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The Best State of the Commonwealth

Good politics is founded on extraordinary hope. Political imagination is the fancy that the world can get better and that the actions of men and women can together make it so. That act of utopian imagination is a description of democratic politics at its best. It is heard to great effect in the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. This is where we hear the idea of popular power expressed in language lifted to move the people. It is politics enchanted once again.

One of the flaws of liberal democracies is that, when they succeed, they start to sound boring. Over time, power has a tendency to corrupt language, though not because politicians are venal. It is because success turns a politician from a campaigner into a technocrat. Their speeches – and I plead guilty to writing some of them – become one half braggadocio about achievements to date and one half technical exposition on policy detail. The enchantment goes missing and so does utopian hope.

Half a millennium ago, in 1516, Thomas More published a strange and remarkable volume called Utopia. Oddly, for a man with a deserved reputation for severity, a lifelong wearer of a hair shirt, More was fond of jokes, and the title of his most famous book is a tease. Does he mean eutopia, the good place, or does he mean outopia, no place at all? He adds to the sense of play by giving his narrator the name of Raphael Hythloday, which translates from Greek as ‘speaker of nonsense’. More’s text causes us to ponder whether Utopia is his version of the perfect society or a kind of Tudor cabaret act.

The clue to the riddle is also the link between Cicero and the rhetoric of the American republic, and it is found in More’s subtitle Optimus status republicae: ‘The Best State of the Commonwealth’. Or to put it in a current idiom, the perfect state of the union. More sends his narrator Hythloday on a journey to Utopia where he discovers, ready-made in the ocean, a society that dramatises Cicero’s argument for the Roman republic. That argument, which More revives and which Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama all articulate, is how the people are to be heard. More’s answer to that question is politics. The noble life, he argues, is one that is dedicated to public service in the name of the people. This marks a change from the Greek tradition in which it was thought that a citizen had to be of noble birth. Cicero’s argument is that virtue, rather than inherited wealth, should have its reward. It is in the finest speeches about popular power that this idea is expressed.

But it is not just the beauty of the idea that makes these speeches fine. The beauty of the diction counts too. Fixing problems is the purpose of democratic politics but saying so is never enough. As La Rochefoucauld said, ‘the passions are the only orators that convince’. Democratic politics still needs the elevation of Cicero’s case for the Roman republic, Thomas Jefferson’s praise of the blessing of equal liberty for all, Abraham Lincoln’s ability to summarise the promise of democracy in a single phrase, John F. Kennedy’s call for an active citizen body and Barack Obama’s extraordinary, audacious hope. All these speakers express in unforgettable cadences the political virtue of granting power to the people.

But, in our time, an alternative utopia to liberal democratic politics has risen again in the form of populism. If politics is to turn away from this phoney appeal to the people, it can only do so in words that once again resound to the times. If politics has become dry then it needs to be reinvigorated by the precious democratic gift represented by the principle of hope.

Popular politics cannot work without utopian spirit. We need to draw from More’s Utopia its sense of possibility, because the spirit of utopia is a desire for progress. It is a way of thinking that reminds us that the world might be different. This hope needs to be expressed in words that take wing. Rhetoric is the art of public persuasion, and if the ideas of liberal democracy are to retain their hold over the imagination of the people, they need to be argued with clarity and elevation. In the speeches that follow, they are.

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

First Philippic against Mark Antony

The Senate, the Temple of Concord, Rome

2 September 44 BC

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was the first man to claim that rhetoric can save the state. Cicero was a philosopher, politician, lawyer and writer. He was the first among equals of the rhetoricians, both as a speaker himself and as the man who made the subject a systematic field of study. Cicero’s De oratore is still the best rhetorical instruction manual. He is headmaster of the school of oratory.

Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric still work; they will always work. Invention, he says, is the drafting of good arguments; disposition is the arrangement of those arguments for best effect; style is giving the argument shape in language; memory is recall in an age before autocue; pronunciation is delivery on the day. Cicero also identified three styles. The plain style should be used to teach, the ornate middle style to please, and the grand style to arouse the emotions. But De oratore was more than a book of instructions on how to talk. It was a book of statecraft as well: the subjects were for Cicero indivisible. If rhetoric and democracy were born together with Pericles, then rhetoric and statecraft were united by Cicero.

After a spell as a slum landlord, Cicero devoted his life to the theory and practice of oratory. He learned his trade in Rome under the tutelage of Crassus, the leading orator of his day. Cicero was debarred from a career in politics due to his ignoble plebeian ancestry. He grew up in the provincial town of Arpinum, the son of a fuller, a cloth-maker who soaked wool in urine for cleansing purposes. Cicero instead built a reputation as a lawyer of great integrity and gained public recognition when he acted in the impeachment of the corrupt governor Gaius Verres in 70 BC. Low birth notwithstanding, he did then make it into politics. In 63 BC he exposed a plot by Lucius Sergius Catiline to launch a coup against the Roman republic. The Orations against Catiline are the most ferocious tirades against a rival in the history of speech. The story is told, fictionalised to dramatic effect, in Robert Harris’s trilogy of historical novels about Cicero.

When Cicero said of Catiline in the Temple of Jupiter: ‘Among us you can dwell no longer’, he ended Catiline’s career. But he also damaged himself. Cicero was granted the title of Pater Patriae, Father of the Fatherland, but he was exiled from the republic for having, in the aftermath of triumph, executed a Roman citizen without trial. The law of the republic made no exceptions, even for its saviour.

It is to the curatorial brilliance of Cicero’s devoted secretary Tiro that we owe the fifty-eight Cicero speeches, of the eighty-eight we know he gave, that we have today. We also know Cicero from his letters to Atticus, which were discovered by Petrarch in 1345 and which are the source of the influence that Cicero was to have on the European Renaissance. In the decade of his retreat after fleeing Rome in 55 BC, Cicero composed a series of works that have among their debtors the significant names of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Burke, Adam Smith and Rousseau.

The speech that follows was delivered in the wake of the slaughter of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 BC. Cicero had been no supporter of Caesar’s tyranny but, mindful that the republic was bigger than any ruler, he had negotiated a settlement in which Caesar’s late decrees would be honoured. The consul Mark Antony confirmed that he would consent, but then, at Caesar’s funeral, seemed to renege on the commitment by inflaming public opinion against the conspirators. Cicero fled the city, disillusioned at the decline of the republic, but returned, to be greeted by multitudes in the streets. The next day, rather than turn up at the Senate to hear Mark Antony, he pleaded fatigue. The Senate met again a day later, when Cicero delivered this speech.

We know it now as the first in a series of fourteen venomous speeches directed at Mark Antony. In a knowing reference to Demosthenes, who, between 351 and 341 BC, tried to rouse the Athenians against the threat of domination by King Philip II of Macedon, Cicero referred to these speeches as ‘Philippics’. Lest this be thought too much invective to be spent solely on Mark Antony, remember that Cicero’s true purpose was to save the republic. In the Second Philippic, published as a pamphlet rather than spoken, Cicero compares Mark Antony with Catiline. The series then leads towards the explicit conclusion of the Fourteenth Philippic that Mark Antony was the enemy of the people and a threat to the republic. When politics fails, the only option, Cicero warns, is discord. The Philippics are the high point of Cicero’s career. In his fledgling years he had been full of ingenious phrases searching for an appropriate cause. Twenty years before, the Catiline conspiracy had given him his first great moment. The Philippics are his glorious second act. All at once his verbal fluency rhymed with the times.

Before, O conscript fathers, I say those things concerning the republic which I think myself bound to say at the present time, I will explain to you briefly the cause of my departure from, and of my return to the city. When I hoped that the republic was at last recalled to a proper respect for your wisdom and for your authority, I thought that it became me to remain in a sort of sentinelship, which was imposed upon me by my position as a senator and a man of consular rank. Nor did I depart anywhere, nor did I ever take my eyes off the republic …

The opening of a speech, like the first still in a film, should contain the address in miniature. Cicero here defines his Topic: the future of the republic. He gets to the main point quickly, as all speakers ought. The point is the defence of the republic and the liberty of the people against those, the tyrants Caesar and Mark Antony, who would violate its principles. This is rhetoric about crisis which increases the crisis with each utterance. Note how Cicero establishes his credentials as sentinel, senator and consul, which give him standing in the republic. He does this to justify his intervention in a dispute from which he has been absent.

The stakes are high, hence Cicero’s dramatic language. The conspirators against Caesar knew, and Cicero himself knew, that his voice in the Temple of Concord could be decisive. Defeat would probably mean death. There is also a personal frailty on display. Cicero had at first struggled to break into politics because his family were plebeian rather than patrician. If he sounds more than a little defensive, ostentatiously reading out his curriculum vitae, this is why. He also has a material reason for defending his calling. The republic thrives on argument; dictatorship would banish his skill. Cicero’s standing as a man of repute rests on the credentials he begins with and the mastery of argument that he commands.

I declare my opinion that the acts of Caesar ought to be maintained; not that I approve of them (for who indeed can do that?) but because I think that we ought above all things to have regard to peace and tranquillity. I wish that Antonius himself were present, provided that he had no advocates with him. But I suppose he may be allowed to feel unwell, a privilege he refused to grant me yesterday. He would then explain to me, or rather to you, O conscript fathers, to what extent he would defend the acts of Caesar. Are all the acts of Caesar that may exist in the bits of notebooks, and memoranda, and loose papers, produced on his single authority, and indeed not even produced, but only recited, to be ratified? And shall the acts he caused to be engraved on brass, in which he declared that the edicts and laws passed by the people were valid for ever, be considered as of no power? I think, indeed, that there is nothing so well entitled to be called the acts of Caesar as Caesar’s laws.

This speech registers Cicero’s deep disapproval of the way in which Mark Antony is squandering Caesar’s legacy. Cicero dismisses Mark Antony with bitterly feigned generosity about the privilege of being deemed unwell. Later passages in this Philippic make it clear that Cicero’s absence the previous day had been as pointed as Antony’s is today. Cicero therefore hardly deserves the high moral ground on which he stands to make his central accusation that Antony is betraying the legacy of Caesar. Framed as a battery of rhetorical questions – always a tactic to sound reasonable while delivering a vicious blow – Cicero here fatally undermines Antony’s claim to be the guardian of Caesar’s legacy. Later in the speech Cicero bluntly accuses Mark Antony of ‘branding the name of the dead Caesar with everlasting ignominy, and it was your doing – yours I say’.

The vivid passage about the notebooks shows how a good image adorns an argument. An audience gets only one hearing, and pictures dwell longer in the mind than abstract arguments. As Cicero describes them, we can see the contents of Caesar’s office. This is the only time Caesar is depicted as a person rather than a representative of the lost republic. The image has a brutal purpose. Cicero is insinuating that Antony is abusing his access to Caesar’s private papers, entrusted to his care by Caesar’s widow. Cicero requests that Mark Antony supply an explanation, not to himself but to the fathers of the republic. That act of transference identifies his own status and perspective with that of the wider republic itself.

