Henry Steele Commager on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution

Henry Steele Commager (1902- 1998) was a prominent American historian who wrote in what was known broadly as the Progressive tradition of the early half of the 20th century.. His first major book, The American Mind (1950), was an intellectual history that built on the tradition of the literary historian Vernon Parrington (1871-1929). Commager wrote a lot on intellectual history, particularly on the influence of Enlightenment thought on American political concepts.

He was also known for his timely engagement with political developments and become a critic of McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the repression of political dissent, especially since Nixon’s Presidency. That is, he was sharply critical of the illiberalism that led eventually to Trumpism. He retained an enthusiastic focus on the Enlightenment core of the American revolutionary tradition. But he also expanded the scope of his work over the years to give increasing focus to the role of minorities in the US.

The 1977 edition of one of his widely used histories, co-authored with Samuel Eliot Marison and William Leuchtenburg, reflects the greater emphasis on diverse history that continued to development. A 1976 book of which he was the main editor, The West: An Illustrated History, also reflects this broader view. Although the title of the chapter on the Native Americans was “The Indian Tragedy,” which reflects the liberal view of US Indian policy as an inevitable result of the clash of an advanced American civilization with a less developed one whose technology and strategies had to inevitably give way to the more “backward” one.

But Commager’s view of the democratic-Enlightenment tradition as being central to the American Revolution and to the democratic constitutional order still provides important critical insights to understanding the American Revolution in both a historical and sentimental sense. Lydialyle Gibson describes his late view this way:

... Commager asserted his thesis:

Americans of the late 18th and early 19th centuries took the Enlightenment principles that Europe had envisioned and “tentatively” experimented with - principles such as religious and intellectual freedom, constitutional order, commitment to reason, progress, humanitarianism - and “wrote them into law, crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work. That, as much as the winning of independence and the creation of the nation,” he wrote, “was the American Revolution.” …

In the 1930s, Commager defended Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and he was an early advocate for American involvement in the Second World War. He supported John F. Kennedy for president in 1960 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. He warned against sending US troops to Indochina and called the Vietnam War a moral catastrophe. In April 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his searing condemnation of the Vietnam War to an overflow crowd at New York’s Riverside Church, Commager stood beside him on the dais. [emphasis in original] (1)

A 1975 collection of his essay on topical political controversies including the Vietnam War was called The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character. It contains this description of American nationalism of the Revolutionary era and the ensuring early years of nation-building (of itself, not of various other countries around the world):

Culturally as well as socially the American asserted that he was a "new man." No sooner had the Declaration separated America from Britain than Americans threw themselves, almost convulsively, into the task of creating, or vindicating, an American culture. As Thomas Paine wrote, "A new era for politics is struck, a new method of thinking hath arisen." Now there were to be an American culture, an American language, American philosophy, American law, American arts and letters. "America is an independent empire," wrote young Noah Webster [1758-1843], "and ought to assume a national character," and he urged his fellow-countrymen to "unshackle your minds and act like independent beings." [emphasis in original]

And he observes, “soon Jefferson had substituted the decimal system for pounds, shillings and pence.” Okay, a distinctive currency is something obvious. But it may not have been Jefferson’s best idea to flush the metric system of physical measurements!

Those observations come in a chapter titled, “Myths and Realities in American Foreign Policy”, originally from 1968, a year that became its own kind of mythical image. That essay expresses a very critical perspective on the contradictory nature of two broad assumptions of American patriotism and nationalism.:

First is the assumption, or the myth, of American uniqueness - a myth which justified and encouraged the habit of isolation. Second is the assumption of the political, social and moral superiority of America - a myth which rationalized Manifest Destiny, mission, imperialism and, in our own time, the imposition on the rest of the world of something that can be called, without stretching analogies too far, a Pax Americana. [my emphasis in bold]

We hear these assumptions still, not only in jingoistic posturing but in the standard politicians’ line that “America is the greatest country in the world.” One of an endless number of examples was Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in a speech for Hillary Clinton: “’Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country is not great, that somehow we need to make it great again,’ she said. ‘Because this right now is the greatest country on Earth’.”

