Wednesday
I recently finished listening to Anthony Trollope’s Prime Minister (1876)—it took me to Maine and back—and I better understand now the nostalgia that certain people have for the old Washington, D. C. I’m referring to a time when, supposedly, Democrats and Republicans could work across the aisle and have dinner parties together. Trollope’s novel gives us a 19th century British version of such a world.
The Duke of Omnium reminds me of President Obama in his distaste for schmoozing and his impatience with small talk. The Duke is a man of deep integrity who has been chosen to lead a unity government—Conservatives and Liberals together—because neither party by itself can garner a majority. Trollope suggests that if only the Duke had socialized more, if only he had let his ambitious wife throw more parties, then the government would have continued on. As it is, the Duke doesn’t provide the necessary social grease so that even his friends feel unsupported. The coalition, once so promising, falls apart.
The story has limited applicability because I think that, even if Obama possessed the schmoozing skills of Bill Clinton, we have become too polarized for collaboration to be possible. The novel is more a study in contrasts in the same way that West Wing contrasts with the way that Washington actually works.
I very much like the Duke’s reflections upon the difference between conservatives and liberals, however, which clarifies what motivates our two parties today. He himself is a liberal but he tries to understand the conservative mindset. As he sees it, a principled conservative genuinely believes that a stratified society is the surest route to happiness for all. His comments come in conversation with Phineas Finn, a fellow member of Parliament:
“The Conservative who has had any idea of the meaning of the name which he carries, wishes, I suppose, to maintain the differences and the distances which separate the highly placed from their lower brethren. He thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and that he may best do his duty by making the inferior man happy and contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds is his by God’s ordinance.”
“And it is so.”
“Hardly in the sense that I mean. But that is the great Conservative lesson. That lesson seems to me to be hardly compatible with continual improvement in the condition of the lower man. But with the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of the maintenance of those distances. I as a Duke am to be kept as far apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars,—and that is to go on for ever. There is much to be said for such a scheme. Let the lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect, and noble instincts, and it is possible that they should use their powers so beneficently as to spread happiness over the earth. It is one of the millenniums [ideal societies] which the mind of man can conceive, and seems to be that which the Conservative mind does conceive.”
We in America may not ascribe to the Victorian class system, but our conservatives do honor wealth stratification. Carnival barker though he may be, Donald Trump receives a certain amount of deference because he is a billionaire.
Omnium then points out the limitations of conservatism. Perhaps it would work if those with wealth and power made good use of their privilege. Unfortunately, wealth and power corrupt. The Duke continues his meditation
“If such happiness were attainable it might be well to constrain men to accept it. But the lords of this world are fallible men; and though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek to govern. We know that power does corrupt, and that we cannot trust kings to have loving hearts, and clear intellects, and noble instincts. Men as they come to think about it and to look forward, and to look back, will not believe in such a millennium as that.”
The Duke then makes an argument for liberalism. In doing so, however, he needs to steer clear of the word “equality,” which in his mind has been tainted by the various European revolutions. But he at least wants to lessen the distance between the classes.
The doctrine of Liberalism is, of course, the reverse. The Liberal, if he have any fixed idea at all, must, I think, have conceived the idea of lessening distances,—of bringing the coachman and the duke nearer together,—nearer and nearer, till a millennium shall be reached by—”
“By equality?” asked Phineas, eagerly interrupting the Prime Minister, and showing his dissent by the tone of his voice.
“I did not use the word, which is open to many objections. In the first place the millennium [a dream of absolute equality], which I have perhaps rashly named, is so distant that we need not even think of it as possible. Men’s intellects are at present so various that we cannot even realize the idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch of a pen or by a chisel on a stone. We have been injured in that, because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think otherwise? How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of your country, and say that it all is as it ought to be? You are a Liberal because you know that it is not all as it ought to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality…
Like the Duke, I think absolute equality is not possible. With him, however, I also believe that there is far too great a gulf between the wealthy and everyone else. The Duke’s 1876 dream, however, has come true to an extent. Disparities would be far greater were it not for the liberals’ great safety net programs, which involve wealth redistribution.
I wonder if the Duke, or Trollope could have foreseen the situation of the ploughman in the 21st century. If he were American, he would have workplace protections for his labor, employment compensation if he injured himself, Obamacare for his rheumatism, and a secure future of Social Security and Medicare upon retirement. We are far from perfect but we have at least a “nearer approach to equality.”