John Adams and the Problem of Contemporary Political Classification

Original post 7/12/08

NB: A version of this was first posted at Anchor Rising.

Providence Journal editorialist Ed Achorn had a piece yesterday on John Adams and recommended taking in the HBO mini-series that is now out on DVD (I hope to). Coincidentally, I had been thinking about Adams after listening to the Independence Day show of local radio talk-show host Matt Allen, during which he he read the entire Declaration of Independence and extolled the virtues of our great nation. (Full disclosure--contributors to another website I co-founded, anchorrising.com, have a weekly spot on his show and occasionally are in-studio guests). The conversation was wide-ranging, and along the way he made an off-the-cuff remark along the lines that John Adams was a Democrat and Thomas Jefferson was a Republican.

Wha.....? I thought. I suspected it was based on the fact that Adams was a prominent member of the post-Revolution Federalist Party (along with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, incidentally), which advocated a strong central government. Given Matt's, shall we say, inclination against big government, I can understand why he'd think that anyone for a strong national government--no matter the time or place, I suppose--was akin to what we would call a contemporary, big government Democrat.

As it turned out, Matt was being a bit anachronistic--though knowingly so--by attributing the Federalist's desire to centralize power as the equivalent of today's conception of "big government." The one-off remark missed the historical context surrounding the rise of the Federalist philosophy of government (hey, it was a talk-show!), which was based on a belief that they urgently needed to strengthen and tighten the internal ties of their nascent nation so it could survive in a belligerent world.

As I discussed with Allen (briefly), Adams is considered by most conservatives to have been the first American conservative; one of their own, much less a Founding era Democrat! He wasn't interested in encroaching on the rights of the population or imposing arbitrary taxes or monetary redistribution or instituting a vast bureaucracy or creating programs to address every ill, whether real or perceived. In fact, neither were his political opponents, Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. I guess the truth of the matter is that, in the Founding era, there really was no equivalent to the modern conception of a big-government Democrat. They came along with Woodrow Wilson and, later, FDR.

Here's some of that historical context I was talking about.

After the Revolution, it was becoming clear to many of the Founders that the Articles of Confederation simply didn't have enough teeth. The government they provided for was very weak and the particular interests of the various states trumped those of the nation to the detriment of all. European powers played the states off of each other and threatened to economically, or even militarily, divide and conquer the young nation. For example, on economic problem was the inability of the national government to place duties on imports. This was a key economic weapon against great powers like Great Britain who restricted imports from America. In 1781 Congress, under the Articles, asked the states for permission to enact duties, but all such actions required "unanimous consent" and--would you believe it--Rhode Island refused.

As for foreign affairs, with no national army, Great Britain made excuses for not abandoning their forts in the American west; with no navy, the Barbary Pirates attacked American merchant ships and put their crews into slavery; with no consolidated diplomatic "vision", virtually no national treaties could be signed (again, because of a high hurdle of approval) while individual states made their own treaties. The colonies had won independence together, but in their freedom, they were drifting apart as each state viewed itself as a sovereign nation. In reality, they were setting themselves up to be cherries ripe for the picking. The states had become their own worst enemies.

In the debate over the creation of a new government, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers to explain why the new Constitution, one that described a stronger central government than that of the Articles of Confederation, was required for a young and vulnerable nation. They were opposed by the Anti-Federalists, who argued against the centralization of power put in place by the Constitution. (Eventually, the Anti-federalist inspired Bill of Rights were thrown in as a compromise to get passage of the Constitution).

During this debate, Adams was in Great Britain, and was asked to hastily compile something to help convince the states of the wisdom of passing the new Constitution. His A Defence of the Consitution of Government of the United States of America helped elaborate further on the principles of the balance of power within government and how a more complicated government guided by laws was necessary to maintain the liberty so desired by the American people. (In this, he was informed by his own work as the chief personality involved in the drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution). A selection from Defence--in this case Adams' theory on the importance of property--is probably enough to show why many consider him a conservative:

Suppose a nation, rich and poor, high and low, ten millions in number, all assembled together; not more than one or two millions will have lands, houses, or any personal property; if we take into the account the women and children, or even if we leave them out of the question, a great majority of every nation is wholly destitute of property, except a small quantity of clothes, and a few trifles of other movables...if all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have? Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty. Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate, would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If "Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.

