Patriotism Is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments that Redefined American Conservatism

Praise for Patriotism Is Not Enough

"This scintillating exercise in intellectual history is fresh evidence of two things. One is that for many decades now America’s most profound and consequential political arguments have not been between conservatives and liberals, but among conservatives. The other is that Steven F. Hayward, author of the magisterial two-volume The Age of Reagan, is an unsurpassed guide concerning conservatism’s not-always-amiable factions."

—GEORGE F. WILL

My old boss Ronald Reagan reminded us in his Farewell Address that America requires informed patriotism if it is to avoid ‘an erosion of the American spirit.’ We have Steven F. Hayward to thank for exploring the lives and thoughts of two of our greatest conservative thinkers—who happened to be fierce rivals—on this vital problem.

—WILLIAM J. BENNETT, former Secretary of Education, host of The Bill Bennett Interview, and New York Times best-selling author

The famous feud between two of the leading disciples of Leo Strauss makes for a fascinating intellectual story, and in telling it, Steven F. Hayward sheds a bright light on the major issues which have bedeviled political philosophy in our time.

—NORMAN PODHORETZ

Steven F. Hayward has a marvelous, Isaiah Berlin–like ability to bring both ideas and the individual behind those ideas to light. Hayward’s account of the rivalry between Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns gives the reader not only a new angle on the history of modern conservatism but also more broadly makes sense of the rise of constitutional conservatism.

—FRED SIEGEL, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and scholar-in-residence at Saint Francis College

[Hayward’s book] will painlessly acquaint newcomers with some pivotal moments and issues in recent intellectual history, even as it keeps those who already know the subject entertained.

—TOD LINDBERG, Commentary

Hayward’s book is so timely precisely because the kind of patriotism he discusses provides a useful corrective for Trump-style nationalism…Trump’s nationalism provides a useful corrective based only on philosophic principle. They are mutually correcting and mutually supportive. On the one hand, a patriotism that is based only on the principles of the founding cannot succeed in winning elections, because voters rightly demand that any political movement that seeks their support have some plausible plan to address their ordinary interests. On the other hand, a patriotism that is based only on the untutored loves and interests of ordinary voters cannot preserve our precious inheritance of a regime based on natural rights, the rule of law, and self-government. A movement that acknowledges each of these concerns amounts to the kind of patriotism, and the kind of conservatism, that can both win elections and deserve to win them.

—CARSON HOLLOWAY, The Public Discourse

Steve Hayward may be the most versatile man in American conservatism…There are just not many conservative public intellectuals who have deep knowledge of public policy who can also offer a subtle and textured analysis of political philosophy.

—JEREMY CARL, National Review

The book is a fascinating chronicle in itself and an instructive tour of important political precepts…Today’s confusion over what principles should guide our lawmaking—or regulate our society—make the Berns–Jaffa quarrel freshly relevant.

—WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY, Wall Street Journal

What makes this book so refreshing is that author Steven Hayward details with gratitude the ways that both men deeply influenced him, and how both might have finally agreed with each other even if they never really acknowledged it.

—RICHARD M. REINSCH II, Law and Liberty

"With Patriotism Is Not Enough, Steven Hayward has rendered in a lively way a tremendous service—especially at the present moment—by laying out some of the most essential questions concerning what it is to be an American and a conservative. One can only hope readers will turn next to his subjects’ best books."

—MATTHEW J. FRANCK, Claremont Review of Books

PATRIOTISM is not ENOUGH

PATRIOTISM

IS NOT

ENOUGH

HARRY JAFFA, WALTER BERNS,

AND THE ARGUMENTS THAT REDEFINED

AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

STEVEN F. HAYWARD

© 2017, 2018 by Steven F. Hayward

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601,

New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2017 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

First paperback edition published in 2018.

Paperback edition ISBN: 978-1-64177-018-7

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Hayward, Steven F., author.

Title: Patriotism is not enough : Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the arguments that redefined American conservatism / by Steven F. Hayward.

Description: New York : Encounter Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016024177 (print) | LCCN 2016027479 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594038839 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781594038846 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Conservatism—United States. | Political science—Philosophy. | United States—Politics and government. | Jaffa, Harry V. | Berns, Walter, 1919–2015

Classification: LCC JC573.2.U6 H393 2016 (print) | LCC JC573.2.U6 (ebook) | DDC 320.520973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024177

As this book is chiefly about Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns, naturally I’ll dedicate it to … C. S. Lewis. Partly because Lewis’s own moral philosophy was congruent with Jaffa and Berns, but also because he was not a stranger to confronting disagreements between like-minded men.

