Harvey Mansfield, "Who and What Are Republicans?"
With Commentary by Professor Thomas Miles
Harvey Mansfield is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has been on the faculty since 1962. A leading conservative intellectual and political theorist, he is the author and co-translator of studies of major political philosophers such as Aristotle, Burke, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and Hobbes. He has been a Carol G. Simon Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among the Harvard students whom he has influenced are Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, Bill Kristol, Paul Cantor, and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Thomas Miles is Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics and the Walter Mander Research Scholar at the Law School. He writes primarily in the areas of criminal justice and judicial behavior. He currently teaches securities regulation and first-year criminal law. He received a BA from Tufts University, a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, and a JD from Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk to the Judge Jay Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Starting November 1, Professor Miles will be Dean of the Law School.
Recorded October 19, 2015, and presented by the Law School Republicans and the Federalist Society.
Transcript
Announcer: This audio file is a production of the University of Chicago Law School. Visit us on the web at www.law.uchicago.edu.
Host: All right. Thank you all so much for coming. Welcome! On behalf of the Law School Republicans and the Federalist Society, we are really thrilled to welcome someone who is best described as a living legend. I really do mean that. Any list of the five most important conservative intellectuals in America today not having Harvey Mansfield is a list not worth the paper it's written on I would say. He's been a fixture in Harvard's department for about 50 years or so since the Kennedy Administration. He's really been a paragon of heterodoxy in the liberal academy, if I can say that. Amongst his mentees over the years have included Bill Crystal, Ross Douthat at the New York Times and now the junior senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton. He's written authoritatively on Western thought leaders going back to Edmund Burke and we're really pleased to have him talking about the present character of the Republican party. Our commentary today also really needs no introduction, at least not around these parts. Incoming Dean of the Law School Professor Thomas Miles. He teaches primarily criminal law and researchers criminal law and judicial behavior. He obtained his PhD in economics from University of Chicago and his DF from Harvard Law School. After graduating, he clerked for Judge Bybee on the Ninth Circuit. And, uh, that's really it. So please join me in welcoming Harvey Mansfield, everyone.
Prof. Mansfield: Thank you Josh. Ladies and gentlemen and Dean Miles. It's a pleasure to be back in Chicago at the university that I most admire. I'm not in social science, I'm in political philosophy. I'm actually against social science. So I'm going to try to rely on my perspicacity to connect with your judgment about work in social science. I will be using my perspicacity to eliminate perspicacity. So I'm not going to do that. What I will do is talk mostly about Republicans, but not incidentally about the Democrats as well because the two parties are pretty much entangled with each other. A fact that most political scientists underestimate.
Prof. Mansfield: Also, you will see that I am a serial transgressor of the fact-value distinction. So let's start with the liberals. Liberals in our country defend progress. They are progressives. They face the difficulty that equality, which is what they think progress is heading towards, seems impossible to define and heedless in it's never ending motion. Though it claims to be more rational than custom, tradition, and common sense, it relies on simple-minded principles and unthinking passionate. It's suffers from faults it fails to acknowledge. The clumsiness of administering its programs, their cost, and its lack of prudence in dealing with foreign enemies as opposed to a skill in defeating conservatives at home. Conservatives face the difficulty of countering the impression that progress is inevitable and irresistible, and so if generally playing defense and reacting to the initiatives of their opponent, they have the faults of progressivism to work against and have enjoyed success by electing conservatives more than by reversing so called progress.
Prof. Mansfield: If liberals are the party of government, conservatives are the party of responsible government. Their responsibility being to make the best of a bad situation. But the battle over progress does not completely define our parties. In this battle, liberals have the advantage because they call for more democracy in a democratic country. While in the same situation, conservatives are stuck with defending inequality. The liberals' advantage is not confined to this point. Liberals also say that they are cruising on the tide of history, the winning side, as well as fighting on the side of justice, the right side, thus claiming credit for both greater power and greater morality. With the entitlements they favor, they appeal to each citizen's desire to live in security and in comfort when young or old or poor, thus satisfying conservative instincts and attaching them to liberal programs.
Prof. Mansfield: That fusion brings the spirit of conservatism to the support of innovation and leaves the party of conservatism to defend the status quo or it can attack the status quo and either reform it or revolutionize it. In the face of liberal progress, conservatives have a choice. They must either go slow with reform or back to an older, better day. If they go slow, they must accept and take responsibility for improving the liberal status quo. If refusing this responsibility, they go back to some better time in the past, like the Reagan revolution, you know, the Republican revolution, they may frighten the country and also themselves. Moreover, and it's probably not possible to make one of these choices and stick to it. Reformers will find themselves in need of a principle with which to resist the liberals. Revolutionaries will find it necessary at some point to want to win. The way to understand this dilemma since it probably cannot be escaped, is to consider more frankly the objection to liberal progress towards ever greater equality.
