long sit-down with Avraham Burg now.
Hedges needs it because Burg, who shares most of his criticisms of the Israeli government and public, could broaden his understanding, sensibility, and horizons. And Goldberg needs it because Burg, who knows everything that Goldberg knows about Israel’s enemies and more, has reached different conclusions about how Israel should respond.
Here I must let Burg speak for himself, as I did Darryl Li of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Then I’ll close with a few words about the writer and Yale lecturer Jonathan Schell, a veteran war correspondent in his own right and a brilliant expositor of new prospects for re-balancing power and violence.
In a recent column for the Israeli daily Haaretz entitled, “Why the West Can’t Win,” Burg writes the following, as only Israelis, who’ve all served together in a citizen army, can sometimes write to one another. (Note in 2024: If I could force Benjamin Netanyahu to do anything, it would be to memorize the following paragraphs by Burg, written prophetically in 2009:)
“Beyond the two piles of bodies and the mourning and bereavement of both peoples, through the fragmented voices of Israel’s leadership, it’s already possible to feel the sour taste of the next combat loss. We haven’t won anything since the Six-Day War. We managed to be saved from disaster in 1973, we got ensnared but survived in 1982, and there is no lack of other examples….. I think it’s no longer possible to win wars. We’re not the only ones who can’t; the West as a whole is incapable of doing so. It’s hard for me to remember a single war in the past 60 years that the United States clearly and decisively won…. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, and from there the West embarked on a new path.
“Western Europe almost totally abandoned the war option. It doesn’t fight, and in any case isn’t assessed on the basis of its ability to win wars,” Burg writes. “The United States, by contrast, went from isolationism to being the country chiefly responsible for Western state-sponsored violence. It…. knows better than anyone how to deploy its forces to the starting line, but from there onward something always gets messed up. Korea wasn’t a wonderful victory, Vietnam ended in disgrace, and the Gulf wars are not considered great military achievements.
“[S]omething in the DNA of the West no longer allows it to declare war like it used to do…. The wars of the previous century, along with the Holocaust of European Jewry, taught the West several lessons, central among which is the abolition of the doctrine of war; the West went from destroying and humiliating the enemy to maintaining [the enemy’s] ability to rehabilitate itself, preserve its dignity, change and become a partner instead of a rival.
“….That’s where the new type of victory began – the kind that doesn’t wipe out the possibility of dialogue with yesterday’s rival. ….. The question remains as to how a just society fights enemies who do not share the same value system, and how to redefine what victory is.
“It seems to me,” Burg concludes, “that if the goal of a war is the destruction of the enemy, it is a war that is doomed to fail. For reasons that are well-known to us, it is no longer possible to annihilate nations or at least suppress their aspirations of independence. …. And if no dialogue with the enemy develops, then the war must be deemed a failure. “It therefore appears that Israel’s leadership in the Gaza war is due to fail in our names – just like the Palestinian religious leaders ushering their people to another failure rooted in ignoring the metamorphosis of the concept of victory, from subduing to talking, from slaughtering to bridge-building. Just as bridges were ultimately built above the tempestuous waters between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, between Dresden and London, and between Catholic and Protestant Dublin, there is a bridge between Sderot and Gaza. Those who do not tread on it will lead their nations to failure in all their wars.”
But what is that bridge, when Israel is facing Hezbollah’s 30,000 rockets to its North, Hamas’ intransigence to its South, a rising proportion of increasingly disaffected Arabs within its own borders, and Iran’s connivances and nuclear ambitions to its East?
For those chastened and disciplined enough to go beyond Hedges’ logic of Puritan condemnation of beleaguered, paranoid Israelis and Goldberg’s jaunty neo-conservative defiance, Jonathan Schell’s The Unconquerable World is the best way to survey the history and emerging premises of the very different logic that guided Gandhi, King, the later Mandela, the European dissidents, and the peacemakers of Northern Ireland. Schell does not address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he does show how peoples that were as oppressed, beleaguered, and overpowered as the Palestinians managed to neutralize or even win over their venomous oppressors without eliminating them, and, indeed, without much bloodshed.
There’s a difference between being wisely, appropriately discreet, on the one hand, and keeping inappropriately, unjustly silent, on the other. Some self-censorship is prompted by fear of speaking up because it might cost you your job and, in a repressive state, your freedom. But some self-censorship is driven by the allure of power and by a desire to get closer to power by proving that you can be trusted never to say that the emperor has no clothes.
In a talk to undergraduates at Yale in 2012, I criticized what I called a galloping culture of self-censorship that’s been woven into the lives of ambitious undergraduates at elite colleges. Such a “culture” reigns in many corporations and state bureaucracies, but a good liberal education wouldn’t train students to adapt to it. A liberal education would enable anyone to question and test conventional wisdom, not only as a student, but also, later in life, as an adult citizen of a republic and/or of the world.
The first 15 seconds of this recording are unclear, but the microphone was adjusted, and it’s very listenable after that. The talk was given outdoors, on Yale’s Beinecke Plaza.
I’d like to say something today about the role that protest and remonstrance can play in restoring this depth of purpose to liberal education. And let me begin this little talk with a caveat: Not all protest or free expression advances freedom. First Amendment absolutists who push every envelope of conventional wisdom—whether in street demonstrations, in nasty Super-PAC ads, or just to play political “Gotcha” or make quick bucks—tend to forget that the people and institutions they’re pushing against aren’t wholly wrong or bad and are often more vulnerable than even the critics want them to be.
For example, those of us who’ve protested Yale’s sad slide into its dubious adventure in Singapore and into its own business-corporatization here at home are actually trying to affirm, strengthen, and even rescue something that’s vulnerable in this university and that we must be careful not to trash. Little is gained and much lost by shooting off one’s mouth and trying simply to shock the complacent into action.
But that’s not actually the argument I want to emphasize today. I want to say that discretion and caution at Yale have been carried too far, not only among administrators and faculty but even among students, who should be learning the arts and disciplines of truth-telling as well as power-wielding. That’s what you are doing in here in the Y Syndicate, but, in some other parts of this college, I notice a galloping culture of self-censorship that requires some comment.
In Singapore and in some American business corporations, self-censorship is prompted by fear of established power. That kind of self-censorship assumes many subtle modulations and guises in daily life. Even here at Yale, as I saw last spring when I attended a panel discussion called “Singapore Uncensored,” this self-censorship of fear, evident among the Singaporeans on the panel, was reinforced by some in the audience who engaged in what I’d call a self-censorship of seduction. It is prompted not by the fear of state or of corporate power but by the allure of power: Some students silence themselves almost enthusiastically, hoping to get closer to insider networking and to high status and power by proving they can be relied on never to mention that an emperor has no clothes.
Any hope for a return on this kind of self-restraint is a terrible delusion. It hastens the decay of trust and freedom inside and outside the halls of power. It has a long and quite embarrassing record at Yale, stretching back to Yalies who emerged from the college’s secret societies in the 1940s and ‘50s to perpetrate blunder after ignorant blunder in American foreign policy, from installing the Shah of Iran and stage-managing the Bay of Pigs fiasco to promoting the Vietnam War and its successors.
There’s a legitimate difference between being discreet and being silenced—between exercising a sound judgment not to do something and accepting blindly that something is simply “not done.” Agreeing to take certain things off the table can help a discussion and freedom of thought at times. But Yale today is doing little better than its old secret societies have done at teaching students when and how to draw such distinctions on behalf of a real republic, not a corporate state.
I want to tell you about some Yalies who broke courageously and constructively with both the self-censorship of fear and the self-censorship of seduction. I witnessed exactly that, right here at this war memorial, when I was 19, almost 45 years ago, and it has never left my mind.
One cold, windy, wintry morning in 1968 I was plodding across this plaza on my way to a class when I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three students and the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the three was speaking almost inaudibly because of the gusting wind and also because he was trying to find his voice against fear. “The government claims we’re criminals,” he was saying, as I leaned in to listen. “But we say that it is the government that is criminal in waging this war.” He and the other two were about to hand Coffin their draft cards to refuse conscription into the Vietnam War upon their graduation three months later.
