The Empty American Heart
This Constitution Day, we need to reaffirm a politics of civic virtue
Image credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne
Both the right and left agree that individual conduct is essential to the success of the public enterprise. On the left, personal responsibility is lauded in the fight against climate change: One must be the caretaker of their own carbon footprint by recycling, composting, and thrifting. On the right, one’s choice to marry and start a family are treated with equal reverence: Values begin at home, traditional gender roles are… well, engendered, and these rituals are key to constructing a moral community. So why can neither party universalize their own conclusions?
In this article, I examine philosopher Harry Clor’s forthright pronouncement in his book Public Morality and Liberal Society that: “Individuals who cannot govern themselves are unsuitable for political self-government.” It is undeniable that I’m returning to a common theme, and if this is a polemic that I too often champion, it is only because I think it is a conclusion of consummate importance.
So, simply put: Democratic self-government requires individual self-government. To be a citizen of a democratic republic demands certain things of us, not only in our capacity to act as voters, but in our private lives as well. Clor argues that “what finally counts the most for our social well-being is who we are; that is our possession in sufficient degree of those moderating and civilizing qualities called character.” The American founders were well aware of the importance of individual character, from Benjamin Franklin’s sardonic quip “A republic, if you can keep it,” to Madison’s pronouncement that a government “without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” What Clor and the Founding Fathers approach is a portrait of civic virtue.
The natural response to the Founders’ argument is that, perhaps, individuals shouldn’t have to worry about their individual conduct. Government is opaque and complex, a far larger concern than it was in Athens, Sparta, or 18th-century Europe. Benjamin Constant warns in The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns that “ask[ing] the peoples of our day to sacrifice… their individual liberty to political liberty” is a doomed proposition. This is why, Constant argues, we have a legislature, “an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards.” However, what the absolute defense of individual liberty misses is that their outcome — representatives in the legislature — is contingent on a democratic process which is inextricably tied to the conduct of individuals. The average voter in California need not know all the standing rules of the Senate, but they should have the modicum of spirit and integrity necessary to elect someone who will govern justly within them. Moreover, legislators do not simply emerge from some primordial swamp in DC and trudge on over to the Capitol (despite Trump’s experiments with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool). Our representative body draws on its own citizenry to fill its ranks; good, moderate citizens become good, moderate legislators. Finally, a rash and distrusting public is in no position to police their delegated leaders. Modern individual liberty is certainly important to protect, but to abandon any attention to personal conduct is to invite the kinds of social infirmities that plague our nation today.
Constant finds that in the modern state “each individual, occupied with his speculations, his enterprises, the pleasures he obtains or hopes for, does not wish to be distracted from them other than momentarily, and as little as possible.” Ironically, in our age of technological modernity, we are distracted from even these especial pursuits. I hesitate to subscribe to the ‘smartphone theory of everything,’ believing the technology snuggled in our pockets is the root cause of everything from political polarization to declining testosterone levels. Nonetheless, I believe that some modern technologies do impair our ability to moderate our behavior in a way conducive to healthy democratic life.
Most Americans have a smartphone handed to them by age 11 — for many, even earlier. For the over half of the population who interact with these mediums everyday, their attention spans are shorter. They are angrier, sadder, and psychologically stunted. Nearly half of American men have an online sports betting account, a habit associated with gambling addiction (the obvious), but also credit delinquency, bankruptcy, and binge drinking. All of this is likely familiar for the reader. What I want to get at is this: The modern American cannot transition from social media addict, sports-gambler, analphabetic, pornographer, zealot, to citizen so neatly. When our private lives are shunted toward the diffuse, irrational, and addictive, we should expect our political lives to suffer as a result.
These technological products function best when we indulge in them immoderately. It is no surprise, then, that our cultural maxims have also shifted to stress individual pleasure, comfort, and safety, often at the expense of those around us. With ‘high agency’ and ‘authenticity’ as our watchwords, we can soothe our ever-present anxieties with retail therapy and psychoactive chemicals. An environment geared towards the immediate satisfaction of fleeting emotions entices them to bleed into political life. Cults of personality and populism, politics as identity and entertainment and absolution. These uglier forms of democratic politics emerge when our attention spans are shorter, when our rage is running hot, and our expectations are chastened beneath the iron collars of despair.
A countervailing force is needed, quite a simple one, I argue: moderation. Reject the lodestone draw and electrome hum of the digital crowd. Be as skeptical of those who crow that we’ve never had it this good as those who harangue us that we’ve never had it this bad. Forgo those technologies that strip us of our human capacity to attend to the world with kindness and humility. What I believe in is a politics of individual responsibility. It is a politics of reasoned, well-intentioned action. It is not a politics of vituperation. It is not a politics of jealousy.
Contemporary political culture is obsessed with the notion that we need some candidate to save us. Trump claims he will save us from the denuded swamp of the ‘establishment.’ Democratic front runners proclaim their stand against the Trump administration which is, in fact, the establishment. Socialists avow their aim to slay the dragon of capitalism in its Manhattan lair; red-blooded capitalists quest to thin the ranks of conniving socialists in our midst. Yet, our constitution is predicated on the idea that we can save ourselves. Searching for a heroic figure is easy and natural. But it’s not how a democratic republic survives, nor thrives.
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Postscript:
Harry Clor is likely worthy of an article himself. An ardent liberal educator who received muted acclaim in life, in death certain obituary articles glitter with effusive praise, like sapphires on the sea floor amidst the wreck of an old and stately galleon. I am sad that I did not have the chance to meet him.
