Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Political statesmanship seems to be in tragically short supply at the moment, but what is it exactly? Has it changed? My guest today has been thinking deeply about this topic and has a new book out on it. Steven Smith is a political philosopher at Yale University, the co-director of Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, and the author of the new book, "On Statesmanship." Professor Smith, welcome to the program.
Steven Smith: Thank you very much, Grant, we can go by first names.
GR: Yes, okay. Well, it's good to see you. Let me just start with a very basic question. How and why did you decide to write this book when you did?
SS: Okay. The book, when I think about it, I started writing the book about two years ago, but when I began writing it, I began to think, this is a topic I've been thinking about virtually my whole career. I didn't even realize it, so much. And the idea of the statesman, which is a central topic of political thought and political theory and really, political history, I began to realize is, sadly been diminished. We don't use the term anymore. When we do, it's in a very debased form. There are very a variety of reasons for this, and one that I particularly like, Harry Truman once joked that a statesman is just a politician who's been dead for ten years. But, you know, there are other reasons. The term is gendered and as we might say, it seems old fashioned, a statesman. It seems vaguely, perhaps anti-democratic. And yet the statesman is our ideal of what a political leader is. And once we lose sight of that, we don't really have a polestar by which to judge our leaders and how to think about them and what distinguishes great leaders from not so great leaders. And it's easy to mistake statesmen for other kinds of demagogues and so on. So, I wanted to restore the concept to its importance in our political vocabulary.
GR: Interesting. So, you start the book with a criticism of sorts of political science education. And I wanted to ask you, why is that a culprit for statesmanship in your view?
SS: Well, I mean that’s, in many ways I'm a political scientist, and some of the book is directed to the discipline that I teach, which may or may not be of broader interest to the general reading public. But political science, like many of the social sciences, which, well, let me just say political science which had traditionally thought of statesmanship as a central theme of its discipline, of our discipline, has given into quantitative studies, the study of big data, like to amass mountains of data, creating mathematical models to understand human behavior. None of this is appropriate to this study of statesmanship. Statesmanship, statesmen are outstanding individuals who in many ways defy model building and quantitative approaches to political science. So, one of the points I made in the book is that these, this approach to big data, it ends up flattening and collectivizing our experiences, denying the centrality of human agency, individual agency, and, frankly, the possibility of greatness in political life. It's all sort of flattened out in a way. And that was a lot of what I was rejecting or opposing in my own discipline.
GR: Yeah, interesting, and use of the word flattening for that, I think is particularly appropriate. Well, as you already pointed out, this notion of statesmanship is very, very old, and it's a throughline for a lot of the ways that we have thought about politics over the years. Has there been any real significant historical or philosophical turning or inflection points in the notion of statesmanship that you would want to point us to?
SS: Sure. The book, you know, I’m a scholar of, you know, politics. I, like many people, I like typologies, so I like creating categories and thinking of different kinds. And one of the arguments I make in the book is statesmen are not all of a piece, there are different types who respond in many ways to different kinds of historical situations. At the greatest level, and this is perhaps the way we most commonly think of the term statesmen, are people who arise, particularly in moments of great crisis, whether political crisis, times of war, economic crisis, and emerge to in many ways set the house, you know, set the house back in place, or in some ways to restore and to refurnish the house in some way. So, there are statesmen who are great reformers and restorers. There are other kinds of statesmen who are preservers, whose aim is simply to kind of help to keep the ship afloat, reformers, preservers. And there are statesmen that I call, one of the categories I enjoyed writing about most in the book was I use the paradoxical formula of statesmen without states, and that is to say, people who, for a variety of reasons, have never achieved political office, sometimes because they preferred working outside formal political life, sometimes they were denied political office. I'm thinking of people in the American experience like, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, in the international context, or Nelson Mandela, who essentially, did their most important work outside the formal corridors of political power, but nevertheless were able to move and shape and direct their societies in important and influential ways. So, statesmanship covers a variety of different kinds of skills and abilities and is adapted to different situations. But I would emphasize, and this is what comes through in the book, that the greatest statesman we think of, and I can give you some examples, but are those who really do emerge in times of almost existential crises for their countries and nations.
