An Interview with David Bromwich
By Nat Schmookler.
“There’s an immediate sense one has, which must be relied on, which we can’t not trust, that says: that’s just wrong.”
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David Bromwich has proved himself to be that rarest kind of intellectual: one whose interests have broadened over time. After honing his academic chops on William Hazlitt as a young man, he has since expanded to aesthetics, 19th-century American history, William Wordsworth, and, most recently and to great acclaim, Edmund Burke.
Yet, despite racking up impressive and diverse academic achievements, Bromwich has also found the time to become one of America’s most trenchant political commentators. Weighing in on the president’s decisions on matters ranging from the war in Syria to healthcare, he has become a strong and articulate voice for the general sense of disappointment dogging many Obama supporters since 2009.
Less than a year after the publication of his newest book, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, Professor Bromwich was good enough to sit down with us at Yale. This proved to be the perfect place to meet with him: with the exception of a decade-long stint at Princeton, Yale has been his intellectual home since graduating high school. He is now a Sterling Professor in the Yale’s English department.
In one of those small, wood-paneled reading rooms in which Yale abounds, David discussed with us as many of his interests as we could squeeze into a long and extremely caffeinated afternoon.
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1. Biography: Los Angeles, Yale, Burke
The Utopian:
Let’s start with the basics: when and where were you born?
David Bromwich:
I was born in New Haven. My father at that time was in Yale Law School on the GI Bill, and my parents soon after went to California, which is where I grew up until the age of 17.
The Utopian:
In LA, yes?
David Bromwich:
In LA, going to UCLA while I was in high school for four quarters, and that was a very good time. The LA city schools had a program which some other cities do that let high school students in their senior year, if they’ve passed certain tests, go to college for the afternoon instead of high school. And I think that saved me. I was finding high school pretty oppressive, and I enjoyed taking college classes a lot.
The Utopian:
Did you actually work or was it a way to get out and have fun?
David Bromwich:
I was taking classes. Real classes in philosophy and literature, and I suppose I might have gone to UCLA if I hadn’t gotten into Yale. But I did and came here and stayed at Yale for graduate school and then went to Princeton to teach for eleven years. And I did not think I would be coming back to Yale. I wanted for complex reasons to move and New York was a possibility, but I ended up coming back to New Haven and gradually have come to like it.
The Utopian:
You said your dad was on the GI Bill – what did he do in the war?
David Bromwich:
He worked in Army Intelligence. The details of it I never knew, whether that’s because they were very secret or boring or some combination of the two. He was in for five years and the last year in China was partly driving trucks, partly serving on the Burma Road for UNRRA, and partly serving as a secretary to an American official connected with UNRRA. So my fault and my father’s reticence are both factors here, but I don’t know enormous detail about it.
The Utopian:
So you didn’t have that sense of “I have to go join the Army like Dad and prove myself”?
David Bromwich:
My dad wasn’t an Army man. He wasn’t the military type, he just happened to have served for five years, a little extra time as many people did then. And I inherited his Army duffel bag which I used for summer camp and other things for many years until it wore out. But no, the Army in my time would have meant Vietnam and I didn’t like anything about the war and was protesting it even before I was of age to be drafted.
The Utopian:
What did your mom do and how did she meet your dad?
David Bromwich:
My mother, Rose Bromwich who is still alive, met my father at the International House at UC Berkeley. She at the time was working on a master’s thesis in the field of education, which she ended up being a professor of: educational psychology, specializing in early childhood. My father was finishing his undergraduate years after the Army. That was a big interruption but he finished and went to law school after that. He did some work initially in the field of labor law. So they met there and went back to California – UCLA, where they were both connected at different times in a small way.
The Utopian:
And what sorts of people did your parents have over? Were you exposed to intellectual discussions as a kid?
David Bromwich:
Political discussions. My brother and I were lucky to have parents who were intelligent but not grueling in the way they expected intelligence from us.
The Utopian:
What do you mean by “grueling?”
David Bromwich:
It was nothing like the nightmare vision of a disciplined intellectual childhood that you get in John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which my father had read and took as a warning on how not to bring up your child. And my parents took care, were liberal minded, and didn’t seek to influence us in very direct ways. There was a lot of political discussion, often over dinner, just the family since we didn’t have guests over that often.
And I suppose on my mother’s side there was also a left-liberal politics. Her family had come over from Germany – Germany to France in 1934 and then from France to the US in 1938 – so they settled in that southern California part where many German Jews ended up settling. They had a pretty good life there, but our politics was partly European and so I suppose now, looking back, there was a worldliness, a sort of nonparochial approach to American politics that was interesting and was unusual. But no, it was not especially filled with intellectual conversation or discussion of important books or anything like that.
The Utopian:
What did you dream of doing when you were growing up? Is it what you’re doing now?
David Bromwich:
I’m happy in what I’m doing now, and I feel very lucky to be a college teacher and to be able to write some things I enjoy writing. What did I dream of? I suppose first of being a baseball player. It occurs to me I would have liked (now that I’ve seen what the life is like, and I was already interested then in that line of work) to have been a jazz musician. But I lacked the talent for it; and the hours and the daily discipline are probably greater than they are for an academic.
The Utopian:
One more background question: the opposite of what you dreamed of? What were you most afraid of?
David Bromwich:
I think early on, as a child, I was probably most afraid of not being accepted by other people, by my peers, especially boys. I had some rough years when I was ten, eleven, twelve, and changed classes and then changed schools. The complete lack of success in gaining acceptance cured me of the fear and I found my own circle of friends and found books.
The Utopian:
So you wouldn’t have described yourself as popular!
David Bromwich:
I don’t know. I never felt particularly popular or isolated and unpopular. There was a period when I wanted desperately to be popular. I flunked, and that was very fortunate for me in the long run.
The Utopian:
So you came to Yale for college. Is that when you first became interested in Edmund Burke?
David Bromwich:
I read Burke when I was an undergraduate for a very interesting and unusual seminar taught by Henry Abelove, who later went on to write a biography of John Wesley, The Evangelist of Desire, and taught for many years at Wesleyan University. Though I read Letter to a Noble Lord and Reflections on the Revolution in France then, I don’t think Burke made the deepest sort of impression on me until I was working on what became my first book, which was on Hazlitt. Burke was one of the writers Hazlitt most deeply admired, and he wrote some of the best criticism that there ever has been on Burke as a writer and as a political thinker. It’s not all appreciative; it’s also a resistant and contesting sort of criticism. But it deepened my interest in Burke, and getting at him through Hazlitt made me read quite a lot of Burke at that stage. That would be in my late twenties and I had an old set of Burke that I bought at a book barn and I read most of it.
The Utopian:
Still got it?
David Bromwich:
Still have it.
The Utopian:
You came to Burke because you needed to know Hazlitt?
David Bromwich:
I was not that responsible. I wasn’t being that officious or answerable with myself. I just followed paths from Hazlitt out into anything that seemed interesting and closely related, and Burke was certainly one thing. And around the same time I was starting to teach a course on the French Revolution and English Literature in the 1790s, and that’s a course I’ve come back to, teaching again off and on, and in that course Burke becomes a major character because his book on the French Revolution started a pamphlet war on the pros and cons of the revolution, which went on through the early nineties. More than a hundred pamphlets defending Burke or attacking him were written. A clear two or three dozen are still readable and I’ve read them.
The Utopian:
Let’s try to understand Burke’s view of things: what is human nature for Burke, for he indicts Warren Hastings in the name of human nature.
David Bromwich:
“Human nature itself.” That’s the last of a series of indictments, the series of charges he wants to bring against Hastings, who has violated the decent rights of the people of India of every age, rank, sex, and condition. It goes on, and human nature is the last term there. Burke speaks in an earlier and very great speech on India – the 1783 speech on Fox’s East India Bill – of what he calls “the natural equality of mankind at large.” That means not that people ought to be made equal or society ought to be level so that there’s absolute parity of economic livelihood between person and person in a society. But it does mean that the precondition of human beings in society is understood to be equal – for example, equality in the eyes of the law is taken for granted – and that a political arrangement that absolutely erases the awareness of that equality is not acceptable.
