The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics

The Modest Republic

M. Federici, R. Gamble, M. Mitchell, M. Federici, R. Gamble, M. Mitchell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137093417
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

By identifying and illustrating aspects of American culture that are out of sync with the modest republicanism that gave rise to the United States in the late eighteenth century, the contributors to this volume expose the vulgarity and excess of American culture.

P A R T I

AMERICA IN THE WORLD

C H A P T E R 1

THE MESSIANIC HOAX AND THE QUEST FOR EMPIRE

RICHARD M. GAMBLE

ON FEBRUARY 27, 1991, RUSSELL KIRK DELIVERED THE FIRST of four lectures at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, under the general heading of “Political Errors at the End of the 20^th Century.” Over the next year, Kirk focused in turn on the follies of the Republicans and the Democrats, blunders in U.S. foreign policy, and finally the antidote to these errors—what he called the “politics of reality.” Kirk’s first lecture took aim at his fellow Republicans, then flush with George H. W. Bush’s rapid victory over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. After chastising the Grand Old Party (G.O.P.) for abandoning its tradition of fiscal conservatism, Kirk attacked what he saw as the presumption of President Bush’s call for a New World Order. Later, in his third lecture, Kirk cautiously praised Bush for what appeared at the moment to be second thoughts about America’s capacity to achieve global democracy and remake the world. But for now, in this first lecture, Kirk accused the president of abandoning prudence and restraint in favor of “emulating those eminent Democrats” Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

Kirk attacked the Republicans’ war in Iraq, and its foreign policy more generally, on two fronts: first, he accused them of waging war in the Middle East for commercial advantage and, second, for fighting for impossible abstractions and ideology. Characteristically, Kirk used Edmund Burke as a counterpoint to President Bush, quoting Burke’s reminder to the British Empire of his day that “[man’s blood] is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.” For Kirk, a war for oil amounted to vanity and crime. He was enough of a realist to know that economic interests might well force a nation into war. His concern in these instances lay more with the question of scale and proportion. Was the massive bombing and armed invasion of Iraq the right and necessary solution? Kirk’s more devastating charge against the Republicans, however, focused on the idealistic side of the administration’s justification for war. He accused Bush of waging what the British historian Herbert Butterfield famously called a “War for Righteousness.”¹

Kirk had long admired Butterfield’s work.² Butterfield taught modern history for many years at Cambridge University and served as fellow and master of Peterhouse College. He wrote standard works on the Scientific Revolution, diplomatic history, and the historian’s craft. He is best remembered today for his 1931 debunking of the Whig fallacy of historical interpretation (one of the few books of his still in print) and to a lesser extent for a masterful meditation on the historian’s calling, Christianity and History, published a few years after the Second World War. Butterfield’s name may have been unfamiliar to Kirk’s Beltway audience. Nevertheless, speaking at a high-profile conservative think tank, in the midst of a popular war and with the President’s popularity rating soaring, Kirk dared draw attention to Butterfield’s warning against the hubris of “national self-righteousness.” Butterfield himself had addressed his warnings to the Allied powers in the wake of their great victory in 1945.

In “The War for Righteousness,” Butterfield looked back behind the recent horrors of fascism and communism to find the circumstances under which the pathology of the sixteenth century’s Wars of Religion had been reintroduced into Western civilization. Butterfield, who was born in 1900 and entered Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1919, could easily have heard the exact phrase “war for righteousness” invoked by professors and clergy to describe the First World War. At least one British university student who volunteered to fight Germany had described the conflict as a “war for righteousness.” Preachers and politicians had described the European War of 1914 to 1918 in any variety of transcendent and totalizing phrases. This habit alarmed Butterfield. He realized that absolute characterizations of the war—that is, the overblown rhetoric deployed to describe the war and the exaggerated way it was pictured in the imagination, and not just how it was waged physically on the battlefield—had perpetuated a new version of the sixteenth century’s devastating Wars of Religion, the very type and intensity of warfare that the subsequent “limited liability” wars of the eighteenth century had tried to restrain. While such observers as Voltaire would be astonished to find the violence and disorder of their generation described as “limited,” in the context of what came before and after, nonideological warfare of the 1700s seemed a rare and precious achievement. But this pragmatism did not last. The Jacobins of the French Revolution injected ideology back into warfare. Since then, these sorts of totalizing wars—a result first and foremost of a disordered soul and not of the industrialized, mechanized combat that only made righteous warfare more efficient—had allowed no room for limited ends, due proportion, restraint, negotiation, or compromise.

To bolster his argument, Butterfield repeated points about historical method he had made two decades earlier in The Whig Interpretation of History. He cautioned that such a war creates a narrative “framework” that substitutes itself for the complexities of cause and effect and too easily sorts out the ambiguities of exactly who is aggressor and who is victim. It prefers deceptive “optical illusions” to untidy reality. A preordained principle of selection and exclusion forces a messy world into a “recipe” or “mathematical formula” that directs the eye and ear to easy, convenient, and dangerous oversimplifications.³ The danger comes from depriving warfare of its necessary boundaries. Far from ridding the world of evil, wars for righteousness make things worse. “If all wars,” Butterfield warned, “are wars of unlimited ends—wars to end war, absolute conflicts of right versus wrong, and crusades against the supposed final seat of evil in the world—it does not follow that the outbreaks will be reduced in number or that the combats will be less intense. It merely means that we have given war itself a greatly magnified role in history and in the process of time.”⁴ Rather than a “war to end all war,” as H. G. Wells called the First World War, unlimited warfare waged for unlimited objectives breeds the very thing it promises to end. When the smoke clears, the survivors crawl from their trenches to find the world as stubborn and fallen as before, not remade, and likely worse off for the effort. It may seem like bitter irony that Wells’s idealistic war ended in Armageddon, but Butterfield would not have seen this outcome as ironic. There was no reversal in the horror of 1914 to 1918 that turned history on its head. Wars for righteousness begin in delusion and end in either farce or a global bloodbath or both. The ending shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

The modern war for righteousness, Butterfield saw, thrives on messianic nationalism. Self-righteous nations wage wars for righteousness, he had warned earlier in Christianity and History. The worst form of national self-righteousness culminates, he wrote, in “mythical messianism—that messianic hoax—of the twentieth century which comes perilously near to the thesis: ‘Just one little war more against the last remaining enemies of righteousness, and then the world will be cleansed, and we can start building Paradise.’”⁵ Surprisingly, Butterfield did not point to Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin as his examples of political messianism, as we might expect a patriotic British historian to have done in 1949. Instead, he singled out two American presidents: Woodrow Wilson for his 1917 War Message and Franklin D. Roosevelt for his 1941 Four Freedoms Speech. Wilson had promised that American intervention in Europe would “make the world safe for democracy.” Roosevelt, a year before U.S. intervention in the Second World War, had promised a “new order” based on freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—“everywhere in the world.” Butterfield imagined the reaction in heaven to such hubris. “When men used to talk of making the world safe for democracy, one suspected that one heard half an echo of a satirical laugh a great distance away, somewhere amongst the inter-planetary spaces. After that, statesmen became still more presumptuous and promised that by a victory in war they could secure for the world ‘freedom from fear’; but it has not taken us long to realise—with what wealth of dreadful meaning—that there are occasions when God mocks.”⁶

Whether or not all of these points can be read into Russell Kirk’s criticisms of Republican foreign policy in the early 1990s, his courage in bringing in the voice of an older conservatism to chastise the new is unmistakable. Kirk did not live to see the attacks of 9/11 or the ideologically driven foreign policy pursued by the second George Bush and his advisers. But Butterfield’s critique, if true, applied to George W. Bush as well, and more so. If Butterfield was right about Wilson and Roosevelt, then God mocked again when President Bush explicitly repeated two of FDR’s four freedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear—in his second inaugural address. God mocked again when Bush presumed to promise in that same speech an end to “tyranny in our world.” God mocked again on September 11, 2002, when the President stood in front of the Statue of Liberty and applied John 1:5 to America. “The light shines in darkness,” he told his national television audience, “And the darkness will not overcome it.” No president in American history had ever drawn so direct a line between Christ and the United States. And given the long history of America’s messianic consciousness, that was no small achievement.

The messianic hoax predates Bush I and II, FDR, and even Wilson. America’s expansive messianic temperament, so evident in Bush’s speeches, has haunted us in one way or another for four hundred years. To be sure, a sense of national chosenness and divine mission is not uniquely American, or Protestant, or Christian, or even Western. But America’s image of itself as an agent of sacred history stands today as the most celebrated and criticized example of the redeemer myth, even if critics forget, willfully or ignorantly, just how many other nations and empires in history have described themselves in the same inflated terms. Regardless of this historical amnesia, the scale of America’s power and presence in the world in the twenty-first century make its messianic identity an urgent question. Not every leader or every region or time in American history has been equally susceptible to the hoax’s seduction, but the temptation has run right through American history nevertheless. Perhaps its very familiarity has deadened us to its presence. Or perhaps its persistence in our history makes its language seem an inevitable and inseparable part of who we are. Indeed, there are commentators who justify America’s messianic consciousness by showing that it has always been with us, as if the mere fact that Americans have described themselves in these exalted terms somehow means that they ought to have done so, as if a home-grown messianic consciousness is not a problem. George Kennan, in a post–World War II series of lectures cited by Butterfield in “The War for Righteousness,” exposed the fallacy of this logic: “A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.”⁷ While the hoax is easy to spot in others, especially in one’s enemies, we rarely have the courage or humility to recognize it in ourselves. But no sane person wants to be the victim of a hoax. The question is, how do we arm ourselves against the messianic hoax?

The hoax manifests itself first of all in the narrative of epic mission. The messianic nation believes itself to be a tool in the hands of God to visit judgment on the enemies of law, unity, peace, righteousness, progress, democracy, or whatever else it imagines to be on the divine agenda for humanity’s future. Ancient Rome believed these sorts of things about its imperial mission. Virgil gave that mission enduring poetic beauty in the Aeneid. St. Augustine, however, chastised this impostor City of God for presuming to think of itself as God’s agent to “beat down the proud.”⁸ If God does indeed use one nation to judge another, Butterfield wrote in Christianity and History, then these instruments of divine justice ought to extend their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction: From Republic to Empire
• Part I   America in the World
• Part II   Political and Economic Immodesty
• Part III   Immodesty in American Culture
• Conclusion
• Notes on Contributors
• Index