McCain's challenge: how to preempt Barack's communitarian dream

National Review, June 30, 2008 by Michael Knox Beran

CONSIDERED purely as a political animal, Senator Obama is unquestionably superior to both his vanquished rival and his prospective one. Whenever, during the primaries, a thwarted Hillary Clinton bared her hyena's teeth, she only made Obama's tact and gracefulness stand out more clearly. Senator McCain, a young eagle in his Navy photographs, is an old bird in comparison with the junior senator from Illinois.

Can Obama be stopped?

Remember, first, that it is an error to confound elegance with originality. Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, spun Obama's victory in the primaries as something new under the sun, the emergence of an innovator superior to Clinton and McCain, those hoary remnants of the "20th century's old guard." Rich, a lifer in the praetorian cohorts of the Sulzbergers, doubtless knows something about aging phalanxes. But in depicting Obama's candidacy as a novel form of "insurgency" against "the two establishment candidates," he misread the race.

Obama, no less than Clinton and McCain, is the by-product of an established tradition, replete with privileged pedigree. He came to it not by birth and an entry in the Almanach de Gotha, but by adoption. He ran a characteristically patrician cursus honorum: Columbia University, Harvard Law School, the Harvard Law Review, work as a "community organizer" in Chicago seeking (in the words of his website) to "improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment."

The last feat was the test. By forgoing the chance to make money in a big law firm so that (as his website quotes from a Chicago Reader piece) he could "continue his battle to organize Chicago's black neighborhoods," Barack conformed to the patrician ethos of Columbia and still more of Harvard, the faith that public service is nobler than working to make a little dough.

THE TRUE HISTORY OF 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE'

Now it is at least arguable that Ivy League grads who work for profit--by delivering products and services and building up businesses that create jobs--have contributed as much to the general welfare as have the grads who "organize" people in the name of social justice or some other cosmic fantasy. But in the world of decaying patriciandom, the public-service grad enjoys a special prestige.

Why? History teaches us to be skeptical of patrician claims that public service is a uniquely beautiful profession. Study the waxing and waning of aristocratic castes, and it is clear that the mandarins have a pretty good idea of just what the rhetoric of community buys them practically.

Power, for one thing. When entrenched privilege finds itself threatened by new and aggressive forms of energetic activity, it typically counters the danger by using the power of the state (disguised into an agency of noblesse oblige or social solidarity) to cement an alliance with those at the bottom of the heap. Decaying patrician orders have historically maintained their preeminence by taking the lower depths in hand and giving them the benefit of a (wise and benevolent) paternal superintendence.

Roman patricians beat back the nouveaux riches of their day by negotiating a deal with the urban rabble. As a result, the dregs of Rome got bread and circuses, and the patricians retained their grip on the machinery of the res publica. When Jacques got out of hand in Bourbon France, the aristocrat who could not bear to surrender his prerogatives to the jacquerie turned mob-master; the Duke of Orleans took the name Philippe Egalite and anointed himself prince of the canaille. The savvier members of Russia's moribund nobility (among them Bakunin and Kropotkin) took note and embraced communitarian socialism. Bismarck and Disraeli gave the dying patrician classes of, respectively, Prussia and England a new lease on life by experimenting with prototypes of the welfare state. In America, the Roosevelts and the Stevensons followed suit.

This patrician ethos, though it has long since been divorced from particular blood-stocks, lingers in the imagination of those who push paper for a living in Ivy League schools, in the Democratic party, and on the editorial desk of the New York Times. Obama speaks for them when he says, in The Audacity of Hope, that government must be an expression of "our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity."

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once opined that the United States vacillates between phases of glittering, communitarian "public purpose," associated with appealing patrician showmen like the Roosevelts, and drab, profit-seeking "private interest" periods presided over by presidents so boring no one remembers their names. Amid his many errors, Schlesinger was right in perceiving that the idea of communitarian public purpose has a glamor, a charm, a way of touching the high-minded, generous instincts of the soul, that the ethos of profit-and-loss will never match, golden-egg-laying goose though it be.

The correlative (and no less valid) point Professor Schlesinger made is that anything, however rational, just, and useful it may be, after a while becomes a bore.