Why This July 4th I'm Asking: Is Bill Kristol a Bolshevik?

“The Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”  That’s Herman Melville talking.  He was trying to say that if you start with the assumption that “all men are created equal,” you will think about, and write differently for, your fellow men—and women.  He said it in the context of a meditation on Hawthorne’s “No, in thunder,” that is, his rejection of the inherited tradition, his declaration of independence from Anglo-European literary standards.

Radicals and conservatives in America have typically defined their respective positions by their stance toward the Declaration, and thus toward the Constitution.  For example, in the 19th century, the abolitionists embrace the ethical principle of equality enunciated in the Declaration, and denounced the historical circumstance—the compromise with slavery—inscribed in the Constitution. 

“Cotton conservatives” in the North and pro-slavery ideologues in the South drained the Declaration of any universal meaning, claiming that in 1776, it applied only to Englishmen.  They meanwhile insisted that the more sober Constitution was the founding document—the ethical principle of equality that animated the Declaration was a dangerous fantasy.

Radicals and conservatives have different attitudes toward history, to borrow Kenneth Burke’s phrase.  Radicals revile the past because it is the repository of custom, tradition, and unthinking adherence to the inherited tradition; they want to escape it, and sometimes they succeed, as in the Bolshevik Revolution and its esteemed antecedent, the French Revolution.

Conservatives revere the past because it is the repository of custom, tradition, and unthinking adherence to the inherited tradition.  The practices of the people from “time out of mind” are not, from this standpoint, to be disparaged or discarded.  Precedent is paramount.  “Original intent” is more important than anything because previous truth should trump novel fact.

In our own time, this difference was displayed in Robert Bork’s bizarre career.  A so-called conservative jurist who wanted to restore “original intent,” Bork actually wrote a book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), in which he announced that the Declaration was a big mistake because it enfranchised the insane individualism and egalitarianism of the Enlightenment.  (If you have a strong stomach, you can look this up: see pp. 56-64, 165-71, 259, this last section is hilarious because the besotted Bork here blames the disgusting 1960s on western civilization itself!).

But now William Kristol has changed the rules of the game.  In Monday’s New York Times, he appropriates the Declaration for his necromantic political purposes.  His father, the founding father of neo-conservatism, should be alarmed, and perhaps ashamed, because here Kristol the younger renounces consent as the principle of political obligation in the modern world, and, in doing so, he renounces his father’s critique of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek—a critique that posited consent, and therefore justice, as the central elements of both political and economic arrangements.  “But can men live in a free society if they have no reason to believe it is a just society?”  That was the father’s question in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978).

It is a question the son has clearly never asked, because he knows what’s right for all us.  Let me quote the son, the William, and then engage the question of consent he raises.

The fate of equality, Jefferson makes clear, also depends on those who see further than, and act first on behalf of, their fellow citizens. In the letter, Jefferson pays tribute to his fellow signers — “that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword.” He wishes he could meet with the few of that band who still survived “to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made.”

So the signers of the declaration made the bold and doubtful choice for independence. Their fellow citizens ratified the choice. But they might have been slow to act if the worthies had not moved first.

For, as the declaration itself notes, “all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” The people are conservative. Liberty sometimes requires the bold leadership of a few individuals.

Perhaps that’s why the representatives, who have signed on behalf of “the good people” of the colonies, “mutually pledge to each other” their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in support of the declaration. Their pledge isn’t to the people. The pledge is an individual one by the signers to one another.

And the pledge has to be supported by a sense of honor — even of sacred honor. The declaration’s assertion of equal rights, one may say, is supported by what is necessarily unequal, the sense of honor of those acting on the people’s behalf.

You might notice the wavering voice here, the one that moves back and forth from “perhaps” to “So the signers” to “One may say.”  But surely you can tell that William Kristol is claiming that worthies like himself must “see further than, and act first on behalf of, their fellow citizens.”  Translation: You don’t yet understand that the war in Iraq is good for you, but in fifty years, if you’re still alive, you will understand, just like the everyday people who “continued to approve” the bold decision of 1776.  Someday we’ll all be Bolsheviks, better able than ever to get beyond the false consciousness of the masses. 