And yet, concerning those laws that were proposed, we have, at all events, the power of complaining; but concerning those that are actually passed we have not even had that privilege. For they, without any proposal of them to the people, were passed before they were framed. Men ask, what is the reason why I, or why any one of you, O conscript fathers, should be afraid of bad laws while we have virtuous tribunes of the people? … The forum will be surrounded, every entrance of it blocked up; armed men placed in garrison, as it were, at many points. What then? – whatever is accomplished by those means will be law. And you will order, I suppose, all those regularly passed decrees to be engraved on brazen tablets. ‘The consuls consulted the people in regular form’ – (is this the way of consulting the people that we have received from our ancestors?) – ‘and the people voted it with due regularity.’ What people? That which was excluded from the forum? Under what law did they do so? Under that which has been wholly abrogated by violence and arms? But I am saying all this with reference to the future, because it is the part of a friend to point out the evils that may be avoided; and if they never ensue, that will be the best reflection of my speech. I am speaking of laws that have been proposed, concerning which you have still full power to decide either way. I am pointing out the defects; away with them! I am denouncing violence and arms; away with them, too!

There are direct and deliberate echoes of the Philippics of Demosthenes throughout Cicero’s speeches against Mark Antony. Rhetoric, even at this early stage, is already a tradition. We can see this first at the level of style. Cicero’s interest in Demosthenes was a reaction to a movement of orators in Rome known as the Neo-Attics, who criticised the elder statesmen, of whom Cicero was the sovereign example, of being stylistically weighed down by decoration. The criticism, that Cicero was, to use the contemporary term, an “Asiatic” orator, was always unfair; Cicero never set much store by purple prose. He insisted that a sentence needed rhythm rather than the ‘embroidery’ he found in some Greek examples, notably the work of Gorgias. The Philippics are, though, plainer in style than Cicero’s previous work.

Not having a style is, of course, a style of its own. ‘I am no orator, as Brutus is, but as you know me all, a plain, blunt man, that love my friend,’ says Antony in Julius Caesar, which is about as rhetorically effective as it gets. The Philippics do not, by the standards of the day, set off many fireworks. They are exact and precise, perhaps to a fault, and they are rather light on memorable imagery. The picture of Antony’s wife Fulvia, in the Second Philippic, with the blood of innocent soldiers splashed on her clothes, is exceptional. For the greater part, the series is forensically argued.

There are also echoes of Demosthenes in Cicero’s argument. Both profess that liberty is in peril, threatened by a dominant individual whose seizure of arbitrary power must be resisted. This is a threat to peace because, as Cicero argues later, peace follows liberty. Both Cicero and Demosthenes before him were seeking to persuade a divided and hesitant audience to take action. There is a choice for both between self-government and tyranny, between true peace and illusory peace, between liberty and slavery.

What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay.

This short section is a clear definition of the philosophical tradition of the Roman republic. This is the argument that was passed down from the classical world to the European Renaissance. The esteem in which Cicero is held is satirised by Erasmus in his 1528 treatise Ciceronianus, written in the form of a dialogue, which contains a character who has emptied his library of all books except those by Cicero.

The idea of the Roman republic begins with the fact that the central goal of the city was peace. The greatest danger to peace, says Cicero, is discord. The setting for this speech is the Temple of Concord, but how is concord to be attained? Concord requires justice for all, and that can only be achieved if all the citizens live in liberty. There can be no freedom except in a republic, and the citizen of the free republic is the engaged man, the political man. This is an echo of an argument Cicero uses in De re publica, where he suggests that political participation can overcome the constant dangers of complacency, ‘the blandishments of pleasure and repose’.

The law of the republic is a vital institution, but Cicero argues that the actions of those who will defend the republic, even to the extent of murder, are legitimate all the same because they uphold the honour of the republic. The story goes that when Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March in 44 BC by a group of senators who called themselves the liberatores, one of their number lifted his bloodstained dagger and cried out the name of Cicero, imploring him to ‘restore the republic!’ Cicero’s primary objective in the speech was therefore the restoration of the res publica libera – the free republic.

And, indeed, you have both of you had many judgements delivered respecting you by the Roman people, by which I am greatly concerned that you are not sufficiently influenced. For what was the meaning of the shouts of the innumerable crowd of citizens collected at the gladiatorial games or of the verses made by the people? Or of the extraordinary applause at the sight of the statue of Pompeius? And at that sight of the two tribunes of the people who are opposed to you? Are these things a feeble indication of the incredible unanimity of the entire Roman people? What more? Did the applause at the games of Apollo, or, I should rather say, testimony and judgement there given by the Roman people, appear to you of small importance? Oh! Happy are those men who, though they themselves were unable to be present on account of the violence of arms, still were present in spirit, and had a place in the breasts and hearts of the Roman people.

It is evident from this first Philippic that Cicero is vying to be the leader of the political opposition. Look at how brazenly he enlists the audience in his cause. In mocking Mark Antony’s deafness to popular opinion, Cicero casts himself as the tribune of the people. It is a reminder that the verdict on a public speech in a democracy is settled by the audience. This is an indispensable lesson for every speaker, at every level. It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you.

Mark Antony reacted with fury to the accusation that he disdained his audience, and seventeen days later delivered a withering attack on Cicero’s career in the Senate. Cicero did not attend because his safety could not be guaranteed. Fearful for his life, he published the Second Philippic as a pamphlet and issued instructions through his friend Atticus for it to be circulated carefully and narrowly. The Second Philippic is written as though it were a speech, with plentiful references to the setting, the occasion, to Antony’s dandy dress sense, and it contains a direct request for a fair hearing. But it was never actually delivered. In his Tenth Satire, Juvenal says that the Second Philippic is Cicero’s masterpiece, the eloquent testament that cost him his life. Antony ordered that Cicero’s right hand, the one which had written the Philippics, be amputated. For good measure the head which had devised and spoken them was cut off. That severed head and hand were nailed to the Rostra on the Forum to discourage imitation. Legend has it that Antony’s wife Fulvia stabbed her hairpins through the dead man’s tongue, which gives chilling meaning to the cliché dangerous rhetoric. Cicero left behind a lament for this and for all times: ‘O tempora, O mores’ – ‘Oh, the times! Oh, the manners!’

Cicero once said that ‘the real quality of an orator can only be deduced from the practical results his speech-making obtains’. By that strict measure the Philippics must count as a failure. Any speaker who ends up with his head and hand nailed to the Rostra is obliged to conclude that the speech might have gone better. Mark Antony went on, with Marcus Lepidus and Caesar’s nephew Octavian, to form a dictatorship known as the Second Triumvirate. The harmony of the group, though, was not helped by Mark Antony, who was married to Octavian’s sister, beginning his affair with Cleopatra. Civil war broke out in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt, where they committed suicide together.

The republic did not end well, but Cicero left a legacy unrivalled in the field. Time and again the speeches of the American republic invoke the spirit of Cicero. It is there in Benjamin Franklin’s defence of the constitution, with all its faults. It is there in Thomas Jefferson’s appeal for exact and equal liberty for all. It is there in Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to popular power and in Barack Obama’s quest for the perfect state of the union. John Quincy Adams said that American democracy had been ‘spoken into existence’. Cicero was one of the scriptwriters.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Equal and Exact Justice to All Men

First Inaugural Address, Washington DC

4 March 1801

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was a Founding Father and the third president of the United States, serving two terms from 1801 to 1809. As the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson stood, against Alexander Hamilton, for a version of the American republic in which the power of the federal government would be limited.

Born and educated in Virginia, where he trained as a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson was asked, in 1776, to draft a statement describing to the world America’s break with Britain. The resulting Declaration of Independence, which ‘affirmed the natural rights of humanity to protect itself from arbitrary and autocratic forms of government’, was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776.

For the rest of the American Revolution, Jefferson served as a governor of Virginia, in which position he remains rightly renowned for his Statute on Religious Freedom. He then succeeded Benjamin Franklin as America’s minister to France and, during five years spent in Paris, witnessed the start of the French Revolution, which he regarded – wrongly as it turned out – as an extension of the example lately offered by America. Upon his return, Jefferson accepted President George Washington’s request that he serve as the nation’s first secretary of state.

Jefferson in Cabinet participated in the most creative tension in democratic history. His own preference for a weak constitution that gave the greater power to the states ran into the objections of Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the Treasury, who wanted a stronger mandate for the federal government. The conflict was managed, rather than resolved, with the formation of the young republic’s first opposition party, Jefferson’s Republicans.

This speech is how Jefferson chose to inaugurate his first presidency, with a statement of his mission in politics. As president after 1801 Jefferson set about reducing government, cutting the budgets of the army and navy and closing diplomatic missions. He was elected for a second term and in 1807 signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves – this despite being himself a slave owner and fathering a child with one of his slaves.

Jefferson retired in 1809, aged sixty-five, but went on to found the University of Virginia. He died on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of his Declaration of Independence.

Friends and fellow citizens, called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favour with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire … Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties.

Jefferson’s modesty would be excessively false were it not for his political purpose. His intention is not so much to diminish himself, but rather – like Cicero in the Temple of Concord – to venerate the republic, beside which any individual must appear small. Jefferson, in fact, had named Cicero as an influence on his drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

We know, from the three handwritten texts that survive in Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress, that he amended his script to make it more overtly republican with each iteration. His first sentence originally read ‘executive magistrate’. The final version instead lauds ‘the executive office’, which transfers the honour from himself, the president, to the office, the presidency.

Jefferson sought to embody this humility in the spartan festivities of the day. Even though he had done so much to bring the city of Washington DC into being, Jefferson eschewed the splendid parades that had inaugurated George Washington and John Adams. In the Senate Room, the only completed room in the new Capitol, he dressed in the habit of a plain citizen without any badge of office or ceremonial sword. There was no festive ball afterwards either. Legend has it that after his lecture he walked back to his boarding house, where he stood in line for dinner to be served as usual.

The absence of flourish in the speech was taken to excess in the manner of delivery. Jefferson’s tone was so low that, apart from those at the front, most of the audience had to read what he said in the Washington papers the following morning. Before electronic amplification, to be audible to a sizeable audience was no easy task. Early presidents scattered emissaries around the crowd, whispering the text as the principal spoke.

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

This call for unity sounds routine today. Kennedy said it; Obama said it; every president says it. But Jefferson needs to say it. Technology has quickened politics but it hasn’t coarsened it much and the election of 1800 remains one of the nastiest in American history. Under the pretext of articulating differing destinies for the republic, the two candidates, John Adams, the New England lawyer from a modest background, and Jefferson, the lofty Virginia intellectual, conducted an acrimonious campaign. Jefferson accused Adams of being pro-English, quite an accusation to level at a Founding Father of the republic, and Adams countered by mocking Jefferson’s association with the violence of revolutionary France and by revealing that Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. When Jefferson won, Adams churlishly left Washington DC before the new president spoke. Hence, if the emollient tone is laid on thick that’s because a lot of mollifying was required.

Jefferson worked hard on this pivotal section, balancing minority rights against the will of the majority. The tactic worked. The Federalists of the time praised Jefferson’s caution and wisdom. James Monroe wrote that the speech conciliated the opposing party. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which a speaker can be pinned down. Instead, Jefferson elevates his language into the floridly abstract. This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say.

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world’s best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

This passage is the fault line of the American republic, the substance of the dispute between Jefferson and Hamilton about where power should lie. It is the great political cleavage that persists in our time: Democrats for a little more government, Republicans for a little less. There is no easy philosophical reconciliation, so Jefferson does what good rhetoric often does. He slides over the difference with a well-balanced, high-minded, euphonious sentence – ‘We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists’ – and evokes the virtues of the nation which belong to Americans of any persuasion. All presidents do this. Barack Obama said there were no blue states or red states, there was just the United States. Jefferson had more call to do it than most, as he was nursing an infant democracy that was prone to tantrum.

