THE IDEA OF FRATERNITY IN AMERICA

with a new Introduction by

Susan McWilliams Barndt

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Contents

Preface ix

Abbreviations xiii

Introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition xv

Introduction

I. Clan, Tribe, and City Between Worlds Souls and Secrets

Politics and Fraternity

Lessons and Legacies

II. Fraternity and the Myths of Identity

Eros and Community e Dying Animal

My Brother, My Enemy Sciences and Sentiments

“ e secret sits . . .”

III. Fraternity and Modern Politics

Aliens and Strangers

Resistance

Generation

Recognition

IV. e Ambiguous Ideal: Fraternity in America

Inheritances e Homes of the Homeless

Wanderer’s Star

Misleaders and Guides

V. Puritanism: e Covenants of Fraternity

“ is nation, under God . . .”

“ e fault of dullness is within us . . .”

“No neglect of means . . .”

“Without despising life . . .”

“Integral and conservant causes ... “

VI. John Winthrop: e Statesman

“More than nature demands . . .”

Citizens and Magistrates

Profession and Action

Promise and Peril

Roger Williams and Anti-Politics

Puritan Statecraft: e Legacy

VII. e Fruits of the Earth: Cain in New England

“Say not, I am a child . . .”

Camels and Needles

John Wise: Statecraft Revisited

Edwards: “God must be near . . .”

VIII. e American Enlightenment

Old and New

Heredity: e Bonds of Race

Environment: e Brotherhood of Place e Brotherhood of Man

Politics as Mechanics

Taming the Great Beast

James Wilson: e Moral Instinct

Wilson: e City and the World

IX. e Je ersonians

“Limited to a narrow space . . .”

Awakenings and Architects

“We are all Republicans . . .”

Je erson: “ e Great Principles . . .”

“ e plain common sense . . .”

“ e hopes of the world . . .”

X. e Divided House

Excelsior

Romance and Transcendence

“Brothers will you meet me. . . ?”

Old Romans, New Liberals

Cries of Race and Clan

White Hopes, Dark Presences

Battlecries of Freedom

XI. Emerson and oreau: e All and the One

America's Philosopher

Living in the All

Each Man a State

Time and Eternity e Radical in Politics

“Something military . . .”

XII. Nathaniel Hawthorne: e Citizen

Puritanism Revisited

Blackness

Veils and Masks

One Twenty-Millionth of a Sovereign e Symptom of Brotherhood

XIII. Herman Melville: e Pilgrim

“A monstrous allegory . . .”

“A poor unit . . .” e Innocents

Dwelling Among Brethren

“Sitting up with a corpse . . .”

XIV. e Gilded Age

“Tenting tonight . . .”

“ e bitch-goddess . . .”

Progress and Poverty

Protest and Portent

“Against the ways of Tubal Cain . . .”

Lloyd: Populist Militant

XV. Whitman and Bellamy: Nations of Lovers e Song of Myself e Base of All Metaphysics e City Invincible

Big Brother

“Striving to be absorbed . . .

XVI. Mark Twain: e Teacher

“Never tell the naked truth . . .”

“ e chief . . . delight of God”

“You have only to nd the rst friend . . .”

“We were comrades and not comrades . . .”

“Take the . . . relics and weave . . . romance”

“It’s a philosophy, you see . . .”

XVII. Old Americans and New

Born in Arcadia

“ e buzzing universe . . .”

In His Steps

“Make the world safe . . .”

New Americans, Old Memories

“My God, it’s Flaherty!”

Huns at the Gate

XVIII. Generations of the Lost e Parting Ways

“A night of dark intent . . .” e Redhead e Philosopher

XIX. Fearlessness and Fear: e New Deal and After Excitement Amid Despair

Shu ing the Deck

E Pluribus . . .

XX. Native Sons rough a glass, darkly . . .

In His Hands

Sinn Fein

Rights and Revolutions

Priest and Prophet

Epilogue: A Note on Generation and Regeneration

Bibliographic Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

S USAN M C W ILLIAMS B ARNDT

It is a great honor to write an introduction to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of my father’s book, e Idea of Fraternity in America. 1 I do so with unconditional respect and love for my father, Wilson Carey McWilliams, who was not just a terri c thinker but also a terri c dad. Yet this book is a challenge: as Dad admits from its outset, e Idea of Fraternity is unwieldy, both in size and in substance. Picking it up is not for the faint of heart.

