A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom - Hardcover

Purdy, Jedediah

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9781400044474: A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400044472 ISBN 13: 9781400044474

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

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From the author of For Common Things: a provocative look at the meaning of American freedom.

Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one’s own life has inspired the country’s best and worst moments—courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

This duality is America’s story, from slavery to the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century, from the New Deal to the social movements of the 1960s and today’s battles over climate change. The arc has been toward expanding freedom as new generations press against inherited boundaries. But economic forces beyond our control undercut our ideas of self-mastery. Realizing our ideals of freedom today requires the political vision to reform the institutions we share.

Jedidiah Purdy works from the stories of individuals: Frederick Douglass urging Americans to extend freedom to slaves; Ralph Waldo Emerson arguing for self-fulfillment as an essential part of liberty; reformers and presidents struggling to redefine citizenship in a fast-changing world. He asks crucial questions: Does capitalism perfect or destroy freedom? Does freedom mean following tradition, God’s word, or one’s own heart? Can a nation of individualists also be a community of citizens? A Tolerable Anarchy is a book of history that speaks plainly to our lives today, urging us to explore our understanding of our country and ourselves, and to make real our own ideals of freedom.

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About the Author:

Jedediah Purdy teaches law at Duke University and has also taught at Yale and Harvard. Purdy is the author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today and Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Democracy, and other publications.

c h a p t e r 3

War and Its Equivalents

One of the best pieces ever in The Onion, the satirical newspaper whose articles make up a parallel history of the last two decades, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, “Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday.” True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media saturation. It concludes, though, with a middle- American version of the “Yes” at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses as Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:
“I baked a cake,” said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. “I made it into a flag.”

Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson.

“It's beautiful,” Cassie said. “The cake is beautiful.”

That Onion piece better captures the mood of those weeks than the soaring and belligerent speeches of politicians. It spoke to a basic and powerful wish to be connected to others, to help heal rather than injure, to be on the side of good rather than let isolation make you neutral. And it recognized that the ways we try to do these things are often stumbling, awkward, easy to make fun of-even though making fun of them is not just cruel but also shoddy and trite, much more jejune than the attempts to do something good. This scrap of satire acknowledged all of this and, in a paper that specializes in relentless fun making, gently refrained from attacking it.

The appetites for connection, membership, and righteousness (which is not the same as self-righteousness) that this sketch almost shyly honored are a reminder of Americans' persistent desire for a sense of national community and the common good. More vivid reminders include the nomination in 2008 of two presidential candidates who believe in citizenship and political service and, in particular, the enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama's conviction-driven primary campaign. Self-concern, self-regard, even a certain amount of self-involvement, are all resting places for human feelings. Selfishness and isolation are not. That is why political language remains essentially engaged in trying to find a language of common good that feels alive, contemporary, genuine, and American. The search often feels as futile as the fictional Christine Pearson's search through her kitchen cabinets and, like hers, ends in the personal orbit of friends and neighbors.

What might such language sound like today? Part of the answer comes from the themes of the previous chapter. For one thing, it would have to take seriously what Ronald Reagan saw when he triumphantly dispatched Jimmy Carter: there is no American appetite for diminution and bad conscience in political life. We listen to be affirmed and celebrated. We are mostly not interested in being called to serve, let alone to sacrifice, for a promise of sterner limits. In this respect we are the spiritual descendants of Walt Whitman,
who announced that he celebrated himself and, in that act, celebrated every American and the country as a whole. Reagan's inaugurals were tableaux of American dreaming and striving, full of a heroic ordinariness that had more of Whitman in them than any previous president's.

For another thing, a renewed language of common good would have to accept some of the personal-virtue consensus that united Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Americans do experience freedom, purpose, and satisfaction most strongly in family and individual life. These are, by and large, our archetypes for understanding what it means to be connected with others and have commitments beyond ourselves. We have fewer “mystic chords of memory” than felt, inhabited bonds with others whom we have seen healthy and sick, elated and sad, and at all hours of day and night. It is not just that these are what we live for, although that is true: they are also how we know what it means to live for something, rather than just to exist. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush went there because they understood
that family and community held undeniable shared values, based in the concrete reality of interdependence. Their difficulty-more frustrating, probably, to Clinton than to Bush-was that they had nowhere to go from there.

