AMERICA: Pluribus, and Unum

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Richard Brookhiser

BUDDIES INSTEAD OF LEADERS

As for the new face of America, it is borrowed from no one, made entirely by ourselves. It is a happy face--too happy. In daily life, it is the face of informality: casual Fridays, stretch waistbands, gimme caps or watch caps instead of brimmed hats, rock 'n' roll in megachurch services. In public life, it is the face of buddyship, rather than leadership.

You would not know it, looking at how we behave today, but we were not always so informal. One of the great apocryphal stories of the Founding involves Washington, Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris, the witty ladies' man who wrote the Constitution. Hamilton bet Morris a dinner that he wouldn't go up to Washington, slap him on the back, and say, "My dear General, I am glad to see you looking so well." Morris gave the slap and won the meal, though he said later that the scowl Washington gave him was the worst moment of his life. Morris, incidentally, had scalded his right side as a boy, lost a leg in a carriage accident, and lived in Paris during the Terror; Washington's scowls must have been something indeed.

Now presidents and presidential candidates high-five voters, grip their elbows, and flop down in their booths at IHOPs. Sometimes the poor voter cringes; all he wants to do is eat his Lumberjack Special. We have reached the point where the common man has more dignity than would-be presidents. Not that he has much, as any spin around the television dial shows. From audiences in football stadiums to audiences of Jerry Springer, we look like a nation of slobs, leavened by freaks. When we were small and weak, we had to stand on our dignity. Often we stood too stiffly: Touchy American rhetoric was a byword among amused European visitors. Now that we are world hegemons, we can afford a grin, a yell, a pumped fist, or the great adolescent "whatever."

The problem of leadership in this country is, by its nature, a delicate one. Our founding document declares that all men are created equal--a statement of rights. Yet we rely on inequality of character and ability, trusting that superior men will come to the top in times of crisis. Our anxieties used to coalesce around the symbolic activity of horsemanship. A horse and rider is an imposing combination, especially if the observer is on foot. For centuries in Europe, owning a horse was the practical definition of an aristocrat, as many surnames (Chevalier, Cavaluzzo, Ritter) attest; the Royalist party during the English Civil War were the Cavaliers. When Richard Rumbold, an English Puritan, was executed for a Restoration-era plot, he said on his scaffold that he could never believe that Providence had sent "a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden." In the last letter of his life, to a committee celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, Thomas Jefferson quoted Rumbold's sentiments, and adopted them as a motto for our system and our hopes. Yet Jefferson was an excellent horseman himself, and rode the political currents of his time with enormous skill.