The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ come across a Clinton Foundation donor. They’re honorable men, for the most part, and simply playing the game as it’s played in America. Unlike suspect donors such as Rajiv Fernando, they aren’t seeking personal favors for themselves, but they might at some point want to recommend a worthy friend or suggest a benign policy change. It’s rather like the old-boy network of days gone by, populated by members of the Cosmos or Harvard clubs. The difference is that today’s network has been monetized.

      That wouldn’t have surprised Alexis de Tocqueville. His Democracy in America, according to Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”¹ Reading it today, many Americans have been led to believe that Tocqueville actually liked America, but that’s because they weren’t paying attention. Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw here, bowled over, and while he was able to see positive features that had eluded other visitors such as Captain Marryat and Mrs. Trollope, what the unwary reader might take as praise was often meant as blame.²

      Tocqueville preferred France’s family-centered aristocracy to what he saw as America’s selfish individualism. Say what you want about aristocracy, he thought, but it ties people to past and future generations and makes them more caring. In a democracy, by contrast, one generation is cut off from those that preceded it and those that will follow. What remains is a radical autonomy, with little connection even to one’s own generation. At first, individualism merely saps the virtues of public life, “but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” It throws one “back toward himself alone and threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.”³

      Tocqueville saw an answer to individualism, however, in America’s free institutions. With greater accuracy, he would have identified American politics as the remedy, for what he had in mind was how we have an incentive to join a political party. “When the public governs,” he said, “there is no man who does not feel the value of public benevolence and who does not seek to capture it by attracting the esteem and affection of those in the midst of whom he must live.”⁴ In short, politics will rescue us from individualism, and Americans have bought into politics with a vengeance. By one count, there are more than half a million elected officials in this country,⁵ from the president all the way down to the local dogcatcher.

      I saw how far politics might extend when I first moved to the United States and rented a new house in Chevy Chase, D.C. As the house was new, it didn’t have a garbage can, so I phoned the city to ask for one. And phoned and phoned. Finally a neighbor, observing the plastic bags I kept putting out on garbage day, took pity on me. “Don’t call the city,” he told me. “Call your councilman.” That’s what I did, and the garbage can arrived a few days later. Not long after that came the first fundraising mailer from the councilman. I learned how I might be able to “attract the esteem” of my local city councilor, but it didn’t seem much like a virtue. It felt more like a shakedown, as though I might not expect such prompt service in the future if I failed to make a donation. I might have preferred to live in a city where it sufficed to pay my taxes, and where I could have cultivated my individualism without knowing who was on city council. What I wanted was less of politics and more of an honest and impersonal administrative state, one in which garbage cans are delivered without being followed by a solicitation for money. That was the very point of administrative law and civil service reform, which were meant to replace the realm of politics with that of law, with equal justice rendered to all, without special payoffs to the well connected or to campaign donors. If Tocqueville’s politics made Americans less individualistic, it also made us more corrupt.

The Mutual Protection Association

      What happens when the state recedes and people are left to their own devices? That’s more like freedom, and it’s where one finds the clubs and associations that Tocqueville discovered in America and which he so much admired. We’ll find them in the PTA, the Red Cross and the groups that pick up litter along the roadways. They are formed around individuals united in a common goal, often doing things the government can’t or won’t do. To the extent they’re effective, voluntary associations permit us to shrink the state, an insight that won Elinor Ostrom a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.⁶ Conversely, the expansion of the government plausibly explains Robert Putnam’s claim in Bowling Alone that Americans are less likely to join an association today than they were fifty years ago, or in Tocqueville’s day.⁷

      People who join a voluntary association become less individualistic, and that’s all to the good. At the same time, the organization can be seen as what the philosopher Robert Nozick called a “mutual protection association.”⁸ What Nozick had in mind was an association that would do all the things in the state of nature that we would normally expect the government to do: provide a justice system, a police force, a fire department and so on. But even where there’s a government, there are things the state won’t do but which an association of private individuals might do. Sometimes it benefits most of us and sometimes only a narrow interest group. The League of Women Voters, the trade union, the special interest cartel—they’re all mutual protection associations.

      Even if Putnam is right about a declining disposition to join up, we’ll still find more voluntary associations in America than in other countries. People here feel they should lend a hand, and joining a group for that purpose makes people more sociable, more concerned about the opinions of others, more like a little politician. It smooths the corners and wears away sharp edges, which is often a good thing, but it also sacrifices the je m’en fiche individualism of the eccentric, of the Christopher Hitchens who takes a savage delight in eviscerating sacred cows. The desire to please others civilizes us, but taken to the extreme it may smile at corruption.

      There can be material incentives to join up and pay our dues, particularly when noncontributing free riders can be excluded from participation. If an organization is creating its own baseball diamond, for example, we may want to contribute our share if that’s the only way we get to play. Pay-for-play, in other words. Even if free riders can’t be excluded—from what economists call public goods—we might still want to chip in if a failure to do so would be noticed and we’d be stigmatized as a freeloader, and perhaps denied other goodies that might have been tossed our way.

      That, of course, is the secret of the Clinton Foundation. Taken at face value, the Clinton Global Initiative provides public goods on a worldwide basis. There’s no pressure to donate, but there are strong incentives for doing so, especially while Mrs. Clinton was the secretary of state and then widely expected to be the next president. A major donor such as Rajiv Fernando didn’t have to wait for the next world for his reward, but instead got a government position for which he was not obviously qualified. It’s nothing like bribery, but only the expectation of return favors. Without contracts, without promises, a settled pattern of cooperation easily develops when one person gives to another, who then gives a return gift, and this is repeated over time.

      Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde called this a gift economy, as opposed to the market economy of legally enforceable bargains, and they regarded it as a worthy alternative to market transactions.⁹ And all it requires to get started is the very human instinct of gratitude, the readiness to repay gifts with return gifts. Stable forms of cooperation can emerge when parties deal with each other over a period of time, as W. D. Hamilton and Robert Axelrod have shown, borrowing from the work of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers on “reciprocal altruism” in animals.¹⁰ When gifts are exchanged again and again, the parties come to expect that the relationship will be maintained in good faith, and that’s as good as a promise. The historian René Girard called it mimetic rivalry, with good paid back for good, and ill for ill.¹¹ One sees this everywhere, and it might sound uplifting. But grafted onto the institutions of public authority it creates a pay-for-play nexus, and in America it has produced the thickest form of crony capitalism in any First World country.

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