It seems, however, that we’re at risk of missing the note’s larger
lesson. Yes, it demonstrates America’s proud tradition of peaceful
transitions of power and highlights Bush’s ability to show kindness and
maintain impeccable manners in what must have been his most dispiriting
professional moment. But that generous letter is also the byproduct of a
worldview; it’s a point on a straight line between a political
philosophy and an approach to public policy. We do ourselves, and our
politics, a disservice by separating the letter and its sentiments from
the author’s views on governing. They’re part of the same fabric.Over the years, much has been written about the “conservative temperament” of modesty, a disposition regularly displayed by Bush 41 and epitomized by that letter. But it’s worth revisiting in this particular moment because its absence helps explain not just the toxicity of more recent elections but also the centralizing nature of so many contemporary policy proposals and the “smugness” that many observers have identified in current political commentary.
Put simply: When we are certain and self-satisfied, we’re liable to be caustic and incurious and advance prescriptions that are bold, swift, and sweeping. When we’re uncertain and modest, we’re likelier to be charitable and inquisitive and offer reforms that would incrementally build on yesterday’s successes.
THE CASE FOR HUMILITY
The essence of the conservative mindset is a recognition of limits. As imperfect humans, our knowledge and understanding are always incomplete. We forecast poorly. We have contradictory principles and priorities. We’re self-interested. We can be greedy.
In a 2011 article for Policy Review, the University of Toronto’s Andrew Stark made the case that this worldview has a predictable influence on how the right thinks about collective action. Humility, he argues, serves as the common denominator across conservatism’s disparate communities; each possesses a doctrine carrying “within itself the notion that it’s very difficult for human beings, when they act as political creatures, to get matters right.” Though factions within conservatism may occasionally find themselves at odds on policy matters, they all recognize “our hobbled abilities, as fallible beings, to bend the world to our will.”
As a result, conservatives are deeply skeptical about governing strategies that presume too much about our capacities—for instance, centralization, muscular government, expert administrators, and grand schemes. This naturally leads the conservative to seek to limit the authority of others: decentralization, the separation of governmental powers into branches, trusting small voluntary associations over compulsory state bodies, putting faith in markets over central plans. But—crucially—this humility extends down to the self and shapes how the temperamentally conservative individual engages in the public’s business: I am limited. I may be wrong. I need to trust others.
Bush learned and exhibited this mindset early. His biographer Jon Meacham notes that Bush had been taught as a child never to talk about himself. Later, he volunteered for dangerous military service. Then there was his fundamental “reticence,” his unwillingness to reveal—much less promote—himself. This personal humility translated into confidence in and dependence on others, which can be seen clearly in his most noteworthy presidential moments: exhaustively building the broadest possible international coalition prior to the Gulf war, compromising with congressional Democrats on budget and tax issues, refusing to triumphantly celebrate as the Soviet Union fell.
For someone less modest, going it alone in war, risking a government shutdown, and dancing on a crumbling Berlin Wall might have seemed sensible, even preferable. But for Bush, that would have been out of the question. As President Obama said during a 2013 White House ceremony recognizing Bush’s volunteer work: “Given the humility that’s defined your life, I suspect it’s harder for you to see something that’s clear to everybody else around you, and that’s how bright a light you shine.”
For the humble leader, a heavy reliance on others and the suppression of many personal preferences serve as a cornerstone of policymaking. One critical element of this is explained in Justus Myers and Philip Wallach’s 2014 National Affairs article “The Conservative Governing Disposition.” They argue that “because people are fallible and the world is complex,” the conservative maintains a “healthy respect for evolved social practices and institutions.” These “embody the accumulated wisdom of trial-and-error experience” collected across the ages. Indeed, at the Constitutional Convention, John Dickinson offered the sage advice, “Let experience be our guide. Reason may mislead us.”