But as generations of readers can attest, the book is stunning in its sweep, ambition, and prophecy. Half a century after its rst publication, the core arguments in e Idea of Fraternity in America are still a revelation—perhaps even more of a revelation now than when they were rst written, because of how urgent and fresh they feel today. At a time when many Americans are wondering how we got to where we are today, and when even the savviest commentators spend a lot of time scratching their heads, e Idea of Fraternity—a book that came out fty years ago—has answers. One of those answers is: we have been here, or going here, all along. is book demonstrates that there is in fact a lot of precedent for what feels so unprecedented in contemporary American politics.

e Idea of Fraternity in America showed up in bookstores in , a few years before I showed up in the world. My father had been working on the ideas in it for at least a decade before that. He had started his formal study of the concept of fraternity as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, under the tutelage of legendary political theorists John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin. Schaar and Wolin, who would each go on to write several in uential books, saw a crisis of values in American politics and were committed to the recovery of a more participatory democratic life.2 e public-spirited teachings of Schaar and Wolin resonated with my father. Dad had grown up in a family where he learned that public life was paramount and that citizenship should be treated as a gift, a precious inheritance to be used for the common good and in the service of human dignity. His own father, Carey McWilliams, was a moral titan: a radical California writer and lawyer who crusaded for racial equality, and who would later become editor of the Nation magazine. My father’s mother, Dorothy Hedrick McWilliams, was a home economics teacher who lacked her ex-husband’s national fame but had a degree of local notoriety: She was known in California’s Central Valley for being able to turn out percent of the Democratic Party voters in her ward on every Election Day.3 Whatever else they may have disagreed about, my father’s parents were similar in their deep egalitarian convictions and in their lived commitments to the public good. My father sought to honor those convictions and commitments throughout his life, both in and beyond his professional endeavors. For my father, Schaar and Wolin modeled the possibility of living out those commitments as a public university teacher and scholar. Even if you are not well-versed in the works of twentieth-century political theorists, it is not too hard to see Berkeley, and the notorious politics of its campus in the s and ’ s, in the background of Fraternity—particularly in its opening salvo about the political dis- is story was so much the stu of regional legend that I rst heard it after speaking at a local Democratic Club meeting in California, about forty years after my grandmother’s death and about ve years after my father’s. Dad would have loved knowing his mother was so remembered. enchantment of young Americans. My father was on the leading edge of political activism at Berkeley, primarily as one of the heads of SLATE. A campus political party that worked for causes such as racial equality and academic freedom, SLATE pre gured the famed Free Speech Movement and was one of the de ning organizations of the early New Left. My father always remained proud of his association with SLATE, with its emphases on increasing political representation, on-the-ground organizing, and giving voice to the disenchanted as well as the disenfranchised.

I would like to thank the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, for hosting an event on e Idea of Fraternity in America that gave me an opportunity to develop much of what I share here. I owe particular thanks to Je Becker, Aurelian Craiutu, Je rey Isaac, and Mark Yellin for their many forms of brilliance in helping me think through these thoughts.

While my father studied with them at Berkeley, each scholar had one major book to his name: John Schaar, Loyalty in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); and Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political ought (New York: Little, Brown, ). A few years before e Idea of Fraternity was published, Schaar and Wolin co-published e Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond: Essays on Politics and Education in the Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books/New York Review Books, ).

Graduate life at Berkeley was also responsible for another one of this book’s de ning qualities: its epic size. As graduate students, my father and his friend Stanford Lyman made a bet over who could write the longer dissertation. (Neither was unaware of the Freudian dimensions to this competition, and it is not hard to suspect that winking at its Freudian dimensions was the competition’s whole point.) Dad thought he had won, when he turned in an -page work of political theory. en he found out that Lyman, who would go on to become a prominent sociologist, had submitted an -page work on the life of Chinese Americans in the nineteenth century. Dad loved to feign crankiness about losing that battle, decades later. But he cut many pages in turning his dissertation into a book. ough it may be unbelievable given the heft of this volume, this is the short version.

In any case, by the time my father was bringing this book to press in the early 1970s, the campus Left looked pretty di erent from the campus Left of a decade before. e principles of individual freedom and authenticity were taking center stage, and cynicism about political systems and institutions abounded. Back at Berkeley, SLATE had disbanded, its members having decided that no meaningful change could come by working through student government. e ascendant Left at Berkeley, as elsewhere, was tuning in, turning on, and dropping out.

