The Problem of Just Authority

David Brooks had an interesting column over the weekend titled "The Follower Problem."  Brooks sets out by describing the symptoms of the problem of the lack of "just authority."  This can be seen when one compares the monuments of times past -- e.g., the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials -- to today's monuments  The new MLK monument leaves out the principles of natural law and natural right that suffused his teachings.  The proposed Eisenhower monument shows Ike in his youth, simply forgoing to explain any reason of his importance whatsoever.  Here is Brooks giving his diagnosis:

Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty. 

Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves. 

While the first paragraph is definitely true, the second paragraph is more complicated.  Brooks is right in his assessment of how most people today think about equality.  Today's equality is one of ends, not of beginnings as it was for the Founders.  Brooks then rightly differentiates today's ideas of equality to those of the past, while further describing the seeming paradoxes of what it takes to rule and in turn be ruled:

Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority. 

I won't delve too much into this but to describe democratic principles (or better yet republican principles) as paradoxes as Brooks does misses the cohesive unity that brings all of this together. 

Brooks then strangely misses something of large importance in his analysis when he equates Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party:

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

I will agree that Occupy Wall Street falls into the category that Brooks describes, but the Tea Party certainly does not.  The Tea Party was all about returning to the moral authority of the Constitution, which is built upon the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Far from the vast majority of Tea Parties thinking in the Hobbesian way Brooks ascribes to them, they believed in the authority of the laws of Nature and Nature's God, reason and revelation.  To equate both of these things together as Brooks does is oddly an error in moral reasoning -- the same error which prompted Brooks to write the column in the first place.

Here is Brooks with the source of the problem as he sees it:

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else. 

I think he is right to assign a larger measure of cynicism to people today as compared with people in the earlier portion of the twentieth century, but it's not simply that alone.  And it's not as though those institutions have not given Americans reason to distrust them in the first place.  The administrative government bequeathed to us by the early Progressives has fostered growing inefficiency, lack of democratic controls, and overall a paternalism to the State.  Rather than cynicism and vanity or vainglory (which Hobbes saw was the chief vice in men) being the cause it, however, is the symptom of a larger problem which is caused by the breaking away from the constitutional government handed down by past generations.  Constitutional government of course requires a constitutional people -- a moral people who have the requisite virtues necessary for self-government.  The Constitution certainly requires a moral people, but the Constitution itself engenders virtues if it is followed.