Browsed by
Tag: Lawrence Reed

Why Free Speech on Campus Is Under Attack: Blame Marcuse – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Why Free Speech on Campus Is Under Attack: Blame Marcuse – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Jeffrey A. Tucker
July 27, 2017
******************************

This article was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education on April 22, 2017.

It’s become routine. An outside lecturer like Charles Murray or FEE’s own Lawrence Reed is invited to lecture on campus, just to give a different perspective than students might be hearing in the classroom. It seems like the way academia is supposed to work: many ideas are presented as a contribution to a rich education and the student is given the tools to make up his or her own mind.

But instead of a fair hearing, the invited lecturer is met with protests and gets shouted down. Aggressive and belligerent students accuse the speaker of every manner of evil. It’s not even about providing an intellectual challenge. No one minds that. The protesters want to stop the speaker from saying anything. They intimidate, threaten, scream, shout, and drive the guest from campus. The victors claim that the campus has been made safe again.

Outsiders look at the attacks on visiting lecturers on campus and wonder why. What could be the harm in hearing an alternative point of view? Isn’t that the point of a university, and a higher education generally? Aren’t students supposed to be trusted with discernment enough to be exposed to a broad range of ideas?

None of it makes much sense, unless you understand a bizarre ideology that has exercised a massive influence in academia since the rise of the New Left in the late 1960s. In the old days, people associated the Left with an ethos akin to the ACLU today: the right to speak, publish, and associate. The turn that took place with the New Left actually flipped whatever remaining attachment that the Left had with freedom.

Blinded by Ideology

There was one major influence here: Herbert Marcuse, the father of the New Left and perhaps the most influential Marxist of the last half century, and his most famous essay from 1965: Repressive Toleration. It is here that you find the template for an upside-down view of freedom held by so many students today. In this essay, Marcuse explains that free speech and toleration are illusions so long as society has yet to conform to the Marxian ideal. So long as that is true, in fact, free speech must be suppressed and toleration itself must not be tolerated.

In some ways, this essay is a blueprint not only for an oppressive campus life dominated by left-wing hegemony; it also offers a rationale for the totalitarian state itself. But in order to understand where he is coming from, and why those under his influence can be so controlling and even terrifying toward basic standards of civility, you need to know the background of his thought.

Marcuse was born in 1898, one year before F.A. Hayek, whose life and ideas serve as a foil for the Frankfurt School that Marcuse represented. And like Mises, Marcuse was driven out of of his home by the Nazis and spent time in Geneva before coming to the United States as an emigre. Unlike Hayek and Mises, Marcuse was a dedicated Marxist, and a main influence in the extension of Marxist economic theory to cover a broader range of philosophical topics.

Both Marx and Marcuse were successors in the long tradition of left-Hegelian thought that opposed every aspect of the rise of laissez-faire commercial life in the 19th century. The Hegelian view was that what we call freedom for average people was a social mask for a meta-narrative of history that was grim and dreadful. Impersonal forces in history were at work creating struggles, clashes, and wars between large-scale social aggregates. The free market (and freedom generally) might look like harmony but it is an illusion to cover a terrible exploitation that the workers and peasants might not directly perceive but could be discerned by enlightened intellectuals.

The goal of history, in this view, is to realize some grand conclusive stage in which the social order ceases to be a messy place of marginal improvements in living standards and instead resembles some utopia as defined by intellectuals. The trick for this point of view is finding the necessary path from here to there.

Recall the strange way in which Marx’s view that the state must “wither away” became an ideological cover for the realization of the total state itself. It’s all about the transition. Yes, Marx said, the state will go away forever, but only once the new socialist man had been created and the reactionary forces keeping scientific socialism at bay were entirely expropriated (or exterminated).

Suppress Freedom to Gain It

As a dedicated Marxist (and left-Hegelian generally), Marcuse believed that the same was true for other bourgeois institutions like free speech, free press, and toleration. Yes, he shared the goal that we need all those things. “Tolerance is an end in itself,” he says with some promise that he could make some sense. “The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society.”

Right on! And yet, he says, “Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale.” Every exercise of freedom as it exists is loaded and dominated by existing elites, who skew the debate to favor their position. It’s not a level playing field because social inequities are so prevalent as to be decisive in all outcomes.

As with Marx, in other words, we’ve got a problem in the transition. The masses of people are being deluded by anti-Marxian practices by governments and power elites, practices which have unleashed every manner of horror: neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression, racist exploitation, police state oppression, and the domination of society by forces of power.