But what would I think of your Thomas More or of our William Tyndale? All the writings of the one and all the writings of the other I have lately read right through. Both of them seem to me most saintly men and to have loved God with their whole heart: I am not worthy to undo the shoes of either of them. Nevertheless they disagree and (what racks and astounds me) their disagreement seems to me to spring not from their vices nor from their ignorance but rather from their virtues and the depths of their faith, so that the more they were at their best the more they were at variance. I believe the judgment of God on their dissention is more profoundly hidden than it appears to you to be: for His judgments are indeed an abyss.

C. S. LEWIS, LETTER TO FATHER GIOVANNI CALABRIA, NOVEMBER 25, 1947

Contents

PREFACE TO PAPERBACK EDITION

The Crisis of the Conservative House Divided

PREFACE

The First Rule of Straussian Fight Club Is …

CHAPTER 1

A Little Touch of Harry in the Night

CHAPTER 2

Patriotism Is Not Enough

CHAPTER 3

Starting Over:

Something Has Gone Wrong …

CHAPTER 4

Statesmanship and the Renegade Revival

CHAPTER 5

The Vital Center Cannot Hold

CHAPTER 6

Equality as a Principle and a Problem

CHAPTER 7

How to Think about the Constitution:

Two Views

CHAPTER 8

Extremism in Defense of Liberty

CHAPTER 9

The Administrative State and the End of Constitutional Government

CHAPTER 10

Political Philosophy in an Anti-Philosophic Age

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

PREFACE TO PAPERBACK EDITION

The Crisis of the Conservative House Divided

A new preface for a paperback edition is typically used as the opportunity to rebut critics in the reviews, clarify confusions and misunderstandings, extend some of the central arguments, and bring up important omissions or correct mistakes. All of the published reviews, even the ones that contained criticisms or complaints, were on the whole very generous to the book. I may have found that unhappy midway point where everyone divides. Some reviewers (David Schafer in Modern Age, for example) thought I was not nearly as hard on Harry Jaffa as he deserved, and I know that some of Jaffa’s champions think I was too critical of him, thus proving that old feuds die hard. Others, especially Matthew Franck in the Claremont Review of Books, thought I wasn’t fair or complete in my treatment of Walter Berns.

In summary defense and rebuttal, I’ll rest by restating my purpose and design of the book, which was neither a conventional biography nor a standard academic treatise. In either case, I would have included more about personal motives as well as second- and third-order aspects of the work of these two great men. The book was written and intended for a general, non-specialist audience. As such, the book was conceived as merely an introduction to a large array of complicated and interrelated aspects of political thought, and an invitation for readers to delve further on their own. Always leave your audience wanting more was an axiom that Ronald Reagan took from show business to politics, and accounts I think for some of his success. Each chapter could have been much longer, if not expanded into its own complete book. (In fact, I have a sequel of sorts in the works.) Each chapter indeed omits many worthwhile facts and arguments—omissions which constitute the basis of a number of reasonable expert reader criticisms.

Rather than do a point-by-point treatment of the reviews, I think a new preface should seek instead to enlarge the question foremost on our minds at the moment that was not apparent at the time I completed the manuscript of the book—the Trump Question. I finished the manuscript before Trump had secured the GOP nomination, and I added a couple of brief references to Trump in the final edit, which was completed before his stunning and unexpected victory in the general election. Love him, hate him, or taking him (as I do) a la carte, the paradox of Trump is that this unintellectual man, who apparently doesn’t read serious material at all, has opened up the liveliest and most fundamental debate in American politics since the 1850s. He has disrupted both political parties, and it is still far from clear how the dust is going to settle. On the right, there was no such ferment among conservative intellectuals for or against George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. As I wrote in the Weekly Standard on the eve of the election in October 2016, Who could have foreseen that the Great Pumpkin candidate would turn out to be a Black Swan event for conservatism?

While this book is not intended as any kind of direct or even background commentary on Trump or Trumpist populism, its relation to this absorbing and faction-generating question is made evident in two sentences of Damon Linker’s friendly notice of the book in The Week: Jaffa is the unlikely but indispensable bridge between the Republicanism of Reaganite conservatism and the Republicanism of Trumpian populism and nationalism, and going on to add that, Steven F. Hayward has written a new book that’s a charming, fun, breezy history of Jaffa’s decisive role in injecting moral and philosophical rigor into the conservative movement.