In a contemporary review of Commager’s The American Mind, Marian Irish said of him, “As an American he believes this is ‘the best of all countries’ but he is doubtful that this is ‘the best of all times’.” (2)

This is a recording of Commager from 1955 talking about the importance of the American tradition of freedom of speech and the press with some comments on how he looks at the position of the US in the world of that time. With 2 ½ minutes of advertisement at the end. (3)

Notes:

(1) Gibson, Lydialyle (2017): All American. University of Chicago Magazine Spring 2017, 52-57. <https://mag.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/issues/UChicagoMag_1705-2017_Spring.pdf> Also: <https://medium.com/the-university-of-chicago-magazine/all-american-f7f6631a8e54>

(2) Irish, Marian (1951): American Political Science Review 45:1, 284. <https://doi.org/10.2307/1950915>

(3) Longines Chronoscope with Henry Steele Commager. PublicResourceOrg YouTube channel 04/05/2011. <https://youtu.be/yH1-6eHGmBA?si=WFgoRGAPDfLAGIdx> (Accessed: 2026-14-05).

Post-Trump priorities: War and the rule of law

Continuing the theme of the last post, restoring the rule of law in the US, it’s important to remember that violations of international law by the US often – even inevitably – spill over into domestic practices. There was some real pushback and reform in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was a well-known liberal historian who had a passion for seeing current politics through liberal Enlightenment values. He was a prominent and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the rank criminality of the Nixon Administration. In the introduction to a 1974 book collecting several of his essays, he gives a scathing description of the blundering recklessness which so often characterized US policy up to that point in the Cold War. Much more cutting criticism than we normally see today, especially in legacy media. The period of post-1989 Cold War triumphalism invited people to shift their focus away from what was often the (literally) bloody mess of US policy during those years.

Commager says there of the US role in the Vietnam War, “Rarely before in history had a great nation drifted so mindlessly into catastrophe.” (1)

His 1974 description of US policy in Latin America brings to mind the old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Just as earlier Presidents intervened in the affairs of Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean, so their present-day successors intervene in Guatemala, Cuba, Santo Domingo and, through the Central Intelligence Agency, in many other South American nations.

Mexico and Venezuela are still on the Trump 2.0 regime’s hit list. And, of course, the US collectively has never forgiven Cuba for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Prompted in no small part by the US contempt for international law in dealing with Cuba’s revolutionary government.

And he noted how a nationalistic myth of American goodness and purity provided a convenient cover for actions that were anything but pure:

When, in the last war [he means the Second World War], Germans destroyed villages because they had harbored snipers, we were justly outraged; but any Vietnamese who so much as fires a gun at one of our planes invites the instant destruction of his village by our outraged airmen. We looked with horror on the concentration camps of the last war; but we set up ''refugee" camps in Vietnam which are, for all practical purposes, concentration camps. And we have driven as large a proportion of the Vietnamese people from their homes, destroyed as much of their forests, their crops, their dams, their villages, as did the Germans in the Low Countries or in France in the last war.

Early Cold War obsessions about Communism led to the many domestic legal excesses of what we now remember as the McCarthy period. The “loyalty oaths” that many universities and colleges required back then were about swearing not to be Communist. The Trumpian versions today are about swearing to not criticize genocidal actions by Israel, armed and funded by US support. In international law, other countries are obligated not to support a nation committing genocide.

And he makes the connection between government lawlessness toward its own citizens and residents and the widespread tolerance of barbaric and criminal behavior in foreign policy:

As we have greater power than any other nation, so we should display greater moderation in using it and greater humility in justifying it. We display neither moderation nor humility, but immoderation and that arrogance of power which Senator Fulbright has so eloquently denounced. In the long run, then, the abuse of the executive power cannot be separated from the abuse of national power. If we subvert world order and destroy world peace, we must inevitably subvert and destroy our own political institutions first. This we are now [1974] in the process of doing.

And when it comes to official dishonesty, the Vietnam War and other US adventures in war and subversion were a major stepping-stone to the post-truth era of today, where the Trump cult defines reality as whatever words are coming out of the mouth of the Orange Leader. Commager notes in the book, “Never before in our own history has government employed so many methods for manipulating and distorting the truth as during the past decade, not even during the First and Second World Wars.”

The domestic lawlessness of Trump 2.0 in such things as turning ICE agents into a masked Gestapo that illegally kidnaps, imprisons, and deports people including American citizens is very much connected to that disregard for law we have had for a long time in foreign policy. Someone who can cheerfully defend the US funding the deliberate mass killing and deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza will most likely to be cheering for US concentration camps like Alligator Auschwitz in Florida.