Coffin, speaking in the idiom of an American civil religion that too few liberals these days understand, was there to bless this demonstration of a civic courage that too few national-security conservatives understand. Near us in the Woolsey Hall rotunda were all those names young Yale graduates, graven in icy marble, under the admonition, “Courage Disdains Fame and Wins It.” The seniors before us were challenging us to join them in disdaining fame, too, but without hope of a memorial’s posthumous regard.
“Believe me,” said Coffin, himself a veteran of the CIA in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, “I know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin’ at a millstone.” It was a burst of Calvinist humor, a jaunty defiance of Established Power in the name of a higher one, and some of us grasped at that ray of hope, because we were scared. For all we knew, these guys were about to be arrested on the spot. Certainly if they refused induction three months later, they’d commit a felony punishable by five years in prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example because we were all carrying draft cards just like theirs in our wallets.
Yet something in these seniors’ bearing made them seem as patriotically American as Rosa Parks had been when she’d refused, only twelve years before, to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery. In both cases, the protesters broke the law openly and non-violently to evoke and elevate something noble in the very concept of law and in the whole society. Parks didn’t use freedom of speech to call the bus driver a racist mo-fo; and while the seniors did say that the government was criminal—and they would be proven right about that—by taking their stand with readiness to accept the penalty, they were also crediting the rest of us, whether we were bystanders or war supporters, with some integrity by speaking to us with clear dignity even as they exposed our shortcomings. By breaking the law in the way I’ve described, they were upholding law.
They were resisting the government in the name of a republic that stands for more than patriotic salutes to nationalist “blood and soil,” or than chants of “Yoo Es Ay!”, or even than global free-markets whose riptides are dissolving the republican virtues and sovereignty those Yale seniors were trying to redeem. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas marveled at such demonstrations of “constitutional patriotism,” not flag-lapel patriotism.
Nathan Hale affirmed a nascent constitutional patriotism against the established but corrupted government and military of his time. And the true Tea Partiers dumped a multi-national corporation’s property into Boston Harbor to protest its collusion with a corrupt government. As I watched the seniors speaking in 1968, the old civil society of the American republic seemed to be rising from a long slumber and walking and talking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. And as Coffin intoned Dylan Thomas’ admonition, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” my silent, wild confusion gave way to something like awe.
I tell you this not just because it happened right here, and not because anyone’s going to criminalize what we say here. I tell it because the Yale administration, which claims that it’s acting on behalf of liberal education as surely as architects of the Vietnam War claimed that they were acting for freedom and democracy, has signed a pact with, and sold its name to, a tightly controlled corporate city-state that does criminalize and otherwise intimidate people who would speak as I’m doing here.
I’m also trying to make a point about the nature of protest. Good protest requires giving clear reasons for what you are doing, even if others aren’t listening. It requires making a binding commitment to uphold what you’re affirming, not just sounding off against what you are opposing. I and other critics of the Singapore venture aren’t wishing it ill or trying to provoke an upheaval or scandal; we anticipate that the project will proceed all too smoothly. The subtle, ubiquitous and cunning self-censorship of fear that I witnessed at the “Singapore Uncensored” panel and described in the Huffington Post is meshing all too smoothly these days with the self-censorship of seduction I’ve seen growing at Yale.
The university is transforming the college from the crucible of civic-republican leadership that I saw in 1968 into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a new global elite that doesn’t answer to any republican polity or moral code.
I’m not idealizing the past. Although Howard Dean was a freshman here in 1968 and John Kerry had graduated two years before, George W. Bush and his gang lived near me in Davenport—he was president of my roommate’s fraternity, DKE—and not everyone considered the Vietnam War a duplicitous folly. What I’m trying to show is that protest for protest’s sake accomplishes little if the protesters aren’t as serious about making clear what they’re affirming as they are about making clear what they’re exposing and opposing.
What the civil-rights movement learned from Gandhi, and what every generation must re-learn to keep a republic or a liberal-arts college, is that these institutions are fragile because they have to rely on citizens’ or students’ taking to heart and acting on certain public virtues and beliefs that neither the institutions nor markets themselves do enough to nourish or protect and that, indeed, their wealth and power may actually weaken.
Only a civic love that’s disciplined and canny enough to renew an institution’s or a republic’s higher purposes by challenging its misjudgments can accomplish anything lasting. Otherwise, as we see elsewhere, twitter revolutions and armed upheavals can intensify chaos. Only an activism that balances group organizing with the irreducibly personal conscience and courage that enabled Rosa Parks and the Yale seniors to risk their standing and security to “arrest” others morally can awaken more people to the subtle dangers to freedom. In other words, a protest strategy has to draw on wellsprings of civic faith, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and even secular activists like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik in Eastern Europe certainly did.
When self-censorship is generated by fear of a state or a corporate employer, the fear leaves no fingerprints, as Slate political editor William Dobson put it in his new book The Dictator’s Learning Curve. In university administrations and faculties, too, there are no smoking memos that order people not to say this or that. Yet Yale’s tenurati and emeriti conduct too much of their communication only with arched eyebrows and significant silences, not with the candor and robust give and take that are the oxygen of self-government.
What troubles me even more is the culture of enthusiastic self-censorship that’s been rising among some students, driven not by fear of the state or the Yale Corporation but by the allure of becoming a powerful “inside player” after proving that one can be relied on to keep one’s mouth shut. That self-censorship is destroying the republic far more than riotous street demonstrations are. It is rendering our political and financial systems illegitimate and unsustainable. The failures of pathological, multi-problem elites in any sector you can name have become impossible to ignore.
Yet that’s precisely what too many of you are being trained to do, and it’s why there are now so many books and articles in which Yale is despised. Like fear of power, seduction by power slowly asphyxiates candor and passion in public life and generates cynicism, prurience, and hazing instead.
A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that when Grand Strategy students visited West Point to discuss a book about Iraq with cadets, the Yalies “decided not to record the discussion because they did not want to have ‘views expressed in the spirit of intellectual debate be used against them at a Senate confirmation hearing’” according to Grand Strategy’s associate director, who treated this as something to brag about. Unlike the Yalies, the cadets, who’d soon put their lives on the line to defend free speech, had no fear of recording the session.
And earlier this year, when posts in The Atlantic and Foreign Policy asked why General Stanley McChrystal is teaching an off-the-record course in “leadership” in the Jackson Institute, some of his students leaped into the public arena with a statement insisting robustly that he had never asked them to sign any pledge not to disclose what’s discussed in the class. But they only wound up proving that their seminar’s supposedly broad, open discussion of “leadership” could not, in fact, be shared with anyone outside it, not even with professors teaching other courses on similar matters who invited McChrystal himself to share his insights, only to be rebuffed.
“The sinister fact about censorship… is that it is largely voluntary,” George Orwell wrote in 1944, as his manuscript of Animal Farm was receiving rejection after rejection by frightened British publishers. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…. Because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. It is not exactly forbidden to say this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness….”
A true liberal education would show students how to put words on things in ways that not only expose public corruption but enlarge personal and public hope. Only by doing both can leaders lead in ways that others can trust. What I learned that wintry morning at Yale is that to kindle such trust and the courage it requires, you have to be willing to “think without banisters” at times, as Hannah Arendt put it – she meant, without a predetermined ideology — and to deepen your own and others’ love of a society or an institution by standing intelligently and affirmatively against what’s wrong in it by summoning the better angels of its nature.
We’ve been seduced: by a 6.8 percent acceptance rate, by the extracurricular bazaar and by the career fair. Most of all, we’ve been seduced by Tony Blair and Stanley McChrystal. We’ve been convinced, whether we ever think of ourselves in these terms or not, that we are, to use a phrase once employed to describe my high school, the “joyful elite;” that we are engaged, that we are passionate and that we are on our way to careers of real worth and standing.
We’ve been seduced — and we’ve been silenced.
Yesterday afternoon, Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in the Political Science Department, spoke to a seminar-sized group of students about what he terms “the corporatization of Yale.”
In Sleeper’s account, the University, in pursuing legitimate ends such as global engagement and fundraising, has been caught in a tide overwhelming all academia. Yale has been carried away from the values that undergird its educational mission, towards a model of opaque authority that treats students as customers.