Sound like a modern day, "big government Democrat" (or "Republican" for that matter!) to you?

But it does get more complicated as we look away from political philosophy and towards actual politics. During Washington's first term as President, two factions emerged with different ideas and priorities as to how the new government should operate. Washington, Adams and Hamilton eventually identified themselves as Federalists, which wanted a strong army and navy, central banking (especially consolidation of state debt into national and the establishment of national credit), strong courts and also favored Great Britain in trade and foreign affairs. Jefferson and Madison would dub themselves Democratic-Republicans and they and their party opposed a strong central government, banking, a standing army--and especially navy--and looked to France for political and philosophical inspiration.

In reality, Washington mostly tried to stay above the partisanship. He was all about noblesse oblige and, as Father of the Country, he could pull it off (though he still came under some criticism for being too "kingly"). Hamilton was the heart-and-soul of the Federalist Party and leader of the so-called High Federalists, who, without pushing it too far, thought that Great Britain had the right idea with an aristocracy and all. For his part, as indicated above, Adams believed in the balance of power, but also in the necessity of a strong central government to facilitate the unification of the disparate colonies and factions when needed. Such was, according to Russell Kirk, Adams' "practical conservatism."

After the nasty election of 1796, Adams, who didn't get along with Hamilton and his allies, was a man very much alone as President. He was left to carve his own path during his single term. But with no allies in either party, he weathered a few crises (XYZ affair and the Quasi-war with France most notably) and served only one-term, losing to the popular Jefferson in the election of 1800 (sometimes dubbed the second revolution).

The legacy of John Adams is hard to encapsulate, and a scattershot blog post can't do him justice. But his writings and political philosophy as well as his determination in the face of personal unpopularity stand out for me. And I've got a soft spot because he managed to keep a foundering U.S. Navy afloat when so many, including Thomas Jefferson--who would later benefit from Adams investment in the Navy against the Barbary Pirates--wanted to sell it off. Adams believed in a strong national defense and strong financial institutions and a central government that could stand up to enemies "foreign and domestic." His idea of a strong national government was meant to deal with these issues, not to encroach into every aspect of Americans' lives.

ADDENDUM: Conservatives have long pointed to John Adams as the first prominent proponent of an American-style conservatism. Russel Kirk and Peter Viereck both wrote histories of American conservatism and each regard Adams as an American conservative touchstone. Many historians--Joseph Ellis, David McCullough and Richard Brookhiser come to mind--regard Adams as essentially conservative, too. They base their classification on Adams' on political thought as expressed in his voluminous writings.

The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a helpful and concise summary of Adams' political thought (the entry was written by Joseph Ellis):

Adams wished to warn his fellow Americans against all revolutionary manifestos that envisioned a fundamental break with the past and a fundamental transformation in human nature or society that supposedly produced a new age. All such utopian expectations were illusions, he believed, driven by what he called “ideology,” the belief that imagined ideals, so real and seductive in theory, were capable of being implemented in the world. The same kind of conflict between different classes that had bedeviled medieval Europe would, albeit in muted forms, also afflict the United States, because the seeds of such competition were planted in human nature itself. Adams blended the psychological insights of New England Puritanism, with its emphasis on the emotional forces throbbing inside all creatures, and the Enlightenment belief that government must contain and control those forces, to construct a political system capable of balancing the ambitions of individuals and competing social classes.

