Gamble – A Small Step Forward: The Future of the Messianic Nation

Richard M. Gamble

“A Small Step Forward: The
Future of the Messianic Nation”

National Meeting of the
Philadelphia Society
Renaissance Chicago Hotel, Chicago, Illinois
Sunday, May 2, 2004

As
I awoke this morning and postponed the inevitable, I tried to come up with
something clever to say at the beginning of my talk.
I gave up. My sister, who is
a musician, once commented after a particularly fine piano recital we had
attended that a virtuoso performance like that made her either want to practice
harder or give up. I know the
feeling. We have heard many
virtuoso performances over the past few days.
And for some perverse reason I get to go last.
I don’t know if this is a privilege or if I am being punished for some
unnamed crime. I don’t want the
last word. I don’t have
the last word on any subject. And
thanks to the question-and-answer time, the last word is left not to me but to
the Philadelphia Society as a whole. This
is as it should be.

When
we debate U. S. foreign policy, even in a family squabble, we are arguing to
some degree over the American identity — past, present, and future — over
our inheritance and what use we ought to make of that legacy.
As Augustine taught us, we can’t help but use the imagination to join
the past, present, and future into a seamless fabric of recollection,
experience, and anticipation. When
we talk about the future, we inevitably talk about the past — in ways
recognized and unrecognized. As we
look to the future, we debate versions of the American founding, and who gets to
count as a representative founding father, and which documents and which
interpretations of those documents are central, and legitimate, and
determinative. We debate which
later historical figures and events, which winners and which losers, get to tell
America’s story. We argue over
the shape of the future, and which future will be authentically continuous with
the American past and present.

America’s
policymakers have known and used this relationship. Abraham
Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and others justified present action
and their visions of America’s future by rhetorically shaping a particular
past. Lincoln stood in Independence
Hall, Philadelphia, in 1861 and said that there was “something in that
Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to
the world for all future time.” At
Gettysburg, Lincoln promised to finish the task begun in 1776.
Wilson stood at Mt. Vernon in 1918 and claimed that
intervention in the First World War in the name of world liberation was the very
thing the Founders “would have done had they been in our place.”
A year later, Wilson told a skeptical Senate that America’s crusade for
a new world order was the role “we dreamed [of] at our birth.”
An enlightened, benevolent, self-sacrificial America had obeyed its
historical destiny and answered God’s call.
Two decades later, Roosevelt assured the nation that the Four Freedoms,
belonging by right to all people everywhere, were “no vision of a distant
millennium.” These universalized
freedoms were a fulfillment of our founding.
“Since the beginning of our American history,” he said, “we have
been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which
goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions. . . .”
During the Cold War, John Foster Dulles, speaking at Independence
Hall and echoing Lincoln, explained that “This Nation was conceived with a
sense of mission and dedicated to the extension of freedom throughout the
world.”

Among
these familiar claims about the American identity and mission, Wilson’s
phrase haunted me as I thought about today’s panel.
Just what was it that we dreamed of at our birth?
The answer was supposed to be obvious in 1861 and 1919 and 1941 and
1956, but is it obvious now? Where
exactly do these intimations of immortality beckon us?
This question gets to the core of any disagreement over U.S. foreign
policy. Policy is never just
about policy. Were Lincoln,
Wilson, FDR, and Dulles wrong to legitimize present action by past precedent?
More to the point, were they correct about the Founders’
natal dreams? Historical honesty
requires that we acknowledge the expansiveness of the
Founders’ dreams and even the hubris of some of their claims about their
place in history. There is indeed
at one level an unmistakable continuity between later efforts to remake the
world by expanding the dominion of freedom and democracy and the Founders’
own hopeful expectancy. In some
ways it is easy to prove that world renewal is exactly
what we dreamed of at our birth. John
Adams connected the settling of America with the eventual “emancipation of
the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
In 1776, Thomas Paine announced in Common
Sense that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.
A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days
of Noah until now” (p. 65). George Washington wrote Lafayette that one day
“the United States will be the legislator of all nations.”
James Madison thought the delegates at Philadelphia were somehow to
“decide forever the fate of Republican Government.”
And Benjamin Franklin claimed that “our cause is the cause of all
mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.
It is a glorious task assigned us by Providence.”
These examples could be multiplied tenfold and more.

But
do these words prove that the Founders set in motion a world revolution and
that it is up to each succeeding generation to fulfill this promise of
universal emancipation?
Is it legitimate and historically responsible to claim or
even imply that the Founders would have endorsed the North in the Civil War
and American intervention in Europe in World War I and World War II, and would
have waged the Cold War in a particular way?
To do so requires radical over-simplification of the past, selective
appropriation of the past for present needs, and a bold Whiggish-ness that
reverses cause and effect. The
historical record is, of course, more complex.
The Founders’ enthusiasm was tempered by their view of man and
history. As Claes Ryn has
recently pointed out, they were anchored in the Classical and Christian
tradition of humility and self-restraint.
They also recognized the inevitability of international rivalry among
nations motivated by fear, honor, and interests.
If they were dreamers, and
some were, they were also practical, experienced men of the world, students of
history who knew the dangers of enthusiasm, shunned “utopian speculations”
and the designs of the “lovers of humanity,” and soon, along with Burke,
feared the “armed doctrine” of ideology.

The
emperor Marcus Aurelius, who knew something about the complexities of world
power, instructed his Stoic soul to stay away from visionary schemes.
“Don’t hope for Plato’s Utopia,” he wrote in his Meditations,
“but be content to make a very small step forward and reflect that the
result even of this is no trifle” (IX.29).
In the spirit of this reminder, I recommend, as we anticipate the next
forty years of foreign policy, one “very small step forward” — and
“this is no trifle.” This
small step is to end the rhetoric and expansive imagination of Messianic
nationalism.
On September 11, 2002, President Bush quoted John 1:5 and
identified America as the light that shined in darkness and was not overcome.
This appropriation of the gospel, and the related claim that the hand
of history is upon America to expand freedom and democracy, ought to be
controversial among conservatives. It
is not clear to me what is supposed to be conservative about this aspiration.
Some arguments for the forced expansion of freedom and democracy appeal
to America’s security, claiming that a more democratic world will be a safer
world, that an expansive foreign policy is not idealistic but sanely
self-interested. But must we
remake the world in order to be at peace with it or even to be safe in it?
Must we make the world over in our own image and likeness?
Perhaps we do have the capacity to make the world peaceful, safe, free,
and prosperous, but at what costs to ourselves and to our institutions?

Policymakers
who advocate a continuing world-redemptive role for the United States need to
prove that a Messianic posture best preserves our constitutional republic and
most effectively secures the lives, liberty, and property of the American
people.
They ought to demonstrate just how and to what degree
Messianic nationalism makes America safer.
Many ordinary citizens might well wonder what harm there is in
universalizing American values, in claiming that the ideals enshrined in the
Declaration and Constitution belong to all peoples in all cultures, as
President Bush claimed in a speech at the National Archives last September.[1]
What is the harm in believing that one’s nation has a divine mandate
to spread freedom, the rule of law, self-government, prosperity, and peace?
Is this aspiration any different from Imperial Rome’s mission to shut
the gates of war, to beat down the proud, and to bring the world under the
dominion of law and justice as Virgil described it?
These are good things. Who
in good conscience could speak against universalizing these blessings,
especially if a nation has the capacity to do so, and especially if national ability
means national responsibility?

But
universalization is exactly the problem.
Good things are not good in every context, or carried to any degree, or
arranged in any priority. Love of
neighbor and even love of one’s enemy are enjoined by the gospel, but
expanded into principles of foreign policy these standards of behavior lose
all meaning.
Universalizing the Golden Rule as if it were the only rule of
right conduct and applicable in every circumstance shows little understanding
of the rule itself and its proper and proportionate relationship to other
ethical rules. Despite what
progressives have been saying for more than a century, the nation is not the
individual writ large; the world is not the community writ large.
The American system of justice and form of government may not
be right for the world. Universalism
makes sense only in an indefinitely malleable world populated by abstractions
and uncomplicated by stubborn complexity and fixity.
Sound judgment and sound leadership always require due
recognition of context, degree, and hierarchy.

Regardless
of real or imagined benefits, Messianic nationalism’s costs are evident and
affect more than political rhetoric (which is rarely “mere” as it expands
the realm of the possible — or the impossible — in the public
imagination). Messianic
nationalism imposes serious costs on America’s institutions.
It confuses the things of God and the things of Caesar, misleading the
Church about the proper identity, boundaries, and mission of the State.
This blasphemous confusion by itself is reason enough to correct the
problem, but consequences also reach beyond the Church to the state and
society. Messianic nationalism
carries with it what William Graham Sumner on the eve of the Spanish-American
War called the penalty of greatness[2] — burdens of increased
taxes, increased likelihood of war brought by constant intervention overseas,
greater jeopardy to American soldiers, the vulgarization of political
discourse, the corruption of politics, and the fanning of national vanity.
An imperial policy may destabilize regions and put the safety of
foreign peoples at greater risk by imposing unsustainable systems of
government based not on efficacy but on ideology.
It denies legitimacy to any regime that does not embrace democracy.
It seeks to overthrow other governments not primarily because of the
likely or overt threat they pose but because of their heretical political
ideologies.

There
are costs as well to a vulnerable Constitution that was not designed to govern
an empire in the first place. The
Constitution, by definition a system of limitations, was, again in Sumner’s
words, designed to be incompatible with “conquest, extension, domination,
and imperialism.”[3]
The “armed doctrine” of global democracy, however, becomes restless
under these inconvenient constitutional limitations.
Ideology becomes impatient with institutional constraints on ambition.
Ideology simplifies international conflicts, either shrinking or
magnifying them into unrecognizable contests of ideas.
It hinders sound judgment by distorting reality through its own prism.
It mistakes part of reality for the whole.
It misjudges proportion, the proper scale of values, and the limits of
the possible. It favors slogans
over careful judgment, precipitous action over slow deliberation.
It promises permanent, universal solutions to intractable, perennial
problems. An ideologically-driven
foreign policy is more likely to misperceive and misconstrue national
interests, to overlook good options in its myopic pursuit of the best, to
choose Quixotic goals, to become intolerant and aggressive, and to earn
ill-will in a world crowded with would-be Messiahs.

U.
S. foreign policy needs to be kept within a constitutional framework, even at
a time of grave threats to national security and to American lives and
property. The Founders’
framework always recognized that the executive powers would require
flexibility, latitude, and responsiveness.
These criteria are compatible with constitutional boundaries.
No one would deny that twenty-first century America has grown into
something unrecognizable to the eighteenth century.
But we ought not to make more of this truism than the passage of time
and the evolution of context and circumstances requires.
There is nothing about the condition of the modern world that prevents
the United States from pursuing a foreign policy characterized by what Claes
Ryn calls “responsible nationhood.”[4]

Americans
were told throughout the twentieth century that we must be willing to “pay
any price and bear any burden,” but is this the language of statesmanship?
Don’t statesmen do exactly that — count costs?
The Wilsonian language of “all,” “every,”
“anywhere” persists with renewed vigor in the current administration.
For its first hundred years, America served as an example
of successful self-government, liberty, prosperity, and the rule of law, but
in its second century it promised to extend
freedom, democracy, peace, and opportunity.
The universal promises of “all,” “everywhere,” “anyone”
have no grounding in human experience and no place in a responsible,
Constitutionally-constrained foreign policy.
How can we promise so much to ourselves and others?
In its place, we need to recover the lost language of a foreign policy
grounded in the U. S. Constitution and in the constitution of man and things.
In this fallen, finite, transitory world, there are no permanent
solutions, no universal remedies, no self-evident outcomes toward which the
hand of history is leading us.

When
I see pictures of our troops in Baghdad, I cannot help asking, is this
what we dreamed of at our birth? In
honor of my pledge to give all of us the last word, I ask you, the members and
friends of the Philadelphia Society, is this what we dreamed of at our birth?
This one question must be answered as we together contemplate the
direction of U. S. foreign policy for the next forty years.

[1] “Remarks by the
President at the Rededication of the National Archives,” 17 September 2003
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/09/20030917-2.html).

[2] William Graham Sumner,
“The Fallacy of Territorial Extension,” in
On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William
Graham Sumner, edited by Robert C. Bannister (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1992) 271.

[3] Ibid., 270.

[4] Ryn, America
the Virtuous, 177-88