Deference to history is an invaluable tool for dialing back hubris. No matter how smart and sophisticated one believes oneself to be, it is prudent to pay heed to the time-tested habits and institutions produced and preserved by preceding generations. “Tradition,” in G. K. Chesterton’s classic formulation, “means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Or, as the British writer Danny Kruger put it in his 2007 book On Fraternity, the authority that emerges from relying on custom “is the cumulative, collective vote of all generations past and present.”
While looking back, the humble conservative also looks out. He trusts the wisdom, decency, and energy of individuals and their small communities spread far and wide. Alexis de Tocqueville famously chronicled and celebrated Americans’ unusual ability to self-organize and nimbly solve countless challenges. The 18th-century British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke similarly lauded the “little platoons” of society that foster deep relationships and facilitate joint action for the public good. Yuval Levin, author of The Fractured Republic, is today’s most prominent conservative advocate for pushing authority down to citizens and neighborhoods. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, he argues for “a decentralizing conservatism of bottom-up solutions” that shifts power away from large, faraway, state-controlled entities and toward America’s vast array of local civil-society bodies.
These intertwined concepts—personal modesty, deference to longstanding institutions, and dependence on local decision-making—provided the backbone for what might have been George H. W. Bush’s finest speech. In his address to the Republican National Convention in 1988 accepting the party’s nomination, Bush used self-deprecation (“I’ll try to hold my charisma in check”), recounted lessons learned from others, and made only passing reference to his extensive résumé (alluding to his military heroism, for example, as “I almost lost my life in [war]”). Then, underscoring his reverence for the accumulated wisdom of the past, he explained, “I am guided by certain traditions,” “I respect old-fashioned common sense,” and “I like what’s been tested and found to be true.”
He took the air out of the inflated ambitions of self-styled experts, admitting to “no great love for the imaginings of social planners.” He called out the conceit of the “technocrat who makes sure the gears mesh but doesn’t for a second understand the magic of the machine.” As an alternative, he offered his take on the decentralizing concept of subsidiarity: “From the individual to the family to the community, and then on out to the town, to the church and the school, and, still echoing out, to the county, the state, and the nation—each doing only what it does well, and no more.” As though channeling Tocqueville, he argued, “We’re a nation of community; of thousands and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional, and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique.”
Perhaps Bush was able to handle his reelection loss with such equanimity and show such generosity to the man who turned him out of office precisely because he had such a modest view of himself, because he trusted the many over the mighty, because he understood that voters might have seen something that he couldn’t, and because he had such faith in our institutions, even when those institutions produced outcomes not to his liking.
But what becomes of our politics and policies when our commentators and leaders don’t have a humble disposition—when they have extravagant views of their own abilities, when they belittle and condescend to others, when they don’t trust the wisdom of their fellow citizens and the institutions of our nation? For instance, when they scornfully call a rival’s supporters “irredeemable” and “deplorable” or pompously pronounce to admirers that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
THE POLITICS OF SMUG
Though the politics of 2016 has given us plenty of reason to despair, there has been one great pleasant surprise: growing appreciation of the dangers of conservative humility’s opposite, namely progressive “smugness.” The right has long bemoaned the left’s haughtiness—progressives’ self-styled superiority and caricaturing of conservatives as uneducated, unenlightened rubes. But what made 2016 unusual is that this smugness has also been self-diagnosed by the left. The biggest splash came in April from Vox’s Emmett Rensin in an extended essay, “The Smug Style in American Liberalism.” Rensin diagnosed the condition as “a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence—not really—but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.”
The article argues that, in the eyes of a significant part of the left, there is simply a gulf between rational, intelligent, cosmopolitan progressives and the “stupid hicks” who are “conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists.” This mindset not only shields the left’s policy positions from scrutiny—of course our views are right; they’re informed—it leads to contempt for others: Our opponents don’t simply disagree with us; they are simple, incurious, and deluded by faith. The progressive community, Rensin argues, can then issue “a condescending, defensive sneer toward any person or movement outside of its consensus.”