So Burke is to a great extent an oppositional thinker, a negative thinker. It’s much harder to say what Burke would have stood for and what he would have wanted in society than it is to say what was he against, what did he think was wrong, morally wrong, politically imprudent, and so on. And what he called arbitrary power, exercised by the governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings–he thought that was immoral, and that it had to be stopped. To stop it by the prosecution involved him in putting Hastings under the process of impeachment or using whatever other means you could find.
But human nature for Burke as I read him – and it’s not the only way to read him – is a subject of abstract understanding from practical observation. The way Hume thought of human nature, what he wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature: we have knowledge of human things; we can cast our eye over humankind and make certain generalizations about the nature of sympathy, the nature of the passions, anger, greed, etc. And government ought to be consistent somehow with the ways we that find people do act together usefully and with as little pain as possible.
But there have been commentators on Burke who thought that he had a deep commitment to natural law, to a Christian kind of moral expectation with its own absolutes. That’s not how I read him. I think if Burke had been a Christian writer, there are many things he would have said differently. He belongs, as he says, to Christianity “much from conviction, more from affection.” So he regarded himself as part of that community, and how could he not be? And he thought there should be an established church. But I think his understanding of human nature and of morality is not particularly religious, and the 18th century is not our most religious century.
The Utopian:
So just to clarify: we’re all born equal?
David Bromwich:
There is something that we can recognize that he calls by the name of “the natural equality of mankind.” But that does not mean we’re all born equal because we’re all born into a society where there is not equality.
The Utopian:
Is this separate from Rousseau’s notion that man is born free and everywhere he is found in chains?
David Bromwich:
It’s very interesting that you pick that out. I suppose Burke would have subscribed to something he could have called the natural equality of mankind at large, which is closer to both “nature” and “equality” than many people imagine Burke ever getting; and Rousseau was willing to make such compromises in his practical adaptations of the social contract that his demands of existing societies look a lot like the accommodations Burke was willing to make in the 1770s and 1780s.
But Rousseau thinks that there is a deep truth in natural equality. And I would say that Rousseau is also finally a political thinker – the category of politics and political existence, to him, as a republican, means the most that any human commitment can mean. I don’t think Burke is, in that ultimate sense, a political thinker. He is in some ways an anti-political thinker. He is trying to clarify the limits of politics, partly from the point of view of morality, partly of just people’s desire to be left in peace.
Rousseau is radical in his demands of political participation. Burke is the opposite. Burke lags far behind even the moderately democratic thinkers of his time. He believed that most people don’t want to be bothered by politics and don’t have a head for it and it should be left to representative government, but where the political representatives know quite a lot and engage in most of the consequential dealings on their own.
The Utopian:
Before we go on from human nature, where does curiosity fit in? He says this is the most fundamental emotion.
David Bromwich:
He says at the beginning of his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful that if you look by introspection into human nature, you’ll find that the leading and irreducible motive is curiosity. And in commenting on that in my book on Burke, I say that this is a sign of how he is going to interpret social and political man as well. What is curiosity? If you think, for example, that the primary motive is fear – above all fear of death – as Hobbes was convinced it was, certain consequences for your political thought will follow. But if you believe as Burke did that the motive is curiosity – well curiosity is non-moral. It’s neither good nor bad. Curiosity leads to scientific discovery, curiosity can lead to transgression. It’s the wild part of human nature that needs to be both accepted and restrained.
The Utopian:
So curiosity is both the problem and the solution.
David Bromwich:
Or it points to the kind of solution you can arrive at and the kind that you shouldn’t try for. What could be a more convincing demonstration of our curiosity than the fact that we know people can be voyeurs? They watch, just watch, and that’s not good or bad. Something follows from watching. If you watch a war movie that’s very exciting and engaging and puts you on one side of the war sympathetically, from that you can become a constitutional patriot, you can become a mass murderer, you can become a medic. This portrayal of things by imagination, and the process of becoming a spectator of a scene that has been imagined, may have any number of implications. And I think Burke partly wrote his book on the sublime just to show how wide the range of possibilities was.
The Utopian:
Burke says we are curious about the beautiful and we are curious about the sublime. What is the difference between these two categories?
David Bromwich:
I’m not sure he applies curiosity so directly to either one, but sure. We are curious to return to a kind of scene, or to come to it for the first time. To use his example: if we are able to stand on a cliff outside a city where an earthquake is taking place and buildings are falling down, we would, he thinks, gladly stand at the very brink, just barely in safety from that scene, and look at what’s happening because it’s astonishing. You want to see it. If it happens in reality, your appetite for being a watcher is even greater than it is if it happens in fiction or as mere spectacle.
The beautiful is a little different, and I think Burke doesn’t deal with that part of his subject as interestingly. Part of the reason for his rather minimal, broad and generalized treatment of the beautiful must have come from the element of sex, which he approaches in a very sparing and self-curtailed manner. There, if you think of beauty as somehow connected with the feeling of sexual attraction, or lust, then curiosity certainly enters into it. But Burke has in mind, or says he does, the purging away of any motive of mere lust or possession from his idea of beauty. He has it in mind, but he doesn’t quite effect the purge, because one of his leading examples is a woman’s breast. That’s one of the examples of what he thinks just obviously is beautiful. Most of one’s reasoning about that book is going to come up short when applied to beauty.
The Utopian:
What does it matter what the difference between sublime and beautiful is?
David Bromwich:
If you take seriously the idea of the aesthetic as pertaining to things that interest us for no immediate practical purpose, but whose interest seems justified and justifiable in some way, where the main category is things seen, things that are attractive to the eye or things that appeal to the mind through reading, which also is seeing in the mind’s eye – if you take that category seriously, then, using as wide an array of examples as you can possibly get, you’ll end up recognizing that there are aesthetic experiences that are relatively pleasant and others that are relatively unpleasant.
Burke has in mind the sort of encounter with the unpleasant that nevertheless could be an experience you would want to renew or be fascinated by – he has in mind an important species of the not-quite-pleasant, the not-quite-friendly – when he offers examples of the sublime from the book of Job, from Milton, from Shakespeare.There’s a more extreme category that is omitted in Burke except when he talks about stench: that would be the category of the grotesque. And that is a category that has a pretty close, perhaps obverse relationship to the sublime.
The Utopian:
But it seems that many things we would call grotesque would be sublime to Burke because they create that sensation of the destroyed city.
David Bromwich:
Hard to say. An interesting test case would be his quotation from Book 2 of Paradise Lost of the scene of Satan, Death, and Sin. Death has a spear in his hand, “a deadly dart” with which he can kill anyone and anything, and Sin is a monster woman like Godzilla who’s constantly having repulsive children because sin spawns other sins. It’s not one of the more purely Miltonic episodes in Paradise Lost, it leans too much on allegory and emblem, but it’s effective in a certain way.
Burke quotes from it, and you could say there he’s honoring the grotesque as if it’s sublime, but what he quotes the passage for is the moment of maximum uncertainty when Satan is looking at Death and doesn’t know what he’s seeing. It’s a moment of doubt. And that doubt, where you don’t even know quite what it is you’re dealing with, I think is all-important for Burke’s idea of the sublime.
If you want a related specimen from a lower walk of culture, but still extremely effective, take the moment near the beginning of the movie Alien. They’re approaching the already crashed spaceship that has been emitting radio waves they don’t understand, and they go into that inner chamber, which is like a swimming pool with a strangely lit, foglike supersurface. One of the astronauts dips his hand in and as soon as you see that, you realize, “Oh no, no, no, something’s wrong there!” But you don’t know what’s wrong. That is sublime. It is truly sublime, in a movie that’s only pretty good, overall, because you can’t keep it up. You have to turn it into something literal, when you draw it out into a narrative, and it becomes quite literal in that movie, as it does in most monster movies.
The Utopian:
His ideas of beauty and the sublime differ sharply from his predecessors: is that right?
David Bromwich:
Yes. Burke originates the modern treatment of the sublime and beautiful and even, it’s fair to say, the whole modern discussion of aesthetics which takes shape starting with Kant and in the writers – German, English, French, and other – who come after Kant. The sublime and the beautiful aren’t at all such antitheses as Burke makes them out to be, in the theorists that you can locate as his precursors.
2. Moral Imagination
The Utopian:
What is moral imagination? Is there a moral component to aesthetics? Do we read to become better people? This is an idea that Burke engages, but I think that he ultimately does not accept it.