You know the litany of evils, of course. But the more you read, the more you realize that the real problem according to Marcuse comes down to one word: capitalism. So long as that survives, the masses will be lacking in proper discernment to see and know what is true. In this case, toleration will only provide opportunities for the perpetuation of evil. “Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery.”

If we allow free speech and give a platform to non-Marxist ideas, the great Hegelian moment when we reach the end of history will continue to elude us.

For this reason, we need to adopt full-scale repression – at least until the end of history arrives. As Marcuse wrote:

They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.

And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly ‘deterrents’, of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc.

Wait just a minute here. Did you catch that? Marcuse says that if you oppose policies like social security or Obamacare, you should be denied the freedom of speech and assembly. You should be shut up and beat up. The path toward true freedom is through massive real-world oppression. If you have the wrong views, you have no rights.

The entire essay is born of frustration that the Marxists have not yet won, that they continue to have to make a case for their perspective in the face of tremendous opposition. Given that he and his friends are part of a priesthood of truth, shouldn’t they just be declared the winners and contrary views suppressed?

In other words, it is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation. Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.

What about freedom and stuff? We’ll get there, but first all opponents of how Marcuse defined freedom must be eliminated. In other words, this is not real freedom. It is a big excuse for suppression, despotism, and the total state.

Or as Marcuse said with characteristic bluntness, we must push the “cancellation of the liberal creed of free and equal discussion.” We must, he said, be “militantly intolerant.”

Who Rules?

Now, the question is: who should be in charge of deciding “the distinction between liberating and repressive, human and inhuman teachings and practices.” The answer is readily at hand: properly enlightened intellectuals like Marcuse and his friends, who must be put in charge of the regime managing the transition. As he puts it, a decider should be “in the maturity of his faculties as a human being.”

It is they who should speak and be charged with putting down contrary views. To Marcuse, it is no different from how society tries to control juvenile delinquents. They don’t have rights and freedoms. Neither should unenlightened adults persist in the failure to be Marxists like him.

Here we have a classic demonstration of the power of dogma. It can distort the world around you to the point that black becomes white, up is down, and slavery is freedom.

It reminds me of the time that Leon Trotsky visited the New York subway and noticed that there were machines dispensing gum. He concluded that gum was a capitalist plot to keep the jaws of the workers moving so that they would not perceive their status as slaves having their surplus value stolen by capitalist exploiters.

And yet: sometimes gum is just gum.

So you wonder: where are these attacks on free speech coming from? They are coming from the academy where this stuff is taught to students of sociology, politics, and literature, from day one. It doesn’t mean that people are literally reading Marcuse or even that their professors have done so. Philosophy works this way. Bad ideas are like termites: you can’t entirely see them, and suddenly the whole house falls in.

Astute readers will notice a strange parallel between the ideas of Marcuse and those of the alt-right that imagines that violating the rights of people who disagree is the way to make progress toward real freedom. The model for the alt-right is the world of Pinochet: dissidents must be thrown out of helicopters.

Indeed, there is not much substantial difference between the Nazi politics of Carl Schmitt and the Marxist politics of Herbert Marcuse. They both exist within the same Hegelian ideological bubble, operating as mirror images of each other. One gives rise to the other in alternating sequences of action and reaction. Two sides of the same coin.

Each wants to suppress the other, which is why the complaints of alt-rightists are so disingenuous. They complain about having their free-speech rights violated, but they aspire to do exactly the same to their own enemies.

And, incidentally, censorship is like socialism: it works in theory but not in practice. Suppressing ideas subsidizes the demand for the very idea being put down. You can’t control the human mind by controlling speech alone.

What about Real Freedom?

As you read through this material, the question keeps coming back to you. What about actual freedom right now? What about actual speech right now? Not freedom and speech toward a specific goal, a spelled-out end of history scenario, but rather just real freedom and speech, right now. And what about commercial freedom itself, which has done more to improve the lives of regular people more than any imagined end-state of history as cobbled together by intellectual elites.

Exploring this left and right Hegelian literature makes you appreciate the absolute genius of the old liberal creed, and the handful of great intellectuals who upheld it through the 20th century against these dangerous and illiberal ideologies. Only in this literature will you discover the great truth that freedom right now, right where we are in this stage of history, is the only social goal truly worth fighting for.

