Jim Sleeper: The Value of a Liberal Education for Leaders
The Lindsay story won't exactly cheer you up, but it'll remind you that some things seemed even worse back then: American cities and backwaters were imploding on racial hatreds and economic undertows; the whole country was exploding over the Vietnam War. Lindsay -- elected only two years after the assassination of another dashing, young, Ivy League champion -- revived the promise of liberal leadership in a style that recalled JFK's and anticipated Obama's.
That style involved more than just youth and charisma. It had streaks of moralism and naivete about what new configurations of corporate and finance capital were doing to American society. But the documentary shows in Lindsay three additional qualities that have made his liberalism and that of JFK and Obama credible, it not successful:
1. Each of them had an aloof, almost aristocratic, intelligence, borne partly of a good liberal education. When coupled with character, that intelligence kept each man from losing his cool under pressure, even when it opened up no clear solutions. (By the way, "aristocratic" didn't necessarily mean "rich:" Lindsay wasn't even as well off as Obama, the best-selling author, and Kennedy's wealth was "new," not aristocratic. Intelligence and character mattered more.)
Each made colossal misjudgments: Evan Thomas' The Very Best Men shows that Kennedy tinkered timorously but fatally with the Bay of Pigs invasion plan. The PBS documentary shows Lindsay being too moralistic with some unions when he should have been more Machiavellian. Obama has been too Machiavellian with corporate and finance capital, when he should be pushing their substantial reconfiguration, as the "aristocratic" Roosevelts weren't hesitant to do.
Kennedy, Lindsay, and Obama have seen further ahead of their own than most other politicians, and each has walked (sometimes too slowly, although in Lindsay's case perhaps too rapidly) toward those distant horizons instead of becoming mired in the political passions and preferments of the moment. A serious liberal education will do that for you -- or to you -- if it's coupled with character training, their second shared quality:
2. They also had something called "sand" and certain essential public virtues. "Behind all the hurly burly of organized college activity lay something called the Yale spirit - usually called 'sand' by the undergraduates," writes Brooks Mather Kelley of the college life that shaped Lindsay. "Sand was placed under the wheels of locomotives to make them go, and sand - grit, determination, 'persistence, reliability, self-reliance, and willingness to face the consequences of one's actions' - was what made Yale undergraduate life go."
Learning to face the consequences of one's actions often comes only from rites of passage early in one's life - tests of courage, prowess, and dedication that bond youths to one another and the larger society in their most impressionable, formative years under the guidance of ratifying elders....
At the schools and colleges Kennedy, Lindsay, and Obama attended, extracurricular regimens and studies of the classic epics and disputations taught that self-denial for a common good requires first a self that is strong enough to deny: What might seem just a row of automatons rowing down a river is really a seething cauldron of eight private struggles against fear and infirmity, refined to a common identity and purpose.
At its best, such training can stimulate a quiet readiness to take responsibility without sure reward; a capacity to bear pain with grace (if only because spiritual grace seems thereby assured); and a direct if understated felicity in speech and bearing, including self-scrutiny and a self-deprecating humor that deflects others' envy and perhaps one's own doubts about privilege. Americans have seen this in all three men, whose training linked liberal education's Truth-seeking to the civic arts and disciplines of republican Power-wielding.
The Yale graduates of Lindsay's time prided themselves "on being good teammates and knowing how to win. Believing that success was virtuous, they respected and rewarded dedication and 'grit,' the personality traits that could decide a close contest. Valuing tact and consideration, they subjected their personal interests to those of the group," writes Isaiah Wilner in a book about the two Yale grads who founded TIME magazine in the early 1920s.
Some Yale men, like the social activists Dwight Macdonald (a descendant of two of the college's early Puritan presidents) William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Dave Dellinger, and Staughton Lynd also carried a strain of the old Calvinist conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. At times, they actually inspired or provoked others to live by it. Lindsay carried that strain, too.
3. They also knew how to sustain trust in networking to wield power for interests besides their own. People who get their sand and moral steel from early rites of passage know how to bond and work together later on in life, outflanking demagoguery. Whenever tea-partiers, religious fundamentalists, racist militias, and worse reprise Joe McCarthy's terrors of the 1950s, serious public leadership knows that such rampages will crest at around 40 percent of the population -- if a society's best standard-bearers can draw themselves up, tell one another, "We can't have this," and deflect and defang the worst of it.
To do that good leaders do have to trust one another in ways the old rites taught them to do. "To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected the very few who wear the colors of high purpose falsely," Yale's president Kingman Brewster, Jr. told my entering class in September, 1965. "This has not been done by administrative edict or official regulation [but]by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions."
It's a easy to dismiss Brewster's pride in this collective capacity for mutual scrutiny as a defense of clubby elitism and its conceits. Writing in my class' 25th anniversary class book, Thomas McNamee acknowledged that "one of the skills useful to a befogged Yale undergraduate is the ability to write down under-informed over-generalizations with an air of easy grandeur" and that "optimism and confidence, even when forced or false, enhance performance."
You can see some of that in Lindsay, too, and in Kennedy. But Brewster explained his ideal of a self-reinforcing logic of trust when he wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven, ''The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept. In commonplace terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger."