GR: Okay, we'll get back into that, and (I) think I know who you're thinking of and I'm going to ask you about him a little bit later in our conversation. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Steven Smith. He's a political science professor at Yale University and the author of a new book titled "On Statesmanship." So, the typology is interesting in thinking about the different roles that statesmen play, and their importance. Are there shared personal qualities or characteristics that make these statesmen and stateswomen in your view, and what are the most important ways in which those qualities that you identify in your book might differ from what, say, the average person on the street would conjure up if I just ran into them and said, hey, tell me what a statesman is?
SS: Great. Thanks for that question, Grant. Really, for the benefit of your readers or listeners, rather, the central thesis of the book, and I think what distinguishes it from many, many other books that are written on political leadership and other related concepts is, for me, the statesman, what distinguishes the statesman is the ability to lead through the power of language. Statesmen are those people, men and women, as you rightly point out, who shape the language by which peoples think of themselves. Let me just give a couple of examples. When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, “Four score and seven years ago,” he used that occasion to really create and shape the way Americans ever since have thought about democracy. When Churchill in 1940 spoke about blood, sweat and tears he gave the English people, the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow said he mobilized the English language and sent it into war. Churchill gave the English people the spirit and the language they needed to think about themselves and how to carry on in a moment of supreme crisis. And that could be multiplied again and again. When, I’ll give one final example, when Ronald Reagan repurposed the famous image coming from the Puritan founding of America, when he repurposed the image of America as a city on the hill, tapped into one of our oldest self-images and used that as a way of thinking about what we stand for in the world, and really helped us in many ways, end up winning the Cold War. So, it is through that, through the importance of language, I understand and their ability to shape language and to bleed through language that is one of the things, in fact, maybe in some ways, the main thing that distinguishes the statesman from other kinds of political leaders.
GR: Yeah, you mentioned Churchill and every time I hear his name, I always think of my favorite quote of his from the Battle of Britain, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” I mean, it just gives me chills just to say it, and it just embodies the heroism of World War II, you know? Well, so, I want to come back to your Harry Truman quote, though, a statesman is someone who's been dead for ten years (laughter) and was in politics. Address the notion that saying someone is a statesman is just another way, I don’t want to say just another way, but another way of saying they were a great politician. It's more than that to you.
SS: It's more than that, but it is a way of saying that. I mean, in many ways, one of the questions I've had from a number of people and I think it's legitimate, is, there seems to be something, there seems to be a tension, I would say, with a between statesmanship and democracy and I think Truman's quote, you know, kind of captures that. Yeah, it's just an honorific we give to a politician, maybe they did a good job or not, but, you know, it's what we say. We're a democratic people, and we don't like to elevate people too high and there's always the danger that we think of a statesman as an idol, a hero, danger of hero worship and that sort of thing. And yet I do argue in the book, and I loved writing this part of the book, that statesmen are heroes and societies cannot really afford to be without heroes. Individuals don't necessarily need heroes, but societies do. They need models to look up to. It doesn't mean the statesman is the pinnacle of human life. There are many kinds of endeavors that we identify with heroes, athletes, musicians, scientists. You know, we give Nobel Prizes, Academy Awards, all kinds of prizes, legitimately so, to people who excel in excellence in their different fields. And politics is, in a way, no different. This statesman is the ideal, to me, of political leadership and statesmen in many ways are civic heroes, and if that's considered by some to be anti-democratic, well, I would say so be it, I'll live with that criticism.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Steven Smith, the Yale University political philosopher is the co-director of the center for the Study of Representative Institutions and the author of a new book titled, "On Statesmanship" and we've been discussing the issues that it raises. So, you have a particularly interesting section in your book I thought, that you called ‘The Dirty Hands Problem’. And, I just would love to have you talk a little bit about that and tell us how it relates to statesmanship.
SS: Right. This is in a chapter that deals with the ethics of statesmanship. What are the ethics of the statesman? And there's a widespread view that in political life, political life is an example of what is sometimes called the dirty hands problem. If you're going to get into political life, expect to get your hands dirty. You're going to have to do things whether you're going to have to lie, you're going to have to cheat, you're going to have to steal. That's what politics is. If you care about your moral integrity, stay out, it's not for you, politics is dirty business. That's a view often, you know, ascribed to Machiavelli, but it's a kind of, I would say, familiar view that we've all heard.
