I’m a little late to this, but Peter’s mention of the Liberty Law Forum on Ilya Somin’s essay over at Library of Law and Liberty caused me to notice that they’ve also posted a wonderful review essay by Will Morrisey. It’s a long review of Aziz Rana’s book The Two Faces of American Freedom (2014), but is chock-full of useful insights of its own. Morrisey is the William and Patricia LaMothe Chair in the United States Constitution at Hillsdale College, and his own book titles show you he’s an expert on certain European things, but also suggest what this essay demonstrates: real erudition and wisdom regarding the whole sweep of American political history. Consider passages like this one:

Rana prefers the purer, local-democracy ideas of such figures as William Manning and Orestes Brownson to the extended-republic federalism of the Founders. He dismisses the argument of Publius in The Federalist — that a continent full of such tiny democracies would be unstable and hence the prey of European empires. He also dismisses Hamilton’s Locke-based point, that “the prosperity of commerce”—and therefore of an extended commercial republic, capable of defending itself against other modern states — “is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares.” Such ideas, Rana maintains, only opened the door to the “wage slavery” of workers under industrial capitalists later on.

And this one:

He’ll have no truck with the obvious point that Americans did not intend to hold onto places like Cuba and the Philippines and in fact did not hold them for very long. In other words, the great imperial period of the United States occurred between 1776 and 1890 but, pace Rana, this really was, on balance, what Jefferson called it: an empire of liberty. The conquests of 1898 and thereafter were almost without exception non-imperial, indeed anti-imperial, as Americans kicked Spaniards out of their New World empire and later kicked the Germans out of France (twice) in order to establish or restore republican self-government in the conquered lands.

While Morrisey’s essay is more interesting for demonstrating what he knows than it is for analyzing The Two Faces of American Freedom, Rana, a law professor at Cornell, proves much worthier of engagement than the typical academic leftist. Go to the review for Rana’s main points about America, but here’s one more taste that shows you how Rana both digs up forgotten voices, and is usefully critical of standard left-liberal lines of thinking:

Rana astutely describes FDR’s famous Commonwealth Club speech of 1932, in which the future President redefined “liberalism” to mean Progressivism with teeth—as not merely Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends, but as the ideology of a national security state in the broadest sense of the word—a state that would provide the fullest possible protection not only against foreign enemies but against unemployment, poverty, disease, and most other ills to which flesh is heir. The liberty envisioned by the new liberalism consisted not of “the social practice of wielding public power”—Jeffersonian political liberty—but “the private endeavor of ‘personal living.’”
Unearthed here is the remarkable 1939 book by Robert Lynd, Knowledge for What?, advocating the rule of social engineers or “expert administrators” over the national economy. In Lynd’s words, “undiscriminating adherence to the forms of democracy operates to cripple the expert performance of essentially democratic functions” — a bit of verbal legerdemain worthy of FDR himself.
Rana accurately distinguishes the New Deal from both Hamiltonian federalism and Jacksonian democracy. FDR’s “idea of a direct representative relationship between president and people,” which was “at the heart of [his] democratic vision of the new social welfare state . . . fundamentally undermined the Federalist theory of democracy, particularly the notion that no existing body or branch of government enjoyed sovereign power.” As for Jackson, his “spoils system” may not have been pretty, but it was the antithesis of “an independent and unelected bureaucracy that could not be controlled by popular power.”

I’m giving you these tastes mainly to send you to Morrisey, but after you read him, I suppose you might want to learn more about Rana, and on his own terms. I’m glad that despite his attraction to cosmopolitan and “post-colonial” ways of thinking, he sees the promise of really digging into the American political tradition. I hope he notices Morrisey’s review and learns from it (he could also benefit from my essay “Globally-Conscious Americanism That Ain’t Globalist”). Hillsdale College, in any case, should be proud that Morrisey is their man; he’s one more reason conservative parents with children nearing college-age might want to give it a serious look.