American Burke

The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Greg Weiner

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780700623495
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620975
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) may be best known as a statesman. He served in the administrations of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford; was ambassador to India and the United Nations; and represented New York in the U.S. Senate for four terms. But he was also an intellectual of the first order, whose books and papers on topics ranging from welfare policy and ethnicity in American society to international law stirred debate and steered policy. Moynihan was, journalist Michael Barone remarked, “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.” He was, Greg Weiner argues, America’s answer to the 18th-century Anglo-Irish scholar-statesman Edmund Burke. Both stood at the intersection of thought and action, denouncing tyranny, defending the family, championing reform. Yet while Burke is typically claimed by conservatives, Weiner calls Moynihan a “Burkean liberal” who respected both the indispensability of government and the complexity of society. And a reclamation of Moynihan’s Burkean liberalism, Weiner suggests, could do wonders for the polarized politics of our day.

In its incisive analysis of Moynihan’s political thought, American Burke lays out the terms for such a recovery. The book traces Moynihan’s development through the broad sweep of his writings and career. “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Moynihan once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” In his ability to embrace both of these truths, this “American Burke” makes it bracingly clear that a wise political thinker can also be an effective political actor, and that commitments to both liberal and conservative values can coexist peaceably and productively. Weiner’s work is not only a thorough and thoroughly engaging intellectual exploration of one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century; it is also a timely prescription for the healing of our broken system.

1. The Central Truths

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Witness the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that conservatives so opposed.

—Moynihan, Family and Nation, 1986

the politics of limitation

Daniel Patrick Moynihan arrived in John F. Kennedy’s Washington a political idealist and left Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration a chastened man. Remarkably few fundamental shifts are detectable in Moynihan’s thought over the course of his career—not that these would be troubling in the thinking of someone constrained by empirical circumstance, which necessarily evolves—but this was one. Something happened; as his friend the chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi said in one of Moynihan’s favorite aphorisms, “People change their minds.”

Just after he left the Johnson administration and before he began publicly to criticize the War on Poverty’s approach, Moynihan had penned the lead article for the inaugural edition of Public Interest, entitled “The Professionalization of Reform.” He wrote with a breezy confidence befitting the New Frontier. Between John Maynard Keynes and econometrics, the business cycle had been conquered. Social reform was now the province of professional experts, and the War on Poverty was its latest iteration. This professionalization was, he observed, “a technique that will not appeal to everyone, and in which many will perceive the not altogether imaginary danger of a too powerful government. But it is also a technique that offers a profound promise of social sanity and stability in time to come.” The cost would be “a decline in the moral exhilaration of public affairs at the domestic level,” yet the professionalization of reform also held out the possibility of “the creation of a society that can put an end to the ‘animal miseries’ and stupid controversies that afflict most peoples.”¹

By the late 1960s, however, violence was erupting in the nation’s cities, and the Great Society was foundering on the shoals of interest group liberalism and inadequate resources. Moynihan—now out of government and in the academy, which gave him a perspective that naturally evoked a greater emphasis on limitation—had acquired (or at least was newly emphasizing) a sense of the complexity of political endeavor.² He reflected later: “In the mid-1960s, when I began writing again, I had considerably scaled down my expectations of what government could do about most things—in the early 1960s in Washington we thought we could do anything, and we found out different—and had acquired the discipline of not being too much impressed by clever-seeming people.”³

He would write of this period: “American liberalism had, in those years, lost a sense of limits. We would transform the Mekong Delta, resurrect Detroit, enlighten South Asia and defend it too, for that matter.”⁴ He would recall that “the presidential advisers of the Kennedy and Johnson era had underestimated the difficulties of social change . . . a naiveté born of noble purpose. The limits of policy were less and less emphasized while the potential for matters to get worse rather than better was increasingly ignored.”⁵

This chapter proposes a framework for how Moynihan’s political thought can be understood—as a blend of hues associated with both liberalism (possibilities linked with governmental action) and conservatism (limitations born of respect for social complexity) to form a unique shade of political thought. Viewing Moynihan through this prism enables us to appreciate both the originality of his ideas and, importantly, their mutual appeal to liberals and conservatives, an appeal that has led both sides to lay dueling claims to his legacy. Liberals and conservatives certainly have much about which to disagree, but Moynihan’s thought shows their mistake in assuming that these beliefs—aspiration and limitation, respectively—cannot be simultaneously held. Moynihan the liberal believed in shared endeavor pursued through the mechanism of government; at the same time, he appreciated the limits that social complexity imposed.