His insistence that elites were unavoidable realities in all societies, however, made him vulnerable to the charge of endorsing aristocratic rule in America, when in fact he was attempting to suggest that the inevitable American elite must be controlled, its ambitions channeled toward public purposes. He also was accused of endorsing monarchical principles because he argued that the chief executive in the American government, like the king in medieval European society, must possess sufficient power to check the ravenous appetites of the propertied classes. Although misunderstood by many of his contemporaries, the realistic perspective Adams proposed—and the skepticism toward utopian schemes he insisted upon—has achieved considerable support in the wake of the failed 20th-century attempts at social transformation in the communist bloc. In Adams’s own day, his political analysis enjoyed the satisfaction of correctly predicting that the French Revolution would lead to the Reign of Terror and eventual despotism by a military dictator.

By the way, Jefferson was decidedly pro-French Revolution, along with the rest of his party, the Democratic-Republicans. Ellis also wrote the EB entry forJefferson, which includes this bit about the Adams and Jefferson retirement correspondence:

The reconciliation between the two patriarchs was arranged by their mutual friend Benjamin Rush, who described them as “the North and South poles of the American Revolution.” That description suggested more than merely geographic symbolism, since Adams and Jefferson effectively, even dramatically, embodied the twin impulses of the revolutionary generation. As the “Sage of Monticello,” Jefferson represented the Revolution as a clean break with the past, the rejection of all European versions of political discipline as feudal vestiges, the ingrained hostility toward all mechanisms of governmental authority that originated in faraway places. As the “Sage of Quincy (Massachusetts),” Adams resembled an American version of Edmund Burke, which meant that he attributed the success of the American Revolution to its linkage with past practices, most especially the tradition of representative government established in the colonial assemblies. He regarded the constitutional settlement of 1787–88 as a shrewd compromise with the political necessities of a nation-state exercising jurisdiction over an extensive, eventually continental, empire, not as a betrayal of the American Revolution but an evolutionary fulfillment of its promise.

These genuine differences of opinion made Adams and Jefferson the odd couple of the American Revolution and were the primary reasons why they had drifted to different sides of the divide during the party wars of the 1790s. The exchange of 158 letters between 1812 and 1826 permitted the two sages to pose as philosopher-kings and create what is arguably the most intellectually impressive correspondence between statesmen in all of American history. Beyond the elegiac tone and almost sculpted serenity of the letters, the correspondence exposed the fundamental contradictions that the American Revolution managed to contain.

Barone's Theory of History: Conformity Lost, or Conformity Redefined?

Michael Barone takes a look at Morton Keller's America's Three Regimes: A New Political History and wonders aloud about his own "theory of history":

The natural state of America, in my theory, is decentralized toleration: We stand together because we can live apart. We are, most of the time, the nation described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of various ethnic, religious, and racial strands who believe fervently that we can live and triumph together if we allow one another to observe our local mores. We can embody David Hackett Fischer's "four British folkways" and at the same time be a united people. There's a tension in that, which threatens to come apart. In the midcentury America of the 1850s, the threat was that we would come apart: We had an explosive political conflagration over the issue of slavery in the territories and an explosive ethnic conflagration in the decade that had the largest immigrant influx, in percentage of pre-existing population, of any decade in our history. Citations: Kenneth Stampp's America in 1857; the opening chapters in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. And in fact, we produced a civil war.

We had the opposite situation in the midcentury America of the 1950s. After the shared experiences of the Depression and World War II, with universal institutions like the comprehensive high school, the military draft, and the big factory workforces represented by giant industrial unions, we were a culturally more uniform country than we have been before or since. We were a nation of conformism, of the regular guy, of the average guy who gets along with his peers. Citations: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; William H. Whyte's The Organization Man. It was a society, to take one example, far more hostile to homosexuality: The midcentury society of the 1850s could evidently tolerate Ishmael and Queequeeg sleeping together in Moby Dick and the poems of Walt Whitman, while the midcentury society of the 1950s cast its eyes away from the obvious gayness of the early Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Roy Cohn.

