Brad Littlejohn: "Nationalism or Conservatism: Lessons From 1912"

You can read the post titled above here. Written by my friend Brad Littlejohn, it contains important reflections on the conflict between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft on popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Some appetizing quotes:

Nationalism is committed above all to the sovereignty of the people; conservatism to the sovereignty of the law, against which the people may sometimes chafe. Nationalists are committed to the development of the nation, the actualization of its latent potential. Conservatives are committed to limiting and tethering this power. Nationalists are committed to the needs of the present and the promise of the future; conservatives to the claims of the past. Nationalists want to stress the unity of the body politic; conservatives will stress its plurality.

Littlejohn goes on to argue that both Roosevelt and Taft offered important insights as well as enduring unresolved questions about the proper balance of powers in the American constitution and the claims of past and future, but that neither quite fully grasped the genius of the Burkean tradition. As Littlejohn summarizes near the end:

But what Taft should have argued, and what Roosevelt should have seen, is that the agency of the American nation—as an intergenerational community of shared birth (natio)—was bound up in the inheritance of its law. Far from being merely the dead hand of the past, the constitution was the living voice of the nation, the means by which Burke’s grand partnership between generations expressed itself.... According to this older tradition, the law is not merely a guardian of individual rights, but the embodied agency of the nation, renewed in each generation.

Those who recall my ruminations on the concept of the common good and the reality of common-good entitles (here, here, and here) may recognize some parallels in the last-quoted paragraph of Littlejohn's piece.

In contrast to my observations on the common good of the business firm, Littlejohn emphasizes the historically-extended nature of a common-good entity like a nation. What he doesn't do in this post, however, is define a nation apart from its common ethnicity ("an intergenerational community of shared birth"). Yet there seems there is more to a nation than a common ancestry "such as geography, ancestry, language, religion, and culture." Application of all these factors to the United States makes its status as a nation less than certain. The geographic integrity of the United States is clear enough but beginning with language and proceeding through ancestry there is progressively less of the foundation for the unity implicit in defining a nation.

The identity of the United States as a nation must instead be found in broad-based support of its civic institutions, particularly the Constitution. Shorn of several of the typical criteria of nationhood, American nationalism is of an attenuated, formal sort. But such a nationalism is even less congruent with the Burkean conservatism championed by Littlejohn. In other words, in America the law is the foundation of the nation; the nation is not the foundation of the law. The profoundly unconservative nature of America helps explain why the appeals of both "conservatives" and Progressives are to the Constitution and nothing more. It also accounts for finding in the Supreme Court--an institution created by the Constitution--the principal (and increasingly sole) arbiter of the soul of the nation.

While construction of the Constitution by the Supreme Court may nearly be all that remains of the "embodied agency of the nation" known as the United States, it is a body far removed from a "grand partnership between generations." Some conservatives may be dedicated to the claims of the past but the past has no claim on America.