While Sleeper’s critique focuses on the Yale administration, he contends that corporatization has also crept into the student body. Students ingratiate themselves to authority figures and take care not to jeopardize their eventual senatorial prospects. But the confusion about the purpose of the University runs deeper: Too often, we at Yale forget that we came here because we are intellectual omnivores.
We prioritize the extracurricular over the curricular. We are overwhelmed as freshmen by the number of organizations in Payne Whitney — most genuinely interesting, most of genuine value. Nothing wrong with that: Yale really is one of the few places on Earth where so many smart, motivated people are together in one place.
Yet somewhere between being swept away by the energy of our peers and the feeling of obligation to do great things with our lives, we develop unctuous habits of mind and action. We seek to distinguish ourselves within a narrow conception of professional success, prizing high grades over challenging courses, default subjects of study over those that might truly interest us and e-board meetings over office hours. These habits draw us away from the very reason Yale attracts us in the first place: academic excellence.
In short, we come to feel that what sets us apart from the rest of the world — those who didn’t get in — isn’t our intellectual prowess but what we surely will accomplish as alumni. Intrinsic motivation is crowded out by the extrinsic. Who, after all, remembers what Tony Blair studied in his Oxford days?
Hopefully, some among us will do great things in and for the world. But for many, the price of that opportunity is too dear: How many of us would say that, above all else, we are seeking out the kind of first-rate education Yale can still offer?
The Yale administration abets this. It hires with pride world leaders who bring titles with enough sheen to surpass the blemishes of their blunders on the world stage, including such gems as the Iraq War. It gestures towards educational principle by instituting distributional requirements and then abandons all pretense of rigor by offering An Issues Approach to Biology and Planets and Stars.
Even Provost Peter Salovey’s signature class, Great Big Ideas, is based on the premise that intellectual exploration is something students can’t be bothered to do outside a class.
Perhaps worst of all, the Admissions Office fails to emphasize — the way, say, the University of Chicago or Swarthmore does — that one comes to Yale to learn.
It’s easy to treat education solely as a path to gainful employment, especially when that’s so hard to find. But Yale can provide haven from those practical pressures. These are the only four years in our lives when we can devote ourselves to thinking.
As the University selects its 23rd president, we students must do everything in our power to ensure that the first priority of those who lead our institution is to rejuvenate its intellectual climate. Of course, President Levin, over the last two decades, has been invaluable in ensuring that the facilities and faculty are of the highest caliber. But those efforts will have been wasted on Yale College if we take no joy in the life of the mind. Now, from the bottom of this University, we must reclaim our highest intellectual ideals and demand that those at the top do the same.
Donald J. Trump isn’t a Nazi, although his father came close. It’s true that historical analogies between Trump’s policies and Hitler’s are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here’s one that I’m not inclined to shrug off.
During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It’s a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.
It’s also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station’s Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week’s shipment of several hundred “Juden” to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.
It’s hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they’d been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.
Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Some time after that, postcards they hadn’t written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they’d listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations.
One day in April of 2009, as I sipped my coffee at the Grunewald station alongside retirees in their 70s and near a beer-garden where younger Germans also overlooked the square, three police cars swept in and officers leapt out, commanding us, “Don’t Move.” Then approximately 45 young military officers in formal parade dress descended from a tourist bus. Their uniforms were attractive, but alien—clearly not German. As they milled about, one of the men seated near me asked a police officer, “Was is das?”
“Israelischen,” he answered. They were Israeli army officers.
A silence descended upon the square like nothing I’d ever felt, so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Not another word was spoken, but I thought that I sensed three dimensions in the quiet all around me. The first was straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “They’re here. They’ve come.” The second was of admiration, or at least respect, for these vibrant young officers, stunning negations of the image of “Juden” that some of these older men must have remembered from their infancy. The third dimension, I sensed from the tightened body language around me, carried a flicker of resentment at having to be reminded, instead of being left to sip one’s coffee in peace.
A black car with tinted windows ascended a ramp toward Track 17. The Israeli officers fell into formation and followed. They’d come to lay a wreath on Track 17 on Yom Ha’Shoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ironically, I hadn’t remembered the day myself.
I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn’t think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children—on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish—I’m thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, “Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran.”
Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolph Hitler.
We now know that German veterans of that war, Jews and non-Jews alike, were lied to and sent into harm’s way for no good reason. So were soldiers in the Nazi Wehrmacht 25 years later, whom my father, a corporal in the U.S. Army Combat Engineers, was ordered to supervise as prisoners as his 277th battalion clanked across northern Germany, because he spoke Yiddish, which is closely related to German.
He did it with mix of grief and revulsion. One day, when his battalion commandeered a Nazi-friendly baron’s estate in the town of Hohne, my father and others scouted a cottage behind the mansion and found a white-haired, well-spoken man who said he was a caretaker but whom the G.I.’s suspected was closer to the missing baron. As some of them prodded him down the hill toward the mansion, jabbing him roughly with their rifle barrels, my father said, suddenly, almost instinctively, “Cut that out.”
“Why? You should enjoy this Sleeper, you’re a Jew.”
“Cut it out, I said.” He had no illusions about Nazism. But he was a young American, emancipated from his ancestors’ European hell, and he thought he was fighting for a world better than one in which the tables of unjust power are merely turned, a world where justice—dare one say, “due process”?—is stronger than revenge.
Watching the fires that Trump is stoking week in, week out, I wonder when his supporters and enablers will see that the unthinkable could happen to them. I’m not inclined to alarmism, but what if, a couple of years from now, veterans who say they fought for an America where people are free to speak their minds decide to speak their own minds in ways Trump doesn’t like? How far might this admirer of Vladimir Putin go against Americans he thinks are his enemies? He’s already said that he wants to tighten libel laws; his ICE agents have developed arrest-and-detention tactics that a craven Congress would let him expand with the stroke of a pen; municipal police forces are more militarized than ever before.
Yes, historical analogies are risky. But, sipping coffee overlooking the Grunewald station’s charming cobblestone square, you’d never imagine what happened there if you hadn’t been told.
Beneath and beyond the January 6 insurrection and the right-wing populist surge expected in Tuesday’s midterm elections, American conservative thinking is taking some confused and confusing turns. One of them involves backing away from familiar“ supply-side” dogmas and moving instead toward seizing the power of the administrative state to restore order and public virtue to Silicon Valley technocrats and to unruly masses, all under the tutelage of a “truly” conservative ruling elite.
These thinkers aren’t flirting with Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism or Joe Biden’s new New Deal. They’re edging closer to the vaguely Roman Catholic “common good Constitutionalism” of Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule and of several Supreme Court justices, or to the old Ivy-Protestant, “Good Shepherd” guardianship of the republic, or even to the Nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s authoritarian, ethno-nationalist welfare statism, which presaged the “national socialism” of a German political party that incorporated that phrase into its name and its public promises.
It’s a complex development, but let me try to make it as comprehensible as it is reprehensible, because it may be hard upon us after this Tuesday’s elections.
* * *
“We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,” writes John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor of The Federalist. a conservative publication (unaffiliated with the judiciary-focused, right-wing Federalist Society). Davidson praises and echoes an argument by Jon Askanos, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, who writes in Compact, another conservative site, that “the conservative project failed” because it “didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos [an over-determined trajectory] of sheer profit.”
Both writers want a counter-revolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans like flies in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track, and indebt us, bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets. But are conservatives who lament such developments truly urging a revolution within “free market” conservatism itself? Or are they making only a tactical shift in a strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed by religiously inflected public discipline?
Yet now Davidson is warning that conservatives themselves have undermined their small-r republican virtues and freedoms by surrendering more than they’re conserving. He’s accusing them of accommodating themselves to “woke” liberals’ efforts to redress income inequality, sexual and racial grievances, and markets’ amoral reshaping of society. So doing, he warns, conservatives, too, have disfigured civic and institutional order. Once upon a time, he explains, “Conservatism was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing. Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion… do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.”
So, conservatives must seize power instead of sharing it. They must restore moral and social order, even if doing so requires using big government to break up a few monopolies and redistribute income a little to Americans whom conservatives have claimed to champion even while protecting the powers and processes that have left them behind.
