The Foundation of Liberalism

STATECRAFT AS SOULCRAFT: What Government Does by George F. Will.

Since then, Will has established himself as the most influential conservative columnist in the country. He was steadfast for Ronald Reagan through the 1980 campaign. Yet now he has written a book saying, in effect, that much of what Reaganesque conservatism stands for is wrong. As a token of Will’s independence, this is certainly impressive. But as a guide to a different kind of politics, it is less coherent and satisfactory than what it is meant to replace.

Will’s point is that liberal democracy stands on a cracked and shaky foundation. He presents himself as criticizing evenhandedly the modern versions of liberalism and conservatism because, he claims, they spring from a common, corrupted source. Both take for granted the eighteenth-century “liberal” view of mankind, government, and society that was shaped by Adam Smith, John Locke, and many others and was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The problem with the liberal tradition, as Will here portrays it, is its dark assessment of the human soul. He claims that eighteenth-century liberals boiled down the intricate riches of the human personality to one crude impulse: self-interest. To them, the free market was ideal because it would harness the selfinterest of each to advance the interests of all. In designing a republic, the major challenge was channeling and balancing the varied self-interests. It would be foolish, according to this view, to expect anything of citizens other than pursuit of their own gain. It would be dangerous to design a government that required any larger sense of public purpose for its success. Will has little to say about the guild-bound, feudal, ignorantly fearful world that the liberal theorists were reacting against. He says of their emphasis on self-interest: “This was not a portrait of man ‘warts and all.’ It was all wart—except that the dominating attribute was not considered a blemish.”

Will then says that en route to creating today’s “liberals” and “conservatives” (for convenience’ sake. Democrats and Republicans), the original liberal philosophy broke into its economic and political components. Republicans revere selfinterest as exercised in the market. Democrats are more cheerful about the government’s meddling with the market, but more apprehensive about its attempts to regulate behavior (e.g., antiabortion laws).

Against these degenerate offspring of liberalism, Will poses the heroic figure of Edmund Burke, who embodies the only “conservatism” Will considers worthy of the name. Burke insisted that society is organic, not an assemblage of free agents, and that states prove robust only so long as their laws reflect the eternal traits of human nature. Among these are respect for tradition, appreciation for rank and hierarchy, and a capacity for motives loftier than pure self-interest.

This reasoning eventually leads Will to his surprise conclusion: that true conservatives should support a stronger, more effective welfare state. If conservatives understand their society as a society, its survival dependent on the wellbeing of all, they should want everyone to have a sense of fair participation. Such sentiments have more often been heanl from Michael Harrington or Hubert Humphrey than from anyone who calls himself conservative.

A related train of thought explains the title theme, “statecraft as soulcraft.” Every choice about laws and government affects the inner man. Will says. If the government takes a stance of “neutral” toleration toward certain behavior—for example, marijuana use—the result will be anything but neutral. According to Will, public standards will shape the decisions citizens privately make. By this logic, those who support “free choice” about abortion are imposing their values on others as surely as their adversaries in the “pro-life” groups. Let us stop pretending that either laws or markets can be neutral, Will says, and concentrate on what kind of effect we want government to have on our collective soul.

WHAT MUST BE said in favor of George Will is that he stepped far outside the inch-wide range of normal political analysis in an attempt to explain our predicament. He also writes in a sweet-tempered tone that is a welcome change from the harrumphing persona of his television appearances.

What must be said against him is that he has done almost nothing to explain what his high-flown concepts would mean when applied to real life.

Rarely has there been stronger evidence for the proposition that defects in style signify defects in substance. This is Will’s first book-length essay—his other books have been collections of his columns—and he does not seem comfortable going the distance. Taken one by one, his paragraphs are well formed, often elegant. But the progression from one paragraph to the next, from the beginning of a chapter to the end, is something other than relentlessly logical.

The choppy quality of the book is made all the worse by a mannerism that has become a serious problem for Will. His fondness for the learned quotation is familiar from his columns. In the book, it becomes self-parody. In one unfortunately typical passage, Will offers quotes from Tocqueville, Blackstone, John Marshall, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—and the paragraph is only half done. In the next paragraph, we hear from Hume, Spinoza, William Penn, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson.

This practice may originate in the (unworthy) desire to impress the sizable number of readers who are suckers for parades of erudition. It may reflect the (worthier) desire to reach a small group of readers who will sit still for your argument only after they have received signals that you, too, have read De Civitate Dei. Whatever its source, Will’s reliance on quotations enables him to evade his

fundamental responsibilities of exposition and analysis. At precisely those points where a transition or a defining illustration is called for, he dances off and blows us a quote.

Will can usually get away with this in a column, where his purpose is accomplished if he can outline an attitude toward a certain event. He cannot get away with it when developing a sustained argument, especially one like this, where everything depends on degree. As Will points out, nearly everyone agrees with some part of the case for strong government and collective interests. The difference is whether they feel that way about reducing acid rain or combating teenage promiscuity.

