Abstract
The book is Professor William Ker Muir, Jr.’s attempt to describe how Americans exercise freedom. Muir recounts in the beginning that when the Iron Curtain fell, a Hungary-born colleague called him asking for books to recommend to Old Country friends on the workings of democracy. To know America is to understand the dynamics of freedom and power, Muir thought, and certain paradoxes surround these concepts. No sooner had he thought of suggesting Democracy in America and The Federalist Papers than he recognized how those two classics, unique as they were in portraying American societal tendencies and principles, needed updating for the 21st century. With that lofty goal and an eye out for international readers, he set out to write this masterful and engaging book, whose outer texture only this brief review can touch.
In 31—numerous, but compact—chapters, Muir gathers under one tent almost all of the puzzles one could raise about American democracy, breaks them down into pieces, and tries to put them back together again in the light of the Constitution framers’ arguments in 1787 and 1788, and observations of America in the 1830s by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Their works serving as platform, Muir’s depiction of what makes America tick also taps a variety of resources, from political theory, old (Machiavelli, Adam Smith) and not-so-old (Schelling, Neustadt, Lippmann, for example); social science research; memoirs and biographies; news; fiction; and even poetry that a reader may be forgiven for lapsing into thinking they are at a fireside chat with the author rather than watching him tackle the underbelly of some of the most controversial arguments in the liberal-versus-conservative debate over American values, habits, and the socioeconomic and institutional fabrics they have been weaving since the nation’s founding.
Picking out some nagging questions from such debates, Muir unwraps how American government uses its power and how Americans use it as individuals to live free. Those questions are “What is personal freedom?” “Does personal freedom simply mean the right to be left alone, or something more, like freedom from hunger, illiteracy, illness?” “Does a society, in order to be free, need to suppress some freedoms?” “Does a society that is free abandon persons to ‘fend for’ themselves?” (Muir, 2012, pp. 2-3). Those familiar with the author know that apart from his distinguished teaching at UC Berkeley, Muir was speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush and California Governor Pete Wilson. Much as Muir’s conservative stripes show early in dissecting those questions, the breadth of his synthesis and the elegance of his formulations should make the book accessible to everyone in the political spectrum. On paper, Muir’s style may look canned, a crash course for nonpolitical scientists, but the condensed treatment of its numerous topics does not subtract from the sober logic that is often missing in the visceral exchanges between adversaries in our contemporary political theater. Summoning the spirits of Tocqueville, Madison, Hamilton, and others, Muir traces out the modern meaning of freedom in America by dividing his treatise into three parts.
Before focus is directed at American politics, the reader is introduced to coercion, reciprocity, and moral power as the techniques by which government and individuals get their way. Their exercise is rid with paradoxes, to which Muir devotes the first part of the book. He uses each paradox to explain why, for example, certain postures like detachment, ruthlessness, and irrationality could contribute to achieving laudable goals like peace among villagers, independence of thought by elected officials, and balance of power between labor and management or other parties in competitive situations that certainly abound in a democracy. Muir shows there are limits to liberty and people do need the competencies of others to achieve selfish goals, and amid all the checking and balancing in the Constitution and in people’s coexistence, in America a division of labor emerges to generate, in turn, teamwork and spiritual fulfillment (the Jeffersonian notion of human faculty development). Readers who did not often ground their understanding of American democracy by way of power’s paradoxes might find this section stark but refreshing, a chemistry of history and philosophy without the encumbrance of three semesters of political science.
The second part describes the institutions that have organized democracy in America—the presidency, Congress, legal system, political parties, media, free enterprise, taxing system, and federalism—and their roles in promoting freedom. Muir does not simply recite conservative tenets (can-do individualism, taxes reducing the rich’s motivation to invest) but uses paradoxes again to explain the coercive powers of the presidency, the moral power of the Supreme Court, the reciprocity among lawmakers, and the value systems that imbue capitalists and journalists, for example, that have made America what it is now, domestically and as a global power. Muir increasingly interlaces selected lines from Tocqueville and the founders with his own in this part, and so readers must be alert when the author is actually describing theoretical arguments made at America’s founding or the ways of life in the 1800s, and when he appears to be demonstrating that the conservative perspective can explain, if not resolve, current debates on poverty, the political influence of money, or labor issues.
Some readers might be persuaded that change is difficult because of sturdy belief systems behind already complex policy making structures (think of today’s “Obamacare”), Americans cluster with people who look like them, and that “custodial democracy” (Murray, 2000) is anathema to freedom in America. Muir certainly brings these points across but he also pays attention in the third part to the kind of people Americans have become from living in a free society. Like Tocqueville, Muir cites the dangers posed by shortsighted materialism on Americans’ moral obligations to their fellows, and by their assumption that everywhere people are alike, whenever they embed domestic or foreign policy with this expectation, which can thoroughly backfire.
Legal opinions, cultural artifacts, and the voices of towering figures pepper the book to show how America has succeeded but which readers must translate for today’s practical challenges and the transformation of American society. Missing from Muir’s painting of why the institutions of the nation have worked is its public administration and the role it can play in ensuring future freedom. Public policies (welfare, housing, desegregation, etc.) are cited largely to demonstrate the power paradoxes, or if they endanger norms and belief systems, or test the public’s readiness to acquiesce to specific solutions. By “fifty-four government departments” Muir refers to the branches of government and the fifty states (p. 57). This approach is understandable as minimal government is a core argument in the narrative, but given the various challenges that power confronts, it is not feasible to set aside the contributions of public administration. The absence is reminiscent of Mettler’s (2011) notion of the submerged state, when a great segment of the public is oblivious to (invisible) policies and agencies that actually benefit them. Muir does use Kaufman’s (1960) study of the Forest Service bureaucracy to derive the characteristics of “moral organizations” (special interest groups) but allusions to public administration in the book, for the most part, are made in the same breath as union bargaining, distrust of school bureaucracies, courthouse gangs and public worker mobilization during elections. Were the reader to assume that bureaucracy is subsumed in Muir’s discussion of the presidency, then providing muscle to foreign policy, court rulings, and congressional actions to remedy unequal bargaining powers in society, and educating the public to ensure freedom surely must require a professional cadre and an infrastructure. The author leaves this gap for the reader to sort out.
Incidentally, bureaucracy today finds itself in one of Muir’s paradoxes of power, wherein failure by, say, the Democrats, to hide detachment to public spending and government workers makes the bureaucracy vulnerable to threats. Its opponents may count some in the business sector who regard government agencies as mere competitors whose endless sources of revenue put businesses at a disadvantage. In theory, it would be a lot easier if politicians favored policies that hide what is prized, such as contracts that employ a shadow workforce. Their low visibility puts them out of reach of those who might want to take them hostage. In the end, students of bureaucracy should find nuggets in Muir’s work. For public administration to succeed, we must recognize where things have been and where they may be headed. Page after page, including its endnotes, this book offers a great chance to understand the ongoing battle for power and freedom in America. Regardless of the author’s politics, the intellectual balance in this book is admirable.