By William Voegeli
Monday, September 12, 2016
‘Hillary, Eleanor Roosevelt would love you.” Thus, in
2000, did retiring New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduce Hillary
Clinton as the candidate anointed to be his successor.
While many first ladies exert influence behind the
scenes, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton had high public profiles,
speaking and writing extensively on the issues of the day, making allies and
enemies. One question raised repeatedly during the 1930s was whether Franklin
and Eleanor Roosevelt shared the same philosophy of government or held
significantly different worldviews.
Sixty years later, political observers were asking
whether there were fundamental differences between Hillary’s approach to
governance and her husband’s. Since no other first lady has pursued a political
career after leaving the White House, much less secured a nomination that would
let her return there by winning a presidential election of her own, the
question is even more compelling today.
So, is Clintonism one body of thought, or two? The
Clintons’ rhetorical oeuvre makes clear that the best answer is zero. Again and
again, for a quarter century, their every attempt to connect and rationalize
individual policy proposals culminates in sour nothings, windy declarations as
solemn as they are vacuous.
According to one journalistic assessment, the pillars of
Thomas Dewey’s failed, hyper-cautious 1948 presidential campaign were:
“Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom
without liberty. The future lies ahead.” Dewey never actually said any of those
things, of course. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, really did say in an
economic-policy speech this year, “I believe in an America always moving toward
the future.”
This inanity is not a new problem. Consider the two most
important speeches the president and the first lady gave in 1993. In his
inaugural address, Bill Clinton said, “Each generation of Americans must define
what it means to be an American.” Further, “the urgent question of our time is
whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.” Less than three
months later, in a speech ostensibly about health-care policy, Hillary Clinton
told a bemused University of Texas audience that “we lack meaning in our
individual lives and meaning collectively, we lack a sense that our lives are
part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another.” Her
solution exceeded the responsibilities of a president’s spouse, but then it
also exceeded the capacities of any public official, private citizen, or
national institution: “Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what
it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new
millennium.”
The earnest, incoherent moralism that characterized
Clintonism at the outset remains its salient feature. In her recent acceptance
speech, Hillary Clinton offered “the words of our Methodist faith” that she had
learned as a girl: “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all
the ways you can, as long as ever you can.”
It’s quite impossible to disagree with this credo, which
is both its appeal and its fatal flaw. The hard questions, the moral and
practical ones that matter, are about how to do good, not whether. The pious
tautology that it’s good to do good but bad to do bad tells us nothing about
choosing between goods when there are trade-offs or conflicts, weighing costs
against benefits, comparing short-term attainments with long-term risks, or
reckoning second-order effects. It’s useless, in other words, for grappling
with every problem that makes our moral and political lives so hard.
The Clintons, to be fair, are not the only Democrats who
have resorted to expansive, empty statements of purpose. In the aftermath of
Dallas, when Lyndon Johnson was first informed of the late President Kennedy’s
desire for a federal anti-poverty initiative, he said, “That’s my kind of
program. It will help people.”
In 1979, James Fallows recounted why he had left his job
as President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter: “Carter believes fifty things,
but no one thing. He holds explicit, thorough positions on every issue under
the sun, but he has no large view of the relations between them.” Because
“Carter thinks in lists, not arguments,” Fallows wrote, “the only thing that
finally gives coherence to the items of his creed is that he happens to believe
them all.”
Barack Obama presents a more complicated case, since it is
so evident that he both feels a greater need than ordinary politicians — even
ordinary presidents — to explain himself and has absolute confidence in his
ability to do so. Indeed, the failure of his high-flown efforts in the
direction of political philosophy explains why Democrats less audacious and
hopeful than he think the prudent course is to throw clichés at the problem.