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which requires that credit be given to the author. Read the original article.

Libertarian Democrat: When New York Produced Giants for Liberty – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Libertarian Democrat: When New York Produced Giants for Liberty – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Lawrence W. Reed
August 18, 2013
******************************

The idea pervades the bill that severe penalties will secure enforcement; but all experience shows that undue severity of laws defeats their execution … [N]o law can be sustained which goes beyond public feeling and sentiment. All experience shows that temperance, like other virtues, is not produced by lawmakers, but by the influences of education, morality and religion. Men may be persuaded—they cannot be compelled—to adopt habits of temperance.

—Horatio Seymour, 1854

This essay is about a long-forgotten New Yorker who served in his state’s legislature and twice as governor, then nearly became President of the United States. Much respected, even beloved by many in his day, his name was Horatio Seymour. He deserves to be dusted off and appreciated now, almost 130 years since his death. But first, some context.

The Democratic Party in the state of New York these days is about as “liberal” (in the twentieth-century, American sense of the term) as it gets. On economic issues in particular, it is reliably statist, meaning it rarely deviates from the “more government is the answer” mentality, no matter how strongly logic or evidence point elsewhere. But not so long ago, New York’s Democrats were largely of the opposite persuasion. They were often what we now would call “classical liberals,” ardent skeptics of the concentration of power. Classical liberals really believed in liberty; today’s liberals really don’t.

Local and national Democratic Party organizations today host “Jefferson-Jackson Day” dinners in honor of two of the party’s early representatives. If Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson could stop in for a drink, it’s not likely that either one of them would recognize their party after all these years. Arguably, they’d be horrified enough to resign their memberships. My guess is that Jackson would become an Independent while Jefferson would bolt for the Libertarians.

New York City in the 1830s was the birthplace of the Locofocos, the most principled libertarians the Democratic Party ever produced. Their opposition to subsidies, high tariffs, special favors, fiat money, and interventionist government helped keep the state and national party on the right side of liberty until the silver-tongued currency crank William Jennings Bryan came along in 1896.

Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor, was a New York Democrat. Economist and historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel argues that Van Buren may be the most libertarian of all the American presidents.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Democrats fought the Whigs, who stood for a Hamiltonian big government that would dispense privilege and corporate welfare, jack up tariffs, and centralize banking. When the Republicans picked up the mantle of the Whigs in the late 1850s, Democrats opposed them for the same reasons. With the exception of Horace Greeley, the most pro-liberty presidential candidates in the thirty years after the Civil War were the Democratic nominees who didn’t win (Seymour, Tilden, and Hancock). The only Democrat to actually capture the White House between 1865 and 1912—Grover Cleveland, born in New Jersey but a New Yorker most of his life and governor of the state—was arguably one of the very best and most pro-liberty presidents of the 44 we’ve had.

New York was home also to eight-term congressman Bourke Cockran, who emerged in the 1890s as one of the staunchest and most eloquent defenders of Jeffersonian liberty Americans ever sent to Washington from anywhere.

But something happened to the Democratic Party in the years between Cleveland and the next Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson—my personal choice for the worst of all presidents. That sad turn of events is a story for another day. Allow me now to return to my primary subject, Horatio Seymour.

Seymour wrote those words at the top of this essay. They were part of his 1854 veto of one of the earliest alcohol prohibition measures that made it to a governor’s desk. If the wisdom of that veto message had been heeded 65 years later, America would have been spared the imbecility of Prohibition. So, too, it could have saved us from compounding that destructive error with a futile, expensive, and tyrannical War on Drugs in more recent decades. His view on Prohibition was indicative of his general perspective on the role of government in our lives. He was no friend of the meddlesome nanny state.

Seymour was born in 1810 in Onondaga County, New York, early in the presidency of another Jeffersonian Democrat (from Virginia), James Madison. At the age of 23, he went to Albany, where he labored for six years as military secretary to the state’s Democratic governor, William L. Marcy. There, he gained detailed knowledge of the state’s politics. In 1841 he won election to the New York State Assembly and served simultaneously as mayor of Utica from 1842 to 1843. He was elected speaker of the assembly in 1845, then governor of the state in 1852. His veto of the Prohibition bill cost him in his reelection bid, which he lost by a mere 309 votes statewide.