The Civil War, the imposition of New England Yankee mores in the way described by Morton Keller, and the creation of national business and professional organizations described by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order 1877-1910 reversed the extreme decentralization of the 1850s. The cultural rebellions, to the left and the right, described recently in neat form by Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance reversed the extreme centralization of the 1950s.

For those of us who grew up in the backwash of the 1950s, this decentralization seemed like an abandonment of American tradition. In the long line of history, I think it is more like a reversion to norm. The seeming inconsistency of currently prevailing attitudes on marriage and divorce, gambling and drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking, is part of the continuing turmoil of a decentralized society. The results don't cohere, but perhaps that is to be expected in a society like ours.

I'm not sure about this. If nothing else, we have become more centralized governmentally and culturally, haven't we? Perhaps we are more polarized politically, yes, and perhaps we all live in our own fortresses, Bowling Alone, so to speak. I think Barone is correct insofar as he links the America seen by Tocqueville with that of today vs. the 1950's. But I think that what has happened is that a new definition of conformism has evolved. Conformism now implies "to each his own" and an underlying "don't be judgmental." Additionally, so many traditional cultural boundaries have been pushed or broken, that nothing much surprises us anymore. Further, to be critical or judgmental about the wrong people is frowned upon. It may be going too far to say the new conformity is essentially what we today call political correctness, but there is some sort of alignment there, I think.

Secular Tribes Here, Religious Tribes There

Paul Waldman wrote a piece in The Prospect in which--after pondering this study on the tribalization of evangelicals--he wonders if secularists are going to tribalize themselves. This has prompted some discussion by Ross Douthat (who also wrote a piece based on the same study) and the guys at The Corner. First, Waldman:

David Campbell of Notre Dame describes how evangelical voters are affected by the demographic makeup of their environment -- but not in the way you might think. Building on the "racial threat" hypothesis -- which states that as the number of African-Americans in a community increases, the more likely white voters are to support conservative candidates and oppose policies that benefit African-Americans -- Campbell set out to see whether he could identify a similar effect among evangelical voters. It turns out that, even when you control for factors like party identification, the more secular people there were within a county, the more likely that people from evangelical denominations living there would vote Republican.

In other words, the more that evangelicals saw non-religious people around them, the greater the likelihood they'd walk a straight line from the church door to the voting booth and pull the GOP lever.
...

So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own. In order to do so, they'll have to feel at least some measure of antagonism toward those on the outside. That's what makes a tribe a tribe, after all. (What would Red Sox fandom be without the Yankees, or punk rock without the conformist corporate tools?) But one key question for secular people is who, exactly, the Other is. Is it anyone who is religious? Those who want to convert you to their beliefs? Those who want their beliefs to be enshrined in government policy?

Douthat summarized his take on the matter:

The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.

Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and Mark Steyn have all weighed in and Douthat has responded. Read their posts to see the argument over the particulars of how the tug-o-war between secularism and religion has played out over the last 40-odd years.

And then there's this study which indicates that adults who graduated from college during the last 10 years or so are more religious than their non-college educated peers.

Researchers found four-year college students and college graduates are the least likely to curb church attendance, to say religion is less important in their lives, or to completely disassociate from religion. Young adults who do not pursue a college degree are the most likely to abandon their faith.

"Many people assume college is public enemy number one for religion," Mark Regnerus, assistant professor of sociology and author of the book "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," said. "But we found young adults who don't experience college are far more likely to turn away from religion."

The evolution of campus culture might explain the surprising results, Regnerus said. As more universities shift attention and resources from liberal arts to professional programs, students are increasingly sheltered from philosophical questions or debates that challenge their beliefs. When they are challenged, they can gain support from campus religious organizations and like-minded peers.

"Religion and spirituality are becoming more accepted in higher education, both in intellectual circles and in campus life," Jeremy Uecker, graduate student and lead author of the study, noted. "Religious students are encountering a much less hostile environment than in years past."