Charles R. Kesler argued in I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (2012)
that Obama’s speeches and writings are marked, and wrecked, by the
determination to have big things both ways. On one hand, he wants the moral
commitment and passion generated by the idealist’s conviction that liberal
causes are undeniably, profoundly just. Thus, Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope (2006) that the
self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence “describe not only the
foundations of our government but the substance of our common creed.” On the
other, he wants American life to exhibit deference and comity, which in his view
necessitates “a rejection of absolute truth.” Any such absolutism, Obama said,
risks ascribing “infallibility” to “any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’
any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single,
unalterable course.” Obama’s attempt to resolve this contradiction is a
shambles. By the end of Audacity, he is reduced to discussing how we “pursue
our own absolute truths,” as though America were a nation of individuals living
in moral and metaphysical silos. We cannot be certain that any cause is just,
he continued, but idealism requires us to act “as if we are certain.”
***
It has now been more than a century since progressivism
reconfigured American liberalism by discarding the Founding’s commitment to
constitutional structures and limits, which were intended to secure inalienable
natural rights and sustain government by the consent of the governed.
Progressives introduced a new determination to organize and improve modern life
by applying, vigorously and if need be forcibly, the insights being uncovered
by a clerisy of social scientists. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, believed
that the emergency posed by World War II called for government experts to
rationalize every aspect of national life. Three months after Pearl Harbor, she
contended that “all of us — men in the services, and men and women at home —
should be drafted and told what is the job we are to do.” Only through such
regimentation could each of us confidently gain the satisfaction that comes
from knowing he was “complying with the wishes and doing the things which those
in authority thought should be done.”
The -ism of progressivism is the belief that movement
toward a better future is a goal, a right, and the highest imperative.
“Progress,” in its most direct, literal sense, simply means getting closer to
some objective, one both comprehensible and manifestly superior to the current
state of affairs. The early progressives believed that ascertaining and
mastering the processes that shaped society and history would move mankind to a
better future, just as understanding the natural laws of the physical universe
had improved the human condition through steam engines, telegraphs,
anesthetics, and other modern marvels.
Liberalism, however, came to regard its faith in progress
as untenable. The rejection was, in part, a reaction to historical
developments. Complying with the wishes of those in authority lost much of its
appeal when the authorities turned out to be men such as Robert McNamara and
McGeorge Bundy, smart fools who provided detailed charts and graphs to justify
each augmentation of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Vietnam. At home,
liberals came to detest the progressivism of Robert Moses and other power
brokers, experts whose idea of urban renewal was to bulldoze any city block
that had the temerity to evince charm or social cohesion in ways not part of a
government agency’s master plan.
More fundamentally, the liberal rejection of progress has
been theoretical. “Relativism rounded on liberalism,” Kesler writes, which
created the “crisis” of his book’s subtitle: Liberalism no longer believes in
itself. According to historian Andrew Hartman, William James’s famous assertion
in Pragmatism (1907) — “‘The true’ .
. . is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is
only the expedient in the way of our behaving” — has come to provide the “air
that historians breathe.” The academic Left’s success in imparting that lesson
to generations of college students has made “anti-foundationalism,” as they say
in the faculty lounge, the air that liberalism breathes. Progress no longer
means getting closer to any particular goal, because progressives now insist
that our understanding of what it means to progress, to get better, will
constantly change, in defiant rejection of any tyrannical consistency. Who are
we to lock future generations, or even our own generation, into a single,
unalterable course?
One might suppose that the determination that everything
is relative would make today’s liberals as tentative in their moral and
political judgments as Eleanor Roosevelt–style progressives had been confident.
The effect, however, has been exactly the opposite. If all moral dispositions
are “values,” idiosyncrasies arbitrarily acquired and held, it’s more
gratifying to assert, “Nobody else’s values are better than mine” than to
concede, “My values are no better than anyone else’s.”