FEE’s senior historian, Dr. Burton Folsom (author of The Myth of the Robber Barons, New Deal or Raw Deal, and other great works) reminds me that Seymour wasn’t as solid on economic issues as New York’s Locofocos: “Seymour was from Utica, and because that town was right on the Erie Canal, he favored state-funded construction of the Erie Canal.  He also favored (though with less enthusiasm) the state funding of the eight branch canals, all of which lost money.” Indeed, Seymour should have seen the logical inconsistency of canal subsidies and small government, but such are the blemishes of politics, which is why when we grade its practitioners, we have to do so “on the curve” or most would flunk. I still see greatness in Seymour on other counts.

The country drifted inexorably toward sectional conflict for the rest of the 1850s. Out of office but an influential former governor of the most populous state, Seymour made headlines whenever he spoke. Prominent party leaders promoted him for the presidential nomination in 1856 and 1860 but he declined to run. He opposed slavery but was reluctant to go to war over either it or the question of secession. When war came in 1861, he staked out a definitive position on the Lincoln administration’s suppression of civil liberties and questionable constitutional ventures such as suspension of habeas corpus:  “Government is not strengthened by the exercise of doubtful powers, but by a wise and energetic exertion of those which are incontestable. The former course never fails to produce discord, suspicion and distrust, while the latter inspires respect and confidence.”

As the war groaned on, Seymour chastised Lincoln and the Republicans for imprisoning (without trial) thousands of dissenters who questioned the war or its conduct. He demanded to know why citizens of the North had to be warred upon by their own government. “Liberty is born in war,” he declared. “It does not die in war! I denounce the doctrine that Civil War in the South takes away from the loyal North the benefits of one principle of civil liberty!”

Defending civil liberties in the midst of a major war was a courageous stand in the 1860s. Even among the large and vocal cadre of Lincoln apologists today, it’s not kosher to bring up the seamy side of our 16th President’s policies. But in the day, some very patriotic Americans like Seymour raised serious questions that deserve attention now as they did then.

In 1862, Seymour was again elected governor of New York and was embroiled the very next year in a vigorous battle with the Lincoln administration over the military draft. He strongly opposed it as unconstitutional. He refused to pay the state’s foreign creditors in paper greenbacks, insisting instead on payment in the medium specified in the terms of the debt—gold. Defeated narrowly for reelection in 1864, Seymour resumed his prominent role as a respected elder statesman and spokesman for Democratic principles. He might have taken the presidential nomination away from George McClellan in 1864 but, as in the past, he declined many demands that he be a candidate.

With no strong Democratic contender for the presidential nomination in 1868, Seymour’s name bubbled to the top again. I’ve written elsewhere about Republican James A. Garfield as the most reluctant man ever to be elected President of the United States. Horatio Seymour is easily the most reluctant man ever to be nominated and not get elected, though he came close. Leading up to the Democratic Party convention in 1868, he declared numerous times that he would not be a candidate. He even accepted the role as permanent chairman of the convention because the very position would make it impossible to also be a candidate, but after 21 deadlocked ballots the conventioneers violated party rules and nominated Seymour anyway. He ran against Republican Ulysses S. Grant out of a sense of obligation to his party, not any lust for the job. Democrats made Francis P. Blair of Missouri his vice presidential running mate.

Almost immediately, Republicans waved “the bloody shirt,” accusing Seymour and the Democrats of treason. The Democratic nominee was a “traitor” because he had once supported secession, though he took that position purely (and in the view of this author, correctly) because the Constitution neither addressed nor forbade it. Like it or not, the notion that secession was a right of any state was a widely held perspective in both the North and the South in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Republicans vilified it for reasons of power and politics, but it was not for many decades a “radical” or unsupportable view in America, even among Northern newspaper editors.

In his superb 1938 biography, Horatio Seymour of New York, Stewart Mitchell writes that Seymour was on solid ground in arousing opposition to Republican duplicity, by which I mean claiming to be defenders of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution while trampling on the rights upheld in both. “The fact was,” according to Stewart (quoting liberally from Seymour himself), “that within ten states of the Union any American citizen who dared to quote that declaration in his own defense ‘would be tried and punished by a military tribunal.’” Moreover, “If a citizen of the state where the ashes of Washington lay buried were to remind his rulers that ‘the military should ever be subordinate to the civil authority,’ he could be ‘dragged to prison’ even from the grave of the man who wrote the declaration.”

