AMERICA: Pluribus, and Unum

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

Bolingbroke fashioned the politics of vigilance. So long as Americans are happily plodding along, they do not give his thoughts a thought. But the moment they become unhappy with the political status quo, their anger and their energy almost inevitably fall into his patterns. The corrupt establishment, using money and patronage to bolster its power; the education campaign, designed to rally the still-untainted nation; the savior outsider, who will rebuke the squabbling pols--all these elements are pure Bolingbroke, and they recur in every reformist crusade, left, right, or center. The John Birch Society, Ralph Nader, John McCain, Common Cause, Ross Perot, socialists railing at Wall Street, southerners railing at abolitionists, northerners railing at the slave power, patriots railing at the Stamp Act--all are sons of the frisky viscount.

It is easy to find the mythical monsters and Gardens of Eden that decorate the Bolingbrokean map of the world. The most obvious is the exaggerated role it assigns the outsider. Consider all the military men who have made it to the White House (Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower) or gotten the nominations of major parties (Scott, McClellan, Hancock). In the last two hundred and thirty years, by contrast, Britain has made only one general--the Duke of Wellington--prime minister. Consider the rash of outsider politicians, beginning with Jesse Jackson, who have run for president in recent years. Half the people onstage during the last three Republican debates of 1999 had never been elected to anything; the virgins would have been a majority if Buchanan had not deserted to the Reform party, to compete with a real-estate developer and a wrestler.

The romance of the outsider is distracting because it distorts reality. The greatest American outsiders were in fact consummate insiders and wire-pullers: Honest Abe was a railroad lobbyist; Ike played tough customers like Harry Truman and Richard Nixon as if they were banjoes. Their mastery of the black arts of politics was indispensable to them in their achievements. We might expect more of our politicians if we realized that some politicians have done great things.

Another criticism of the politics of vigilance is that it lets the people off the hook. In Bolingbroke's Britain, there was a hereditary monarch and many seats in Parliament were rotten boroughs. In today's America, every major national officeholder except judges is elected. If we don't like the leaders we have, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

This critique is true, but it too often ushers in an observation that liberals make use of: People want contradictory things (no pork, except mine; no welfare, except the middle class's). Since the people are confused, why not let the establishment go about its business undisturbed?

Yes, of course the people are confused; but they always are. It's up to politicians and advocates to help them sort out their inclinations. It matters a lot, then, where the establishment wishes to lead them. When anti-populist arguments are deployed by Federalists urging a strong military, or Anglophiles hoping to aid Britain before Pearl Harbor, one can endorse them. When they are used by commuters on the Third Way to endorse multiculturalism or a multilateral foreign policy, they have a different value. The politics of vigilance is simplistic in its analysis, and often mistaken in its ends. But it can act as a necessary corrective, and we would be poorer if we lost it. Fortunately, that won't happen.