Marvin Folkertsma
Marvin Folkertsma is a professor of political science and fellow for American Studies with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. These articles are from V & V, a web site publication of Vision and Values.
The Politics of Arrogance
On the eve of the German offensive against France in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently asserted to some departing troops, "You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees." The German monarch was known neither for his prescience nor intellect and undoubtedly was einige Apfelstrudel short of a Dutzend, but his sentiments on this matter were not unique. Other military and political leaders were busy rummaging through their wardrobes to ensure that full dress uniforms for autumn would be available at a courier's grasp for the inevitable march through their enemy's capital; after all, last summer's garb is so-o-oo, well, last summery. The last thing a monarch needed was to be fashion-challenged at the time of triumph.
This colossal arrogance generated colossal horrors, which, a half-century later, relegated the war's participants to the status of effete sideliners -- sideliners, that is, to greater historical dramas taking place elsewhere in the world. European hubris had political consequences far beyond the fortunes of national leaders, nearly all of whom put themselves first and their countries second. At lower levels in a political or military hierarchy, arrogance generates losses that are measured in the thousands, often multiplied many times. At higher levels, the fate of nations or entire civilizations is in the balance. In short, there is a geometric progression of consequences in the politics of arrogance, and politics informs all decisions in government, the military, and society in general. The inherent resistance to criticism and blindness to reality that are characteristic of oversized egos magnify such consequences.
Sometimes nations beat the math and survive the politics of arrogance practiced by leaders who identify their personal fortunes with the destiny of their country. For instance, in the opening campaigns of the Civil War, adulation of George B. McClellan reverberated hugely inside the echo chamber of his own ego, generating a conclusion that "God had placed a great work in [his] hands," and the fate of his country rested solely with him. In fact, McClellan was an able organizer but an inept commander whose battlefield judgments were ludicrous and whose incompetence unquestionably lengthened the war. Unfazed by criticism, McClellan still ran against "the well-meaning baboon" Lincoln, who beat him soundly in the 1864 election. God, Grant, and "the original gorilla" saved the Republic to persevere, at least until another megalomaniac strode across the political platform to gain America's attention.
Few fit this description better than Woodrow Wilson, particularly since he compared himself favorably to Jesus Christ, whose major shortcoming in Wilson's view was the failure to produce a plan for peace. Wilson trumped the Ten Commandments by adding four -- the Fourteen Points -- and burned his life out leading a crusade for a cause few Americans cared about, the League of Nations. Wilson finally concluded that his countrymen were not ready for the grand project he had in mind for them. It's hard to get more arrogant than that, but at least Wilson's haughtiness produced few adverse consequences; international organizations are singularly inept at preventing war, and America's membership in the League likely would have meant little. But Wilson's politics of arrogance rendered him impervious to such considerations.
Which brings us to the present, with an administration filled with people whose self-esteem would make the Kaiser blush. America has a leader who reprises Sonny and Cher's trademark song with the words, "You've Got Me, Babe." Indeed, Mr. Obama's use of the personal pronoun suggests a new political formula to calculate arrogance -- call it the "I-Test" -- which refers to the frequency the President uses that letter in his speeches. But it's not just him; his supporters numbered millions who were swept into the "we are the change we've been waiting for" movement, and the American Left still views the current political situation the way the German leadership looked upon Europe in August 1914: now is the time to strike; we may never have an opportunity like this again.
But it is almost impossible to conceive of the United States over the next decade "beating the math" to overcome a McClellan-like ego or vitiate a Wilsonian-type moral crusade. Efforts to create a European-style social democracy likely will produce a European outcome: a debt-ridden menagerie of stagnant societies smothered under a thick cloak of bureaucratic mediocrities oozing with self-importance. The prevailing politics of "never letting a serious crisis go to waste" so far has generated national debt estimates that cannot possibly be sustained without the United States suffering in economic terms what imperial Germany did in military terms during the Great War.