David Bromwich:
I think we read to learn and to learn in the medium of imagination, which can be more economical than learning from experience. I think that’s the burden of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy (but he could be just as well describing anything that has a digestible plot): “an imitation of an action” that is “serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.” We want to learn. That comes from curiosity.
Moral imagination, as I use the phrase in the essay of that title, treats objects that have come under the scrutiny of imagination as if they were real, and treats them as objects for conscience and not just consciousness. Can you go through what anyone would call the experience of an aesthetic phenomenon and have the moral imagination not be engaged? I would say yes.
I would say that the spectator of a great film such as Vertigo, which has human agents in it and human fate implicated in the story and even a disturbing sympathy –nevertheless, the kind of imagination that that film engages is not drawing on any interest we have in judgments of right and wrong. Judgments, I mean, concerning what makes for good or just conduct towards someone and what is utterly wrong or unjust conduct towards someone. Now you can make that story into some sort of critique of exploitation of a woman by a man, or a deception of a man by a woman, but you’d be off the track of what the movie is doing.
The Utopian:
You wouldn’t be engaging in the proper spirit.
David Bromwich:
Right. So the movie has something to do with the unreachability of self-knowledge. It affords a vision of experience that defies the hope for coming to know something final about yourself and your relation to the world. Its tactics in doing that are fascinating, and are not immoral, but I don’t think the imagination you’re engaged in, while looking at that movie, is “moral.” I have in mind, by using “moral imagination,” much more the experience that’s centrally associated with the 19th century novel, and with some of the great realist films of the Thirties and Forties, and with moral philosophy as it began to be practiced in earnest in the 18th century. Also certain examples of social criticism, where the view taken of the fate or fortune of someone remote from oneself and from one’s own circumstances becomes very important, becomes arrestingly important.
The Utopian:
So is moral imagination the ability to conceive of oneself as someone else?
David Bromwich:
Interesting that you’d say it that way, because Burke defines sympathy as “a sort of substitution.”
The Utopian:
Is sympathy the foundation of a moral imagination?
David Bromwich:
Yes.
The Utopian:
So if I have a good moral imagination–
David Bromwich:
I would prefer to say having it, period, versus not having it. If it exists, it produces certain effects. I think it’s impossible to have a moment of such recognition or and be possessed by it and act badly. If it’s there at all for you, the exercise of it becomes imperative.
The Utopian:
One of the most fascinating things about Burke’s idea of the moral imagination is that it almost seems like little more than having good habits or good manners. Is that right?
David Bromwich:
Well, Burke’s idea in the Reflections on the Revolution in France, where he talks about “the wardrobe of a moral imagination” which collects what is beautiful and cherishable in life – that’s a matter that originates in custom and habit and in the usages one has been taught, so one knows how to behave. So, trivial example, anyone could think of it: the small chivalry of a man opening a door for a woman. Why? We might think that’s good but it’s just something that’s been taught and seems a courtesy. So, small ceremonies, courtesies, charities that don’t even require thinking but that involve something almost prereflective: that comes under the category of gestures or reactions from the “wardrobe” of a moral imagination.
The Utopian:
These are things that “the heart owns and–”
David Bromwich:
“–the understanding ratifies.” That’s right. But Burke also uses moral imagination in what I think is a more valuable sense of the idea. He evokes the importance of a moral imagination in talking about what allows him to sympathize with oppressed people in India under rule of the British East India Company. He’s able to think that they are like himself in being human, in ways he can recognize, and that it will do no good for him or his career but he owes them something just by having recognized their suffering. And by having recognized it across that enormous distance, geographical distance, racial distance, cultural distance, religious distance, having recognized that they share a common humanity with himself.
That kind of leap of imagination is a different thing I’d like to mean by moral imagination. Burke represents it vividly, too, he does justice to the more extended idea, but he doesn’t use the phrase when he’s talking about it.
The Utopian:
I thought that Burke’s objection to the way that the people in India were being treated was because of the moral injury to the soul to those who are causing the injury. That his main objection isn’t the fact that these people should have more rights: that we can’t do these bad things because they’re wrong in and of themselves, but because we are ourselves corrupted in doing so.
David Bromwich:
Well, he did believe they should have more rights. But yes, we (the governors of the empire) can’t be the kind of people who do such things. We are judged by an invisible tribunal, an imagined tribunal whose moral authority has no superior.
The Utopian:
We imagine ourselves being watched on a stage.
David Bromwich:
That’s it. You’re doing more to connect the context of the French Revolution and even the idea of the wardrobe of moral imagination with India than I do in that essay, and I think you’re right: Burke’s concern for the good faith and the sense of decency of one’s own conduct – which is certainly his subject in dealing with France – matters in India, too. And that’s the point of view from which he thinks that moral persuasion has to work.
You can’t on the whole preach successfully against the infliction of suffering from the point of view of the sufferer. You can’t say, “Pity for them is the reason why I’m doing this.” Rather: shame at what you’re doing and the loss of valor if you should be seen, by yourself and by others, as the sort of person or the sort of nation that would do such things. This is a real discovery. It’s a discovery that I think – though it’s a minority opinion – other persuasive thinkers about politics have had in mind. Lincoln seems to me another example.
The Utopian:
One more clarification on this point. Is Burke’s objection to trying to persuade people based on “woe to the oppressed” a political, pragmatic and expedient strategy or is it that he actually thinks one is the greater concern than the other?
David Bromwich:
Burke is very capable of pity and thinks it is an essentially human susceptibility. You can’t be human if you don’t feel compassion, if you don’t feel pity. But do people change to the extent of wanting to put an end to a pattern of action or policy that they’ve long engaged in, do they do that because they feel sorry? People do it rather when they feel that something in themselves is being debased. And they want to hold themselves above such debasement. This is the emphasis in Lincoln that prompts him to speak not, for the most part, against the sufferings of slaves, but against the abuses inflicted by masters.
The Utopian:
The souls of the masters are incompatible with democracy as they’re committing such acts.
David Bromwich:
Absolutely. You’re not saying to yourself “Oh what a pity for the slaves,” but rather, “I refuse to be a master.”
The Utopian:
A little more on that later. But first I’m going to quote you. “To imagine morally is a labor of the social will whose success is proved only when woven into the conduct of each person. The instructions I am to follow are already there, but they must act through me in order to be realized.” Does this mean that for Burke, or for you, or both, there is a universal morality that we must discover and apply with good habits?
David Bromwich:
I’m struck by the – what to say – grammatical intricacy of the sentences you just quoted, and that they seem to be somewhere between Kantian universalism and just a recognition of the bare act of sympathy as acting on oneself, which is closer to Burke. I think an imperative is delivered by the recognition of sympathy as such.
The Utopian:
What I mean is to ask if there’s one morality that’s the same here as it is in Timbuktu as it is anywhere else.
David Bromwich:
No, it’s not the same once you get into the discussion of morality as a semi-coherent, understood body of beliefs about conduct. No, it’s clearly not the same. The ranking of vices and virtues is different from culture to culture. That alone tells you something. Greed, for example, is not very high in the current American ranking of vices. Greed is not one of the worst vices, for us, no matter how gross and unseemly the spectacle it affords. But lying still is ranked pretty high among the vices.
The Utopian:
But just because we now consider greed to be somehow more moral doesn’t mean that it is more moral.
David Bromwich:
No, no, I agree with that. So I do think it’s possible to classify and put into families or clusters, groupings, cultures, the ways we think about the moral order. But I think there’s an immediate sense one has, which must be relied on, which we can’t not trust, that says that’s just wrong.
And I’m with Burke in this, that the much greater vividness of what’s wrong is present to us like something visible, in a way that our perception of what is right or what is the ideally just action at such and such a moment is not always so clearly present. You know when you’re seeing somebody abused, and you’re seeing an example of the sudden infliction of suffering, you know that it’s wrong, and you know this whatever culture you come from and whatever practice of another culture you might be looking at. I think the similarities – there are obviously exceptions to this and an anthropologist could take you to the mat with them – but there are people in other cultures, one knows of them and one can meet them, who share one’s sense of right and wrong in this immediate sense. My intuition or my instinct has always been those people are my brothers and sisters in human society.