Linker—a rare defector from the ranks of the right to someplace on the center left of the political spectrum (Damon indulges my routine slur of him as the missing Linker)—is very kind to suggest my book as the ideal background for understanding his bold proposition, but I must borrow one of Jaffa’s rare disclaimers and say that I shall not attempt to climb up on the pedestal he prepared for me! I’ve never claimed to provide the illumination of an arc light, but perhaps I can offer a modest sunbeam into our current troubles, which will surely postdate Trump.

I did write in the original preface that I suspect [Walter] Berns would have found Trump appalling. But that’s because Berns found most politicians to be appalling. I heard Walter offer many casual expressions of contempt for politicians as a class. The only political figures I ever heard him express admiration for were Lincoln, Churchill, and Reagan, though even in Reagan’s case he expressed some reservations and criticisms. I think he admired Margaret Thatcher as well, but I don’t recall any specific comments. In casual conversation, Walter expressed some sympathy from time to time with campaign finance regulation (while agreeing completely about the constitutional defects of such regulation), not for any of the usual liberal reasons about the corrupting effect of money in politics, but because of the degrading effect mass money raising has on the character and bearing of candidates. He thought it unseemly, grubby, and bad for deliberative government. (I’d go further and speculate that, deep down, Walter never completely shed the socialist sympathies of his youth about the defects of capitalism, but once again this is based more on some stray indirect comments and his silences about the matter.) You can see the pattern in Walter’s regard for only the highest order of statesmen among politicians. There is zero chance Walter would have made out any redeeming qualities from the vulgar Trump.

About Harry Jaffa, however, I offered no judgment about what he might have made of Trump. At the time of my final editing of the book well before the general election, it seemed an idle question. I think it very likely he’d have swung round to liking Trump for his disruptive character alone. Jaffa’s fondness for pugilistic spectacle cannot be underestimated either. He was known to have sympathized with Muhammad Ali’s refusal of military service, almost surely because he loved the boxer’s loudmouth style as much as his roundhouse punches. He was willing to overlook the plain defects of Ali’s self-serving stance out of sheer affinity with Ali’s extraordinary effect in the ring. There is certainly something of Ali’s I am the greatest! boastfulness in Trump’s political performance.

One thing is beyond dispute: Many of Jaffa’s students, often referred to as Claremonsters, became strong supporters of Trump early on, culminating in one of the most infamous manifestos in American election history—The Flight 93 Election article by the pseudonymous Decius Publius Mus, later to be revealed as Michael Anton. But he was hardly alone. Several other Claremont eminentos who had been students or friends of Jaffa appeared on the list of Scholars and Writers for Trump, including Charles Kesler, Larry Arnn, Thomas West, John Marini, Hadley Arkes, Brian Kennedy, and John Eastman. This enthusiasm for Trump struck many observers as odd for at least two reasons. First, the Claremonsters were aligned with a lot of people with whom they are normally at odds, especially libertarians and traditionalist paleoconservatives, which is yet another indication of the extraordinary scrambling effect of Trump.

The second oddity of the fervent support for Trump among Jaffa’s students is that Jaffa, like Berns, is known for championing the examples of Lincoln and Churchill as the models from which to take bearings on how to order political action. (This is the subject of chapters 3 and 4 in the book.) How is it, people would ask me, "that a group known for its emphasis on the idea of high statesmanship, and on the importance of serious political rhetoric, can champion Trump?" After all, one person noted, the full name of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the Claremont Review of Books, includes "for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy." (Emphasis added.) One of the early books the Claremont Institute published was Rhetoric and American Statesmanship, where it is argued that political speech cannot be judged solely by how well it appeals to its audience. Political speech must serve the ends of statesmanship…A political speaker never aims, like a pedagogue or entertainer, simply to instruct or amuse his audience. For all of his rhetorical effectiveness in some ways, no one would ever confuse Trump with the great communicator Ronald Reagan, let alone produce an example of high statesmanship along the lines of Lincoln or Churchill. This circumstance seems like one of those old SAT questions about which term doesn’t belong with the other two: "Lincoln, Churchill, Trump."

Unfriendly critics from the left, such as Michael Brendan Doherty of The Week, Jeet Heer of The New Republic, and Sam Tanenhaus of The New Yorker, attributed this sympathy for Trump as a manifestation of the split between the so-called West Coast and East Coast followers and students of Leo Strauss, but that long-running theoretical dispute is mostly off the mark in this instance. A slightly better critique is that the intellectual support for the proposition that Trump somehow fulfills the necessity of statesmanship reflects a fascination with Caesarism and cataclysmic moments in U.S. history—crises that only a big man can address. But this explanation depends on ignoring or denying the serious underlying circumstance that the crisis of the American regime is so far advanced that another conventional Republican administration would be futile—that only someone as unconventional and unorthodox and, above all, as intransigent as Trump would suffice for the present crisis.

