I had the good fortune to study with Allan Bloom during my undergraduate years at Cornell University. I came from a left-leaning family, and Allan never stopped struggling against what he regarded (with some justice) as my political naivete. Like most of Allan’s students, I was enthralled by the thinkers of classical antiquity. At the same time, I believed that I was fortunate to live in a modern liberal democracy—that it would be hard to imagine (and unreasonable to expect) anything better. I was deeply perplexed about the connection between the Greeks and the American regime.
In the final semester of my senior year, Allan taught a seminar on Plato’s Republic, which he was in the process of translating. Although it was thirty years ago, I vividly recall the excitement of weekly discoveries. As we worked our way through the book, a question began taking shape in my mind: if the rule of the wise is impossible, and if some tension between the demands of politics and freedom of the mind is inevitable, is it the case that this tension necessarily takes the same form (or reaches the same intensity) in all regimes? It seemed to me that Socrates’ depiction of democracy as a “many-colored cloak” left room for the high as well as the low; Sparta would not have tolerated his activities for a day, let alone seventy years. During the final class, I raised my hand and asked whether by legitimizing dissent and restricting persecution, modern liberal democracies had not found a way of reducing the tension between philosophy and politics to a greater extent than any other form of government? Judged by the latitude afforded the philosophic enterprise (not the sole standard, admittedly), could one not conclude that liberal democracy was in fact the best regime?
It is testimony to the narcissism of the young that I cannot remember Allan’s answer, though I do recall his complex amusement at my intervention. (The interpretive essay he subsequently published with his masterful translation of the Republic indicated some sympathy with the underlying thrust of my question.) Today, three decades later, I see a more complex picture. From a legal/political standpoint, thought enjoys unprecedented freedom in liberal democracies. But liberal democratic society tends to deprive philosophy (and culture in general) of depth and significance. One sees signs of this in the laments of Russian and Central European intellectuals: under communism they were persecuted, but what they said mattered. Now it doesn’t. Their activity no longer represents the struggle for forbidden truths or the vehicle of a nation’s hopes; it is reduced to a commodity, or entertainment, or at best a conversation within a small group.
This is not to suggest that a brutal and repressive political order is somehow justified by the quality of the resistance it engenders; it is to suggest that the very safety of thought in a free society carries with it a kind of risk against which one must struggle. It is all too easy to see speech—philosophy, literature, cultural criticism—as a right without responsibilities, or as play without consequences.
In the middle of my last semester at Cornell I was accepted for graduate studies in political science at the University of Chicago. Two weeks later I learned that Strauss was leaving the department, a grave disappointment. Nonetheless I had the opportunity to participate in his last Chicago course in the fall of 1967.The topic was Aristotle’s Politics; it was for me a transformative experience.
To this day I do not know whether what I learned corresponded to anything Strauss intended to convey. What follows is a rough summary of what I took away from his memorable course:
There will always be competing claims about justice in politics and passions will run high, but no political order can function well without some agreement on justice and injustice. That agreement will be much harder to reach if the citizenry is sharply divided into the few rich and the many poor; the prospects for decent politics are greatly enhanced by a large, stable middle class. (One would, in Aristotle’s terms, hope for such a class; in the terms of modern political economy, design policies to facilitate its growth and security.)
A political community’s understanding of justice (whatever it may be) will serve as the basis of its institutional arrangements, within which decisions are made and competing claims balanced. But however wisely crafted, institutions cannot replace good citizens, whose virtues must be carefully and deliberately nurtured. Families have a role to play in this process, but the political community has a large stake in it as well. The conduct of education is a matter of collective concern. Religion can help nurture civic virtue and bolster respect for the principles of the regime.