The question is, can this politics of arrogance be stopped? To this, another German, Otto von Bismarck, had an answer: "God protects fools, drunks, and the United States of America." Bismarck is no longer around to give advice, which leaves America with only one alternative to combat our own politics of arrogance.
God help us.
Barack and the Buchanan Precedent
Presidential comparisons that greeted Barack Obama's election ranged from the sublime to the transcendent. He was variously described as the second coming of John F. Kennedy, a re-embodiment of Franklin Roosevelt, and even a budding Abraham Lincoln -- a sort of Savior-in-Chief to rescue an aggrieved nation from the Dantesque tribulations of his predecessor. Mr. Obama's public pronouncements signaled his determination to abrogate George W. Bush's policies and send us all back upon paths of righteousness. And that was before the new president had even done anything.
Well, now President Obama has done quite a number of things, which bring to mind other analogies, some of which lurk beneath the worship continuum. Before Roosevelt there was Herbert Hoover, and before Lincoln there was James Buchanan, both of whom share the dishonor of being ranked among the country's worst presidents, as Nathan Miller pointed out a decade ago in a perky book entitled Star Spangled Men. About Hoover, much has been written; but it is President Buchanan who presents a really interesting case.
Miller's review suggests that presidents fail because they are clueless or spineless or both. James Buchanan was both. Among the most reviled in the heap, he exhorted Supreme Court justices to deliver what was arguably the most disastrous court decision in American history -- Dred Scott v. Sanford -- and in the process egregiously violated constitutional integrity and the separation of powers. Buchanan lambasted Congress for not passing the notoriously pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution that would have admitted Kansas as slave state into the Union. To get his way he resorted to political thuggery: promises of cash to his supporters and dismissal of officials who opposed him. All to no avail; Congress defeated the measure anyway. A later vote in "bleeding Kansas" resulted in the defeat of the Lecompton plan by a margin of about nine to one, a result that surprised him. Cluelessness.
And when southern states seceded one by one, Buchanan dithered and temporized, declaring such acts unconstitutional, but unlike Andrew Jackson before him and Abraham Lincoln after him, he did nothing. Spinelessness throughout. All this from a man who believed that defusing the time bomb over slavery would rank him at the level of George Washington, a hope that goes beyond cluelessness.
This is the danger of the Obama presidency, as Barack Obama juggles a half dozen major bills along with several foreign-policy challenges, any one of which risk failure that could damage his presidency severely, if not destroy it altogether. Since the last summer especially, Obama's executive style has been carefully documented with increasing alarm by president-watchers, even those who are sympathetic to his goals. Thus, on healthcare, Mr. Obama has insisted on reconstructing the entire industry in spite of the fact that all but a minority of Americans have insurance, and by large margins are satisfied with their coverage. Ghosts of Lecompton haunt this figure.
In foreign policy, Obama has courted dictators, spurned America's traditional allies, and curried favor with adversaries such as the Medvedev-Putin duo by caving to their objections over a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic -- apparently in hopes that appeasing the Russian bear will bear fruit in negotiations with Iran. Such spinelessness did not go unnoticed by the Iranians, who responded with missile-firing contempt. Finally, the president's vacillation over Afghanistan while carbon-footprinting his way to that other Euro-Superpower, Denmark, apparently to seek advice from Hamlet on executive decision making, hardly speaks well for his quest to find the buck that stops somewhere in the vicinity of the Oval Office. It's hard to see how old "Public Functionary Buchanan could have done worse.
The implications of these actions seem to escape President Obama, and therein lies the chief danger to his presidency. He could take a lesson from another predecessor to a favored president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Neither flashy nor eloquent, Ike actually had a life before writing about it and knew the world is not a global version of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. Further, he possessed the good judgment not to inflict ambitious programs onto a population weary of war and the previous incumbent, much like Americans in 2008 who were tired of conflict and of George W. Bush. Initial reviews of Ike's terms in office were unenthusiastic; more recently, his stature has risen among mature scholars who do not equate presidential greatness with increased federal power.