And when I act, I’m not just acting for me; I’m also acting for the people who have this recognition. In some societies, they can be a minority. And in some societies they can be a minority that’s almost compelled to keep itself hidden, and yet the feeling exists, and I don’t think we ought to be reluctant to admit it or speak it.
There’s a whole academic school of “weak morality” that suggests you shouldn’t ever judge another culture, never judge any action by someone from another culture, but in fact I think we do it all the time. One ought to have a proper humility, but not fail to say suttee just seems wrong. I don’t care if millions of people chose the ritual from their moral wardrobe and chose it for a long time.
Again: the custom of stoning someone to death for a transgression against religious law just seems wrong. And on a much more modest shelving ground of abusive conduct, discrimination against women on the grounds that they just don’t have good enough minds to be heads of companies or whatnot, is wrong. It may not make you as angry, it isn’t in the same category of atrocity, but it strikes you just as plainly.
The Utopian:
I want to talk a little bit about Burke’s notions of fear. Burke says that a perfect democracy is the most shameless and fearless thing and that fear is necessary.
David Bromwich:
“A perfect democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fearless.”
The Utopian:
But elsewhere you write that “fear to which you have become accustomed in one realm foments cruelty in another.” So it seems that fear can be both a cause of misconduct, but also something that prevents misconduct because a perfect democracy, at least in Burke’s mind, is problematic because it is fearless: they’re not afraid even of what they themselves will do.
David Bromwich:
That’s for a practical reason. You cannot subject “the people” to punishment by any human hand. What is it to punish “the people”? It can’t be done. When people act en masse as the people, they do it regardless of ordinary moral restraints, because they know they can’t be punished. That’s why a mob is so dangerous.
The Utopian:
I see. But on the individual level, fear can lead to cruelty, but fearlessness in the mob leads to destruction.
David Bromwich:
The simplest way to say it is that they act irresponsibly. No one of them is responsible for what they do. Fear of punishment, which is a salutary fear, comes in as soon as you know you can be seen doing what you are doing. Burke is not alone in this train of thought, any first-rate thinker on jurisprudence has had the thought, too – it’s because we are so forgiving of ourselves, and so good at making plausible excuses for our worst actions that we must not be the judge in our own cause.
The Utopian:
That’s why we have to put ourselves on the stage and imagine somebody watching us.
David Bromwich:
I don’t think that’s quite the same argument. When Burke invokes the theatrical test of moral action – What would you think if you saw it performed on the stage? – he is thinking about Marie Antoinette being dragged from her bedchamber and escorted by the revolutionary mob from Versailles to Paris. But there, he’s talking about what would restrain any spectator if one were shown the action in a fictive frame. What would restrain us from approving the mob action? And if one imagines seeing it on a stage, you couldn’t possibly root for the mob.
Burke wants to say there’s something revealing and instructive about that fact. Something you wouldn’t admire or applaud in the as-if arena of a staged event should not get a pass in reality. The separate argument about not being a judge in your own cause is, rather, an argument for abstention or recusal, owing to the dangers of selfishness and egotism. People just don’t condemn themselves. They don’t even see how they might be condemned in the most probable light. They’re concerned for their own advantage. and they see all the things favoring their advantage. We can’t be trusted to judge ourselves impartially.
The Utopian:
I love the fact that Burke’s main concern seems to be preventing self-deception.
David Bromwich:
He is very concerned – you could even say at times preoccupied – with the human and social phenomena of deception and self-deception. It’s related to his interest in conspiracy. It’s related to what makes him say about scenes like the taking of the Bastille that there are events where those who may appear most stirring in the scene may not be the real movers. This is a habit of suspicion Burke shares with a few other writers; with Machiavelli, for one, whom he’s not much akin to in other respects.
The Utopian:
A couple more questions on Burke before we move on. Burke did not have a great view of democracy–
David Bromwich:
He didn’t approve of democracy. He distrusted and feared it.
The Utopian:
Yeah. I’d like to read part of a quote on his distrust of moving from an aristocratic society to a democratic and commercial one. “Burke warned against a great change in the spirit of society from aristocratic to democratic manners, and from the authority of an ancient landed nobility to that of a mobile, commercial class. He spoke as a believer in precedent and prescription and as a defender of natural feelings such as reverence for an established church and a hereditary nobility.” Do you think Burke’s pessimism about democracy and the way it would corrupt morality has proved correct?
David Bromwich:
I think it was partly right at the time, and partial proofs of it have continued to emerge. Democracy has a very difficult time erecting for its own edification and admiration suitable models of political conduct; without the aristocratic basis, you don’t have the same reliable standards of honor and shame.. And democracy is certainly susceptible to changes that are bad as well as good, and that are unthinking, and that can happen very suddenly.
The Utopian:
But doesn’t that lack of reverence exist just because religion doesn’t have the same grip that it once did, which is not something I think we can necessarily pin to democracy?
David Bromwich:
Burke actually would connect the reverence he’s talking about to chivalry, which has its religious roots but is also a sort of habit, a tacit understanding of unreasoning patterns of good action: reasonless virtue. Reasonless virtue doesn’t even get a start in a commercial democracy. But that was only half my thought. I think Burke’s suspicions of democracy are to a great extent justified, but his trust in an aristocratic society, his admiration for the aristocratic society that was already beginning to grow weaker and break down in his own time, can’t seem to us justified. He exalts it too highly, he reveres it too much, too warmly and too wishfully.
The Utopian:
He says they have “the vital stamina of a society.”
David Bromwich:
Yeah, the “stamina of the society” is a metaphor he will use about the Duke of Devonshire and Sir George Savile and other greatly admired members of the nobility or the gentry in his party, who owned vast acres in England and in some cases in Ireland, too. And Burke hopes they will be responsible caretakers of, as it were, the estate of British politics.
The great good of democracy which Burke underrates – he doesn’t underrate it in principle but he underrates its operation in democracy, which is to say, in a government by the people – the great good of such a system of equal representation is as a restraint on unaccountable greed, or unaccountable small tyrannies that can add up to a larger tyranny.
Now Burke always acted against those things – he wanted to decrease the power of the king in England, he wanted to decrease the commercial and political power of the British East India Company over the people of India – but, in fact, the checks that Burke sought are no more easy to achieve when the rule is, practically speaking, by an oligarchy than they are in a democracy.
And Burke distrusted democracy for at least one reason that has been proved wrong: he thought it would always degenerate into anarchy. That has proved false in the United States and Europe and elsewhere in the 19th century and the 20th century.
But on the other hand, Burke’s wariness and concern on behalf of constitutional checks against exorbitant power – and that’s what politics is really about for him, a system assuring that power should always be checked – that worry of his has been vindicated again and again, and in our own time in America as much as at any time in any democracy. Burke thought that the vehicle for such checks needn’t be the people, and it’s hard for us to share his superstition against the people.
The Utopian:
You say that you can’t let acting in the guise of the state absolve us of credit and blame, so how do we check that power? We remain moral agents even when we are working as representatives of the state, but it seems that there isn’t any way of checking that power. Is Burke right to say that democracy is beyond the people?
David Bromwich:
It’s not just democracy we have to be wary of; it’s the larger contractual basis of the kind of republican democracy that the United States embodies. This is a criticism that isn’t original with me, but very acutely expounded by another commentator on Burke, Uday Mehta: a reservation about contract theory as it comes to us from Hobbes and Locke and others – that the terrible weakness, which is a moral flaw in any contractually based political system, is that you can put off all responsibility on the system.
The citizen, in his thinking about the actions of the state that he supports, becomes just like one of the mob that Burke deplored. Actually to punish actions that should be punishable or even subjected to shame is not possible by any human hand because “Hey, it’s the state that did it. Don’t look at me. I voted against it.” But in fact, by participating, by paying taxes and giving our tacit consent, by showing no resistance at all or not enough resistance, we all are implicated in the abuses that are committed by our state against strangers who have a claim of justice against us.
And Burke sees this flaw – which may be in the nature of politics, or in the nature of power – but one of his insights, which Uday Mehta reasons about so ably, is that the contractual metaphor for thinking about democratic politics and any other polity is an excuse right at the heart of modern political theory. It is the way we irresponsibly accord legitimacy to injustices that are woven into the system. It has made the large middle – the left-center, the right-center, tens of millions of people who are the ballast of American politics – feel as if they’re not exactly responsible for what the state does.
