How do republics die? Reflections on "constiitutional rot"

Sandy Levinson

Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written a justifiably much-discussed book on "How Democracies Die," but it's worth attending to the oft-quoted statement from Benjamin Franklin that we established a "republic," and the question was whether we could in fact keep it.  "Democracy" can refer only to the numbers of people who are actually part of the decision-making pool; a "republic," on the other hand, requires as well a certain disposition on the part of the demos in order to assure the genune legitimacy of the decisions reached.  I am especially influenced by the fact that a philosopher friend and I are embarking on reading through Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, which I confess I've read only in fragments. It is sobering reading in these parlous times. Early in the book he offers his famous argument that a republic to maintain itself requires a strong sense of civic virtue on the part of both citizens and leaders alike.  It is, to put it mildly, not easy to inculcate or maintain, and there is no reason at all to believe that the United States has in fact been successful in doing so. Indeed, what is most striking is the overlap between his discussions of the "despotic" temperament and the current polity here and in many places abroad.

There might be some debate as to when our republic actuall died (assuming, of course, that it actually operated  even for an instant).  It is surely before the election of the egregious lout who occupies the office once held by Lincoln or Roosevelt.  Reading Montesquieu, I am tempted to say that one possible death-date of the Republic is 1971, with the abolition of the draft and the reliance, therefore, on an all-volunteer army.  No longer do most American youths (or their parents) have to ask what devotion to the country might really mean, including elements of sacrifice and a concomitant duty to make sure that it is in fact defensible that lives be lost, on all sides, in the name of the policies being pursued by our leaders.  To be sure, some members of the armed forces are genuine patriots who instantiate a sense of public service that may in fact generally be lacking in the population at large.  (Everyone should read a stunning full-page piece on the editorial page of the NYTimes by Alex Kingsbury on a classmate of his from college who is a career officer in the Army.  Among other things it conveys is the information that Dwight Eisenhower is the last US President who had a child serving actively in the military.  And, of course, George HW Bush is the last president who himself could honestly claim to be a veteran.  It is striking that the only veterans currently running for the office are Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttegieg.)  But it's also worth noting that only an extremely small percentage of Americans enlist, and many of them do so because the armed forces are thought to offer a way out of what might be distinctly straitened circumstances (not to mention, at least until the Trump Administration, an accelerated path to citizenship for resident aliens).  Along with genuine dedication to the US comes what appears to be ever-increasing contempt for the civilian population and its materialistic values (completely instantiated, of course, in the lout in the White House).

But I was also stunned last night by several passages from Jill Lepore's truly outstanding one-volume history of the US, These Truths, a book that should also be read by every American.  I had read most of it shortly after it came out, when I was spending my usual fall semester in Boston.  I brought the 900-page book back with me to Austin and nearly finished it, but got distracted by various teaching duties, and I chose not to take it back with me to Boston this past fall in order to complete the last 100 pages or so,  So only now did I finish the book.  I was almost literally stunned by a passage near the end, when she is describing a now-traditional gathering held at the JFK School at Harvard eery four years, after the presidential elections, when the various campaign managers come up and offer their analyses of the campaign:

'I've sat around these tables with some of these other guys before,' Jeb Bush's campaign manager said.  In a room about the size of a tennis court, its walls painted martini-olive green, the campaign managers of the candidates for president of the United States in 2016 sat around a broad conference table to debrief after the election.  They were warriors, after the war, standing atop a mountain of dead, remorseless.  They had gathered at Harvard's Kennedy School, as campaign managers had done after every presidential election since 1972, for a two-day tell-all.  Most of what they said was shop talk, some of it was loose talk.  No one said a word about the United States or its government or the common good. Sitting in that room, watching, was like being a pig at a butcher's convention:  there was much talk of the latest technology in knives and the best and tastiest cuts of meat, but no one pretended to bear any love for the pig.  (Emphasis added)

Isn't this the perfect evocation of our truly decadent polity, at least in Montesquieu's sense?  There is, it should be emphasized, nothing remotely partisan in her description.  Campaign consultants and managers are, with some exceptions, the equivalent of lawyerdom's hired guns, willing to use their talents for whoever hires them.  (Is it fair to evoke Alan Dershowitz here, at least inasmuch as he seems recklessly indifferent to the actual consequences of failing to convict our truly dangerous lout of a president, even if, as I have earlier argued, he might have been motivated in part by a relentless, and often admirable, defense lawyer's suspicion of sanctimonious prosecutors?)  To be sure, most differentiate between Democrats and Republicans, but is that enough to temper her critique?

No doubt, many of the actual supporters of the candidates, including Trump, are willing to speak the language of common good, even if the ultimate lesson is that there is no consensus on wherein that good consists.  But she is describing the ideology of the professionals who increasingly dominate the actual campaigns and, crucially, the way they talk at a place like the Kennedy School when describing their actions.  Perhaps we should expect the same kind of amoral professionalism if, for example, one brought together the generals of World War II or Vietnam.  I.e., there is a time and place for politics, but one can also learn a lot from the way that dedicated professionals talk about their craft. After all, I presume that teachers at West Point are willing to learn from the decisions made by Confederate or Nazi generals and to incorporate innovations that will help the US to win future wars.  So should we be grateful that the campaign managers would talk about knives and techniques and be indifferent to the victims of the slaughter?

There is one other aspect of the JFK gathering that Lepore didn't mention, but might have:  The various campaign managers, I suspect, were expected to be "good sports" in the sense of not refighting the political battles presumptively decided by the election.  As a matter of fact, I seem to recall reading that there was palpable tension between Corey Landowski and Robby Mook, the managers, respectively, of the Trump and Clinton campaigns, in contrast to the presumably more "professional" demeanor of the other participants.  This, of course, raises the general question of "civility" and how one should be expected to behave in the presence of those one views not simply as one's political adversaries, but, instead, as agents of true evil.  (For some of us, Attorney General Barr is in this last category.  Should we be expected to shake his hand or otherwise treat him with the respect ordinarily accorded Attorney Generals?)

I apologize for these more-than-usual rambling thoughts.  Perhaps, though, they relate to the epistolary exchanges Jack and I traded in our book Democracy and Dysfunction.  I, of course, emphasized the importance of our formal structures or governance, while Jack focused more on cultural features, including "constitutional rot."  Although I continue to believe that our formal Constitution may have us in an almost literal stranglehold, I trust the reader will realize that I find much merit in the notion of "constitutional rot," a notion that I think Montesquieu would endorse.  The real question is whether the "volunteer" military and the JFK gatherings are illustrative of the phenomenon and, if so, exactly why (or why not).
Posted 12:52 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]