Speaking of concentration camps and foreign policy corrupting the domestic rule of law, we have recently had a dramatic reminder of the famous saying by Gavin Stevens, a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”

USA Today’s Bluesky image for An August 23 story: (2)

Notes:

(1) Commager, Henry Steele (1974): The Defeat of America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

(2) Cuevas, Eduardo & Villagran, Lauren (2025): Army base used for WWII Japanese internment will be nation's largest ICE detention center. USA Today 08/23/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/23/texas-army-base-japanese-internment-ice-detention/85767850007/> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

Donald Trump, Richard Nixon and the long radicalization of the Republican Party

One thing that often gets obscured in the entirely justified outrage over Trump's criminal conduct and contempt for Constitutional institutions is that Trump is very much carrying on the radicalization of the Republican Party that has decades-old roots.

There are several ways to break down the trends. Eisenhower's Administration in retrospect is a model of "moderate" Republicanism, although he gets more credit for a peaceful foreign policy than he deserves. His "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear policy was a genuinely high-risk position. And he actually threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

The Goldwater candidacy in 1964 was a major marker in the process. But it did not yet define the national party. The Nixon Administration was path-breaking in authoritarian usage of Presidential power. But his nuclear arms-control policies, his diplomatic bridge-building to China, and even his Vietnamization policy diverged from the positions that the Goldwater right and the John Birch Society types favored. Nixon used wage-and-price controls to limit inflation, and even proposed a limited form of national health insurance that was arguably more comprehensive than "Obamacare".

Jerry Ford established a major precedent for Presidential impunity for serious crimes by issuing a blanket pardon to Richard Nixon. He also elevated the careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who have the dubious distinction of being two of the most destructive characters in American politics.

The Presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a decisive turning point for the Republican Party, representing a convergence of neoliberal market fundamentalism, a general endorsement of hard right politics, and focused authoritarianism. The Iran-Contra affair was itself a real Constitutional crisis, which the Republicans took in stride and the Democrats didn't dispute as actively as they should have. Old Man Bush expanded Republican official impunity by pardoning Iran-Contra criminals. And Bush's own actual role in the possible (I would say likely) 1980 "October Surprise" dealings with Iran.

The fall of the Warsaw Pact and the decline in the fall of the USSR changed the international picture so dramatically that it makes it hard to describe the nature of the continuity and change during the Bush-Quayle Administration. They initiated a serious of closing military bases that would have seemed like a pacifist dream a few years before. But they also conducted the first Gulf War, which in retrospect was a fateful escalation toward what became the current Middle East situation. In general, the Bush family ties to the Saudi monarchy that Craig Unger ably described in House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) have had serious negative consequences for US foreign policy and the well-being of ordinary people in the Middle East.

But since the 1994 midterms elections which marked the so-called Gingrich Revolution, the radicalization of the Republican Party has seemingly proceeded steadily. They keep getting more authoritarian, more crassly oligarchic and rightwing, more bitterly divisive, and generally more fanatical and sleazy. And this is definitely not a case of Both Sides Do It. Nothing remotely similar has happened on the Democratic side. In fact, one of the most important defining facts of American politics since 1994 has been the asymmetric polarization beteen the two political parties.

But I always want to give Richard Nixon his due in this process. Henry Steele Commager (1902 – March 2, 1998) was a major liberal American historian in the 20th century. He was a classic "Cold War liberal" in the Truman years, very much a supporter of Truman's containment policy against the Soviet Union. During the 1960s, he became an activist critic of the Vietnam War and actually developed a sometimes radical critique of American politics based on his understanding of how Cold War foreign policy was undermining the liberal principles on which the US government and Constitution were based. In other words, an imminent critique founded on his focus on the democratic elements of classical liberal political theory.

A collection of essays published in 1975 under the title The Defeat of America features that perspective, in particular with relation to the Nixon Administration. Including the essay from which the title of the book is derived, which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books (10/05/1972 issue). He had this to say about how Nixon was undermining the system (text from the book):

Basic to an understanding of the usurpations, duplicities, and irresponsibilities of the Nixon era, then, is paranoia, which has a life of its own, and which still lingers on - even after the "end" of the [Vietnam] war and the rapprochement with China - polluting the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the country. Certainly there is little evidence that Mr. Nixon or his underlings think the new relationship with the Soviet Union and China justifies the mitigation of their own paranoia about "national security," or their conviction that any attack upon official policy is itself a potential threat to security. How else explain the vindictiveness of the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg and the readiness to subvert justice in that prosecution; how else explain the political skulduggery that persisted long after the 1972 election, the persistent use of the FBI and the CIA for political purposes, the readiness to employ provocative agents, the contumacious boast at the POW dinner that reliance on secrecy, even useless secrecy, would go on and on; how else explain the determination to bomb Cambodia back to the Stone Age? ...