Prof. Mansfield: This objection in practice amounts to the defense of inequality by conservatives or Republicans. Democrats are the inclusive party. Their drive toward equality is aimed at including as equal all those presently considered unequal. Those who lack security and are in one way or another by incapacity, lack of virtue, or bad luck, vulnerable. Republicans are the exclusive party. They believe that some people are better than others and deserve to be honored or rewarded for this. They are the party of virtue. I call them that even though they do not make that claim themselves. They would probably speak of values rather than virtue in fear of the prudish connotation of that lovely antique word. They would also probably call themselves the party of liberty and reject the boastful claim of being more virtuous so invidious in a democracy. But they want not any liberty, but the virtuous uses of liberty. Liberty used to the end of supporting an honoring of virtue as opposed to lazy or licentious living.
Prof. Mansfield: Republicans are of course also the party of money as well as virtue. Anyone particularly attracted to either virtue or money is very likely to be a Republican. The obvious problem being that these two things are not identical. Recently, many of the Wall Street and technology rich have been supporting the Democrats, just challenging the association of virtue and money while illustrating the subordination of money to virtue. For they find virtue in lack of virtue, as Republicans see it. For example, in same sex marriage. Republicans tried to conceive virtue and money as close, if not identical. The success in money as justly earned. Money a consequences of virtue. They believe in the free market as an institution, both democratic as open to all and just as rewarding merit. In general with the idea of getting ahead, they do their best to reconcile the inequality of virtue with the equality of democracy.
Prof. Mansfield: Democrats say that inequality is a matter of privilege, which is luck not virtue. They say this especially about gaining wealth, but the more sophisticated ones will say the same of honors gained through talent or intelligence. They reserve their indignation, however, for those wealthy in money, and they give a pass to those rich in another sense. Those outstanding in honor or public esteem and recognition are not attacked as the latter might include professors, at least in the opinion of professors. Democrats do not object to the inequality of the talented, the intelligent, the celebrated who are on their side. Now those who are uncomfortable about being wealthy in money will be Democrats, even if they are rich. Those convinced that the wealthy deserve their wealth will be Republicans even if they are poor and perhaps even if they are envious. To be a Democrat is to believe that government must above all, not incidentally, be concerned with counteracting ill luck.
Prof. Mansfield: To be a Republican is to believe that government should sustain rather than punish the virtuous citizens and incidentally help out those who through no fault of their own do not succeed in managing their own lives. Certainly one's interest influences one's ideas, but it is more certain that one's ideas can correct one's interest, and thus remained sovereign over it. This way of regarding them, our parties look different from a division between liberals and conservatives over progress, in which liberals have the upper hand. Now it is conservatives who take the initiative and stand up for something rather than always being against something. They make the positive assertion in favor virtue to which liberals must react. In doing so they follow a different and older political science then that of the progressives which is based on John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.
Prof. Mansfield: The difference that I'm talking about, the difference over virtue, comes from Aristotle and Tocqueville. Aristotle said that societies are divided in the main into democracies and oligarchies, those governed by the many and those governed by the few. Tocqueville presents Aristotle in modern dress which means in the perhaps inferior circumstances that humans now live in a democratic age and do not have a viable choice between democracy and oligarchy or aristocracy. Actually, a modern liberal democracy permits the few known as elites to gain mostly unopposed honor and advantage over the many as long as opportunity for rising appears to be more or less equal and open. And if our democracy is less democratic than Aristotle's, which was based on the rule of the indigent, so our oligarchies are more democratic than his because it offers the opportunity to many to rise. Tocqueville says that in every free society, there are two great parties resting on two opinions.
Prof. Mansfield: They are as old as the world for these parties. One of them wants to restrict popular power, the other wants to extend it indefinitely. In this formulation, Aristotle's two parties are stated in terms of one of them, the democratic. The oligarchy appears as a naysayer rather than as the initiator of choice so that both parties focus on the people, the power of the people rather than the whole they aim at. From the standpoint of power, democracy is about majority rule and equality is not so much the overriding end as it is in the progressive view of things. As the means to majority rule, democracy in action as democratic governor. Two meanings of democracy: democracy as ever more equality and democracy as majority rule. The difference is that democracy as majority rule faces the possibility that the majority may vote against greater equality, that the majority might on occasion be conservative or composed of Republicans. So in that way, the Democrats don't look on themselves as, as the bearers of inevitable progress. Their progress must constantly be defended against conservatives.