It is essential to emphasize at the outset that the labels “liberal” and “conservative” were less important to Moynihan and are less important to this study than the ideas themselves. As we shall see, Moynihan associated both possibility and limitation in key respects with liberalism. Our concern lies more with the unique brew that arose from this blend rather than with the names applied to the ingredients. We begin with the decisive significance, evident in multiple contexts throughout Moynihan’s thought, of limitation.

Limitation

For Moynihan, all human endeavor, especially that undertaken politically, was subject to limitation. We might trace this commitment to any number of sources—the Catholic doctrine of fallen man, Burke’s warnings of the limits of reason, or simple commonsense observation—but it was there. There were limits to the capacity of human beings to manipulate infinitely intricate social systems and limits to the ability of reason fully to comprehend them. For Moynihan, this theme found its most deeply reflective expression in the long introduction to his 1973 book Coping: On the Practice of Government, a collection of writings reflecting perhaps his most theoretically fruitful period, that arising from his contemplation of the promise and shortfalls of the 1960s.

Increasingly it is what is known about life that makes it problematical. The dictum of Ecclesiastes 1:18, “For in much wisdom is much grief and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” seems more fitted to our time; and education is more and more a matter of coming to terms with this less optimistic vision. . . . The unexpected, the unforeseen: the public life of our age seems dominated by events of this cast, while the task of intellect seems increasingly that of imposing some measure of order on this less than cosmic chaos. After a period of chiliastic vision we have entered a time that requires a more sober assessment of our chances, and a more modest approach to events.⁶

The problem, he reflected, was that the brand of radical politics that came to characterize the expectations of the 1960s not only mistrusted but also actively resisted gradual reform: “It is the seeming nature of the chiliast to resist social changes which, however profound, are not perceived as somehow ultimate.”⁷ Moynihan, by contrast, imposed the constraints of limitation on the idealist impulses of liberalism. Politicians could not be subject to a religious requirement of purity. “Their achievements can never be more than relatively good,” he said, expressing an idea with echoes of both Burke, for whom politics was always a choice between lesser goods, and Oakeshott, for whom it was tinged with a permanently tragic dimension.⁸ Politics in a democracy seemed to require heart-quickening causes for sustenance. Prudence, however, was difficult to communicate. “It was easy to be captain of the Indomitable, was it not? But what commands,” he asked, “shall issue forth from the quarterdeck of the Worried, the Uncertain, the Not Sure.”⁹ Moynihan imagined a newly inaugurated President Kennedy standing on the windswept front of the US Capitol and stirring a nation with words of prudent perspective: “‘So let every nation know that we would be crazy to undertake to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.’ . . . No, there would have been nothing inspiring in this. There might also have been no Vietnam.”¹⁰

This appreciation for limits must not be mistaken for quietism. Moynihan remained an advocate of muscular government, but he also noted that “having through all my adult life worked to make the American national government larger, stronger, more active, I nonetheless plead that there are limits to what it may be asked to do.”¹¹ It was, to repeat, imperative to separate what government could competently do from what it could not—as much to ensure government did competently what it could do as to prevent it from undertaking the impossible.