GR: And you, not to interrupt, but you are obviously in your book a fan of movies and the movie that comes to my mind when you say that is the old satire, "The Candidate," because that's Robert Redford's dilemma, right? He doesn't want to have the dirty hands problem.
SS: He doesn’t want to have the dirty hands. And, I want to push back against that. I want to say no, there are ethical limits in politics, and yet the statesman, we all know, there is a there is a grain of truth to that view. If you care about moral purity, yes, politics probably isn't for you. But that doesn't mean all things are permitted. There is a zone in which statecraft works that is bounded, it's limited by in our regime and our society, by Constitution, by law. Lincoln recognized this in the midst of the Civil War, that there were certain things that a leader should not do. And part of the book is an attempt to spell out what are the kind of limits, the ethical limits of the statesman and certain areas that are just sort of off limits. And that, to me was an important statement to make, particularly living as we do in a time when our leaders are telling us things like, the only thing that matters is power, and we can, power is sort of this, kind of celebration of power politics is something that I wanted to push back against. The great leaders are those who are cautious with the use of power, and are very much aware of the limits, the damages that that can impose upon people.
GR: And you hinted at this before, and so did I, but, Lincoln is the consummate statesman for you. You've got quite a bit of the book devoted to him. May seem like an obvious question, but why?
SS: Well, one answer to that, Grant, is because I've been teaching Lincoln for many years now.
GR: (laughter)
SS: That’s not a good answer, but, Lincoln has become my ideal of the statesman because he was able to, I mentioned earlier, what distinguishes the statesman is governing through language and the language that they use to shape and inspire into and to form a sense of peoplehood. But of course, words alone don't do the job. Words have to be followed by deeds. And Lincoln was to me the ideal synthesizer of the way in both words and deeds work together and he was deeply conscious of this throughout his life, throughout his career. He knew that, you know, in the case of slavery, slavery was a deep moral wrong for him. And yet he also understood there are limits of what he as a constitutionally elected official can do or would be willing to do. And even in the time of war, he exercised a term that I use in the book, a certain kind of prudence, a certain kind of moral judgment about, in a way that allowed him to balance what was morally right with what was politically possible. And it is that synthesis or that ability to hold those two ends of the chain together, the morally right and the politically possible that I think is a characteristic of statesmanship at its best.
GR: So, this is a question I have to ask, it's maybe half cheeky, but, you know, we're both in the academy. Lincoln, in some ways has had a rough ride in the last 10 or 20 years, particularly on the left and from younger academics, younger intellectuals. What do you make of that? Is that kind of illustrating what statesmen have to navigate, that this is purity that doesn't recognize the realities of politics? How do you view the revisionism of people like Lincoln?
SS: Well, in one sense, Lincoln is a national hero, and in another sense there's always been a minority, but often a kind of vocal minority of Lincoln critics and in some cases, even Lincoln haters for a variety of reasons, some on the progressive left and some on the right, who also don't like him for various reasons. But I do think what you put your finger on when you talked about the kind of woke critique, which I think is very prominent today because, you know, a view that saw Lincoln as temporizing with the problem of slavery, he didn't do much and this is just false, I mean, I would just say this is this is revisionist history at some of its worst, and it is an imposition. This goes back to the questions of ethics and statesmanship, it's an imposition of a certain kind of moralism on the political world. Unless someone lives up at every moment to the highest level of moral possibility, then you are at fault. And it is this kind of attempt to impose a kind of moral, if not moralistic vision on politics that, I mean, I think is at the core of much of, you know, what we call today, cancel culture and woke culture that just is blind to the imperfections and the difficulties of decision making in real time.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Steven Smith of Yale University, the author of "On Statesmanship." So, after Lincoln, who else would be in the pantheon of greatest American statesmen and stateswomen, in your view? You gave us some names before, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, any other presidents that might make that list for you?
