Wave Elections: What They Mean
Larry P. Arnn
President, Hillsdale College
LARRY P. ARNN is the twelfth
president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A.
from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in
government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977
to 1980, he also studied at the London School of
Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University,
where he served as director of research for Martin
Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill.
From 1985 until his appointment as president of
Hillsdale College in 2000, he was president of the
Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and
Political Philosophy. He is the author of Liberty
and Learning: The Evolution of American Education;
The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection
Between the Declaration and the Constitution; and
Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the
Salvation of Free Government (forthcoming).
The following is adapted from a speech delivered
on December 5, 2014, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P.
Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and
Citizenship in Washington, D.C.
We have had a wave election. For those of a
conservative disposition, it is a satisfying wave.
According to Michael Barone, speaking recently here at
Hillsdale’s Kirby Center, this wave is like several
recent wave elections in its magnitude and decisiveness.
There was a wave in favor of the Republicans in 1980 and
again in 1994. There was a wave in favor of the
Democrats in 2006 and again in 2008. There was a wave
for the Republicans in 2010. There was a stalemate in
2012. Now there is a Republican wave in 2014. Looked at
one way, these waves appear more like tides, ebbing and
flowing.
These waves have something to do with a change in
opinion over the last 50 years. Increasingly large
majorities of the people consistently profess themselves
afraid of their government. They think it too big. They
think it does not account to them—that it is beyond
their control and does not operate with their consent.
They think it should be smaller, even if that means they
receive fewer services. It seems that the growth of
government has not made people feel safe and happy.
Nonetheless, two of the recent waves elected people
who support larger government, and Americans continue to
depend upon government more than ever. At all levels,
government consumes something close to 40 percent of the
economy, not even counting regulatory costs, which are
nearing $2 trillion. People seem to be groping for a
solution to this, and they do not seem to think they
have found it.
This picture is not unprecedented. In the period
leading up to the American Revolution, loyalists or
Tories contested with revolutionaries, and these two
groups alternated having the upper hand between 1763 and
1776, and even later, after the war had begun. The
people were making up their minds about something
fundamental, and a consensus was slow in forming.
In the period before the Civil War, there were those
who advocated destroying slavery in the slave states,
where the national government’s constitutional authority
to do so was weak or nonexistent. There were others who
supported slavery where it existed, and even the
extension of slavery into new regions. Others still
would find some compromise that would do the least
dramatic possible thing. And then there was the new
Republican party, founded to stop slavery’s expansion
and seek a constitutional path to its eventual
abolition. This too was a fundamental question, and it
took a long time and eventually much blood to decide it.
This controversy over slavery grew up in the course
of one generation. One may mark it by two of the most
important statutes in American history—the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The Northwest Ordinance brought the territory that
became Michigan and other states into the Union, and it
was the first time that a government like ours, ours
being the first such government, had grown. It did not
choose to grow by establishing colonies, but rather by
treating the citizens of the new regions as full
citizens as quickly as they could get organized. The
Northwest Territory had belonged to Virginia, and
Virginia, a slave state, on the motion of Thomas
Jefferson, a slave holder, gave the land to the Union
for free on condition only that there be no slavery
allowed in it at any time. Although Virginia also
insisted on a provision to return escaped slaves from
Virginia back to their servitude, the document must be
read as a sign of a consensus about slavery. We have it,
those early Americans said, and we do not know what to
do about it, but we know that it is wrong and should not
be extended elsewhere. Many in the Founding generation
stated this, often in beautiful terms. And eight states
either abolished slavery or set up laws for gradual
emancipation relatively quickly after the Revolution.
A generation later, Missouri was to come into the
Union, and the Senate was evenly balanced between slave
and free states. A compromise was necessary because the
slave states insisted upon keeping that balance by
admitting as many slave states as free states. Not long
after that, agitation began to extend slavery even
further into the vast territory still not incorporated
as states. At the same time, the argument began to
appear that slavery was in fact a good thing, based on
the idea that some human beings had evolved to a state
of superiority over others. The principle that “all men
are created equal,” the very basis of American liberty
in the Declaration of Independence, was condemned by a
U.S. Senator from Indiana as “a self-evident lie.”
This dispute had something in common with the dispute
with the king during the Revolution. In 1776, the king
had a message from the throne distributed across the
lines in Boston to the American Army. He was confident
that this would make them abandon the cause of
Revolution. He made the argument that he was born to be
king by divine right, and that his children must obey
him for the same reasons he, occupying his station of
nobility, was obliged to care for them. The Declaration
of Independence had said that no one may be rightly
governed except by his consent because “all men are
created equal.” The king understood his position to be
built upon the opposite notion. But the American troops
besieging Boston, whose enlistments were soon to expire,
reenlisted in vast numbers in rejection of the king and
in support of the Declaration. Soon enough the whole
country followed.
