The Art of Politics: The New Betrayal of America and How to Resist It

John Kekes is a philosopher in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, which tries to stick with ordinary language, use logic and reason, and respect empirical research and science. His analytical style aims for clarity over verve. It may take some perseverance read a man who thinks in such a pedestrian way, and by pedestrian I mean "walking by foot on the ground" rather than flying off into space. He holds the tragic conservative view ("the balanced view") that natural contingency and man's inherently flawed character make political arrangements basically defensive (my word, not his) and always needing to be carefully adapted to particular circumstances, within an overarching framework. In this most recent book, he lists the specifically American framework of "political goods", each of which he then explores: Reason as prudence Plurality of goods Necessary limits Limited liberty Toleration within reason Justice as having what one deserves Right to private property Equality as exclusion of arbitrariness Political democracy Legitimate authority Civility as a social condition His contention is that all of them together constitute our society's complex political framework and all need to be taken into account in a variety of constellations in order to make decent political decisions. For him there is no highest value aside from the whole composed of these parts. Kekes' vision is intelligent, self-consciously humble but rigorous, humane and carefully thought out. But since politics is a matter of passion for many, it will not generate the slogans or ideological righteousness which makes politics appealing and exciting. The title illuminates Kekes' thesis, that politics is an art, not a science and especially not that pseudo-science, ideology. In outline, he holds that a political philosophy is ideological if it grants to one value (or to a small group of values) the highest place in a hierachical way of thinking about politics. Libertarianism is ideological in that respect, since it privileges individual liberty above all. And certainly Marxism is an ideology of hard-despotic egalitarianism, the parent of our Western soft-despotic liberalism. He especially rejects the dominant liberal ideologies of egalitarianism, whose seductiveness and pervasiveness in the West he deems to be a great danger to the system of plural political goods which have made our civilization so successful. The influential work of the American Marx (my phrase, not Kekes'), John Rawls, has made "justice as fairness" an ideological fetish for contemporary American liberals. Despite the frequent media mantra about "hard-right ideologues", most conservatives, who are happy to lay out principles, would say that the heart of conservatism is that it is an attitude which has no ideology. They tend to value historical experience with the particularities and complexities a given society over rationalized or revealed programs of change. Kekes makes that case intelligible. Funny h

This author, though not an ideologue per se, does seem, judging by one of his previous books, "Against Liberalism," to have a pragmatic conservative intellectual bent and outlook. While I have yet to see him critique the more conservative political philosophies as sternly as he has liberalism, his analysis overall is still clean enough to trust his intellectual and academic bona fides. One suspects from this tract that his "intellectual crap detection system" is well developed and remains "on" and in the full non-ideological mode at all times. Like the book "Against Liberalism," which I admit for me was a seriously uncomfortable but nevertheless honest academic critique of the liberal persuasion, this one too is a supremely levelheaded, mostly philosophical and high level analysis of the art of politics, American style. And although it brings to light many of the factors that have sustained American democracy, it suggests that our democratic principles can not stand alone and defend themselves, but require a politic of reason, stability, and a non-ideological spirit. It is not the same as your "run-of-the-mill" fawning pseudo-patriotic sloganeering that has now become a fixture among today's conservative ideologues. Here Kekes gives a larger much more careful nuanced narration of the reasons why American democracy is the envy of the world by explaining that it is due to our visionary politics, which value all of the intangibles of a strong political system, above all else; viz, a penchant for law and order and stability, a foundation and history of struggles to maintain and advance liberty, unencumbered free markets, a sensibility towards peace and prosperity, civil rights and a tolerance for minority concerns, including equality and non-discriminatory practices, a concern for health welfare and education, smooth and peaceful transitions of power, and a preoccupation with both internal and external security. All are things that many non-Western nations, pay only lip service to and have yet to learn how to negotiate conflicting claims among them in a peaceful way, or indeed how to fully integrate them into their respective political systems. The strength of the book is that it exposes the kind of "ideological small-mindedness" that is now slowly taking over the American political spaces on either side of the political divide. It exposes them as having the same basic shape and form and therefore represent the same inherent dangers to a thriving democracy such as ours. They have become dangerous enough to choke out our democracy, as each side tries with equal ruthlessness to outlaw all the things they consider wrong (i.e., ideologically impure), while embracing and promoting only those things they consider right (i.e. ideologically pure). The flaw in this model, which is the centerpiece of competing political interests in the U.S. is that it is not "self-correcting." Unless ideologues can muster the patriotic vision to see the weaknesses of the