[00:00:00] SARAH SONG:
Good afternoon, and welcome everyone to the 2011 Jefferson Memorial Lectures. I’m Sarah Song, a professor of Law and Political Science here at UC Berkeley, and a member of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures Committee. We, along with the Graduate Council, are delighted to have Rogers Smith as this year’s speaker.
Before I introduce our speaker, let me briefly tell you about the Jefferson Lectureship. It was established in nineteen forty-four through a bequest from Elizabeth Bonestell and her husband, Cutler Bonestell. A prominent San Francisco couple, the Bonestells cared deeply about history, and they founded the lectureship to support the study and promotion of the basic principles of American democracy.
The first Jefferson Lecture was given in nineteen fifty-eight by the historian Douglass Adair. Other Jefferson lecturers have included Richard Hofstadter, Archibald Cox, Eugene Genovese, Robert Dahl, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Carol Pateman, Linda Kerber, Alan Simpson, Gordon Wood, and Elizabeth Warren. These lectures have taken up a range of topics, too many to name, but briefly from the origins of American democracy and the politics of slavery and the New Deal to global capitalism and the ongoing challenges of inequality and the war on terror.
An archive of all past lectures is available on the Jefferson Lectures website, including videos of of the more recent lectures. In light of the Bonestells’ wish that the Jefferson Lectureship be devoted to the study and promotion of the basic principles of American democracy as embodied in the U.S. Constitution, we are especially fort-fortunate to have as this year’s Jefferson Lecturer, Rogers Smith, whose work has been devoted to the study of American citizenship, constitutional law, and American political thought. His research and teaching have given particular attention to racial, gender, and class inequalities in the United States.
He is the Christopher H. Brown Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the chair of the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. Prior to joining the Penn faculty, he was professor in the political science department at Yale University for twenty-one years. He has authored many influential essays and books, including Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, which was a finalist for the nineteen ninety-eight Pulitzer Prize in History.
His most recent books include Stories of Peoplehood, The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, and Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America, which was co-authored with Desmond King and published just this year. He has received seven Best Book Awards from the American Political Science Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Social Science History Association, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. I am personally delighted to be introducing Rogers Smith because he is the greatest teacher and mentor I’ve ever had.
It was in his graduate seminars at Yale on citizenship and American political thought, which inspired me and many of my peers to pursue the study of ideas and their role in politics. In addition to being a distinguished scholar, I can attest he is also rem– a remarkable teacher and advisor. Even after he’d left Yale for Penn, he came back to Yale regularly, met with graduate students he’d been working with, sitting for long stretches of time in a New Haven cafe, giving us detailed comments on our rough drafts.
This gives you a sense of his dedication to fostering the next generation of scholars. He took our ideas seriously and also genuinely cared about students’ general well-being. He is living proof that you can be a distinguished scholar, a deeply engaging teacher and mentor, and a wonderful human being.
The title of his lecture today is The American Experiment: A Twenty-first Century Assessment. He will speak for about fifty minutes, and then we’ll open it up for a brief Q&A. Uh, there will be a microphone set up, uh, near the front, so please feel free to come forward and line up if you have a question.
And you are all welcome to join us for a reception after the Q&A at the back. Now please join me in welcoming Roger Smith.
(applause and cheering)
[00:04:42] ROGER SMITH:
Thank you, Sarah. I have been fortunate to have had, uh, many wonderful students and, uh, none more so than Sarah, although other wonderful ones, some are here today. Um, and my thanks, uh, to the dean, to the planning committee, and especially to the amazingly efficient Ellen Gobler, uh, for, uh, giving me the honor to be part of the Jefferson Lecture tradition.
This will be a traditional lecture, but focused on what I see as some of the central challenges facing the American experiment in constitutional government today, and I thank you all, uh, for coming. On February 28th, 1796, seven years after the adoption of the experimental new U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams. He said, “This, I hope, will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded on principles of honesty and the morals of the people, not mere force.”
Adams replied that this is indeed, as you say, the age of experiments and government, and both thought the experiments of their generation might do much, as the first Federalist paper had said, to decide the important question whether the societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice. Both men expressed confidence that in their lifetimes, America’s elections, so central to modern Republican governments, would not become corrupt, even though, as Adams said, “Corruption in elections has heretofore destroyed all elective governments, you and I,” he assured Jefferson, “shall go to the kingdom of the just, or at least shall be released from the republic of the unjust with hearts pure and clean of all corruption in elections.” Grand words.
Within a few months, the two old political allies were locked into the first of two increasingly vicious election campaigns in which charges of corruption flew in all directions. It was quickly proven that at least some of the results of America’s experiments in new forms of Republican self-governance did not fulfill all the hopes expressed on their behalf. Today, roughly two and a quarter centuries have passed since colonial Americans embarked on their experiments in new forms of government, including their greatest experiment, the U.S. Constitution.
It therefore seems appropriate to consider what lessons we might draw early in the twenty-first century from the American experiments in constitutional republican governance. There are many, but I wish to call, to call attention to the consequences for constitutional republicanism of the ways in which the U.S. Constitution structured three realms of activity that have proved crucial for American experiences of self-governance: commerce, science, and religion. My core argument is that the American institutions, practices, and activities of commerce, science, and religion, shaped by the Constitution’s structuring, have transformed commerce, transformed science, transformed religion, and transformed Americans in America in ways that have created a nation divided over the understandings of those realms that prevailed, at least amongst unenfranchised American citizens, when the American experiments in constitutional republican governments began.
These transformations have made modern Americans wealthier, more scientifically knowledgeable, more powerful, in many ways more diverse, and in important ways more democratic and inclusive than the founding generation. But these changes have also led modern Americans to deeper differences than their founding predecessors had over many matters, and perhaps especially over what James Ceaser has called the foundational concepts of their worldviews. The politically enfranchised members of the founding generation had concepts of science, religion, and to a lesser degree, commerce, that were more similar to each other, even if not identical, than those of Americans today.
Even as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams contested so bitterly to become President of the United States, Jefferson was president of the American Philosophical Society. Adams was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and each belonged to the other’s scholarly society, for they shared passionate commitments to Enlightenment science. Though they envisioned different sorts of commercial republics, both made a good chunk of their living from as commercial farmers, and both wanted to see the nation’s commercial economy grow.
And though Jefferson was an Episcopalian turned deist and Adams was a Calvinist who became less orthodox while never losing his sense of human sinfulness, they agreed far more than they disagreed on what constituted morality in opposition to corruption. Deep as their differences over the Constitution’s structure of powers and appropriate economic and foreign policies were, they and most of the founding generation shared many foundational concepts, especially in regard to science and morality, a fact that helped the bitter rivals become friends and correspondents once more in their later years. But over time, American differences have grown deeper, both at the levels of political elites and the mass citizenry.