Prof. Mansfield: So it was that the American founders Federalist Party, which was responsible for the Constitution and which Tocqueville calls and an aristocratic party was overborne by the Democratic Party in the election of 1800. Since that time, America has been democratic as a whole and the distinction that James Madison tried to maintain in 1787 between a republic: good and a democracy: bad has been abandoned. When the Republican party was formed in 1854, it was a popular party but still a virtue party. Abraham Lincoln made sure of that. And in doing so, set an example for today. The conservative need today is to recognize the basis of conservatism in virtue and to make virtue democratic suitably to our time. Lincoln's opposition to slavery took America back to the Declaration of Independence more than to the Constitution. The latter being what he called the frame of silver. The Constitution he calls the frame of silver, but the Declaration is the apple of gold. Phrases from the Bible. This is the democratic principle in its extreme by Aristotle's analysis, the principle used by Lincoln to abolish the distinction between free and slave. A distinction that Aristotle thought to be endemic to human life.
Prof. Mansfield: Perhaps Aristotle was not altogether wrong. I never hesitate to mention Aristotle at the University of Chicago. Perhaps he wasn't altogether wrong because he understood freedom to be as much a human accomplishment through virtue as a gift from nature. Perfect without a human contribution. As he explained it, nature has the capacity for freedom and the capacity to get in the capacity for virtue as opposed to animal instinct. It is up to men to make themselves free through education and politics by engaging this capacity. Lincoln took heed of nature's requirement of virtue as well as nature's gift of equality. Freedom is an attainment, a right to be free and be treated as free, not a right to be left alone and to be respected regardless of how freedom is used. For one thing, freedom must not be used by citizens in elections to impose slavery on others. Contrary to Steven Douglass theory of popular sovereignty. Free citizens must be morally disposed against slavery, so it's not tolerated.
Prof. Mansfield: Equality should be understood as equal rights; a standard maxim constantly constantly looked to though never perfectly attained. The Constitution tolerates or tolerated slavery, but only in a manner that does not fix it in politics and in preparation for the day when free citizens would be willing to abolish it. Lincoln subordinates the Constitution to the Declaration by infusing it with the spirit of equality, and at the same time he specifies that spirit by explaining how the Constitution will bring it about with the free consent of citizens. For the South was coerced only when it refused assent to a President duly elected under the constitution, namely Lincoln, under the Constitution that it had consented to. Lincoln had more to say about promoting virtue in a democracy. In a less well known speech of 1857, to the Wisconsin state agricultural society, he speaks to farmers, the most numerous class, having the most votes he remarks not entirely as a joke.
Prof. Mansfield: These farmers are not stupid peasants. They are always using their minds. They know the difference between doing one's work and doing it well, and they take pride in the latter. They do their work thoroughly, which means with an eye to how it might be improved and made more productive. They know therefore that labor and education are compatible, and that labor is not slavish, nor is it a punishment, but on the contrary, makes one free. Free labor is earned freedom, freedom with virtue in the moral and intellectual as well as the physical world. It justifies the hope that the course of the world quote Shelby "onward and upward." This is progress as it was presented before the progressives to which conservatives in a democracy might repair. A progress without the mindless extension of equality, the numbing guarantee of historical inevitability. The well-meaning oppressiveness of big government. The sludge of bureaucracy. And the curse of demagoguery. For in one of the typical beauties of his rhetoric, Lincoln expressly warns the Wisconsin farmers that he is going to flatter before proceeding to do so, and he gets away with it: announcing his flattery while practicing it. Virtue to do its work needs an agreeable presentation. Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party, the less self-knowing party is the only American politician who had something to say about what he is saying.
Prof. Mansfield: Now it's time to speak of virtue as it is in the Democrats. Republicans, the virtue party, do not have a monopoly of virtue because humans cannot live without passing value judgments, prizing some activities and some humans over others. Democrats have no difficulty in stating their virtues, even if they would not volunteer them. Their virtues are those of inclusiveness which have two opposites, compassion and justice. Both aim at suckering the vulnerable and the weak, but compassionate comes readily from the heart while justice comes out of indignation against the few and applies coercion to enforce compliance with the demands of the many. Compassionate is undiscriminating and justice is focused. Democrats prefer them to generosity. Republican virtue of giving freely and well. Generosity to Democrats seems hit or miss and arbitrary. Its very voluntariness causes those who practice it to pump themselves up about the rest of us, which is the general objection that Democrats have to virtue. They would rather have taxation, universal in principle and rationally selective in application. This is the coercion of the whole.
