The Battle for “The Soul of America”

I just got around to reading Jon Meacham’s best-selling book ‘The Soul of America.’  Like most non-fiction books, the title is intended to get your attention and the subtitle tells you what it’s about: ‘The Battle for Our Better Angels.’

Meacham is a left-leaning editor and presidential historian.  So, I expected to get some moralizing about the current resident of the White House.  But I didn’t get it.  There were a few swipes at him in the introduction and the first chapter.  That was just to set the tone for what followed.

Meacham lays out a history of the United States as we have made progress on racial justice by consistently overcoming a tribal fear of “the other.”  The story he tells - mostly through presidential history - reveals the complexity of presidents who had the political courage and the moral leadership to enact laws, enforce court orders and espouse a moral philosophy consistent with that of our founders.  

He does so while pointing out the moral failures of those same presidents.  Harry Truman used racial slurs in private but wrote to Congress in 1948 about our belief that “all men are created equal and that they have the right to equal just under the law.”  He faced down the inevitable backlash from Southern Democrats saying, “I’m everybody’s president.”

Teddy Roosevelt (TR) was the first president to invite a person of color – Booker T. Washington – to dinner at the White House. He later recalled, “the very fact that I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him because of his color made me ashamed of myself…”  And, yet, he worried that low birth rates among the “best people” (the English-speaking, white population) might lead to “race suicide.” 

The two-steps-forward-one-step-back struggle for racial equality and acceptance of immigrants has always been a study in contrasts.  Initial reforms under TR and Woodrow Wilson were “plagued by theories of racial superiority and fears of the ‘other.’”  FDR rescued capitalism and “redefined the role of the state to lift up the weakest among us” but interned “innocent Americans of Japanese descent.” 

Meacham spends more time discussing the courage and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson than other chapter of our history.  Paying scant attention to the failure of the Vietnam War and the five decade long failure of his Great Society, he paints LBJ as a hero of the same stature as Lincoln. And, indeed he was.  Despite my distaste for LBJ who lied us into a war we should never have fought, I gained a new appreciation for his moral and political courage.  Like Truman, LBJ was a Southern Democrat whose moral sense overcame his background.  He relentlessly advocated that we as a nation rise above racism, saying, “whatever your views are, we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for [The Civil Rights Bill of 1964] and three-fourths of the Republicans… I signed it, and I am going to enforce it…”

Meacham closes his book thusly:

“For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the [American] experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”

WHO WILL LEAD?

Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Machiavelli... Where are they now?

Poor Nicolo Machiavelli!  He really gets a bad rap, doesn’t he?  I mean, just because the well-worn phrase “the end justifies the means” can be traced to his masterwork, The Prince, that doesn’t mean he was a bad guy, does it?  But, that’s the way he’s perceived.  Even people who don’t know what he has written or who he is know that a “Machiavellian scheme” is a bad thing.

More high-minded people point to how he turned the concept of a virtuous society on its head.  The ancient Greek philosophers – Aristotle and Socrates – defined a virtuous society as the result of the good works of its citizens.  To their way of thinking, the means were more important than the end.  Old Nick turned that concept of virtue on its head.  To him, virtue was about being crafty, astute or sly.  It referred to the ability of a leader to deal with whatever comes their way – to be decisive and get results.

The Prince was a handbook for the heirs to the Medici fortune not a blueprint for utopia.   The Greeks were idealists.  Machiavelli was a pragmatist.

Most often this blog turns on “issues” and policies.  I am an issues-oriented guy and those who take the time to read this fit the same mold.  We decry the misguided media and wonder aloud why the mass of voters doesn’t seem to care about the issues.  We parse the words of political candidates as if they will actually do (or have a chance to do) what they promise in campaigns.  Naïve idealists that we are, we actually think that policy matters more than politics and that what politicians say, they should do.

Alas, most political leaders have no opportunity to pursue the policies on which they campaign.  Some have no illusions.  They campaign to get elected.  Others may be sincere but their best intentions are overcome by events.  The administrations of LBJ and the much-maligned Jimmy Carter were not defined by their political campaigns.  They were defined by what the world handed them, the Vietnam War and the Iranian hostage crisis, respectively.

What was handed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was Mikhail Gorbachev.  What was interesting is that Gorby brought them an opportunity to pursue ideas in which they believed (unlike the duo mentioned above).

More than any world leader in the 80’s, Gorbachev determined how the 20^th Century would draw to a close.  His policies of “perestroika” (restructuring)and “glasnost” (openness) led to freely contested elections and liberalization of the economy.  He foresaw the economic collapse of the Soviet model and hastened it.  The Soviet Union may not have gone so quietly had it not been for Gorbachev, a pragmatist who saw that he didn’t have the resources to continue the Cold War.  Would we think of Reagan and Thatcher in the same way had the Soviet Union dragged on for another decade or two?  How about Helmut Kohl?  Could he have unified Germany and worked with Mitterrand toward the development of the European Union?

In 2000, George Bush campaigned against Clinton’s policies in the former Yugoslavia, calling it nation building, a policy that often results in failure.  But, 9/11 changed everything.  Bush soon found himself nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His successor, Barack Obama, campaigned against Bush’s policies in those two far away lands.  Once inaugurated, he was off to the Middle East to address the Arab public so as to differentiate himself from his predecessor. But, the financial crisis and his response to it define his first term more than any ideology he espoused. 

It was not the policies on which Bush and Obama campaigned that mattered.  It was their character and their ability to make a decision in moments of crisis and stick with them. 

It’s great to focus on policy as a framework for the direction of the country (any country).  However, it’s naïve to think that the political and international landscape is so benign as to permit a candidate to actually follow their prescription for governance.  It is usually a crisis and a leader’s response to it that defines their tenure.  And, it’s their ability to embrace the Machiavellian concept of virtue that determines their success. 

Policy wonks may decry the way in which the media – and most voters – focus on personality or, to put in high-mindedly, character of the candidates.  But, at the end of the day, character is more important than policies. 

WHO WILL LEAD?