Is the crisis of the present so imperative that it requires an unconstitutional revolution - requires, that is, abandoning the separation of powers, discarding limitations on the executive authority, weakening legislative control of the purse, repealing the Bill of Rights, subverting the traditional rule of law, and covering with a fog of secrecy the operations of government? Clearly Mr. Nixon and a good many of his followers think that it is. Now we are back with the phobia about communism and paranoia about national security. [my emphasis]

It is noteworthy that Commager viewed the approach of Nixon to government and politics as an attempted "revolution". Or, as he puts it, "an unconstitutional revolution"; Commager would later describe Nixon's impeachment as a legal and constitutional revolution. But he viewed the Nixon version as being revolutionary in the sense of revolutionary dictatorship as in the Terror during the French Revolution, which both classical liberal and conservative political theory regard as a cautionary tale of arbitrary excess. And which Edmund Burke, a godfather of modern reactionary political thought, used as his prime bogeyman.

It was from reading Commager among others that I first became aware of the pragmatic criticism that a big problem for US foreign policy has been a failure to understand revolutionary processes, even losing sight of the revolutionary traditions in the US itself. That is still true today, for both parties. But the Republicans have long since become accustomed to thinking and talking in terms of revolution, or "unconstitutional revolution" in Commager's somewhat awkward phrase: the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party, today's armed protests by Trump cultists in favor of unrestricted spread of the COVID-19 virus, the lunatics of QAnon, even Alex Jones' advocacy of murdering and eating his neighbors. (On the latter, see: Oliver O'Connell, Alex Jones says he'd kill and cook his neighbours to feed his kids Independent 05/01/2020. Though I don't recall ever hearing that cannabalism was a feature of the French Terror.)

Meanwhile, on the "other side of the aisle," when Bernie Sanders talked about having a "revolution" involving broader voter participation and national health insurance of the type that is standard in European democracies, conservative Democrats professed to see vision of guillotine blades dropping. A good illustration of how asymetric partisan polarization works in American politics.

But going back to Tricky Dick, his administration established a practice of authoritarian illegality that took deep roots in the Republican Party. It also established a defensive mentality among Nixon's hardline fans that the law should be just another political tool in the partisan war. One used only by Republicans, of course. The rabid allegiance of Trump's cult followers is the most recent flowering of that attitude. It won't be the last. And it won't be eliminated by Democrats chasing a chimera of Bipartisan harmony with today's extremist Republican Party.

A more radical critic of the Nixon Administration, the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose perspective was not restricted to the liberal political tradition, formulated this view of the situation at the time of Commager's observations quoted above (Countervrevolution and Revolt, 1972):

The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. ...

The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution. It runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship. Capitalism reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historical revolution. [my emphasis in bold]

For anyone who is wondering, by "world-historical revolution" Marcuse had something more drastic in mind than simply national health insurance. Which, as I mentioned, was an entirely respectable idea in 1972, even among some senior Republicans, and not seen as remotely "revolutionary" in the then-mainstream of both parties.

Henry Steele Commager's 1965 criticism of the Vietnam War and the deeply problematic assumptions behind US involvement

The 1965 anti-Vietnam War speech by Henry Steele Commager on which I've previously commented has some perceptive criticisms of some fundamental problems with the prevailing post-Second World War adopted by US foreign policy makers and widely marketed to the voting public. These arguments became much more widespread and familiar as the Vietnam War dragged on. (The text quoted here is from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager Amherst College, December 3, 1965," The Massachusetts Review 7:2; Spring 1966)

Even if we take the most jaundiced view of the sources of American foreign policy since 1945, or adopt a standpoint of fundamental criticism like Noam Chomsky, for instance, the Vietnam War did mark an important turning point in American public attitudes toward war. The US continued to operate on much the same assumptions that Commager was critizing in 1965, although Nixon's two-China policy and the later formal recognition of the People's Republic represented a major adjustment in that the US adopted a more practical stance toward the existence of China.

What hawkish politicians on "both sides of the aisle" but especially Republicans called "the Vietnam syndrome" did have a large effect on constraining policymakers from direct military interventions in other countries from the early seventies until the Gulf War of 1991. It didn't do away with the imperialist orientation of US policy. The military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil were viewed favorably by the US, though Carter's human rights policy did reflect some real concern about political repression there. Chile and Argentina in particular became test cases for the "neoliberal" austerity economics that came to dominate much of the world in the 1980s and after, with the 2008 crash putting a huge crack in the consensus around it.