Prof. Mansfield: There can also be a wholesome solution from the whole of Republicans who denied the virtues of the whole, the virtues that focus on the vulnerable. For Democrats, the whole is a whole of those who put inclusiveness first. For this reason, no causes more congenial to the Democrats than environmentalism, both as to the climate and as to ecology. The danger from climate change here a scientifically neutral euphemism for warming includes everyone, and equalizes everyone by exposing the equal vulnerability of all humans. All are guilty too, but the most successful, supposedly most virtuous humans are the most guilty. Guilty of what? Having made the most technological progress while inspired by the most advanced science. Fortunately, science has technological remedies for climate change, so the progressives do not have to turn against science and forsake it's ambiguous help. In our woes of excess warmth, science will make us more equal and less vain of our triumphs over nature.
Prof. Mansfield: Together with two valuable political consequences which will have more big government and more redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor ones. Science will be morally improved by turning it and turning it to the task of sustaining rather than exploiting nature. Science will indeed secure the triumph of human morality. Instead of seeking to increase the pounds of human empire, a la Francis Bacon, putting man back into his place, an equal place, not a separate kingdom in nature will be true progress toward equality and sobering inclusiveness to boot. When taken to the limit, Democrats are the party of ambition against all human ambition. Since the 1970s, since then particularly the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, Democrats have defended the right of abortion fervently, with increasingly partisan conformity so that now no strong opponent would be with the Democrats. The vehemence of abortion supporters betrays a strong moral indignation against the other side for keeping women down in the status of the second sex bound to motherhood.
Prof. Mansfield: Their Republican opponents, Democrats think, do not want to allow women to join men as equals, both in career opportunities and in sexual liberation. Thus, there's is a demand for inclusiveness in the new gender neutral society that has been created by feminism. Feeling on this issue runs high on both sides, but that in support of abortion is more remarkable because it runs against any maternal inclination and serves only to make career more convenient and sex more available. Women are slightly more than half of Americans, the most do not follow feminism too, it's quite demanding extremes. All of them are open to the judgment that women are often put upon by men.
Prof. Mansfield: Feminism has a stranglehold on American universities, not just threatening but actually squeezing an important role, at least a veto power, in the Democratic Party. By its interest in safeguarding women's careers, feminism has made its peace with capitalism and with the bohemian bourgeoisie of Hollywood moguls and would be technocrats. Thus enabling Democrats to dispense with Marxism though not of course with government, big government. Democratic women like to work for the government and to be active in public employee unions. Republican women are more likely to appreciate the advantages of femininity which grace the virtues of a woman as distinct from those of a man. They might think that women are better than men in some regards whereas Democratic women believe that the two sexes are roughly the same and that men treat women as inferiors accidentally and unnecessarily. Above all, women, Republican women believe in feminine modesty and Democratic women if they practice it, do not believe in it.
Prof. Mansfield: A word should be added on libertarians whom I haven't yet discussed. Libertarians hold to the sovereignty of the free market as far as they can. The free market, they believe, substitutes for the government of men who have special interests as all men do that disqualify them as just and impartial rulers. But since government is needed to regulate these special interest, the rule of law is altogether necessary and desirable, and libertarians are not anarchists. They can be quite fierce unbending and enforcing the law if law has been the product of just consent in a fair system of representation. They do not like the executive and judicial discretion. However, however wise or responsive to emergencies, because it clouds the calculations and expectations of free citizens. Libertarians are leftists of the right or rightists of the left. They can go left in company with Democrats demanding abortion rights for women or they can go right with Republicans who justify inequalities arising from the accidents of a free market.
Prof. Mansfield: Though they are the party of self interested calculation, hostile to the demands of virtue, they can be quite surprisingly moralistic in defense of the freedom expressed in spontaneous order. The concept of their philosopher Friedrich Hayek, readers of Ayn Rand know that they have their heroes too. Libertarians caused trouble for both parties wanting as they do to eat their cake mainly by allowing inequality and have it to, namely by not imposing it. They do not cause trouble for an analysis based on a duality of the parties, however, even though they stand for a whole that just happens without anyone's carrying for it, and for freedom that needs no instruction in virtue. Because the Democrats are the party of the people, they are free to be less scrupulous than Republicans who are more earnest and upright. Upright equals uptight. Both have their scandals, but Democrats get away from there's more readily.