The Utopian:
And ten percent of Americans approve of Congress, and yet Congress persists and nobody feels responsible.
David Bromwich:
You find the limits of participation testified to there as well. I think our last presidential election – how many voted? It was under fifty percent, and yet it was more than people thought it would be. But in some very large state elections and city elections you have participation down to twenty or even ten percent. These are major decisions made by people who later have complaints against the state, but they will not feel that anything wrong the state has done to other people is their responsibility. Why? Because we’re a democracy.
3. Lincoln, Democracy, and Checking the Powerful
The Utopian:
Lincoln undergoes a transformation in his thought that I don’t quite understand: he seems very sympathetic, in your portrayal, to the founders’ idea that slavery has to be accommodated, so let’s make a country in which half of the states will be slaveholding, but we’ll believe that slavery is going to die off in the future.
David Bromwich:
Lincoln says that the founders believed in the eventual extinction of slavery in the United States. That was Lincoln’s conviction, honestly arrived at, and he gives historical and documentary evidence to support his belief in the Cooper Union speech of the spring of 1860. But I don’t think it’s incontrovertible that the founders believed slavery was going to die out. What they knew was that slavery was a subject of extremely heated controversy among them, and they knew the federal government couldn’t be formed unless they subdued that controversy. So they subdued it by, as Lincoln says many times, not mentioning the word slavery in the Constitution, and by various other arrangements, postponements, temporary fixes that he takes to indicate a generally understood desire to see it gradually die out; but you can read it other ways, too.
The Utopian:
Would that decision be what Burke would call “salutary neglect”, or should we condemn the Founding Fathers for their treatment of slavery?
David Bromwich:
It’s fair to say Lincoln read the silence of the Framers of the Constitution on the subject of slavery as an instance of salutary neglect. There’s a Latin phrase for it, too, quieta non movere, which comes out in English as “Let sleeping dogs lie.” But Lincoln did not think that it could be left quiet after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854. He says that was the moment that his recognition of something ominous dragged him back into politics. At that moment, I think he felt that the situation would regress: the Constitution and the country would regress, and we would resign ourselves to simply continuing as a slaveholding republic.
The Utopian:
That’s something that has always been mysterious to me: which is why couldn’t the democracy persist as it was, half-slave and half-free? For reasons that aren’t clear to me, neither side continued to be okay with the arrangement: the South wanted everyone else to embrace slaveholding, and the North wanted everyone to be free. Why was the compromise no longer enough for people?
David Bromwich:
The South wanted approval, and they wanted an open door for the expansion of slavery as a form of labor and as a way of life. They were a gentrified class; they liked their privilege a lot, and they were furious racists. Racial privilege was something they had nursed up in themselves and they cherished it.
The Utopian:
But what’s the psychology there that says to them, “This has to be other people’s way of life, too.” That’s not what they said at the beginning, or in 1800. What changed?
David Bromwich:
One thing changed: the United States was becoming an empire. Not calling itself that then, but there’s an argument for saying that the Mexican War of 1846 is the first imperialist war of the U.S. This allows the country to engross those territories that formerly had not belonged to the States, taking them from Mexico. What’s going to be done with those lands? Those lands represent, potentially, great power. How are you going to populate them? That’s one of the sources of contention of the late 40’s going into the early 50’s.
Lincoln made a speech against the Mexican War. In his one term in Congress, he made a strong speech against that war, and he thought right along that the newly acquired territories posed a large field for the expansion of slavery. David Wilmot thought so, too – Wilmot, whose proviso Lincoln recalled he voted for something like forty times. It was in the Wilmot Proviso that none of the new territories should be open to slavery. Lincoln suspected that the possession of these territories would heat up the slave question once again, and he was right. He wasn’t alone in this, but he was right.
So that’s one of the motives for addressing the South in a new way. Aggrandizement, selfishness, greed, could be relied on to operate as they always do. People see a new opportunity, and they want to get bigger, richer, more powerful. They want to spread their way of life, out of their good feelings for themselves; and the acquisition would build up a new source of pride. So that’s one of the factors. Economic historians can tell you a different story – that capitalism won the civil war – but it was slavery and not capitalism that drove Americans to slaughter each other to the extent of three quarters of a million dead.
The Utopian:
My sense is that there was a fundamental need for approval of slavery that didn’t exist before. It was no longer okay to tolerate it, but it had to be actively approved.
David Bromwich:
Lincoln says that. Nothing less will satisfy the South than for us to say that slavery is “morally right and socially elevating.”
The Utopian:
I think that’s right. There was an idea in the South, not entirely absent today, that their honor is being maligned and the North needs to respect them, and the way to respect them is actively approving of slavery.
David Bromwich:
There we come back again to the question of “Who is to be addressed in the name of action, and action going in which direction?” Are you going to talk about slavery being good or bad for the slaves, or are you going to talk about what it does to the master? And what it does for the political arrangements of power in general?
There, if you read the section on slavery in Locke’s second treatise on government, the reasoning against slavery is not, first of all, that it is humanly wrong because there is equality in the eyes of God, every man being equal to everyone else, though that is implied in Locke as it is implied in the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence. But his argument against slavery is that no one has the right to have as much power as the master will have. And the argument is against giving anyone the power of death over anyone else.
You can take it all the way back to Hobbes. Nobody has the right to have so much power that it is a power of life and death over another person. That’s why, according to Rousseau, for example, you don’t even have a right to make yourself a slave. You can’t decide to become a slave (because there are lots of people like that, at any given time, people who would like to give away their will, who would love to give away the control of their lives to somebody else who they think will do better for them than they can do for themselves). It’s not for their sake that the principle of anti-slavery is built-up; it’s as protection against the master, and against letting anyone get used to that much power.
The Utopian:
Because then no democratic values are possible.
David Bromwich:
No democracy can prevail against giving people that kind of power.
The Utopian:
That’s what the House Divided speech is about: the whole country is going to become one or the other.
David Bromwich:
It’s the deep moral, political, and theoretical perception under the surface of the House Divided speech. I don’t think he says it quite that way anywhere in the speech, but yeah.
The Utopian:
A little more on Lincoln: he worries that America will be unable to check the ambitious man – “The towering genius” – the Napoleons born among us.
David Bromwich:
Right. That’s the Lyceum speech of 1838, on the perpetuation of our institutions.
The Utopian:
So how is America doing on that problem? Do you think we can beat back the Caesars and the Napoleons who are born among us?
David Bromwich:
We were not good at checking the power of Dick Cheney, which is still with us and whose power and whose legacy of power is a very important feature of the way the national security state now works. He is a curious case, as a man of ambition, because he was a man of ambition who didn’t want the ordinary fame, publicity, or luster that goes with excelling and ascending to the very heights of power. Cheney was utterly ambitious behind the scenes.
But there is no doubt that the ambition at work among the neoconservative advisers to Bush, and people all the way up and down the networks of the Bush-Cheney administration, are considerable instances of ambition, and of just the sort that Lincoln feared. They switched the country onto a different and revolutionary path that we are right to fear. But ambition comes in different kinds. Lincoln probably had in mind most of all, close to his own time, Napoleon and maybe Andrew Jackson, who were military conquerors among other things, men who wanted to build an empire.
The Utopian:
That’s not so different from Cheney.
David Bromwich:
But we count ambition in the currency of winning national elections – a senator or a governor of a big state or a president – whereas I think in fact ambition in a more impersonal, anonymous, interlocking state and corporate form has never been more of a danger than it is now. But we don’t have a good name for it, and we don’t have many current and recognizable descriptions of the entity we should want to fear because it constitutes a relentless pressure of aggrandizement. Libertarians are better at giving it a name than any other political grouping.
The Utopian:
Is it “corporate power”?
David Bromwich:
It’s not just corporate, is it? If you think about the national security state, you’re thinking of the – as Priest and Arkin count it in their book Top Secret America – two thousand companies and 1,300 government organizations that are employed in homeland security, intelligence gathering, and all the rest. That could include people who make, say, retina scanners that only became important after the year 2001, but it could also include people who devise particular indexing techniques or algorithms to be used by those who comb through those enormous NSA data files being stored in Utah.