In the 1960s, the sociologist James Coleman led what was then and still may be the largest social science experiment ever undertaken—a study of the effect of various inputs on educational outcomes. Its results showed the primacy of family structure, nearly to the exclusion of other variables such as per pupil expenditure.¹² Moynihan recalled the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset approaching him at the Harvard Faculty Club and asking if he had heard about Coleman’s findings: “And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘All family.’ And I said, ‘Oh God.’ We both looked at Coleman’s influential study with consternation about the relative incapacity it revealed of public institutions to shape individuals.”¹³ His disquietude, which Coleman shared, pertained to a realization of the expanding scope of limitation,¹⁴ but note his use of the word relative. Moynihan was not denying government’s ability to shape individual behavior. The point was that government could not simply do what it did best—spend money—and expect educational outcomes to follow. This was different, it is crucial to observe, from saying government could not do anything.

But government had to appreciate what it could not do in order to undertake successfully what it could. Moynihan attended Oakeshott’s inaugural lecture when the British philosopher succeeded Harold Laski in a professorial chair at the London School of Economics, and he would recur to it often. “Oakeshott preached the art of the possible, and bespoke the fate of those who reject those limitations: ‘To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.’”¹⁵ In a 1969 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Moynihan reflected:

What is it that government cannot provide? It cannot provide values to persons who have none, or who have lost those they had. It cannot provide a meaning to life. It cannot provide inner peace. It can provide outlets for moral energies, but it cannot create those energies. In particular, government cannot cope with the crisis in values that is sweeping the Western world. It cannot respond to the fact that so many of our young people do not believe what those before them have believed, do not accept the authority of institutions and customs whose authority has heretofore been accepted, do not embrace or even very much like the culture that they inherit.¹⁶

Notice Moynihan’s concern here with the collapse of social authority—an appreciation for the necessity of society’s intermediate institutions. He would allude more than once to Nisbet’s observation that a vacuum of authority cleared the path for raw power. We also see in the passage that the politics of limitation must recognize space for morality.¹⁷ This was, crucially, private space: space in the social sphere. Its misdirection into the realm of politics was one of the pathologies of the 1960s, whose overly moralized politics descended into an all-consuming Manichaeism. Late in that decade, Moynihan wrote of a religious crisis in which the essentially spiritual cravings of the time were channeled instead into politics. The “principal issues of the moment” were only “seen” as political; that they were was “the essential clue as to their nature. But the crisis of the time is not political, it is in essence religious. It is a religious crisis of large numbers of intensely moral, even godly, people who no longer hope for God.”¹⁸ The absence of spirituality was akin to the absence of authority, for it left a gap in private space that, when not nourished by intermediate institutions, was filled, unhealthily, by politics. The resulting “fervor becomes pathological” and leads to “the total state; the politicization of all things.”¹⁹ This was evident in the tendency of 1960s radicals to regard all disputes as political disputes and thus see anyone with whom they disagreed about anything as a political enemy.

Still, even while resisting politicization, Moynihan defended government. When, paraphrasing Reinhold Niebuhr, he said that failing to “accept that there are some things that can’t be changed, and learning to recognize which they are” was “to be false to a large vocation,”²⁰ he meant to identify some limits as permanent and grounded in the nature of things, not merely in circumstance, but he also meant to defend the vocation. When Carter argued that government could not “eliminate poverty, provide a bountiful economy, reduce inflation, save our cities, cure illiteracy, provide energy, or mandate goodness,” Moynihan responded that the president had gone “farther than I would”: “For the government can eliminate poverty—that is, poverty defined as income below a certain level. A good welfare reform bill would do that. This is precisely the kind of thing government can succeed in doing. It cannot ‘mandate goodness.’ But it can ‘save our cities’—if not from sin, then surely from bankruptcy.”²¹ By the early 1980s, he was worried about an overcorrection in the Reagan era. “We have moved far too precipitously and blindly,” he said, “from sublime confidence in government to solve all our problems and meet all our needs to what can only be termed a profound mistrust of government’s ability to do anything at all.”²²

Moynihan’s appreciation for limits was inextricably linked to his recognition of the complexity of the social organism and the inherent difficulty of manipulating it politically. Here, we arri...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “And You Still Break Stone”
• 1. The Central Truths
• 2. Poverty and Problems Poorly Stated
• 3. The United States in Aspiration
• 4. Toward a Burkean Liberalism
• Notes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• Back Cover