Our times are like these previous times in terms of
the alternation and number of political waves. But is
there a principle at stake today that is as deep as the
one that divided the nation in those two fateful
periods?
* * *
The left and some on the right, in both political
parties in America, have styled themselves “progressive”
for more than 100 years. Progress to them is a process
of history. In that process, people and peoples are
transformed and can be elevated. Time and circumstance
define the being of man and of everything else. This
process of social evolution makes our grandest universal
statements in any time not really universal, but merely
products of their own time. When the Declaration of
Independence says, “all men are created equal,” it
understands itself to be asserting an abiding and
universal fact. When it appeals to the “Laws of Nature
and of Nature’s God,” it refers to laws above the
authority of man and continuing without fail through all
time and everywhere. Progressives understand such laws
as only time-bound assertions, the product of prevailing
circumstances. Early Progressives were fond of saying
that those universal assertions were good things for
their time, and history was made better for them, even
though they were wrong at the time in their claims of
being universal. They can have permanence, by this way
of thinking, only if they can assume new meanings as new
circumstances arise.
For Progressives, we discover the real truth about
these matters by a certain kind of scientific inquiry,
an inquiry into history. And once we begin that inquiry,
it becomes sovereign. If everything is to change, and we
are simply creatures of that change, we can win our
freedom by taking control of the process of change.
Guided by highly-trained people, scientists and social
scientists, we can direct the society to become a new
society, its people a new people. The work of these
scientific people is very important, perhaps even
sovereign. They have a standing independent of the will
of the governed, previously thought self-governing by
nature. These scientists are the makers of the future,
and in making the future the people are the subject of
their experiments.
Since the wave election last month, we have been
treated to videos of Professor John Gruber, an MIT
social scientist. He has been dining out since 2010 on
his experience as one of the “architects of Obamacare.”
He was paid, at last count, $400,000 by the federal
government, and something over $1.5 million by several
state governments in aggregate to practice his
architecture. Now he is on video telling the story. The
architects of Obamacare figured out that if they
described the health care law as it was, the American
people would not go for it. They are “stupid,” in
Professor Gruber’s estimation. They are stupid at least
in this respect: If the complex bill could be called
something other than it was, then the bill could pass
and people could be introduced to its wonders. They
would be able to enjoy those wonders only through
experience, as they lacked the intelligence to figure it
out in advance.
Dr. Gruber apologized when the initial video
appeared, but since then several other videos have
surfaced that show him saying the same thing on other
occasions. This means that conversations like the ones
he describes were going on among many people, apparently
one of them in the White House with President Obama, at
the time of the bill’s passage. And the videos of his
speeches mean that there are many people, generally
highly educated people, who enjoy stories like this, pay
Mr. Gruber when he tells them, and respect him for his
achievement. To these people, the passage of Obamacare
is apparently a delightful episode in American history.
Nor is this an isolated achievement. The Dodd-Frank
law sets up a power in the federal government to
investigate anyone and everyone who lends money to any
consumer. The agency that performs these investigations
gets its budget directly from the Federal Reserve, and
the Congress is forbidden by its own statute, signed by
the President, to inquire into the agency’s budget. This
is a perfect example of a violation of separation of
powers that the Constitution was written to prevent.
There are many others.
Now the President has legalized the residence here of
several million people who have entered the nation
illegally. Immigration and illegal immigration are of
course tangled and difficult issues. There are so many
illegals, and many of them have been here for a long
time. Many of them have children, and the children are
citizens under the current reading of the Constitution
(there have been others). The President himself spoke
about amnesty by executive order to a Hispanic group
called La Raza, which means “The Race”: saluting by race
and categorizing by race have reached epidemic
proportions in our country. Obama was pressed by La
Raza, as he has been by many others, to provide amnesty
by his authority alone. He replied in his La Raza
speech, “I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the
books.” “Believe me,” he continued, “the idea of doing
things on my own is very tempting. . . . [But] that’s
not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy
functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”
Now he has changed his mind, however, and has done what
the Constitution, by his previous admission, prohibits.
There are many reasons why one must sympathize with
illegal immigrants and their children. There are many
reasons to rue the generation or two of bad policy that
has admitted them here, designed and implemented by
people who simultaneously failed to make the case for a
wide immigration policy, legally sanctioned, that pays
attention to ability to work and emphasizes the
practices and beliefs that constitute the United States.