The question for President Obama is less about whom he resembles among the great ones; rather, it is about which among the others will be staring him in the face when he completes his term in office: Hoover, Eisenhower, or Buchanan?
When Regimes Reach Insanity
On August 25, 1914, in a spate of disorder, shots rang out from the Belgian town of Louvain, instigating its German occupiers to launch a frenzy of looting and destruction. Crazed soldiers butchered civilians, ransacked buildings, and finally burned the town to the ground, including its magnificent and irreplaceable library. The Kaiser's truculent commanders were convinced that Belgian citizens had been ordered to resist by those "above" them; that is, by a malevolent cabal of government officials, local burgomasters, and priests, all devoted to a bloodthirsty campaign of resistance. In Barbara Tuchman's words, "that people could be animated to stop the invader without an order from 'above' was inconceivable." Further:
. . . the Germans saw these orders everywhere. [General] von Kluck claimed that the Belgian government's posters warning its citizens against hostile acts were actually "incitements to the civil population to fire on the enemy."
The plain meaning of such words was irrelevant, which meant that Belgian citizens were perfidious murderers acting on their superiors' orders to kill Germans.
This is the perspective of a regime that had gone insane, one whose theory of terror in warfare had clearly put it outside the community of civilized nations. Indeed, Germany's depredations during its second effort to dominate Eurasia instigated war crimes trials against its leaders. A special irony is that during the first half of the 20th century, Germans were among the most highly educated, culturally sophisticated, and technologically advanced people on earth. Didn't matter. Kaiser Wilhelm's Empire and the Third Reich both perpetrated acts of unspeakable insanity.
The relevance of Germany's experience to contemporary politics perhaps becomes clearer with an understanding of what a regime is. A regime is a complex of institutions, personnel, and practices committed to the preservation of a ruling ideology. A regime comprises the commanding heights of a political and social system, including public and private bureaucracies, major media outlets, and the academic establishment -- all of whose members understand one another, defer to sympathizers' needs, and devote their professional lives to self-aggrandizement and ideological conquest.
Naturally, not all regimes are alike and therefore do not go insane in the same way. Has the American regime -- i.e., our governing political order -- gone insane? Some may think the matter is debatable, but I think we may be taking the first steps on the pathway to political insanity.
For instance, the way regime officials and sympathizers have treated Tea Party people is nothing short of despicable, a mere hair's breadth this side of insanity. Tea Party supporters have been characterized as racists, radicals, fascists, and traitors, none of which of course applies to them, but some of which are fair characterizations of some of those making such accusations. The liberal-progressive regime that has dominated America for the past generation or so cannot fathom a genuinely popular uprising. Regime adherents are cynically familiar with all sorts of fraudulent demonstrations, from their college days to union organizing, and can manage no better response to the Tea Partiers than to project their own race-class-gender-political identity bigotry onto their challengers. This rube-like narrowness of intellect would be amusing if it were not so mean-spirited.
Other growing manifestations of regime insanity are counterintuitive and often grotesque. For instance, would a sane regime member compare American soldiers to death-camp guards or terrorists --"Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some other mad regime"-- as did Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)? Would its minions enact policies whose inevitable trajectory is to bankrupt the country within a decade? Would a sane regime delegate authority to a government agency to regulate practically every puddle of water?
The list of questions goes on, much longer, from immigration to recent defense policy, the latter of which has been characterized by Charles Krauthammer as "incomprehensible."
And if this isn't quite at the stage of insanity, it is at least very bad policy.
The question is, what can citizens do about it? Here's where I'm concerned, because the answer is: probably not much. Unless, that is, citizens reconstruct those institutions and fill their posts with fresh recruits from the ranks of civil society. That would mean ending the tenure of incumbents throughout the regime, in government, media, and academia, which is a tall order, one whose magnitude is likely not fully understood by Tea Party enthusiasts and their supporters. But absent a thorough changing of the guard, the liberal-progressive regime's walk on the path to political insanity will continue. *
"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom." --John Adams
