Twilight of Authority

Twilight of Authority is something of a follow-up to Nisbet's 1953 classic, The Quest for Community. In Quest, an important book in the post-World War II conservative movement, Nisbet made the case that the modern, centralized state was built on the ruins of traditional, non-state institutions like the family, the church, and the community. Twilight continues these themes, but the passage of 20 years has both sharpened Nisbet's analysis and made him noticeably more jaded, with Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal looming large in Nisbet's obvious pessimism.Nisbet believes that the political community - by which he means not just the state, but the entire array of concepts, including rights and liberties, and feelings that are entailed in political questions and opinions - is losing favor, and with it the rights and liberties that Nisbet believes made Western progress possible. At the root of this decline is the state's growth that Nisbet discussed in Quest, which he still believes has come at the expense of voluntary associations. A new wrinkle in this narrative, however, is that Nisbet believes that the state has proven itself incapable of fulfilling the functions it has taken from voluntary associations, and has proven itself to be corrupt to boot. Hence the decline of faith in the political community among individuals who, having been deprived of their traditional associations, find their new centralized association unfulfilling.Nisbet observes a couple of interesting social consequences of these trends. First, he uses architecture to point out how the state has well outgrown the human scale. He quotes columnist Russell Baker who, upon observing the grotesque size and design of government buildings, wrote, "My misgivings are not about the wretched architects, who must give Washington what it pays for, but about their masters who have chosen to abandon human scale for the Stalinesque. Man is out of place in these ponderosities. They are designed to make man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with evidence that he is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of things. Those most likely to be affected are men who work in such arrogant surroundings. And so, it is not surprising that of late we have seen a curious tendency for Government people to differentiate between duty to Government and duty to country in a most ominous way."Nisbet further notes the dramatic increase in the role and function of the president, not just in the American government, but in American society. He writes, “There is the ever-growing centrality of the image of the President and, with this, the constantly augmenting attention to the President by public and press alike. Not only what the President thinks on a given public issue, but what he wears, whom he dines with, what a major ball or banquet he may choose to give, and what his views are on the most trivial or cosmic of questions - all of this has grown exponentially in the regard lavished by press and lesser political figures upon the presidency during the past four decades. The first care of royalty, beginning if we like with Alexander and coming down to the absolute monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, coming down indeed now to our own day, is that of being constantly visible, and naturally in the best and most contrived possible light for the people." Nisbet thinks that Richard Nixon's trespasses would be quickly forgotten once another figure like the idolized John F. Kennedy came along, because “There are too many powerful voices among intellectuals - in press, foundation, and elsewhere - that want a royal President provided only that he is the right kind of individual." Not only were Nisbet's predictions on this point accurate, they have startling relevance in our own day, in which we see the cultural elite and the intelligentsia bemoan the current Commander-in-Chief, which they see as unsuitable to their sensibilities, but have no reservations about endowing the office of president itself with all their hopes and expectations. That this situations plays out in reverse when a Democrat is president only offers confirmatory evidence of Nisbet's thesis.There are further ways in which Nisbet's analysis would made modern audiences, right and left, uncomfortable. Regarding the effect of war on society, Nisbet states his belief (which can also be found in The Quest for Community) that war and militarism generally work to destroy traditional institutions and values, in addition to limitations on state power. He writes, "I do not think it extreme to link the breakdown in moral standards in all spheres - economic, educational, and political, as well as in family life - to the effects of two major wars - celebrated wars! - in this century. What is in the first instance licensed, as it were, by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum." He continues, "Between military and civil values there is, and always has been, relentless opposition. Nothing has proved more destructive of kinship, religion, and local patriotisms than has war and the accompanying military mind. Basic social institutions can, on the incontestable record, survive depression, plague, famine, and catastrophe. They have countless times in history. What these and related institutions cannot survive is the transfer of their inherent functions and authorities to a body such as the military, which has...its own dominant values, symbols, constraints, and processes of consensus." It should be noted that Nisbet is not a pacifist, but a realist. He believed at the time that it was inadvisable to drastically reduce military capabilities while the United States faced a strong enemy (the Soviet Union). But he also recognized that unchecked militarism destroyed the very things that military defense was supposed to be protecting.Nisbet was also concerned about what he saw as the increasingly strident push for equality in American society. Again, here qualification is needed. Nisbet was not opposed to ending true inequality, but he felt that, once commenced, the desire for inequality was insatiable. He wrote, "It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality... In this respect it resembles some of the religious ideals or passions which offer, just by virtue of the impossibility of ever giving them adequate representation in the actual world, almost unlimited potentialities for continuous onslaught against institutions." Again, the difficulty Nisbet identifies is that there is a sense in which equality is a proper feature of society, but once it goes from being what Thomas Sowell would call a process equality to equality of result, its nature changes. Nisbet adds, “The tragedy in our time is that what is good in the ethic of equality is fact becoming swamped by forces - of power above all - which aim not, really, at equality in any civilized sense but at uniformity, leveling, and a general mechanization of life."Nisbet thinks that none of the above problems can be solved by either political centralization or radical individualism. Indeed, he believes that the latter would simply lead back to the former, writing, “Nowhere, not in economy, state, or culture in any of its forms, do we in fact find aggregates of 'individuals.' What we find are human beings bound, in or or other degree, by ties of work, friendship, recreation, learning, faith, love, and mutual aid." Without these ties, not only social degeneration but the loss of political freedom is the result. “Each such association," he writes, "is a nursery of freedom, if only because it is built around a value or idea that men wish to be free to espouse. Voluntary associations are buffers between individual and state."Ultimately, there's not much new in Nisbet's conclusions, but he does a magnificent job of showing the consequences of continuing to move further away from these voluntary associations, just as he would again a decade and a half later in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. Nor would that analysis have changed much in the two decades since Nisbet's death. Time has the tendency to either cast doubt on a writer's opinions and conclusions, or validate them. My opinion is that, for Nisbet, time has had the second effect.

