"The Rule of Law Must Yield"

The way the Wall Street Jingo packaged this morning's freebie

The Case for the Strong Executive Under some circumstances, the rule of law must yield to the need for energy. BY HARVEY C. MANSFIELD (Mr. Mansfield is William R. Kenan Professor of Government at Harvard.)

had us fooled for a moment. We wondered whether Mr. Mansfield of Harvard was going to assure us that aggressions and occupations are warrantable whenever the alternative would be outrageously expensive gasoline and fuel oil. Decorum is, however, preserved and the closest the learned neocomrade comes to that sort of crudity is his final sentence,

I believe too that the difficulties of the war in Iraq arise from having wished to leave too much to the Iraqis, thus from a sense of inhibition rather than imperial ambition.

That has no visible connection with the rest of the piece, although one could make up an invisible one easily enough, as for instance that George XLIII is being commended for the "energy" of his imagination. In any case, the key term is elucidated as follows:

The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason--one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.

Thus we wound up in beautiful downtown Leostraussville, as the by-line should have warned us at once. Leostraussville is rather a quaint and agreeable intellectual hamlet, in many respects, but it is located far off the ordinary Boy-'n'-Party path, and even well off Signore Machiavelli's: imagine what the latter might say about the Big Management Party's colonial procedings since 1 May 2003, or in general about The Dynasty Boy as an instantiation of Il Principe! Naturally Mr. Mansfield prefers to defend the abstraction of Executive Energy rather than the record of George XLIII, yet by his own account they cannot easily be separated, and if he had separated them too severely, the WSJ would not have found him fit to reprint. Not even America's Moonpaper guards the ideological purity of its opinion pages more closely than the jingos do. To be sure, Mr. Mansfield of Harvard is perhaps too up-market a product for that fishwrap to purvey.

By a happy accident, the neocomrade himself obliquely expounds the ideal relationship between the Faculty of Arts and Science, "Harvard" proper, and the Harvard Victory School, the MBA-granting folks over across the river by the stadium:

This admiration for presidents extends beyond politics into society, in which Americans, as republicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule. The CEO (chief executive officer) is found at the summit of every corporation including universities. I suspect that appreciation for private executives in democratic society was taught by the success of the Constitution's invention of a strong executive in republican politics.

Would that analysis pass muster in the History Department, though? Mr. Mansfield is certainly right to admit, if not exactly to point out, that the USA had already become democratic before ever it became capitalistic. Few things are more important to understanding why we are so exactly like US and not so very much like anybody else in the world. On the other hand, it is a bit hard to connect the dots exactly between, say, John Tyler and James Buchanan on the "republican politics" side, and the archetypical Morgans and Carnegies and Rockefellers on Lord Mammon's team -- at least if getting the chronology right matters. A political philosopher, rather than "political scientist," such as the neocomrade is may transcend mere chronology, perhaps, but even at that toplofty level, doubts may arise about Mr. Mansfield's account of his own suspicions in the mind of anybody who recalls Herr Prof. Dr. Strauss's a priori account of the interaction between The Philosopher and what he called "the merchant classes" or something similar, referring to gentry who were long dead (and foreigners as well) as viewed from Philadelphia in 1787.

Meanwhile, it is fun to watch Mr. Mansfield of Harvard's characteristic shtik in operation bottom-up. The immediate problem confronting Boy and Party is that two-thirds, or thereabouts, of Televisionland and the electorate appear to have decided that Big Management of all the affairs of neo-Iraq is no longer of vital national interest, if it ever was in the first place. To confront that formidable contingent head-on and tell them they are an ignorant mob, a "great beast," incapable of appreciating all the exhibited beauties of Crawfordite Realpolitik in action, would give offense and maybe it even cost votes. How much more viable it were to sidle in subtly from Cloudcuckooland and remind us all that "Americans, as republicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule"! Sen. Reid and Speaker Pelosi and the two-thirds have somehow lost touch with our own roots, with the true Yankee quiddity, don't you know? O tempora, o mores!

The general idea of this gimmick is nifty, no doubt about it, but the Mansfield implementation could, in my judgment, be improved. The neocomrade sidles in subtly at far too high a level. Even at too high a level as regards mechanical punctuation, I fear, for lots of folks are likely to misunderstand the Ivy League fortune cookie just quoted as if it had been "Americans, as [R]epublicans, tolerate, and appreciate, an amazing amount of one-man rule" -- implying that Americans, as [D]emocrats, tolerate and appreciate nothing of the sort. Which is historically ridiculous in itself -- Andy Jackson rotates in his grave! -- as well as not the neocomrade's intended meaning.

The appropriate level would, in my amateur judgment, lies down somewhere around Profiles in Courage, a work which really does seem in retrospect to have had a serious impact upon Televisionland and the electorate. Perhaps even upon George XLIII himself, who knows?

Of course the old book as it stands is little fitted to the present purposes of Mr. Mansfield of Harvard, for it tendentiously featured upper-case-R Republicans breaking out of their Party lockstep and doing the conscientious thing instead. Not quite exactly what the aggression faction requires at the moment, obviously! Yet not altogether wrong, either, because when "President Sorensen" praised selected Congresspersons for defying their constituents as well as their Party, and then his book became at once a best-seller and a prize-winner and subsequently a palpable influence, one can only infer that some constituents in America, at least, are open to the proposition that constituents in America are not necessarily infallible. Apply that openness to the latest poll results about the GOP's neo-Iraq, and voila! Behold, if not everything that Mr. Mansfield of Harvard sidles in from Leostraussville for, well, at least a very great deal of it!

We are led along to the speculation that Mr. Mansfield of Harvard should not so much be trying to remind American constituents of their, "our," traditional folkloric love of "an amazing amount of one-man rule," which is only a tasteless joke with an incumbent uno solo like Little Brother and the track record that Little Brother has accumulated, but rather to their Sorensen-engendered, or Sorensen-fortified, awareness that even American constituents can err. Mr. Mansfield of Harvard will not join us if we move in that direction, for the move implies that Hamiltonian "energy" is not the master category after all, but rather something like its opposite, call it self-doubt in the vernacular or perhaps even call it humilitatem in Latin.

The History Department gentry are best fitted to decide the underlying question, as it seems to me, and as it most ferociously does NOT seem to the Bani LeoStrauss. The underlying question boils down to something like this, perhaps:

"Teach us, o tenured gurus, about the mastery of the master classes! Are they in charge because they really possess Executive Energy™? Are they in charge because, whilst not actually possessing Executive Energy™, their subjects attribute it to them by mistake? Are they in charge only because we subjects lack any Executive Energy™ of our own? Or what?"