Will says that if everyone understood the principle of “statecraft as soulcraft,” it would change the language with which we discuss public affairs. The right words would nurture “the habit of regarding our fellow citizens as united in a great common enterprise.”

But once we step down toward the mire of specifics, Will does not guide us far. Two illustrations of his reasoning— one concerning the state’s influence on the economic and social order, the other its responsibility for the moral climate— suggest that his is the kind of argument that can survive only in the abstract.

The first involves race relations. Will offers a moving tribute to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as “the most admirable achievement of modern liberalism,” and to desegregation laws in general. They clearly diminished the rights of people like Lester Maddox, who wanted to exclude blacks from their businesses.

Still, they were noble efforts, because they reflected the belief that “a right exercised meanly, with ugly consequences, should yield to another, better right.” They also showed that changes in law led to changes of heart. Desegregation laws “were explicit and successful attempts to change . . . individuals’ moral beliefs by compelling them to change their behavior. . . . [ I ]f government compelled people to eat and work and study and play together, government would improve the inner lives of those people.”

Will makes the case for vigorous state intervention on behalf of racial equality and to offset the countless economic, cultural, and even physical inadequacies of birth. But he then slides past the practical considerations that have assumed such importance in modern debates about equality. The logical next steps in this process are “affirmative-action” programs, school busing, racial quotas for jobs and promotions. If eating in Maddox’s Pickrick Restaurant is important to the inner life, what about admission to law school, or selection for the police force, or learning as a child to live with those of another race? Based on what Will says here, the Boston busing plan would seem a natural part of the Burkean vision. If Will’s objections to it would be mainly practical—that parents of both races hate to have their children bused across town—his “soulcraft” has told us little that Republicans and Democrats have not.

Will has another concern about the inner life. He says that if the state takes a permissive, supposedly “neutral” attitude toward sexual morality, it will undermine the private virtues on which society is based. “The law can treat, say, all sales of pornography as private transactions between particular sellers and buyers. But the law cannot make the results—a multibillion-dollar pornography industry. . . the laceration of. . . sensibilities . . . and we know not what else— . . . matters of merely private rather than public importance.”

Will has a point: most liberals feel uncomfortable with the very notion that legal standards can affect private behavior. For example, Senator Alan Cranston was asked in a recent interview whether homosexual couples should be able to adopt children. He said they should, because “discrimination—you start with one group and you never know where it stops. Adolf Hitler started out going after Communists and gays.” The liberal attitude toward pornography is that free speech must be defended everywhere if it is to be defended anywhere. But can’t we use common sense, if not First Amendment absolutism, to agree on the difference between political beliefs and sexual services? Can’t we find a way to ensure the Klan’s right to march and the Communists’ right to organize without waiving our culture’s right to shape its moral environment? If this is what George Will means by “statecraft as soulcraft”—that there are certain standards of human behavior, responsibility, and morality that should be defended rather than approached “neutrally”—it is hard to disagree.

But this is not all Will means to insinuate. In addition to tolerating public pornography, Will says, our liberal society has let down its guard through “elimination of most laws criminalizing sexual activity among consenting adults.” That is, we have erred in deciding that sex out of wedlock, or between homosexuals, or in “unnatural” forms, should no longer be a crime. Typically, he does not make such an implication clear; but if he means to exclude this logical consequence of his reasoning, he never says so. Here Will’s loose allusions to “human nature” demand a closer look. He repeatedly invokes human nature, without once specifying its ingredients. To be fair, he does say that the fall from social grace began in the modern liberal-scientific era, when people began to think that human nature could be analyzed, instead of taken for granted. But if renewed fidelity to human nature is to be the foundation of a new republic, it deserves more than a passing mention.

Any definition of human nature would include a religious sense, feelings of loyalty to family, community, tribe, and country, deference to tradition—in short, the private traits that tend to reinforce stable public behavior. I am willing to believe, with George Will, that it harms my children and my country if the prevailing climate of ideas turns against these values. But anthropology, history, even the most rudimentary acquaintance with literature, suggest that homosexuality and a rich variety of “sexual activity among consenting adults” are also parts of human nature. It is not so clear to me that my children and my country are better off if homosexuals are required to live hidden lives, or if criminal law intrudes into the most intimate relations. The climate of public virtue that Will, like most of the rest of us, desires would suffer more from the intrusions than it could conceivably gain. Sexual behavior is too consequential a part of the social fabric to be treated in a “neutral,” value-free way. But it is also too basic a part of our human nature to approach as squeamishly as Will does in this book.

By attempting to legitimize the notions of “public interest” and “human nature,” Will has done something of value. Each of our political parties has ignored these principles whenever it seemed convenient—Republicans in their unbounded praise of the pursuit of private interest, Democrats in their uneasiness toward the religious and moral ingredients of social life. Will has preached consistency to both parties. He would have done more had he said, in his own words and not Edmund Burke’s, what else he had in mind.