EDITOR’S NOTE: While it is easy to knock Donald Trump’s ham-handed response regarding the three primary functions of government, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t fielding a difficult question. Any apt handling of the question will necessarily get into the thick weeds, and weeds – we have this on good authority – are hardscrabble things to deal with and be fruitful. More troublesome, Trump’s blundering series of rapid-fire flip-flops on the question also doesn’t mean he was entirely wrong. In fact, whether he meant to be or not, I suspect he may well have been right in a few particular ways that modern conservatives might find at least mildly unsettling. In a series of, presently open-ended, posts I will do my clumsy best to see if I can find my own way through some of these weeds. If the hike seems helpful, come along.
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The conservative view, of course, is that government, at every level, is best limited to those powers requisite for serving, in the words of James Madison, the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community;” in other words: the “public good” of the republic. This implies that a good government must possess both “fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people” and “knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.”
Crucially, “happiness” in this context is not equivocal – the American founders, on this point knee-deep in the same stream in which stood Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, did not conceive happiness as either directionless or merely subjective. Regarding human happiness, C.S. Lewis insisted that we too often fail to want happiness grounded in specific things, rather we are content if those we love, including ourselves, are “just happy.” This won’t do. “Love,” Lewis asserted, “would rather see [the loved one] suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes.” To my mind, then, Madison articulates the claim that the object of government is basically eudaemonist – it is oriented toward the promotion of human eudaemonia, toward human flourishing, or happiness.
In the Christian view, this happiness is, itself, grounded in the realization of our calling, in becoming that for which we were made – sons and daughters of God, children willing to proclaim their patrimony. This is not to suggest that the federal government has any role in the promotion of a particular faith but it is to suggest that the government has as its object the cultivation of a certain kind of citizen – one characteristic of which is a disposition toward other-centered acts of self-donation. Precisely how the government promotes this kind of citizen drives us straight into the weeds. Differences of opinion on this have been a part of the tension between the governments of the West and those of the Middle East.
But my doctoral supervisor, the late political theorist and Christian ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, always one for the weeds, had some notion of how this might come about. In the preface to her book Augustine and the Limits of Politics, Jean describes what she called a village of the mind, a vision really, that represents a kind of earthly ideal. This village, in which she takes up lodgings in the midst of her own enduring pilgrimage, offers the essentials: good conversation; friendly neighbors; a well-stocked library; book clubs; classic westerns at the movie theatre, and the fortifying sounds that emanate into the street, including: hymns from the Lutheran church, bells marking the time from the Catholic church, Torah readings from the synagogue, and rousing gospels from the black Baptist church. Kids play safely at dusk. Parents – moms and dads – read bedtime stories to drowsy children and daily make the effort to give them not quality time but, simply, time. Patrons of the local pub argue politics and religion well into the night. “Of course,” Elshtain admits:
This village no more exists than does Plato’s far grander “city in speech”…But my village is a more livable, because humbler, place. It has its boundaries, of course, but it extends hospitality to all strangers, wanderers, pilgrims, to the lost, the forlorn, the bold, and the timid. It is a rather simple place…but it is a human landscape, a site within which beings such as ourselves enact daily the small gestures of kindness and trust and care and speaking out for fair treatment that are the stuff of lived life. Because that is not all that beings as ourselves do, the village has its share of malicious gossip and backbiting and pettiness and scandal, but because people have to live and work together, none of this is codified into rival adversarial sides or camps. They understand what it means to tend to the quotidian. They understand forgiveness.
Jean called this village “an alternative to the social contract.” It represents all the thick stuff that ought to reside between the individual and the state. It’s civil society: that aggregation of non-governmental associations and institutions – family, houses of worship, scout troops, small businesses, clubs, and the like that is charged, in various degrees, with the moral formation of citizens. As an earthly ideal it is not perfect. And while it does not indulge in utopian horrors to try and make itself perfect, neither does it allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. It is content, if impatiently so, with approximations of the ideal. In this approximation, neighbor comes to the aid of neighbor; private action serves both private and public ends; folks volunteer their time and resources to get needed things done; they share; they empathize; they long to see, and give appropriate assistance to help ensure, that other people’s children grow into the kinds of men and women with whom they would want their own children to play and woo and marry and mate and raise families of their own.
The central object of government is to keep the conditions to let this happen. As Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner put it:
While all this makes clear the case for a limited government, Jean knew as well as anyone that not all villages are like the village of her mind, at least not all the time. All communities are susceptible to hardships and twists of fortune. What happens when, whether willfully or not or both, a local community fails to meet the responsibilities it has? What happens when individuals stagger and fall and there is no one there to break their landing? What then?
Back to the weeds.
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Marc LiVecche is the managing editor of Providence
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John Trumbull‘s painting, Declaration of Independence, depicting the five-man drafting committee of the Declaration of Independence presenting their work to the Congress. The painting can be found on the back of the U.S. $2 bill. The original hangs in the US Capitol rotunda.