The significance of the anti-colonial movements after 1945 and well into the 1970s don't necessarily receive as much attention as it should these days. But Commager's speech reflects how central they were in practice in world politics at that time. Formal, official colonialism now survives only in spots, like Britain's control of Gibralter and the Malvinas/Falkland Islands. But with China moving quickly to be the leading economic power in the world, it would be easy to forget to what extent Commager's comments on the rise of what we tend to call the developing nations these days represented a sharp criticism of prevaling attitudes.

His speech was a criticism of American Exceptionalism with particular focus on how the Vietnam War illustrated its disastrous effects. Commager was articulating a left-liberal anti-imperialist criticism, not an Old Right isolationist one. Old Right isolationism, the foreign policy outlook of Trump's America First ideology, is actually a virulently nationalistic and imperialist attitude relying on a crude and authoritarian version of American Exceptionalism. (To what extent the chaos in the Trump foreign policy represents incompetence rather than the weaknesses of the America Firster position isn't something on which this post focuses.)

Commager described five assumptions of US Cold War foreign policy that had clearly shown them to be problematic by 1965.

The first of these assumptions was that the world was divided between two great powers or power complexes, the Russian and the American, the slave and the free, and that we and we alone were responsible for the free world. Actually, within a few years, we confronted a world of five or six great power complexes: China, and India, and Western Europe as well as Russia, and possibly others such as Japan, the British Commonwealth, the Latin American, the African, and the Arab worlds. No one nation is, or can be, responsible for the protection of freedom in such a world.

But that was also to a large extent the assumption after 1989 and the so-called End of History. Both neoconservatives and liberal interventionists viewed the US as the hyperpower, the "indispensable nation" that was uniquely qualified to give political and economic directions to the rest of the world and morally obligated to do so. This wasn't simply a cynical propaganda justification for an imperial policy. Ideologies do matter, because they affect the way people interpret events in the world. But the more crudely cynical power motives and old-fashioned greed inevitably pushed the US to show that the Indespensable Nation didn't consider itself bound by the rules it expected lesser nations to follow, shown most dramatically by the Iraq War.

Second, we assumed that Communism was monolithic, fixed, and unchanging; that it was not a political system, or even a social or economic system, but a moral (or immoral) system, and that there was no compromise with it, for you do not compromise with sin except to strike it down. We assumed, too, that Communism was inherently aggressive and expansionist and we have continued to assert this in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary. [my emphasis]

The intermixture of ideology, base motives, and typical great-power self-aggrandizement was present then, too. But the particularly dogmatic version of anti-Communism dominant in the US at the time was especially well-suited to drown out more practical considerations.

Third we assumed that there was only one China, that headed by Chiang Kai-shek which ended up in Taiwan, and we are still stuck with that assumption. We insisted that Communist China was not the real China, that it was on the contrary a usurper and an evil force, and was not therefore to be recognized. [my emphasis]

This was the most dramatic case in which imminently practical realities were excluded from actual policymaking due to crackpot ideology. It's particularly striking that even in 1965, official government policy still relied on a concept of a unified and aggressive Soviet-Chinese bloc. In fact, the Chinese and Soviet governments were already having significant differences and disagreements in the mid-1950s, disagreements which had become public in 1960 and became increasingl virulent thereafter. (See the 2015 book Shadow Cold War: The Sino- Soviet Competition for the Third World by Jeremy Friedman.)

One of the effects of McCarthyism in the 1950s had been to basically drive a lot of the most qualified China experts out of the State Department. Because anyone with actual knowledge and expertise in the area had at one time or another made a factual observation or policy recommendation not consistent with simplistic anti-Communist assumptions. The Trump Administration was not the first time that militant ignorance gained undue influence in American foreign policy.

[Fourth] Because in 1945 we were the most powerful nation on the globe we assumed that our power was and would continue to be limitless, and that we could impose our will upon the rest of the world. We knew that we were virtuous and our will righteous and we were not therefore worried about the moral implications of this kind of arrogance, though history teaches that there is something corrupting in assumptions of this kind. [my emphasis]

Whatever measure of moderation of this dominant attitude that came into play in the 1970s and 1980s was largely swept away with the End of History in 1989. Remember when Shrub Bush declared that the war against terrorism aimed at the end of evil? David Frum, one of his speechwriters and now a prominent Nevertrumper, co-authored a book with the neoconservative Richard Perle, who his admirers referred to as the "Prince of Darkness", An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003), a prime example of the fanaticism and arrogance that led to the Iraq War. (Note: Sixteen years later, we still seem to be quite far removed from ending Evil.)

Fifth, because we meant well, because the American way of life was part of freedom and progress, and was even identified with the cosmic system, we assumed that those who opposed us were either misguided or wicked or both, and many of us still cherish this assumption, though no longer with the confidence with which we entertained it in the past.