JFK, Lindsay, and Obama held true to that admonition to extend trust cannily, not naively, in ways that actually elicit trust from others and thereby enhance strengths of a free society that money can't buy and that national-security strategies alone can't defend.
One of the first honorary doctorates Brewster gave, at Yale's 1964 Commencement, was to Martin Luther King, Jr., who'd just been released from jail. Brewster understood, as Lindsay did, that the poor black churchgoers who walked trembling into tense Southern squares were re-enacting The Exodus from slavery to freedom and opening the hearts of astonished northern WASPS and Jews whose ancestors (including Brewster's own) had made history of that same Exodus myth in ages past.
Watching King on television from the White House during the 1963 March on Washington, Kennedy understood it, too, and his own speech to the nation on civil rights shortly before his death testified to his civic-republican commitment across time and space and political self-interest. That took some sand, moral steel, and public trust.
The documentary shows Lindsay, too, bearing brave, calming moral witness to that commitment as he walks through Harlem after riots in 1967 and after King's assassination a year later. I've written more than a little about his blind spots and blunders, and in the film tonight I say a little more about that. But there's no question that his presence on the streets actually made a difference, because ordinary people still trusted the leadership of civic-republican "aristocrats" like him and the martyred Kennedy's soon-to-be martyred brother Bobby. Somewhat similarly, Brewster's leadership helped keep Yale from blowing up in 1970, as Columbia and Kent State had done not long before.
People could feel these leaders' sand, steel, and trust. And they trusted them in return, knowing that they had earned their prerogatives through self-sacrifice and moral imagination.
Narrow ideological partisanship was secondary, party affiliation tertiary: Even Lindsay's most formidable opponent in the 1965 mayoral race, William F. Buckley, Jr., who ran on the Conservative Party line, was a product of a civic-republican training that nourishes friendships across ideological lines: Late in his life, drawing, perhaps, on what he'd learned in his early rites of passage, Buckley would sense that conservative ideologues had strayed from the civic-republican depths and comity he valued more deeply than the fatuous ideas he'd preached, at 24, in God and Man at Yale.
Among Buckley's lifelong left-liberal friends was the columnist Murray Kempton, who helped Lindsay in 1965 by writing, "He is fresh, and everyone else is tired." That became a Lindsay campaign slogan, but New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, who has edited a companion volume of essays to go with the PBS documentary, notes that when Lindsay was reminded of it many years later he quipped, "We're tired, and everyone else is dead." If one understood how he'd been trained, one sensed in his riposte the sand and self-deprecating humor he'd absorbed so much earlier in life.
You see some of it in the documentary. Kennedy's Harvard imparted some of those same qualities and public virtues; think of the Roosevelts and Al Gore. And when you think of Dick Cheney flunking out of Yale in 1961, you begin to sense his misunderstandings of where republican strength really comes from and how it's best defended.
By the time George W. Bush was at Yale a few years later -- in the Class of 1968, while Lindsay was mayor -- the old rites of passage were breaking down, although not for everyone: John Kerry ('66) and Howard Dean ('71) were there, too.
Great American leaders are trained in lots of places -- church basements, Little League lots, immigrant settlement houses, public schools, state universities, historically black colleges, labor unions, and social and political movements. But I've been learning recently that a staggering number of these seedbeds of public leadership -- including Obama's high school in Hawaii -- were founded or led by people trained with a fateful, almost missionary intensity in rites of passage at Yale.
As a candidate in 2008, Obama evoked and, of course, embodied some of what Brewster had honored in King and what Lindsay had walked through Harlem to affirm. But is Obama marching alone? Or worse, has he donned the colors of high purpose falsely, as even some leftists now claim?
Obama is wiser than Lindsay was in deploying his public virtues against daunting odds. He understands that another liberal capitalist War on Poverty wouldn't conquer poverty any more than Reaganite free-marketeering would, but he also knows that no leftist war on capitalism would do it, either. It will take strong leadership that inspires trust to strike a plausible balance among bleak options.
Knowing this, as Obama clearly does, doesn't guarantee he'll make sounder judgments, let alone achieve any more than did Lindsay or Kennedy, both of whom failed. What worries me that the spiritually deep convictions and rites of passage that produced good leadership are indeed breaking down under riptides of consumer marketing and reckless disinvestment that only civic-republican leadership, widely diffused, can hope to counter and channel.
Ultimately a liberal capitalist republic does have to rely on virtues and beliefs that neither the liberal state itself nor markets alone can nourish or even enforce. Somehow, liberal leaders have to be nurtured all the more intensively.
Yale did that. And Obama found his nourishment in bits and pieces from his mother, his high school, and at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, as well as in Chicago's South Side in a black branch of the United Church of Christ, the Congregational church of Kingman Brewster's Puritan ancestors. Obama wasn't faking this in the campaign, but he was discovering its limits as well as its necessity.
Our need to regenerate great civic-republican leadership is the new American Dilemma. Only if we can address it can we develop better strategies for the riptides and undertows that are upon us. If "establishment" liberals can't muster more of what the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Lindsay, and countless unsung civic leaders did, and adapt it for our time, as Obama has promised to do, then Americans will never trust liberals to defang those who wear the colors of high purpose falsely.