Daniel Johnson responds to Noel Malcolm
I was interested in your initial philosophical analysis of this process as a sort of pseudo-science. But in the eyes of continental thinkers, perhaps they really do think it is a science. You know, you took it for granted that because from our more empirical, practical, common law tradition, we don’t believe that laws are discovered in this way, that they are just waiting to be found. Isn’t the continental vision slightly different? It starts with Roman law, and in a sense the last 2,000 years are a steady commentary on an existing codex. I’m just wondering: French tradition certainly, but perhaps more widely, the continental tradition, is very rationalist and does believe that law is a science. You know, the Germans would use Wissenschaft to describe what they’re doing. I’m just wondering whether what we’re dealing with are two very different mentalities? I remember Hayek tried to defend common law against this kind of rationalism. He doesn’t even talk about human rights in the Constitution because it simply hadn’t yet emerged in the way that it has since then. It really is a recent phenomenon.
Daniel Johnson responds to Keith Windschuttle
It suddenly struck me that there have been only two men who became the President of the United States who could be described as academics. The first was Woodrow Wilson, who invented the League of Nations and all that we know that followed from that, and the second is Barack Obama. And what these internationalist intellectuals are doing—perhaps intellectual is a better word than academic, because the déformation professionnelle really relates to a wider group than just academics; it includes journalists, writers, all kinds of other intellectuals—contrary to what they proclaim is their wish to do away with barriers and promote universal brotherhood, is in fact stirring up racial hatred. That is what Keith has told us is happening in Australia, it’s what is happening in the United States today. Why are there these terrible riots in places like Baltimore? The dream that having a black president would put an end to the whole racist, post-slavery sort of problem in the United States—but it hasn’t happened, has it? It simply doesn’t follow that because you are well educated and have these internationalist ideals you are necessarily conducive to peace and harmony.
James Piereson responds to Andrew C. McCarthy
The Catholic Church has long seen the secular welfare state as an ally in assisting the poor. But is it in fact an ally? As a secular welfare state accumulates its power in these areas, the church has had to withdraw—education, healthcare, adoption. All the way down the road, the secular welfare state is taking over these functions that the church used to have. The National Conference of Bishops supported Obamacare, and once it was passed they turned around and sued against various elements of it. Obama passes Obamacare, and then he exempts all of his friends from a lot of the conditions of that legislation. That, to me, is an obvious example of corruption running through the system. All the large charities in the United States are funded by the federal government through grants from the various agencies. That includes Catholic charities; they get huge grants from the federal government. Are they independent organizations? Or are they to some extent instruments of government? And once they take all that money from the government, how can they oppose the expansion of the government? Those seem to me concrete examples of corruption, the dissolution of the power of representative government institutions and the takeover by the government of formerly private and independent organizations.
Daniel Johnson responds to Andrew C. McCarthy
Your parallel between King John being released from his obligations on Magna Carta by Pope Innocent III and the rapprochement between Pope Francis and President Obama raises a very interesting question about church and state. I think the reason Innocent did that mainly had to do with realpolitik: John was a useful ally and he didn’t want to see him deposed. And in the case of Francis, I think it has something to do with being an Argentine Peronist, which is his background and he is naturally disposed to approve of a man like Obama. We also saw that he was rather soft on the Castros on his visit to Havana. I speak as a Catholic, but popes, like kings and presidents, have their own private reasons.
The more serious point is that actually the first clause of Magna Carta states, “The English Church shall be free,” and that was there because the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, was actually the main organizer of the barons; he’s the man that forced John to come to the table and do a deal. So in fact the church played quite an important part in the attempt to limit the powers of the king and place him under the rule of law.
Roger Kimball responds to Daniel Johnson
I very much like your anatomy of “dereliction.” With the Victorian example, you have a fairly recent, concrete case of the re-moralization of society and that is really the task that is before us. I don’t mean it in a prim manner. I mean it in the sense of recapturing, reanimating those monuments to magnificence that we seem totally anesthetized to. The question is, how do you do that? In a way, I like to say that’s a rhetorical question. It’s a matter of persuasion but we, despite our eloquence, seem unable to get much beyond a fairly narrow circle of people who agree with us. At least that’s my sense in this country. Now that may be just the way things are; sometimes the maintenance of civilization is a task that has to be performed in the catacombs, metaphorically speaking. But it does seem to me that unless we are able to reanimate a passionate interest in these monuments of civilization, then that dereliction of duty that you anatomize will lead to our downfall.
Douglas Carswell responds to Daniel Johnson
I was just wondering if I could introduce a theoretical thought and suggest far from having good reason to be pessimistic—we’ve been talking pessimistically about the future of our civilization—I think we should be quite optimistic. In a sense, things that were once regarded as Western values are more personal than ever before. The human race is more productive than ever before. Every year, tens of millions of people are drawn into a network, a specialization, an exchange that I would say began in England and across the Atlantic a couple of centuries ago and now spans the globe. The elites are useless, the elites have a political system that is rotten but the wonderful thing is that the world is getting better despite that. Technology means the elites have never been less relevant and we shouldn’t mistake contempt for a political system that’s corrupted and politically elite institutions that need reform for the fact that actually the broader civilization beneath it is actually in pretty good shape, despite all the failings of these politicians.
James Piereson responds to Jay Cost
I am not convinced that our modern form of corruption runs back through history to the days of the Federalists. It’s obvious that it’s the case today, this kind of corruption. Most of the corruption in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century was more of a state and local phenomenon. Up until the 1930s, the federal government spent only about 2.5 percent of GDP, and it raised those funds mainly from the tariff and used them to fund a postal system. There was some corruption and patronage in that system in the appointment of postmasters and custom-house officials. But it was small, and the federal government never ran up much of a debt through that whole period from the 1790s to the 1930s, except to finance wars—and those debts were afterwards paid off rather quickly. It is true that the Republican Party in the post–Civil War period was a kind of Hamiltonian party in that it was organized around protection, tariffs, and support for American manufacturing. But the scale of corruption was limited by the limited powers of the national government. It has really been in this post–World War era that corruption of the kind we are talking about here has more or less taken over the national system. The functions of government have exploded without limit and we now believe that enormous amounts of debt are needed to keep the system running. There is no area of national life where the federal government is not active, and this has meant that large areas of American life—the schools, colleges and universities, business and trade associations—have been politicized to an alarming degree. In other words, the kinds of corruption we are discussing now are really a function of the post-war order in America rather than a defect that goes back to the founders.
Jeremy Black responds to Douglas Carswell
Many of the excellent papers we’ve been listening to are versions of eighteenth-century Tory thought—and I’m not criticizing people. It’s an eighteenth-century Tory period when the Tories thought to cope with the dominance of politics that they were alienated by, what they saw as the progressivism of the misleading, weak progressivism. They were offended by what they saw as the moral consequences of the role of commerce and the way in which that distorted any true value, and I think of course this directly affected American thought. In many senses, although the Americans attacked what they called a “Tory.” in the case of George III, many of their ideas were directly taken up from Toryism. Jefferson, he would have hated to think about this, but many think Jefferson is a Tory. So what I’d like to suggest is in essence that the conservative tradition, the Tory tradition, has always been one which has found it very difficult to accommodate itself to the nature of power. In essence, discourses of virtue are in part the ways in which we cope with how others compromise power, and sometimes, alas, we find our own side of compromises with power.