It appears as if this study supports the idea of religious tribalization indicated in the study cited by Douthat and Waldman. Further, if a majority of the next generation of college-educated kids is more religious than their peers and if it can be assumed they will comprise the future "leadership class" in the U.S. Does that mean that their secular, college-educated peers will indeed be pushed toward tribalization? Well, I guess we'll see.

Scapegoating

As I recently blathered on about, I think that part of being a "good" historian is to tone down the rhetoric and hyperbole while debating both the historical and contemporary. Also, it is also wise to avoid getting sucked into believing that there are always simple (reductionist) explanations for historical causation. Add to these the related temptation of scapegoating as explained by Mary Eberstadt.

... a flight from political reality has indeed been underway on both the left and the right in America in the years since that event, as well as accelerating into more advanced forms in much of Europe. To switch metaphors, in the wake of the 9/11 attack -- and later, related Islamist attacks on civilians, most notably in Spain and Britain -- many Western observers have responded not by absorbing what we now know to be true about our world, but rather by transposing those brute facts into other, safer, more familiar keys.

In other words, instead of focusing on the potential world-changing force that is radical Islam, many in the west are taking a sort of perverse comfort in turning towards familiar scapegoats.

Eberstadt explains that some on the right have taken to blaming "immigrants" for all of America's ills, while some on the left (including some libertarian's) have glommed onto the idea that "christianists" and/or "fundamentalists" are marching America toward Gomorrah. Then there is the popular Bush scapegoat, which many in the general public and the intellectual class find particularly appealling. But, Eberstadt explains, there are problems with this:

[One example is] Frank Rich's The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (Penguin Press). Like so much else now dominating the nonfiction aisles, it apprehends one large truth -- that the current balance between reality and rhetoric has been altered in a way deleterious to us. It then scrambles that message, again like the other scapegoaters, into a version more palatable than what the actual one would require. In this case, the scramble ends in focusing blame and hatred onto one single man -- George Bush -- who also shares a key feature of attraction alongside other scapegoats: He is not going to strike back.

Like others who are Bush-haters simpliciter, Rich is too bilious to make a systematic argument. The result is a burning effigy of a book whose smoke obscures one fundamental point: Whatever else George W. Bush is about, what the record does seem to show and what even many of his enemies feel forced to concede is that he does actually believe in what he is doing. Because it can't allow itself to go there, The Greatest Story Ever Sold becomes as two-dimensional as its subject...

The trouble with putting Bush personally at the center of what ails us is much like the related trouble of relocating the illegals or the theocrats there instead: i.e., it tries to explain too much. In this, too, the parallelism of the scapegoats can be seen. He is a child of privilege who believes in nothing. No, he is an ideological Christian possessed of an unwavering and therefore dangerous faith. Which is it? He is a tool of the oil interests, of the neoconservatives, of the Christians; no, he is a puppet master of them all; no again, he is himself a puppet of Karl Rove. He is "someone who likes to compete and win at all costs" (Frank Rich); he is someone who has had everything handed to him and doesn't know what it is like to struggle (also Rich). And so on.

There are also those--Eberstadt points to a recent issue of Foreign Affairs--who have concluded that "9/11 was not that big a deal after all." Then there is Europe, which has closed its eyes to the Islamist threat in its own backyard and instead resorted to a ramping up of anti-American rhetoric. Yet, Eberstadt thinks that anti-Americanism may be nothing more than misplaced anger:

Perhaps these days, on the Continent, the widespread, all-explaining urge to lay everything at the door of the U.S. has little to do with America proper. Perhaps it does not have much to do either with the post-Cold War unipolar world. Perhaps it is not even really about Iraq.

No, perhaps the anti-Americanism of today is best understood instead as a way of being furious in public with somebody for the insecurities and anxieties wrought by Islamist terrorism in this world, including in increasingly Muslim Europe -- an option made even more attractive by the safe bet that Americans, unlike some other people, are unlikely to respond to this rhetoric, let alone to editorial cartoons, by burning cars, slitting throats, or issuing death threats in places like Paris and Amsterdam and Regensburg and London.