The Seymour-Blair platform assailed the party of Lincoln and Grant in certain if not grandiloquent terms, and largely from a pro-liberty perspective. It called for restoration of a sound, metallic currency and lower tariffs. It condemned the Republican Party thusly:

It has nullified there (in the ten states occupied by federal troops) the right of trial by jury; it has abolished habeas corpus, that most sacred writ of liberty; it has overthrown the freedom of speech and of the press; it has substituted arbitrary seizures and arrests, and military trials and secret star-chamber inquisitions, for the constitutional tribunals; it has disregarded in time of peace the right of the people to be free from searches and seizures; it has entered the post and telegraph offices, and even the private rooms of individuals, and seized their private papers and letters without any specific charge or notice of affidavit, as required by the organic law; it has converted the American capitol into a Bastille; it has established a system of spies and official espionage to which no constitutional monarchy of Europe would now dare to resort; it has abolished the right of appeal, on important constitutional questions, to the Supreme Judicial tribunal, and threatens to curtail, or destroy, its original jurisdiction, which is irrevocably vested by the Constitution; while the learned Chief Justice has been subjected to the most atrocious calumnies, merely because he would not prostitute his high office to the support of the false and partisan charges preferred against the President. Its corruption and extravagance have exceeded anything known in history, and by its frauds and monopolies it has nearly doubled the burden of the debt created by the war; it has stripped the President of his constitutional power of appointment, even of his own Cabinet. Under its repeated assaults the pillars of the government are rocking on their base, and should it succeed in November next and inaugurate its President, we will meet, as a subjected and conquered people, amid the ruins of liberty and the scattered fragments of the Constitution.
***

Grant easily won the election in the Electoral College, 214 to 80, but the popular vote was a different story. There the margin was less than six points, as Grant bested Seymour 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent. With Grant’s troops occupying most Southern states, controlling many polling stations and actively disenfranchising significant numbers of Southern whites whose votes would likely have gone Democratic, Seymour’s 47.3 percent seems all the more remarkable.

In his 1944 book about losing presidential contenders, They Also Ran, Irving Stone described Seymour as “one of the most intelligent, high-minded and able statesmen produced in America since the creators of the Constitution.” He argued that Seymour’s gentle character likely would have made him an excellent president, “the most logical figure in the country to bind the wounds of the war and wipe out the bitterness.” But alas, he didn’t get the chance.

Seymour never ran for office again after 1868 and turned down a guaranteed seat in the U.S. Senate, two more likely nominations for governor, and even two strong efforts to nominate him for the presidency in both 1876 and 1880. He may hold the record in American history for turning down more opportunities for high office than anyone else. His last political activity was to campaign for Grover Cleveland in 1884. He lived long enough to see Cleveland elected as the first Democrat since James Buchanan. Seymour died in February 1886 at the age of 75 and is buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica, New York.

Horatio Seymour, a significant figure and friend of liberty in his day, is remembered by few and appreciated by even fewer. We should not treat the good men of our past this way.

***
The author wishes to thank Mr. John Chodes of New York, a longtime FEE supporter, for his tireless efforts to remind his state and nation of the important contributions of his fellow New Yorker, Horatio Seymour.

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008. Prior to that, he was a founder and president for twenty years of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught Economics full-time and chaired the Department of Economics at Northwood University in Michigan from 1977 to 1984.

He holds a B.A. degree in Economics from Grove City College (1975) and an M.A. degree in History from Slippery Rock State University (1978), both in Pennsylvania. He holds two honorary doctorates, one from Central Michigan University (Public Administration—1993) and Northwood University (Laws—2008).

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Cleveland Passed the Test of Character and Statesmanship – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Cleveland Passed the Test of Character and Statesmanship – Article by Lawrence W. Reed

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Lawrence W. Reed
July 31, 2012
******************************

As usual, this year’s presidential campaign will test the popularity of two men. It will also tell us a lot about each man’s character, even if we think we already know all there is to know about them both. At this writing, some pundits are predicting a photo finish, maybe even a repeat of the 2000 Bush-Gore cliffhanger. Whatever the next few months produce, every presidential contest gets me pining for my personal favorite of the 44 men who have held the office—Grover Cleveland, America’s 22nd and 24th president.

Until 2000, the last time a close election produced a split decision in the popular vote and the Electoral College was 1888. Cleveland, the incumbent Democratic president, had been through a close one once before. In 1884 he won New York by just 1,200 votes—and with it, the presidency—but a switch of 601 votes in that one state alone would have swung the election to Republican James G. Blaine. Four years later Cleveland bested Benjamin Harrison by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast nationwide but he lost in the Electoral College 233–168. Because the contest was tight in a number of states, a slight shift in the popular vote plurality would have easily won it all for Cleveland.