Today's Republican Party has made Christian Right fundamentalism so integral a part of its ideology that that identification "with the cosmic system" applies even more strongly to the Republican Party today than it did to either party in 1965. Although secularizing trends have continued and outside the Republican Party religious pluralism is a more rubust sentiment today.

Commager added what he saw as a fundamental miscalculation in relation to the anti-colonial liberation movements and the aspirations of new nations that had emerged from colonialism:

Along with these misguided assumptions, we made a great miscalculation of a negative character. We failed to understand the nature of what is doubtless the greatest revolution of modern times, the greatest and most far-reaching since the shift in the center of gravity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the revolt of Asia and Africa against the West, the emergence into modernity of two-thirds of the peoples of the globe. ... We allowed ourselves to be maneuvered into the position that Britain had occupied throughout much of the 19th century and France in the 20th - that of the stalwart defender of the status quo, of the West, and of the white peoples, as over against the underprivileged, the black and yellow and brown peoples of the world. [my emphasis]

And he pointed out how the preference for stability along with anti-Communist ideology led to a thoroughly unpragmatic phobia against revolutions everywhere (although that bias for stability didn't hold the US back from counter-revolutionary regime change operations):

Once again, too, we are failing to recognize and cooperate with revolution - revolution in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and elsewhere; that is one reason we have lost the support and confidence of the spokesmen of these peoples. Here as elsewhere on the globe - Cuba, Santo Domingo, Brazil, Guatemala, we have maneuvered ourselves into the position of being the enemy of change and of what the peoples of these countries think is freedom. In the eyes of Asians we are the protagonist of the West against the East, of white people against yellow and brown people, of power against the weak people who are always the victims of power. [my emphasis]

The social character of the various revolutions he mentions tvaried greatly, from a Communist-led revolution in Vietnam to a liberal democratic reform government in Guatemala. He was calling here for a more realistic and less militarized approach to countries in the world system of nations who might be annoying to the US government, as in accepting military support from Communist China or development aid from the Soviet Union, or to particular lobbies in America like United Fruit Company with Guatemala.

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1967, Commager stated his perspective this way (Changing American Attitudes Toward Foreign Policy 02/20/1967):

What I am suggesting is that, we need to cultivate patience, tolerance, the long view, and even sympathy with the new nationa of the globe, even if their emergence onto the crowded stage of history is turbulent and dangerous. We would do well to recover something of Jefferson's penpective on the French Revolution - which horrilied most Wstern peoples just as communism does today. It was, he said, "the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberties." "Long-lost liberties" is, to be sure, not the phrase we instictively apply to either the Russian or the Chinese revolutions, for they did not, alas, enjoy liberty in their historical past, but that they are seeking to throw off what they assume to be tyranny and exploitation - in the case of the Soviet, a homegrown brand of tyranny; in the case of China, foreign and achieve independence and progress in their way, is, I think, beyond dispute. [my emphasis]

Commager there wasn't advocating indifference to human rights abuses. He was arguing for a pragmatic and less militarized foreign policy in place of one by ideology, arrogance, and ignorance.

Henry Steele Commager and immanent critique of American actions

Need I add that every great American leader, from Washington and Jefferson to Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, acknowledged a responsibility of our membership in the great community of civilization? That responsibility can best be fulfilled by drawing on our own experience and invoking our own authority to solve national problems and applying the lessons of that experience to the challenges of the future.

That quote is from the historian Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) from his 1993 book, Commager on Tocqueville.

Commager was one of the best known Amerian historians during his career. And his writing on current issues was a big influence on my political thinking when I was an undergraduate. I've had a lot of other influences since then, too.

But I've been reading some of Commager's work recently in the process of trying to inform myself better about the history of US dealings with native peoples in North America. And it has reminded me of what impressed me about his approach.

Commager was a liberal Democratic thinker and activist with an anti-imperialist inclination and a focus on intellectual history. In the early years of the Cold War, he was a more convential "Cold War liberal," a term which once carried a similar polemic edge to what "corporate Democrat" has today. But by the 1960s, he became a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.

In December 1965, the year that President Lyndon Johnson put American troops in a much ore expansive and direct role for US troops in Vietnam on the side of South Vietnam against North Vietnam, Commager opened his presentation in a debate over the war with:

Speaking of one of the greatest of crises Abraham Lincoln said, just over a century ago:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object in confidence of putting an end to the slavery agitation"- let us substitute: to the Vietnamese crisis. "Under the operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented." (Speech, Springfield, 1858) [text from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager" Massachusetts Review 7:2 {Spring, 1966}]

This is something that Commager did well that I still appreciate. He invoked iconic American historical figures to make policy and political points about the preseent, while still taking the original context seriously.