Like many others of his age and ilk, my father was disappointed by the individualistic turn that came to dominate the American Left in the late s. He saw that beneath even the most earnest communal experiments of the time lay an individualist, do-what-feels-goodto-you ethos (an underlying ethos, he might point out, that was responsible for destabilizing and devastating most of those experiments in fairly short order). He was also critical of the antiwar movement because, as he wrote, “the mass of ‘resistance’” was in fact de ned by political “evasion, whether by ight into Canada or into exempt status.”4

Yet my father did not see any of this as reason to abandon the American Left or—heaven forfend!—join the Republican Party. His critique of market capitalism and erce devotion to human equality made either of those possibilities a nonstarter. On top of that, my father believed that you should not cut ties with a relationship or organization the second it fails to live up to your highest hopes for it. He believed, in fact, that an American enthusiasm for cutting ties and changing allegiances and starting over was a big part of what troubled American life. (I will elaborate on that idea in greater depth below.) Sometimes, when making this argument, Dad would adopt a fauxSouthern drawl and say, “You gotta dance with them what brung you.”

More profoundly, my father knew that what was so markedly on display in the American Left of the late s and early ’ s was just a symptom of much deeper ailments in American life—ailments suffered across the spectrum of American politics. You couldn’t get away from these ailments just by changing political labels or parties. You certainly couldn’t get away from these ailments by declaring yourself “independent.” To the extent that you are an American, the ailments are yours: to be reckoned with and to be fought, perhaps, but never to be avoided and never, entirely, to be cured.

e American A iction

In e Idea of Fraternity in America my father argues that over the course of American political history, modern liberalism has become ever more ascendant. is is the small-l liberalism that emphasizes the individual and nds its voice in the language of individual “rights.” As I sometimes ask my students: How many political positions do you have that you understand in terms of the language of rights? Right to life? Right to choose? Right to privacy? Do you even have ways to explain the values behind your policy positions that don’t depend on the language of rights? Probably not. You would likely have to struggle to nd other words to do that explaining. e fact that “rights talk,” as Mary Ann Glendon puts it, is the central talk of our politics betrays their small-l liberal character.5 e dominance of modern liberalism in the United States owes, according to my father, to certain decisions made by the framers of the United States Constitution. (Note that my father always insisted on calling them “framers,” a more limited term than “founders,” since he thought America’s founding, properly understood, was much bigger than the constitutional framing.) ose framers crafted a massive, impersonal regime that works to erode relationships, destabilize communities, and inhibit collective action. As Dad would later write, “ e framers’ theorizing followed a liberal trail: ey believed in natural rights and in an idea of freedom that emphasizes the individual’s private capacities, treating the public good, for the most part, as an aggregate of private interests.”6 My father thought that the constitutional framers stuck us in a system of politics that deprives people of true political voice, eviscerates meaningful citizenship, and leaves American life—especially American politics—dominated by feelings of frustration and disappointment.

At the level of classic democratic ideals—liberty, equality, and fraternity—the framers’ Constitution advances inadequate understandings of liberty and equality. But critically, it has almost nothing to say at all about fraternity, the idea that human ourishing requires that we be able to work together, with a sense of common good and shared fate, for a common purpose.

Consider that the framers’ Constitution advanced a system of politics that, as all Americans know, was compatible with the treatment of humans as property and enamored of individual property rights. Note that in my father’s account, the two favorite nemeses of today’s American Left—white supremacy and capitalism—are secondary problems, emanations of the excesses of and faults within modern liberalism. He was fond of saying that those people who saw capitalism or racism as the central problem (or problems) of American politics had only scratched the surface of what really troubles them.

Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: On the Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, ).

Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Ambiguities and Ironies: Conservatism and Liberalism in the American Political Tradition,” in his Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams, – (Lawrence: e University Press of Kansas, ), .

In making this general argument, my father was not staking out original territory. Many other authors, most famously Louis Hartz, had described the United States as a nation dominated by a liberal, individualist tradition well before this book was published.7 And many other authors—going back at least to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the United States in the 1830s—worried about the possibility that American politics might pursue liberal individualism to excess, and that liberal individualism taken to excess is a recipe for second-rate politics and general unhappiness.8

As such authors have argued, and as my father agreed: liberalism risks discounting our human need for relationships and communities and thus can impede our ability to work together collectively for a common good. To the extent that modern liberals do value communities and social relationships, they tend to do so in terms of the utility that those communities and relationships have to the individuals who comprise them. Modern liberals envision communities, at best, as groups that individuals pick and choose, and join and leave, based on their shifting priorities (as in: “ e current leadership of the Democratic Party displeases me, so I am leaving the party”). Such groups are not without meaning, but they tend to lack the depth, intensity, and staying power that enable, among other things, sustained political action.

