Yuval Levin - The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

Copyright 2014 by Yuval Levin

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Designed by Linda Mark

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover as follows:

Levin, Yuval.

The great debate : Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the birth of right and left / Yuval Levin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-04094-0 (e-book)

1. United States--Politics and government. 2. Right and left (Political science) 3. Political sciencePhilosophy. 4. Burke, Edmund, 17291797Political and social views. 5. Paine, Thomas, 17371809Political and social views. I. Title.

JK275.L5 2013

320.50973dc23

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Cecelia, with love

CONTENTS

O N ITS SURFACE, AMERICAN POLITICS THESE DAYS CAN seem impossibly complicated. We confront a bewildering array of public policy problems, each impenetrably convoluted in itself and largely disconnected from the others. Who could simultaneously understand the intricacies of our tax code, the inefficiencies of our entitlement system, the inadequacies of our transportation infrastructure, the moral challenges presented by the abortion debate, and the ins and outs of the dozens of other prominent public questions demanding our attention?

I make my living as a combatant in these policy debates. I am the editor of a quarterly journal about domestic policy and a think-tank scholar who studies health care, entitlement reform, the federal budget, and similarly wonkish fare. I have worked on these issues as a policy staffer at the White House (under George W. Bush) and as a member of the staffs of several Republican members of Congress. And in doing so, I have found that making sense of these debates requires more than an immersion in the technical details. It requires a sense of how the different policy dilemmas that confront our society relate to one another and why they so frequently divide us as they do.

The way they divide us, after all, is hardly arbitrary. It is not by coincidence that people who tend to agree with one another on one set of issues (say, how to deal with the deficit) often also agree on others (like how to reform American education) that do not seem obviously connected. There are exceptions, to be sure, but conservatives and liberalsand therefore often Republicans and Democratsfairly consistently find themselves on opposite sides of contentious debates on a very broad range of subjects, from economic policy to social policy to the environment, the culture, and countless other public questions. The political right and left often seem to represent genuinely distinct points of view, and our national life seems almost by design to bring to the surface questions that divide them.

I have long been intrigued by the sources and nature of those distinct points of view. And since the thick of the fight is not always the best vantage point for understanding what moves our politics, the search for some answers at one point took me away from Washington for a time, to pursue a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. In studying the work of the Wests great political thinkers, I became persuaded that the complicated policy debates that take place on the surface of our politics are moved not just by partisan passions or economic interests but by deeper questions that, perhaps ironically, can be much more accessible to average citizens. These debates pose moral and philosophical questions regarding what each of us takes to be true and important about human life and how this influences our expectations of politics. We may not think about these deeper questions explicitly every time we approach a contemporary political issue, but how we answer such questions shapes the great political debates of our day.

That such questions should underlie our political life, however, does not itself explain why the citizens of our republic should coalesce around two clearly discernible and fairly coherent sets of answers. Why, then, is there a left and a right in our politics? This book hopes to offer the beginning of an answer to that question. That beginning is both historical and philosophical, and so this book is, too.

It is historical in that it seeks to understand where we are by considering where we came from. And in our particular political tradition, seeking out where we came from often means beginning our search in the late eighteenth centurythat extraordinary era of the American Revolution and the French Revolution that together helped to shape the modern world.

It is philosophical because it contends that what we can learn from that era is above all a way of thinking about the most basic and timeless dilemmas of society and politics. This book therefore looks at Anglo-American politics during the age of Americas foundinga subject of justifiably unending fascinationfrom an unusual angle and tries to expose some unfamiliar features of it.

The historical and the philosophical in this case intersect not in the abstract but in the real lives of two people whose thoughts and actions helped define the right and the left at their origins. This book tells the stories of their lives and times and carefully considers their ideas and arguments. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine lived in an era defined by a seemingly interminable succession of intense political crises, and both men were deeply involved in a great many of them both as thinkers and as actors. In the process, each laid out a vision of the world and especially a way of thinking about political change. In some important ways, Burke and Paine laid out the beginnings of the right and the left, respectively. The implicit and often explicit debate between them therefore offers us a glimpse into the origins of our political divisions. This book is thus a case study in how ideas move history and in where some of the key ideas that have moved, and still move, our history came from.

To point to the historical and philosophical roots of our political debates is not to stand apart from or above those debates. On the contrary, I have been drawn to the questions that animate this book precisely because I have played a modest part in some political debates myself. Im a conservative, and I would not pretend to leave my worldview at the door while I explore the foundations of our political order. But a conservative must take an interest in his own societys traditions, and our political tradition has always contained both the left and the righteach passionately advancing its understanding of the common good. I am therefore a conservative who is deeply interested in understanding both the left and the right as they truly are, and I strive here to tell their stories in a way that both liberals and conservatives today might recognize as meaningful and true, and from which both might learn something about themselves and their political adversaries.