Note how unequivocal and confident Jefferson is in declaring the United States to have the strongest form of government on earth. Then, cleverly, at the end of this section he brings the people to his side, drawing the implicit contrast that I, the Republican, trust the people, whereas you, the Federalist, arrogate power to the state. He concludes with a vivid rhetorical question about whether we have found angels in the form of kings to govern men, then adds the redundant answer that history will be the judge. Or to put the effect more bluntly but less poetically: No, we haven’t and we never will. This is why we need to curtail power; it is why we need democratic institutions. Because men are not angels.

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honour and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter – with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens – a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

To us, wearied by repetition at a time when democracy can feel old and worn, a claim to American superiority sounds arrogant. But in early American speeches this was a claim of hopeful naivety and youthful excitement in an era when democracy was a novel experiment at home and a rarity anywhere else. So look past that claim towards the really suggestive words here, which are ‘to close the circle of our felicities’. As well as begging the listener to pay attention, the phrase concludes a profound point: wise government is defined more by what it prevents than either what it does or what it permits. This passage could be read as the origin of the American suspicion of the encroachment of the federal government, and it is that too, but the point runs deeper. Perhaps the greatest achievement of democratic politics is that public authority is limited to create the space for private autonomy. It closes the circle of our felicities.

The circle closes here, though, over a dark question. It is inconceivable surely, as he drafted the speech in the two weeks before the Inauguration, that Jefferson did not reflect on his slaves. Not for them the bread they have earned. The fellow-feeling and empathy of the rest of this passage hardly seems consistent with such a blind spot, although we can also hear a vocabulary of politics that seems lost to us now. It would be a brave politician today who would wish for happiness and blessings, but it was an idiom that came easily to Jefferson and his peers. Political conversations are drier than they were and Jefferson has something to teach us. Blessings and happiness should find their way back into our rhetoric.

About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people – a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labour may be lightly burdened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

This passage is the last word on democratic liberties. Try editing it. Try cutting. It is all but impossible to take out a single phrase without doing grievous harm to the whole. Jefferson provides the most comprehensive spoken list since Pericles of the attributes of democracy. This is democracy’s evergreen. It is a checklist of institutions and a standard against which to measure how close a nation approximates to the ideal of popular power. The most resonant phrase in the speech – ‘equal and exact justice for all men’ – is almost a direct quotation from the Funeral Oration of Pericles. The quotation is almost lost in the litany of virtues, but this is a supreme definition of minority rights which shines in the text today as much as it did then. Of course, it wasn’t exactly true. Not every person in America was a bearer of rights. But that does not mean this passage should be thought of as hypocritical. It’s not; it’s a statement of an ideal, a foundation myth and a utopian aspiration. As he did in the Declaration of Independence, when he simply asserted that all men were created equal and were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson is setting a standard. America didn’t meet it then; no nation does now. But the claim that liberal democracy represents the terminus of political philosophy rests on the list of popular freedoms contained in this passage. The political battle to instantiate them in existing societies goes on but, philosophically, this is the last word.

I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favour which bring him into it … I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts … Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favourable issue for your peace and prosperity.

There is a crucial wisdom about politics as a career here which is also captured in Enoch Powell’s less accurate axiom that all political careers end in failure. Some careers do pass through success but no success is ever final; politics must go on. The point Jefferson is making here is that the political capital of a leader is at its highest at the beginning of his tenure, when experience is least, and statecraft at its least developed. The statesman’s learning and his popularity run counter to each other. As wisdom gathers, popularity declines. See Tony Blair’s A Journey for a dramatic recent example of the process. Barack Obama is an example of a swell of general hope giving way to specific disappointment. Donald Trump will be subject to the same law of political inflation and deflation.

Jefferson makes a plea that sounds today all too contemporary. He asks forgiveness for his mistakes, and appeals to those who may not be able to see the whole picture to forbear from judgement. Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of modern political culture is the rush to judge on the assumption that every error must be self-serving. Elegantly, Jefferson asks here for a lost art of democratic politics: patience and understanding. It is a lesson we would do well to heed, though we have forgotten how to do so.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Government of the People, by the People, for the People

The Gettysburg Address

19 November 1863

Abraham Lincoln said simply in a sentence something it can take whole books to complicate. If there were a manifesto for democratic politics, Lincoln’s most famous line might be too long to be the title, but it would certainly offer the subtitle. Given that he could cram so much into ten words, it is a wonder he needed all of 272 for the whole speech.

Abraham Lincoln was not, however, the man who really delivered the Gettysburg Address. That honour goes to the forgotten orator Edward Everett, who was top of the bill on the Pennsylvania battlefield in November 1863, to speak the funeral eulogy after the poets Longfellow, Whittier and Bryant turned the invitation down. Lincoln’s task was to come on afterwards and do what were, by comparison with Everett’s lavish address, parish notices. It is the greatest example of stealing the show in all the arts.

Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) served as the sixteenth president of the United States of America from March 1861 until his assassination by a resentful Confederate-supporting actor, John Wilkes Booth, in Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865. He is one of the icons of American democracy, famously immortalised at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. His is the name most often summoned in the speeches of the presidents who followed him. He is the re-founding father of the American constitution.

Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky, the son of a frontiersman. It was, according to Lincoln himself, ‘a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods’. It was not a literate childhood, and in later life he thought himself lucky to be able to ‘read, write and cipher’. Political opponents would later patronise him by wondering how a man of such unpromising literary beginnings could command the language as he did. The answer is bound to be a mystery, especially as he was a self-effacing man. In the words of the writer and diplomat John Bigelow: ‘He [Lincoln] was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him.’

Lincoln’s political career began when he joined the Illinois state legislature in 1834 and, self-taught in the law, was admitted to the Bar in 1837. ‘His ambition’, said his law partner, ‘was a little engine that knew no rest.’ This led Lincoln to a term in the House of Representatives between 1847 and 1849. His political zeal was awakened by the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed states and territories to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.

A reputation as an eloquent opponent of slavery helped Lincoln secure the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1860. It is also the source of his indelible reputation as one of the great presidents of the American republic. Lincoln’s moral stature on slavery infused his leadership throughout the Civil War and helped to preserve the Union during a spell of potentially terminal peril. As if all that were not enough, there is something else to reinforce the abiding myth of Abraham Lincoln in American life. He is the frontiersman who made it to the White House. He is the incarnate American dream. The man who showed that virtue derives from public service rather than noble birth.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

The first thing you notice about the Gettysburg Address is its length; just 272 words compressed into ten sentences. It challenges every other writer to cut. The famous final words encapsulate the whole in just ten words. Of the 272 words, 204 are of a single syllable, mostly of Anglo-Saxon or Norman derivation, like ordinary speech. High political rhetoric until Lincoln had tended to look to Rome or Greece, for both structure and vocabulary. The phrase ‘conceived in liberty’ is an echo of Cicero’s argument that the only constitution in which a citizen can flourish is a republic. But stylistically, Lincoln here exemplifies the link between successful oratory and plain speech. Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights.

The entire text can be read out in under two minutes, and the concision is all the more marked by the fact that the audience had waited so long for it. The procession that had escorted Lincoln to the field had been greatly delayed. Everett, the day’s main orator, then took his time getting to the platform. Before he spoke there was a lengthy prayer and some music, and then he spoke for all of two hours. By the time Lincoln rose to the lectern, the audience had been on its feet for close to four hours.

It was worth the wait. The opening words are a date spoken in a musical cadence, but also more than that. ‘Fourscore and seven years’ takes the listener back from 1863 to 1776, the moment of the Declaration of Independence, rather than to 1791, the signing of the Constitution. Lincoln is making a critical point: he is saying that the ideals of the revolution have been violated in the Civil War. If the war is to honour the dead it must be fought for a purpose higher merely than preserving the Union. It must hark back to the founding idea that ‘all men are created equal’. Without once mentioning the word, Lincoln is talking about slavery. In January of 1863 Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery is nowhere in his text but it is everywhere.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

The repetition of the word ‘nation’, which recurs five times, shows what, and how much, Lincoln believes to be at stake. The words ‘nation’ and ‘birth’ share a common root and often come back together at moments of heightened rhetoric. As early as the second sentence, Lincoln upsets the equilibrium he has established in the first. The nation, defined in the respect for the equal moral worth of all, is placed in peril in a single crisp sentence.

To say so much so quickly requires complete control, which raises the question of how a text so learned could be composed by a man of such jejune education. Writers are often asked where their ideas come from. The best answer may be Larkin’s: ‘pure genius’. Fitzgerald perhaps came closer to the truth when he wrote, in a letter to his daughter which described exactly what he never did himself, that a good style forms through good reading. Lincoln is known to have read Aesop’s Fables. Robert Burns was his favourite poet and he knew both the Bible and Shakespeare. There is, though, some magical property in verbal composition that can make a novelty out of a reading list, and Lincoln had that mesmerising quality.

We know that the words are Lincoln’s own because we have the testimony of his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who saw the text, written in ink, in Lincoln’s hand. Nicolay also points to an important truth when he says that Lincoln wrote half the speech the day before he left Washington and the other half when he arrived in Gettysburg. Political speech has a short half-life. It goes stale fast and should therefore be composed as close to the deadline as possible. Bad writers are apt to think they will get better by taking longer, but taking pains can simply add to the agony.

This is quite different from the myth, which first appeared in a 1906 book by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews called The Perfect Tribute, that Lincoln was so slapdash that he composed the speech, literally, on the back of an envelope. The Gettysburg Address attracts myths. Harriet Beecher Stowe also claimed that Lincoln had written the speech in a few moments, and Andrew Carnegie insisted that Lincoln had used his pen. Don’t believe a word of it. It is clear from the finished version, let alone from the surviving manuscripts, that, though the craft cut close to the deadline, Lincoln himself worked on it until he had the desired effect.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Lincoln is taking a risk with this speech. He is speaking at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four months after the Confederacy forces were defeated there by the Union armies in the only battle in the war to be fought on Northern soil. More than 40,000 men had been wounded and 5,000 had perished. Most had been hastily buried in shallow graves just where they had fallen. The citizens of Gettysburg, led by Judge David Wills, had purchased seventeen acres of ground on Cemetery Hill. The graves were arranged in a semicircle and a speaking platform erected to face away from the buried dead so that the gathered would not defile their memory by trampling on the graves.