Not everyone will attain the virtues of citizenship to the same extent; especially in a democracy, there will be an inevitable tension between the claims of equality and excellence, and between wisdom and consent—and therefore a democratic place for persuasive speech in the service of sound policies. But there is wisdom in the many as well as the few; democratic public deliberation can produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Finally, no political community is comprehensive. Each encompasses a limited population and territory; the imperatives of self-defense should never be disregarded. Each community is morally limited as well; none is likely to embrace, or practice, a fully defensible understanding of justice. For that reason (among others), every set of institutional arrangements will be flawed, and every specific conception of the good citizen will stand in some tension with what it means to be a good human being simpliciter. The domain of politics is essentially limited, because political virtues and activities, though noble, are not the highest available to human beings; a zone of independence transcending politics must be acknowledged.
In short, the Aristotle I studied thirty years ago offered an understanding of government as both strong and limited: strong because legitimately involved in the material and moral well-being of its citizens; limited because not legitimately “totalitarian” regarding the life of the mind. It was possible, therefore, to imagine a kind of Aristotelian social democracy, and also a kind of Aristotelian liberalism, and to believe that an Aristotle returned to life in the twentieth century would not be wholly critical of modern liberal democracy—especially in view of the available alternatives.
Conversely, it seemed to me possible—indeed essential—to reconsider liberal democracy in the light of Aristotle’s insights. For example, if there is a form of civic virtue suited to, and required for, each regime, then surely liberal democracy is no exception. The artful arrangement of constitutional institutions can take us only part way (as even the authors of the Federalist conceded). There must be specifically “liberal virtues,” and the formation of liberal citizens must be a matter of common concern—even if the modern liberal understanding of limited government restricts the capacity of public institutions to inculcate civic virtue directly.
While this rethinking of liberal democracy in light of Strauss’s Aristotle proved decisive for both my scholarship and practical political activities, I was left less satisfied by Strauss’s more direct account of the origins of liberal democratic philosophy. There were two reasons for this. First, the anti-utopian, “low but solid” line of descent through Machiavelli and Hobbes to Locke seemed to give short shrift to the genuinely moral element in liberalism. Couldn’t Kant’s project be understood as an effort to uphold the possibility of human freedom, dignity, and distinctiveness in the face of the deterministic, homogenizing challenge of science? Wasn’t Kantian morality and politics a doctrine of duties as well as rights? (My rigorous but generous advisor and lifelong mentor Joseph Cropsey allowed me to pursue these dissenting thoughts in a dissertation on Kant’s historical essays.)
Second, it seemed to me that Strauss’s official account of the rise of liberalism understated the extent to which it represented a response to the novel situation created by the rise of revealed religion. Strauss himself had explored with unparalleled profundity the tension between “Athens and Jerusalem,” between reason and faith, between the pride of understanding and the humility of obedience. But what was to be done in practice when these two great sources of the West were copresent within political communities? Were institutions of faith to be allowed to repress the development of science and philosophy? Were the apostles of reason to be allowed to declare war on faith? And what was to be done when the unity of Christendom splintered and destructive religious passions spilled over into politics? Liberalism at its best tried, not to obliterate, but rather to domesticate, these differences in a manner that offered fair if not full liberty to the contending parties. I do not mean to suggest that liberalism solved the problem; no political dispensation could, and unresolved tensions manifest themselves in practical controversies down to the present. My suggestion is only that the liberal impulse on these matters is more capacious and more honorable than the anti-theological ire with which Strauss justly taxes Machiavelli.
Strauss reshaped my thinking, as he did for so many others, but his influence extended beyond scholarship. Though he was not a “conservative” in any of the American senses of the term, he sent large numbers of students on a path toward the conservative movement; I could not follow them.While I accepted Strauss’s critique of utopian egalitarianism, I saw no contradiction between the broad thrust of his teaching and the best of modern liberalism (in the political rather than philosophical sense of the term). Unfortunately, as I pursued my graduate studies, American liberalism entered a period of degeneration and self-destruction. This posed a practical problem that has dominated my political endeavors ever since: the creation of a coherent alternative to both liberal excesses and a conservatism that, while not without strengths, proved too narrow and rigid to fully address the issues before us.
Just months after I entered the University of Chicago, the worst year in modern American history began. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy presaged a breakdown of order and hope. As urban riots and anti-war demonstrations intensified, a fratricidal war broke out within the Democratic party. I instinctively took Hubert Humphrey’s side against the partisans of the counterculture. I was not persuaded that the antinomian attack on all restraints was a basis for a decent society or politics. Nor could I accept the terms in which opposition to the Vietnam War was increasingly cast: the war might be tactically and strategically flawed, but I very much doubted that Ho Chi Minh was a misunderstood nationalist and social democrat. Four years later I found myself unable to support George McGovern’s candidacy.
For much of the next two decades, as I wandered ineffectually through three presidential campaigns, I struggled to develop an alternative to the dominant tendencies in my party. My thoughts finally came together in 1989, when I published a political manifesto under the combative title, “The Politics of Evasion.” In it I argued that the Democratic party could not hope—and did not deserve—to regain a presidential majority until it shifted its orientation in a number of respects. Americans would not support a party that they saw as lacking in realism and strength in matters of national defense, that espoused social policies at odds with the moral understanding of the middle class, and that pursued an economic strategy too concerned with distribution and class conflict at the expense of growth and opportunity. The electorate was rightly impatient with a politics drenched in sociological explanation; what they wanted was a politics of moral accountability in which social responsibility was matched by personal responsibility.
This broadside created a row within the party. It came to the attention of a young governor of Arkansas, and we had the opportunity to discuss it as his nascent presidential candidacy took shape. I advised the campaign and helped out during the transition, without expectation of anything more. On January 20, 1993 I was astonished to find myself entering the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy.
One of my principal responsibilities was education. Bill Clinton had long believed that excellence in public education was the key to equal opportunity—that is, to a society in which individual merit would mean more than economic or racial background. As governor of Arkansas, he had challenged orthodoxy and key interest groups to push for more rigorous standards and testing. Now I was to represent the White House and work with the Department of Education to translate his approach into national legislation. Our proposal—the Goals 2000 bill—annoyed just about everyone. Conservatives opposed it on the grounds that it represented a large and unwarranted intrusion of federal power into traditional state and local prerogatives (it didn’t). Liberals were skeptical because it focused on results rather than increased funding and because they feared that rigorous standards and testing would have a negative impact on poor and minority students (they wouldn’t; just the reverse). After a legislative struggle that lasted more than a year and put the president at odds with the leadership of his own party, Goals 2000 was signed into law in March 1994. At the beginning of his second term, the President sought to reinforce this legislation by offering to share with the states a set of examinations in reading and mathematics, now administered to a relatively small national sample, for comprehensive testing of fourth- and eighth-grade students. This proposal remains mired in partisan controversy.
Goals 2000 was the flagship of the administration’s education reform armada. I had the opportunity to work on the quinquennial redrafting (“reauthorization” in Washington parlance) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first passed during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. We tried to replace long-established but ineffective “compensatory” programs for poor children with our broader strategy for improved educational outcomes. I was also able to use the ESEA as a vehicle to promote two of the President’s other cherished ideas: charter schools, publicly funded but created, authorized, and run by educational innovators (parents, teachers, entrepreneurs) outside top-down, bureaucratized school districts; and a new emphasis on the promotion of school-based civic and character education nationwide. Other important efforts included national support for local initiatives to make schools safe, disciplined and drug free.
During the transition, I was asked to chair a working group charged with fleshing out the president-elect’s proposal for a new national service program; as the administration began, I was asked to represent the Domestic Policy Council in the effort to translate this proposal into legislation. The core idea was simple: just as members of the armed forces who serve their country are eligible for a range of post-service benefits, so too young people who wish to serve as civilians should be able to do so and qualify for benefits that could be used to defray the costs of education and job training through a “domestic GI Bill.” Underlying this idea was the principle of reciprocity: rather than getting something for nothing, these young people would contribute something of value to their country and receive something in return. Far from being an ad hoc contrivance to bolster a specific policy, this principle was at the heart of the president’s effort to reconstruct domestic policy. Early in the administration he wondered aloud in my presence whether there should be any outright grants or subsidies for individuals who were capable of making some kind of reciprocal contribution.
Political considerations limited our ability to advance this principle on every front, but we did what we could. As in the case of Goals 2000, our draft national service legislation antagonized members of Congress across a broad political spectrum. Conservatives objected on the grounds that it would expand big government and that what they called “paid volunteerism” was an oxymoron (if so, we had better change the name of our “All-Volunteer Armed Forces”). Liberals feared that in times of fiscal stringency, this new venture would come at the expense of cherished social programs, and some of them were uncomfortable with its underlying principle, which they interpreted (correctly) as a critique of the welfare/entitlement state. After another prolonged struggle, the National and Community Service Act was signed into law. Although targeted for elimination after the Republican tidal wave in November of 1994, funding for the act survived with the president’s unflinching support. As a result, tens of thousands of Americans have already had a chance to serve their country while expanding their educational and economic opportunities.
The national service program can be seen as part of President Clinton’s effort to realign public programs with principles central to healthy liberal democratic life. The responsibility (if possible) to support oneself and one’s family rather than becoming a permanent recipient of public assistance was at the heart of the President’s welfare reform proposal, for which he took a great deal of heat within his own party. He proposed a simple new social contract: government will provide the kinds of temporary support (job training and placement, health and child care) needed to sustain the movement from dependency to employment; in return, individuals who are able to work must prepare themselves to do so and then accept available employment opportunities.
A similar conception undergirded the large expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) enacted in 1993.The principle was straightforward: if you work full-time, neither you nor your family should be living in poverty; if the market doesn’t compensate your labor sufficiently to honor this principle, the public sector should step in to make up the difference. In many respects, after all, the social value of work exceeds its market value—for example, by giving children credible models of adult responsibility and by creating positive structures of community life. (William Julius Wilson has recently traced the social and moral catastrophes that overwhelm neighborhoods where work disappears.) Here again, the principle of reciprocal individual and public responsibility fell between the political stools: many conservatives denounced the EITC as a new form of welfare, while many liberals feared that its expansion would come at the expense of established social and economic policies.
It is not enough, obviously, for republican institutions and programs to rest on sound principles; especially in republics, the people themselves must have virtues that sustain these principles. Early on, my Aristotelian conception of civic virtue was nourished and rendered more concrete by an understanding (derived principally from Tocqueville) of the sources of civic virtue in the United States. I came to focus on three above all: the family, civil associations, and religion. Not entirely by chance, I had the opportunity to work on all of them during my White House years.
Starting in the mid-1980s, I had become increasingly concerned about the effects of family disintegration, not just on the economic status of children, but on their psychological, social, and moral development as well. I came to believe that trends such as the doubling of the U.S. divorce rate and the sixfold increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock birth since 1960 represented a clear and present danger to the health of the republic. I wrote extensively on these topics, to mixed reviews within my own political party. The President and the First Lady shared my concerns, however. I was overjoyed when the President accepted my advice and spoke out forcefully on teen pregnancy during his 1995 State of the Union address, catalyzing the formation of a national leadership coalition to address the problem. In her book It Takes A Village, Hillary Rodham Clinton surprised some of her supporters by expressing serious misgivings about the ready availability of divorce in contemporary America, especially when minor children are involved. The President subsequently reinforced this concern in heartfelt comments at the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
During 1994 I began discussing the condition of American civil society with Harvard professor Robert Putnam and examined his now-famous article “Bowling Alone” while still in manuscript. Following an Oval Office meeting, the President asked me to assemble a group of scholars to advise him on his forthcoming State of the Union address. (I had a similar opportunity the following year, on the day of the great January 1996 blizzard in Washington.) I invited Putnam, Stephen Carter, and a number of other thinkers to Camp David for an extended discussion that involved the President and First Lady, Al and Tipper Gore, and a number of cabinet officers and senior White House staff.While the President was not entirely persuaded by Putnam’s case that U.S. civil society is in decline, he instinctively understood the power of the public’s belief that we are indeed in the midst of just such as decline. He went on to address that concern in a series of speeches, starting with the 1995 State of the Union and continuing through much of that year.
Beyond giving voice to this theme and offering moral leadership in events such as the 1997 Presidents’ Philadelphia Summit on volunteerism, it is not immediately obvious what affirmative steps government can take to strengthen civil society. A place to begin is with a political variant of the Hippocratic oath: first, government should do no harm. Legal and regulatory strategies must be reviewed to ensure that civil activities and associations are not inadvertently impeded.
Just this issue arose early in the administration in the case of religion. In a much-criticized 1990 decision, the Supreme Court made it much easier for governments throughout the federal system to enact laws and regulations imposing burdens on the free exercise of religion. Groups representing the full spectrum of U.S. religious denominations banded together in a coalition to reverse this decision through a proposed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which would allow government to burden religion only in pursuit of a “compelling state interest” —a much more stringent standard. President Clinton strongly backed this legislation, enthusiastically signed it into law in the fall of 1993, and instructed us to monitor its execution. Subsequently, a White House team worked with executive branch agencies to ensure maximum feasible responsiveness to legitimate religious free exercise claims.
Throughout this process, we were aware that RFRA raised some important constitutional issues—in particular, whether this congressional action was consistent with its powers to enforce the liberty guarantees of the 14th Amendment. In June 1997, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had exceeded that limit and that the constitutional separation of powers had been breached. Those who believe—as I do—that religious free exercise lies at the heart of a healthy civil society will continue to search for constitutionally appropriate remedies for the problem that prompted the enactment of RFRA. We must not allow overblown fears about the establishment of religion to impede efforts to guarantee the widest possible freedom of religion, consistent with the necessary and legitimate exercise of government authority.
During and after my White House years, I have often been asked what it is like for someone with training in political philosophy to serve as an advisor to the President of the United States. My standard response, offered in jest, is for the questioner to read Plato’s Seventh Letter.A more serious response is that based on my experience it is difficult but possible for political philosophy to have an impact on practice, subject to constraints imposed by the democratic process.
To begin, a president is typically elected (especially to a first term) based on a set of policy proposals or at the very least a general orientation that is distinguishable from competing alternatives. Under normal circumstances, advice tendered to a democratically elected leader must remain within the four corners of the people’s consent. The advisor has room to maneuver but is rarely free to counsel outright disregard of explicit democratic undertakings.
Advice is also subject to the limits of public explanation. If a policy that must be democratically approved cannot be set forth in terms the people can understand, then the president should be counseled to consider an alternative. Setting aside the (contested) merits of President Clinton’s health care plan, its unfathomable complexity was a significant—perhaps decisive—argument against proposing it in the first place.
In a system of separated powers, the views of other elected and appointed leaders constitute an added constraint. Advisors should not lightly send presidents on fool’s errands. If an otherwise meritorious proposal consistent with the president’s promises stands no chance of acceptance, and if backing it diminishes the prospects of a second-best approach that is nonetheless preferable to the status quo, the advisor should think hard before urging the president to go for broke, let alone doing so without consultation in the president’s name. (For purposes of long-term public education and negotiation with other branches, however, it is sometimes right to advocate policies that stand no chance of short-term approval.)
For me, the most challenging aspects of the advisor’s role were psychological rather than philosophical or institutional. It is very difficult to advocate a particular course of action when every else in the room is counseling just the opposite—especially when the president seems to agree with the majority rather than the lone dissenter. Nor is it easy to be the bearer of bad tidings. Giving advice in the White House casts into high relief all the weaknesses of one’s character. Reflection on such an experience in tranquility can be an important step on the road to self-knowledge.