The last couple of weeks, I’ve been sharing excerpts of my writing from the past few months that’s been published elsewhere. This essay, too, is a piece done for an entity other than TTP. In this case, it is an essay I wrote as part of an application for a fellowship. I found the prompt and writing of the essay so thought provoking, I thought I’d share it here since TTP is all about promoting thought provoking reflection and discussion on politics.
What is the Central Threat Constitutionalism and Limited Government?
Thomas Jefferson observed that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants…” At first reading, this statement may be troubling. Jefferson seems so comfortable with the idea of violence. However, there is another way to understand this quote: Jefferson could merely be stating an observed reality about the nature of liberty. Does human nature necessarily tend towards individual freedom or tyranny? If towards tyranny, then struggle is inevitable in the maintenance of liberty.
Practically speaking, when a people build a system of limited government, like the constitutional order in the United States, they can expect that the preservation of those limitations in the name of individual liberty will be contested. Dangers to individual liberty are multitudinous and ever present. They could be political, economic, cultural, social, internal, or external. So from the long list of possible dangers to American constitutionalism and limited government what could be the central threat today?
This essay argues that the central threat to constitutional and limited government is an internal threat. Not internal to society, but internal to the individual. It is the threat of nostalgia unmoored from historical memory. To apply Jefferson’s metaphor of liberty as a tree, such an unrooted nostalgia leaves us desiring the tree’s fruits of freedom, but neglecting the tending of the tree itself, which produces the bitter fruit of tyranny.
What’s so bad about nostalgia?
Generally, the problem with nostalgia is that it fundamentally looks to the past with rose-colored glasses. It is a selective memory that tends to remember what is good about the past while ignoring what was not good. Yuval Levin notes that such nostalgia is something that affects both conservatives and progressives alike so we should not necessarily attach ideological meaning to nostalgia but rather recognize that we are all affected by it. Nostalgia affects our memory of the past, which impacts our ideology in the present, and our goals for the future. That being said, Levin argues that nostalgia can actually be useful, if it is historically grounded.
From a conservative standpoint, such self-aware nostalgia identifies the goods and traditions of the past that we may wish to retain and and learn from. However, nostalgia today is not so refined. It is a nostalgia heedless of historical perspective. Millennials’ favorable view of socialism with a seeming forgetfulness for the long track record of failed socialist experiments around the world is but one such example.
The sources of historical amnesia
From where does this historical amnesia come? The Annenberg Public Policy Center published a 2016 study, which found that only 26 percent of American adults could identify the three branches of government. The American Enterprise Institute links this dearth of civic knowledge to the poor state of social studies in public education. Given the place that formal education holds in the liberal project it is problematic that an understanding of American government and its historical context go forgotten, or worse, presumed. This lack of civic education contributes to a devaluing of participation in civil institutions especially those all-important secondary institutions that connect the social fabric of the United States.
Those secondary institutions like churches and civil associations have all seen declining membership and involvement in recent decades. When a lack of civic education is combined with a lack of civic engagement, a point is soon reached where one is only looking at the conflicts of the present as disconnected from the causes of the past. The practical effect is that people, in observing reactions to events divorced from any context, will either focus on the present reactions alone or tune out them out completely in favor for a preferred nostalgia.
This lack of historical memory and civic engagement is heightened by demographic changes. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Eliot Cohen argues that America’s withdrawal from a liberal international order is happening because the good of said order is taken for granted. There is little reference in our mainstream culture to the institutional memory and historical knowledge that established said order, namely, pushing back the threat of totalitarian forms of government around the world. The passing of the Greatest Generation who fought World War II and the early Cold War signals a demographic change where the great struggles of the past century are passing from lived experience and memory. When that generation dies out, their experience no longer touches our experience. The wisdom they gained no longer seems relevant and the dangers they faced die with them.
So, our nostalgia grows stronger as we see and experience the goods that we have received from the past, but fail to fully appreciate and guard against the dangers that would threaten them. The end result of this is a desire to pursue happiness just like the Declaration of Independence may suggest, but it’s a pursuit of happiness lacking definition. It only allows us to feel desire for happiness without ever feeling the satisfaction of attaining some measure of it.
Learning to value limited government
A forgetful nostalgia is not something that is easily and quickly remedied. It is a sickness of the soul, a lethargy of the mind not fixed by programs or policy. It’s harm may be mitigated by programs, but because it resides in the individual the solution must start there. How do we reach an individual’s mind and heart, and encourage him to reach beyond a narcissistic pursuit of pleasure to a more meaningful citizenship? The crucial point here is that the individual must take the first step, but it’s a first step that communities and local institutions can encourage and foster.
First, there needs to be a rediscovery of the common texts that define the American founding and the American philosophy of government. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, and the other writings of the founding generation all speak to universal truths as well as the contextualized concerns of the day. They bring to our attention that there is much that is common in the human experience regardless of the time and place in history that can inform our understanding of government. In reintroducing these common texts we can rediscover common values and speak a shared civic language. These things cut against any nostalgia that is divorced from historical context. It cuts against ideologically defined visions of the past because it calls us to share in the experience of reading and understanding the Founders’ wisdom.
Second, the individual needs to engage in a more dynamic and robust discussion on what it means to pursue happiness. The pursuit of happiness has become highly individualized along the lines of merely fulfilling personal desire. But such libertine approaches are not what Thomas Jefferson had in mind or any of the Founders who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to preserve liberty and equality. If the Founders had such a individualized pursuit of comfort and personal preference in mind they would, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, have surely hung separately attempting to preserve their own lives. In understanding the pursuit of happiness in line with the common texts of the American system of government, we might be surprised to discover a unifying vision of the good life.
Finally, in recognizing the common values and goals undergirding the American system and coming to a deeper understanding of what it means to pursue happiness both in the individual life and in our communal settings, we can reinvigorate our local communities. Returning to the work of Yuval Levin, he notes that this is one of the key elements of our development in the current century: learning how to use the benefits of an increasingly individualistic society to enrich our local communities and to maintain personal connections.
Nurturing liberty
This is certainly a worthy goal but it must be built on something. It cannot be built on nostalgias disconnected from history. Understanding why the American system was put in place and that it was built on timeless observations about human nature should help people recognize that there is still a need for constitutionalism and limited government in the mold of the American model. It is not some outdated anachronism like so many seem to currently believe.
Absent the rediscovery of a historical memory that articulates the why of America’s constitutional order we can be assured that waves of nostalgia for bygone eras of imagined security and good feeling will drive our policy and politics away from the counterintuitive wisdom of limited government. That will happen because liberty, as Thomas Jefferson observed, is not something easily achieved. It is hard to grow and maintain liberty, and it often requires the sacrifice of people who are willing to set aside individual happiness for the betterment of the larger society. Nostalgia without memory thus forms the central threat to a system of government predicated on the counterintuitive idea that the best society is not the most controlled society; that human flourishing is not done in the absence of conflict and hardship, but rather finds its nurture in such soil.