The setting could scarcely have been more sombre, yet Lincoln’s references to the gravity of the day are rapid and perfunctory. He does not, as Everett had before him, recite a roll-call in remembrance of the American dead. No sooner has he read this parish notice than he changes the subject, in a shift reminiscent of the Funeral Oration of Pericles, from the individual to the nation. The speech is sprinkled with the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation ‘brought forth’, ‘conceived’, and a system of government that shall not ‘perish’. The dead of the battle have become the nation incarnate.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

This is as clever a transition as you will find in all public speech. The triple formulation ‘we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow’ is a routine rhetorical device. The language is resonant but the cliché is really transformed by what Lincoln does next. He picks up the word ‘consecrate’ to note that the combatants on this ground have done more in deed than he can ever do with words. Then, even better, he repeats the idea of dedication but alters its meaning. The first instance refers to the dedication of sacred ground; the second implores the people of the United States to complete the revolution. A smooth transition is one of a speech’s technical problems and Lincoln here packs it into a single word. Surreptitiously, with a disguised repetition, he slides from the dedication of a memory to the dedication to a cause. With subtle brilliance that no listener will notice, Lincoln has moved from the past to the future, the direction of every good speech.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln shows that the only rule in writing is that there is no rule that cannot be broken if the speaker retains control of the words. This single sentence is set up and paid off with four succeeding clauses, all referring back to the beginning. In the hands of a poor writer it would be too long, but the broken rhythm enhances the effect when the flourish comes. Speeches should accelerate, intellectually and audibly, as they come to their end. The repetition of ‘dedication’ enlists the dead in Lincoln’s cause as he states, much as we shall see Pericles doing, that they died for the purpose he is applauding. Whether they did or not is really a moot point.

The only extempore addition to the script was the phrase ‘under God’. It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for Lincoln, but he kept the change in all three copies of the address he prepared later. The phrase under God became controversial again in 2013 when, in a recording he made of the Gettysburg Address, Barack Obama omitted the improvised phrase. This loosed a volley of criticism that Obama was censoring and secularising Lincoln’s words. In fact he did nothing of the sort. There are five extant versions of the Gettysburg Address, only three of which contain the phrase ‘under God’. Obama was reading from Nicolay’s draft, the first draft, which does not include it, because it was prepared before delivery.

At the end, Lincoln elevates the pitch even further. The question is now not just the ending of slavery but the very survival of democratic representation. Government of, for and by the people: the whole subject in one memorable phrase. It probably wasn’t Lincoln’s coinage, though. The prologue to John Wycliffe’s first English edition of the Bible in 1384 includes the phrase: ‘This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people’, which seems too close not to be the source.

Lincoln’s language may seem biblically dramatic to us now, yet it is considered to be a turning point in the nature of public speech. Before Gettysburg, orators tended to speak like Edward Everett, who said, among many purple passages, ‘standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labours of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature’. There were 13,000 words in that vein. Here is the ancient battle between the Attic and the Asiatic styles, brought forward twenty centuries onto a battlefield in Pennsylvania. Oratory changed that day and Lincoln, in a speech far plainer than Everett’s grand-style classicism, changed it.

Not that the speech was wonderfully received. Lincoln was heard in silence. Not many listeners realised they were in the presence of a speech that would be one of the first in every anthology. It took time for the verdict to settle that Lincoln had delivered a lapidary masterpiece. Its brevity, which had caused consternation on the day in Gettysburg, has since come to be seen as poetic concision rather than short-changing the audience. Lincoln gave meaning to the terrible sacrifice of battle. He defined again the purpose of the United States of America. He gave voice to democracy and equality, the foundations of the nation which he had laid once again.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You

Washington DC

20 January 1961

John F. Kennedy (1917–63) feeds the American desire for myth. In life he defined American modernity, an image that death petrified and preserved. His assassination in 1963 produced the first tumult of conspiracy theories which, half a century later, threaten to overwhelm the quest for truth. More Americans believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of a conspiracy than disbelieve it.

In 1960, at the age of forty-three, Kennedy had become the first child of the twentieth century to become president, the second-youngest man to take that office after the 42-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. Kennedy remains the only Roman Catholic to have been president and the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize, for Profiles in Courage.

Kennedy was one of nine children born into a Massachusetts family of Irish lineage that had gone into state politics. In 1938, he came to London with his father, who had been appointed as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s. He was in London on 1 September 1939, the fateful day that Germany invaded Poland, and attended the debates in the House of Commons in which war was announced. His Harvard thesis, about the British role in the Munich agreement, became a best-seller under the title Why England Slept.

The war changed Kennedy’s life. His first attempt to enter military service was scuppered when he was disqualified for service due to chronic lower-back pain. It was only after months of exercise to strengthen the muscles that he joined the US Naval Reserve in September 1941. War service gave him a stature that cannot be earned any other way. In August 1943, Kennedy’s navy patrol boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. The crew abandoned the boat and swam to a small island three miles away. Kennedy injured his back in the collision but still towed one of his men, who was badly burned, through the water with a life-jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart Medal. On 1 March 1945 he was honourably discharged from the Navy Reserve with the full rank of lieutenant.

The war changed Kennedy’s life in another way too. The mantle of future president had always been laid on his oldest brother, but the death of Joe Kennedy in 1944, killed on a mission over the English Channel at the age of twenty-nine, meant that his father’s hopes for high office were transferred to Jack. Kennedy’s first job after the war, arranged by his father, who knew the proprietor William Randolph Hearst, was as a special correspondent for Hearst newspapers. In that position he was in Berlin, the scene of his own later triumph with a speech (see chapter 2), to cover the Potsdam Conference.

Kennedy returned to America and set out on his political course. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 and in the Senate from 1953 until 1960, in which year he became the Democrat nominee for president. In the general election of 1960, Kennedy won a tight victory over his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. The young president came to power bearing vast domestic hopes. He had plans for ending privation and poverty, for action in the cause of equal civil rights, federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly and a programme of economic stimulus, most of which would fall to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The 1964 Civil Rights Act passed in part because Johnson invoked the memory of his slain predecessor.

Kennedy’s short time in office was dominated, as the tenure of most presidents is, by foreign affairs. His first error was to overreact to a Cold War speech by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in early 1961 which poisoned the atmosphere of the Vienna Summit that year. Kennedy announced in Vienna that any treaty between Moscow and East Berlin which affected American access rights in West Berlin would be regarded as an act of war. The Russians proceeded nevertheless, and the prelude to war, with the threat of nuclear confrontation, began.

The next site of the struggle with communism was Cuba. Following Fidel Castro’s victory against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, Kennedy approved a plan he had inherited from President Eisenhower and ordered the invasion of the island using CIA-trained Cuban exiles. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on the night of 16/17 April 1961 ended in humiliation when the invaders were killed or captured. What took the world to the brink, though, were the events of the following October 1962, when the CIA took pictures of ballistic missile sites being built by the Soviet Union in Cuba. Against the advice of some hawks on the National Security Council, Kennedy settled on a naval quarantine. The world trembled on the cusp of nuclear war, but after a perilous period the Russians backed down and removed the weapons.

The next domino to fall was Vietnam. Kennedy vastly increased American involvement in Vietnam, but found no lasting solution and handed on an unresolved problem to his successor. It is still disputed, and will never be settled, whether America’s entanglement in Vietnam would have happened had Kennedy lived longer.

Everyone remembers where they were on the day that C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died. It was 22 November 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, shot by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. After just two years and ten months in office, he became the youngest president to die. Perhaps because of that early death, Kennedy remains an icon of American politics.

The light has flooded in on his private life since his death. News has spread about his alleged infidelities, such as spending a week at Bing Crosby’s house with Marilyn Monroe, and his illnesses, which were at times critical. Perhaps Kennedy’s brief presidency would not have been possible in this more prurient age. There are plenty of commentators on American politics – Gore Vidal and Arthur J. Schlesinger, for example – who date the decline in trust in the political establishment to the death of John F. Kennedy.

None of the revelations appear to have besmirched his reputation. The Kennedy White House exists in a sepia reality in which hope is forever young. The culture and the politics never seemed so well aligned. Kennedy’s approval rating remains the highest of any American president. It is now impossible to read the speech that follows without a retrospective sense of foreboding. This was Kennedy’s only inaugural address, and it cannot be read now, as is also the case with Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address, free from the shadow of what is about to befall him. On his grave at Arlington Cemetery in Washington DC there is a plaque on which many of the lines from this speech are engraved.

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end as well as a beginning – signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

Before he began writing, Kennedy insisted that his speechwriter Ted Sorensen read all the previous inaugural addresses. Sorensen concluded that the best speech of all was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and resolved to keep his drafting simple, or at least to prune the finished text of ornamentation. A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. Sorensen has said that ‘no Kennedy speech ever underwent so many drafts. Each paragraph was reworded, reworked and reduced’. This opening sentence began as: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but the sacrament of democracy’ and was then changed to: ‘We celebrate today not a victory of party but a convention of freedom’. The final completed version has a better balance and does the required thing – required for Kennedy as it had been for Jefferson – which is to bring the nation back together. The 1960 election had been one of the closest of recent times. The difference in votes between the two candidates was tiny, although Kennedy emerged with a majority in the electoral college. America was, as it usually is, split between two competing visions of how it should be governed. Kennedy thus signals at once the function of the inaugural address, which is to heal fresh wounds.

The campaign had contained a famous incident that shows us that rhetoric is visual as well as oral. Kennedy and Nixon had taken part in the first televised presidential debates. The verdict of the radio audience was that the debate had been a draw. If pressed, that audience would probably have awarded the debate to Nixon. The television audience took a clear and differing view. Nixon looked tense and ill at ease, perspiring under a heavy five o’clock shadow. The professionally made up Kennedy was by contrast a picture of relaxation. This marks the moment television began to play a big part in American politics, although the impact of presidential debates on the outcome is exaggerated. It is not likely that many since 1960 have made much difference.

Kennedy, in fact, did give an inaugural speech that would fit neatly into the television schedule. He was determined to keep it short. ‘It’s more effective that way,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want people to think I’m a windbag.’ At under 2,000 words, 1961’s was the shortest inaugural speech since 1905. It worked: as Harry S. Truman said afterwards, ‘it was short, to the point, and in language anyone can understand … Even I could understand it, and therefore, the people can.’

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

The central theme of the speech is time passing: a new generation has arrived. This rather empty chronological point was given substance by the fact that Kennedy sat next to his predecessor, the seventy-year-old Dwight Eisenhower, once the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe while Kennedy had been a navy lieutenant in the Pacific. The young men Kennedy proposed to bring into his administration were visible behind the new president as he spoke.

The final text had not only undergone many mutations in the drafting. It had also had a number of previous airings on the campaign trail. Repetition of this sort would be assailed as plagiarism or lack of imagination now. In his acceptance speech in Los Angeles, for example, Kennedy had said ‘man … has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over’, which is a less polished version of what we have here. The line ‘it is time, in short, for a new generation of Americans’ has here acquired the light of a metaphorical torch.

This opening signals something unusual for a presidential Inaugural. Kennedy has ordered this speech to be exclusively about foreign policy. Domestic questions, which were plentiful and problematic – a third recession in seven years, the highest unemployment for two decades and the oppression of black Americans – were weeded out. This is the origin of the flat phrase ‘today at home and around the world’, which has the air of not being at all crafted. It was in fact inserted by Kennedy at the last moment because he suddenly took fright at the realisation that, as a speech devoted to foreign affairs, his Inaugural might read like an evasion on civil rights at home. The effect of seeking to have it both ways is that it doesn’t work. Trying to patch the omission makes the absence of domestic topics glaring. It would have been better to leave out the reference, as his speechwriter had, because then the audience appreciates that the omission was a choice. A perfunctory inclusion makes the audience feel that it must have been an error.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge – and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do – for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder. To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom – and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

The survival of liberty is, as a subject for a speech, ‘nobly conceived’, as John Steinbeck put it at the time. But words are close to deeds for a president, and Kennedy has, ever since then, faced the accusation that he locked himself into the stance of the cold warrior in the short time he governed with the pledge to ‘pay any price, bear any burden’ in the defence of liberty. Critics have drawn a straight line that runs through the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the peril of the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond.

