The Roots of Political Gridlock

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                                                   (Part 2 of a 3 part series)

     Americans, contrary to what some scholars and many political pundits have consistently suggested, have been and remain profoundly influenced by ideology. The insistence that American politics is best explained by non-ideological considerations has inspired a long and well-documented literature in America which resonates to the present. Even today, some American intellectuals are afflicted by this peculiar aversion to the world of ideas; their aversion prompts them to deny that the political views of ordinary citizens are shaped by ideas. They  reject the basic insight derived from phenomenological philosophy - i.e. that people participate in a shared perception of social reality that is often based upon a mutually-shared worldview.

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     Daniel Boorstin was not unique among American historians who have denied that the political perceptions of Americans are shaped by a political philosophy,  "The genius of American democracy comes not from any special virtue of the American people but from the unprecedented opportunities of this continent and from a peculiar and unrepeatable combination of historical circumstances. These circumstances have given our institutions their character and their virtues. The very same facts which explain these virtues, explain also our inability to make a 'philosophy' of them. They explain our lack of interest in political theory, and why we are doomed to failure in any attempt to sum up our way of life in slogans and dogmas..."

     Boorstin insisted that the antipathy to political theory which Americans express is based upon a sound conviction that "an explicit political theory is superfluous because we already possess a satisfactory equivalent...the belief that values in America are in some way or other automatically defined: given by certain facts of geography or history peculiar to us."
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    Unfortunately this kind of argument -which endorses the myth of "American exceptionalism" -is profoundly ahistorical and anti-intellectual. Essentially, it denies that humans are sentient beings who understand social reality based upon the sets of ideas which constitute their worldview. From where did the ideas of the Founders come? If American values are always implicit in American institutions, were the implicit values just randomly chosen from some kind of intellectual smorgasbord, or was the creation of these institutions the result of some overarching design--i.e. a political theory? Did the choice of institutions create the values which Boorstin praises as "a perfect and complete political theory," or did the chosen values create the institutions?

     An important part of the explanation for this tendency to dismiss or minimize the role of a political philosophy in informing our understanding of U.S. politics, personally and collectively, is the pervasive and often unconscious acceptance of a legacy of ideas derived from John Locke's liberalism. In fact, the origin of the very pragmatism or common sense for which Americans so often laud themselves may be traced back to the epistemological concepts that emerged after the Protestant Reformation. These ideas were systematically explicated in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
 

    Subsequently, this penchant for "common sense" reasoning was transmitted to the New World where it was popularized by Puritan divines such as Jonathan Edwards and became part of what has been described as the New England Mind. To quote  Harvard Historian Louis Hartz in his justly  famous book, The Liberal Tradition in America,  "Pragmatism, interestingly enough America's greatest contribution to philosophic tradition...feeds itself on the Lockean settlement. It is only when you take your ethics for granted that all problems emerge as problems of technique." By the 18th century,  as Carl Becker once noted, "Most Americans had absorbed Locke's works as a kind of political gospel; and the Declaration, in its form, in its phraseology follows certain sentences in Locke's second treatise on government."

     Jefferson, Madison and John Adams, among many others, were intimately familiar with the most minute details of Locke's political philosophy. Jefferson, in fact, was so impressed by Locke's arguments that he read Locke's treatise on civil government three times and used Locke's compact theory of government to justify the American Revolution, just as Locke's treatise had, almost a century before, been interpreted to justify the "Glorious Revolution" of 1680 and the ouster of the Catholic Stuart kings.  

    Francis Fukuyama, a zealous defender of the U.S. political status-quo, acknowledges in his tome, The End of History, that "The American founding was thoroughly if not wholly imbued with the ideas of John Locke. Thomas Jefferson's 'self-evident' truths about the right of men to Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were not essentially different from Locke's natural rights to life and property."

     As he further  observes, "The principles underlying American democracy, codified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were based on the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and the other American Founding Fathers who in turn derived many of their ideas from the English liberal tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. If we are to uncover the self-understanding of the world's oldest liberal democracy--a self-understanding that has been adopted by many democratic societies outside North America--we need to go back to the political writings of Hobbes and Locke."

       The historical record shows that Alexander Hamilton and John Jay also uncritically accepted Locke's argument that one of the primary duties of government was to protect private property; and they invoked Locke's argument to urge an end to the Articles of Confederation. British political theorist Harold Laski has argued that " The view taken by Madison was fully shared by such contemporaries as Jefferson, Marshall, and Alexander Hamilton. It was responsible for that interpretation of the Constitution which, under the masterful Chief Judgeship of Marshall, gave to the claims of property its special place in the American system. Their whole purpose was to prevent the invasion of those claims by the masses, and they were successful in that effort."

      Because the U.S. constitutional system, as devised by the Founding Fathers, is essentially an extension and an endorsement of Locke's politics, Locke's political philosophy has become the scripture from which almost all subsequent American political thought has been divined; it is the primary inspiration for what is commonly known as the American Creed.

    In England, Locke's ideas were subsequently refined and further elaborated by David Hume and Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. His political doctrine, however, was also vigorously challenged by a number of English critics during the nineteenth and the twentieth century.  By contrast, here in the United States, Locke's ideas, to borrow a phrase from John Kenneth Galbraith, gained acceptance as the "conventional wisdom." Thus, during the intervening centuries, legions of American thinkers, politicians and pundits have embraced the liberalism of Locke's political philosophy, either as a matter of conscious preference or cultural inheritance.

    In point of fact, Locke's political philosophy has so successfully and thoroughly insinuated itself into American political thinking that it has created significant intellectual confusion. Today many Americans describe themselves as conservatives despite the fact that the core values that they profess owe their debt Locke rather than to Thomas Aquinas or Edmund Burke; their values are thus profoundly liberal. Ironically, those whom these self-described conservatives often derisively dismiss as liberals are those who generally share the same commitment to Locke's ideas and his political legacy as they, although they may differ about specific policy prescriptions and the proper role of government.

     This confusion is so pervasive that Herbert Hoover, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush and his father, to cite recent examples, are invariably described as conservatives, although each of these individuals have expressed political ideas that have little in common with the tradition of conservatism as a political philosophy.
    
    More than two centuries after the founding of this republic, the constitutional system that is based upon Locke's ideas exhibits pronounced signs of advanced institutional atherosclerosis. Further, because the process required to amend the federal constitution is so arduous, meaningful institutional reform is virtually impossible. As a consequence, American liberal democracy together with the market economy - which is based upon those same liberal values and ideas - have become irrelevant for millions upon millions of American citizens who see little reason for optimism since they have effectively been frozen out of the political system.

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