Though conservatives find liberal sanctimony
insufferable, complaining about it is beside the point. Self-righteousness is
the only kind of righteousness liberalism now affords to dedicated idealists
pursuing their own “absolute” truths. Values such as social justice, doing all
the good you can, or enthusing over that distinct category of government
programs meant to help people “represent the consensus position among the most
enlightened thinkers,” in the words of political scientist James Ceaser. “If
enough of these thinkers tell themselves and those who follow them that
something is ‘true,’ then it must be so.” If the sole validation of a political
opinion is the character of the people who endorse it, the notion that
respectable, reasonable people might oppose the liberal project creates
intolerable cognitive dissonance. The only resolution is to hold the truth to
be self-evident that liberalism’s antagonists are all bigoted, greedy, callous,
and fanatical. Thus, liberals’ eagerness to ascribe conservatism to
conservatives’ moral and mental defects is more functional than scornful.
***
Inevitably, then, assessments of Hillary Clinton’s policy
agenda are inextricable from her self-presentation as a politician and a
person. Attempting, over 20 years ago, to explain why so many Americans
preferred hearing fingernails on a chalkboard to watching the first lady on
television, Peggy Noonan cited Mrs. Clinton’s “air of apple-cheeked certitude.”
Noonan discerned in that demeanor not just a policy orientation but the
“implicit insistence throughout [Clinton’s] career that hers were the politics
of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of
a lower moral order.”
The Clintons’ long effort to convey the key attributes of
that moral decency is, as noted, a work in progress that has never made any
progress. The junkyard of bellowed, didactic banalities that constitute Mrs.
Clinton’s inventory of pronouncements is not, however, simply a random
assortment. Two recurring themes suggest how she understands the larger purpose
of her political career.
The first is the determination to secure a better future.
In keeping with anti-foundationalism, however, all questions about the
attributes that would make one future better than another, or than the present,
are left unasked and unanswered. Since liberalism has discarded the idea of a
human nature with any particular intrinsic qualities, human flourishing can
mean nothing other or more than facilitating the pursuit, by as many people as
possible, of as many of their aspirations as possible. Upon ending her 2008
presidential campaign, Clinton said, “I entered this race because I have an
old-fashioned conviction that public service is about helping people solve
their problems and live their dreams.”
The second theme amounts to a sprawling elaboration of
the feminist axiom that the personal is political. Its original meaning was
that catcalls from construction workers, or the awarding of a coveted promotion
to an inferior male co-worker, were not just affronts but consequences flowing
directly from the power structures that feminists had to discern and dismantle.
The underlying idea was that men and women were so fundamentally similar that
the detail of being one or the other should, in a just world, have a negligible
impact on how any individual’s life unfolds. As an undergraduate at Wellesley
in the late 1960s, and then a law student at Yale, Hillary Rodham was certainly
well acquainted with this viewpoint. It’s hard to believe she didn’t share it,
at least in part.
In her maturity, however, Mrs. Clinton has drawn heavily
on the older, supposedly discredited idea that women are innately,
distinctively preoccupied with family cohesion and, above all, children’s
well-being. On that basis she has asserted, over and over, that the personal is
political and the political is personal. To care for a child now requires
acute, often alarmed, cognizance of the endless list of social and economic
conditions that can help or hinder children’s development. Citizenship, whether
it consists of volunteering for some community-improvement project or voting
for candidates dedicated to helping children, is an extension of responsible
parenthood. To govern a modern nation, by the same token, requires fully
grasping the array of trends and problems besetting families. Public officials
must, accordingly, subordinate all other policy concerns to fashioning
government responses that meet and master those challenges. As a result,
leadership is a kind of parenthood writ large.
Clinton has shown no reluctance about resorting to
mawkishness to make this point. In her address to the 1996 Democratic convention
that renominated her husband, she said, “I wish we could be sitting around a
kitchen table, just us, talking about our hopes and fears about our children’s
futures,” since “our family, like your family, is part of a larger community
that can help or hurt our best efforts to raise our child.” The speech’s
conclusion was even more ghastly: “Sometimes late at night, when I see Chelsea
doing her homework or watching TV or talking to a friend on the phone, I think
to myself, Her life and the lives of millions of boys and girls will be better
because of what all of us are doing together. They will face fewer obstacles
and more possibilities.”