An original commitment to commerce that promised and, in many respects delivered, greater opportunities and prosperity for all, has often– has also proved to foster unprecedented economic inequalities and private corporate power. A commitment to scientific progress has generated revolutionary technologies, but also profound intellectual challenges to the doctrines of natural, rationally self-evident truths that American revolutionaries proclaimed, and in which many Americans still believe. The founders’ refusal to establish a national church has contributed to a plethora of religions that have increasingly become divided between more ecumenical and more fundamentalist outlooks, with the latter opposed to much in secular scientific worldviews.
The results in our– are, in my view, not best described as culture wars, because all the positions are authentically parts of American political culture. But they are contests between two equally American but conflicting worldviews that have been generated in the course of American political development. These changes are interconnected.
America’s developing forms of commerce, science, and religion have shaped each other’s transformations. And for many twenty-first century Americans, some or all of these transformations toward a modern materialist commercial economy, towards evolutionary science, uh, and towards more ecum-ecumenical forms of religion and towards secularism, all these count for some as advances in human civilization, while for many other Americans, some or all of these changes are seen as new kinds of corruption. These fundamental divisions are posing new challenges for constitutional republican self-governance today that Americans and their institutions are struggling to meet, even as these developments leave the nation with few means to resolve them other than sharply contested democratic politics.
However one assesses these developments normatively, the more controversial point I wish to stress is that they must be seen as things not only permitted but facilitated by core elements of the American experiments in constitutional republican government. For better or worse, these transformations are more the products of than they are departures from the Constitution and the founders’ projects. And they leave us today, I’ll contend, not with any real choice either to go back to the values of the framers, whose pursuit led us to where we are, or to go forward to unequivocal embrace of the new world views of commerce and especially science and religion, which so many more traditional Americans still find anathema.
Instead, the central challenge of the American experiment in constitutional republicanism today is to make our institutions of popular self-governance operate effectively despite the deep modern divisions in the foundational outlooks of the different members of We, the People of the United States. To flesh out this argument, let me note that John Pocock argued in his magnum opus, The Machiavellian Moment, that the American founding generation felt compelled by the absence of an evident natural aristocracy to design institutions in which all power stemmed from the people conceived of as an undifferentiated mass, but that mass could and should only govern through its selection of representatives. The Federalist authors praised representation not only because it might serve to refine and enlarge public views, but because it also permitted the enlarging of the territory governed in order to take in a greater variety of parties and interests and make majority factions less likely.
A large, diverse republic would have to be governed by, and would be more safely governed by, coalitions of directly and indirectly re-elected representatives who would act on behalf of a range of diverse interests and perhaps the common good, rather than the immediate, sometimes selfish or short-sighted decisions of mass majorities. But the founders’ embrace of republican self-governance by the representatives of a great variety of parties and interests raised the question of what would promote cooperation and united action despite this diversity? What would constitute the common good?
Rousseau had urged that republics be bonded in part by a civil religion, but most Americans knew that amidst the variety of contentious Protestant denominations that held sway in different states, no official church of the United States was feasible or desirable. Instead, Thomas Paine announced in Common Sense, “Our plan is commerce.” The Philadelphia Convention was called to strengthen the capacities of the Confederation to protect and promote commerce.
And the Federalists proclaimed confidently that the desirability of fostering commerce through a more perfect union is one of those points about which there is least room to entertain a difference of opinions, and which has in fact commanded the most general assent of men who have any acquaintance with the subject. The founding generation and many to come did have short, sharp differences over the forms of commerce that were best for American governments and over the means through which they should be fostered, as Jefferson’s advocacy of state-centered, westward-expanding commercial yeoman agriculture and Hamilton and Adams’ contrary support for national financial manufacturing, trade, and infrastructure initiatives demonstrated. But it’s undeniable that when Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution authorized Congress to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay debts, to borrow money, to establish laws for bankruptcy, to coin and regulate the value of money, and above all, to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, it created a national government with powers to promote commercial prosperity that most Americans wanted, whatever their other differences.
Article 1, Section 9 then prevented Congress from favoring the ports of one state over another. Article 1, Section 10 prevented the states from impairing the obligations of contracts. And together, the sections prevented Congress and the states from granting titles of nobility.
Article 4 required the states to give full faith and credit to each other’s acts and to grant citizens of other states the same basic privileges and immunities accorded their own. Collectively, these provisions made clear that the new extended republic was to be one united commercial market in which all citizens would have formally equal economic rights, including the rights of contract that were increasingly ordering economic activities via private agreements, not customs or legal codes. In this national commercial market, none would have aristocratic economic privileges.
This constitutional framework did not guarantee that unit– that the United States would become an overwhelmingly commercial society in which most citizens had a wide range of formal economic opportunities, and most felt impelled by physical necessities, family and social pressures, and personal ambitions to pursue economic opportunities. But that was the aim, and that was the result. Yet to say only this would be to neglect two other important aspects of the place of commerce in the Constitution.
The first is that Article I, Section 8 also authorizes Congress to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes, a textual indication that the tribes were viewed as neither foreign nations nor among the several domestic states. They were peoples that had a distinct, not fully defined status in relation to the republic that the Constitution created. The fact that they were not simply included, yet not definitively excluded, and the often harsh and sometimes generous answers subsequently given as to how the constitutional– Constitution’s commercial republic should relate to these people, all this inevita-inevitably shaped the kind of republic the U.S. would become.
The second, still more fundamental point about the Constitution’s commerce powers is that Southern slaveholders feared the creation of a national government with authority to interfere with slave labor and slave trading. At the Constitutional Convention, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina argued that it was the true interest of the Southern states to have no No national regulation of commerce. But because the Northeastern states had agreed to permit the international slave trade at least until 1808, he was prepared to accept that power.
The Constitution’s series of compromises on how the slaveholders legally recognized property in slaves would affect the apportionment of taxation and political representation, the return of fugitives, national powers over domestic insurrections and more all showed both how ardent the framers were to create a national union bounded in part by its support for the economic interests of its dominant members, and how from the start, the example of the new republic was bound up with the treatment of persons of African descent as factors of production and little more. In regard to the tribes and the African slaves, few framers constituted a multiracial commercial republic. Still, commercial prosperity was not the Constitution’s only goal.
Article I, Section 8 also empowered Congress to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries, to fix the standards of weights and measures, and to establish post offices and roads. These provisions assisted commercial development, but they also committed the national government to the cause of scientific, technological, and intellectual progress more generally. James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that the most noble object of government was not property, but the improvement of the human mind.
James Madison proposed that the new government not only protect copyrights, but also establish a national university and provide premiums and provisions to encourage the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries. These aspirations gained further significance from Article 7’s sweeping mandate that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the United States, and the fact that though the Constitution’s Preamble spoke of goals of union, justice, tranquility, defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty, there was no constitutional promise to encourage religion as there had been in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The First Amendment then made explicit that Congress could not legislate respecting an establishment of, of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and protected the freedoms of speech and press.