e Place of Fraternity

But even as others have seen things similarly, my father’s argument has three elements that, I think, distinguish it—and make his voice a crucial one for us to hear and heed today. First, in e Idea of Fraternity in America my father argues that the liberal individualism set into motion by the constitutional framers may be the dominant intel- lectual and political tradition in the United States—but that it is not the only intellectual and political tradition in the United States. Most of e Idea of Fraternity in America is devoted to identifying what my father called an “alternative tradition” in American culture and politics, one that does not deny the human longing and need for relationship and recognition in real, esh-and-blood communities—and that understands politics as a collective endeavor rather than an endless defense of atomized living and individual rights. at alternative tradition puts fraternity at the center of things. It is a critical part of the American inheritance, providing ballast and inspiration against the prevailing trajectory. ese, too, he emphasized, are people who have made America what it is; they, too, have a claim to being founders and forebears.

7 Louis Hartz, e Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1945). See also, among others, Robert Nisbet, e Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

Dad found voice for that “alternative tradition” in a variety of sources: the Puritans, the Anti-Federalists, and literary gures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain—all of whom drew on more ancient understandings of politics as a collective and elevating endeavor. Importantly, my father saw the “alternative tradition” often most powerfully expressed in African American political thought—by thinkers such as W. E. B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—and in the writing of and about American immigrant communities and religious groups. (Some of his favorite books to teach to undergraduates, in courses about American politics, were Mario Puzo’s e Fortunate Pilgrim, Chaim Potok’s e Chosen, and Edwin O’Connor’s e Last Hurrah, and, in the last years of his life, he became enamored of the short stories of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.) Analyses of such thinkers, and an exploration of the depths of the alternative tradition, dominate the pages of e Idea of Fraternity in America.

My father did worry that this alternative tradition was, over time, being drowned out in American politics. To some degree, that has to do with the fact that the alternative tradition has been consistently voiced by people who stand at the margins of American life: racial minorities, religious minorities, rural minorities, and so on. To the extent that people who fall into those categories have given voice to the alternative tradition, they have often been derided or ignored or overcome by those in power.

Or, as so many immigrant stories attest: the price of success in the United States (or what some might call “Americanization”) is leaving behind weighty ancestral traditions or ways of living in favor of a more individual, liberal way of life. To the extent that immigrants or their descendants are able to preserve ancestral traditions or rituals across the generations, they tend to be those—like eating certain foods or celebrating certain holidays—that can be accommodated readily in modern liberal society and not those—such as arranged marriage— that challenge modern liberal assumptions. More fundamentally, my father taught that the framers set into motion a constitutional machine that—in giving both formal and informal power to the terms of modern liberalism—made the language and habits of modern liberalism ever more dominant in ordinary American life. He was fond of Tocqueville’s formulation: Americans seem inclined to honor their philosophy—the liberal ideas of “self-interest” and “individual right”—rather than to honor themselves.9 Even when behaving altruistically or compassionately, Americans learn to explain themselves in terms of private rather than public orientation. And over time, the talk shapes the walk. Later in his life, my father would describe contemporary debates over the Second Amendment as one example of what he had in mind: e eventual Bill of Rights, shaped so much by Madison, was cast in a negative, largely individualistic language, with a corresponding tendency to be read as a set of private protections against politics. In our time, one example is graphic: e Second Amendment is the most didactic provision of the Bill of Rights—and arguably of the Constitution as a whole—indicating that it proceeds from the principle that a free state depends, through a “well regulated militia,” on popular service in the military. It implies, at least, a citizen’s duty to serve; it surely deprecates professional soldiers. Yet in our times, the Amendment is widely read by conservatives as establishing a private right, and though contemporary liberals are critical of this interpretation, they are a long way from adopting the sterner teaching that the lives of citizens, like their goods, should always be at their country’s command.10

9 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:122.

10 McWilliams, “Ambiguities and Ironies,” 186.

Against progressive narratives of American history, in which we are told that things have gotten more democratic in the United States over time, my father was concerned about the ways in which the opposite is true: this is a nation that gets ever bigger, ever more impersonal, ever more techno-bureaucratic, ever more individualist and isolationist—and ever lonelier and less democratic. is is not merely a matter of the passage of particular laws, though my father always taught that the passage of particular laws matters, but even deeper currents in culture and ordinary life. “In certain important respects the Constitution, contrary to the prevailing view, was more democratic in the past than it is today,” he wrote, “especially in providing greater dignity for the citizen and greater protection against ‘tyranny of the majority.’”11 e conventional story in American politics has often been that the extension of voting rights is the true measure of the democratic character of the regime, but, for my father, that focus on voting—important though voting protections are—distracts us from the bigger and more important story, in which our collective voice is eroded and in which we are increasingly thrown back upon ourselves in the face of an impersonal and unresponsive state. When we are talking about democracy, my father would say, voting is the period at the end of what should be a long sentence. In the absence of the sentence, the vote is just a tiny, meaningless blip. e second thing that sets my father’s argument apart from similar arguments that have sometimes been called—especially in the 1980s and ’90s—communitarian critiques of American politics is that he did not merely say that America’s dominant liberal ideology neglects the importance of human relationship and community. Instead, he elaborated on the ways in which America’s dominant liberal ideology also gets community wrong, in ways that doubly damage all Americans.

