I publish unedited some unedited text messages I sent a dear friend several months ago, to keep them easily accessible to myself. This is just a mull on applied political theory.
It dawned on me that I have basically looked at TR’s approach— unsparing on personal standards, unsparing on public honor, total faith everybody can do it, sense that anybody not doing it is in some sense broken, ie hold everyone to highest standards— as the right way of doing things. I have thought about that in all public ethics I have, from bipartisanist public service dignity and patriotism to intellectual integrity to the braver angels way and beyond.
But I am realizing now, as I reflect on Hamilton’s statecraft and view of society, and especially his really complex views about liberty as means not ends of government, and honor as bedrock of systems but cannot be expected of anybody, (he also called virtue ‘the only unmixed good permitted to man,’ complicating things further) I am setting myself up to be disappointed. (Also Lincoln is almost polar opposite to TR on personal worth, thinking about first and second inaugural closings.) Hamilton and Lincoln were more realistic than TR in weirdly opposite directions.
Hamilton is probably right that you really should not expect anyone in public life to behave ethically, or for the American people to behave ethically, at the expense of self-preservation and self-interest etc. (which is why hypocrisy is the norm.) Institutions might help create a functional public ethics but that will not make people in it “good,” nor does it have to actually. And if you don’t expect anyone to behave ethically, you can have a system that doesn’t rely on anyone’s goodness to function. TR would not have this, he would demand people in public life behave with integrity and rail at then if he judged they didn’t.
Lincoln is probably right that regardless of whether people are virtuous or not, they do deserve unconditional reconciliation and understanding for they know not what they do etc, up to and including traitors and blood enemies; and that it is impossible for virtue to be the bedrock of any kind of political identity, including for responsible elites, and impossible for any values structure to genuinely create unproblematic virtue (including for example abolitionism or unionism.) TR would not have this, he would judge people who don’t hold themselves to higher standards and call them weak.
I still don’t know what this means about harnessing anger, ambition, self-interest, etc. for the public good, or harnessing them in ways that make it people’s self-interest to behave with public integrity that in time actually becomes civic virtue. I am poring over McDonald’s Hamilton and trying to comprehend. I used to try that for just depol but now it increasingly is everything, and I am so unschooled in this. You know my classic dialectic of honesty vs responsibility; that’s real, but it also can’t escape the reality of public life, or, I think, Hamilton’s structure. TR just wants people to hold themselves to virtue (which I do too.) Hamilton doesn’t want anyone to tell them to hold themselves to virtue but wants a structure that punishes them subtly for not being outwardly virtuous. That feels hypocritical to me; but is probably more in line with human nature broadly than the self-improvement stuff you and me live in. (But also puts cultivation of virtue in hands of people wielding power, which is easy corruption too.)
All this to say that TR’s standards are the lowest anyone should hold themselves to, and good for leadership inspiration of choice spirit elites maybe, but are as delusional about what to expect from or how to treat most Americans as Woodrow Wilson’s civil religion. Hamilton being dark and not expecting frameworks to need virtue to function, and Lincoln being bittersweet and treating everybody as if they were broken and deserved compassion, are way more realistic.
If I were to follow my normal path on this stuff I would try to synthesize Lincoln’s and TR’s and Hamilton’s attitudes into an amalgamated personal attitude that was analytically useful and applicable across various political ideologies and understandings, and preach for people to hold themselves to it, and build YP programs off of it. But the Hamilton stuff would not let it stop there; it would have to have a very specific structure of soulcraft at the very least for elite formation, and that in itself would be an argument about society and politics with major implications for how politics should be organized (and I think that last bit is an open question.) like with TR you can have it be basically a personal thing, and even with TR and Lincoln you can have it be basically personal and social. But with Hamilton— I think probably unlike any other American political theorist, moreso even than Madison— it must also be political, not just personal and social. That terrifies me and goes against a lot of what I’ve preached at Braver Angels, even concedes things that people at BA whose views I’ve considered to be heresy have been pushing for years. But maybe it’s good then that I am no longer there. I might not be betraying my service to braver angels in doing this; it might be that my view of BA could’ve been correct, that BA should remain what it was, but that the problems for America are getting deeper into this and my service must change too.
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