Bruce Ledewitz - The Universe Is on Our Side: Restoring Faith in American Public Life

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To my wife, Patt, with all my love. Always marry an editor.

This underlying order, further honed by selection, augurs a new place for usexpected rather than vastly improbable, at home in the universe in a newly understood way.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (1995)

When you write during a pandemic shutdown, you have the impression you are working on your own. But this is an illusion. My friend and teacher, Robert Taylor, often tells the story of the novice who arrives at the temple, seeking spiritual enlightenment. The master asks him, How did you come here? The novice replies, By train. Fool, responds the master, the whole world brought you here. So, I have many thanks to give.

Foremost, to Patt Risher Ledewitz, my wife. She edited every word for content and clarity and shared her deepest responses. I suppose I could have written this book without her, but Im glad I didnt have to.

Then, to my talented research assistant, Diana Bruce. By email, she molded the work into a form acceptable to a publisher.

Also, to my editor at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read. My book proposal had been making the rounds for quite some time before she rescued it.

By the time Cynthia Read saw it, that proposal had been sharpened under the careful eye of my friend Eugene Mazo, who helped me as he has helped so many others. He is the best model I know of what the academy needsthe generous teacher-scholar.

These were just the immediate help. In the longer term, I have benefited for forty years from the resources of Duquesne University School of Law. The law library, under the direction of Frank Liu and with the able assistance of Tsegaye Beru, provided the materials I needed for this book. Our dean, April Barton, like her predecessors, has been immensely supportive. My colleagues at Duquesne have always been a community tolerant of new ideas. My students have always been sympathetic to a professor whose first commitment is to constitutional democracy. And my administrative assistant, Nicole Pasqualino, always finds whatever mistakes I miss.

I have also benefited from living across the street from the Monterey Pub, surrounded by close friendships that one does not usually encounter this late in life.

Recently, I have had the opportunity of trying out my remedies for public life in the actual political sphere, as a regular contributor to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. The editor-in-chief there, John Micek, has kept my thinking closely tied to solutions for the problems of the day.

But for all that, there is still the actual train that brought me to writing this book. There were many persons on that train: teachers from the New Haven Hebrew Day School and Northfield Mt. Hermon, friends at Congregation Dor Hadash, my synagogue before I left Judaism, now known to all because of a gunman in 2018, and Gertrude Falls, who, even more than my parents, reared me and, before I could speak, showed me the love of God. Above all, there is the engineer who has driven that train for forty years, Robert Taylor. He and his wife Nancy have been a haven for learning, whatever the chaos of our time.

To each and all, my gratitude. I hope this book is worthy of you.

I am writing this book on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, a few months away, and in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. But you, the reader, will not read this book until much later.

I will do a minor rewrite after the election, but not much in the book will change regardless of how the election turns out.

Given the partisan temper of our time, it may seem surprising that I can say that. After all, this is a book about the brokenness of American public life. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are very different people, with quite different characters, who will pursue vastly different agendas if elected. The policy implications of the various possible combinationsRepublican majorities in both houses of Congress, Democratic majorities in both houses, divided government, all of which can be matched with either presidential winnerwill yield a greatly different tone and content to American public life. Am I suggesting that none of that matters?

That would be an absurd claim. Of course it matters a great deal, in many ways, which political party dominates American public life. And I have strong preferences personally in those choices. Given our partisanship, the reader must be informed that I am a registered Democrat who has not voted for a Republican candidate for any office in years.

But in another sense, no, it does not matter at all who wins in 2020.

No matter the election outcome, in America and in all the world, the forces of progress will continue to be in decline.

That is not a partisan statement. By progress, I am not referring to policy disagreements over things like the tax rate, or government regulation of business, or even important foreign policy issues, like participation in the Iranian nuclear agreement.

Instead, by progress, I am referring to confidence in the promise of freedom and democracy, of the importance of limited government and the rule of law, of the potential for reasoned debate to reach fair and convincing conclusions. I am talking about the inspiration of the American Revolution creating the experiment of self-government and the commitment, exemplified by Abraham Lincoln, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. I am pointing to the establishment of universal human rightsthe great accomplishment of the post-WWII international order.

The forces of progress in this sense are in decline all over the world. And, no, I dont think the outcome of the November 2020 election in America will change that.

Even to call these forces by a traditional name, the party of humanity, seems more like a joke today than a claim.

The strongmen of the worldPutin, Modi, Erdogan, Xiare ascendant. Though any one of them may fall at any time, the trend they embody away from liberal regimes will continue. Their successors will also be authoritarian.

The decline in the forces of progress did not happen because of a counterargument about human nature, government, or the universe. The strongmen did not win some intellectual contest. Instead, one day, almost out of the blue it seemed, people no longer had confidence in the various national forms of constitutional democracy. These political structures no longer seemed to represent hope for the future. Certainly, their apparent inevitability, so obvious in the 1990s that some thought history had come to an end, evaporated.