Prof. Mansfield: and do not suffer guilt. To see the difference, contrast the most outstanding recent scandals of each party, those of Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Nixon had to face his embarrassed party and resigned in shame. Clinton's party supported him readily with a dismissive shrug at his, at his misbehavior, and both he and his party prospered. Whatever the faults of Democrats, they automatically mean well as being on the side of the people which is also the winning side, the party of history. The Republicans' virtue compels them to defend propriety and the conventions that the more virtuous erect to identify themselves and which they too readily take satisfaction wearing suits.
Prof. Mansfield: Republicans take pride in being shocked; Democrats in not being shocked. Thus as a dinner companion, one would prefer the beguiling charm of a Democrat to the stiffness of a Republican. For a spouse, however, one might prefer a person capable of shame. As the more inclusive party, Democrats are more informal than Republicans. For Democrats, formalities are barriers, closing off the warmth of feeling known to them through their scientific psychology as empathy. Republicans are suspicious of psychology. That is the modern psychology that speaks of the self, not the soul, and so has nothing to say of the beautiful soul. They sense its hostility to virtue, particularly the virtue of self reliance, so contrary to its therapy of self excusing. But Democrats love with the sort of care that makes few demands on the recipient. They do give the impression of course that they would be happy if the recipient got off his tough far enough to show gratitude to Democrats with his vote, but they always want to make it easier to vote, and they prefer automatic voters voting their interests or their identity to conscientious ones who might think about it.
Prof. Mansfield: Republicans believe that virtue is efficacious. If you are honest and hardworking, you will succeed in making a living with more or less comfort for yourself and your family. This means that society is, on the whole, just. It rewards the deserving. A just society needs to be supported by a just God to correct for human imperfections, and Republicans tend to be church goers and worshippers more than Democrats. Many Democrats go to church too, but to liberal churches that preach compassion for human weakness rather than assistance to the virtuous. Republican speak of sin or vice, though less frequently than they used to. Democrats omit sin and denounce the vices of the powerful and rich. Republicans will agree to help government help the truly needy of suspecting description they'd like to use, but in a spirit of generosity than justice. With Democrats, virtue was not efficacious and society is not just. Things are stacked against the various vulnerable groups and they have no real chance to show their virtue.
Prof. Mansfield: Indeed, their virtue may be held against them if they tried despite their handicap so powerful is prejudice compared to virtue. The vulnerable are victims in need of the government's protection and assistance who suffer from the callous neglect of the pseudo-virtuous. According to Republicans, however, the welfare state has encouraged the disastrous loss of virtue in America. In America, the welfare state came later than in the social democracies of Europe under the title of "the Great Society." The name suggests an intent to avoid it's being confused with socialism and the lassitude that develops when government pays one's bills. Just as Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats have been careful to deny that permanent relief was their plan, but the name also appeals to America's desire for greatness. With the crushing victory in the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson became the author and legislator of the ambitious transformation of America that began with a War on Poverty. Rick Everstat's fine analysis, that war, despite its bureaucratic overhead and naive scientific optimism, was actually won at a huge cost estimated by Everstat is about a trillion dollars annually.
Prof. Mansfield: Poverty as it was in the 1960s has been nearly eliminated. It was a startling sign of the incompetence with which this was accomplished was the fact that the measure of improvement in the war on poverty, the government's poverty index has not moved down at all since the war began. According to the official measure, poverty is held it's own. So much is progress impeded by its own machinery that it cannot identify its success. Or what news of success be inconvenient for Democrats who would like to spend still more and whose party depends on finding evermore poverty to overcome. Believing in the irreversibility of their progress, Democrats easily conceive when they encounter opposition that all may be lost in a moment.
Prof. Mansfield: If the returning to the past is assumed impossible, the slightest incidence of conservative prejudice can make it seem probable. History, with it's supposed inevitability, is as little reliable as virtue and as mysterious as God. You have the War on Poverty, the one has made the country worse, not better. Not because of the cost, but because the American people have been corrupted in a "tangle of pathologies." The phrase comes from Daniel Patrick Moynihan's notable report of 1965, used by him to describe the Black population, but now borrowed by Everstat to describe what has spread to all races and classes and can be found everywhere in America. The pathologies are welfare dependency, flight from work, and family breakdown. Each of these represents a failure of the virtue that philosophers have often thought necessary to the life of Republics. The virtue of self support, of taking satisfaction in one's work, and to living with responsibility for one's family.