Davidson and Askanos reproach fellow-conservatives for buying into “woke” corporate capital’s intrusive, subversive technologies, which treat citizens as impulse-buyers whose “consumer sovereignty” suffocates deliberative, political sovereignty. One irony in conservatives’ making this critique is that profit-crazed media such as Rupert Murdoch’s assemble and dis-assemble audiences on any pretext — sensationalistic, erotic, bigoted, nihilistic—that might keep them watching the ads and buying whatever they’re pitching. Another irony is that conservative jurisprudence’s protection of consumer marketing’s algorithmically driven pitching — by pretending that the business corporations engaging in it are persons deserving of the First Amendment-protected speech of self-governing citizens — only hands bigger megaphones to managers of swirling whorls of anonymous corporate shareholders, leaving truly deliberative citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard the cacophony that’s being driven by the telos of sheer profit.
It’s no small thing for conservatives such as Davidson and Askonas to acknowledge that they can’t reconcile their claim to cherish traditional communal and family values with their knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of conglomeration or financialization. Ivy League graduates often try to finesse the contradiction gracefully and persuasively to most Americans, as John F. Kennedy and the two George Bushes did, but they “knew better” than to persuade themselves: “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, … damned from here to eternity,” Yale’s Whiffenpoof songsters croon, clinging to lost civic virtue in formal white ties and tails but acknowledging, humorously and ruefully, the soulless life awaiting them in Dad’s firm or at J.P. Morgan or in poring over spreadsheets as corporate lawyers and business consultants.
Although Davidson and Askanos are more candid than the Whiffenpoofs about the costs of facing both ways, they stop short of crediting Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist conservative zealot who drew on his Marx to warn William F. Buckley Jr. that “You can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture,” as Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of Chambers, paraphrased him in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in 2007. Liberal Democrats, too, have stopped short of challenging neoliberal capitalism’s relentless dissolution of civic-republican virtue, voting instead for “the pro-corporate and anti-worker policies that made Trump,” as Robert Kuttner reminds readers of an American Prospect column in which he filleted the centrist liberal writer Anand Giridharadas’s effort to rescue liberalism without indicting or significantly reconfiguring corporate capitalism.
Democrats celebrate their breaking of glass ceilings to install “the first” Black and/or female or gay CEO, but they do little to reconfigure those structures’ foundations and walls. While they’ve been breaking glass ceilings, they’ve also been breaking laws and regulations like the Glass-Steagall law, which restrained the investment banking, private-equity, and hedge-fund rampages that bamboozle and dispossess millions of Americans. They’ve even accepted the Supreme Court’s orchestration of George W. Bush’s ascent to the presidency and its decimation via the Citizens United ruling, of campaign-finance laws that curbed corporate capital’s sway over elections of officials who are supposed to regulate corporate capital itself.
In Kuttner’s view (and mine; see Liberal Racism) liberal Democrats who wave banners of ethno-racial and sexual identity to cover for their complicity in all this have given conservatives excuses to divert a resentful public’s attention from the right’s even-more deceitful complicity in fomenting our republican crisis. Instead of offering alternatives to inequality and decay, conservatives have dined out so compulsively on liberals’ follies that they’ve forgotten how to cook for themselves and the rest of us and have abandoned the kitchen to Donald Trump.
* * *
After peddling demagoguery and coming up empty, some conservatives have turned to religion for cover and succor, if not salvation. But religion should scourge them, as Moses scourged the fabricators of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai; as Jesus did the moneychangers whom he drove from the Temple; and even as the conservative theologian Richard John Neuhaus did Senator Bob Dole, who’d condemned cultural decadence in Hollywood and had challenged Bill Clinton in the 1996 election but later made TV commercials for Pfizer, testifying that Viagra helped him cope with his erectile dysfunction. “The poor fellow looks like he’s restraining the impulse to unzip and show us the happy change,” Neuhaus sneered.
When I noted Dole’s folly in “Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change,” an essay for the journal Salmagundi, the conservative Christian editor Rod Dreher, then at The Dallas Morning News, republished my essay in that newspaper, explaining to the conservative Catholic magazineGodSpythat although I had made “an impassioned case” that “’the pornification of the public square’ is destroying any kind of civic-republican ethos,” I would never see my dreams realized through liberalism because “only religious faith has the power to resist our very powerful commercial culture.”
Religious conservatives such as Dreher and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have indeed sought in faith an escape hatch of sorts from conservatism’s imprisonment in the telos of sheer profit in our fallen world. Religion served that purpose, too, for William F. Buckley, Jr., who inherited part of the fortune his father had accumulated as an oil prospector and industry developer who meddled in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerto. In 1951 Bill, Jr.’s book God and Man at Yale summoned that college’s presumptively Christian gentlemen alumni to rout the godless socialism of its professors.
* * *
Buckley’s conservative movement has been at it , albeit in secular terms, ever since his passing in 2008. The lavishly funded William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale characterizes itself as a champion of “viewpoint diversity” instead of color-coded diversity, and it claims to oppose “intellectual and moral conformity” on campus. Its website features Buckley’s observation that “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” Actually, the program isn’t above trying to shock left-of-center students into making censorious protests which conservative media then spotlight and lampoon, as I recounted in Salon. Whittaker Chambers would have responded to conservatives’ zeal to own the libs with a shrug and “the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better,” as Tanenhaus put it.
The fuller truth is that “viewpoint diversity” doesn’t make much headway against the Buckley Program’s own carefully managed internal conformity, as I discovered in September 2021, when its president, having read a column of mine about Yale’s star-crossed venture to establish a liberal-arts college with the tightly run city-state of Singapore, invited me to speak with Buckley student fellow, writing that “we are looking to host in-person events with Yale affiliates. Please let me know if you are and I would be happy to follow up.”
“I’d be delighted to talk with and listen to Buckley Program participants,” I responded. “My criticisms of Yale College (which I’ve defended at times against certain outside conservative critics) are themselves somewhat “conservative,” in that I try to protect old civic-republican virtues that I think Yale should continue to nurture. I agree with conservatives that Yale doesn’t do enough of that. But… I believe that… finance capital… undermines what’s best and necessary in a traditional liberal education….
“I could also discuss broader dilemmas that Yale faces in its role as a crucible or training center for civic-republican leadership. Again, I’ve been severely critical of some conservative critics of Yale (try this, for example! –how’s that for “viewpoint diversity”?!). But the older and wiser I become, the more convinced I am that each side of the political spectrum needs the best of the other side in certain ways, and, in this time of increasing polarization, that can’t be stated often or clearly enough. I’d be glad to explain what I mean by this, and I’d be more than willing to listen for a long time to the Buckley student fellows’ own thoughts about this…. — Jim Sleeper
I never heard back from the Buckley president or anyone else in the program. Ironically, my disinvitation may have had been prompted by my depiction of some conservatives’ stagey condemnations of liberals’ “disinvitations” of conservative speakers. I described Buckley board chairman Roger Kimball’s introduction of the columnist George Will to Buckley student fellows at a “Disinvitation Dinner” staged by the program to dramatize Scripps’ college’s cancellation of its speaking invitation to Will after Will had made disparaging remarks about a “rape culture” of supposedly inflated accusations and cries of victimization.
“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,” Kimball thundered, oblivious of the conformity he was enforcing on the 20 year-olds seated before him in formal wear at Will’s “Disinvitation Dinner” in an elegant hotel. More telling than this reeking strain of hypocrisy has been the conduct of the Yale Law School’s chapter of The Federalist Society, some of whose alumni guided Trump in deciding his appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal judicial benches. Here I commend a brilliant expose of the Federalist Society’s “free speech” hypocrisy by Jack McCordick, a Yale undergraduate at the time who’s now a researcher-reporter for The New Republic.
Firebrands in the Buckley undergraduate program and the Federalist Society’s law school chapter succeed at times in baiting left-leaning students (and, sometimes, university administrators) into committing or suborning excesses that the national conservative media eagerly denounce. But when the Law School’s Federalist Society chapter did manage to sponsor a straightforward debate — “Income Inequality: Is it Fair or Unfair?” — between the progressive Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits and libertarian writer Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute — Markovits wiped the floor with Brook: See for yourself how an outbreak of “viewpoint diversity” at the behest of the Federalist Society flummoxed its organizers.