My father took it as axiomatic that, as human beings, we all long to be recognized by and live in relation with others. But modern liberalism makes it hard for us to put words to that longing—and, to the extent that we use the language of modern liberalism to express our longing for brotherhood and connection, we get misdirected and mess up. Liberalism makes us unrealistic about the nature of human friendship, community, and love, and that makes it harder for us to nd truer versions of those relationships in our lives.

11 Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Democracy and the Citizen,” in his Redeeming Democracy in America, 9–28, at 9–10.

For one thing, Americans—and especially elite, left-leaning Americans—often espouse the belief that if we just dissolve all di erences and distances, we can achieve some state of universal brotherhood or sisterhood or personhood. In other words, modern liberalism teaches that fraternity is an as-yet unachieved end of politics, one that can be realized with the dissolution of all particular ties among particular people in communities. is belief is evident in the academy in the work of philosophers like John Rawls, who argues that imagining ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance,” where we discount all our embodied experience and knowledge, is a necessary precursor to achieving justice.12

Such teachings—beyond Rawls, there are many popular versions of that aspiration to universal brotherhood—undermine the more ancient theory that it is only through those particular bonds and relations that an individual can truly be formed, and that even well-formed individuals can never transcend their rm locations in particular settings. As James Baldwin puts it, “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great di culty is to say Yes to life.”13 In short, the assault on fraternity by modern liberal thought—in the name of fraternity, ironically enough—has threatened the possibility of individual cultivation by promising the realization of an unachievable state that lingers perpetually outside the grasp of we embodied and embedded humans. 14 We let the idea of the perfect be the enemy of the good, let the idea of the perfect be the enemy of the person.

At the same time, Americans often attach the language of community or friendship to organizations and institutions that cannot provide them. For instance, anyone who spends time at a college or

12 John Rawls, A eory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

13 James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: e Modern Library, 1956) 5.

14 My father much admired Robert Booth Fowler’s re ections on this theme in e Dance with Community: e Contemporary Debate in American Political ought (Lawrence: e University Press of Kansas, 1991) university will eventually hear talk of the “campus community.” But community is an odd word to apply to a place that is highly transient, where most people are either paying or being paid to be there, and in which everyone is there largely in pursuit of their own, distinct individual ends. Any student (or university employee) who really believes that their school will o er them a community is bound to become cynical or disappointed, as the institutional reality rears its bureaucratic head. Such a person will become cynical about their school, for sure, but they also risk becoming cynical about the aspiration to community itself. is inappropriate use of “community”—attaching the idea of community to conditions that are not in any meaningful sense communal—shows the desperation and misdirection of Americans who long for a kind of condition of life that the United States, for the most part, denies them. My father was a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, who had one of his characters put it this way in Cat’s Cradle: “Americans . . . are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.”15

Further, in response to their loneliness and feeling of disconnection, Americans—and particularly American men—have misguidedly sought fraternity through groups that are organized around destruction or violence. Certain attitudes toward the military are a clear illustration of this, what my father calls in this book “fraternities of battle.” (I should note that my father served in the Eleventh Airborne Division of the United States Army, so this argument implies no paci st or blanket objection to the military; it objects, rather, to certain romantic views of the military.)

Other examples of “fraternities of battle” abound in American history and contemporary American life, from street gangs and selfstyled militias to ght clubs and more than a few university fraternities. Men tend to join these groups out of a desire for brotherhood. But in a nation where so many are so angry about denials of their dignity, they tend to band together through destructive violence, whether that’s in trashing dormitories, engaging in violence against others, or somehow destroying themselves. e logic of these fraternities of battle is ultimately self-destructive, my father writes, since “the war which was needed to create the bond slays so many,” annihilating the bonds that were created and leaving “those who remain with an insuperable burden of guilt.”16

