Harry V. Jaffa continues to inspire a few on the American Right and haunt the rest. Glenn Ellmers’s The Soul of Politics is the most extended example of Jaffa’s tutelary spirit tutoring the post-conservative Right. Peter Berkowitz’s recent review of Ellmers’s book is an instructive illustration of Jaffa’s ghost troubling the mind of a still-conservative thinker.
Berkowitz tacitly accepts Aristotle as the standard for moral and political virtue, but his review is based on misunderstandings of the “moderation” of virtue as well as the meaning of prudence. As a result, he misses the mark in criticizing Jaffa and his heirs, and (far worse) blinds himself to the condition of the actually existing American regime—the one we inhabit, not the one we have all read about.
Berkowitz accuses Jaffa of political schizophrenia: on the one hand, of having a “love-hate relationship with moderation,” of “championing extremism and demoting moderation,” of “prais[ing] immoderation,” of endorsing “uninhibited rhetoric and drastic measures,” of training his followers to “press an apocalyptic diagnosis of contemporary liberal democracy in America,” and yet, on the other hand, of devoting his scholarly pursuits to “monumental figures who identified moderation and prudence as virtues essential to ethics and politics,” namely, Aristotle and Lincoln. As a result, Berkowitz contends, “Jaffa’s life’s work represents both an extended case for moderation and prudent statesmanship and an invitation to immoderation.”
Berkowitz never quite explains what was “immoderate” about Jaffa’s words and deeds, but he points to Jaffa’s spirited arguments with peers on the right, the alleged political extremism of his heirs at the Claremont Institute, and, of course, the famous lines he penned for Goldwater: “I would remind you that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
The first point, Jaffa’s argumentativeness, is certainly a civic virtue and, if one considers it under the species of truth-telling, also a virtue important for the highest forms of friendship. One could almost imagine a chastened interlocutor saying of Socrates what William F. Buckley said of Jaffa: “If you think it’s hard to argue with Harry Jaffa, try agreeing with him.” One would think any self-proclaimed defender of classical liberalism would err on the side of giving robust debate the benefit of the doubt. Spirited debate among thick-skinned citizen-thinkers is a necessary condition for liberal societies to reap the reward of free speech: the victory of hard-won truth over various sophistries and mistakes. If free speech is to have any positive political purpose (in addition to the negative purpose: depriving the state of more excuses to oppress those it wishes to oppress), surely it requires verbal brawlers like Jaffa.
The second point, the alleged extremism of the Claremonsters, and the third, the famous Goldwater lines deployed by Berkowitz as evidence of Jaffa’s extremism, are errors that result from mistaking moderation for centrism. It is true that Aristotle’s moral virtues are each a mean with respect to two extremes. But “with respect to what is best and the doing of something well, [virtue] is an extreme” (Nicomachean Ethics 1107a6). The mean, courage, is truly “extreme” in the sense that it far outstrips both cowardice and recklessness in nobility. It is also apparently “extreme”: the vicious judges of the virtuous man will fault him for extremity, either his excess or his deficiency, rather than rightly perceive his moderation between the extremes. Moreover, the bent of a given individual—or the condition of a given polity—might require aiming for the opposite extreme in order to hit upon the mean. We might say that, just as the best man and the best citizen are the same only in the best regime, so too are centrism and moderation the same only in the best regime, the best political order in the best of times.
Berkowitz laments the “extremism” of the Claremonsters’s diagnosis of America. But the most important question is whether or not the diagnosis is accurate. The correct diagnosis might warrant an extreme prescription. A correct diagnosis of cancer might warrant “treatments” that would be insane—would be forms of torture, not healing—if administered to a healthy body. An already-healthy body living in a salubrious environment does not need to make any radical changes to preserve its health. But an unhealthy body may require an “extreme” treatment. It is similar with the body politic. The correct diagnosis of contemporary American might warrant an extreme prescription: Ellmers’s “restorationism,” not Berkowitz’s “conservatism.” (It’s worth noting that mere “restorationism” warrants, in Berkowitz’s eyes, this condemnation of extremity. He’s not even accusing Ellmers or Ellmers’s Jaffa of out-and-out reactionary thought—only of doing what one can to restore the principles of our regime and approximate once more the necessary conditions for those principles to operate. This is to Berkowitz’s credit.)