The result was to permit a plurality of religions that might well develop in ways that could not be foreseen, and that American governments would by and large not seek to guide or constrain. Since Article IV also required the United States to guarantee to all states a Republican form of government, these provisions of the Constitution collectively worked to wed the American experiments in Republican self-governance to the open-ended growth of commerce, to unpredictable progress in science, and to the equally unpredictable outcomes of religious freedom and, in practice, religious pluralism, rather than to any fixed economic structure or any settled orthodox scientific and religious understandings, as most, if not all, previous societies had had. Most of those favoring the Constitution must have believed that a constitutional republic, so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure whatever transformations the pursuits of commerce, science, and religious liberty might foster.
And many must have hoped that the results, unforeseeable as they necessarily were, would represent advances in each and all of these interconnected realms. So what’s happened since then? The most authoritative, ative analysis prior to the Civil War was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
The young French aristocrat was fascinated with America precisely because he thought the Americans appeared to, quote, “have handed over the world of politics to the experiments of innovators in democratic government.” Not all innovations won support. Tocqueville visited a nation that after ratifying a constitution that refused to establish a national church, also refused to establish Madison’s National University, and one that after intense political struggles, created and destroyed two national banks.
But if Americans thus clearly remained wary of centralized governmental actions in pursuit of the Constitution’s goals, their society still displayed the manifold impacts of the constitutional commitments concerning science, religion, commerce, and republicanism. By 1831, the American state and national republics had further democratized, with the franchise extended to virtually all white males, a political process Tocqueville saw as an almost irresistible rule of democratic social behavior. The Constitution’s support for a national market and contractual rights, and its refusal to countenance aristocratic privileges, had also indelibly reinforced the commercial character of American life.
Tocqueville said that it was only in America that, quote, “Everybody in the country is engaged in both commerce and industry,” and that he knew of no other country where love of money occupies so great a place in the hearts of men, or where people are more deeply contemptuous of the theory of permanent equality of wealth. Against Jefferson’s hopes, the fact that in an ever-churning commercial economy, fortunes tended to be middling and ephemeral meant that while all honest work was seen as necessary, natural, and honorable, most Americans were coming to prefer commerce and industry to agriculture. More money could be made more rapidly in those occupations, so they better served what Tocqueville saw as Americans’ fervent ardor for prosperity.
Tocqueville also believed that as American in-industry progresses, the commercial ties uniting all the confederated states grow tighter, and the union, no longer a matter of opinion, becomes a habit, just as the founders hoped. But if the growth of American commerce brought greater prosperity and unity in many regards, Tocqueville also saw dangers consonant with Jefferson’s fears. Tocqueville foresaw that even though wealth circulated rapidly in America, there was a potential for a manufacturing aristocracy to arise that might reintroduce permanent inequality of conditions into the world.
This aristocracy would be, he said, one of the harshest that ever existed on Earth in its treatment of its impoverished workers. But politically, it would nonetheless be amongst the most limited and less dangerous because of the industrialist economic preoccupations. Tocqueville also thought America’s expanding commercial and industrial society would deprive the native tribes of their land and ultimately destroy them, and he expected the practices and culture of the free labor North ultimately to become the common measure throughout the Union, but he could not see how the end of slavery, which he thought must come, could be followed in America by peaceful racial equality.
Tocqueville’s concerns about the European-descended economically striving, about whether European-descended economically striving Americans could find ways to coexist with those they perceived as racially and culturally distinct, connect in revealing ways with his reflections on religion in antebellum America. In both regards, Tocqueville did not see America as easily embracing a very robust multiculturalism. He observed that although there were countless sects in the United States, they all preached the same morality.
Everything in the moral field is certain and settled, he said, though the political world seems given over to controversy and experiment. Even would-be revolutionaries were, quote, obliged to profess a certain public respect for Christian morality and equity, despite the fact that Americans philosophically had an almost insuperable distaste for the supernatural. Tocqueville explained this apparently paradoxical combination of devout, morally monolithic faith, monolithic faith, and intellectual worldliness and experimentation in two ways.
He first noted that Americans believed their common religious morality helped preserve their republican institutions. He also contended that the constitutional separation of church and state meant that American religion spoke primarily to the desire for immortality that torments the hearts of all men equally, rather than aligning themselves with partisan political causes. Hence, American religions won dedicated spiritual adherence, while generally being seen as political assets, not as threats to any political interests.
They did so, however, only because all denominations, including Catholics, rejected all opinions, quote, “Hostile to democratic and republican institutions, but a single current commands the human spirit.” Tocqueville discerned a comparable uniformity in the American philosophical opinions that he said regulated everyday actions and guided conduct in general. Americans, he wrote, believe that the source of moral authority lies in universal reason and that the spread of enlightenment necessarily brings useful results.
All consider society a body in progress, making a changing tableau in which nothing is or should be fixed forever. And they admit that what seems good to them today may be replaced tomorrow by something better, but is yet hidden from view. Beliefs that, again, paradoxically, Americans also treated as certain and settled.
Tocqueville explained this seeming contradiction by noting that philosophically, Americans were not given to speculative inquiries. They had a common philosophic method born of the constant state of flux that prevails in a democratic society that treated tradition only as a source of information, that regarded existing facts as useful to study only in order to do things differently and better, and that looked to results in practical life. Focused in their daily lives on mundane, generally commercial and technical concerns, Americans simply accepted the principal dogmas of the Christian religion and a large number of moral truths derived from and dependent on those dogmas without examination, setting narrow limits to individual analysis that omitted several of the most important matters of human opinion.
At the same time, Americans admirably cultivated the purely practical part of science and those theoretical aspects of science that are immediately necessary for the application at hand. In this respect, Tocqueville said, “The American mind has invariably shown itself to be clear, free, original, and fertile.” “But almost no one in the United States,” he averred, “devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract aspects of human knowledge, including the questioning of widely accepted Christian moral tenets.”
Tocqueville’s characterizations may have understated the breadth and depth of the differences amongst American Baptists, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Quakers, much less Catholics and members of the new Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. He may also have minimized how religious and scientific views could provoke controversy, as in the monogenesis, polygenesis debates over the origins of what were seen as distinct human races. But his basic contention is hard to deny, that even as Americans energetically pursued economic, technological, and democratic political innovations and a wide variety of religious and civil associations, they were still, to a large degree, united by shared ideas, in his words, on basic moral and political principles, seen as eternal universals supported by both religion and reason.
These shared ideas helped Americans operate their commercial, economic, and democratic republican institutions successfully. But things changed. The antebellum American Union was, of course, shattered and then transformed by conflicts over the place of slavery in the constitutional republic.
But though the economic, political, and moral dimensions of those conflicts ran very deep, it’s not clear that they went all the way down to foundational concepts. On the eve of the Civil War, the vice president of the new Confederacy, former Whig Congressman Alexander Stevenson– Stephens, praised the recently adopted Confederate Constitution for maintaining all the essentials of the old constitution, including religious liberty and perfect equality of rights for all honest labor and enterprise. The Confederate document did not provide national commercial powers, but not, Stephens said, from any hostility to commerce or all necessary aids to facilitating it, only out of the belief that internal improvements should be paid for by those localities benefiting most from them.