In the end, people are comfortable with scapegoats because they can understand them. They are "problems" that have been solved before. Throw out the illegals, demonize the motives of religious people, blame Bush or America for everything or put our head in the sand. All are easier than dealing with an entity that simply doesn't think about life and society like the West.

Spinning Clio : Best of 2006

With nominations for the 2nd Annual Cliopatria Awards opening soon, I thought I'd offer up some of my best/favorite posts over the past year. Sure, I'd like some of 'em nominated (if they deserve it), but I also think it's a worthy exercise in and of itself. Blogging can get a little ephemeral and rediscovering one's own work may inspire further investigation down a forgotten path. Anyway, they are with a brief blurb about each:

Meet the new boss, will he turn out like the old boss?: Prompted by a Peggy Noonan column about the insular elite, I tied in a discussion of a "new elite," Glenn Reynold's Army of Davids, Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town and Turner's frontier thesis.

I Like Medieval Women (Especially Queens) : An introduction to the study of medieval queens, with a few suggested readings.

A Positive Historical Baseline : I argue that we should be truthful about the missteps in America's past, but "[w]e should teach our kids to give their own nation and those who built it the benefit of the doubt" when first exposing them to American history.

The Historiography of the Early Middle Ages and National Homogeneity : After reading a piece by Götz Aly on re-contextualizing the Holocaust in which he mentions the medievalist Jacob Burchhardt, I delved into how current medievalists have shown that the concept of ethnically pure nation-states was a myth.

Qualifying Bennett's Jefferson: How Jefferson Was Able to Wage War on the Pirates : An excerpt from William Bennett's America: The Last Best Hope seemed to me to give too much credit to Thomas Jefferson--and to be too dismissive of the efforts of George Washington and John Adams--for how the U.S. finally dealt with the Barbary Pirates. In short, Jefferson used a Navy that he had previously and repeatedly tried to scuttle.

Historical Consumerism : Historian Stephen Fry spoke about why history matters and I explained why, and how, I discovered it matters to me.


And there you have 'em. The six bests post of the past year, IMHO.

Gathered Thoughts: Populism, Democracy and Liberalism, the Trope of the Brave Idealist , American Exceptionalism

Sometimes, we find things that interest us, we keep 'em, but can't really find a way to work them in to a post. Well, here are the remnants after picking through a summers' worth of left-overs.

Back in July I was led to this Dallas Morning News piece that called for a new type of populist movement.

There is a tremendous cost to the health of the republic, to the common good, that comes with the creative yet destructive power of unlimited economic and political progressivism. The vital role property-owning and self-sufficient families, small towns and regional governments play in a free republic has been recognized for centuries. The civic virtues associated with widespread ownership of land, decentralized systems of trade, commitment to the common good of one's tribe and the moral sturdiness of belonging to a tradition are necessary to the continued independence of a free people.

And the loss of these goods will always strike the middle classes first and hardest. When they are lost, they are felt as loss – loss of an entire way of life. And just as the masses of dispossessed and alienated fought back during the Gilded Age, they are likely to again....

What is called for is an anti-progressive populism; an anti-movement movement; a return to what is near, known and particular. What is called for is what I think of as regional populism. Its first political task will be to rediscover the ways citizens of the old American republic used to think and talk....

Folk populism requires people willing to make sacrifices to defend what they love from encroaching destruction via spaghetti-like superhighways, foreign entanglements, megacorporations and megachurches, technological developments, mass media and hypermobility....

What would this kind of regional populism look like in an actual political platform? Broadly speaking, it would seek at every turn to end the dependence of its constituents on elites. It would oppose, for example, the nationalization of any sector of our economy, from health care to agriculture. Instead, it would seek creative ways to open regional markets for regional goods.

It would seek to permit regional cultural and religious particularities to emerge from the fog of federalized regulation and be made manifest in our schools, courthouses, businesses and civic organizations. And it would provide incentives to keep cultural capital local. It would encourage people to work, study and raise families close to where they grew up. It would seek ways to promote local culture and would cultivate loyalty to our neighbors and a fierce love for our own places.