In all these cases, even when most Americans try to achieve conditions of fraternity in their own lives, we don’t quite get there— and in fact, our failures to achieve a feeling of connection and collective voice make us lonelier, angrier, and more disappointed. And most of us lack the words to explain why. As a result, my father wrote, the lives of Americans have increasingly been shaped by the experience of isolation, the expectation of loss, and the encounter with insecurity. Americans do have the sense that there is “something missing” in their lives, but “they are without knowledge of what the needed thing might be or resemble, which raises not only the danger of passing it by but of anger which is objectless—as lonely and universal as society itself.”17

My father felt deeply a crisis of the American soul, a crisis exaggerated by the growing inability of Americans to speak about the soul itself. If the stakes of American politics are “elusive, it is because so much of the contest lies within Americans rather than between them,” he wrote.18 And part of what makes our politics so frustrating is that we continue to be taught to understand the foundational di culties in those politics in terms of the competition between Americans as opposed to the con ict and confusion within ourselves. But the third element that separates my father’s critique from the tone and content of other critiques of American liberalism might be the most important today. at element is its underlying hope in the possibilities of American politics. Unlike some on the left and the right, my father never advocated regime change or constitutional redesign, much less forceful overthrow of the government. I think his friend Daniel Mahoney’s description of my father as an “anguished patriot” hits the nail on the head. “His political ideals often caused him to be disappointed with America’s major choices and broad trajectory,” writes Mahoney. “ is, however, did not deter him from seeking ways forward.”19 ough my father might have been a radical, he was not a revolutionary. He hewed to radicalism in the sense of the word’s Latin origin: radicalis, in that ancient language, means “having roots,” and so radicalism implies getting to the root of things. My father thought that our rst-order task, as fellow Americans, was to try to get to the root of our own political order. at task involves doing the intellectual and historical re ection that comprises this book and his other writings. e alternative tradition becomes, in that understanding, newly urgent because it provides us with resources from within American history to be able to reconceive of the American present and redirect the American future. As Tocqueville, who my father so admired, sought to identify those aspects of American culture that might mitigate the worst excesses of American democracy, my father’s writing is focused on those aspects of American culture that might mitigate the worst excesses of the framers’ liberalism. e very liberalism whose excesses he lamented was also the source of his ability to make the kinds of arguments he makes in this book, and my father never once forgot that. He knew that, despite the excesses of liberalism, there are alternatives to

See chapter in this volume. See the epilogue.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, “Leo Strauss and the Dignity of American Political ought,” in his e Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader, ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams, – (Lexington: e University Press of Kentucky, ), .

To be sure, you could think of this as a conservative kind of radicalism. My father’s writing is infused with the spirit of Edmund Burke, who emphasized that we should look for the means that a political order contains to right itself, rather than to fantasize about starting over. (My father would add that fantasies about starting over are signal American fantasies, emblematic of precisely what ails us.) My father sometimes noted, simply, that in the Constitution the ultimate power lies in the power of amendment: a democratic power that is no less glorious for how little it has been deployed.

My father was deeply mindful that, despite his objections to some of the dominant trajectories in American life, the United States was the nation that had allowed him to pursue the teaching and writing that he wanted to pursue.

Daniel J. Mahoney, “Anguished Patriot: Review of e Democratic Soul: A Wilson Carey McWilliams Reader and Redeeming Democracy in America, by Wilson Carey McWilliams and edited by Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams,” Claremont Review of Books , no. (Winter ): – , at the modern liberal order that are much more devastating and threatening to human dignity.

One need not even look outside the United States to nd them. My father had grown up sensitive to authoritarian impulses in American politics. His own father had been considered a dangerous radical during the McCarthy Era, so much so that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover placed him on the Custodial Detention List, to be detained in case of national emergency, and the Committee on Un-American Activities in California compelled him to testify before it (for sins that included his support of interracial marriage). My father grew up hearing about plausible threats to his father’s life, and he never discounted the temptations or threat of totalitarianism in this country. And he knew, as Mahoney puts it, that “free societies need to draw on all the resources of the centralized state” to defend against them.20

One of Dad’s standard jokes, in the classroom, was to tell his students that if ever America produced a Socrates, we would just stick him in a university somewhere and give him tenure, so nobody would take him seriously. at always got a laugh. But my father also taught that Socrates, despite that old philosopher’s misgivings about democracy, knew that democracy is the regime that makes the most room for philosophy. Only in Athens could Socrates have lived as the Socrates we know. Only in a liberal regime could my father have lived as he did, in much the way he imagined a modern Socrates might. Maybe that joke wasn’t so much of a joke, after all.