The greatest difference between the Confederate and U.S. Constitution was instead, in his view, in their treatment of the status of the Negro, which Stephens termed the immediate cause of the late rupture in the present revolution. The Confederate Constitution had as its cornerstone, in his words, “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery’s subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” a truth that Stephens presented as a discovery of modern science and as an ordinance of the Creator. Four years later, Stephens’ former congressional and Whig ally, Abraham Lincoln, agreed in his second inaugural address that slavery was somehow the cause of the war.
And he noted that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Both men and most of those they led, in fact, still subscribed to worldviews in which scientific reason and religion were expected to converge on affirmation of enduring standards of natural justice that should guide politics. And both were devotees of republicanism and commercial growth.
They disagreed on the institutions and policies through which those endeavors could best be advanced, and they disagreed still more on slavery and the natural rights of African Americans. Apart from that great issue, their ideas at bottom remained very similar. But shortly before and after the Civil War, Charles Darwin published two scientific works on the Origin of the Species in eighteen fifty-nine and The Descent of Man in eighteen seventy-one, which proved to interact with the American common ideas of commerce, science, and religion in ways that helped to generate the pro– profound transformations and the modern divisions that are my chief theme here.
Reinforced by the impact of the German historicist thought that made the St. Louis Hegelians the vanguard of American philosophy during the Civil War and for decades thereafter, the Darwinian idea of evolution spurred both excited hopes and profound anxieties in American intellectuals, and to a lesser degree, the American public. What James Kloppenberg has aptly termed the late nineteenth century American marriage of Hegel and Darwin gave birth to new visions of the natural and social worlds as evolving over many millennia in ways that generated changing physical environments and changing animate species, including humanity and very different human societies. I contend that in many respects, the Constitution had prepared Americans to embrace these new visions, conceptions of historical evolutionary developments fit well with the American beliefs in a society as a body progressing towards something better that Tocqueville had discerned.
They also provided defenses of the economic inequalities that burgeoned during the late nineteenth-century American Industrial Revolution, presenting these features of America’s evolving commercial society as natural products of an economic competition. As a result, the English theorist Herbert Spencer, who coined the term survival of the fittest, enjoyed near-cult status in America, and William Graham Sumner, the first professor of political science and sociology at Yale, wrote a popular anti-redistributinous– redistributionist treatise in eighteen eighty-three, What the Social Classes Owe Each Other, answer, not very much, uh, which has remained in print to the present day. On evolutionary grounds, it expressed intellectually re-bolstered contempt for the theory of permanent equality of wealth.
Yet at the same time, the new evolutionary scientific perspectives staggered prevailing religious beliefs in biblical inerrancy, along with confidence that reason could discern unchanging standards of justice and rights that applied in any and all human contexts. The responses to these challenges were many and varied, but the most influential thinker who sought to incorporate these intellectual developments into a comprehensive new philosophy was the leading voice of modern democratic pragmatism, John Dewey. Dewey’s views on science, religion, commerce, and democracy simultaneously represent clear culminations of and clear departures from the predominant understandings of the founding era that had been incorporated in and advanced by the Constitution.
For Dewey, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the political revolution of the last few hundred years, of which the American Constitution was a key part, had produced a much-changed human situation that required pervasive reconstruction of philosophy, science, religion, and political and economic institutions. He believed that in much of the nineteenth century, just as Tocqueville observed, a compromise had existed in which modern science transformed pursuits of lower material concerns while leaving moral and ideal matters undisturbed in their older form. But Dewey believed this equilibrium was decidedly uneasy, in his words.
The development of science fostered a kind of secularization of prevailing perspectives and practices in every realm. This secularization resulted from what he called the most revolutionary discovery yet made, that in the natural sciences, as well as in moral standards and principles, the development of fuller knowledge required abandoning the assumption of fixity and recognition that what was actually universal was process, processes of change. Modern theories, modern institutions, modern behavior should be reconstructed on this foundational reality of inescapable evolution.
And in every realm, Dewey thought reconstruction involved democratization. Recognition in the natural sciences that the earth, sun and moon and stars are not hierarchically ordered, but equal in dignity and subject to the same laws, and that living species do not fall into fixed classes of higher and lower, but they all evolve. And recognition in politics and economics that, quote, “The supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society without, without regard for race, sex, class, or economic status, and with the good of each person in every situation regarded as of equal worth, rank and dignity with every other good in any other situation.”” Dewey believed this economic and political egalitarianism stemmed logically from the rejection of any fixed natural or divine ordering of existence, including human e-existence, uh, a rejection that evolutionary science demanded.
Since there were no natural hierarchies, all should count equally in, and all should have equal opportunity to share in shaping, in proportion to capacity, the evolving determination of appropriate human means and ends, including, he said, new and better ends to be achieved by humanity’s newly unleashed imagination and by intelligently guided democratic, social, and moral engineering. And as new ideas of human purposes and practices thus came to be expressed in social life, Dewey promised they would take on religious value, revivifying the religious spirit in new forms that would be in harmony with men’s unquestioned scientific beliefs and their ordinary day-to-day social activities. Well, James Ceaser contends that advocating these positions, progressives like Dewey’s set up a battle of the titans between the founders’ philosophy of natural right and their own new philosophy of pragmatism.
And we can add between reformulations of religion meant to be compatible with modern science and more traditional religious perspectives. Ceaser also notes that some scholars nonetheless see similarity between the progressives and the founding generation due to their emphasis on science and reason and their rejection of tradition, although he argues that in the end, it’s the contrast between these two views that stands out. Here, I advance a third alternative: neither stark opposition between older and newer worldviews, nor identity between them, but rather recognition of the lineage linking old and new.
There is indeed a great gulf between most founders’ endorsements of natural rights and religious revelation and the democratic pragmatist’s rejection of eternal natural and religious moral and political standards. Yet there are also undeniable connections between the founders’ initial decisions not to establish a national religious orthodoxy, to foster a culture of scientific and commercial innovation, and to give ultimate political power to the mass of the people. Connections between that and the subsequent development of a political philosophy valorizing democracy and change above all, and calling for sciences that assist the people in continually imagining new goals, commercial, political, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual, and discovering new means to achieve them.
Democratic pragmatism is a fit theoretical counterpart, if not indeed the logical, high philosophic articulation of that purely practical, everyday American philosophy that Tocqueville delineated. Even so, perhaps the paradoxical combination that Tocqueville portrayed in Antebellum America, in which Americans regarded basic moral and religious values as fixed while seeking to experiment and innovate in science, technology, commerce, politics, and other realms, could and should have been sustained in the uneasy equilibrium Dewey perceived. But after the advent of Darwinian evolutionary science, it’s difficult to see how this could have been done.
Either that science had to be rejected or some sort of reconstruction in philosophy like Dewey’s, with uncertain but potentially far-reaching implications for republicanism, commerce, and religion had to be undertaken. And though it might be possible to fuse evolutionary perspectives with intellectually powerful affirmations of unchanging, rationally discernible natural moral standards, no effort to achieve that sort of philosophic reconstruction has yet proven to be broadly persuasive. But modern democratic pragmatist perspectives have also failed to persuade many Americans for understandable reasons.
The belief that modern science points to democratization has itself proved paradoxical in many ways. Although Progressive Era pragmatists did endorse democratizing reforms, including nominating primaries, direct election of senators, initiative and referendum, and eventually women’s suffrage, their belief in the authority of the new sciences of economics, public administration, sociology, and more led them also to favor increased governmental power for appointed experts of various sorts. In the name of democracy, pragmatists then and since have often sought to empower intellectual elites.
And though many pragmatists remained convinced during the first third of the twenty century– twentieth century that biological and so-social evolution had generated races and sexes at different levels of development, so that many progresses– progressives supported segregation and even disfranchisement for most non-whites and women, many came over time to agree with Dewey that political and economic institutions should instead be restructured to treat all persons as of equal worth, rank, and dignity regardless of race, sex, class, or economic status. This agreement drove their advocacy of heightened governmental efforts to regulate commercial activities in order to promote greater economic security for all and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. And it also spurred legislative and judicial decisions banning many forms of discrimination and promoting racial and gender integration decisions that marked the transition of progressive era democratic pragmatism into modern American liberalism.
But even 20th century thinkers who accepted evolutionary premises have continued to divide sharply between those who believe relatively unbridled commercial competition comports best with those premises, and those who think instead that expertly informed governmental decisions should guide the economy to more broadly beneficial results. And the anti-discrimination initiatives can and have often been accused of disregarding rather than expressing the will of democratic majorities. Many in an America that had wariness of an inclusive multiculturalism, especially multiracialism, embedded in its constitution, have found the new ideas of social, political, and economic reconstruction that progressives and liberals have advocated to be an assault on, not a revivification of, their ordinary day-to-day social activities.
Even so, abetted by the pressures of depression and global warfare during the middle third of the twentieth century, longtime progressives and later liberals did build broad popular support for their state and national economic regulatory and redistributive restructuring of American commerce, such as the programs fostered by the Social Se-Security Act, and for many of their racially and culturally inclusive political and social reforms, such as the banning of legal segregation and racial voting discrimination. Perhaps the arena in which democratic pragmatists and liberal perspectives proved least successful in winning popular acceptance was religion. As David Hollinger has recently detailed, many early 20th century Protestants and other religious leaders sought to reconcile their faith with modern scientific beliefs, as Dewey had urged, and did so in part by embracing social gospel goals of service to the needy in this world rather than stressing salvation in the next or insisting on religious conversion to faith in scientifically improbable literal interpretations of the Bible.
And from the 1940s through the 1960s, especially in David’s words, the intellectual leadership of mainstream liberal Protestantism advanced intense self-critiques as part of their social consciousness, attacking the ethnocentricism and sectarianism they professed to find all around them, including in their own churches. They thought– they sought to foster egalitarian practices of inclusive diversity, supported by liberal theologies so influenced by modern philosophy that God became simply the ground of being, as in Paul Tillich’s formulation, or the term God was called a crudely sectarian word that should perhaps not be used at all, as Harvard theologian Harvey Cox argued in nineteen sixty-five. These theologically liberal and diversity-embracing social service-oriented religious perspectives proved from the 1940s on, far less appealing to many Americans than more evangelical and fundamentalist forms of faith focused on facilitating a close emotional relationship with the divine, with Jesus Christ as one’s savior.
Such evangelicalism better responded to the desire for immortality that Tocqueville had seen as tormenting most, if not all, human hearts. Many evangelicals also supported public policies aimed at fostering a vibrant world of Christianity, not compromise and accommodation with diversity, in ways that many Christian Americans found inspiring. And most conservative evangelicals allied themselves strongly with American capitalists against godless communism and against what they saw as equally impious liberal reform policies that threatened to hamstring American commerce.
Though critics contended that such pro-capitalist religious stances appeared to replace God with mammon as the chief object of worship, many saw no discontin-continuity between Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and the ancient Gospels of the Lord. From nineteen– from the 1960s through the 1980s and beyond, Hollinger argues, the liberal-conservative political divide has therefore mapped quite easily on the ecumenical-evangelical divide, and conservative political forces have benefited from the fact that during those years, all of the more liberal denominations have indeed experienced a precipitous drop in membership numbers, while evangelical denominations have swelled. The significance of these developments can be overstated.
David notes that the children of mainline Protestants have often become secularists, but have continued to favor much in social gospel morality. I’m one of those. And he also says that, as I’ve found, many contemporary evangelicals are willing, for various reasons, to endorse notions of official equal treatment for all moral and religious viewpoints, rather than insisting that the U.S. see itself as a Christian nation.
Though many evangelical churches felt threatened by the civil rights movement and other modern liberation movements, none today seek to restore legal segregation, and many are increasingly willing to accept greater gender equality and even some government programs designed to assist those in need. As a result, on some issues, young adults of virtually all faiths can sound like classical liberal Protestants. But on many other topics, American religions no longer preach the same morality regarded as certain and settled, expressing but a single current to nearly the degree that Tocqueville saw.
And they do not, in part because conservative evangelicals and liberal ecumenicals have come to accept very different foundational concepts concerning religion, nature, history, and science, with most in the first camp adhering to older notions of revelation and natural justice, most in the second adopting more recent evolutionary premises and reformist pragmatic beliefs. So even if modern democratic pragmatists philosophic views and liberal religious perspectives are in some ways consequences of the American experiments in government, they are nonetheless far from broadly accepted and are instead often bitterly contested in modern American. Many twenty-first century Americans continue to see in the successes of modern scientific, technological, commercial innovations only affirmations of the wisdom of the older understandings of natural justice and religion that helped launch them, rather than indication of of any need for reconstructed philosophic premises and political purposes.
And though it’s debatable whether their numbers are actually growing, these Americans today are more politically mobilized now than in much of our past. Democratic pragmatic progressives and New Deal and Great Society liberals and their economic and social policies dominated American politics from 1932 through the early 1970s, but since then, dissatisfactions with the perceived costs and consequences of their national economic, regulatory, and redistributive programs, disquiet in many kinds of liberal diversity initiatives and at liberal international and multilateralist foreign policies, and the rise of the religious right have all generated a broad and powerful conservative coalition in American politics that gained increasing control of national governmental institutions from 1980 to 2004. Its reversals in the elections of 2006 and 2008 were partly offset by victories in 2010, a year that also saw the emergence of the passionate Tea Party movement, whose invocation of the American revolutionaries in many ways represents a call for return to earlier foundational concepts allied with decentralized government and a return to traditional social morality.
Today, there’s little doubt that while many Americans support particular positions favored by modern liberal democratic pr-pragmatists, conservatives can often win electoral and legislative majorities opposed to many liberal policies concerning commerce, religion, and to a lesser degree, science, in favor of policies that express more traditional commitments. What have been the results of the predominance of this conservative coalition in the past generation? Well, in regard to commerce, any aspirations for permanent equality of wealth have clearly been beaten back.
In 2005, three financial analysts for Citigroup Research, a division of Citigroup Global Markets, drew on the work of former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips to argue that with the aid of modern conservative economic policies, the United States had become a plutonomy, as it had previously been in the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. By plutonomy, these analysts meant an economy generally aided by capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, in their words, in which growth is powered and largely consumed by the wealthy few. In the US in two thousand, the top one percent of households accounted for twenty percent of overall US income and forty percent of the nation’s net worth, um, uh, percentages percentages comparable to the income share of the bottom sixty percent of households and greater than the financial net worth of the bottom ninety-five percent of the households.
As a result of these economic hyper-inequalities, the Citigroup researchers argued that low savings rate, higher prices for many goods including oil, housing, other commodities, this wasn’t going to harm economic growth, investment, and innovation. The wealthy did most of the buying investing, and they’d always be able to continue to do so. These financial analysts did think a political backlash against plutonomy, probably involving labor protections and higher taxes might occur, but they saw a little threat of this as long as the U.S. economy continued to grow.
Three years later, of course, the U.S. plunged into a deep reception– recession from which growth ye- rates have yet to recover, contributing to the election of Barack Obama and to intense and protracted struggles over national economic policies. Whether these developments suggest the U.S. now has a kind of manufacturing and financial aristocracy, and if so, whether it’s as politically limited as Tocqueville expected, is a topic on which Americans are deeply divided. Many fear this is true.
Many others see in the very accusation the return of godless socialist class warfare. Also, during the last generation of conservative political ascendancy, some scholars believe that the place of science in America has begun to undergo far-reaching transformations as well. The US continues to seek to be the world’s leader in scientific research and in intellectual advances more generally.
But education scholar Roger Geiger argues that beginning around nineteen eighty, American research universities, the key venues for scientific experimentation in the twentieth century, began to undergo a fundamental reorientation in which they embraced the mission of contributing to the economy, especially by forging links with private industry. And as university research budgets then rose in part to service commercial interests and tuition rates also increased, state support for public higher education diminished, fostering a shift toward the privatization of higher public education– of public higher education, as people here know all too well. Conservative national legislators have also begun pushing for cuts in National Science Foundation and other governmental research funding, arguing that too much goes to intellectual work that does not directly produce scientific, medical, or technical benefits, developments that again incline many universities to turn to alliances with industry.
And at the elementary and secondary levels, fresh controversies have arisen over the place of evolutionary biology in public school classes. Collectively, these developments have raised concerns that American science and scholarship are becoming restrictively tied to commerce on the one hand and hampered by by traditionalist forms of religion on the other. Though others see in these developments salutary pressures to make research more useful and more respectful of the full range of modern worldviews.
The public school controversies over evolution are intense, in part because exposure to modern science continues to have consequences for religion. A recent national survey indicates that today, unlike the sixties and seventies, Americans become somewhat more likely to attend religious services the more they’re educated. But they’re also more likely to attend mainline Protestant denominations, to deny that their own religion is the one true faith, and that the Bible is the literal world of God, and they affirm belief in a higher power more readily than that they definitely believe in God.
Thus, although religion continues to matter to Americans at all educational levels, and indeed there’s a slight trend for the educated to return to active religious participation. The author of this study, sociologist Philip Schwadel, concludes that the religious worldviews of the highly educated differ from the religious worldviews of those with less education, and most with more traditionalist religious outlooks, along with other educated middle-class and more affluent voters, tend to vote Republican. And although the association of ecumeni-ecumenical religious liberals with regulatory and redistributive economic policies and conservative evangelicals with more full-throated support for American commercial capitalism, this is far from complete.
Nonetheless, these combinations continue to be far more prevalent than their opposites. Political and religious liberals and political and religious curvi– conservatives tend to be organized into opposed camps, with conservative religious groups still growing faster to the benefit of conservatives of all sorts. In sum, the differences over foundational concepts that have emerged in the course of American constitutional development are contributing today both to pronounced economic inequalities and to deep disagreements over policies toward commerce, science, religion, and many other matters.
Americans, to be sure, still have many common ideas, but not so many as to enable clerical, scholarly, or industrial leaders to foster any underlying national consensus that might enable political and economic institutions to operate without intense friction. One consequence is that there is now increased pressure on representative democratic institutions and processes to be the arenas in which these profound differences over current policies and foundational commitments are worked through. What alternative is there?
In this regard, at least, the results of the American experiments in republican government are making government more important than ever. But these developments are also making democratic-republican self-governance harder than ever. It is probably not wise to draw too many conclusions from the difficulties of this past summer when the world’s wealthiest nation, facing real economic problems but not a crisis, proved so incapable of reaching policy agreements that it came to the brink of default and sent stock markets tumbling around the globe.
But it seems reasonable suggest, to suggest that throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the U.S. has experienced a deepening of the foundational divisions that emerged in the late nineteenth century, sundering the broadly shared moral and religious worldviews that Americans previously displayed and making it hard to reach political agreements. So ironically, the rise of the views that valorize collective democratic decision-making process appears to be rendering those processes more dysfunctional. Yet that irony concerning modern democratic pragmatist perspectives is matched by an irony concerning their Enlightenment rationalist and religious ancestors.
Although it appears to many Americans desirable to return to these older foundational concepts, I’ve argued that it is the institutions and practices based on those concepts that have encouraged processes of innovation in commerce, science, and religion, innovations that have led many modern Americans to reject those founding ideas, at least in their original reform. To seek to return to the past then may be to seek to return to what gave us the present, and it’s not clear whether such a quest is an affirmation or a repudiation of the Founders’ experiments. Despite the current difficulties, I don’t think that either America’s present condition or this analysis of the circumstances that have contributed to it warrant any such repudiation of the American experiment.
The modern American scene remains, after all, one of extraordinary commercial abundance, breathtaking scientific and other intellectual achievements, and the blossoming of many largely happily coexisting faiths in which millions find spiritual fulfillment, all governed by democratic institutions that have grown more fully inclusive and democratic over time. But modern divisions over foundational concepts require Americans to demand more of their governing institutions and, in many ways, more of themselves than ever before. Lacking common moral authorities to whom most of the population defers, Americans have little choice but to find ways to identify goals that can be shared and policies that most can accept as means to achieve them through democratic politics, which means that they must find ways to work together politically without denying or dismissing the profound differences in their foundational commitments.
