Globalism and the Individual
Political life must operate at some intuitive level on a coherence between views of the self and modes of governance. This issue, more than any other, resides at the heart of current and past controversies concerning our constitutional system. By the middle of the 1780s Madison and others had developed deep concerns about what was going on in the states, where partisanship and populism embodied the problems of disintegration and majority tyrannies that Madison constantly declaimed, such as in Federalist 58 where he dismissed majority rule as "a practice subversive of all the principles of order and regular government" that "leads directly to public convulsions and the ruin of popular governments."
Nonetheless, most thinkers sought to maintain the default of American politics that located sovereignty within the states. Defenders of the Constitution saw this as part of a long-standing problem in politics: how could one maintain the balance of a mixed regime, historically ordered around the king, nobility, and commoners, without a principle of hereditary or a landed aristocracy? The solution lay in the principle of divided sovereignty, which could provide the conditions under which an energetic government could be combined with an interest in personal liberty in a way that would stabilize political life.
But how much energy in the national government? Anti-Federalists thought the desire for greatness was a blight on a nation. "The silence of history is the surest record of the happiness of a people." Being an actor on the historical stage would lead to "conquering and being conquered." "Luxurious and effeminate capital" would attract the greedy and ambitious, corrupting the fledgling republic with political rent-seekers who would use taxes, debt, and standing armies to secure their own interests. The nation, they thought, was too varied in its cultures, habits, dispositions, economies, religions, and more to be one regime. The new government might erode local affections, parental bonds, and associative life by drawing authority out of those realms unto itself. Suspicion rather than trust, collective ignorance rather than personal knowledge, and government dependency rather than mutual dependency, would become the rules. America should instead give the world an example of people attending to their own virtue rather than driven by a desire for glory.
The republican principle, many Anti-federalists believed, meant cultivating virtue and community on the principles of kinship, fraternity, and homogeneity. Size and familiarity would be integral to good politics for it would avoid sharp distinctions and gently persuade people to an ethos, rather than using force as the central principle of politics. Dependence on the people, close public inspection, and concern with virtue: these three things would keep power in check. The constitutional system, Anti-federalists feared, would erode virtue and personal piety, without which no republic could long endure. The fact that the Articles of Confederation ended with a meditation on God and God's blessings while the Constitution avoided any reference to God and prohibited religious tests was taken as evidence of this erosion.
Anti-federalists also objected to specific provisions of the Constitution; most specifically, the standing army, the power of taxation, the necessary and proper supremacy clauses, and the judiciary. A word about the latter. Popular control of government occurred not primarily through the legislature, but through popular juries, which had the authority not just to establish facts, but to interpret and then apply the law. They could overrule judges, and were thus "the palladium of liberty." The Federal Farmer argued that the new constitution would destroy the jury's ability to interpret the law and would create a judicial aristocracy that would ultimately usurp popular rule.
Publius (the author of The Federalist) responded to all these concerns by ignoring them. Instead, he turned his attention to national security and defense. The great problem of the current system was that it didn't allow the central government to either command armies or raise revenue directly from individual citizens. Military powers, Hamilton argued in Federalist 23, "ought to exist without limitation," and in #31 argued that taxation authority ought to be “unrestrained." Hamilton further worried that a weak confederacy wouldn’t give our best and most ambitious types a proper stage upon which to exercise their talents and achieve glory.
Hamilton had argued in Federalist #15 that a new government was needed in order “to be the friend and patron of industry.” Since government has no resources of its own, it’s implied in Federalist #31, it can grow only if it seizes for its purposes the resources of another. It would be difficult for government to engage in such seizing in a land-based economy. Only if an economy moved to a cash nexus could government easily skim wealth. A cash-nexus economy, however, becomes necessary only when economic transactions are impersonal. It also creates enormous problems of credit and debt, not to mention destructive financial speculation. It creates more pronounced kinds of wealth inequality. It creates luxury—“the parent of inequality” and the “foe to virtue,” said Cato—which operates always beyond the limits of restraint. It now becomes possible for a remote government, unattuned to local needs, confiscating and relocating local wealth, to pursue projects contrary to the immediate interests of those paying for them.