It is a good rule in life that the blessing and the curse of any entity ow from the same source. e source of weakness is also the source of strength. In my father’s account of American politics, the same intellectual tradition that causes our su ering—liberalism—is also the fount of the critique and multiplicity that might save us.

e Contemporary Condition

In the half-century that has passed since e Idea of Fraternity in America came out in print, so much has happened in American politics: the rise of Reaganism and “trickle-down economics,” the collapse

Mahoney, “Anguished Patriot,” of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, new forms of international and domestic terrorism, the rise of a surveillance state and what Shoshanna Zubo calls surveillance capitalism, the splintering of the Republican party and the rise of Trumpism, and so on.21 e Internet alone has transformed ordinary American life in so many ways that it is hard to imagine life before it—even though many of us lived before it.

But if anything, the core arguments of e Idea of Fraternity seem to ring even truer today than when my father wrote them fty years ago. It is hard to know how to provide evidence of this, but some recent surveys seem relevant: since the 1970s, the percentage of Americans who say that they are lonely has gotten bigger and bigger. For example, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, a January 2020 survey found that three in ve American adults report that they feel “lonely, left out, poorly understood, and lacking companionship.”22 Many studies have also found a link between Internet usage and loneliness; researchers consistently nd that the more time you spend on the Internet, the more lonely you are likely to feel—supporting the conclusion of one study that “the Internet can decrease social well-being, even though it is often used as a communication tool.”23 It is now commonplace for researchers to refer to America’s “loneliness epidemic.”24

We see lots of language of “community” on the Internet, in chat rooms and online forums. But to most of us, online communities are at best parodies of the real thing, places of cat shing and pretense and performance—all of which can be distracting and entertaining but fall far short of being sites for collective recognition and action. In fact, if anything, the Internet has seemed to amplify the misguided and frustrated American quest for fraternity. We are living out the framers’

21 Shoshanna Zubo , e Age of Surveillance Capitalism: e Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicA airs, 2019).

22 Elena Renken, “Most Americans Are Lonely, and Our Workplace Culture May Not Be Helping,” NPR.org, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23 /798676465/.

23 E. J. Moody, “Internet Use and Its Relationship to Loneliness,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 4, no. 3 (2001): 393–401 dream: we are a diverse republic connected via big and impersonal networks of power. But as those networks of power have metastasized over time, it has become ever more di cult for Americans to nd privacy and intimacy and recognition. Our world is bigger and more connected, and yet more and more of us feel trapped in the smallness of ourselves, disconnected from the feelings of relationship and community that we awkwardly seek.

24 See, for instance, Susan Mettes, e Loneliness Epidemic: Why So Many of Us Feel Alone and How Leaders Can Respond (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021).

At the same time, for reasons that my father’s arguments show are no coincidence, Americans are increasingly likely to say that they distrust government. Even though the most familiar measure of voting suggests a healthy civic sphere—by which I mean, mostly, that more Americans voted in the presidential election than in any election before—surveys suggest that more and more Americans are worried about the future of American democracy. One recent survey found that percent of Americans believe that the American political system either needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed, and percent of those said they are not con dent the system can change— even though many of those still call themselves “hopeful” about the country.25 (Note how these data support Dad’s long-held contention that voting rates are an inadequate way to measure civic vitality.)

In the wake of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, huge swaths of the electorate are now beholden to the idea that the presidential election, as well as other elections since, was stolen by a cabal of nefarious global elites. Many of the people who are taken in by these stories get attached to them through online social networks that o er a sense of connection, belonging, and common purpose. I am sure that it would not escape my father’s attention that those who stormed the United States Congress on January , , were largely men aspiring to nd status and meaning through a “fraternity of battle.”

More generally, we might regard what people today are calling “toxic masculinity” as just a new way of talking about the fraternities of battle that my father talks about in this book. Here, I think that my father might say something similar to what he said about capitalism and racism: those people who think that toxic masculinity—or patriarchy—are the core problem have only begun to scratch the surface of where the problem lies. We have to think deeper, back to the core crisis of fraternity in this regime. at said, while my father believed that all Americans were subject to a crisis of fraternity, it is clear from the title and content of this book that he was disproportionately thinking about men. As my father saw it, modern liberalism does pose an exaggerated internal crisis for men, even if that general crisis was largely shared across the spectrum of gender.26 As my students would say, we Americans are likely to “code” individualism as particularly male—think of our image of the cowboy, rugged and alone on the frontier—a myth that has found academic support in, among other places, the recent work on manliness by my father’s friend Harvey Mans eld.27 Lots of terri c feminist work has explicated the ways in which the modern liberal ethos limits and devalues women’s disproportionate role as caregivers, and one way to read my father’s work is as a complement to that scholarship, helping to show how the modern liberal ethos limits and devalues men—by walling them o from meaningful relationships, positive collective action, and caregiving roles in the rst place.