Nisbet presents this writing as a warning, even a plea, for a return of freedom from a dominating, overwhelming, centralized, bureaucratic national state. Uses history - Greece, Rome, Renaissance, etc. - to add weight to this argument.Highlights the thought of Burke, Weber, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Marx, etc..1. The Political Community at Bay2. The Crumbling Walls of Politics3. The Lure of Military Society4. The New Science of Despotism5. The Restoration of authorityFrom the Forward - Nisbet (and Tocqueville) see . . .''. . . alienated individuals, that is, people lacking moral compass and thus any purpose or sense of direction beyond that provided by the cash nexuses. . . . As such they are in danger of losing their freedom to the allurements of a paternalistic state. . . . The tendency of the centralizing state as it is found in democracies is to make permanent children of its citizens.'' (ix)‘Government makes permanent children’. Personal success paid for — by risk of personal failure.''A clerisy of power exists that in size and complexity is without precedent since the height of the Roman Empire. . . . It is composed not only of those who occupy the top elective or appointed position in our political society, and by their aids and subordinates, all alike preoccupied with the attributes of power, but also, and far from least, by the greater part of the intellectual, especially academic class. For this class the political state has a sacredness that the church once possessed for its own clerisy.'' (2) Nisbet wrote this in 1975. Still valid.''Clearly, we are at the beginning of a new Reformation, this time, however, one that has the political state rather than the church as the central object of its force. . . . The first great Reformation, that of the sixteenth century, was also a period of twilight of authority in the West. It was terminated by the rise of the national state and the gradual retreat of the church, kinship, guild, and hereditary class. Today we are present, I believe, at the commencement of the retreat of the state as we have known this institution for some five centuries.'' (5)‘Start of another reformation’! Wow!Nisbet spends pages on the significance of religion. For example -''There is another value to institutional religion, one that, as Tocqueville perceived, is never so great as in democratic political orders. . . .'When there is no longer any principle of authority in religion anymore than in politics, men are speedily frightened at the aspect of unbounded independence.'Democracy, as Tocqueville further observed, only too easily becomes a religion itself, a form of pantheism, with a transfer to people of what is taken from god.'' (78)Augustus, Alexander, Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, etc., etc..''The proliferation of civil rights in the area of speech, press, theatre, and the arts generally is attended by license and anarchy, in the judgement of many, rather than the hoped-for liberation of the creative mind and the sense of intellectual buoyancy that liberty carries with it. 'Men are qualified for civil liberty,' wrote Edmund Burke, 'in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites.' Few such moral chains are to be seen at the present time.'' (65)Nisbet easy chewing. Sweet tasting? Not really. Think jalapeños. Maybe even Tabasco.Acquired taste. Cotton candy just can’t compete!

This is written from the perspective of Watergate, and the author makes strong points about the danger of the royal Presidency, and also, something that struck me was he said our checks and balances don't really work. He credits the janitor more than anyone for uncovering Watergate, and Congress drug its feet to investigate afterward.