We don’t have a name for it. It is a bureaucratic entity, it is enormous, it includes large numbers of Americans under anonymous cover, many of them loyal to a Constitutional idea in some way in their minds, but none of them responsible. This is just the sort of evasion we were talking about. If you add the weapons industry, it comes to millions of Americans who have a stake in the aggrandizement of the state and corporate entity that I would want us to fear the way Lincoln wanted us to fear ambition.
But there’s no coherent, emerging movement of description or resistance. The descriptions and the resistance come from people here and there, from occasional candidates in local and national elections.
The Utopian:
From you.
David Bromwich:
From me, and in a much more regular and concerted way, people like Marcy Wheeler or Glenn Greenwald or those who have been fascinated with the details of the security state from the beginning, talking about the abuses and in some cases remedying them.
Think of Greenwald’s action on behalf of Bradley Manning, who is now Chelsea Manning, when he was locked up in Quantico and subjected to abuse that comes pretty close to the international definition of torture, and that was kept under wraps by the armed forces -- Greenwald, by exposing it publicly, ended the mistreatment of Manning.
But you can only go so far – Chelsea Manning is now serving –what is it? 35 years in prison? And there’s no sign from people anywhere near the top of the government or the mainstream media that they find this sort of treatment or this sort of punishment worthy of serious and sustained news attention. But I think it is, and we have to rely a lot on the people who keep watch, because the guardians aren’t guarding themselves.
4. President Obama and Contemporary Politics
The Utopian:
Let’s talk about the main guardian: Mr. Obama. You describe him variously as The Establishment President, The Fastidious President, The World’s Most Important Spectator–
David Bromwich:
Those are all titles of articles I wrote for the London Review of Books, and the titles come out of details in the articles, but those aren’t the phrases I would necessarily choose for maximum emphasis. With a piece they chose to call A Bad President, I got into a lot of trouble among left-liberal friends; but in fact I was quoting two persons who, like me, voted twice for Obama.
I meant that Obama has been, as indeed most of our presidents have been, in some large way disappointing and not up to the job. If you think who have been the exceptions, we could talk about Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, maybe the third year of JFK. But Obama has been particularly disappointing, in an almost etymological sense: he made an appointment, with the spectacular promise to change the course of the country, in his 2008 campaign – he raised hopes with specifications attached to those hopes, and I don’t side with the apologists who say “It was an impossible task and it was only traditional campaigning.”
The Utopian:
Sorry, what’s the impossible task?
David Bromwich:
The impossible task, for example, of closing Guantanamo. For example, of cutting back the control held autonomously and without proper legal or legislative checks by the NSA over domestic surveillance. I don’t think it was so impossible to reform these things as people imagined after the fact when Obama failed to accomplish or even keep up steady pressure for the reforms, and they said, well, it was never really a thing anyone could have done.
Having once made his avowals – they weren’t just campaign promises, they were repeated and they were made the heart of his campaign, certainly in the primaries and to some extent the general election in 2008 – he had an obligation to keep talking about those subjects and do all he could. Obama hasn’t had, for the most part, the patience to stick to the task – the very hard task – of resistance by the executive branch against an entrenched abuse. He hasn’t kept to the commitment and he has let such practices as drone killing expand enormously.
The Utopian:
Led – he’s actively led them.
David Bromwich:
Right, he’s led them. This was not a main procedure for the disposal of terrorists under Bush. Obama raised it to the status of a regular tactic and carved out a legal rationale for it all his own, which he kept secret until a circuit court decision forced him to disclose it to the public.
In all those respects, I think Obama has been second-rate. But let’s make an exception for the Affordable Care Act. The way it was done was all-consuming and it let him do nothing else in his first two years when he had a democratic majority, but the fact is that the measure will probably turn out to mark a serious advance for the kind of domestic policy Obama believes in, which is to say an augmentation, within reason, of the liberal welfare state.
Now we have the Iran deal, which, if he can, with Europe’s help, manage to prevail, will be the largest and most significant peace agreement that there’s been since Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik.
Those will be not insignificant exceptions, but I see him as a discouraging figure, because of a failure of energy, a failure of imagination, the mostly conventional diet of conventional politics to which he restricted himself at a critical time, once he got into the White House.
The Utopian:
I’m curious to know if Obama’s shortcomings have been miscalculated tactics and strategy or if there’s been something about his psychology–
David Bromwich:
Let’s call it character – something about his character or something about the nature of the knowledge he came into the office with and the knowledge he didn’t have. His knowledge, I think, was insufficient, and his character was untested.
The Utopian:
He took so long to realize what he was up against with the Republicans.
David Bromwich:
That was a kind of denial. Again and again, he would assert they would get over their fever. “The fever will break.”
The Utopian:
I think it ties into his idea that he sees himself as a compromiser and that the truth is in the middle, whatever the two positions are. On the one hand I want to say that that is politically expedient, as we were talking about with some of the older political decisions, but then again it also seems morally deficient.
David Bromwich:
It is morally deficient, for someone who derives his political lineage from Gandhi and King, and it was a despicable moment in his Nobel Prize speech when he said he’s different from Gandhi and King because “I face the world as it is” – implying that Gandhi and King lacked considerable knowledge of the world’s reality. The difference is that they engaged in resistance, and defined the nature and limits of resistance with great rigor and political canniness.
Obama actually in a recent statement about Guantanamo and why he didn’t succeed in closing it, said forces were arrayed against him and just letting it stay became – these are his words – “the path of least resistance.” I think he is a good man, by some ordinary measure, but not particularly strong, and he had no practice at making sacrifice for something he believed in. When you look back on his career, the lack of the experience of taking risks for his stated convictions is what you see. That’s not unusual for someone who sets up to win elections. It is unusual for someone who presents himself as a major reformer.
The Utopian:
He concedes everything preemptively.
David Bromwich:
Yes, the pattern of concession: that’s not what a leader of a protest movement or a political dissident does when he knows he is taking an unpopular position to start with. He’s willing to pay the price of popularity. There is something in the person that comes from having gone through that experience. It comes just from the experience itself.
Wordsworth says, “Diversity of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong.” He means going through that kind of questioning and the recognition that you’ve got to stand against some obstacle.
The young Obama had a charmed life. From his earliest teens, the age of ten or eleven when he went to the Punahou School in Honolulu, up until his election for President. And I think the strangeness of his earlier life, the very interesting and out-of-the-way existence he and his mother led, and the desertion of his father and Obama’s interest in recovering those roots, and all the rest of that, actually tended to conceal this main fact about him: that he is a very elite and fortunate and privileged character. Fortunate in the great good luck – without much test of strength – that attended him over the early decades of his adult life.
So there was little or no no resistance, there was no testing through self-sacrifice, no history of standing up against large forces. The position-taking that allowed his ascent was always, for him, a matter of co-opting. It was always making himself a more important figure, so he could get to the place where he could do important things. But he didn’t have in some sense the practical knowledge that comes from setting yourself against the odds.
I think that was a major factor in his miscalculations so early in his presidency, and his inability to learn what you were alluding to about the implacable obstruction he faced in the debt ceiling matter and the ACA: the long wait for one Republican to come across and nobody did.
I think he really has a hard time believing that any given reasonable position he takes won’t eventually become the choice of everyone of good sense. I said, in one of those articles for the LRB, that he holds the belief that a sensible and prudent policy is bound to be generally approved of if only it’s well understood.
Well, he had two deficiencies there: he underrated the power of ideology to outweigh understanding; but also, he never really made the most important of his policies well understood. He turns out to be good at the inspirational but bad at the explanatory part of being a statesman.
The Utopian:
That comes back to your sense of him being an elitist: he talks down to people.
David Bromwich:
It’s not just that he talks down, it’s that he doesn’t show the links in the reasoning so as to persuade somebody who is just entering into knowledge of the subject.
He starts at a fairly advanced stage. It’s not because he is the most sophisticated of presidents or that he has such profound inside knowledge of something like the stimulus package he brought forward as a remedy for the financial collapse; but it’s that he talks to people who are experts, he listens and assimilates, and he doesn’t understand the difficulty of the task of explanation.