And that's a big reason that I'm still reluctant to embrace the sort of casual revisionism that we see quite a bit now on the left and center-left that writes off a large part of the American democratic tradition as hopelessly tainted by the shortcomings of democracy in earlier times. In 2019, Abraham Lincoln still mostly gets a pass because of his status as the Great Liberator in the Civil War. (Just to be clear, I'm a big Lincoln fan myself.)

I'm very much in favor of a critical approach to history. And obviously our collective view of historical events and actors changes over time as the ways we see the world develop and become more informed. I think it's safe to say that in 100 years or so, people will look back at all of us who are of voting age in 2019 and criticize us for our collective irresponsibility on the climate crisis. Because it is appalling. And at least a lot of people right now also recognize it's appalling.

If we have a nuclear war, we can only hope there will still be surviving members of humanity around to trash us for our mind-boggling irresponsibility on nuclear arms proliferation.

But as long as there are still people around to think about history, it's important to be cautious about "anachronism," which is applying current standards to past events without taking adequate recognition of what standards people in those previous times were applying to themselves and each other and the actual conditions in which they were acting. The Britain of 1215-1225 when the Magna Carta was established was seriously backwards compared to the American colonies of 1776. But the Magna Carta played a large role in how the American revolutionaries understood their own rights in real time and served as an effective part of the revolutionary ideology of 1776 and the following years. (We're talking about a tradition that in 1776 was 550 years old!)

And that was despite the fact that King John, his sucessor Henry III, and the British nobles in the early 13th century would have regarded it as absurd to even consider something like the US Bill of Rights. But the historical path to the Bill of Rights nevertheless passed through the Magna Carta and events that led to its establishment. Anyone who regards liberal democratic freedoms as important can't condemn the Magna Carta as hopelessly backwards and reactionary because it didn't comport with cutting-edge democratic standards of 2019. Or of 1776.

Commager's respect for the Jeffersonian tradition and Enlightenment reason didn't prevent him from passing highly critical judgments on bad decisions and mistaken assumptions of the present and much more recent past. His criticism would become even sharper as the war wet on. But he was pretty sweeping in his criticisms of the Vietnam War in 1965:

The consequences of our Vietnamese involvement to our moral standards are already painfully familiar. It means deception; it means putting out arguments and claims which we do not ourselves believe; it means lying to the American people; it means that we are losing our friends throughout the globe; it means we are coarsening our own moral fiber, getting hardened to bombing innocent people and destroying the country on pretexts that will not stand examination. It means ever sharper divisions in our own society, and the upsurge of the forces of intolerance and militarism. It means a pervasive indulgence in that sin which may well be the unpardonable sin of the New Testament, the sin of supposing that we are a special people, exempt from those rules of morality which apply to all others. [my emphasis]

Commager was not indulging in Biblical hermeneutics here. But he was making a forceful point against American Exceptionalism. And there was probably some Niebuhrian theological influence there, too.

And he was adapt at judging American assumptions about other countries by the standards Americans applied to their own actions:

Does Russia have a vital interest in Cuba because Castro is an outpost of Communism? When Russia attempted to display that [in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962], we prepared for war .... Surely if we have a vital interest in distant Vietnam we must concede Russia a vital interest in Iran, Irak, and Hungary •••. And even more obviously, if we have a vital interest in Vietnam what are we to say to China's interest: is it something less than vital? ...

More, to assume that a request for military aid even from an independent South Vietnam would somehow justify our intervention there requires us to concede that a request for military aid from an independent Cuba justifies the intervention of the Soviet in that island. That was not what we thought in 1962. [my emphasis]

Commager was very good at making an immanent critque of American actions within the context of American history and democratic ideals.

Executive-dominated war policy and American Exceptionalism

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1999) was a historian who was outspoken in his activism for liberal Democratic candidates and in particular against the Vietnam War. He was known for his books like The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (1950) and Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977). The latter expressed his continuing reverence for Enlightenment concepts of Reason. He also co-authored an influential American history textbook with Samuel Morrison and William Leuchtenburg.

Several of his essays from 1969-1974 were collected in The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character (1974). His writing made a big impression on me when I was an undergraduate. In his writing during the Vietnam War stressed how mistaken and disastrous American intervention there was. He also advocated Congressional restrictions on the President's war powers, not just in Vietnam but more broadly.

