Republican virtues in a democratic age

There's something almost bittersweet in David Brooks' reflections this morning on small-"r" republicanism:

The breakthrough [on a budget agreement], if there is one, will come from the least directly democratic parts of the government, from the Senate or some commission of Establishment bigwigs. It will be enacted when voters realize we need to build arrangements to protect ourselves from our own weaknesses. It will all depend on reviving the republican virtues upon which the country was founded.

One reads such phrases -- "republican virtues" -- mostly in unread history texts these days, since the good-citizenship concept of republican virtue was long ago eclipsed by the presumed superiority of Jacksonian democracy; the latter of which Brooks, as a Burkean conservative, is of course distrustful.

But that's OK. I'm sympathetic to Brooks' lament -- in one of those full-circle ways. I too am distrustful of Jacksonian democracy and tend to look toward "the least democratic parts of the government" for long-term national salvation, though not from a conservative point of view. Mine, rather, is from another and now dated concept, nearly as dated as Burkean conservatism: that of a Fabian-socialistic thrust.

I suspect I repeatedly find myself endorsing Barack Obama's executive approach because I also suspect that in his political heart of hearts, he, too, sympathizes with Fabianism's essence: that of an intellectual elite steeped in republican virtue, working in undemocratic concert for the nation's common good, and launching in each policy case from a rather coldly technocratic and exquisitely pragmatic point.

Philosophically speaking to the end points, this brand of what you might call intellectually aristocratic socialism is light years away from Burkean conservatism: the first shoots for a kind of functional, material egalitarianism, while the other assumes a certain and natural rigidity of class. Yet their working methodologies are essentially the same: they both distrust ... well, let's be blunt ... the uninformed rabble; both elevate to near deification the governing value of an educated elite; and both, reflecting perhaps their greatest similarity, comprehend the strong advisability of gradual, incremental change over sudden bursts of the earthshaking.

If I'm correct in my suspicion that President Obama does indeed sympathize with my and Brooks' preference for political elitism, if goes without saying that he couldn't be waterboarded into confessing it publicly. For we operate in a Jacksonian democracy, where Every Man and Woman is Unenlightened King and Queen, of the Huey Long sort -- hence we must suffer from popular and thus governing ignorance such as, cutting the deficit in a recession is a bright idea.

At any rate, it's good see phrases like "republican virtues" in popular print, notwithstanding the distance we've traveled from them.

Comments

[Billy B]

Brooks and his fellow republics are not nearly as distrustful of a Jacksonian democracy when a republic is president.

[Charlieford]

Yup. Irving Kristol in the 1970s was lamenting the effects of populist anti-war sentiment, because it interfered with elite hegemony over our foreign policy. By the early eighties he was scolding anyone who dared look down on the populism that swept Reagan into office as a snob.