Alyn Brodsky, in a biography entitled Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character, records that when reporters asked to what he ascribed his defeat, Cleveland smiled and said, “It was mainly because the other party had the most votes.” He did not equivocate. He did not whine and fret that he won more popular votes than Harrison. The “votes” to which he referred were the ones that really matter under the rules of the Constitution—Electoral College votes.

Cleveland handled his defeat with dignity. No recounts, no lawsuits, no spin, no acrimony. His grace in defeat was all the more remarkable considering that the loss meant he had to relinquish power he already possessed, not merely accept failure to attain it. He would not tolerate his political allies making an issue of the discrepancy between the popular and Electoral tallies. There was nary a hint of a “constitutional crisis” because the Constitution was Cleveland’s “controlling legal authority.” Cleveland retired to private life until he ran again in 1892, when he beat Harrison decisively, becoming the only American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

One reason the American people accepted the 1888 outcome in stride was that the federal government of that era just didn’t matter like the one of today does. Cleveland famously vetoed a bill to send federal money to drought-stricken farmers in Texas with the admonition, “Though the people support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the people.”

In Cleveland’s day chronic budget surpluses at the federal level of government animated many a political contest, in stark contrast to the massive and endless deficits of today. While some people thought a surplus should be spent, Cleveland thought it was evidence that taxes were too high: “When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government.”

Adjusted for inflation, the Obama administration spends more in one day than the first Cleveland administration spent in an entire year. Washington claims more than a quarter of national income now; in 1888, it managed to get by on about 3 percent. The two sides that will slug it out in the fall know that control of a gargantuan apparatus of money and power is at stake, and the temptations to pull out all the stops to win will be immense.

Even more emphatically, it was the character of Grover Cleveland that made the 1888 outcome a virtual nonevent. In so many ways he was a political oddity even for the Victorian times in which he served. Time and again he refused to do the politically expedient. For example, as a mayor, governor, and president, he rejected the spoils of victory and appointed the best people he could find—often earning the wrath of friends and party bigwigs because they didn’t get the nod. As biographer Brodsky puts it, “Here, indeed, was that rarest of political animals: one who believed his ultimate allegiance was to the nation, not to the party.”

Cleveland never lusted for public office. A prominent New York newspaper endorsed Cleveland for president in 1884 by declaring “three reasons” for voting for him: “1. He is an honest man. 2. He is an honest man. 3. He is an honest man.” He was, by all accounts, as utterly incorruptible when he left office as he was when he first assumed it. “Public office is a public trust” was an original Cleveland maxim.

Cleveland didn’t schmooze and slither his way through smoky backrooms to political power; nor did he exercise power as if he loved it for its own sake. He did the public’s business honestly and frugally and otherwise left us alone. It would not have occurred to him to so covet power as to fear private life. Trashing either the system or a good man’s character to obtain or hold on to public office was, to Grover Cleveland, unthinkable.

Every statesman is also a politician but not every politician is a statesman. Cleveland was so quintessentially statesmanlike that it hardly seems appropriate to note that he was also a politician. He certainly didn’t seek office for the thrill of it or for the power and notoriety it brings. Politics was not the meat grinder of principles for Cleveland that it is for so many others.

The Statesman

What qualities define a statesman? He or she doesn’t seek public office for personal gain or because it’s the only job he or she knows how to do. Like ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus or America’s own George Washington, the statesman takes time out from a life of accomplishment to serve the general welfare. He stands for a principled vision, not for what he thinks citizens will fall for. He is well informed about the vicissitudes of human nature, the lessons of history, the role of ideas, and the economics of the marketplace.

The statesman is a truth-seeker, which means he is more likely to do what’s right than what may be politically popular at the moment. You know where he stands because he says what he means and means what he says. He elevates public discussion because he knows what he’s talking about. He does not engage in class warfare or in other divisive or partisan tactics that pull people apart. He does not cynically buy votes with the money his taxes take from others. He may even judge his success in office as much by how many laws he repealed or vetoed as by how many he passed. (Cleveland vetoed more bills than all his predecessors combined.)

Grover Cleveland is my model candidate and model president. I’m betting that this fall’s campaign will only make me miss him all the more.

Lawrence Reed is the president of the Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.