A similar embarrassment became public when editors and board members of conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal denied its writer Sol Stern freedom of speech to criticize Donald Trump at all. Stern, who’d been writing for that magazine and institute for years, outed them in an article — “Think Tank in the Tank” — for the left-liberal DEMOCRACY Journal that’s as telling as McCordick’s expose of the Federalist Society. * * * It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with some conservatives’ religious escapes –Rod Dreher’s embrace of what he calls the “Benedict Option,” comes to mind.
But it’s not enough to make me sympathize with the secular cries de Coeur of Davidson. “Put bluntly,” he writes, “if conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. ”One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips,” the baker who has indeed been hard-pressed to defend himself legally several times for refusing to decorate a cake with words congratulating a gay couple on a wedding.
“The left will only stop when conservatives stop them,” Davidson continues,” warning that “conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about ‘small government’…. “To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point,” he concludes. “If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.”
But when have conservatives ever shied from wielding power, except when they’ve been embarrassed or forced into relinquishing it by the brave civil disobedience of a Rosa Parks and the civil-rights movement or by the disciplined, decisive strikes and protests and electoral organizing of labor unions and social movements? If conservatives really want to “attend with care” to the examples set by Cincinnatus and George Washington, who relinquished power so that the public interest would continue to be served more lastingly and effectively by others, they’ll have to enable American working people to resist the “telos of sheer profit” that’s stressing and dispossessing them and that’s displacing their anger and humiliation onto scapegoats under the ministrations of Fox News and right-wing demagogues.
How about taking seriously Davidson’s proposal that government offer “generous subsidies to families of young children” — a heresy to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who said he wants to shrink government to a size where he could drag it into a bathtub and drown it? How about banishing demagoguery from their midst, as they often claim that Buckley banished John Birchite anti-Semitism? How about disassociating themselves, as I think Buckley would have done, from The Claremont Institute, the hard-right think tank that’s been so deeply “in the tank” for President Trump that he gave it a National Humanities Medal and followed the advice of its senior fellow John Eastman in attempting to overturn the 2020 election?
Not only does Davidson propose that “to stop Big Tech… will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms;” he also proposes that “to stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds.” He writes that conservatives “need not shy away from [big-government policies] because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.” But American conservatives who expect to wield big-government power are moving toward something like European conservatism, which has long mixed capitalism and welfare-state spending to advance nationalist, imperialist, and even racialist purposes. That dark, dangerous tradition began with Bismarck and metastasized into Nazi “national socialism” half a century later.
American conservatives should should look carefully into the Pandora’s Box that they’re opening. And those who crave a “godly” relation to power would do well to ponder an observation by John Winthrop, the founder and first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in his essay-sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,”: “It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” In other words, not even wealthy estates can survive for long in a society that’s being disintegrated by capitalism. It’s getting very hard to imagine America’s conservative “fundamentalists, be they religious or secular, finding it in themselves to escape the English poet Oliver Goldsmith’s foreboding of doom in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
Religious conservatives such as Dreher and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have indeed sought in faith an escape hatch of sorts from conservatism’s imprisonment in the telos of sheer profit in our fallen world. Religion served that purpose, too, for William F. Buckley, Jr., who was a wealthy heir to part of the fortune his father had accumulated as an oil prospector and industry developer who meddled in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerto. In 1951 Bill, Jr.’s book God and Man at Yale summoned that college’s presumptively Christian gentlemen alumni to rout the godless socialism of its professors.
* * *
Buckley’s conservative movement has been at it , albeit in secular terms, ever since his passing in 2008. The lavishly funded William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale characterizes itself as a champion of “viewpoint diversity” instead of color-coded diversity, and it claims to oppose “intellectual and moral conformity” on campus. Its website features Buckley’s observation that “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” Actually, the program isn’t above trying to shock left-of-center students into making censorious protests which conservative media then spotlight and lampoon, as I recounted in Salon.
Whittaker Chambers would have responded to conservatives’ zeal to own the libs with a shrug and “the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better,” as Tanenhaus put it. The fuller truth is that “viewpoint diversity” doesn’t make much headway against the Buckley Program’s own carefully managed internal conformity, as I discovered in September 2021, when its president, having read a column of mine about Yale’s star-crossed venture to establish a liberal-arts college with the tightly run city-state of Singapore, invited me to speak with Buckley student fellow, writing that “we are looking to host in-person events with Yale affiliates. Please let me know if you are and I would be happy to follow up.”
“I’d be delighted to talk with and listen to Buckley Program participants,” I responded. “My criticisms of Yale College (which I’ve defended at times against certain outside conservative critics) are themselves somewhat ‘conservative,’ in that I try to protect old civic-republican virtues that I think Yale should continue to nurture. I agree with conservatives that Yale doesn’t do enough of that. But… I believe that… finance capital… undermines what’s best and necessary in a traditional liberal education…. I could also discuss broader dilemmas that Yale faces in its role as a crucible or training center for civic-republican leadership. Again, I’ve been severely critical of some conservative critics of Yale (try this, for example! –how’s that for ‘viewpoint diversity’?!). But the older and wiser I become, the more convinced I am that each side of the political spectrum needs the best of the other side in certain ways, and, in this time of increasing polarization, that can’t be stated often or clearly enough. I’d be glad to explain what I mean by this, and I’d be more than willing to listen for a long time to the Buckley student fellows’ own thoughts about this…. — Jim Sleeper”
I never heard back from the Buckley president or anyone else in the program. Ironically, my disinvitation may have had been prompted by my depiction of some conservatives’ stagey condemnations of liberals’ “disinvitations” of conservative speakers. I described Buckley board chairman Roger Kimball’s introduction of the columnist George Will to Buckley student fellows at a “Disinvitation Dinner” staged by the program to dramatize Scripps’ college’s cancellation of its speaking invitation to Will after Will had made disparaging remarks about a “rape culture” of supposedly inflated accusations and cries of victimization.
“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,” Kimball thundered, oblivious of the conformity he was enforcing on the 20 year-olds seated before him in formal wear at Will’s “Disinvitation Dinner” in an elegant hotel. More telling than this reeking strain of hypocrisy about “viewpoint diversity” has been the conduct of the Yale Law School’s chapter of The Federalist Society, some of whose alumni guided Trump in deciding his appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal judicial benches. Here I commend a brilliant expose of the Federalist Society’s “free speech” hypocrisy by Jack McCordick, a Yale undergraduate at the time who’s now a researcher-reporter for The New Republic.
Firebrands in the Buckley undergraduate program and the Federalist Society’s law school chapter succeed at times in baiting left-leaning students (and, sometimes, university administrators) into committing or suborning excesses that the national conservative media eagerly denounce. But when the Law School’s Federalist Society chapter did manage to sponsor a straightforward debate — “Income Inequality: Is it Fair or Unfair?” — between the progressive Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovitz and libertarian writer Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute — Markovitz wiped the floor with Brook: See for yourself how an outbreak of “viewpoint diversity” at the behest of the Federalist Society flummoxed its organizers.
A similar embarrassment became public when editors and board members of conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal denied its writer Sol Stern freedom of speech to criticize Donald Trump at all. Stern, who’d been writing for that magazine and institute for years, outed them in an article — “Think Tank in the Tank” — for the left-liberal DEMOCRACY Journal that’s as telling as McCordick’s expose of the Federalist Society.
* * *
It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with some conservatives’ religious escapes –Rod Dreher’s embrace of what he calls the “Benedict Option,” comes to mind. But it’s not enough to make me sympathize with the secular cries de Coeur of Davidson.“Put bluntly,” he writes, “if conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. ”One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips,” the baker who has indeed been hard-pressed to defend himself legally several times for refusing to decorate a cake with words congratulating a gay couple on a wedding.
“The left will only stop when conservatives stop them,” Davidson continues,” warning that “conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about ‘small government’…. “To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point,” he concludes. “If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.”
But when have conservatives ever shied from wielding power, except when they’ve been embarrassed or forced into relinquishing it by the brave civil disobedience of a Rosa Parks and the civil-rights movement or by the disciplined, decisive strikes and protests and electoral organizing of labor unions and social movements? If conservatives really want to “attend with care” to the examples set by Cincinnatus and George Washington, who relinquished power so that the public interest would continue to be served more lastingly and effectively by others, they’ll have to enable American working people to resist the “telos of sheer profit” that’s stressing and dispossessing them and that’s displacing their anger and humiliation onto scapegoats under the ministrations of Fox News and right-wing demagogues.