Kennedy’s rhetoric has both a lineage and a legacy. The lineage runs in the commitment to liberating the oppressed around the globe, which is an echo of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism. The legacy ensues in the echoes from 1963 that are audible in the first inaugural addresses of both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, and in George W. Bush’s rhetoric against tyranny in his second Inaugural, after 9/11. ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ That could have been Kennedy; in fact it was Bush.

Bear in mind, though, that the calculation changes over time, and the same words in defence of liberty have one charge in 1961 and quite another forty years later. For Kennedy the threat to American liberty was real and domestic, as nuclear annihilation would respect no boundaries. By the time Clinton and Bush come to make speeches in the name of the liberal international order the demands are different. The question has become solely whether America should be out in the world helping to police liberty. But here Sorensen’s writing is as sonorous as anywhere, and we see one of the dangers of rhetoric, which is that it can run away with the speaker. The words have a grandeur which, in the hindsight of the troubles to come, is skirting closer to hubris than Kennedy might have meant. Indeed, a famous later speech, at the American University in Washington in 1963, treated a similar topic in a much more emollient fashion.

Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course – both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war. So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms – and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah – to ‘undo the heavy burdens … [and] let the oppressed go free’. And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavour, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

That opening ‘finally’ must make the speechwriter cringe: we’re only halfway through. It is the final part of its own section but it still sounds the only false note in the writing, which is otherwise perfectly controlled. The credit for that is due to Sorensen, who acted as editor-in-chief of the many contributions that Kennedy commissioned. Solicited suggestions came in from the columnists Walter Lippmann and Joseph Kraft, civil rights advisers Harris Wofford and Louis Martin, and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, along with a pile of unsolicited material. Secretary of State Dean Rusk added phrases. Billy Graham sent a list of possible biblical quotations, as did the leader of Washington’s Jewish Community Council, Isaac Franck. Sorensen held the pen, though, and Galbraith, in particular, was disappointed that so few of his resounding phrases made the final cut. Years later he rather forlornly claimed that among the surviving words of his contribution was the simple refrain: ‘Let us …’

This is the passage in which Kennedy moves the argument on from rigid Cold War binary opposition. The speech does contain plenty of counterpoints to his deliberate show of strength – ‘civility is not a sign of weakness’; the United Nations is ‘our last best hope’; and the need for ‘a grand global alliance’ against ‘the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself’. It would therefore be wrong to read this speech as nothing other than a resilient text of a cold warrior, although that is the essential context. In 1957 the Soviet Union had launched the first space capsule to orbit the earth. West Berlin had been threatened by a Soviet ultimatum. South Vietnam had been menaced by a guerrilla campaign from the communist regime in Hanoi. America felt ill-equipped for the challenge and wanted a strong response. That speech about the peril is in there certainly, but so too are the caveats and the entreaties. Kennedy’s message to Khrushchev is clear. He will stand against armed encroachments, but he wants to lower the temperature with negotiations and cooperation.

In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’ – a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?

With the claim that the future rests in your hands rather than mine, Kennedy drops the first hint of the line that will forever after be the title of this speech. It is notable that citizen action has not featured thus far. Suddenly the speech switches focus, from the world to America, from the president to the citizen body. This was a regular Kennedy theme. The president was irritated by his party’s comfort-zone tendency to argue that government will fix social problems. He thought the Democrats were too ready to reach for the state. The speech he had given at the Democratic Convention, which became known as his ‘New Frontier’ speech, was notable for this reason. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak’, he said on that occasion, ‘is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.’

Kennedy dramatises this switch, and this focus, in the writing. He made a conscious decision during the drafting to strike out all uses of the word ‘I’. He also eschews one obvious course, which is to make himself the embodiment of the new generation. Instead, new times will be defined by a compact between the governor and the governed. This is the irony in the existence of the prestigious John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard: an academy devoted to the craft of using state power is named after the president who is famous for wanting to devolve his power to the people. This evocation of ‘we’ over ‘I’ leads perfectly to the theme of his peroration, which is that power is dispersed. Power resides with the people. This is a way of asking for popular support and a reminder of the central virtue that democracy exhibits over other forms of government. It is only in a democracy that the people would be asked to contribute. In other forms of polity they would be told.

This was also a way of diverting attention from Kennedy’s relative youth and inexperience, which had been a problem for him during the presidential campaign. The era of Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Adenauer was fresh in the memory. By making a speech of such gravity, and by drafting the people as partners, Kennedy is, in effect, saying that he is ready to serve in dangerous times.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

The famous chiasmus comes at the end of the speech. In this formulation the words will last, but this was by no means their first airing. This was another line that had been tested on the road. In a televised campaign address in September 1960 Kennedy had said: ‘We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country, all of us.’ By the time of the Inaugural, Kennedy has polished the words for effect. He told Sorensen that he was worried that the ending sounded very much like the one he had given in a recent speech in the Massachusetts legislature. Three other campaign speeches, in Anchorage, Detroit and Washington, had all included a variant of the same idiom.

The famous line – ‘ask not …’ – was an echo of Jefferson’s belief, which he took from the ancient governments, that taking part is an important aspect of American citizenship. The words were an instant inspiration as soon as it was uttered. Legions of young Americans joined the effort to fight poverty in America’s inner cities. The Peace Corps took many volunteers overseas. By the end of Kennedy’s presidency, more than 7,000 mostly young Americans were working in underdeveloped countries around the world.

For all that it is a wonderfully poetic sentence and a fine sentiment, and at the risk of heresy, it is a slightly odd conclusion to a foreign policy speech. What can any individual really do, in the context in which this advice is offered? This would have been a more comprehensible counsel in a speech about domestic policy, where active citizen engagement is part of the solution. Quite how the individual was to affect the conduct of the Cold War was less obvious.

However, it didn’t feel like that at the time. The 1961 Inaugural shows how occasion matters to the verdict of greatness. This speech is not as important, historically, as the televised address from October 1962 in which the president revealed to the world the secret presence of Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles on Cuba. It is, though, the speech that is best remembered. The line it is remembered for is this one. It is the naming of popular power that makes it memorable. Kennedy gets into a magnificent rhetorical phrase one of the great insights into democratic politics, which is that it needs an active citizen body. It is the conclusion to a different speech, if we want to be fastidious about the structure. It is a brilliant conclusion nonetheless.

BARACK OBAMA

I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America

Grant Park, Chicago

7 November 2012

No matter what he achieved in office, Barack Obama changed the world simply by who he was. The forty-fourth president of the United States was the first black leader of a nation no more than a generation after it had been segregated by race. The shock proved too much for some opponents who confected a conspiracy that Obama was not actually American, a nonsense ended by the production of his birth certificate. More than any American leader since John F. Kennedy, Obama embodied, and spoke about, the idea of hope. Even more than Kennedy he owed his elevation in politics to the pitch and power of his rhetoric. In an age when oratory was deemed to have collapsed into stock phrases, Obama rescued the trade.

Barack Obama was born on 4 August 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a Kenyan intellectual and a white teenager from Kansas. After briefly living in Indonesia, he was raised by his grandparents in Hawaii. He studied law at Columbia and Harvard and worked as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago. Obama’s political break came in 1996 with a seat in the Illinois state senate, followed by a US Senate seat in 2004. His book The Audacity of Hope, which prefigures many of the themes expressed in his speeches, became a best-seller. Political aficionados had spotted his rhetorical brilliance, but it was still somehow from nowhere that he ran, in 2008, a flawless campaign to beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic presidential nomination. In a nod to the classical origins of the American Republic, Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in front of a reconstruction of a Roman forum.

It is as yet early to assess Obama’s legacy as president, especially on foreign affairs, on which he was elected to pull America back from engagement. On this basis he was awarded a premature Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. As most presidents do, he found the world came to him even if he had not invited it in. Obama’s domestic record may stand the scrutiny of time. The American economy recovered on his watch from the financial crisis of 2008, but his claim to political memory is the Affordable Health Care Act. Every Democrat president has promised universal health care for America. Every one before Barack Obama failed to put anything into statute; Obama did. If even a cover version of his legislation survives its assault by his successor, Obama will be remembered as the Democrat who succeeded.

Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward. It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people. Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.

The first task in the instant aftermath of every election victory is to bind the nation. Obama does this by placing himself within the history of the republic and attaching it to the entire present nation. Election campaigns are, by their nature, divisive. The criticism that politics divides people is always wrong. People are divided. It is the nature of human beings to disagree. Politics is the means by which that division is recognised, negotiated and settled.

That is Obama’s opening and defining purpose in a speech that is a paean to politics itself. That central argument makes sense of the idea of perfecting the union. Obama, like Jefferson has before him, makes it clear that the process towards perfection will never end. It is, after all, only the pursuit of happiness that the constitution protects, not its accomplishment. The road is hard, the journey long, and success is never assured. The best resource that the public have in the eternal pursuit is to be as one, a single family brought together after the electoral verdict has been entered, as a single political community. The night of a general election realises and thwarts ambitions in an instant. The moment opens the crack. The task of the president is to let the light flood back in. That allows him to conclude that the best is yet to come.

I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics that tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym, or saw folks working late in a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you’ll discover something else. You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organiser who’s working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity. You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift. You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home. That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.

In its way one of the most quietly moving passages Obama has ever uttered. This is not the most dramatic speech he ever gave, nor the one that most directly stirs the emotions. Obama’s speech about race in 2008 and his victory speech the same year in Grant Park may be greater. His decision to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ after the murder of the Reverend Pinckney in Charleston in 2015 is one of the most affecting moments of public speech there is. Obama often sounds like he is singing; on that occasion he actually was.

But here, in this prosaic passage, Obama sets out a manifesto for politics and the hope it carries for progress. For someone viewed as a lyrical speaker, you might be surprised to find that, like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman, Obama has been speaking prose all his life. Mario Cuomo’s line that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose is quoted too often, not least because it’s wrong. Obama shows that politicians campaign in prose too, but that if the prose is good enough then the effect can be poetic.

More than any other speaker, with the exception of Martin Luther King, with whom he shares a vocal style, Obama needs to be heard rather than read. The way he slides down the consonants, dwelling on a word so that the stress imparts unmined meaning. The way he pauses, in complete control; his silences better than most people’s words. The way his voice contains the music and the rhythm in a vocal pattern that is closer to singing than to speaking and which is the secular transfer of an idiom that can be heard in the black churches.

The comparison with King is irresistible but it will stretch only so far. King’s language is biblical and showy: Asiatic in the ancient currency. Obama’s is Attic; simple and plain. Read a speech by Dr King out for yourself and you can electrify the air. It’s not as easy to do with a text by Obama. You can’t say it like he does. The case he is making – about the liberty of a nation under democratic government – contains a quiet beauty, but it takes Barack Obama to really make it sing.

But despite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future. We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers. A country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all the good jobs and new businesses that follow. We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet. We want to pass on a country that’s safe and respected and admired around the world, a nation that is defended by the strongest military on earth and the best troops this world has ever known. But also a country that moves with confidence beyond this time of war, to shape a peace that is built on the promise of freedom and dignity for every human being. We believe in a generous America, in a compassionate America, in a tolerant America, open to the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag. To the young boy on the south side of Chicago who sees a life beyond the nearest street corner. To the furniture worker’s child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president – that’s the future we hope for. That’s the vision we share. That’s where we need to go – forward. That’s where we need to go. Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path. By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock or solve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin.