Katherine Schae er, “On July Fourth, How Americans See eir Country and eir Democracy,” Pew Research Center (June , ), https://www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/ / / /how-americans-see-their-country-and-their-democracy/.

My father lived until , long enough to see and write through much of what has transpired since this book rst appeared. He did not change, over the years, any of the core arguments in this book, though he certainly o ered many re nements and elaborations to them. He continued to lament the many ways in which the American order worked to deprive its citizens of dignity. But he always found reasons to hope, and he always found the alternative tradition rising up just when you might count it out. While he titled his book of essays on American elections e Politics of Disappointment, he named its updated version Beyond the Politics of Disappointment?—a nod to the possibility of multiple futures.28

My father would go on—after this book—to write at least one essay giving explicit attention to women. See “Equality and Citizenship: e Rights of Men and the Rights of Women,” in his e Democratic Soul, –. Harvey C. Mans eld, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). Wilson Carey McWilliams, e Politics of Disappointment: American Elections, – (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, ); Beyond the Politics of Disappointment?: American Elections, – (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, ).

And right before he died, in 2005, my father had this to say about a book and movie series that was getting a lot of attention: e books give us magic, to be sure, but the grander side of the story is friendship and loyalty among children who are willing to run great risks to play a role in defending their way of life against an evil whose doctrine is elitism and mastery. Harry Potter reminds us that we are, in fact, naturally political animals. In their cold season, Democrats have at least that much reason to hope that citizenship will nd a new rendezvous with destiny.29 e Harry Potter series, with its centering of friendship and fraternity in a story of great political crisis, retains its popularity almost a generation later. It is one of many places in ordinary life and popular culture where my father heard the voice of the alternative tradition. If Percy Shelley is right that it isn’t legislators but poets who in the end script the future, my father would remind us we have that much reason for courage.

Among younger Americans, the phenomenal readership of the Harry Potter series developed in a largely autonomous way, initially with little hype and to the astonishment of its publishers, at least in part an expression of nature as opposed to convention.

Within the discipline of political science, my father gave courage to many students to study poets. He was one of a few scholars of his generation responsible for the invigoration of the study of politics and literature, and he was among the earliest scholars to devote serious attention to African American political thought. Today, there are organized sections of the American Political Science Association devoted to “American Political ought” and to “Politics, Literature, and Film,” and both of those sections bear the imprint of my father’s in uence. At least in the academy, the alternative tradition has places for voices that it did not used to have. ere is reason for some hope there, too.

I’ve often heard some of his students lament that my father, after e Idea of Fraternity in America, never wrote another book. His book-

29 Wilson Carey McWilliams, “ e Meaning of the Presidential Election,” in e Elections of , ed. Michael Nelson, 187–213 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2005), 204 length collections of essays on American elections, which I mentioned above, came out more than twenty years after this book. I have heard many speculations about why my father did not attempt to follow up this book with something equally majestic. But I suspect that if my father had been a woman, the answer would have been clear: he published e Idea of Fraternity in America just before my sister and I were born, and he published his book-length collections of essays just after I went to college. When we were growing up, my father prioritized the care of his children—and he did so with evident joy. I could not be more grateful that he lived as he did, in being the father he was, especially because he must have been under so much pressure to do otherwise. I remember him lamenting how di cult this society made it for most parents to be good parents, an argument that is inchoate in this book but is clearly part of the core crisis of citizenship that he describes.

Today, thinking with my father, it is hard to deny that there is a great crisis of citizenship—and of democracy—in the contemporary United States, and that this crisis grows more acute over time. We are caught, in this country, in a terrible position: ours is a nation founded on and dedicated to the ideal of popular sovereignty, and our constitutional framers set up a system in which meaningful popular sovereignty is, at least in the classic sense, impossible. “For most of us,” as my father wrote, channeling his old teacher, “democracy is always likely to be ‘fugitive,’ in Sheldon Wolin’s term, a thing of moments and not a way of living, but none the less worth cherishing for that.”30

At the same time, I recently heard the historian Elisabeth LaschQuinn—herself the daughter of a man who wrote hefty tomes about American politics—say that it is often in moments of dire crisis when we do our clearest and best thinking. ere is lots of good thinking going on out there. And there is more waiting to be done by those willing to do what my father loved doing: sitting around and talking about the good life, in the company of friends. Maybe especially in times of crisis, the company of friends is the good life itself.