How about taking seriously Davidson’s proposal that government offer “generous subsidies to families of young children” — a heresy to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who said he wants to shrink government to a size where he could drag into a bathtub and drown it? How about banishing demagoguery from their midst, as they often claim that Buckley banished John Birchite anti-Semitism? How about disassociating themselves, as I think Buckley would have done, from The Claremont Institute, the hard-right think tank that’s been so deeply “in the tank” for President Trump that he gave it a National Humanities Medal and followed the advice of its senior fellow John Eastman in attempting to overturn the 2020 election?
Not only does Davidson propose that “to stop Big Tech… will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms;” he also proposes that “to stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds.” He writes that conservatives “need not shy away from [big-government policies] because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.” But American conservatives who expect to wield big-government power are moving toward something like European conservatism, which has long mixed capitalism and welfare-state spending to advance nationalist, imperialist, and even racialist purposes. That dark, dangerous tradition began with Bismarck and metastasized into Nazi “national socialism” half a century later.
American conservatives should look carefully into the Pandora’s Box that they’re opening. And those who crave a “godly” relation to power would do well to ponder the observation by John Winthrop, the founder and first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in his essay-sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” that “It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” In other words, not even wealthy estates can survive for long in a society that’s being disintegrated by capitalism. It’s hard to imagine America’s conservative fundamentalists, be they religious or secular, escaping the English poet Oliver Goldsmith’s foreboding of doom in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
Beneath and beyond the January 6 insurrection and the right-wing populist surge expected in Tuesday’s midterm elections, American conservative thinking is taking some confused and confusing turns. One of them involves backing away from familiar “supply-side” dogmas and moving instead toward seizing the power of the administrative state to restore order and public virtue to Silicon Valley technocrats and to unruly masses, all under the tutelage of a “truly” conservative ruling elite.
These thinkers aren’t flirting with Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism or Joe Biden’s new New Deal. They’re edging closer to the vaguely Roman Catholic “common good Constitutionalism” of Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule and of several Supreme Court justices, or to the old Ivy-Protestant, “Good Shepherd” guardianship of the republic, or even to the Nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s authoritarian, ethno-nationalist welfare statism, which presaged the “national socialism” of a German political party that incorporated that phrase into its name and its public promises.
It’s a complex development, but let me try to make it as comprehensible as it is reprehensible, because it may be hard upon us after this Tuesday’s elections.
* * *
John Daniel Davidson / National Review.com
“We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,” writes John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor of The Federalist. a conservative publication (unaffiliated with the judiciary-focused, right-wing Federalist Society). Davidson praises and echoes an argument by Jon Askonas, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, who writes in Compact, another conservative site, that “the conservative project failed” because it “didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos [or over-determined trajectory] of sheer profit.”
Jonathan Askonas, Catholic University of America
Both writers want a counter-revolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans like flies in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track, and indebt us, bypassing our minds and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets. But are conservatives who lament such developments truly urging a revolution within “free market” conservatism itself? Or are they making only a tactical shift in a strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed by religiously inflected public discipline?
Yet now Davidson is warning that conservatives themselves have undermined their small-r republican virtues and freedoms by surrendering more than they’re conserving. He’s accusing them of accommodating themselves to “woke” liberals’ efforts to redress income inequality, sexual and racial grievances, and markets’ amoral reshaping of society. So doing, he warns, conservatives, too, have disfigured civic and institutional order. Once upon a time, he explains, “Conservatism was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing. Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion… do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.” So, conservatives must seize power instead of sharing it. They must restore moral and social order, even if doing so requires using big government to break up a few monopolies and redistribute income a little to Americans whom conservatives have claimed to champion even while protecting the powers and processes that have left them behind.
Davidson and Askonas reproach fellow-conservatives for buying into “woke” corporate capital’s intrusive, subversive technologies, which treat citizens as impulse-buyers whose “consumer sovereignty” suffocates deliberative, political sovereignty. One irony in conservatives’ making this critique is that profit-crazed media such as Rupert Murdoch’s assemble and dis-assemble audiences on any pretext — sensationalistic, erotic, bigoted, nihilistic—that might keep them watching the ads and buying whatever they’re pitching. Another irony is that conservative jurisprudence that protects consumer marketing’s algorithmically driven pitching — by pretending that the business corporations engaging in it are persons deserving of the First Amendment-protected speech of self-governing citizens — only hands bigger megaphones to managers of swirling whorls of anonymous corporate shareholders, leaving truly deliberative citizens with laryngitis from straining to he heard in the cacophonous free-for-all that becomes a free-for-none as it’s driven by the telos of sheer profit.
* * *
It’s no small thing for conservatives such as Davidson and Askonas to acknowledge that they can’t reconcile their claim to cherish traditional communal and family values with their knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of conglomeration or financialization. Ivy League graduates often try to finesse the contradiction gracefully and persuasively to most Americans, as John F. Kennedy and the two George Bushes did, but they “knew better” than to persuade themselves: “We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, … damned from here to eternity,” Yale’s Whiffenpoof songsters croon, clinging to lost civic virtue in formal white ties and tails but acknowledging, humorously and ruefully, the soulless life awaiting them in Dad’s firm or at J.P. Morgan or in poring over spreadsheets as corporate lawyers and business consultants.
Although Davidson and Askonas are more candid than the Whiffenpoofs about the costs of facing both ways, they stop short of crediting Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist who drew on his Marx to warn William F. Buckley Jr. that “You can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture,” as Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of Chambers, paraphrased him in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in 2007. Liberal Democrats, too, have stopped short of challenging neoliberal capitalism’s relentless dissolution of civic-republican virtue, voting instead for “the pro-corporate and anti-worker policies that made Trump,” as Robert Kuttner reminds readers of an American Prospect column in which he filleted the centrist liberal writer Anand Giridharadas’s effort to rescue liberalism without indicting or significantly reconfiguring corporate capitalism.
Democrats celebrate their breaking of corporations’ glass ceilings to install “the first” Black and/or female or gay CEO, but they do little to reconfigure those structures’ foundations and walls. While they’ve been breaking glass ceilings, they’ve also been breaking laws and regulations like the Glass-Steagall law, which restrained the investment banking, private-equity, and hedge-fund rampages that bamboozle and dispossess millions of Americans. They’ve even accepted the Supreme Court’s orchestration of George W. Bush’s ascent to the presidency and its decimation via the Citizens United ruling, of campaign-finance laws that curbed corporate capital’s sway over elections of officials who are supposed to regulate corporate capital itself.
In Kuttner’s view (and mine; see Liberal Racism), liberal Democrats who wave banners of ethno-racial and sexual identity to cover for their complicity in all this have given conservatives excuses to divert a resentful public’s attention from the right’s even-more deceitful complicity in fomenting our republican crisis. Instead of offering alternatives to inequality and decay, conservatives have dined out so compulsively on liberals’ follies that they’ve forgotten how to cook for themselves and the rest of us and have abandoned the kitchen to Donald Trump.
* * *
After peddling demagoguery and coming up empty, some conservatives have turned to religion for cover and succor, if not salvation. But religion should scourge them, as Moses scourged the fabricators of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai; as Jesus did the moneychangers whom he drove from the Temple; and even as the conservative theologian Richard John Neuhaus did Senator Bob Dole, who’d condemned cultural decadence in Hollywood and had challenged Bill Clinton in the 1996 election but later made TV commercials for Pfizer, testifying that Viagra helped him cope with his erectile dysfunction. “The poor fellow looks like he’s restraining the impulse to unzip and show us the happy change,” Neuhaus sneered.
When I noted Dole’s folly in “Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change,” an essay for the journal Salmagundi, the conservative Christian editor Rod Dreher, then at The Dallas Morning News, republished my essay in that newspaper, explaining to the conservative Catholic magazineGodSpythat although I had made “an impassioned case” that “’the pornification of the public square’ is destroying any kind of civic-republican ethos,” I would never see my dreams realized through liberalism because “only religious faith has the power to resist our very powerful commercial culture.”
