Return to Greatness: An Interview with Alan Wolfe

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Alan Wolfe: Well, I have a three-part definition of greatness. I think it involves an articulation of one but hopefully two of America’s great founding ideals—the ideal of liberty and the ideal of equality. That’s absolutely essential, it’s at the heart of the American experience, it’s what makes us different from European countries that we rebelled against in the 18th century. I think, secondly, you can’t just assert those things as ideals. You’ve got to realize them, you’ve got to put them into practice, and the only way you can do that is through a conception of national citizenship, that we all belong to the same nation, that we all have equal rights in this nation – which, frankly, requires the active use of government to promote equality and citizenship. And then thirdly, it means that these ideals of liberty and equality, which I think are great ideals, shouldn’t just be for Americans alone, that we have an obligation to think about helping others in the world to realize their objectives as well, if they want to. <snip>

You know, ideally, why not be good and great at the same time, they’re both good things, but in fact they really do require a choice. We’ve had politicians and thinkers who’ve tried to embody both – Woodrow Wilson as someone who wanted to be both good and great, and just got torn apart in the process, proving how difficult it is. And one of the reasons is because the underlying philosophical conceptions behind them are very different. Goodness advocates tend to be very suspicious of human nature. They think that the good is always being threatened by the bad, and most people are born bad. We require strong checks on them – for example, the notion that runs throughout American history that politicians are grasping and corrupt, and they need things like term limits or separations of powers. That’s a constant fear. If all men were angels, James Madison said, then no government would be necessary. But men aren’t angels – people aren’t angels, so you have to have all these kinds of checks. And that’s been a kind of really inherent theme, the theme of suspicion, in the goodness side.

The greatness side talks about what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” It talks about that human beings can aspire to do great things, that they have the capacity to do so, that really the purpose of government is not to chain people against their own sinfulness, but to liberate them, that people can use government and use their collective resources as a nation to expand their potential and expand their capacity. <snip>

It is a strong theme in American history that history itself is not that important. Henry Ford said history is bunk. And running throughout their way of thinking of the goodness camp, right from the beginning, there’s this notion that you can always start again, you can always start anew, you don’t have to be bound by history. Whereas the greatness people think more about the kind of stream of history that has run throughout our traditions, and that you build on your predecessors in order to make the country greater. And so you see yourself as part of a process of historical continuity. John F. Kennedy’s life was cut short, we don’t know what he would have done, and he may have never been a great president, but he certainly had that sense of locating himself in history. Theodore Roosevelt himself was a great historian, who wrote books about American history that were bestsellers. That’s kind of one attitude that history… and not just the history of this country, but the history of its environment, the history of its people, really motivates one camp, while the other camp doesn’t want to be bound by history and sees history as kind of corrupt. <snip>

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/04/alan_wolfe.html