In an August Huffington Post article, “The Culture of the Smug White Liberal,” Nikki Johnson-Huston agreed, writing, “Somewhere along the way we stopped fighting for the little guy and became the party of the smug, educated elites who look down on those with less education and deem them unable or unworthy of being able to make personal decisions for their own lives.” The day after the election, Will Rahn of CBS News conceded the press corps’s progressive bias, writing that “with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer.” Reporters missed the story of Trump in part because they had “spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on” due to “modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness.” Just days after the election, the New York Times columnist Frank Bruni lamented the “smugness and sanctimony” that had contributed to the left’s losses.
Interestingly, several writers maintained that the posture taken by Jon Stewart’s Daily Show typified the problem. As Rensin wrote, it was a program that “advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid.” Similarly, in an August article for Tablet, “How Jon Stewart’s Culture of Ridicule Left America Unprepared for Donald Trump,” author Jesse Bernstein argued that Stewart helped create a “very specific type of internet-era liberal smugness.” The righteousness of those “in the know” was assumed, and opponents were treated with scorn. Bernstein smartly noted the unfortunate influence this style of thinking has on public debate: “When ridicule replaces reasoned discourse, there’s no longer a place for persuasion.”
Some have wondered if shutting down discussion is less a byproduct of smugness than its key purpose. In a May New York Times column, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” Nicholas Kristof worried that progressives seem to believe in diversity until it includes conservatives. “Liberal arrogance,” he argued, can imply “that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion.” The president of the University of Chicago, Robert Zimmer, was sufficiently alarmed by campus illiberalism rooted in progressive superciliousness that he felt compelled to defend the value of intellectual diversity in the Wall Street Journal. The recent wave of student demands for “silencing of speakers, faculty, students and visitors” can emanate from a group’s “moral certainty that its particular values, beliefs or approaches are the only correct ones and that others should adhere to the group’s views.”
In our politics, it’s been common to assign stubborn certainty to the devout churchgoers on the right. But it looks like a kind of proselytizing zealotry has swept the secular, progressive left. At minimum, this has contributed to today’s political polarization and the venom in contemporary debates. For sure, overconfidence can afflict leaders of any political persuasion; a Texas swagger may have played a part in the misguided military forays of both left-leaning Lyndon Johnson and right-leaning George W. Bush. But while many on the left made note of Donald Trump’s insinuation that the only explanation for his potential loss would be a rigged election process, too few have applied similar scrutiny to the ongoing presumptuousness of the Obama administration.
It requires a herculean sense of self to stage a nomination speech in front of ancient Greek columns, to dismiss Congress so cavalierly, to expand Uncle Sam’s reach over health care and schools, to issue so many far-reaching executive orders via the “pen and phone” strategy, and so on. As the Democratic party reassesses and rebuilds in the years ahead, it is probably worth their asking how the outgoing administration’s behavior paralleled, even energized, the politics of smug.
It has been refreshing, however, to witness the uniform postelection graciousness from all three major players in the presidential drama. In his conciliatory congratulatory speech about the winner, President Obama conspicuously used the exact language of Bush’s 1993 letter about “rooting” for his successor’s success. In his victory speech, President-elect Trump showed kindness to his opponent, pledged to unify the nation, and promised to reach out to those who opposed him. Secretary Clinton expressed hope for the winners’ success.
In other words, the democratic forms of our presidential transitions are being respected at the top, for which we can be grateful. But no one should be accused of cynicism for doubting that the national political scene is about to enter a golden age of humility. It may well be the case that politics will always privilege hubris. We get fired up for “hope and change,” “morning in America,” and “happy days are here again,” not for modest expectations and incrementalism. The buoyant confidence of FDR, Reagan, Bush 43, and Obama was rewarded with reelection. The humility of a Gerald Ford or Bush 41 was not.
But we should also recognize that the greatest line in our greatest president’s greatest speech masterfully blended conviction and modesty. Abraham Lincoln ended his second inaugural by encouraging the nation simultaneously to pursue justice while recognizing our limited ability to ascertain it—”with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.” Perhaps appreciating—even embracing—the tension between those cardinal principles was essential for acting with malice toward none, offering charity to all, and binding up the nation’s wounds.
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