His criticisms were common among antiwar Democrats, who we might think of in retrospect as the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party at that time, during the Vietnam War. The War Powers Act was passed as a result of the Vietnam War experience, in particular. As we see in the debate over the Saudi war in Yemen, even today Congress hasn't completely forgotten that the Constitution gives Congress the decision power over war.

In theory, some conservatives and libertarians are in favor of restricting Presidential war powers. And during the Clinton Administration, the Republicans in Congress did make some effort to restrict American military action in the Balkans. Given the Congressional Republicans' responses to Trump's Presidency in 2017-18, one could be excused for doubting that Grand Old Party is all that serious about upholding the Constitutional order beyond the partisan pretence of doing so for positions they support at any given moment.

In The Defeat of America, Commager identifies two strong trends in thinking about foreign policy that he sees reaching back even before the American Revolution:

First is the assumption, or the myth, of American uniqueness - a myth which justified and encouraged the habit of isolation. Second is the assumption of the political, social and moral superiority of America - a myth which rationalized Manifest Destiny, mission, imperialism and, in our own time, the imposition on the rest of the world of something that can be called, without stretching analogies too far, a Pax Americana. [my emphasis]

These days, we talk about this cluster of attitudes as American Exceptionalism. In her campaign for President in 2016, Hillary Clinton declared in a speech to members of the archconservative Veterans for Foreign Wars (VFW), "I don't understand people who trash talk about America, who talk about us as being in decline, who act as though we are not yet the greatest country that has ever been created on the face of the earth for all of history." (Hillary Clinton addresses military veterans at the Democratic National Convention Telegraph) 07/25/2016 (just after 1:10 in the video):

Commager's criticisms have a radical sound today, as they did at the time. And there's nothing wrong with that, since American foreign policy has created some radical problems and made some radically bad assumptions, which by no means ended with the Vietnam War.

Referring in particular to various cases since the Second World War, including in his list the Korean War, the Truman Doctrine, and "pareticipation in the Vietnam War even before 1956", among others, he notes of those cases:

All are inspired by and directed to Communist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the cold war. All are functions of our obsession with communism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to contain communism everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of Communist conspiracy or Communist subversion is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with communism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our war in Vietnam - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where communism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with communism.

The continuing relevance of these observations can be illustrated by employing the substitutions indicated with italics in the following to events of recent decades:

All are inspired by and directed to terrorist threats, real or imagined. All are skirmishes or battles in the War on Terrorism. All are functions of our obsession with Muslim terrorism and of our notion that we have been chosen by providence to fight terrorism  everywhere on the globe. Furthermore, almost all of the attitudes and gestures which distinguish the current claims for the outmost reach of the presidential power have, on closer examination, the same common denominator: namely, that when a threat of terrorism or Muslim extremism is implicit or explicit in any situation, no limit can be or will be put on the executive power necessary to dispose of that threat.

If the pattern is clear, so too is its meaning. Until we can rid ourselves of our delusions of universalism and our obsessions with terrorism and other ideological threats which are, in last analysis, the inspiration for our unending wars in the Greater Middle East - we will not and cannot abate presidential abuse of power in foreign affairs.

The misuse of executive power where terrorism is, or appears to be, involved is not a phenomenon of the Presidency or of individual Presidents. After all, when we trace a harmonious pattern of the use of the executive power in Ronald Reagan, both President Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump , we are forced to conclude that what we have is not a manifestation of personal or even official ambition but something inherent in the Presidency and in the age in which these Presidents serve.

Nor have Presidents been alone, or even idiosyncratic, in their illusions about total power, or in their obsessions with military intervention.

Particularly since the intervention of Russia in the 2016 Presidential election, Russia has become an image of The Enemy with more obvious resemblances to the days of the Cold War.

The point here is not that we should embrace "isolationism," which Andrew Bacevich rightly describes as more of a bogeyman than an actual policy option. That's also true of Trump's "America First" posturing, which has strong ideological echoes of Old Right Isolationism before, during, and immediately after the Second World War. Terrorism is a real problem and so is Soviet cyber-mischief. And we do have major treaty commitments to an expanded NATO, including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that are more vulnerable to military action by Russia than were the NATO members prior to 1989.

The point is to recognize that American attitudes, fed and encouraged by some very material interests like arms manufacturers (aka, war profiteers) and energy companies, also look for a foreign policy to justify themselves. Inflated notions of an American world mission and unrealistic fears can distract from more realistic concerns. And, as Commager was very aware, they can and do create problems that could have been avoided with a little more caution and good sense.

Goya: The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters