America as it Really Is
‘On my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the citizens and so little among the heads of the government.’ These words could be written today by a traveller struck by the modest educational attainments of Donald Trump, but are actually by Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in 1831–32, and published the first two volumes of Democracy in America in 1835. He goes on:
It is a constant fact that at the present day the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs; and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result in proportion as democracy has exceeded all its former limits. The race of American statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably in the course of the last fifty years.
De Tocqueville had too penetrating an eye for the way the world was moving to be an opponent of democracy. His genius lay in his ability to see things as they actually are, unblinded either by a futile attachment to an ancien régime which could never be restored, or by a servile deference to public opinion. He saw, and wrote, that by the 1830s there had been a precipitate decline in the quality of America’s leaders.
The founding generation was guided by men of the first rank, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Jay and George Washington. Four of those seven served as president. In 1828, a startling change occurred in American politics with the election of Andrew Jackson, the first president to acknowledge no debt to the European ruling classes. He expressed himself with a biblical ferocity inherited from his Ulster Presbyterian forebears, but adapted to local conditions. So he warned one of his adversaries that his creed was ‘An Eye for an Eye, Toothe for Toothe and Scalp for Scalp’.
Jackson was tough, fearless, patriotic, loyal and a born leader of men, but also touchy, quarrelsome, ignorant, vindictive and a born killer. He hated the British without any corresponding love of the French, slaughtered native Americans without compunction, and was a dangerous man to pick a quarrel with in a saloon.
In 1791, Jackson had married Rachel Robards, née Donelson, unaware that her first husband had failed to complete the formalities needed to divorce her. They regularised things a few years later by going through a second ceremony, and Jackson always flew into a fury when anyone aspersed her name. Charles Dickinson, a brilliant shot, referred while drunk to the Jackson ‘adultery’, so Jackson picked a quarrel with him about the payment of a forfeit in a horse-race.
In the resulting duel, fought at eight paces, Jackson decided to let Dickinson fire first, hoping that speed would be the enemy of accuracy, but was hit in the chest. The bullet, though partially checked by his coat, broke two of his ribs and was so close to his heart that it could never be removed, and in years to come caused him much pain. Jackson then took aim at Dickinson, but the hammer of his pistol stuck at half-cock. Their seconds conferred, and decided Jackson could have another go if he insisted. He did insist, and hit Dickinson, who bled to death. In local society in Nashville, Kentucky, Jackson’s reputation suffered from this cold-bloodedness. He makes Trump look moderate.
Historians confuse matters by making Jackson an apostle of democracy, and he certainly expressed and turned to political advantage the resentments of backwoodsmen who felt they were looked down on by the folks in Washington DC. But he himself was a natural autocrat. Henry Clay, a statesman who never managed to become president, described Jackson as ‘ignorant, passionate, hypocritical, corrupt and easily swayed by the basest men who surround him’.
None of the eight presidents between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln was a politician of the first rank. Nor were any of the eight presidents between
Lincoln, assassinated in 1865, and Theodore Roosevelt, who became president in 1901 when William McKinley was assassinated.
De Tocqueville remarks that ‘mountebanks of all sorts are able to please the people, while their truest friends frequently fail to gain their confidence’. Equality, for which democracies have a deep craving, means that only when the great cause of independence was at stake did distinguished Americans feel impelled to offer their services, and voters to cling to them for support. In normal times, voters ‘do not fear distinguished talents, but are rarely fond of them’, and able men tend ‘to retire from the political arena, in which it is so difficult to retain their independence, or to advance without becoming servile’.
Half a century later, James Bryce observed, in The American Commonwealth, that eminent men make more enemies than obscure men do. When a party is selecting a presidential candidate, it is concerned above all to find someone who can win the election and reward his supporters by distributing the spoils of office to them. Whoever is chosen will be subjected to searching scrutiny in the press, which will remind the public of any controversial passages in the candidate’s past: ‘Hence, when the choice lies between a brilliant man and a safe man, the safe man is preferred.’ It is better, in electoral terms, never to have said anything at all original.
Trump is satisfactorily mediocre, but one cannot exactly call him safe. He is better seen as a reaction against the dull, safe candidate the Republican hierarchy would have preferred. Like Jackson in the 1820s, his attraction is that the Establishment cannot bear him. The more Trump enrages conventional politicians by giving free rein to his barbarous instincts, the better pleased his supporters are. He is their revenge on the tyranny of liberal virtue to which Barack Obama signed up with such marvellous control of tone, but which Hillary Clinton could not uphold without sounding prissy and hypocritical.
Liberals expressed astonishment and dismay at Trump’s victory. How could such a despicable figure reach the highest office in the land? For they see
American history as a morality tale which should be told for the edification of liberals the world over. In order to sustain this vision, they concentrate on the heroic founding of the republic, and on a few other presidents, including Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. They operate in too narrow a register to understand their own country, or even to want to understand it.
So just as they spend almost no time talking to Americans who voted for Trump, they spend almost no time contemplating the presidents from Jackson onwards who deserve to be regarded as his predecessors. Moralising spares them the effort needed to study their country as it actually is. They condemn Parson Weems, author of the best-selling Life of Washington, for inventing anecdotes which showed that Washington from his boyhood possessed impeccable morals (the story of the cherry tree and the hatchet); an honesty and courage which were rewarded with earthly success. But they themselves are inclined to assume that liberal virtue will be rewarded with electoral success, and when, as often happens, this proves not be the case, they feel an offence has been committed not just against their assumptions, but against the very nature of things. Democracy equals virtue: to deny that equation is to be a scoundrel.
As a philosophy of government, this approach has acute dangers. Woodrow Wilson, the most famously liberal president the United States has ever had, sanctioned repeated military interventions in Mexico, a neighbouring country of which he knew little. In 1913, a British diplomat said to him: ‘When I go back to England, I shall be asked to explain your Mexican policy. Can you tell me what it is?’ Wilson replied: ‘I am going to teach the South American Republics to elect good men!’ One notes the assumption of moral superiority: Wilson is the teacher. He evades the question about Mexico by voicing an aspiration for a continent. Yet one may doubt, given the quality of his immediate successor as president, Warren Harding, a third-rate figure with a band of seedy and corrupt friends, whether the lesson about electing good men had been permanently learned even in Wilson’s own country.
In April 1917, Wilson found himself obliged, despite his earlier pledges, to
take America into the First World War. But from the first, he made it clear he was waging war in order to make the world ‘safe for Democracy’. The overthrow of the autocratic Tsar of Russia in March 1917 made this an easier line to take.
When Wilson arrived in Europe in December 1918 to help negotiate the peace, he was greeted as a saviour, and was indeed in a powerful position, for only America could supply the food and the money needed to save Europe from starvation, and from the menace of Bolshevism. But how was Wilson to translate his noble ideals into the practical provisions needed in the peace treaties with the defeated powers? He persuaded himself that as long as he got the League of Nations, it did not matter too much if the Treaty of Versailles imposed punitive and indeed totally unrealistic reparations on Germany, which was also forced to admit its guilt for starting the war.
But it did matter. For although the Germans had no choice but to sign the treaty, they felt they had been swindled. John Maynard Keynes, who attended the conference as official representative of the British Treasury, immediately afterwards published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which with wonderful clarity, charity and intelligence he explained why Wilson had failed:
The President was not a hero or a prophet; he was not even a philosopher; but a generously intentioned man, with many of the weaknesses of other human beings, and lacking that dominating intellectual equipment which would have been necessary to cope with the subtle and dangerous spellbinders whom a tremendous clash of forces and personalities had brought to the top as triumphant masters in the swift game of give and take, face to face in council - a game of which he had no experience at all....
Faced with such wily and determined figures as the French leader, Georges Clemenceau, and the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Wilson did not stand a chance; was indeed, as Keynes said, ‘playing blind man’s buff’.
Wilson could not admit to himself that it had all gone wrong. He returned to Washington determined to get Congress to ratify what he had negotiated, including American membership of the League of Nations, which would uphold the peace. Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations, riled the president by pouring scorn on his prose: ‘As an English production it does not rank high. It might get by at Princeton [the university at which Wilson studied, and of which he became president] but certainly not at Harvard.’ Many of the objections Lodge had to the substance of the treaty were shared by perceptive Europeans, and if Wilson, a Democrat, had approached the whole task in a bipartisan spirit, and treated the Republicans with respect, he could probably have talked them round.
He instead reacted with his usual obduracy, and vowed to rouse public opinion on his side, to which end he set out on a tour of the country. In October 1919 he suffered a massive stroke – there had been minor ones earlier in the year – and was brought back to Washington in a desperate state, his left side paralysed. Edith, his wife, became his gatekeeper, hiding from the outside world how bad his condition was, issuing presidential instructions in her large, childish handwriting, and frightening others into subservience.
The end result of Wilson’s self-congratulatory propaganda was a world unsafe for democracy, which would have to go through the horror of another war. Success in government should not be confused with success in keeping one’s liberal conscience intact. This error, the egoistic primacy they accord to thinking of themselves as virtuous, renders Trump’s opponents unable to see America as it really is, and does much to account for his success.