But in the end, what this kind of vibrant regionalism requires is something much more difficult to obtain than a slogan. It is a renewed appreciation for society over and against both the individual and the state. Society defined by what the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry calls "membership" – a network of social interconnectedness and shared obligation. To be a member of this kind of social order is the best hedge against manipulation by the central planning committee for "growth" and "prosperity." It is, to put it plainly, to be free.

On the topic of populism, Prof. John P. McCormick (hosted by Alfredo Perez at Political Theory Daily Review) has a long paper of interest. (Here's the abstract):

The chapters of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to republican Rome prescribe institutions that obstruct popular efforts at diminishing the excessive power and influence of wealthy citizens and political magistrates. I argue that Rousseau reconstructs ancient Rome’s constitution in direct opposition to the more populist and anti-elitist model of the Roman Republic championed by Machiavelli in the Discourses: Rousseau eschews the establishment of magistracies, like the tribunes, reserved for common citizens exclusively, and endorses assemblies where the wealthy are empowered to outvote the poor in lawmaking and elections. On the basis of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to general elections, Rousseau’s neo-Roman institutional proposals aim to pacify the contestation of class hierarchies and inflate elite prerogative within republics—under the cover of more formal, seemingly more genuine, equality.

James Lileks examined the '50's and the adolescent mind-set by skewering a play that championed the prototypical brave counterculturist who took on McCarthy.

I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated?

Jonah Goldberg offered thoughts on whether its democracy or (classical) liberalism that we should focus on spreading in the Middle East:

No serious person, it seems to me, can deny that it would be better to live in a liberal but undemocratic society than a democratic but illiberal society. In other words, democracy — while an important mechanism — is fundamentally amoral. A society of evil men can democratically choose to do evil.

I think many democracy-boosters understand this, and agree, but they use democracy as an umbrella term for liberalism. The problem is that this leads to a corruption of rhetoric and, eventually, thinking. I think it's pretty clear that liberalism and democracy go together in the long run. But I think it is obviously false that democracy automatically yields liberalism. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. More often — as in the United States, Great Britain etc — one could just as easily argue that liberalism leads to democracy. I understand we need to take a principled pro-democracy stand. But we shouldn't blind ourselves to the fact that undemocratic institutions are often on the side of the angels. The Turkish military, for example, is a defender of Turkish liberalism - flawed though it may be — against the threats it faces from, among other things, democratic Islamic populism.

Pursuing elections before you've cultivated liberal values is a recipe for Hitlerism or Hamas-ism. Indeed, it's a fascinating contrafactual to ponder how different things might have been if the Bush Administration had not emphasized — rhetorically — literal elections over everything they think elections represent (see here for a recent lament along these lines in the Corner).

Rich's points are well-taken. There's a reason we're stuck dealing with the Middle East — because much of the rest of the world has come to its senses. The Arab or Muslim "street" doesn't much care about democracy. Until it does, harping on elections is a fools errand. That doesn't mean we shouldn't support pro-democracy groups and activists — where our support would help — but our choices right now are basically, to use a social scientific phrase, really sucky. That's why I think we can't be tied down to one approach. If there's a strong-man who wants to be Attaturk, we should give him some leeway. If elections will advance the ball toward liberalization, we should be for elections. Our principles are larger than mere elections and a more realistic foreign policy would advance our ideals more if it took this into account. Ronald Reagan, for example, understood that pushing democracy in the Soviet Union was a far less effective rhetorical weapon than the subject of human rights.

Finally, Scott McLemee examined how globalization has contributed to American Exceptionalism, Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor wrote a related paper (PDF), Joshua Zeitz reviewed Eric Rauchway's contribution (Blessed Among Nations) to the debate, and AEI has James Q. Wilson's explanation of the qualities that make American political institutions unique.