This undoing of republican principles under the pressures of nationalism flowed from a related notion of the self: namely, as determined by the belief in human perfectibility. The great early articulation of this is found in Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel Looking Backward. In his radio address, the nation’s minister, Mr. Barton, articulates the principles upon which their utopia has been reached: “It is not necessary to suppose a moral new birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction of the wicked and survival of the good, to account for the fact before us. It finds its simple and obvious explanation in the reaction of a changed environment upon human nature. It means merely that a form of society which was founded on the pseudo-self-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social and generous instincts of men.” The organizing principle was the “limitless development,” coterminous and symbiotic, of both human beings and the nation. Power no longer had to be fractured and limited, because perfected human beings required no such limits. Change the social sphere and institutions, and you can alter and perfect human nature.
In some ways, the progressive and federalist arrangements could co-exist, because they both predicated themselves on assumptions concerning the transparency of human beings, the universality of human nature, and the operations of reason. And, in other ways, they could coexist and place checks on each other while both had an interest in pursuing national greatness.
But this peaceful coexistence couldn’t survive the storms of the 60’s and 70’s, whose fundamental principles were that human beings were not rational creatures, nor was human nature a universal trait. Under the pressure of what Paul Riceour labeled “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the effects of epistemological and moral skepticism on increasingly libidinous and atomized citizens, progressive and constitutional notions of selfhood and governance gave way to eroticized notions of the self and a view of governance that was fundamentally incoherent in that it simultaneously obsessed itself with an increase in government power and the fabrication of ever new rights. We were treated to anonymous “structures of power” housed by “irrational selves” who viewed the world through “lenses” distorted by latent racism, sexism, and classism. The effect of the age was to permanently cripple belief in rational, aspirational, and universal selves who could fashion their governing institutions accordingly. But note: the political background to this was an increasingly aggressive American foreign policy accompanied by the internationalization of corporate capitalism.
Nonetheless, the politics of the age were held together in some ways by a continuing consensus of mainstream Protestantism and social institutions, and the compulsions of the cold war. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, however, American politics entered a new age that thoroughly refashioned both our notions of the self and our governing institutions. On the latter score, there is an increasing sense that “nation-states” are no longer legitimate modes of governance. Indeed, the primary function of nations is to provide the necessary infrastructure that allows for the flow of capital, goods, and labor transnationally. Maintaining borders is seen as hostile nativism, insisting upon trade agreements that serve the interests of workers is seen as protectionism, conducting foreign policy on the basis of national interest is seen as jingoism. The newly emergent order takes political authority out of the hands of what one author has labeled “the unncessariat” and placed it in the hands of what Jonathan Rauch called the supposedly “empathetic non-self-interested decision makers” who operate in a post-political world. The problems of politics become fundamentally problems of technical solutions administered by experts. A laborer builds some wings in Sri Lanka and a hurricane blows in America.
As the flow of capital goes toward large urban centers, chased by the highly educated who leave behind family and the places from where wealth is extracted, the world is gradually reshaped between those who master the principles of power and those who will seek to divert themselves by having their "happiness" secured and their minds distracted. So: everything must be brought into service of the neo-liberal order, which means associations and institutions that have claims on individual's allegiances need to be liquidated and then evaporated in order to serve global markets; and goods and services must be redistributed in such a way that the individual can be made "comfortable.”
Without localized institutions and thick associations, identity becomes fragile and needs protection. The conflict can be seen in relief on university campuses where the rational selves of liberal individualism, who operate on principles of debate and truth-seeking, try to uphold "free speech" against the fragile identities of the post-modern selves, who envision a global utopia where each person achieves recognition and affirmation of who they are, exactly as they understand themselves to be. This self is precisely the self desired in the post 1989 global order: it seeks only security and comfort and the distractions of high-tech gadgets that keep it from actual engagement with others or the world around it. Civic engagement is reduced to the fetishized act of voting. The global order of free-flowing capital necessarily results in individual fragility. Globalization and atomization happen simultaneously.
As with the earlier progressivism, a constitutional order that is predicated on national interest, checks and balances, decentralization, localized markets, thick selves, and geographical fragmentation, held together by the virtue of patriotism, is treated as atavistic at best. The predominant feature of American political life is the attenuation of associative life and our mediating institutions. This is a necessary feature of the age. Globalized governing and financial institutions require an evaporation of the institutions that resist the project, and individuals, regarding those institutions as restrictions on their project of identity formation, seek only emancipation. Having lost a sense of belonging, they insist on its bastard cousin "inclusion."
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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