A Preface to Politics

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A PREFACE TO POLITICS

by

WALTER LIPPMANN

"A God wilt thou create for thyself
out of thy seven devils."

Mitchell Kennerley
New York and London
1914
Copyright, 1913, by
Mitchell Kennerley

_Contents_

CHAPTER PAGE

INTRODUCTION

I. Routineer and Inventor 1

II. The Taboo 34

III. The Changing Focus 53

IV. The Golden Rule and After 86

V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report 122

VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm 159

VII. The Making of Creeds 204

VIII. The Red Herring 247

IX. Revolution and Culture 273

INTRODUCTION

The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men
and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter
very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise,
the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings
by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public
affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as
silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile
of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as
interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is
compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that
politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But
such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize
how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who
venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of
the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to
their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid,
inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone
they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private
person."

The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a
fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the
day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the
unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month
or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is
when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon
some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the
attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and
philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of
political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is
felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized
as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men
engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often
as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in
the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to
the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"

Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many
people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a
conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of
articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the
currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to
some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great
battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out
of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief.

That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your
newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the
"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is
entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to
take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_
uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public
affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from
the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people
in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession
to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
respected the indifference of the public. There was something
monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and
an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to
place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was
valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in
a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object
was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or
a vague abstraction without substance.

Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs
do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which
civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools
and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is
directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly
not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our
thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.

The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the
penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see
politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.

These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it
concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A
Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own
sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to
emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a
legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after
to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would
contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was
it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
assumptions put forward as dogmas.

It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to
thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a
grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For
though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the
language of particular men.

W. L.

46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.

A PREFACE TO POLITICS

CHAPTER I

ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR

Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one
of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has
ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his
vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You
have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that
body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings
for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public
enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it
has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical
transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in
the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and
the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a
protracted man-hunt.

Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is
and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New
York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away.
It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man
theory is to political thinking:

"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on
the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and
denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."

Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told
exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut
difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are
largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's
tar than their own.

But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?

If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the
Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
between Philistia and Bohemia.

When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
those who regard it as a problem to be solved.

The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
above him is nothing but the roof.

He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.

If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to
the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth
century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence
Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by
cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet.

It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From
Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of
popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt
to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The
manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much
gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.

Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no
guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A
prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely
cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No
fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not
offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is
accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat
smoother rotation.

Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more
perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not
altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the
machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we
actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers.
Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer
force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some
approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in
spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when
he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any
corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly
knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial
and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an
intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a
panic and a cry of Go Back."

I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals
who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we
have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are
simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than
the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed
in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a
different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine
they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put
the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run
automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be,
but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own
creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another
conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation.

The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards
all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are
valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones
can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its
place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the
routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as
puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the
center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook
for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it
alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results.

Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential
quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has
experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not
the tendencies of mechanical things.

The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the
phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are
days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we
grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a
city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed
in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we
often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the
shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our
office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the
business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of
lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so
unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines
and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary
life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never
really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest
moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with
primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."

The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and
delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this
is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from
public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn
something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his
sabbatical year.

The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known
to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might
point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist a
outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on
'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular
habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one,
he made a point of interrupting it."

Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches
of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life
when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before
you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you
seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real
soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of
steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work
are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous.

Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle
and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These
are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
founder of a religion.

It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something
he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring
of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by
which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual
creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing
needs.

This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is
made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as
a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the
Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically
constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and
compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These
frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical
commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the
frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.

Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we
have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human
affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply
at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a
more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine
which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature
into account? What other explanation is there for the naive faith of the
Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with
vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all
mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather
pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they
put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety
to pretend that they succeeded.

They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed
upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of
unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton
might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the
heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government
suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a
dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist
radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their
youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they
would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine
expressed itself in logical formulae as inflexible to the pace of life as
did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows
beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the
spiritual habits of a period.

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