Religious conservatives such as Dreher and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have indeed sought in faith an escape hatch of sorts from conservatism’s imprisonment in the telos of sheer profit in our fallen world. Religion served that purpose, too, for William F. Buckley, Jr., who was a wealthy heir to part of the fortune his father had accumulated as an oil prospector and industry developer who meddled in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerto. In 1951 Bill, Jr.’s book God and Man at Yale summoned that college’s presumptively Christian gentlemen alumni to rout the godless socialism of its professors.
Buckley’s conservative movement has been at it , albeit in secular terms, ever since his passing in 2008. The lavishly funded William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale characterizes itself as a champion of “viewpoint diversity” instead of color-coded diversity, and it claims to oppose “intellectual and moral conformity” on campus. Its website features Buckley’s observation that “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” Actually, the program isn’t above trying to shock left-of-center students into making censorious protests which conservative media then spotlight and lampoon, as I recounted in Salon.
Whittaker Chambers would have responded to conservatives’ zeal with a shrug and “the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better,” as Tanenhaus put it. The fuller truth is that “viewpoint diversity” doesn’t make much headway against the Buckley Program’s own carefully managed internal conformity, as I discovered in September 2021, when its president, having read a column of mine about Yale’s star-crossed venture to establish a liberal-arts college with the tightly run city-state of Singapore, invited me to speak with Buckley student fellow. “We are looking to host in-person events with Yale affiliates,” he told me. “Please let me know if you are and I would be happy to follow up.”
“I’d be delighted to talk with and listen to Buckley Program participants,” I responded. “My criticisms of Yale College (which I’ve defended at times against certain outside conservative critics) are themselves somewhat “conservative,” in that I try to protect old civic-republican virtues that I think Yale should continue to nurture. I agree with conservatives that Yale doesn’t do enough of that. But… I believe that… finance capital… undermines what’s best and necessary in a traditional liberal education…. I could also discuss broader dilemmas that Yale faces in its role as a crucible or training center for civic-republican leadership. Again, I’ve been severely critical of some conservative critics of Yale (try this, for example! –how’s that for “viewpoint diversity”?!). But the older and wiser I become, the more convinced I am that each side of the political spectrum needs the best of the other side in certain ways, and, in this time of increasing polarization, that can’t be stated often or clearly enough. I’d be glad to explain what I mean by this, and I’d be more than willing to listen for a long time to the Buckley student fellows’ own thoughts about this.”
I never heard back from the Buckley president or anyone else in the program. Ironically, my disinvitation may have had been prompted by my depiction of some conservatives’ stagey condemnations of liberals’ “disinvitations” of conservative speakers. I described Buckley board chairman Roger Kimball’s introduction of the columnist George Will to Buckley student fellows at a “Disinvitation Dinner” staged by the program to dramatize Scripps’ college’s cancellation of its speaking invitation to Will after Will had made disparaging remarks about a “rape culture” of supposedly inflated accusations and cries of victimization.
William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will
“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,” Kimball thundered, oblivious of the conformity he was enforcing on the 20 year-olds seated before him in formal wear at Will’s “Disinvitation Dinner” in an elegant hotel.
More telling than this reeking strain of hypocrisy has been the conduct of the Yale Law School’s chapter of The Federalist Society, some of whose alumni guided Trump in deciding his appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal judicial benches. Here I commend a brilliant expose of the Federalist Society’s “free speech” hypocrisy by Jack McCordick, a Yale undergraduate at the time who’s now a researcher-reporter for The New Republic.
Firebrands in the Buckley undergraduate program and the Federalist Society’s law school chapter succeed at times in baiting left-leaning students (and, sometimes, university administrators) into committing or suborning excesses that the national conservative media eagerly denounce. But when the Law School’s Federalist Society chapter did manage to sponsor a straightforward debate — “Income Inequality: Is it Fair or Unfair?” — between the progressive Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits and libertarian writer Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute — Markovits wiped the floor with Brook: See for yourself how an outbreak of “viewpoint diversity” at the behest of the Federalist Society flummoxed its organizers.
A similar embarrassment became public when editors and board members of conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal denied its writer Sol Stern freedom of speech to criticize Donald Trump at all. Stern, who’d been writing for that magazine and institute for years, outed them in an article — “Think Tank in the Tank” — for the left-liberal DEMOCRACY Journal that’s as telling as McCordick’s expose of the Federalist Society.
* * *
It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with some conservatives’ religious escapes –Rod Dreher’s embrace of what he calls the “Benedict Option,” comes to mind. But it’s not enough to make me sympathize with the secular cries de Coeur of Davidson. “Put bluntly,” he writes, “if conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible.
”One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips,” the baker who has indeed been hard-pressed to defend himself legally several times for refusing to decorate a cake with words congratulating a gay couple on a wedding.
“The left will only stop when conservatives stop them,” Davidson continues, warning that “conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about ‘small government’…. To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point,” he concludes. “If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.”
But when have conservatives ever shied from wielding power, except when they’ve been embarrassed or forced into relinquishing it by the brave civil disobedience of a Rosa Parks and the civil-rights movement or by the disciplined, decisive strikes and protests and electoral organizing of labor unions and social movements? If conservatives really want to “attend with care” to the examples set by Cincinnatus and George Washington, who relinquished power so that the public interest would continue to be served more lastingly and effectively by others, they’ll have to enable American working people to resist the “telos of sheer profit” that’s stressing and dispossessing them and that’s displacing their anger and humiliation onto scapegoats under the ministrations of Fox News and right-wing demagogues.
How about taking seriously Davidson’s proposal that government offer “generous subsidies to families of young children” — a heresy to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who said he wants to shrink government to a size where he could drag it into a bathtub and drown it? How about banishing demagoguery from their midst, as they often claim that Buckley banished John Birchite anti-Semitism? How about disassociating themselves, as I think Buckley would have done, from The Claremont Institute, the hard-right think tank that’s been so deeply “in the tank” for President Trump that he gave it a National Humanities Medal and followed the advice of its senior fellow John Eastman in attempting to overturn the 2020 election?
Not only does Davidson propose that “to stop Big Tech… will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms;” he also proposes that “to stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds.” He writes that conservatives “need not shy away from [big-government policies] because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.” But American conservatives who expect to wield big-government power may be moving toward a strain of European conservatism that has long mixed capitalism and welfare-state spending to advance nationalist, imperialist, and even racialist agendas. That dark, dangerous tradition began with Bismarck and metastasized into Nazi “national socialism” half a century later.
If so, American conservatives should look carefully into the Pandora’s Box that they’re opening. And those who crave a godly relation to power would do well to ponder an observation by John Winthrop, the founder and first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in his essay-sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,”: “It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.” In other words, not even wealthy estates can survive for long in a society that’s being disintegrated by capitalism. It’s hard to imagine America’s conservative “fundamentalists,” be they religious or secular, finding it in themselves to escape the English poet Oliver Goldsmith’s foreboding of doom in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
Few if any who recall the uproar over Mahmoud Amadenijad’s appearance at Columbia University two years ago can also recall the uproar over the appearance at Columbia of Hans Luther, the first Nazi ambassador to the U.S, in 1933.
But one TPM reader could, because she’d been carried across W. 121st St. on Dec. 12, 1933 by two cops after circulating anti-Nazi handbills during the speech.
She was “a blonde, hatless, quiet, and, it seemed to me, imperturbably valiant freshman [who] stood her ground firmly but undemonstratively,” wrote James Wechsler, a reporter for the Columbia Spectator, years later in The Age of Suspicion. “I knew her name was Nancy Fraenkel and that her father was a Civil Liberties Union lawyer. I saw her much more frequently after that evening which, I learned later, was her seventeenth birthday. We were married the following October.”
Nancy Wechsler, who died Monday, at 93, never stopped showing how to stand your ground imperturbably in an uproar – a piece of political wisdom that grows from character and civic culture more than from intelligence or ideology.
Nancy and Jimmy Wechsler were young Communists in those dark years of capitalist collapse and fascist ascendancy, when democratic decency, principles, and courage like theirs saw few “fighting” alternatives to the left against the many betrayals of democracy in World War I, the Depression, and American-capitalist likings for Mussolini and Hitler.
Like some other leftists, Nancy and Jimmy soon saw through Communism’s tragedies, duplicities, and cruelties. But because their idealism and decency weren’t phony, but rooted in personal character and civic-republican principle, their disillusionment with the Stalinist left didn’t catapult them into the arms of the right, as it did some future neoconservatives, who mistake corporate capitalism’s mountebanks, bounders, and blowhards for carriers of republican freedom.
Jimmy, a hard-driving liberal and wonderfully literary journalist until his death in 1983, was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy while he was the crusading editor of the New York Post in its intelligently pro-labor, pro-civil-rights glory days, which ended in 1977 when Rupert Murdoch bought the Post and turned it into a daily reminder that Australia was founded as a penal colony.
Nancy became a prominent public lawyer, like her father and Jimmy’s brother Herbert Wechsler. Unlike them, she needed her unflappable, feisty, but disciplined manner to become one of the first women admitted to Columbia Law School and the New York Bar.
Through political and family adversities, Nancy and Jimmy sustained a redeeming, impish humor, recalling, for example, how Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a dinner at the White House, thought of nothing better to ask Nancy than whether she baked bread. They griped about each other’s driving: Jimmy hated to drive; Nancy was a demon on the road and, even this summer was still driving back and forth from Manhattan to a summer home in Westport, CT. (In the city, Nancy seldom took cabs; as late as this year, she was still taking city buses daily from her home west of Lincoln Center to her firm at Madison and E. 38th Street.)
It wasn’t only McCarthyism that targeted her and Jimmy’s politics, though. Jimmy was also assailed by unreconstructed Stalinists who couldn’t get over his decision not to take the Fifth Amendment before McCarthy’s committee but to denounce McCarthy to his face, on the record, even while giving him the names of some old Communists who, Wechsler knew, were already on McCarthy’s lists.
He did it for reasons he explains compellingly in The Age of Suspicion, and I think he did the right thing. That book, which also describes Nancy, is especially instructive now for two reasons:
First, it’s obvious now that many leftists who assailed the Wechslers were also wrongly assailing Elie Kazan (for naming names) and defending the Soviet Union and Alger Hiss, long beyond the point where it made political, moral, or even simple cognitive sense. Jimmy’s account of how he and Nancy saw through them so early is instructive.
Second, The Age of Suspicion is even more instructive because, reading now about the Stalinists of that time, you’ll find yourself thinking of neo-conservatives who bear striking characterological, cultural, and even political resemblances, for reasons that are worth pondering.
While both left and right have valid claims to represent profound truths, both suffer from deformities of character that only a wiser balance of civil libertarianism and civic-republican discipline can offset.
Nancy and Jimmy Wechsler found their ways to that balance because they’d grown up with it in the first place, as indomitable, savvy New Yorkers who could bring the best of progressive commitments along with them toward a viable civic consensus.
Until a few days before her death, Nancy was at her firm, McLaughlin & Stern, LLP, working in that spirit on copyright cases, as she had for decades at Deutsch, Klagsbrun, Blasband. She knew that both left and right can seem morally noble when they’re going up against the more dominant side’s (and its many apologists’) institutionalized carapaces and cant. But she also knew that each side tends to cling almost tribally to its fundamental truths until they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other side is wrong.
Thus Hitler’s Nazis (“National Socialists”) seemed noble to more than a few working people while on the upswing against striped-pants capitalists who’d crafted the Versailles settlement and Great Depression. On the left, Stalin seemed noble against the fascist Franco in Spain and Hitler after 1941.
But political crises demand good judgment and sometimes humor, even when one has taken a firm and fateful stand. Because Nancy Wechsler understood this, she was a brave civil-libertarian and civic-republican, from that moment in 1933 when she handed out leaflets against Hitler’s ambassador to her last freedom-of-speech case. She would never have temporized for ideological reasons about Ahmadenijad’s Iran.
Those of us who are sometimes hard on leftists and lawyers should keep this leftish lawyer in mind. No less than conservative Southerners like that old “country lawyer” and segregationist, Senator Sam Ervin, a hero of the Watergate hearings — or even like Republican Lindsay Graham, at least in his pro-Sotomayor speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday — Nancy Wechsler remained rooted in and loyal to the American republic, when others were seeking political salvation elsewhere.
I first met Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ newest columnist — and, at 29, its youngest-ever and perhaps its first op-ed page conservative Catholic believer — four years ago after reviewing his engaging and gutsy student’s memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. I’ve recently reviewed his book, Grand New Party. So herewith some thoughts about the Times’ smart and telling but slightly risky choice.
The smart and telling part is that Douthat will outclass not only William Kristol but also a faithless, conniving, faux-populist neo-conservative strain of punditry, whose collapse has been evident recently in loud second thoughts from the historian Robert Kagan at the Washington Post and in the maunderings of David Brooks.
Ironically, Douthat’s co-author of Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, worked for Brooks at the Times in 2003-4. But Douthat comes from somewhere else and is going somewhere else, and he is not alone. He may give serious left-liberals an adversary they deserve, because, unlike Kristol and Brooks, he has more beliefs than insecurities.
That brings us to the risky part of Douthat’s hiring. Although I wrote about Grand New Party for the liberal Catholic Commonweal, which I’ve admired and written for occasionally since the early 1980s, I have no hosannas for that celestial railroad the HRC&AC (Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church). Myself a sometime carrier of the Hebraic strain in the early-American, republican civil religion, I find the Church perverse in too many ways to reprise here (i.e., Don’t get me started.)
The Church does take a long view of things, usefully keeping the tragedy of the political before us. Sometimes it props up what looks like the serenity of its faith with unseemly, Grand Inquisitorial musings about (and exploitations of) the weaknesses of the flesh in a fallen world. Some of us Hebrews take an even longer and somewhat different view of how to balance the evil inclinations in the human heart with efforts to repair a world that isn’t quite so fallen.
That Jewish orientation has its own risks, but this whole debate is lost on those who’ve been running the nervous, neo-liberal/neo-conservative Times for the past few decades. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has found that his empire is a fragile craft in history’s tides (and God’s). So he has grasped for a pundit who respects the Catholic Bishops’ well-known injunctions on behalf of the poor and against unjust wars, but not from a knee-jerk-liberal vantage point.
In Privilege, Douthat stood almost equidistant enough from the free-marketeering right and the liberationist left to see a perverse codependency between them, as I mention in my review. Conservative though he is, he confessed to a sneaking sympathy for his fellow students’ Living Wage Campaign on behalf of Harvard’s underpaid workers. That’s the Dorothy Day part of him. Or maybe it’s the Baltimore Cathechism, which is more Tory and corporatist in the conservative “we incorporate and care for everyone” sense of that term.
Conservative Catholics tend also to be statists of theocratic inclination and to be prissily or haughtily silent about their side’s own sins — a silence of the sort to which the usually congenial Douthat is not always immune, owing partly also to his inexperience in the business and political worlds. His hauteur flashed during a long and increasingly testy defense of the late conservative Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus in a series of exchanges with Damon Linker in the New Republic. That his casuistry has a longer arc than Brooks’ sophistry makes Douthat a bit too ecclesiastical for my taste, but also, when he’s at his best, more grounded and even profound.
It doesn’t worry me that Douthat considers human life a sacred, inter-generational thread that is not to be broken by individual decisions or (as I hope he also thinks) by the state in capital punishment or in unjust wars. I do wonder what Douthat would think about capital punishment and lesser but noxious repressions if the state tended toward theocracy or just took sides on certain issues, in ways he considered beneficent.
But he’s only 29. As he travels his Via Dolorosa from the Times op ed page toward the Kingdom of God on earth, Douthat may be an interlocutor who makes liberals think through their own long-unexamined assumptions and find the missing groundwork for some of their beliefs in government action and individual rights. Neo-conservatives have derided liberals for holding these beliefs at all or for holding them badly, when in truth neo-cons held some of the same beliefs. It may be more rewarding to watch Ross Douthat transcend his conservative prematurity than it has been to watch David Brooks grow up politically so much later in life.
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.
The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images/Bettmann)