What is that crisis? It’s not primarily the usual litany of items that typically come to mind—the $21 trillion national debt, economic stagnation, political correctness and identity politics run amok, unchecked immigration that threatens to work a demographic–political revolution, runaway regulation, and confused or unserious policy toward radical Islamic terrorism. These are mere symptoms of a much deeper but poorly understood problem. It can be stated directly in one sentence: Elections no longer change the character of our government. The growth of what is called the administrative state (described in chapter 9 of the book) has continued apace under both Democratic and Republican administrations—Democrats because they believe in this form of governance, and Republicans because of their relative cluelessness about its nature and irresolution in resisting it.

The political character of the administrative state is more important than the economic inefficiency or arbitrariness of bureaucracy that is the usual target of conservative ire, because it represents a new answer to the classic political question: Who should rule? The premise of the Constitution is that the people should rule. The premise of the administrative state, explicitly stated by Woodrow Wilson and other Progressive-era theorists, is that experts should rule, in a new administrative form largely sealed off from political influence, i.e., sealed off from the people. At some point it amounts to government without the consent of the governed, a simple point that surprisingly few conservative politicians perceive. Ronald Reagan was, naturally, a conspicuous exception, noting in his First Inaugural Address in 1981 that, "It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed." (Emphasis added.)

Consider one circumstance that does not receive the full attention it deserves: Since the explosion of modern administrative government in the 1960s and 1970s, nearly all successful presidential candidates, of both parties, have made their principal appeal as outsiders, running against Washington. Even Barack Obama, though a sitting senator, ran in this mode, which was only possible because he was a first-term senator. Does this not indicate fundamental disharmony between the people and their rulers? Never mind that Democrats are insincere when they speak of the mess in Washington. The administrative state is the partisan creation of liberalism and serves the ends of liberalism—a fact that Republicans either do not clearly perceive or fail to confront directly. If this statement seems hyperbole, try this simple thought experiment: If you’re a federal bureaucrat, which party is more likely to defend your professional interest and policy domain?

In opposition to the slow-motion Progressive assault on self-rule by the people, the conservative establishment has been offering mostly what can be called checklist conservatism, i.e., policy ideas with indirect or negligible political effect. What do Progressives stand for? Justice, equality, and the side of history! What do conservatives stand for? More tax cuts, school choice, enterprise zones, a balanced budget amendment, medical savings accounts, a statutory cost–benefit standard for regulation, and other policy wonkery. All worthy ideas, to be sure, but none of them reaching very far to halt the steady unraveling of constitutional government.

Here we should reflect on the shortcomings of the glorious Reagan presidency. For all of the positive steps and changes Reagan’s presidency brought about, Reagan and his team, with all the best intentions and many sincere efforts, underestimated the depth of the fundamental roots of the administrative state. Reagan was more successful rolling back the Soviet empire than he was in rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because this is a harder problem. Charles Fried, Reagan’s second Solicitor General, wrote afterward: The Reagan administration tried to make a revolution. It proposed dismantling large parts of the welfare-bureaucratic state which had grown up over the previous half-century. Revolutionary as it was, it required (in Danton’s phrase) boldness, more boldness, ever more boldness. This boldness was not always in evidence, and often when it was it met ignominious defeat at the hands of Congress, the news media, and timorous Republicans.

At least the Reaganites tried, and were stymied by the courts and an uncooperative Congress. The succeeding Republican administrations under two presidents named Bush didn’t even try. Does anyone think the technocratic Mitt Romney would have challenged the foundations of the administrative state if he had won the 2012 election, or John McCain the 2008 election? To follow up on William F. Buckley’s famous rallying cry that conservatism should stand athwart history yelling Stop!, the Bush Republican administrations were content merely to propose privatizing the tracks on which liberal-propelled history was proceeding. In the conclusion to my narrative history of the Reagan presidency, The Age of Reagan (published in 2009), I wrote:

If the Reagan Revolution is finally to be consummated, the movement that cherishes his name will need to return to this [older] mode of constitutional thinking, and press to achieve the reforms Reagan could only dream of. Reagan’s would-be successors would do well to recall Machiavelli’s counsel that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Trump may not be a genuine Machiavelli, but he is sufficiently outside of the conventional framework for political advancement that he represents a new mode and order. One of the ironies of Trump is that among the large and distinguished Republican field in 2016, he invoked the memory and image of Reagan least, and at one point shocked the conservative establishment with his near heresy that, It’s called the Republican Party, not the conservative party.

But beyond the weakness of Republican political challenges to the administrative state is a deeper problem. Conservatives, and much of the conservative movement, succumbed to the political equivalent of Stockholm syndrome. Along with the increasing concentration of power in the hands of unaccountable experts in the administrative state is the equal concentration of authoritative public opinion in the hands of the experts and their elite media–academic allies. Prof. John Marini of the University of Nevada at Reno, one of the premier analysts of the nature of the administrative state, said in an interview to me: Public opinion is in the hands of a national elite. That public opinion, the whole of the public discourse about what is political in America, is in the hands of very few. There’s no way in which you have genuine diversity of opinion that arises from the offices that are meant to represent it.

The enforced conformity of public opinion is also not a brandnew thought. Walter Lippmann perceived in the 1920s how elite dominance of public opinion would shape and constrict our political horizons, and you can also hear the distinct echo of Tocqueville. But in recent years the combination of administrative sovereignty and authoritative public opinion has taken a menacing turn with liberalism’s full embrace of political correctness. It’s one thing for liberalism to organize and minister to society according to specific economic interests and ethnic group solidarity, which provided the practical political glue for old-fashioned pork barrel politics. During the Obama years, the boundaries of acceptable opinion shifted sharply to an identity politics rooted in radical grievance that rejects wholesale the justice of American democracy. Marini summarizes it thus:

Post-modern intellectuals have pronounced their historical judgment on America’s past, finding it to be morally indefensible. Every great human achievement of the past—whether in philosophy, religion, literature, or the humanities—came to be understood as a kind of exploitation of the powerless. Rather than allowing the past to be viewed in terms of its aspirations and accomplishments, it has been judged by its failures. The living part of the past is understood in terms of slavery, racism, and identity politics. Political correctness arose as the practical and necessary means of enforcing this historical judgment. No public defense of past greatness could be allowed to live in the present. Public morality and public policy would come to be understood in terms of the formerly oppressed.

This is no longer just a campus fetish. It has broken out with measures such as the federal government threatening to cut off school funding to any public school district that wishes to keep its single-sex bathrooms, the social pressure to punish anyone who opposed same-sex marriage like Brendan Eich, and the legal vice grip being applied to religious institutions that resist government mandates of several kinds. Liberalism today goes beyond wanting to control your pocketbook; it now demands that it control how you think, and what you say, right down to the pronouns you use. It resembles the state of play that Lincoln noted in his Cooper Union address in 1860—that the South would not be placated by toleration of slavery, but demanded that "we cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right…Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Just as in 1860, the tacit platform of today’s Democratic Party is that the Republican Party is illegitimate unless Republicans surrender their principles and get on the side of history."

More than just a rebuke to political correctness and identity politics, Trump’s victory is a vehicle for reasserting the sovereignty of the people and withdrawal of consent for the administrative state and the suffocating boundaries of acceptable opinion backing it up. You can see instantly why a large number of Americans responded to Trump’s slogan Make America Great Again because they could see that Trump is a forceful tribune against the slow-motion desiccation of the country under the steady advance of nihilist liberalism.

For all of his defects, Trump represents an end to the defensive crouch of too many conservatives. Trump is doing this precisely because he doesn’t know—or doesn’t care—that he’s not supposed to, and in doing so he exposed the feebleness of conservatism at the end of the Obama years. Sen. Ted Cruz was the only other top-tier candidate from the 2016 field that might have been as bold as Trump in moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, dumping the Paris Climate Accord, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, reliably appointing conservative judges, and appointing agency heads who actually want to pursue serious reforms (at every turn celebrating the outrage it generated within elite opinion instead of apologizing for it). But even Cruz is often an unfortunate example of a defensive-crouch conservatism that is too willing to accept the boundaries of elite-defined opinion. Shortly after the 2012 election, Cruz commented—before a National Review audience no less!—that conservative social policy must pass through a Rawlsian lens, an astonishing concession to the supercharged egalitarian philosophy at the heart of contemporary leftism. Yet is there anything Democrats and the media said about Trump that they wouldn’t have said about Ted Cruz if Cruz had been the nominee?

If Trump does not articulate a comprehensive and profound account of the crisis of our regime, he can at least be said to embody the necessary reaction to it, in part because he exposed the feebleness of conservatism, and in part because his implacable character is essential in the face of the powerfully established forces against serious reform. The