The pledge of fortune and honor made by the signers is, by this account, only to themselves, not to the people at large, out of doors, because they, the signers, knew they were the only individuals capable of fulfilling the political promise of the Declaration.  Everybody else, including the shivering soldiers who knew the document because George Washington had it read to them in the winter of 1776, was lacking in that sense of honor which would verify such political promise, because this aptitude is “necessarily unequal”?  You’d better read David Hackett Fischer, who read Steve Rosswurm, before you make such a ridiculous claim—by 1776, everybody was at risk of treason and execution without appeal to a court of law, and everybody knew what equality entailed.

Kristol’s lazy 4th of July picnic is the most egregious reading of the Revolution I have ever encountered.  It is much more offensive even than the Progressive reading (which treats the Constitution as the American Thermidor), because it erases the popular uprising that turned the colonial rebellion into revolution—and this uprising began, I would insist, with the Great Awakening of the 1740s—and returns us to the idea of the American Revolution as an exceptionally dignified and tranquil affair, conducted by well-educated men who always knew what they were doing.  Harvey Mansfield, Kristol’s teacher at Harvard, should be just as ashamed as Irving Kristol, the father, of this reading.

The revolution began in 1774, when colonies started becoming “states,” rewriting or inventing their constitutions as per the specifications of the Continental Congress, which cited the “exigencies” of impending warfare because it had repudiated the Navigation Acts and had endorsed the Suffolk Resolves.  The Congress that authorized the Declaration in 1776 was catching up to what we now call facts on the ground—it was trying to make itself legitimate in the eyes of the people, who were already in motion, already headed toward a very different polity.

“The charges against the king take quite a while to get through,” Kristol complains about the recitation of the Declaration at his July 4th  barbeque, because he can’t ask why—these charges would get in the way of his political theories and his hamburgers.  But it’s clear from the document itself that the signers wanted to convince the world that they were among the oppressed—they needed public opinion on their side, and hoped to produce it by appealing to, not ignoring, their fellow men.  That’s why the list of grievances is so long.

Now the issue of consent is vexed, as Harry Jaffa—another Straussian, by the way—demonstrated brilliantly in 1959, in Crisis of the House Divided.  But legitimate government in the age of equality, after 1776, is not viable in it absence, as James Madison and Abraham Lincoln always insisted, and as George Bush has unfortunately proved.  (Lincoln put it poignantly: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master; this expresses my idea of democracy.”)

Public opinion is the practical embodiment of consent, which presupposes a commitment to equality—you don’t need the consent of your inferiors, they just do what they’re told.  To ignore, evade, or dismiss public opinion is, then, to ignore, evade, or dismiss the possibility of democracy as such. 

That is what William Kristol is doing in his op-ed for the New York Times.  That is what makes him a Bolshevik, a radical rather than a conservative. He admits as much when he says that the people as such are conservative, that liberty sometimes requires the “bold leadership of a few individuals.”

To be sure, public opinion is problematic.  Sometimes it needs reshaping because it departs from the founding principle of equality.  Sometimes it devolves, as it did from 1850 to 1860, or from 1990 to 2000.  But the goal of the politician or the intellectual who wants to change the world must be to persuade her fellow citizens, not treat them as benighted fools who can’t think for themselves—as Kristol clearly does.  You can believe in both consent and “bold leadership,” but you can’t just do what you think is right and still believe in democracy.  Public opinion has to be your constraint and your goal.

When Lincoln was harried by Charles Sumner and other radicals at the White House, for example, he always said, “The difference between you and me is three to six weeks.  Go out and make me some public opinion.”  He was the same politician who said in debate with Stephen A. Douglas that “public sentiment” is the key to change in a modern republic—he “who shapes public sentiment goes deeper,”  he claimed, than the legislator or the judge.

Homage to the Revolution on the eve of the Fourth is a good thing, Frederick Douglass notwithstanding.  But let us not forget that our original revolutionaries had a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind.”  Let us also not forget that William Kristol’s utter contempt for public opinion, then as now, makes him the most dangerous kind of radical. 

Let us not forget that his rendition of the Revolution is a prison break from the past.  Then as now, I guess, the best and the brightest do what is right for the rest of us.