Two dominant features characterize American democracy today: endless war and suppression of domestic dissent.

When the Cold War ended, the United States had the opportunity to become, as Jeane Kirkpatrick described it, “a normal country in a normal time.” Instead, the United States promptly sent half a million soldiers to the faraway Middle East to save the throne for an obscure sheikdom that had been attacked by a vengeful neighbor. We later launched two major wars, one in Iraq, a nation largely disconnected from American national interests, and another in Afghanistan—which began as revenge for September 11 but lasted 20 years. In its final days, the Afghan War was marked, in Kabul (the capital of a very traditional Islamic nation) by America’s promotion of wokeness, like pride flags and George Floyd murals. The consensus now is that the United States gained nothing from the Afghan War. More recently, the US has encouraged and funded a proxy war in Ukraine that has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands and inflicted enormous destruction, again promoting a war in a region where American national interests are far from clear.

According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, direct war deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars totaled between 905,000–940,000, including over 400,000 civilians. If indirect deaths are included, this number balloons to 4.5 million deaths. This does not include the just-mentioned deaths in the Ukraine War, which was supported by the US.

While ongoing war is the most prominent feature of American foreign policy, a most disconcerting aspect of US domestic policy is the increasing intolerance of dissent by government authorities. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies regularly surveil Americans and routinely cooperate with social media companies to suppress speech that contradicts US government policy. The authorities monitor political protests and even local Board of Education meetings. Disfavored political candidates find their staff surveilled and sometimes indicted. US federal law enforcement and tax agencies also have shown a propensity to target and prosecute Americans with unfashionable political views, such as pro-life activists, conservative Catholics, and parents seeking input into their children’s education.

In short, the US has evolved into a warlike nation abroad and one with prominent elements of tyranny at home. Yet, when it is argued that we should be “protecting” and exporting “our democracy,” one is expected to swoon.

Libido Dominandi

The 100th-anniversary commemoration of Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership could not be more timely, for what Babbitt argues is that if democracies succumb to decadent leadership, they will descend into a warlike posture and domestic tyranny. The mechanical processes of democracy will not save the nation; the character of its leaders will seal its fate. Babbitt defines “decadent leadership” as the casting off of all ethical restraints so that politics becomes solely guided by the libido dominandi, the desire for power and control over others.

In Democracy and Leadership, Babbitt points to several famous societies with democratic elements that devolved into war and tyranny including ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and revolutionary France. There can be little doubt that the United States is on this same trajectory.

Babbitt does not explore the devolution of democracy as a policy matter, but as a deeply moral and philosophical issue. War and tyranny are ever-present possibilities because of an unchanging aspect of human nature, the vice emanating from our lower nature, a prominent part of which is to seek to control others. Those lower impulses need to be controlled by individuals themselves through an exertion of self-discipline, preferably with the encouragement of the broader society. Without such self-control, those leaders seek domination over others, which they do by enticing similarly self-indulgent popular masses in their schemes of foreign or domestic control. The result is war and tyranny. The only way to protect against this development is for individuals, especially leaders, to check their selfish desires and impose a higher will upon themselves—the central theme of Democracy and Leadership.

As an introduction to Democracy and Leadership, a reader would do well to ponder Allen Mendenhall’s essay, “We Should Have Listened to Irving Babbitt.” Mendenhall explains several key concepts with fidelity to Babbitt’s actual meaning. He might have added a discussion of Babbitt’s notion of the higher power that pulls man out of his lower self. Babbitt gives it different names in different contexts. The most well-known is “the inner check.” 

Mendenhall rightly draws attention to Babbitt’s assertion that modernity is characterized by “naturalism.” Naturalism has two forms: scientific naturalism and sentimental humanitarianism. He considers these the dominant cultural and philosophical forces of the modern age. It is asserted by progressive philosophers that human happiness will flow from the advance of scientific knowledge or the outpouring of compassion for the downtrodden. Mendenhall is correct that the founders of scientific naturalism and sentimental humanitarianism—Babbitt treats Bacon and Rousseau as representative of the two strains—hardly have compatible philosophies, but they have in common an assumption that Babbitt considers the earmark of modernity: a denial of the moral dualism of human nature. 

Human beings, Babbitt claims, are cleft between their higher and lower natures, i.e., a duality of human nature. If people let their lower impulses run wild, they invite unhappiness and ultimately “nemesis.” Cultivation of the higher nature in man, which is centrally a matter of the “higher will” reining in the lower impulses, is essential to both personal happiness and public order.

Naturalists of both kinds eschew the necessity of personal discipline, of limiting self-indulgent desire, and Babbitt therefore labels them “expansionists.” By ignoring a higher self, the naturalists are shunning what is conducive to the deepest form of human well-being, what Aristotle called “happiness.” This higher discipline is what is most “divine” in human nature. As Babbitt phrases it: “As against the expansionists of every kind, I do not hesitate to affirm that what is specifically human in man and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain.”

If the West wished to avoid another catastrophic event like the Great War, Babbitt advised, a sounder, more realistic understanding of human nature had to be restored.

Babbitt’s understanding of our “higher nature” has slight differences from the traditional classical Christian understanding which sometimes concludes that human reason represents the most divine quality of human beings. Babbitt therefore is less related to Aquinas and closer to St. Paul, who emphasizes the cleft nature of human beings as “the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit.”