Prof. Mansfield: These are bourgeois virtues perhaps but as my deceased colleague Judith Shklar once said to me, what other sort of virtue is there besides bourgeois virtue? These manifest countable indicators of failure and unhappiness began to drop coincidentally with the legislation of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and have worsened with its advance. The Everstat analysis may well be incomplete. However, the tangle of pathologies he shows to coincide with the welfare state also coincides with the rise and success of feminism beginning from the 1970s. The feminist desire to gain independence and dependence especially from men not only turned women away from motherhood and family toward careers, but also compelled them to abdicate their traditional role stressed by Tocqueville with many others and accepted by accepted by 19th century feminism of being in charge of morals and mores. One could say that women have held onto that role but used it differently. Instead of shaming sexual and other misconduct by both sexes, they used it to reprove oblivious male disregard at women's equality so that the quote raising consciousness method of feminism could be revealed as a moral complaint.
Prof. Mansfield: Women's virtue would no longer require the sacrifice of one's freedom to do as one pleases. A woman could also work for the government as a social worker combining career with caring for the casualties of the welfare state in feminism. On the other side is the minority of Republican women, for the Republicans are more and more a party of males and their feminine admirers who otherwise except what they like from feminism, and the Democrats, the party of women and their promoters who with risky, obsolete gallantry urge on the feminists. As electoral strategy, the Democrats have added the accusation against Republicans have a War on Women to compliment the War on Poverty that they approve of. Again, it is clear in regard to feminism as to the welfare state, that Democrats have not abandoned virtue but adapted it to programs that are mainly intended to substitute for virtue. Republicans, for all their love of money making and sometime worship of economics, bear the burden of defending virtue in a democracy. And yet, another gift,
Prof. Mansfield: it's necessary to lean against democratic egalitarianism, not so much because it is democratic but because it is elitist in inspiration. The few are always ministers of the few said Machiavelli. And this goes for the progressives too. They care for themselves and they can remind one of the defects of oligarchy as much as Republicans favoring the rich. Oblivious self satisfaction and unjustified superiority. Americans want to be a great people, not just another people like all the rest, and they locate their greatness mostly in they're great presidents, but those presidents from both parties. When one from the one from the party of inclusiveness like Jefferson or Franklin Roosevelt, shows the people what an aristocrat is, and when one from the virtue party like Lincoln or Ronald Reagan makes virtue popular rather than conceited. Thus one must not dismiss the ambition of the Great Society, even if it's in effect, it made Americans more dependent and less great.
Prof. Mansfield: Democrats and Republicans also differ over relativism, which is the term that Republicans used to disparage the multiculturalism of Democrats. Democrats have indeed shifted their thinking from progress with it's positive value to change, ostensibly neutral, but in practice the same as before. The individual rights they used to think the basis of progress have been eclipsed by the notion of culture. Formerly the ways of liberal society, it's culture were thought to be derived from knowledge of rights, but now it's the reverse. Culture is held to be the basis of that knowledge which is now demoted to mere belief. Democrats tend to accept with some hesitation in the older generation and among the uneducated, the discovery that all cultures are equal. Hence, the best culture is a multiculture. Democrats will therefore become indignant on principle about someone who holds a principle and will take offense at Republicans not so much for their principles as for having any principles that imply judgmental standards. With this development, taking offense becomes legitimate, replacing the calm toleration taught by earlier liberalism. Since every such standard amounts to an insult against the person or group judged. In this mess, confused Republicans inevitably old fashioned stick to their principles and often forget to arguing for them calling them values as if they could not and need not be defended.
Prof. Mansfield: You have your patios; I have mine. And to speak of defense, both parties are public spirited and patriotic, but each in its way. Republicans are much more likely to join the volunteer military, which performs well. To serve in the military is to make a career of sacrifice and risk. Those who do so cannot help taking pride in themselves and feeling some disdain for others they defend who live in easier, better rewarded life. Such people are Republican material. Democrats are more likely to work in the caring and regulatory parts of government as public employees in the clutch-ocracy. Servers who with their own entitlements serve themselves first. America is a country that stands for progress, progress and prosperity and freedom and science, but above all, progress in the practice of self government. Democrats have the party of government, the Democrats have brought down American estimation of their own government. It has done so even while changing the standard from the one that we all used to value namely self-government, to a much lower standard of government that cares. I'm going to end there. Thank you.