Third, it would have to be a language of common good for a country that is much more diverse and, in some ways, equal than any previous America. The New Deal, the greatest American political experiment in social solidarity, addressed a national community with whitesupremacist struts. Roosevelt held his indispensable congressional majority only through concessions to Southern Democrats who refused to have their system of racial caste dismantled. He went as far as declining to support an antilynching law, a shameful capitulation to the ugliest and most lawless form of American violence. The part of the Great Society that we remember-the War on Poverty- had real failings, but it was also broken on racial resentment, precisely because Lyndon Johnson would not limit its reach along the racial lines that Roosevelt accepted. Decades of growing tolerance and openness have made the country a much better one but have also made us more nearly a country of strangers. The equality of tolerance is not that far
from indifference, and very far from the equality of opportunity that LBJ envisioned. As political scientist Robert Putnam has recently argued, there is no reason to deny in principle that diversity and solidarity can coexist; that said, we have not found a convincing register for their coexistence in American politics.

Finally, a language of common good would have to contend with the enrichment of private life. The search for a fuller life is under way everywhere but in government: it is the personal utopianism of yoga and Pilates studios, mega-churches and living rooms, pharmaceutical labs and psychotherapy clinics, and the editorial offices of Dwell and Saveur-the hundreds of thousands of places where billions of dollars and hours drive the unending search for meaning and satisfaction. Americans have always been amateur specialists in self-transformation, but the practice has never been more elaborate, mainstream, or sorted into lifestylecompatible market segments. If there was a hint of unique adventure and transformative possibility in the politics of past generations, it is harder to find now, partly by contrast with the multifarious growth of possibility elsewhere in life.

At least some of a language that worked might extend Roosevelt's and Johnson's images of citizens whose free personal activity is enabled by shared institutions. Such language might begin with the paradox of American individualism-a new version of what Progressive critics of free labor described a century ago. On one hand, we experience ourselves as vessels of infinite possibility, and we have more tools and techniques to make that possibility real than anyone else in history. We feel correspondingly entitled to make good on at least a generous portion of what we might become, and disappointed and wronged if we find we cannot. On the other hand, we are not much less buffeted by economic and institutional fate than earlier Americans. Tens of millions lack the basic security of health insurance. Globalization, the decline of private-sector unions, and new corporate models all make unemployment an ordinary interruption for the fortunate and a long-term threat for the unlucky. It is fashionable to praise the flexibility and selfrevision that these changes necessitate, and there is some basis for the praise; but “reinventing” yourself is much more fun when you choose the occasion than when circumstances pick you out for reinvention. The Progressive criticism of laissez-faire began in the clash between the ideal of selfmastery and the reality that people were vulnerable to impersonal forces whose dictates could feel as arbitrary as the Greek Fates and that, like those iconic powers, made a mockery of human will. The world has changed since 1905: we are much richer, and real deprivation is less likely. Nonetheless, the psychic whiplash that strikes when our vast sense of possibility meets unyielding constraint is as acute as ever. A competent, innovative government might pick up this problem-which it is fair to describe as the politics of the American dream-where Johnson set it down when the Great Society yielded to bureaucratic overreach, racial anger, and a war the country was coming to hate, which the president did not know how to end. There is more on this possibility in later chapters on the economy of freedom.
War and Its Equivalents

Maybe, though, there needs to be more. In an 1895 Harvard commencement address, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court justice, attacked the Progressive concern with personal security and comfort as spiritually insufficient. Holmes and some of his contemporaries might have predicted the developments described in the previous chapter: the failure of Progressive politics to sustain an idea of common good and the retreat of public values into personal virtue. For them, the lives that Progressives tried to make possible for all citizens could not sustain the idea of citizenship itself. Citizenship, as a status and source of dignity, relied on an idea of civic honor. Honor was a quality of soldiers, not homemakers, and there was no way to save it in a world of safe private lives. “War is out of fashion,” Holmes complained to the listening Harvard graduates, and he derided the “society for which many philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion unite in longing . . . one in which they may be comfortable and may...

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