May 03, 2007
"He that hath ears to hear, let him hear"
The left blogosphere is in an uproar about Harvey Mansfield’s suggestion in today’s WSJ Online that the President has, by Constitutional design, “executive power” unfettered by, and indeed opposed to, “the rule of law,” as represented by Congress and the courts.
Harvey Mansfield has written one of those articles in which the writer's elegance, erudition and stylistic flair make an abhorrent position sound halfway reasonable. One lovely sentence follows another, and if you aren't careful, they lull you into overlooking the fact that he is arguing against the rule of law.
No doubt, some in the White House and the wingnutosphere will take comfort in such an argument, made by a scholar so eminent.
But both sides are missing the point. Those of us who have been his students know that Mansfield is far more a philosopher than he is a partisan. Moreover, he is a philosopher of a particular bent: a Straussian.
It is a core Straussian belief that in times of maximum political danger philosophers dare not, for their own sakes and for the sake of the community, tell the truth in plain language. Instead, they must conceal the truth under elaborate cover, and especially under cover of its opposite. By writing apparently in defense of a given position, in a way that leads those who hold that position to agree but makes obvious to those who do not hold it how vicious or trivial it truly is, philosophers can safely unmask obnoxious ideas and potential tyrants.
In The Prince, for example, Machiavelli warns Florentines about the emerging Medici tyranny by frankly stating the horrible tactics required to help a new tyrant consolidate power: “Whoever becomes master of a free city and does not destroy it, must expect to be destroyed by it.”
Similarly, Mansfield lays out the principles of Banana Republicanism for all to see. In the midst of a seeming panegyric on “energy in the executive,” Mansfield, in an apparently unguarded moment, lets the cat out of the bag:
We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.
Mansfield fearlessly unmasks the claim that Presidential violations of law derive from, and are therefore limited by, the demands of temporary emergencies:
The case for a strong executive begins from urgent necessity and extends to necessity in the sense of efficacy and even greatness. It is necessary not merely to respond to circumstances but also in a comprehensive way to seek to anticipate and form them. "Necessary to" the survival of a society expands to become "necessary for" the good life there, and indeed we look for signs in the way a government acts in emergencies for what it thinks to be good after the emergency has passed.
Moreover, with a broad wink, Mansfield signals that arguments of the very type he purports to make are necessarily partisan and insincere. But he does so in a way that demands the "close reading" Straussians teach. Early in the essay, he writes:
In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law.
Hmmm … just what might those “other circumstances” be? A hint is given in the middle (where Straussians argue that the truth is most cunningly hidden):
The American Founders heeded both criticisms of the rule of law when they created the presidency. The president would be the source of energy in government, that is, in the administration of government, energy being a neutral term that might include Aristotle's discretionary virtue and Machiavelli's tyranny — in which only partisans could discern the difference. (Emphasis added.)
And, just in case the reader is especially dense, Mansfield frankly provides the answer to the riddle near the end of the essay:
Democrats today would be friendlier to executive power if they held the presidency — and Republicans would discover virtue in the rule of law if they held Congress.
So, Mansfield, in his adopted character of an apologist for Bushism, reveals the Bushite project of ruling in defiance of the law as fundamentally tyrannical, fundamentally unlimited, and defensible only from a position of partisan bad faith.
And of course, if challenged, Mansfield would deny all this, and dismiss the above interpretation as fanciful, which is the normal reaction of the uninitiated to Straussian interpretations of classical texts.
Brilliant!
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Thread: GWB, the Beloved Leader , Thread: Watching Conservatives
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