Prof. Mansfield: Thank you, Professor Mansfield for coming and joining us today. And thanks to the Federalist Society for inviting me to give comments on Professor Mansfield's wide-ranging and insightful remarks. I guess now I realize why I was invited; I guess I'm here to defend social science being someone who has a PhD in economics, and who has no shame about that. Along the way, I guess I also have to defend progress, feminists, and libertarians among others. I'll see if I can do all of that in just a few minutes. I think Professor Mansfield's absolutely correct in that it's very hard in the public imagination to want to be opposed to progress. I think when most people think about progress, they might think of statistics such as the following for someone born in what's now the United Kingdom in 1540, their life expectancy was 35.
Prof. Mansfield: It's now an excessive 80. So if Professor Mansfield and I had been born in 1540, neither one of us on average would be here to deliver comments and commentary. That seems to me like progress. It's hard to oppose that, but of course that's progress of a maybe technological and scientific variety which may be different from the leveling notion of equality that Professor Mansfield talks about. I mean, I wonder if in the public imagination those two things can be distinguished. I also wonder if, as a practical matter, the two can be distinguished. But I think the Professor's point about the idea of evermore equality being understood as the equivalence of progress, and yet we wonder where, where does it end? Is there a stopping point? Is they're appointed, which we have obtained sufficient degree of equality in such that society can no longer needs no longer finds it necessarily to push on that frontier.
Prof. Mansfield: I think that's an interesting question, but it also makes me wonder about whether or not we can ask of conservatives a similar question, which is to say why defend the status quo? Or should we harken back to some earlier age? When was the political Eden, and maybe given Professor Mansfield's comments on feminism, political Eden is the right analogy because now we understand it's all Eve's fault. Is it 1905? Lochner? Is that... the year of the Lochner decision? Is that the Golden Age in which conservatives should be pushing back to? Or 1787 when the Constitution, which let's not forget, included the three-fifths compromise, or should we go all the way back to 399 BC to the Trial of Socrates? When was the moment of ideal virtue to which conservatives should defend and push back? A second sort of reaction that occurred to me was that there's a certain irony about the progressive enterprise that maybe should be emphasized and used for those people who seek to criticize it.
Dean Miles: I'm in that, is that in promoting equality through government it often requires the creation of structures that are themselves unequal or they create undemocratic accumulations of power. To give some, some examples, of course, think of just the administrative state, a vast bureaucracy containing many unelected officials exercise wide ranges of discretion, which is to say power. Power that's not checked by majority rule. Or think of the Federal Reserve System - in effect, a private banking system that wields enormous power over the economy. In contemporary science, I wonder if these examples provide opportunities to distinguish more sharply the distinction between majority rule and a push towards, towards ever greater equality. I also wonder if in today's political environments someone who identifies as a conservative in the ways the professor of landscape describes is really at home in the Republican Party as it exists today. One might look at, for example, a George W. Bush's second inaugural address and think about that and see they're a very Wilsonian statement about the need and a principle of creating a world safe for democracy everywhere and is that principle really one of the types of progress that Professor Mansfield critiques or is it more in keeping with the ideas of virtue that he describes?
Dean Miles: Simply one might also just look at the size of governments during the last Republican administration. The size of the public debt nearly tripled, much of that increase occurred before the 2008 financial crisis. And so one might wonder whether or not the Republican Party really has a place for the types of conservatism that Professor Mansfield describes or is it really a place of just a different form of progressivism. As Professor Mansfield said the phrase that you used was, "was virtue at antiquated word?" It does strike me, I think in contemporary discourse as a antiquated word. It made me think about, wait a minute, I do remember this. The four classic virtues of justice, courage, prudence, and I'm sure to an audience of mostly 20 year olds, this is not a popular one: temperance. Do we have agreements on what each one of those virtues really means here in Law School?
Dean Miles: Of course, we might think about what we do every day as wrestling with the question of justice and how and what is justice in specific applications. And of course these virtues there they are values, they are principles. But we're going to disagree in many instances about what is the best way to manifest them in specific instances. And that makes it hard for us to think about one party as being a party of virtue as opposed to another. I also wonder about whether or not in the contemporary environments there's any widespread agreement on what are the proper sets of virtues. Can we reach agreement on what those issues are? And if we accept, right that the Republican Party as a Professor Mansfield's example of Lincoln suggests is a party of majority rule and in an environment when there's such widespread disagreement on what the proper virtues are in society, can we really find a place for conservatives in the Republican Party these days? Or is it simply another manifestation of the tension between not just majority rule, independent equality, but majority rule and virtue. So these were the terrific, a terrific set of remarks, uh, incredibly stimulating. And so I'll, I'll leave the rest of the time for questions.