SS: I think so, and, you know, one of the things I like about the concept of the statesman, it's not a category that you can just, it's not a locked down category. There will always be debate about who who's in, who's out and that's kind of an interesting thing to have. But to me, 2 or 3 of the obvious stars in the firmament are FDR, who arose, you know, whose great, you know, his presence during our greatest economic crisis and probably, well, with the exception of the Civil War, our greatest, you know, international crisis, he saw us through that and that was an extraordinary feat. I would also say Ronald Reagan, who saw us through a, you know, not to be sneezed at, a peaceful end of the Cold War that is something that's a considerable achievement. I would say kind of, people who I admire, but maybe near misses, we could argue near misses. I think JFK, particularly his, you know, his aspiration to go to the, you know, he did inject a kind of idealism into politics again, it was youthful, ideal, a little bit like Obama, you know, 50 years or so later, gave a kind of new sense of purpose and particularly the space race was important for him. And in a way, somebody who doesn't really get the credit they deserve I think is LBJ for his, particularly, I mean, he was very flawed and we can argue Vietnam and so on, his inability to really deal with that. But his, really, an act of supreme political courage in passing and getting that civil rights agenda, the civil rights bill passed, which he knew would be deeply unpopular, even with his own party, and within at least members, the southern wing of his party and arguably cost his party, the Democratic Party, the southern vote ever since to a very large degree. That was an act of extraordinary political courage, I think he understood that. And I wish if I were writing the book again, I mean, it just came out in August, I think I would give LBJ a little more respect that he didn't get it in the book, I would say. So those I think are some good examples I would use. And of course, there's a whole international dimension of statesmen too.
GR: Yeah, you know, it's funny, there's other questions I want to ask you more than this, so I'll just make this as a quick observation. But it struck me that you didn't mention George Washington, but then it did make sense to me almost in the same moment, because he's someone that more led by his actions, I think, rather than the use of language. And we don't really remember him for his language, but we remember him for resigning his commission when, you know, he arguably could have made a play for King. And then again, you know, setting the norm of two terms for a president. So, it got me it got me thinking. I did want to though, on the issue of both language and action, think about moments of statesmanship rather than statesmen. And I wonder what you would make of, one that I always talk about with my students is Gore, accepting the Supreme Court decision in 2000 and his statement about that, as being a moment of statesmanship. You know, I don't agree with this decision, I don't like this decision, but I am going to accept and respect this decision. And, I never thought he got the credit that he deserved for that. Instead, we kind of think of him as, oh, you know, he lost to George W. Bush.
SS: Right. No, I think that's an excellent point. I don't think I said this in the book, but I'll tell you something I've always remembered about his concession speech, which I should say seems almost unimaginable today when you look at our leaders today, would anybody concede in such a contested and kind of questionable conclusion? I remember, a well known talk show media host at the time said that his speech was an example of sublime manliness. I always remembered that, sublime manliness, and you're absolutely right, he doesn't get the credit. You know, there's a list of people, I mean, I didn't write lists, but I mean, who should be in the honorable mention category.
GR: (laughter)
SS: I definitely think, you know, that that would be one, you know, people who never quite made it, but who deserve at least some kind of shout out for what they've done.
GR: So, we've got about, oh, a minute and a half left, and I want to just leave you with this one last question and that's something you probably could have talked the whole half hour about, it's a conundrum, at least for me, as I'm listening to you. On the one hand, when you talk about statesmen restoring or replenishing the house, you know, coming in in these moments of crisis, then I immediately think, well, 2019 would be the perfect moment for the emergence of someone like this. On the other hand, I think, is there even room in today's politics for a genuine statesman or stateswoman to be successful, to make it to the top because of that kind of power politics that you described, how do you think that's going to sort itself out?
SS: Well, the answer to that is I don't know any more about. I can't predict that any more than anyone else. But I would say this, when we look at many of our greatest statesmen, some of the ones I've mentioned, let's say Lincoln, FDR, Churchill, nobody imagined in 1860 Lincoln was going to be a great statesman.
GR: True.
SS: Nobody imagined in 1940, I mean, the same about Churchill, and so on and so on. We never know. We don't know who will rise to the occasion, who will use a defeated situation to emerge as a voice of the nation, as a voice of the people and as a true leader, not a demagogue or an authoritarian. So, one of the things about history is it's unpredictable and we don't know where the next great statesman is coming from. But there will be such a person. I'm confident.
GR: Oh, I'm glad you ended with that confidence. We'll have to leave it there. That was Steven Smith. And again, his new book is titled "On Statesmanship." It's wide ranging, it's erudite, and also it's a great and timely read. Professor Smith, thanks so much for talking with me, it's been a real pleasure.
SS: The pleasure's been all mine. Thank you. Grant. Thanks to all your listeners.
GR: You bet. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