Now, he doesn’t have any very formidable predecessors to go up against, but if you compare him to John F Kennedy explaining the test-ban treaty, which was as radical as anything Obama has undertaken, there’s considerable work of explanation that went into it. That’s the kind of work that Obama is not equipped to do; he just doesn’t seem to have a sharp mind for that sort of persuasion.
The Utopian:
It seems to me that a great many of Obama’s problems stem from his decision not to prosecute the crimes of his predecessors. Whatever he was riding when he came to office was squandered, and he didn’t recognize from the beginning what the Republican party had become, and that they had to be punished.
David Bromwich:
You can’t punish a whole party; you punish those who have committed crimes. Actually, one Republican – Lincoln Chafee – and one independent – Jim Jeffords – voted against the authorization for war in Iraq. So in a sense you’re right, almost all Republicans are guilty to that extent. But they’re not all guilty of knowingly endorsing the path of torture or of rendition.
I think Obama’s problems stem from many causes. One is racism, for sure. One is that the Republican party won’t recognize the legitimacy of a Democratic president – they would not recognize the legitimacy of Jimmy Carter, they impeached Bill Clinton, and it was crazy of Obama to assume that they were going to be more light-handed with him.
So there are many sources of it, not all attributable to his shortcomings; but I agree with you that to say, at the outset, across the board, unconditionally, that we’re going to “look to the future, not to the past,” and by saying so to give assurance in advance that nobody will be prosecuted, was an extremely poor calculation, even from the point of view of common political prudence.
You do not – and Machiavelli could have taught him this – you do not reassure your enemies in so sweeping a fashion. Never. From a moral point of view, the promise of impunity for the gravest of crimes is wrong. Wrong in itself, and wrong because it will embolden state criminals in the future.
The Utopian:
He doesn’t seem to regard his enemies as enemies at all.
David Bromwich:
He has a very difficult time seeing anyone as an enemy, certainly seeing any American party or faction as an enemy. He might pardonably have discouraged Eric Holder from taking all the way to court any important case that could be construed as “political.”
But it was very wrong, in the most basic terms of constitutional accountability, it was immoral as well as impolitic to give the vow that you will not prosecute anyone. And that goes for the Wall Street crooks, the bank and money-firm crooks, as well as the people who violated treaties by writing justifications for torture, and those who planned and engaged in actions they kept secret from Congress. You just don’t grant impunity like that across the board.
I also think, and this may have been the effect of naiveté as well as perhaps laziness, complacency, and just being conflict-averse, but it was very strange of him to allow so many of the Bush and Cheney personnel at Justice, Treasury, Defense, and State to continue without disruption from the previous aberrant administration into his own.
If you are going to be a reformer – not a radical reformer, not changing everything back from what had been so horribly altered in those Bush-Cheney years – but to cut back some of it, to reduce the evil, you have to be willing to get rid of people who are still executing actions similar to those of the previous administration. He seems to have been quite indifferent to that.
The Utopian:
He sees himself as the reconciler.
David Bromwich:
This gets back to your point about the irreducible aspect of character.
I do think he had a messianic self-conception. It’s understandable. Once he was elected President – the first black president -- and once he was given the Nobel prize before he did anything to deserve it – it has to go to your head!
I think he did come to believe that he was a great reconciler, a person through whom all the opposing forces of the society, and perhaps all the opposing forces of the world, would flow. But life doesn’t work that way. Political life in America doesn’t work that way. And most of all, political life for a Democratic president with what the Republican Party has become since 1980, does not work that way. He’s rather regardless of the history. He’s as if unequipped with recent historical understanding.
It struck me that in the primaries, running against Hillary Clinton, a sort of one-liner he enjoyed repeating was that we’re going to get over the “partisan bickering of the Clinton years.” That was a very simple-minded thing to say. To anyone like me who lived through those years and the Clinton impeachment, the partisanship was extreme. It was red-hot, it was white-hot, it was exorbitant on the Republican side against Bill Clinton. It was not an equal scene of bipartisan bickering.
I’m no great admirer of Clinton, but they were after him the day he got into office, and they used fair means and foul, mostly foul, to bait him and finally to impeach him. And the popular will was so much against the impeachment that Clinton escaped. 70% of the people were against the impeachment, and even so, Lindsey Graham and Henry Hyde and all the rest were after him and they did impeach him.
How can Obama have lived through that time, in his grown-up maturity, and not notice that this was the political character of one of the major parties of the U.S.? And how could he have assumed that he would escape something like Clinton’s fate? It was not just “partisan bickering,” and yet he seems to have assumed that the Republicans are just one more pretty good party, substantially composed of people of good sense and good will.
The Utopian:
You likened America in one of your articles to the moment of Lincoln’s House Divided speech–
David Bromwich:
I don’t think we’re on the verge of a Civil War, the year is not 1858 or 1859, but Obama is continually echoing the second inaugural, “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” and treating the country as if we had successfully passed through such trials and tribulations together that we’re now in a perfect state of mind to be reconciled.
Well that’s not so. The country in its two political cultures – the mostly bureaucratized, academic, institutional left-liberal culture that Obama comes out of, and the imperialist and property-libertarian culture of the far right in America – in that respect, the country has been enormously divided ever since LBJ ran against Barry Goldwater.
We’re seeing a continuation of the same division, and Obama is like someone wanting to deliver the Second Inaugural after an exhausting civil war, where people might be ready to come back together, but in fact he should have recognized it was much more like the moment of the House Divided speech.
5. Moving Forward: Politics and Academia
The Utopian:
So what can he – we – do to reunite people? Do you have any ideas? Obama has really tried.
David Bromwich:
The people I respect most as political observers say something like this. “At this moment in American life, local politics – at the level of district, town, city, and sometimes state – affords the best chance for people interested in reform to have an effect. People, that is, interested in accountability, interested in such things as guarding against the disasters that are already following from global warming.”
You’ve seen some actions of this kind in New York, with Cuomo and his ban on fracking, at the local level in Connecticut, in California, with a good governor imposing restrictions necessary for the state to get along in a time of drought. It is citizens’ groups that can help with this, in settings small enough to allow citizens to know each other.
The idea that reform may come from a single charismatic politician seems to me not always entirely irrelevant, but it’s a peculiar accident, maybe an accident that could have been avoided if we’d known enough, that Obama could have seemed such a plausible charismatic leader. He probably believed he was himself. But he was not equipped to play that part once he got to the presidency.
So one shouldn’t underestimate the relevance of individuals in this, and certainly our academic culture tends to underrate the importance of individuals, but the structures that we’re talking about are very large ones – the national security state, the connected bureaucracy – and I take some admonition from a train of thought I’ve learned from the principled libertarians: There is a terrible bargain that unites the far right – the jingoes, the imperialists, the advocates and puffers-up of American power, and on the other hand the good-hearted liberals of the welfare state. And that bargain is dependency on the state.
The right and the left both enter into the bargain, where there are artificial limits drawn around the amount of resistance that they offer. The right-wing Republicans hate the welfare state – they sincerely think that it corrupts individual morale. And the left-liberals who believe in the welfare state are commonly opponents or at most lukewarm believers in American imperialism, they don’t care much for our wars abroad, but they’ll sign onto those wars because that’s the price of getting support for the state they believe in implicitly for other reasons. The far-right Republicans correspondingly limit their resistance to state power domestically, including the abuse of state secrets and domestic surveillance, because they want the continuous expansion of America abroad.
This terrible bargain has created limits on the kind of criticism one gets of the reach of state power, from both of the major parties. The exceptions are the conservative libertarians who are not just property libertarians, the ones, I mean, who are interested in civil liberties, and that includes people who want the NSA not to be spying on them – they come from the right very often these days – and it includes even people who fervently support the right to bear arms: they’re afraid of the Bureau of Firearms and what it may do if it gets out of hand.
On the left you can number the ACLU and a few others, but I wish there were more libertarians on the left. That’s one of the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’ve seen it happen in the last twenty years – it dates back from Clinton – that the concern with civil liberties on the left is greatly diminished. You get things like speech codes and the innovation of “hate crimes” and other new sorts of prescriptive lawmaking, a regime of preventive ethics that has nothing to do with Constitutional liberty. These are fashionable innovations that come from the left.
The Utopian:
And have saturated academia.