Host: We will open for questions. If you have questions for either Professor Mansfield or Dean Miles, please specify. So questions? Any questions? I'm sure there are some lurking out there.
Question One: This question is for Professor Mansfield. Could you comment on the what I see as a tension in the Republican party right now and conservatism in general between the sort of maybe Burkean, what many call the establishment, which would seek to inculcate a respect for institutions, is suspicious of revolution, and kind of rapid solutions to problems. And the varieties of kind of radical revolutionary groups on the right who want to burn the whole thing down. Could you talk about, I mean, my mind, is the suspicion that kind of 1960s political movement strategies have kind of infiltrated the right. I'm just wondering, can you talk about that?
Prof. Mansfield: That's an interesting suggestion you make right at the end that, uh, that, uh, that the right is now influenced by individualism, the aggressive individualism of the 1960s. Look at the Ted Cruz for example. He doesn't seem to care for the Republican Party. He wants to use it as a way of making a show or display of his virtue. So this is still a kind - the virtual party has plenty of faults. He is a good example and that epitome of manly vulgarity Donald Trump is another. But uh, yes, this part of the polarization of party in our time which makes every vote crucial and allows for no looseness or relaxed dissent, and therefore kind of focuses on each individual and gives him a certain power to disrupt or a small group like the Freedom Caucus of 40 members in the House. And I think that's a good thought that that is part of the individualism of our time. There is actually, was a very good article in today's Wall Street Journal by Christopher Duluth on this point.
Host: Further questions?
Question Two: Professor Mansfield as well. It seems to me that the major problem the party's having is being able to counter the appeal so many liberal policies have. You mentioned that philosophies have, you mentioned feminism, which comes this year for instant liberation in the parenting space defined by society. The socialist policies also. They don't talk about self reliance, about building yourself up over time. They say you know what do we need to provide for you right away? So my question to you is, you know, in a society that moves so quickly and people are trying to move on to the next thing, how has it the Republicans are able to make policies that seem relevant and actually seemed to actually be able to improve people's lives in the same way socialist policies seem to have that sort of immediate impact?
Prof. Mansfield: Yeah. It doesn't have the same instant appeal, that's for sure. And we see a study by my colleague in which he shows that, polls of the Tea Party show that they want their entitlements, same as everyone else. So those programs are designed to be sticky, to give each person an individual stake in big government and in the Democratic Party. And so it's not a surprise that they're very difficult to dislodge and it may take, it may require some kind of crisis, comparable to the one that we saw in Greece recently. Which I think is not, that is not, that that is a weak and small country and circumstances totally different from ours. And yet it was a democratic country that voted itself into grave harm by demanding politicians who would spend more than they could collect. Just that simple failure. So and here we are, yes, Bush increased our national debt, but look at what Obama did - eight trillion extra. That can't go on. Well you could keep saying that and it does go on. But, uh, and yet it can't. So and it doesn't take any economics and by the way, if you're going to boast of economics, let me ask you why your profession did absolutely nothing to predict this Great Recession we were recently in, right?
Dean Miles: I don't have a good answer for that. But philosophy has been around for 5,000 years?
Prof. Mansfield: We've done nothing, yes. Only understanding and only for a few.
Dean Miles: Do you think it's enough? It's this tendency to the Greek example is very clear for those of us who were sitting here in Chicago and in the state of Illinois and we've looked at the financial condition of our local governments. Is that an inevitable problem with democracy?
Prof. Mansfield: Yes. I think it is. But it's much aggravated by the progressive movement sort of using, making a point of it and see the economists have played a role in this. The Keynesian economics. Economists I have to say. It stopped making thrift a virtue - that that's the virtue takeaway from Keynes. It's good to spend. It's better to spend than to save. Conservatives -- Economics used to be a very conservative profession. It was a, it was about an economy meant being careful with your expenditures, reckoning up what you're spending, but now I like to think of Larry Summers who was arguing that the American public should go out and spend a whole lot during this time of great recession. Did he, did he tell his wife or would she actually have accepted the advice or his individual family that at a time of dearth and difficulty is the best time to go out and spend? So, so, so there's an interesting relationship between economics and virtue and lack of virtue
Host: So students have a 1:30 class so I think we probably have to end it right there. Please help me in thanking Professor Mansfield.
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