The relevant practical questions are always: first, what is the state of our polity? And second, what can be done to improve it? If the answer to the first is “pretty bad,” then the correct answer to the second might be “something that seems extreme to those who do not perceive the same problem.” (I am setting aside, for Berkowitz does not entertain it as a possibility, the view that the body politic is horribly diseased, but that any attempted remedy would be worse than allowing the disease to run its course.) And that perception is the key: prudence is the ability to perceive the conditions one finds oneself in and what is the best and most noble action in that situation. Prudence is not a set of principles, and it is not abstracted from particulars: it is the intellectual virtue that governs the moral virtues, and the moral virtues are always exercised in particular cases, relative to conditions beyond one’s control. Ethical and political prudence are sights to behold precisely because they wed the good to the practical, the absolute to the relative, the rigid adherence to nobility to the necessary flexibility of realism.
Berkowitz’s most substantial criticism of Jaffa and Ellmers’s Jaffa is found near his conclusion:
Ellmers overlooks that so sweeping a repudiation of contemporary America and such grand dreams of restoration blur, and contribute to the destruction of, the nation’s precious heritage—that is, to borrow Jaffa’s words, “the moral unity that underlies the moral diversity.” Even amid today’s acrimony and vituperation, the simple but defining belief in the freedom and equality of all human beings can still be observed in the opinions and conduct—however misguided their policy preferences—of many on the left as well as the right. This abiding conviction should serve as the foundation for rededication to the task of conserving a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Here we see Berkowitz disagree with the conditions on the ground. The Claremonsters are zealous because they see, as Berkowitz does not, that the “moral unity” underlying our “moral diversity” has been under assault for decades, and—this is the crucial point, distinguishing them from their more complacent conservative brethren—that that assault has had an effect. No self-proclaimed conservative would deny the long duration of this assault, but many, such as Berkowitz, seem in denial about the fact that this assault has succeeded in part, and so the body politic has become diseased and weakened.
Berkowitz comforts us with the suggestion that “many on the left as well as right” are still animated by “the simple but defining belief in the freedom and equality of all human beings,” and that this is apparent in their “opinions and conduct.” The Claremont contention today is that the agenda of our ruling class is radically opposed to freedom and equality rightly understood, that is, as the Founders understood them and as the early generations of the Republic lived them.
Berkowitz also ignores the fact that the law educates: the Claremonsters’s urgency comes not only from their immediate objections to the unjust policies of the ruling class, but also to their anxiety about how these policies will miseducate and malform future Americans. What is law for this generation may be mores for the next.
And all that is to say nothing of the extent to which ruling class mores (“opinions and conduct”) are already divorced from freedom and equality rightly understood. Was the annus horribilis of 2020 not sufficient evidence that our ruling class has wholly abandoned a regime of natural rights (to property and self-defense, to say nothing of the lockdowns), equality before the law (equal enforcement of those lockdowns on public gatherings, woke or deplorable), and republican self-government (free from the interference of those in the federal bureaucracy, the military, and the security-and-surveillance state)?
Apparently not, at least not to those who still understand themselves to be conservative. Berkowitz is correct that the belief in human equality does remain in the American people, but he unconvincingly downplays the alienation of the ruling class from this heritage, while ignoring the damage they will continue to do if they are not defeated and removed far from the levers of power. And he is correct, again, that this belief in human equality is the right “foundation for rededication to the task” before us. But this is largely a task of restoration, not mere conservation. Today, it is a soft centrism posing as principled moderation that imperils the exercise of liberty, both individual and political, and the pursuit of justice for all.
see my facebook post attacking Peter B's "review" https://www.facebook.com/clifford.bates/posts/10159842262668724
Welcome Pavlos! And good to see you this past weekend