Hillary Clinton’s efforts to synthesize the personal and
the political have necessarily entailed synthesizing her own public persona.
Plan A, that by virtue of her supposed expertise and intelligence she would be
her elected husband’s quasi-official co-president, was jettisoned in 1994 after
her health-care task force failed even to produce a plan the Democratic
Congress would vote on. Plan B was described by journalist Caitlin Flanagan:
“Hillary wanted to be seen as warm, spontaneous to the point of being a little
bit silly sometimes; someone who always has a twinkle in her eye whenever
children are around.”
Mrs. Clinton has largely stuck with this option, building
not just a personality but a philosophy upon it, the most ambitious statement
being her book It Takes a Village
(1996). The smaller problem with this choice is that decades of trying to act
the part have not diminished Clinton’s excruciating inauthenticity. As Flanagan
wrote, “there’s nothing more uncomfortable than witnessing someone straining to
be natural.” The more serious difficulty is that Clinton’s approach
sentimentalizes the crisis of liberalism while doing nothing to solve it. A
passionate concern with how people are continues to contradict the detached
refusal to be judgmental about what they do. A century ago, most Americans
lived in small towns — actual villages. The sensibility that formed
progressivism was appalled, not impressed. As the novelist E. L. Doctorow once
wrote, small-town life was “responsible for one of the raging themes of
American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces.” Gopher
Prairie, for example, the fictional Minnesota town deplored in Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street, is relentlessly judgmental, always ready to condemn any departure
from the consensus view about right and wrong ways to raise a child and conduct
a life.
Now, few Americans live in such villages. Recognizing
this fact, Clinton’s book stipulates that the village “can no longer be defined
as a place on a map, or a list of people or organizations.” Nevertheless, “its
essence remains the same: It is the network of values and relationships that
support and affect our lives.” This expansive redefinition makes it difficult
to specify what, if anything, the village is not. As she said in her 1996
convention speech, “to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a
family.” But it also requires teachers, clergy, businesspeople, community
leaders, and “those who protect our health and safety.” Indeed, “it takes all
of us.” And “it takes a president.”
Twenty years ago, as half of one of the most scrutinized,
most mysterious marriages in American political history, Hillary Clinton could
do no more than stand by her man and endorse a president she said was necessary
to raising happy, healthy, hopeful children. Now she is on the verge of being
such a president herself, not only the first female commander-in-chief but, by
her own account, the first social worker–in–chief of any description. If
elected, she will have more power than ever before to help people solve their
problems and live their dreams.
As the late political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain
noted, however, Clinton’s amorphous village, indispensable to raising children
despite being everywhere yet nowhere, consists of “organizations and
initiatives and policies and experts fanning out across the countryside to
‘help’ people in various ways, whether the people in question have asked for it
or not.” Elshtain saw Clinton’s blithe self-assurance, dangerous to her
political cause and to the objects of her solicitude, in the fact that It Takes
a Village invariably shows the people who have received help responding with
“gratitude and appreciation, never irritation or perplexity or ‘mind your own
business.’” The busybodies of yesteryear’s small villages were censorious. But
because the credentialed ones in the new global village are therapeutic, the
possibility that they will be similarly overbearing or resented seems never to
occur to Clinton.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton encouraged the idea that she was
running for Bill Clinton’s third term. In 2016, she has done more to suggest
she is running for Barack Obama’s. If elected, however, the result is likely to
confirm Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s suggestion: Her apotheosis will be to serve
President Eleanor Roosevelt’s first term. Unlike 1942, 2016 offers no global
crisis giving rise to the idea of drafting every American and telling each what
to do. Rather, Clinton’s success will turn on whether Americans, when assured
it is for the abiding need to pursue their dreams and raise their children, are
amenable or resistant to complying with the government’s wishes and doing the
things those in authority think should be done.
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