Revolutionary War, Revolutionary Peace?

by Kevin J. Jones

America is divided. One hears this constantly either in the rhetoric of an opportunistic politician’s “Two Americas” stump speeches or in the petty dualisms created by journalists in search of a thesis, like the metrosexual/retrosexual split. And who can forget the Red State/Blue State rift that will be featured once again in our national election coverage? American demographics are bisected like so many green peppers in a Ginsu knife infomercial.

To reconcile these divisions, some have put forward the Declaration of Independence–specifically its second paragraph–as a source of national unity: in their eyes, the Declaration is a veritable kerygma of the American credo. Following Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, they view America as a nation fundamentally dedicated to a proposition. This advocacy of the “propositional nation,” with its attendant establishment of an American orthodoxy, echoes G.K. Chesterton’s cautionary description of the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church.” Whether or not one grants the position that America is primarily defined by the beliefs of her people, this means that the civil religion of the United States is likewise vulnerable to the political equivalent of the theological liberalism that has so weakened confessional religious discourse. It is not politically feasible to reinterpret the “articles of faith” of the American creed to mean mere articles of peace, as Samuel Johnson did with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. For, as it happens, opposition to any traditional American understanding of political concepts takes a familiar form: the same words are affirmed, but not the same meaning. In view of such ambiguity, Claes G. Ryn’s recent book, America the Virtuous, has done us the great service of recovering traditional understandings of American politics and clarifying the revolutionary essence lurking beneath so many rhetorical invocations of American ideals.

America the Virtuous:
The Crisis of Democracy
and the Quest for Empire
by Claes G. Ryn
Transaction Publishers,
October 1, 2003
Hardcover: 400 pages
ISBN 0765802198

Not surprisingly, America the Virtuous is a book set on exploring a split within American culture. To use the taxonomy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there is an Old America and a New America, that is to say, an older kind of conservatism and neo-Jacobin neoconservatism. Both assert that virtue, democracy, and the free market are to be desired, defended, and promoted. But Ryn argues that the interpretation of typical American values radically differs between the “old” Americans and the neo-Jacobins, with the latter in the ascendant.

Take virtue, for example. For Old America, virtue is made manifest in concrete practices like love of neighbor, humility, and self-restraint. By looking after oneself and one’s own and leading by example, one can influence one’s own community and indirectly the world. This modest aspiration was given voice by John Winthrop in his speech to the nascent Puritan colony in New England: “We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”

Against this older vision, Ryn sees the Jacobin conception of virtue as primarily emotivist in character. Jacobin virtue is not a matter of conduct but instead a matter of holding the right humanitarian opinions: “Their putative virtue is that they entertain benevolent sentiments towards various abstract entities, such as “the people,” “mankind,” “the proletariat,” “the poor,” “the downtrodden,” “the starving third world,” or the like–entities that are all diffuse and distant from the emoting person and which therefore impose on the individual no concrete and personally demanding obligations. (p. 56) Nor does the influence of the virtuecrats of the Christian Right serve to limit neoconservative hubris: “In its practical effects on United States foreign policy, this religious triumphalism puts a religious gloss on neo-Jacobinism. It does not Christianize United States foreign policy, but makes it less humble and more belligerent.” (p. 138) And as for our city upon a hill? Prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan have belittled this image, writing “A policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example in practice is a policy of cowardice and dishonor.” (“Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 1996. quoted by Ryn, p. 6)

“Democracy” is another term that, to use Professor Ryn’s awkward but accurate terminology, needs to be “dichotomized.” There is a vital distinction to be made between constitutional democracy and plebiscitary democracy. The former means decentralized government and a popular will mediated through all the little platoons of life, like family, church, the rotary club, and the town hall–the institutions which help cultivate the virtues necessary for living freely. Plebiscitary democracy, on the contrary, sees the popular will as a simple aggregate of individual wills and does not see these wills as needing formative institutions of any kind other than the centralized bureaucracy produced by plebiscite. For, as Ryn writes, “the political dynamic of plebiscitary democracy is to mobilize, expand, and centralize government. The effect is to erode local and private autonomy and initiative and to efface what is locally and regionally distinctive.” (p. 53)

Ryn’s section on the free market, a chapter titled “Jacobin Capitalism,” is perhaps the most provocative, and least satisfying, of his analyses of ambiguous terms. One standard conservative description of the free market defines it as an efficient mechanism for price discovery. Against this mundane standby of the economics textbook, Ryn writes:

“It should be carefully noted that there is a sense in which a free market would become a reality only if the movement of goods and services were wholly unrestricted, unfettered not only by “external,” legal, or institutional checks but by “inner” restraints, such as the inhibitions and tastes of civilized persons.

A Rousseauistic, Jacobin desire to destroy traditional moral and cultural restraints and corresponding sociopolitical structures can thus be said to aid in the creation of a truly free market. It is not far-fetched but entirely consistent to be a moral, intellectual, and cultural radical and a strong proponent of the free market by a certain definition of “free market.” (p. 147)

This is a striking passage. First, Ryn’s insight reveals the deep–and perhaps heretofore unexpected–inner consistency that lies at the heart of the slogan of the libertarian journal Reason, “Free Minds and Free Markets.” Furthermore, once one overcomes the minor shock of a non-ironical reference to civilized tastes, one is forced to consider just how many Jacobin capitalists are found among our corporate leaders, not to mention among their influential employees in the marketing department. Yet well aware of the suspicions that will be raised by this critique of the market, Ryn follows up by describing how capitalism could function in a decentralized society where self-restraint checks uncontrolled self-interest. Citing Wilhelm Röpke, he argues that the market simply reflects the values we bring to it. In a civilized society, the market reflects civilized tastes, and conversely a market in a degenerating society reflects degenerating tastes–as the classic programming adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

This attempt to salvage the market doesn’t quite convince. Though Professor Ryn, in the spirit of Edmund Burke, warns us that the market does not exist in the abstract, here, it seems, some abstraction is in order. To wit, no matter its cultural situation, the market has no inherent capacity to limit itself. If even a small minority of society views the capacities of the market as the only constraint, the market will tend to reward them, granting them an economic and cultural base from which the “civilized tastes” of men can be further undermined.

Besides this point, Ryn’s work also suffers from an undersupply of sources. Ryn makes several arguments that go against contemporary conventional wisdom. For instance, he argues against describing the beginnings of the United States Federal Government as a “founding,” contrary to the Straussians and high school civics teachers everywhere. He prefers the term “framing,” which suggests less novelty. Ryn also holds that it is misleading to define the rebellion that separated the colonies from British rule as the “American Revolution;” rather, it should be conceived of as a “War of Independence.” In many ways, the war was counterrevolutionary, leaving most of society untouched and keeping in place many of the traditions of British government in particular and Western government in general. These are defensible arguments, but Ryn doesn’t take much space for their detailed defense. A few more endnotes would suffice to redirect skepticism towards more robust material.

There is a more crucial flaw in Ryn’s failure to provide better support for his attack on putative neo-Jacobinism–to invert a phrase, “the covers of this book are too close together.” For instance, in his description of plebiscitary democracy, Ryn fails to cite even one conservative or liberal who tends towards pebiscitarianism. Not one contemporary person is mentioned as an example of a Jacobin capitalist. Ryn cites only Marx as an example of how Jacobin capitalism might reason, and though anyone even vaguely familiar with the neoconservative movement knows that many of its leaders have lamented squandering their formative years in Marxist foolishness, Ryn should have backed up his argument with concrete contemporary examples. To be fair, he does cites Michael Ledeen’s gleeful invocation of the modern American tendency towards what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” but too much of his case rests upon insinuation and abstract descriptions. Though these descriptions ring true in the ears of this reviewer, they are not enough to give full credence to Ryn’s wide-ranging accusations of neo-Jacobinism.

The foregoing is not to imply that this book is one long accusation. Ryn makes some subtle analyses of the interaction between universal principles and particular actions, as well as of the differences between nationalism, internationalism, and Ryn’s favored view of a “rooted cosmopolitanism” which is open to other cultures but refuses to disparage the mother country. His reflections on responsible nationhood are as welcome as they are timely, and his lengthy list of critical problems facing America in the chapter “Democracy in Peril” will garner the praise of any culture warrior worthy of the name.

Having diagnosed American troubles, Ryn’s solution will not charm those enamored of governmental activism. He has nothing but disdain for those who campaign not “for a revival of character but for more laws and regulations.” (p. 102) As he states, “The crux of the problem with neo-Jacobinism is not particular individuals, however great their power, but the moral, cultural, and intellectual trends in the West that have made persons like them appear insightful and worthy of influence in the first place.” (p. 201) Still, Ryn does not propose a popular movement to sweep away the corrupted elites. In his mind, “the people” in general are docile, and any current disagreement they may have with the neo-Jacobins simply means that they are slow to grasp what the current elite expects from them. Instead of an ideological populism of outrage, which is unlikely to produce much besides hot air and a new elite just as committed to augmenting its own power, Ryn proposes the decentralization and diversification of our nationalized and homogenous contemporary American culture–that is, the creation of new, locally grounded elites closer to human concerns and further away from the “New York-Hollywood” and the “Boston-Berkeley” axes. Immediate national political action on such a program is largely futile, so we must concentrate on the little things, like improving ourselves and helping our neighbors, until such actions can have their effect on a larger scale.

Such pleas for decentralized action are rare enough. Rarer still is a book that so keenly connects a major strain of modern political life to its ideological sources. Though Professor Ryn is not optimistic about the prospects for renewal, his America the Virtuous provides a very valuable starting point to help turn back the tide of abstract revolution, and for that he deserves our gratitude.