In Spite of it All.
This summer we are seeing the age-old conflicts of American political life played out in the context of health care reform. The progressives steamroll forward, while conservatives attempt to erect any roadblock they can. Centrist factions emerge – here the Blue Dogs — seeking political gain in moderating between extremes, as Jefferson called it “trimming between parties.” The participants – politicians, pundits and activists alike — dichotomize and mislead, lashing out, loudly and publicly, at those who dare to disagree.
On the one side, self-styled ”progressives” have an anxious faith in the ability of Barack Obama’s Washington to fix all things. Under the banner of a kind of governmental messianism, they scope a beeline to human perfection and harmony, even as the road is dizzyingly tortuous and must end, if history is any indicator, with large doses of disappointment and discord. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, said Kant, no straight thing was ever made.
But the visionary cannot be bothered with such details. The passionate reformer, wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., enjoys “the more subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism . . . where he can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.” Progressives, to be sure, nest in a world of lofty egalitarian ideals, removed from the frustrating realities of politics in a pluralistic society. But, alas, when they wake up from their dreams of a redistributive utopia they often find that their clever policy concoctions have exacerbated the very problems they set out to solve. The innovator, George Santayana once said, never knows how near to the taproot of the tree he is hacking.
Though having to duck, dodge and deflect no small number of punches from the opposition, the President and his party can lay claim to one kind of advantage. History shows that the call for change always has the rhetorical upper hand. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. and, now, Barack Obama – all legendary men of words precisely because they were able to conjure up for us an optimistic vision of the future, changed for the better. These men changed history by exploiting the inherent rhetorical advantage enjoyed by the themes of progress and promise in America. That advantage derives from America’s distinct, if irrational, tendency toward optimism. Despite all of the “obstacles and pitfalls” in America’s past, wrote Herbert Croly in the The Promise of American Life over a century ago, we “still believe that somehow and sometime something better will happen to good Americans than has happened to men in any other country.” “[T]his belief,” he wrote, “vague, innocent, and uninformed though it be, is the expression of an essential constituent of our national ideal.” Reaching for the stars, to be sure, is an American pastime. But Croly failed to see that our national optimism is as much of a liability as a boon. It tends irrationally to feed on itself, ballooning into a gigantic, load-bearing monster which collapses under its own weight at the last minute. The promise of American life has a tragic refrain.
The conservative leaders of our past have rarely turned a phrase to the great effect our reformers have. In the final analysis, there is little oratorical fodder with which a conservative can work. Conservatism, Emerson wrote, necessarily “has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate . . . [I]t must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vices of society.” Innovation, by contrast, “is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success.” The prospect of change and reinvention always carries wide appeal. It touches a better part of all of us – the part that dreams – where conservatism touches the part that drifts.
Change, however, ultimately offers an unsteady consolation. It navigates its course in a stormy sea of contingency and risk, not evident facts or comforts. “Reform converses with possibilities” – Emerson again – “but here is a sacred fact!” The devil we know is presumably better than the one we don’t.
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