But now that we have this situation, it must be resolved
by constitutional processes. These are specifically
contrived to include everyone in the debate and to make
decisions over time, not suddenly and not partially. To
circumvent those, which by his own words President Obama
has said executive amnesty would do, is to circumvent
the only system of self-government that we have.
Of course there is a partisan aspect to all of this
for both political parties. The President appeared at a
gathering of La Raza because he was courting the votes
of Hispanics, who are growing in number, and who vote
more heavily for his party than the other. There is a
well-developed and heavily-funded strategy to win a
majority based in part upon this fact. That means that
the President has an interest in amnesty, and so does
his party. This fact reminds one of the actions of the
British king, cited in the Declaration of Independence,
to expand the territory of the British government in
Quebec in 1774, and to give that government more control
over territory previously associated with the American
colonies. He gave it control of much of the Northwest
Territory, eventually the subject of the Northwest
Ordinance. The king was picking the constituency that he
wanted, and by this means, our Founders thought, he was
circumventing the will of the people.
These issues are of concern to Hillsdale College for
several reasons. There is the fact that we were founded,
as every old liberal arts college was founded, to study
the nature of man, his place in the order of creation,
and his relationship to God and to the other creatures.
It was organized to find the good of each kind of being,
especially the human being. This work, much more than
any contemporary political question, is the heart of the
work of the College and its main substance.
Because of this work, the College was founded in
loyalty to the principles and institutions of this
country. Its oldest building was dedicated on the Fourth
of July, and this is one of many testimonies to this
loyalty, some of them written in blood. America’s
Founders believed, and the founders of our College
agreed, that the regime of freedom was the best to
protect the ability of each to seek his virtues, moral
and intellectual, and especially wisdom and the
knowledge of God. These activities cannot be commanded
in detail from above.
Another reason we care about these matters is because
we wish to continue as we have always done, according to
the mission explained in our founding document. We wish
to continue to teach the moral and intellectual virtues,
which include the personal, the family, and the civic
virtues, and which include the pursuit of prudence and
wisdom. We wish to continue to teach that the family,
established in nature and established in the same way in
faith, is the best way to raise children, and the
raising of children is necessary to the well-being of
everyone in every generation, young, middle aged, and
old. And if the current political trends continue, of
replacing constitutional processes and self-government
with administrative or bureaucratic command and control,
the activities we have continued to pursue here for 170
years will be endangered.
* * *
We look back through the past and through the great
books, old and new, and wonder what solution can be
found to this crisis. It turns out that there are
examples both of thinking and of acting that can help
guide us. We require today a devotion to two things that
are on the surface contrary. The first of them is
constitutionalism, and the second is statesmanship.
It is obvious why these do not seem to go together.
The work of statesmen is only a sharp example of
something we all must do daily. We hold convictions that
are elevated above practical circumstances, but we must
apply those convictions amidst the pressures of the day.
We compromise all the time: Shall we see our child’s
basketball game or shall we go to the meeting at work?
It is necessary to spend time with one’s children, and
it is necessary to earn and provide for them. Our ends
come into conflict all the time. Statesmen are people
unusually adept at finding ways to get the best and
avoid the worst, and constantly they adapt and
compromise.
Constitutions on the other hand are grand laws
written a long time ago. They get in the way all the
time, and statesmen constantly have reasons to be
impatient with them. Any list of the most influential
heads of state in the 20th century has to include the
names of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. They are not
famous for their constitutionalism, but for being
tyrants. The greatest opposite example in the 20th
century is found in the remarkable career of Winston
Churchill, which I have been privileged to study. The
British Constitution, and for that matter the American,
are among his favorite themes. He served them faithfully
through his more than 50 years of active political life,
through war such as has never been seen, and also
through unprecedented economic depression.
These two solutions, constitutionalism and
statesmanship, come together then in the careers of
certain remarkable people. On the one hand they are good
at getting power, and on the other hand they are quick
to give it back and to set examples that serve to
distribute power long after them. One need think only of
George Washington and his repeated resignations from
office just at the moment when he had gained such
credibility that some called for him to become king. If
you want to see a contemporary example, watch the
victory speech of the newly-elected U.S. Senator from my
home state of Arkansas, who spoke of the need to find
ways for our government to address our many problems,
including those of the poor and the weak, while still
running the government under the Constitution so that
the people can control it, and not it the people.
Although we have plenty to worry about in the
management of the College that stems from these great
trends, still we see reason to hope for more waves in
the direction of the Constitution. Our crisis may be
grave and threatening, and yet it cannot be worse than
others we have survived in the past. Those others can
supply a guide to us today. And just like the pursuit of
wisdom, so the life under free and constitutional rule
is a beautiful life, and it sings to the heart of every
man and woman.
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