David Bromwich:
Exactly. If a new speech code is proposed, if somebody complains of having been “offended” by something another person said, the left can’t be counted on defend freedom of speech as a paramount right. Now the new manners, which have been legislated into moral prohibitions, too, require professors in some places to say before they read out a quotation that might be shocking to some students, there’s a trigger coming in this. Recently I heard of a law professor who was explaining the legal definition of rape and received a complaint through his dean from a student saying she had to leave the room because there was no trigger warning for the discussion.
The Utopian:
Why do you think this movement has had such success on the Left? The Left used to be the party of free speech.
David Bromwich:
It included many of the strongest defenders of free speech, for sure.
The Utopian:
Academia also used to be the place where you would find the most offensive or subversive thought.
David Bromwich:
There’s two pieces to that. One is that the definition of common values or moral assumptions we take for granted and don’t even have to work too hard to defend – that assumption, on the left-liberal side, has been very much chastened and constricted by self-consciousness regarding the importance of culture and the diversity of cultures and the fact that what is good for me may not seem to be good for you. The fear of insulting people who are different – the whole prestige of the categories of Difference and Otherness.
I, myself, think that the sensible way to go about such recognition is toleration. Toleration is what one should want as a person, and one shouldn’t want more. One doesn’t deserve more as a person, and doesn’t deserve more as a person who is also a member of this or that culture, depending on what description you choose at a given moment. So there’s respect and there’s respectful regard and ways of respectfully talking to a person–
The Utopian:
Which is tolerance.
David Bromwich:
Yeah. The only sanction against disrespect in the academic setting or anything related, I should think, is disapproval. You have to trust that a person speaking loutishly, boorishly, brutally towards someone who is quite other than or different from himself, in these settings where we have to presume some refinement, some decency towards other people, such a person is going to be disapproved of and shunned.
But once the cultural definition of identity got in so strong, and the doubts about the “Western” idea of liberty that often comes with that, you started to see innovations such as the speech codes at several liberal arts colleges, at Stanford, at other research universities – you’re just not allowed to speak in this or that way, there are certain words you’re not allowed to say. It’s extraordinary.
It has become so exaggerated that the chancellor of UC Berkeley on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement wrote a letter to the Berkeley community saying that we have a fine inheritance, the Free Speech Movement, and we should engage in free speech, only remembering we are all different from each other and so we ought to speak politely. And then he said: and take care not to arouse strong emotions. That, to me, spells out the repressive and therapeutic extreme to which left-liberal correct thinking has been driven.
The Utopian:
Has this occurred because universities see their job as trying to remedy a problem?
David Bromwich:
Yes. It’s partly the aspiration of engaging in social reform, within the university, making sure everybody has the best kind of good manners. It’s also wanting to subdue the noise of conflict and resistance within the university.
But the other thing I was going to mention, which goes to your question about whether universities are supposed to be the places where, if anywhere, dissension and loud disputation are allowed to take place: this freedom was especially marked when the students in the universities, in the Forties and Fifties and Sixties, were on the whole more conservative than their teachers, and where the teachers were the breakthrough force that tended to show the students a wider world of diversity. Diversity of thought above all, and diversity of opinion.
The Utopian:
And now it’s just the opposite because those students are the professors.
David Bromwich:
Now you have professors who are themselves the consensus. The consensus is a broad, vague, left-liberalism, a consensus by which many students in the West Coast states and in much of the Middle West too, have learned the code of reticence and prohibition already in high school from a lot of their textbooks. There are huge exceptions of course – Kansas and Texas for example, where the textbooks and the educational culture go to the opposite extreme.
But the students and the professors are more homogenous with each other than they used to be. To shock students now, in many colleges and universities, you’d have to come at them with surprises from the extremes of the libertarian position that don’t sound at all liberal. Or from Burke’s conservative arguments, say, against democracy. When I present those arguments, I try to present them sympathetically to see what kind of rise I can get out of students. If it “arouses strong emotions,” so be it.
The Utopian:
Have these movements changed the way you teach? Do you worry about causing offense or getting in trouble?
David Bromwich:
It probably hasn’t changed my ways much. I’m too old to change very much. But I think that it has a subduing effect, a bad tranquilizing effect on almost anyone who is conscious of what students expect and what they’re not ready to hear. You might get a rise out of students by even saying the word “girlfriend,” which is what any female partner of a male was called any time up to the year 1990 or so. But now, for one generation already, they’ve been called “partners.”
The Utopian:
I didn’t know girlfriend was a controversial word.
David Bromwich:
I don’t mean that word in particular is controversial, but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t become controversial, in a few years maybe, in the pattern we’re used to.
Something much more obvious is the correctness of saying, “The novelist – she – or the critic – she – or the philosopher – she – even if you’re writing about, say, philosophy in the 1700s: Hobbes’s reader – she. Well, actually, Hobbes probably didn’t imagine having female readers, or not to any great extent, so you are telling a historical lie if you engage in the academic correctness of saying “Hobbes’s reader – she.”
But a large plurality of the colleagues I know and the scholars I read do that kind of thing because they think it’s the polite way of conducting yourself. These changes of manners have subtle effects and they have larger effects. They have made university and college classes probably less contentious than they used to be. We have lost the expectation of friction, the idea that education ought to involve what Blake called “mental fight.”
The Utopian:
Okay, one last topic: are you as confident today as you were when you wrote Stay out of Syria that American involvement would have been a bad thing? Has the rise of ISIS changed your thoughts on the matter?
David Bromwich:
I don’t think we could have prevented the rise of ISIS by bombing Syria and overthrowing Assad except by introducing a remedy that could well have become worse than Assad.
This is to say that the US, and the European countries that were allied with us, would have been left in charge of Syria. We would have had to install a client government and hope it worked out better than our client government in Iraq. Iran, as was also the case in Iraq, would be a very interested party in keeping the Syrian government as an ally. It would have become a party perhaps in tension with us.
Could we have stopped the Islamist insurgency by putting ourselves in control and demolishing government forces on behalf of the “moderate rebels” Obama once honestly characterized as “an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists, and so forth”? (It was a welcome but very late admission by him that such a counterforce of moderate rebels was always “a fantasy.”)
It’s possible it could have worked out, but it was an enormous wager being indulged by people like the editors of The New Republic and columnists for The New York Times, as well as the usual neoconservatives: they wanted to do it again but this time we would get it right.
It seemed to me extremely improbable. You’re dealing with thousands of lives, and also, just from my prudential, patriotic, American point of view, you are making yet more enemies in that part of the world, just as we would have done if we followed the advice of the neoconservatives and bombed Iran in 2007. Iran is a country of 70 million people. That is enormous. Iraq was 27 million. We made refugees of almost five million in a country of 27 million. The disaster there is on a scale most Americans haven’t reckoned with in our own minds.
The Utopian:
And perhaps won’t.
David Bromwich:
And never will, because a nation has to be defeated, as Germany was, before it will really look hard at itself and think about motives, actions, and causes. As you were saying in the case of the American south, even a defeated secessionist cause or part of a country has a very hard time doing that. I won’t say I was sure about Syria – how can one be sure?
But it seemed to me that the great improbability was on the side of the people who urged war. And you should never push for war unless you are quite sure of an irremediable evil that you are preventing and an enormously lesser evil that you can be confident of putting in its place. I was also in conversation with a couple of journalists who had information about Syria that led me to be suspicious of the evidence used there. So all of that went into my article “Stay out of Syria.”
The Utopian:
Okay, really one last topic: Sam Moyn in The Nation accuses Burke of being too much against things, and not enough for things. Then he accuses you of the same.
David Bromwich:
Yes! Good! Good for Sam Moyn!
The Utopian:
So what are you for? What do you stand for?
David Bromwich:
I’m against unlimited power because nobody should be trusted with that.
The Utopian:
That’s an against!
David Bromwich:
What am I for? At that point we’ll go in for cornball platitudes and we all sound much the same as each other. I am for liberty, but I am on the side of liberty as restraint of power much more than liberty as the duty to participate in every town meeting where my presence is required. I would not be for the kind of liberty, even, that Obama recently off the cuff proposed when he said voting in elections should be mandatory if you’re going to get the benefits of the state – I’m not even sure I’m for that. So I know what Sam Moyn said was meant as criticism, but I rejoice in it. I am glad to be against injustice. I understand that much better than I understand promoting a system of justice.