Wave Elections: What They Mean
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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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