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How the neocons turn George Washington into a symbol of their own ideology
Wonderfully predictable are the Powerline guys. In all their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes they are such perfect neocon party men. Remembering George Washington on his birthday yesterday, they praise him highly, saying that among all the great men of the Founding era his greatness was the rarest and most needed. And of what did this greatness consist?
Presiding over the [constitutional] convention during that fateful summer, Washington said virtually nothing. In his wonderful book on Washington, Richard Brookhiser notes: “The esteem in which Washington was held affected his fellow delegates first of all…Washington did not wield the power he possessed by speaking. Apart from his lecture on secrecy, Washington did not address the Convention between the first day and the last.”Brookhiser, the neocons’ pop biographer, departing from the real Washington biographers of the twentieth century who revealed the man behind the monument, had the original idea of revealing the monument in front of the man, and the Powerline guys eat it up. Washington was the greatest man who ever lived—because he did nothing and said nothing. They laud him—not for his accomplishments, not for his leadership, not for his judgment and policies, not for the ship of state that he built from the abstract plan of the Constitution, but for his mere presence. He provided us with an empty symbol to rally around—the human correlative of the Abstract Proposition Nation. Why was Washington great? Because he was, as Brookhiser puts it, “esteemed.” He is admirable because he was admired. (Sort of like supporting Giuliani for president, as Brookhiser and the rest of the neocons did, because he was ahead in the polls and could “beat Hillary.”) Washington did not have to lead, with all the storm and stress that leadership involves. He just had to be, and thus serve as the unifying object for everyone’s esteem. The neocons don’t want Washington to be a living man who actually did things, because then he would be something particular. And how can a particular man be the symbol of a universal nation? The fact that it’s Washington’s universalism above all else that the Powerline guys have in mind is shown by the fact that the only achievement of his that they mention—besides his supposedly sitting like a statue for four months during the 1787 convention—is his noble and justly famous letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport in which he said that Jews were as much a part of America as anyone else. Of the 10,000 notable things Washington did in the course of his 25 years as America’s pre-eminent man, that’s the only one that Powerline mentions. For the neocons, what makes Washington and America worthy of approval is that he and it included the Jews. Here is VFR’s own collection of articles on Washington, from which I hope you will get a more lively and varied sense of him than from Powerline. If you’re new to VFR, be sure to see the magnificent bust of Washington by the genius Houdon in the Museum of the Louvre.
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