Politics is difficult. Change is ground out slowly. It is often boring to do, let alone to watch. Slow, incremental improvement – the vital currency of democratic politics – is hard to turn to rhetorical gold. It takes great skill to turn ‘Let us proceed slowly and cautiously’ into a rallying cry, but this is what Obama does here. He is borrowing the form of the uplifting call-to-arms to play down expectations. Obama is a master of the glorious compromise, the beautiful consensus, the slow change that lifts the heart.

Obama restates America’s meritocratic idea of itself – a compliment America pays itself quite wrongly, its rates of social mobility being lower than most comparable democracies – in a reminder that the path to the ideal of the republic is never easy. It is an important dream. The idea that individual enterprise will gain its due reward is America’s foundation myth. It’s never been as true as it should be but it would be even less true than it is if there were no myth expressed at all. Obama, though, cleverly lays it on thin. Rhetoric is too easily an art that exaggerates, and Obama has more gifts in the art than most. Here, he is deliberately reining himself in, to make an important point about the application of power.

Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over. And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you’ve made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead. Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We’ve got more work to do. But that doesn’t mean your work is done. The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on. This country has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations. The freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for comes with responsibilities as well as rights. And among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.

The list of the items in the White House in-tray continues the theme of sober administration. It won’t be every anthology that immortalises the line ‘reforming the tax code’. I have a dream … of reforming the tax code. Still, this is what good politics does. It is also crucial for Obama, the high priest of vague hope, to make a claim to practical achievement. This is his recognition that expressions of hope not anchored in the world are frivolous.

Then Obama reverses the burden of proof, much as Kennedy had done with ‘ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ in his 1961 Inaugural. Presidential speeches, at least until Donald Trump, make up a single story, the story of American democracy. Presidents are conscious of each other, and no other country’s leaders quote their predecessors more than the Americans do. They are not citing heroes or sainted icons, as a Labour Party figure would with Clement Attlee or Aneurin Bevan. They are invoking the prestige of the office. Obama’s riff about what can be done by us rather than for us is more or less a direct lift from Kennedy, who was himself echoing Lincoln.

This is an elegant reminder of the limitations of politics and the narrow range of the state. Just as the law is upheld by voluntary compliance rather than by enforcement, so government makes demands of its citizens. Democracy is a culture and a pattern of behaviour. The early days of President Trump have shown us that this point applies to the president himself. The American constitution makes a fetish of its documents but it works in practice through the tacit understanding of the people who make it work. The president has to understand that if he pushes the executive order too far he is upsetting the balance. The formal mechanism of the court will strike back, but the very act of constitutional defiance is damaging. The checks and the balances are two separate things. The balance in the classical tradition is observed by the participants who are checked if they refuse to comply. Obama here defines the bond of America, the glory of the republic, as duty. The language is less ornate but, intellectually, this is classical. The ideas of the Roman republic are still intact.

I am hopeful tonight because I’ve seen the spirit at work in America. I’ve seen it in the family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbours, and in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see a friend lose a job. I’ve seen it in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb and in those SEALs who charged up the stairs into darkness and danger because they knew there was a buddy behind them watching their back. I’ve seen it on the shores of New Jersey and New York, where leaders from every party and level of government have swept aside their differences to help a community rebuild from the wreckage of a terrible storm. And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his eight-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukaemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for healthcare reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father’s story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own. And I know that every American wants her future to be just as bright. That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president.

The skilled speaker needs watching. This speech has been given with the aim of healing, and the first part of this passage is generously ecumenical. Vital categories are ticked off in a list of commendations: small-town American entrepreneurs, soldiers in the field, the US Navy. Note, in passing, how not saying something says it so effectively. The audience would all be aware that Obama is referring to the killing by Navy SEALs of Osama bin Laden, public enemy number one. The president doesn’t need to spell it out. The success of the mission is evoked the better for being modestly done. Nothing establishes standing as a national leader like defeating an enemy – this is Cicero and Mark Antony revisited – and Obama uses it politically to make a point in his own favour.

He slides from this triumph to praise for the cross-party response to a hurricane in New Jersey, and from there into a story about health care. The craft of a wide-ranging speech is to find a theme that strings together its disparate parts. There is always a risk of contrivance; there really is nothing to link Osama bin Laden, the wrecked New Jersey shore and the Obama government’s healthcare legislation. Obama therefore makes an emotional link, stringing the speech together with mood music.

In the thick of the pathos he sneaks in a trick. Healthcare was and is a great divide in American politics. Should it be a state or an individual responsibility? Only a moment before this, Obama had been advocating individual duty. With skilful manipulation of the mood and ordering of the topics, he swaps sides, clinching the case with a harrowing and irresistible story about the tears shed for a young girl’s salvaged future. With the audience now involved emotionally, Obama then leaps to cite the young girl as the definition of America. A partisan policy has become, in a few deft sentences: ‘That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president’. Rhetorical skill like that is brilliant but we need to be on the alert.

And tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America. And together with your help and God’s grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.

Ever since Barack Obama was lifted to the presidency of the United States on a high tide of language, politicians have wanted to be like him. They should pause and consider the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. There is, in fact, almost no end to the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. First, they are not president of the United States. Second, they do not have his gift for language. Third, they do not have his voice. Fourth and most important, they are not a black president in a nation still scarred by slavery, the silent subject of the Gettysburg Address. Obama touches on that question in the meritocratic section of this passage, and it is granted the greater force because he is saying it. A black man becoming the president of the United States of America is one of the greatest stories ever told in all the annals of politics.

Martin Luther King’s vision has not yet been achieved in full, but it would take a hard heart to suggest that Obama’s presidency is not one act in the drama of his dream. This is the context when Obama speaks and it lends historic weight to his every word. None of this would apply if your task is to present the strategic objectives to the sales team or if you are on in the just-after-lunch slot discussing council tax at the annual conference of the Local Government Chronicle. Important a topic as that is (and it is), it has a register of its own which is not the same as that of a victorious president in the world’s most powerful democracy. The lesson here is: respect your occasion. If you pretend you are speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and have the ear of the world cocked for your words, you do not elevate your subject; you diminish it. Obama can do this because of who he is and the context he speaks in. If the ending reads on the page as slightly boilerplate Obama, it works in the hearing. Hope is not always an audacious emotion to evoke. It can sound vacuous if it is not attached to the power to realise it in the world. Without pragmatic politics, hope is a wish-list. Which makes the defining point. The finest political hopes are those of an elected president of a free country.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESSES

On the centenary celebration of the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1963, the sitting president of the United States was indisposed. He was required to fly down to Texas to appear in Dallas with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. Instead of speaking at Gettysburg, as he had been requested to do, President John F. Kennedy sent a message that read: ‘On this solemn occasion let us all rededicate ourselves to the perpetuation of those ideals of which Lincoln spoke so luminously. As Americans, we can do no less.’

Kennedy’s place at Gettysburg was taken by a famous resident. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War as the commander of the US Army Tank Corps Training Center. After the Second World War he had bought a 189-acre farm on the site where, in 1952, he held a picnic to open his campaign for the presidency. During his time in the White House, Eisenhower would often spend the weekend in Gettysburg, shooting skeet and inspecting his herd of Angus show cattle. It was here, in the farm that became known as the ‘Temporary White House’, that he recuperated from his heart attack in 1955 and here that he received the world’s dignitaries.

In 1961, General and Mrs Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, where the ex-president began work on his memoirs. He was called upon to perform this one last major service, though, to stand in for his successor President Kennedy. President Eisenhower used his centenary address to summon the noble destiny and unity which had inspired Lincoln. Though Lincoln’s words retain their power to move, said Eisenhower, ‘the unfinished work of which he spoke in 1863 is still unfinished; because of human frailty it always will be’. The task was to pass on, as best we could, the legacy bequeathed by Lincoln: ‘a nation free, with liberty, dignity and justice for all’.

Despite the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of his words, President Eisenhower’s speech has been lost to posterity because three days later the man who should have made the speech at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The bullets in Dallas completed a gruesome symmetry around the most famous speech in the political canon. Both the man who was never meant to make the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, and the man who was but didn’t, John F. Kennedy, were assassinated, almost a century apart.

Ever since Abraham Lincoln consecrated the spot in 1863, American presidents have repaired to the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the American Republic that Lincoln’s 272 words were designed to save. In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes hoped that contemplation of the National Cemetery would allow Americans to appreciate those who ‘gave their lives for the Union, liberty, and for a stable, constitutional government’. Beating even Lincoln for brevity, Hayes spoke just 253 words, forty-four of which were in quoting Lincoln’s last sentence. In 1904, in a lesson about applying the disciplines of war to win the liberty of peace, Theodore Roosevelt commended the soldiers who had made their countrymen forever their debtors. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson celebrated reconciliation and offered a paean to a nation ‘undivided in interest’. On Memorial Day, 30 May 1928, Calvin Coolidge observed the usual pieties, dwelling on America’s interest in maintaining global peace and depicting the American economy, just prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929, as prosperously content.

Two years later, in a Gettysburg Address about the common good, Herbert Hoover issued a warning against demagoguery and said that ‘the weaving of freedom is and always will be a struggle of law against lawlessness, of individual liberty against domination, of unity against sectionalism, of truth and honesty against demagoguery and misleading, of peace against fear and conflict.’ In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Gettysburg to sound a warning, which has extraordinary contemporary resonance, to those who seek to ‘build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of the game’. Roosevelt articulated better than most presidents the idea they all took from Lincoln of an America that forswears prejudice and seeks unity in the common welfare.

Perhaps the finest of the second-order Gettysburg Addresses was given six months before Eisenhower took Kennedy’s place on the rostrum. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson used Memorial Day to make a significant speech about civil rights. Johnson spoke as the grandson of a Confederate soldier and responded to Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail by offering the black people of America a promissory note. ‘Our nation found its soul in honour on these fields of Gettysburg a hundred years ago,’ he said. To ask for patience now would be to court dishonour and impair that soul. ‘In this hour’, the vice-president went on, ‘it is not our respective races which are at stake – it is our nation … The Negro says, “Now.” Others say, “Never.” The voice of responsible Americans – the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here – their voices say, “Together.” There is no other way.’

Johnson does to a high standard what all American presidents do at Gettysburg, which is to sing a hymn to the Republic. All speakers, taking their cue from Lincoln’s line about America being an experiment, reflect on the fragility of democracy, and they all say that, as long as the citizens remain committed to vigorous work, then a government of the people, by the people, and for the people could yet propel the nation towards greatness. That was, at least, the tradition. Then, on 22 October 2016, Donald Trump, at the time a candidate to be president of the United States, delivered his own Gettysburg Address and did none of this.

Instead, Trump gave a speech whose chief subject was not the American Republic but himself. It was both daring and egregious. After opening in the traditional fashion, by invoking and associating himself with Lincoln’s battle against division (‘hallowed ground … amazing place’), Mr Trump then proceeded to take the Address somewhere both unprecedented and unpresidential. Trump’s scattergun hit Washington and Wall Street for rigging the game against ‘everyday Americans’. He called his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, a criminal, claimed massive voter fraud without a shred of evidence, denounced unspecified corruption and fulminated against his enemies, home and abroad, real and perceived. He complained bitterly about named media outlets who he claimed were biased against him and which he alleged deliberately fabricated stories to discredit him. He labelled as liars the women who had made claims of sexual assault against him. It was a broadside against all the estates of the realm.