In describing our higher nature, Babbitt lays out a complex epistemology in which we discipline our will to make sound choices which, in turn, shapes our imagination and, with those sound choices of our will, we tend to view the world correctly, and once we have a sound imagination, our reason is pointed in the right direction. Babbitt explains his view of the higher part of human nature with a quote from Confucius: “‘That wherein the superior man cannot be equaled is simply this—his work which other men cannot see.’ It is this inner work and habits that result from it that above all humanize a man and make him exemplary to the multitude.”

In his assertion of a duality in human nature, Babbitt stands unquestionably in the classical and Christian traditions. His notion of “the inner check” upon passion and impulse certainly runs parallel with or coincides with the Christian notion of “conscience.” It has much in common with the bedrock of Aristotle’s moral philosophy: moderation in all things. Babbitt however supplements this Western tradition with keen insights into the key role of the imagination as it interacts with will and reason.

Mendenhall does a good job of explaining key terms, other than “the inner check,” in Democracy and Leadership so I will avoid redundancy by not offering my own summary of them.

Unleashing the Dogs of War

Readers may ask: what is Babbitt up to? He is not a professor of philosophy or epistemology, and no one would mistake Democracy and Leadership for a philosophy textbook.

One gets a hint of Babbitt’s purpose in writing this book when learning that his proposed title was “Democracy and Imperialism.” As I wrote in my book on Babbitt and foreign policy (which I gave the title he abandoned): “Only after final negotiations did his editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, advise against this title.” Babbitt then considered two other titles: “Democracy and Civilization” and “Democracy and Leadership.” 

It is my belief that Babbitt’s central purpose in authoring this book was to warn the West against a disastrous, permanent turn toward war, illustrated most recently by the Great War, and to philosophically explain the roots of a new aggressive imperialism.

Babbitt’s remarks about scientific and sentimental progressivism in the first few pages of the book are a warning about total war: “An age that thought it was progressing to a ‘far-off divine event,’ and turned out instead to be progressing toward Armageddon, suffered, one cannot help surmising, from some fundamental confusion in its notion of progress.”

Babbitt asserts that the West was dominated by two philosophies. Scientific naturalism claimed that increasing our power over nature would lead to a new utopia. The advance of science might have genuine benefits, Babbitt argues, but it would also lead to advances in the methods of warring and killing one another.

The other dominant strain of Western thought, sentimental humanitarianism, claimed that virtue was synonymous with compassion, emotional sympathy with society’s victims. Humans, in their natural state, uncorrupted by civilization, would spontaneously take pity on their fellow humans and act virtuously. Rousseau, for example, asserted that virtue is not a discipline, a matter of character, but an emotion.

Claes Ryn succinctly explains the connection between Rousseau’s sentimental humanitarianism and the unleashing of the dogs of war: “Rousseau’s notion of the natural goodness of man gave rise to a radical redefinition of moral virtue. It undermined the ancient belief that checks must be placed upon individual and collective action and formed the basis for the idea that the popular majority of the moment should have unlimited sovereignty.”

There is no doubt a connection between Rousseau’s idea of the purity of the popular General Will and the virulent strain of German nationalism that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both German Romanticism and Rousseau, the “will of the people” takes on a kind of antinomian quality and no legitimate check can be placed upon that will. Western democracies’ obsession with political polling is a distant reflection of this view that there is something mystical and inherently legitimate about popular opinion.

Babbitt remarks that the West was “picnicking on a battlefield.” The weaponry created by science combined with Rousseau’s moral fantasies about the inherent goodness of human nature to sweep away the restraints that older traditions had put on man’s lower nature.

If the West wished to avoid another catastrophic event like the Great War, Babbitt advised, a sounder, more realistic understanding of human nature had to be restored.

Democracy and Leadership is primarily concerned with war and peace, but this confirms a concern running through all of Babbitt’s writings. Every one of his books, from Literature and the American College (1908) to Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), touches on the moral crux of the human condition and on how to control the inner or outer imperialism to which humanity is prone and that sentimental humanitarianism threatens to unleash. In Literature and the American College, Babbitt does not yet use the term “imperialism,” but he argues that an educational system grounded in mere utilitarianism or expansive emotion does not produce ethical but warlike leaders. He points to Napoleon as a leader who was incapable of controlling his own “lust for power.”

It is tragic that American conservatives have largely failed to understand and heed Babbitt’s warning about decadent democracies and instead drifted into neoconservatism, an ideology that has much in common with political ideas inspired by Rousseau. Conservatives paradoxically slid into warlike crusading and meddling. As Claes Ryn has argued, many American conservatives adopted the mantle of Jacobinism, ignoring Babbitt’s call for restraint, ethical control, and cultivation of the higher self. A careful reading of Babbitt would help Westerners connect with the great Western tradition of humility that marked traditional Christianity for centuries. However, one of Babbitt’s strengths (and some would say weaknesses) is that he can bring Westerners back to their traditions without requiring them to accept a set of theological dogmas. He operates on what he calls the “humanistic” level.

Allen Mendenhall is right to assert that American politics would have been far different had Americans heeded the advice of Irving Babbitt.