- Codevilla, Angelo.
The Character of Nations.
New York: Basic Books, [1997] 2009.
ISBN 978-0-465-02800-9.
-
As George Will famously observed, “statecraft
is soulcraft”. This book, drawing on examples from antiquity
to the present day, and from cultures all around the world, explores
how the character, culture, and morals of a people shape the political
institutions they create and how, in turn, those institutions cause the
character of those living under them to evolve over time. This
feedback loop provides important insights into the rise and fall of
nations and empires, and is acutely important in an age where the
all-encompassing administrative state appears triumphant in developed
nations at the very time it reduces its citizens to subservient, ovine
subjects who seek advancement not through productive work but by
seeking favours from those in power, which in turn imperils the wealth
creation upon which the state preys.
This has, of course, been the state of affairs in the vast
majority of human societies over the long span of human history
but, as the author notes, for most of that history the
intrusiveness of authority upon the autonomy of the individual
was limited by constraints on transportation, communication, and
organisation, so the scope of effective control of even the most
despotic ruler rarely extended far beyond the seat of power. The
framers of the U.S. Constitution were deeply concerned whether
self-government of any form could function on a scale beyond
that of a city-state: there were no historical precedents for
such a polity enduring beyond a generation or two. Thomas
Jefferson and others who believed such a government could be
established and survive in America based their optimism on the
character of the American people: their independence,
self-reliance, morality grounded in deep religious convictions,
strong families, and willingness to take up arms to defend their
liberty would guide them in building a government which would
reflect and promote those foundations.
Indeed, for a century and a half, despite a disastrous Civil War
and innumerable challenges and crises, the character of the
U.S. continued to embody that present at the founding, and millions
of immigrants from cultures fundamentally different from those of
the founders were readily assimilated into an ever-evolving culture
which nonetheless preserved its essential character. For much of
American history, people in the U.S. were citizens in the
classic sense of the word: participants in self-government, mostly at
a local level, and in turn accepting the governance of their fellow
citizens; living lives centred around family, faith, and work, with
public affairs rarely intruding directly into their lives, yet willing
to come to the defence of the nation with their
very lives when it was threatened.
How quaint that all seems today. Statecraft is soulcraft, and the
author illustrates with numerous examples spanning millennia how
even the best-intentioned changes in the relationship of the
individual to the state can, over a generation or two, fundamentally
and often irreversibly alter the relationship between government
and the governed, transforming the character of the nation—the
nature of its population, into something very different which will, in
turn, summon forth a different kind of government. To be specific,
and to cite the case most common in the the last century, there is
a pernicious positive feedback loop which is set into motion by
the enactment of even the most apparently benign social welfare
programs. Each program creates a dependent client class, whose
political goals naturally become to increase their benefits at the
expense of the productive classes taxed to fund them.
The dependent classes become reliable voting blocs for politicians
who support the programs that benefit them, which motivates those
politicians to expand benefits and thus grow the dependent classes.
Eventually, indeed almost inevitably, the society moves toward a
tipping point
where net taxpayers are outvoted by tax eaters, after which
the business of the society is no longer creation of wealth but
rather a zero sum competition for the proceeds of redistribution by
the state.
Note that the client classes in a mature redistributive state go
far beyond the “poor, weak, and infirm” the
politicians who promote such programs purport to champion. They
include defence contractors, financial institutions dependent
upon government loan guarantees and bailouts, nationalised
companies, subsidised industries and commodity prices, public
employee unions, well-connected lobbying and law firms, and the
swarm of parasites that darken the sky above any legislature
which expends the public patrimony at its sole discretion, and
of course the relatives and supporters of the politicians and
bureaucrats dispensing favours from the public purse.
The author distinguishes “the nation” (the people
who live in a country), “the regime” (its governing
institutions), and “the establishment” (the ruling
class, including politicians but also media, academia, and
opinion makers). When these three bodies are largely aligned,
the character of the nation will be reflected in its
institutions and those institutions will reinforce that
character. In many circumstances, for example despotic
societies, there has never been an alignment and this has often
been considered the natural order of things: rulers and ruled.
It is the rarest of exceptions when this triple alignment
occurs, and the sad lesson of history is that even when it does, it
is likely to be a transient phenomenon:
we are doomed!
This is, indeed, a deeply pessimistic view of the political
landscape, perhaps better read on the beach in mid-summer than
by the abbreviated and wan daylight of a northern hemisphere
winter solstice. The author examines in detail how seventy
years of communist rule transformed the character of the Soviet
population in such a manner that the emergence of the
authoritarian Russian gangster state was a near-inevitable
consequence. Perhaps had double-domed “defence
intellectuals” read this book when it was originally
published in 1997 (the present edition is revised and updated
based upon subsequent events), ill-conceived attempts at
“nation building” might have been avoided and many
lives and vast treasure not squandered in such futile
endeavours.
December 2009 