The worst of the speech is that Trump chose the site of the greatest-ever speech about the virtues of the Republic, to ask citizens not to trust the machinery of their own government. ‘The rigging of the system’, he said, ‘is designed for one reason, to keep the corrupt establishment and special interests in power at your expense, at everybody’s expense.’ Throughout, Trump portrays himself as the only man who can fix the problem of the system that has been broken by the elite: ‘I have no special interests but you, the American voter.’ The speech divides government from people and proceeds to widen the gap with every barb. There is a sort of secular blasphemy in the nastiness of Trump’s drearily inevitable conclusion: ‘We will drain the swamp in Washington DC and replace it with a new government of, by and for the people. Believe me.’ This is government of, by and for the populist.

Democracy in Crisis

Anti-politics is the most potent political idea of our time. The finest speeches in the popular tradition have always lent enchantment to politics, and it is salutary to be reminded of their magic. It would be naive, though, to ignore the worrying fact that the glamour has gone. We have mislaid the excitement of Cicero’s battle with Mark Antony, the struggle of Thomas Jefferson to create the new republic, Abraham Lincoln’s heroic attempt to salvage it, and John F. Kennedy’s sense of renewal. There may be little trace left of Barack Obama once President Trump has tweeted his way through a term of office. The land made in broad daylight, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous phrase about America, appears to be fading into the twilight. There is a dangerous claimant to the idea of popular power. An enticing new utopia is advertising its virtues. It is insurgent, protean and elusive and it goes by the misleading name of populism.

Democracy is in the midst of a crisis, but then it always is. As a system founded on the absorption and the negotiation of dissent, democracy invites sceptical voices. David Runciman, in The Confidence Trap, has pointed out that an excessive sensitivity to crisis, along with the ability to adapt their way out of the mess, are the twin characteristics of successful democracies. However, just because democracies have adapted their way out of messes before does not mean they will necessarily do so again. Just because politicians have hit upon the words in the past does not mean that they will do so in the future. The developed democracies face in strident chorus a threefold crisis of prosperity, of fear, and of confidence.

The crisis of prosperity is an anxiety about a future that the West appears to be losing. The fractious American and European politics of our time is in part explained by imminent economic decline. The West now has a potent rival in China. President Trump’s electoral slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, conceded the point. Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, has noted that, when America was growing at its fastest, living standards were doubling every thirty years. China has doubled its living standards three times in the last thirty years. But the threat is greater than the sheer numbers, and China is more than an economic rival. It is an affront to the very modus operandi of Western capitalism. Max Weber was the first serious thinker to note that capitalism thrived best under the conditions created by liberal democracy. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, attribute their economic success to the tight control possible in a regime with no need to fret about the whims of the people. It seems to be working. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85 per cent of Chinese were ‘very satisfied’ with their country’s direction. The number in the United States was just 31 per cent.

The growth of China threatens to break the monopoly that the democracies have enjoyed over capitalist prosperity. Just as this lesson was sinking in, developed capitalism suffered a self-inflicted crisis of its own. Financial hubris, which allowed the complexity of financial products to run ahead of the human capacity to regulate their effects, created a generational bust. For two decades in the USA and one in Britain, real wages have stagnated. In the USA, median net worth for every group except the wealthiest 10 per cent fell between 1998 and 2013. Working-class Americans experienced a decline in their net worth over that time of a staggering 53 per cent. Meanwhile, the richest 10 per cent of people got 75 per cent richer. The republican bargain, in which hard work receives its merited reward, seemed to have been breached. It is not surprising that the idea took hold that capitalism and liberal democracy were loaded in favour of the privileged. It is not surprising that only one in four voters in the bottom two social classes in Britain believe democracy addresses their concerns well.

The crisis of shared prosperity has created a climate of cynicism. At the same time, an even more basic threat has thrown the efficacy of liberal democracies into question. There is no more important task that the state takes on in the name of the people than to ensure safety. The apparent incapacity of liberal democracies in the face of external threat is creating a serious crisis of fear. The experience of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was intensely damaging. Two invasions ostensibly designed to replace a tyrant with the will of the people collapsed into military disaster. The Left now regards the Iraq invasion as proof that democracy is a code for American imperialism. The Right concluded that even dictatorial stability is preferable to the chaos of change.

The struggle to conclude a successful military adventure in the name of the people was one more apparent indication that the writ of the West would no longer run. The institutions created out of the ruins of the Second World War – the United Nations, the European Union and the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – appear bereft of power and irrelevant to the crises engulfing the world. Successive problems, in Ukraine and in Syria, appear to have passed power from the hands of democrats to eager tyrants. Russia and China are devising their own rules for the world diplomatic order.

Most potent of all, people in the liberal democracies have been subject to the fear of terror. In The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad described the invisible but palpable fear that governs a society under the threat of terrorist attack. The threat is all the more potent for being essentially invisible. The prospect of terrorism comes from no state, although states may turn a blind eye to its perpetrators or even sponsor them. It is a threat that can be activated by radicalised zealots, many of whom are reared in the comfort of free liberal democracies. Although one of the virtues of these democracies is that they tend not to rush towards a threat by negating the liberties that make them targets in the first place, there are always two temptations, to which some of their number may be yielding. The first is to blame a set of outsiders, usually these days the whole community of Muslims. The second is to repudiate some of the freedoms of the open society in the quest for a gilded cage of better security.

The crises of prosperity and fear make common cause to produce a crisis of confidence. After a century of progress, democracy appears to be in retreat. The fledgling democracies are struggling. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been ruled by one party, the African National Congress, which has become progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is lapsing into corruption and autocracy under a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has begun to tear up the secular liberalism on which his nation’s constitution was founded. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.

In some democracies disenchantment threatens to tip into authoritarian rule. In Hungary Viktor Orbán openly declares that national needs trump liberal values such as freedom. In France, Marine Le Pen and her nativist Front National denounce a political establishment that she blames for betraying the white people of France. Similar tunes are played by the Danish People’s Party, the Swedish Democrats, the People’s Party of Switzerland and the notoriously Islamophobic Geert Wilders in Holland. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party stands accused of trampling on the country’s constitution to establish an ‘illiberal democracy’ of its own. But the most conspicuous setback for democracy has taken place in Russia. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were high hopes for a democratic order in the old Soviet Union, but these hopes faded in 1999 when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin. Putin, a former KGB operative, has since been both prime minister and president twice. He has muzzled the press, imprisoned opponents and presided over the murder of radical journalists, even as the display of democracy has been preserved.

The crisis of confidence is fuelled by impatience. Democracy has everywhere been a long time taking root, and it is unreasonable to expect that the transition will be either quick or smooth. The failure of Egypt to emerge as a functioning democracy when Hosni Mubarak’s government fell to popular protest in 2011 was a setback to the hope that democracy might spread across the Middle East. Despair set in when the ensuing elections were won by Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi promptly granted himself almost unlimited powers and created an upper house with a permanent Islamic majority. In July 2013 the army stepped in, Egypt’s first democratically elected president was arrested and leading members of the Brotherhood imprisoned.

Syria and Libya too have seen incipient democratic revolutions run into the sand. Viewed in the right light, the Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 was a series of popular uprisings of oppressed people desirous of the same liberties they witnessed in the developed world. That was certainly the hope and the initial interpretation. Yet it was naive to suppose that democracy was there ready to take wing, like the butterfly in the chrysalis. By the same token, to pretend that no impulse for popular sovereignty was part of the uprising in the first place is simply untrue. The demand for recognition was there; it has just not been met.

Quite remarkably, given their manifold advantage over other forms of government, the established democracies are losing confidence in their own goodness. Astonishingly, the 2011 World Values Survey found that 34 per cent of Americans approved of ‘having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections’. They might have been more careful what they wished for. A third of voters are at least prepared to say they would like to drop the inconvenient panoply of democracy. The young have been steeped in complacency. When Americans born before the Second World War were asked to say how essential it was to live in a democracy, on a decimal scale, 72 per cent rated it as maximally important. Only 30 per cent of the millennial generation did the same.

The same spectre stalks Britain. Sixty-four per cent of British people recently told YouGov they thought conventional politics was failing and 38 per cent had at least some sympathy with the statement that ‘Democracy isn’t always the best way to run a country’. Against this sentiment, we need to retort, without hesitation, that it most certainly is. The noble arguments of Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are not just random fancies. They are making the case for a system of government that is emphatically superior to other forms. If we are ever hapless enough to be cursed with any of the alternatives we will learn to regret our complacency.

The Populist Utopia

When people cease to believe in democratic politics they will not find it replaced with better politics. They will find it replaced by populism which, rather than representing the power of the people, arrogates power in their name. Populism is utopia’s dark shadow.

The term populist derives from the 1890s, when the Populist movement in America set the rural Democrats against the more urban Republicans. The already elastic term then stretched further, across political movements of the fascist Right and the communist Left in Europe, the hearings of Senator McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the Peronistas in Argentina. Contemporary movements that include Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the less scrupulous advocates of departure from the European Union and those backing the election of President Trump in late 2016 have a range of natures. They are connected by their claim to be the envoys of the people in adopting the use of the term populist. This is the fraud that utopia can smuggle in along with its promise. It is crucial to comprehend the populist utopia the better to counteract it.

The populist utopia has no place for politics. In William Morris’s News from Nowhere the House of Commons has been transformed into a storehouse for manure. The literary utopia erases all conflicts, which means that politics, the arbitration system, is redundant. In utopia, all desires have been satisfied and all the virtues miraculously consort in infinite combination in a land of no scarcity and abundant happiness. Individual rights can be revoked as unnecessary. The utopian takes all the complex questions of politics and promises, as if by magic, that they can be solved.

The idea that all good things can be had at once is a fantasy. The pursuit of a society that can satisfy everyone is a fool’s errand. Robert Nozick put this point colourfully in Anarchy, State, and Utopia when he suggested that no single society can be imagined in which Hugh Hefner, the Buddha and Ludwig Wittgenstein would all be equally happy. The clever statesman is always trying to build a coalition across ideological lines. Cicero is seeking to win the approval of the Senate. Jefferson needs to heal the nation after a bruising election. Lincoln wants the country to unite after civil strife. Kennedy summons the citizen spirit of the American people. Obama makes a direct appeal to people who did not support him. All of them are speaking to the best in the circumstances, not to some absolute best.

The populist pretends that politics is easy. The only reason that the obvious solutions have not been arrived at is that the prevailing elite is venally self-regarding. This is why the defining trait of the populist is an anti-political division of the nation into rival tribes; the elite cast against the people. The only factor that unites populist movements of the nativist right and the socialist left is hostility to the governing elite. The 2016 campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was populated by advocates, some of them, bizarrely, government ministers, who agreed on nothing except hostility to views they caricatured as those of the establishment. The American historian Richard Hofstadter called populism ‘the paranoid style of politics’ because it is always based on a supposed betrayal. If only the elite weren’t in it for themselves, the people would have been served.