To do so, Americans may perhaps need to undertake new political experiments, redesigning institutions crafted for a polity more fundamentally unified, at least amongst its enfranchised citizens, than our own. But though these tasks are in significant measure novel and profound, there’s no reason to conclude that they cannot be met. Instead, these tasks, finding ways to make democratic institutions work effectively despite deep foundational differences, these tasks, these challenges define the agenda that Americans must pursue now if they are to continue the experiments in constitutional governance that Jefferson and Adams helped to begin, carrying those experiments forward into a future that Jefferson and Adams left to us to make.
Thank you.
(applause)
[01:01:47] SARAH SONG:
Thank you very much, Rogers. So the floor is now open for some questions.
[01:01:57] STUDENT:
Hi. Thank you. I’m an undergrad, so I was at a bar at the Oakland Airport.
[01:02:03] ROGER SMITH:
He said he was an undergrad, so he was at a bar. That follows logically.
[01:02:07] STUDENT:
Yeah.
(laughter)
All right. Yeah, so I’m an undergrad, so I was at a bar at the Oakland Airport, and seated next to me was a historian from a Texas university. And we were discussing the climate and energy challenges, and he mentioned to me that in his reading of history, he doesn’t think anything can solve the partisan divides in this country, uh, other than clean energy.
And I kind of want to know what you think about that. Thank you.
(laughter)
[01:02:36] ROGER SMITH:
Well, I actually think he’s onto something in that I think that the only way that we can, uh, find the political will to find common, uh, policies despite deep foundational differences is if we become sufficiently convinced that we have severe common problems that can’t be answered any other way. And I don’t think a sense of environmental danger will prove sufficient. The traditionalist worldviews that are doubtful about modern science attack the notion of climate change, as we’re hearing much about.
But it is, um, uh, also, uh, possible, uh, that problems of energy supply, uh, will persuade people, uh, that we need new policies, uh, including government policies, uh, to promote innovations in energy production, and that many of those innovations, uh, will be more in a clean energy direction. The fact that you’ve got a Texas oil man running around this country, uh, urging, uh, the development of alternative energy sources as well as his own natural gas supplies, um, uh, I think that shows, uh, that there is a, uh, potential, uh, for the shared sense that we really do need energy, uh, to, uh, produce coalitions, uh, on some new policies, uh, but to make sure it’s really clean energy, uh, uh, that will be, uh, demanding, uh, task of political coalition building. Sir.
[01:04:16] STUDENT:
Um, I guess shifting to the other big issue, um, I, I, I, I’m, I’m wondering about the coalition of, uh, conservatives and, and commerce. The, the– It seems that the big money interest in the U-United States does have this alliance with, uh, you know, born again Christians and people that support, um, a limited knowledge and education around science. Um, but at the same time, uh, commerce seems to fall.
You know, though, much of this country is wealthy, and, you know, wealthy people don’t like taxes, whether they’re progressive or conservative. It seems that commerce is able to, uh, to cut both ways and play both sides of the fence. And I just wonder if there, if so, it’s two questions.
One, you know, this, this seeming alliance between co-commerce and, and Christianity, and also, um, maybe there’s another way to look at it because it– because nobody likes taxes. No– for example, nobody wants their healthcare benefits for– at work to be taxed, which perhaps would be a good thing for leveling the plate– playing field for the poor. So I just wonder if there was another way to look at it.
[01:05:34] ROGER SMITH:
Well, I think that there is, uh, that the, uh, alliance of, um, religious conservative perspectives with, um, uh, economic, uh, ideologies tolerant of, uh, enormous inequality, uh, this is, um, uh, not in many ways a, uh, natural alliance. Um, it’s been forged, uh, in the course of, uh, modern politics in part because they had, uh, common enemies. Uh, and there are, uh, in the evangelical ranks, uh, many, uh, who are saying that it’s time to place, uh, renewed emphasis on the Christian message of concern for the poor and also for the strangers.
The National Association of Evangelicals has passed a resolution saying, um, well, we should be helping, uh, uh, immigrants in need, including, uh, they make clear, um, uh, undocumented, um, immigrants. And, uh, I think it is one of the challenges of trying to, uh, build, uh, coalitions on policies, uh, across the worldview, uh, divide that, um, uh, proponents of more liberal policies need to not be dismissive of their, uh, of the worldviews of these, uh, conservative religious types, uh, but rather, uh, engage them, uh, constructively in, uh, uh, finding the common ground in their, uh, moral traditions for things like, uh, concern for the poor, uh, instead of, uh, higher tax rates for, um, uh, many less wealthy Americans than we, um, have for, uh, wealthy Americans. Uh, and there are some signs, uh, that that is, um, happening, but it is an unfortunate feature of deeply, uh, divided, uh, America, uh, that, um, uh, too many liberals have demonized those with, uh, more traditionalist worldviews as just, um, ignorant, stupid, or crazy people.
Um, and that’s not a good way to get them to vote for you. Um, I find myself much more sympathetic with the values that Western European nations have established in their politics and in their, um, tolerance. Uh, is, is that because they do not have a constitution?
They, they don’t have the, uh, written down experimental nature that we do, and that they’ve, they’ve evolved their
[01:08:31] STUDENT:
governmental forms, uh, without a, a rigid constitution?
[01:08:38] ROGER SMITH:
Uh, I don’t think that the, uh, written constitution is the, uh, key factor in, uh, America’s comparative rigidity, uh, such as it is, um, uh, uh, to whatever degree that it is. Uh, and I do think that you see, uh, in a lot of Western Europe now, uh, moves to transform economic policies in more conservative directions that have counterparts to, uh, uh, patterns in the United States, uh, as well as, um, uh, hostility toward, um, uh, especially Islamic immigrants that are far– it’s far greater than we have in the, uh, United States. It’s not an issue in West Philadelphia where I live, um, uh, if, uh, an Islamic, um, woman, there are many African American, uh, Islamic believers in West Philadelphia, and the women, uh, wear, um, uh, the full, uh, hijab with complete, um, uh, only eyes are visible, nobody cares.
It’s just not an issue. Um, in Europe, it’s a huge issue. Uh, and, uh, so, um, I think that they, uh, certainly had historical trajectories, particularly after World War II, where they embraced more robust forms of social democracy, uh, in much of Western Europe than we did here.
And while they swung away from that and are continuing to swing away from that in some places, um, it doesn’t take them, uh, to, uh, as limited a social support system as we have, uh, in the United States. Uh, but I think, uh, that, uh, the explanation for that is, is, um, uh, not so much, uh, a written constitution, uh, as it is, um, uh, a variety of, uh, factors, uh, in which socialist movements became more aligned with national causes, um, and gained more, uh, popularity through the World War I and World War II period. Uh, in this country, uh, socialists have, uh, been much more, uh, opposed to what were seen as, um, uh, American nationalist causes, including, uh, American nationalist wars.
So I don’t think it’s so much, uh, the Constitution as the decisions of the American left often, uh, to put their positions, uh, in opposition to a celebration of America, uh, and that’s what, um, has, uh, put Americans off, or at least, um, Eric Foner wrote an influential essay on this years ago that featured that answer, and it still seems the most powerful to me.
