Shapiro:
Americans reject Locke and embrace Hobbes.
Last
week, President Obama became the target of mockery when he descended into Porky
Pig protestations at the divisiveness of presumptive Republican nominee Donald
Trump. After tripping over his words while trying to gain his footing, Obama
finally settled on a line of attack: “If we turn against each other based on
divisions of race or religion, if we fall for a bunch of ‘okey doke’ just
because it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative, then we’re not going to
build on the progress we started.”
Meanwhile,
across the country, likely Obama supporters rioted at a Trump event in San
Jose, Calif., waving Mexican flags, burning American ones, assaulting Trump
supporters, and generally engaging in mayhem.
The
same day, Trump labeled a judge presiding over his civil trial as unfit for his
job. “I’m building a wall,” said Trump. “It’s an inherent conflict of
interest.” What, pray tell, was that inherent conflict of interest? Trump said
that the judge was “Mexican” (he was born in Indiana, to Mexican parents).
Two
days later, Trump told Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro, “Barack Obama has been a
terrible president, but he’s been a tremendous divider. He has divided this
country from rich and poor, black and white — he has divided this country like
no president in my opinion, almost ever . . . I will bring people together.”
So,
who’s right?
They’re
both right. Obama, like it or not, leads a coalition of tribes. Trump, like it
or not, leads a competing coalition of tribes. The Founders weep in their
graves.
The
Founders were scholars of both Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Hobbes argued that
the state of nature — primitive society — revolved around a war of “every man
against every man.” In such a state, life was awful: “No arts; no letters; no
society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death;
and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The only
solution to such chaos, said Hobbes, was the Leviathan: the state, which is “but
an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for
whose protection and defense it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is
an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.”
Hobbesian
theory has prevailed throughout human history: Tribal societies either remain
in a constant state of war with each other, or they are overthrown by a
powerful government. Jared Diamond writes that “tribal warfare tends to be
chronic, because there are not strong central governments that can enforce
peace.” Those strong central governments often arise, says Francis Fukuyama,
thanks to the advent of religion, which unites tribes across family boundaries.
The rise of powerful leadership leads to both tyranny and to peace.
But in
Western societies, such tyranny cannot last. After generations of tyranny —
after tribalism gives way to Judeo-Christian teachings enforced through
government — citizens begin to question why a tyrant is necessary. They begin
to ask John Locke’s question: In a state of nature, we had rights from one
another; what gives the tyrant power to invade those rights? Is prevention of
violence a rationale for full government control, or were governments created
to protect our rights? Our Founders came down on the side of Locke; as they
stated in the Declaration of Independence, “to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.”
But the
Founders still feared tribalism. They called it “faction” in The Federalist Papers, and were truly
worried about the seizure of the mechanism of government in order to benefit
one group over another. They may have agreed with Locke over Hobbes about the
proper extent of government power, but they never believed that tribalism had
disappeared. That is why they attempted to create a government pitting faction
against faction, cutting the Gordian knot of tyranny and tribalism with checks
and balances. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:
If men were angels, no
government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external
nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government
which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:
you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next
place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the
primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
necessity of auxiliary precautions.
It was
a brilliant solution to an intractable problem — so long as it worked.
It no
longer does. Tribalism has had its revenge.
It
began with the decline of American religion in the 1950s. As religion declined,
Americans looked for new sources of community — and in the 1960s, the Marxist
Left provided Americans communal meaning in ethnic and racial solidarity. Even
as America began to move beyond its historic racism, the Left hijacked the
conversation around race and divvied Americans up into subgroups of ethnic
haves and have-nots. City governments became playgrounds for racial factions
taking control of government and expanding their power. Student groups divided
along racial and sexual lines. The social fabric frayed.
The
unrest of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a law-and-order backlash — a desire for
a government that would tamp down the unrest and restore order. For three
decades, Americans rejected tribalism as a mode of politics (Ronald Reagan
believed in universal human freedoms, and Bill Clinton famously rejected Sister
Souljah’s race-baiting). Not surprisingly, the rejection of 1960s tribalism
ushered in an era of smaller government dedicated toward the proposition that
constitutional checks and balances were the best protection against tyranny.
And
then came the Obama presidency.
President
Obama’s tribal politics have crippled America. Americans hoped that Obama —
after campaigning on the notion that he would provide the capstone to America’s
non-tribalism — would heal our wounds and move our country beyond racial
politics. He, in his own persona, was to be a racial unifier. He represented
the hope that America could reject tribalism in favor of American universalism.
Instead,
Obama has rejected checks and balances as a matter of principle, and has used
tribalism to grow his own power. By cobbling together a coalition of racial and
ethnic interest groups, Obama knew he could maximize the power of the
government to act on their behalf. And so his Department of Justice has
crippled police departments based solely on the race of police officers. He
constantly suggests that America has an inborn, unfixable problem with racism.
He poses as a rejection of the Founding ideology.
Donald
Trump is the counter-reaction. But he is not a Reaganesque or even Bill
Clinton-esque counter-reaction. He, like Obama, is tribal. His tribalism is the
tribalism of Pat Buchanan, who suggested in 2011 what appears to be Donald
Trump’s electoral strategy: “to increase the GOP share of the white Christian
vote and increase the turnout of that vote by specific appeals to social,
cultural, and moral issues, and for equal justice for the emerging white
minority.”
“Why
should Republicans be ashamed to represent the progeny of the men who founded,
built, and defended America since her birth as a nation?” Buchanan asked,
concluding that “white anger is a legitimate response to racial injustices done
to white people.” Instead of attempting to set checks and balances to prevent
faction, instead of attempting to educate Americans in our Founding principles,
this philosophy focuses on tribalism of a different sort, making the crucial
error of linking skin color to culture.
And so
we may have reached the end of the era of small government. As tribalism rises,
Americans look again to the strongman. We begin the cycle anew. But first, we
feel the rage of riots in San Jose and Ferguson, and the spiteful glee of the
white-nationalist alt-right. We watch contests between tribal figures like
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We wonder which tribe will win, even as
America disintegrates before us.