In a notable speech in October 2016 Donald Trump hit all the discordant populist notes. ‘This’, he said portentously, ‘is a crossroads in the history of our civilisation that will determine whether or not We The People reclaim control over our government.’ There has rarely been a clearer exposition of the paranoid style than this. All those warnings about the fragility of democracy that were aired at Gettysburg sounded prophetic, and so did the alarms about the demagogue when Trump said: ‘this election will determine whether we are a free nation, or whether we have only the illusion of Democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system. This is not just conspiracy but reality, and you and I know it.’

The agents of this treachery, in the mind of the paranoid populist, are usually the media, and so it was in this case. ‘The most powerful weapon deployed by the Clintons is the corporate media’ – which, he went on to say, is now part of the conspiracy. The suspicion of the free press that is common to all populists is exactly the paranoia that Plato exhibits when he banishes the poets from his utopia in The Republic. We hear this argument in the social media echo-chamber today. According to this critique, the ideological prejudice of the media lackeys, who are themselves puppets of unscrupulous proprietors, enters unfiltered into the empty heads of the people. The minds of the people are so many tabula rasa on which the fiendish thoughts of the elite speaker will be imprinted. Conspiracy theories are always based on a credulous people and the populist is a full-bore conspiracist. ‘This is a conspiracy against you, the American people,’ said Trump. Utopia has always been just around the corner if only the corrupt elite had cared to venture there. ‘We will rise above’ said the candidate Trump, ‘the lies, the smears, and the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous reporters.’

This is why the utopian’s account is so fatuously inadequate about how change will come about. In More’s Utopia a traveller, a speaker of nonsense, finds the perfect society in full working order in the ocean. The title of H. G. Wells’s utopia accurately captures the lack of seriousness of the genre: When the Sleeper Wakes. These books are nothing more than grown-up fairytales. In the place where an account of change should be, the utopian populist substitutes the supreme leader. The paradox of populism is that it has a rhetoric of a movement but the practice of a cult. Camus once said that democracy is the system for people who know that they don’t know everything. The populist utopian has all the answers. The omniscient figures are, variously, the priests, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the scientists, the process of history or the party. Plato believed in the rule of the sages, the Stoics in the power of reason, the seventeenth-century rationalists in metaphysical insight and the eighteenth-century empiricists in science.

The populist in government has the same status. No sooner has he ejected the hated elite than the populist’s entourage become the elite themselves. He glosses the shift by posing as the tribune of the people. No need for a manifesto: he simply intuits the general will. Populism is a movement with no ideological content beyond its resentment of an elite. It therefore requires a charismatic leader – lately a Trump, a Chávez, an Erdoğan – to glue it together. The movement gathers around the leader as if around a maypole. Its name proclaims allegiance to the people, but in fact populism requires the people to swear allegiance to the leader. The bargain rests on the populist knowing everything, but, of course, the truth is that he knows almost nothing. The populist has a utopian account of political change, which is to say no account at all.

It is no accident that populists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alexis Tsiprias in Greece have proved to be so hopeless in office. The failure is baked into their arrogance about how easy it will be. President Trump believes that politics is usefully analogous to his dreary and ghostwritten business manual The Art of the Deal. This is not an analogy; it is a fantasy. The populist, devoid of politics, impatient with gathering allies, is bound to fail the test of administrative competence. Gratifyingly for him, the populist can invoke an easy escape clause. He can write off his failure as the conspiracy of the elite class which gave him his energy in the first place. The fact that he can offer no evidence for this absurd proposition only goes to show how clever a conspiracy it really is. Truth is always a casualty of populism.

It is not, alas, the only casualty. The foundation myth of populism – that the true way has been corrupted – means that the populist has to find a scapegoat. In the utopian literature, the leader is constantly marching backwards into battle. The safest refuge from the corrupt present is the blessed past. The promise to turn back the clock is a recurrent motif in utopia. In the Garden of Eden, in Hesiod’s golden age before the decline, the bliss in Atlantis or Virgil’s Kingdom of Saturn, in which all things are good, utopia is sadly discovered to be a paradise lost. The populist has nothing interesting to say about the future. He sets himself against progress and so is projected headlong into the past. Populism is a promise to return to popular wisdom before it was corroded by the Enemy.

This is not ‘the people’ as it is invoked by Lincoln. It is a Gemeinschaft, the binding of a community against outsiders, in a return to a bygone golden age. The outsiders in question are, in every instance of populism, the elite, but they are also often the immigrant. These days, specifically, the Muslim or the Jew, but also sometimes the non-national. The words of Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are all designed to bind a nation together. Populist politics, by contrast, needs to construct internal enemies as detached from the people. President Trump has proposed the deportation of undocumented immigrants and wants a wall to keep out the Mexicans. In Holland Geert Wilders wants to repeal hate-speech legislation. In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński sought to make the use of the term ‘Polish death camps’ illegal.

As the incarnation of truth, the populist is a stranger to the doubts and humility that find expression in the speeches in this chapter. His utopia has none of the pluralism of a liberal democracy. The truth is no longer the upshot of open exchanges among free people; facts are what the populist leader says they are. Karl Popper has cited the Funeral Oration of Pericles as the moment that men began to glimpse the possibilities of an open society. The populist dismisses all that discussion as a waste of time and energy. Better to get things done with his prowess at embodying the popular will.

To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind. The populist stands at the top of this chain of certainty, a position, as William Blake said, ‘like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind’. Disenchantment is inevitable, and when it sets in it can be vicious. Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are images of how fatally the vigorous energy can turn to vice. It is never long before the leader tires of the constraints that are built into the constitutional apparatus. It was, after all, the paraphernalia of politics that he believes he was chosen to change. The tiresome mechanisms that we see Jefferson applauding are merely impediments to the populist. He is therefore bound to attack the free press, minority rights and judicial oversight as institutions that are seeking to defy the will of the people.

The era of populism sets the political leaders against their own constitutions. The purpose of political arrangements, most evidently the American constitution, is to curtail power. Politics is the wisest solution to the fact that men cannot always be trusted. It is founded on realism about fallen humans rather than utopian optimism. The balance between elements of the constitution, which Cicero set out and which were borrowed for the drafting of America’s, are designed to hold populist power in check.

Most of the time the constitution holds. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and the Kaczyńskis in Poland have tried largely in vain to undermine other sources of power. It is probable that President Trump will be frustrated by the absence of executive power that, following the liberal principles of Locke and Montesquieu, was deliberately built into his office. Yet we cannot always be so sanguine. Orbán in Hungary, Chávez in Venezuela and Erdoğan in Turkey have rewritten their constitutions to erase the inheritance from liberal democracy. Since the failed coup against Erdoğan in 2016, broadcasters, newspapers and magazines have been shut down and journalists detained. The public realm is now severely censored. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has done as he pleases regardless of constitutional propriety. Institutions that demand neutrality, such as judicial appointments, have been made partisan. The writ of law has been invaded by ideological correctness. The media has been silenced. It is dangerous, and sometimes fatal, for Russian journalists to pry too closely into sensitive subjects such as corruption and organised crime.

Populism begins with recriminations about the governing elite and, to use Donald Trump’s extraordinary allegation, their ‘criminal enterprise’. It ends with recriminations about the constitution. All the while it claims to have special knowledge of the will of the people. It is a fraud from start to finish. Plato hated democracy because he thought it led to populist rulers. There is a risk, if we do not find the words to advertise the virtues of conventional politics, that Plato’s anguished prediction will be proved right. The task for the responsible democrat is therefore to describe what has gone awry and find words for a better future, like the wonderful writing in Jefferson’s 1801 Inaugural Address and the compressed poetic expression of Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg. The solution to disenchanted politics cannot be populism. It has to be better, more enchanted politics.

The Principle of Hope

Enchantment in politics does not mean a sweet lyric coating applied to toxic words. The case for popular power has to be rooted in the capacity of liberal democracies to respond to the three concurrent crises of prosperity, fear and confidence.

The first emotion that needs to be summoned is defiance. Democracy is the great philosophical success story of modern times. There were no democracies anywhere in 1799. Throughout the nineteenth century more than a third of the world’s population lived in countries ruled by imperial powers and almost everyone else lived in countries governed by despots, not many of them enlightened. The first wave of democracy was crushed, in the midst of economic failure, by the malignant populists of the 1930s. The second half of the twentieth century saw the great flourishing. Empires, notably the vast terrain of the Soviet Union, ran out of time. The share of the world’s population that lived under democracy grew quickly. In 1989 41 per cent of the nations on earth were soi-disant democracies. In 2015 it was 64 per cent. Now more than every second person lives in a democracy.

The reason for this is that politics can offer valid answers to the crises of prosperity, fear and confidence. We will see in chapters to come that the liberal democracies have a vastly superior performance in generating prosperity to any of their rivals. We shall see that democracies are very much the safest regimes in which to live. Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things – hope and sleep – to make up for the many miseries of life. We sleep more soundly in our beds if we know that our politics will keep us safe. Liberal democracies rely on fine articulations of the principle of hope, and we must rediscover our confidence in and our patience with the idea that politics will gradually improve the condition of the people. The short cut signalled by the populist is an illusion.

Liberal democracy is a series of failures, each one slightly better than the last. It can be hard to make that sound as dramatic as the populist’s utopian insistence that we can make it to a perfect island in the ocean in a single leap. If the passion appears to be spent, if the extraordinary hopes that were once embodied in democratic politics now seem to be fraying, this is the moment to recall that liberal democracy was born as an insurgent idea. It was the utopia of its day, and the case in its favour, expressed in some of the finest words ever spoken, embodied the hope that tomorrow would exceed today.

We need to make the case again that Cicero inaugurates, for liberty and justice in the republic as a superior state to the rule of the demagogue. We need the uplifting words of Thomas Jefferson to maintain that the beauty of politics is its capacity to restrain men from injuring one another and that this is the only way to protect the rights of minorities. We need the retort to the populist that Abraham Lincoln supplies. There is no pithier expression of a fine idea in the archive of speech than Lincoln’s imperishable formula of government of the people, for the people and by the people. We need to take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning that good government is done with the people rather than to the people. And we have Barack Obama’s reminder, from not so long ago, that when hope connects to power it is still possible to be hopeful about America, and, by extension, about democracies the world over. Cicero, Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama – all, in their way, speak on behalf of representing the popular will through democratic institutions. They describe a utopia that is the best possible in the circumstances and they do so in words that yield to none in clarity, lucidity or beauty.

The utopia of the people that is described in democratic rhetoric is not a state of final perfection. It is an endless process rather than a truth out of Pandora’s box. It is, as Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, ‘the hope that life will eventually be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everyone’s descendants’. The conversation will never end, as the solution to one problem begets another. The purpose of democratic government is forever to adjudicate between rival expressions of reasonable desire. The calls for unity made by Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are far more than political platitudes. They are the deepest wisdom of political thought.

These speeches communicate a spirit too. They are not dry political theories. They are words written to cajole, persuade and inspire, words that articulate the principle of hope which was described by Ernst Bloch in the book of that name as follows: ‘Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness.’ Populism, which trades on – relies upon – fear, is locked into nothingness. Camus’s brilliant observation bears repeating. The democrat is the one who knows he does not know everything. Only the populist utopian thinks he has all the answers. He promises an odyssey to utopia but he is going nowhere.

Being set on the idea

Of getting to Atlantis,

You have discovered of course

Only the Ship of Fools is

Making the voyage this year.

Auden is right. We must not embark on the ship of fools.