[01:11:28] STUDENT:
Thank you. California seems to be, um, a state that is not following the pattern of the rest of the country. It’s been really decades since we elected a statewide arch-conservative to office. Uh, are we yet? Um… Are we ahead of the curve or are we behind the curve?
[01:11:53] ROGER SMITH:
No, you’re just weird.
(laughter)
Uh, it’s– I think that, uh uh, the, uh, in some ways, uh, California is, uh, uh, ahead of the curve, I’d have to say. Unfortunately, uh, that includes, uh, uh, you may not have, uh, elected a lot of conservatives. What Arnold Schwarzenegger was not very clear to me, I don’t think it was very clear to him.
Uh, but, um, uh, uh, you have shown a lot of dysfunctional government.
(laughter)
And the dysfunctional government, uh, is due to the fact, in significant measure, that you were ahead of the curve in the anti-tax movement and put into, uh, your Constitution limitations on, uh, funding and spending, uh, that have made governance, um, uh, almost impossible, uh, and in that sense, I think, uh, California was, uh, prophetic. Uh, you’re also, uh, ahead of the curve, of course, in your demographic, uh, transformations, and I think that they have contributed to, uh, the, um, continued success of, um, uh, many, uh, more progressive or democratic, uh, politicians, uh, in this state, uh, I think it is still very much a question, uh, whether the, as appears at the moment, uh, the, uh, growing numbers of, uh, Latino and Asian American and other, uh, uh, immigrant American communities, um, whether, uh, these will end up, uh, dividing between the parties more in the Democratic or, or Republican camp. Right now, they’re more in the Democratic camp, um, because, uh, uh, Republicans, uh, convey such a message of hostility to them, and California Republicans, uh, were leaders, uh, in that regard, too.
But, uh, at the national level, it’s not yet clear to me whether that will carry over or not.
[01:14:06] STUDENT:
You suggested that this may be a time calling for new experiments. Can you describe the details of a new experiment that you would propose, the, the changes you would suggest in government and politics to meet the needs of this time?
[01:14:21] ROGER SMITH:
I don’t have a list of, uh, the, uh, institutional innovations that we need. I’m more urging, uh, that we take this as an agenda, uh, for American political thought now. Uh, but there are some innovations, uh, that I think are, uh, desirable.
Uh, I think the, uh, efforts to, uh, transform our election system in ways that would first produce, uh, more, uh, accurate, um, uh, elections. We have locally– We have, uh, elections that are run in this very unusual way by, uh, local partisans, and that is not a guarantee either of efficiency or honesty.
But I also think that, uh, our presidential election system, uh, could, within the framework of the Constitution, be moved more, uh, in the direction of, uh, direct, uh, national, uh, election of, um, uh, presidents. Uh, there are these, uh, proposals that the, uh, states agree, uh, that, um, if enough other states do so, uh, they will commit their electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. Um, and you can do that without a constitutional amendment, and it would allow the national popular vote winner, uh, to win the presidency.
Uh, that has the potential, uh, to create a kind of, uh, politics that really seeks to build broader national political coalitions rather than focusing simply on a few, uh, contested swing states with a lot of, uh, electoral votes. Um, uh, I think that we can also, uh, related to that, uh, consider, uh, changes in the nominating process so that we don’t have, uh, nominees that are primarily selected, uh, by, uh, the most, uh, activist and often most ideological members of each party, which helps, um, uh, contribute to, uh, political polarization. Uh, and I think that, um, uh, there is an enormous need, uh, for, uh, internal reform of Congress to try to promote, uh, more genuine, uh, collective, uh, deliberative processes and for Congress to take responsibility, uh, for collectively deciding on national policies much more than, uh, it has.
Uh, the modern Congress has, um, uh, decided in effect to, uh, defer, uh, many difficult decisions of not only, uh, foreign policy, uh, but domestic policy to the executive branch and executive branch agencies. And, um, uh, uh, that collective, uh, irresponsibility means, uh, that we don’t build, uh, broad democratic coalitions in support of particular, uh, policies. Uh, people in Congress are out to seek their own individual, uh, re-election.
Uh, they’re not, um, working together, uh, to create, uh, shared policies with substance. Uh, at most, they pass bills and kick them over to the exec– that are very vague and kick them over to the executive branch to, uh, give them content. Um, that is not the way, uh, to create a politics, uh, that, uh, includes, uh, great efforts to build coalitions that bridge divides.
I’m caricaturing, uh, some of course, uh, but that’s an example. Um, uh, in our electoral system and in the, uh, conduct of, uh, Congress, there I need to– I think we need to, uh, think how we restructure our institutional processes with a view to compelling, uh, politicians, uh, to seek to build broad majorities, um, uh, compelling them, uh, to overcome, uh, uh, work across these deep divides in worldviews.
[01:18:44] STUDENT:
Um, so, so just a, a question about addressing the deep divides. Um, and, you know, I’m gonna, uh, maybe border on caricature myself, but, um, in observing the political, uh, factions today, it seems to me that the, the progressive liberal side of the aisle tends to be somewhat evidence-based and, and, and, uh, um, you know, Using, uh, you know, uh, te- you know, you know, um, honors science research facts in crafting policies that are practical, while the more conservative side of the aisle tends to operate from faith, where, um, evidence that doesn’t fit the world view is disregarded, um, or, uh, you know, things are ignored or cherry-picked.
How do you, um, you know, and again, this may be bordering somewhat on caricature and, and, and I’m describing extremes, of course, but how do you get… How do you build these coalitions you’re talking about when there are such very, um, you know, diverse– when peop- when they come from fr– such very diverse places?
[01:19:41] ROGER SMITH:
Two things. Uh, first, you do look with all sincerity, uh, for arguments of faith that, uh, they recognize as authoritative and that you can credibly claim comport with what you’re advocating. Um, and, uh, Second, uh, they do care about evidence on some matters.
There are some kind of problems that will really be disturbing to them. And so you look for evidence on things that they, uh, care about, that there are problems that really, uh, need to be solved, and then they may be more willing to work with you. And I guess I should add, you also have to, uh, be willing to work with them.
Um, uh, the, uh, that raises difficult choices of the sort that, um, uh, the Obama administration so far exemplifies. Um, do you put so much emphasize– emphasis on, um, compromise, uh, that you end up, uh, only chasing after their positions without really, uh, coming up with any agreement on things that can solve policy problems? Uh, but that is a, um, task of, uh, effective political leadership.
Uh, and, uh, I think you begin, uh, by, uh, seeing what in the things they care about, both faith and evidence, uh, that you can use to get them to engage in serious dialogue.
[01:21:19] SARAH SONG:
Thank you, Rogers. Please join me in thanking Rogers Smith.
(applause)
[01:21:29] ROGER SMITH:
Thank you all.
[01:21:32] SARAH SONG:
And you are all welcome to join for a reception in the back.
