OPINION:
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES: HOW DECENT PEOPLE CAN SAVE AMERICA FROM THE CULTURE OF CONTEMPT
By Arthur C. Brooks
Broadside Books, $27.99, 242 pages
Arthur C. Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, where great Americans and others of note at one time or another come to think things through. The common wisdom is that it has a conservative tilt, and that’s true if your definition of conservatism covers the old verities and virtues that have held our country together and as such have also been subscribed to by generations of old-line liberals.
Mr. Brooks, who has a Ph.D. in policy analysis and also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Free Enterprise at AEI, defies easy political or ideological pigeonholing. He is the author of 11 books, among them “The Road to Freedom” and “The Conservative Heart.” “While I’m not a member of either political party,” he writes, “free enterprise is something I deeply believe in.”
Previous to his 10-year stint at AEI, he taught policy at Syracuse University for a decade; and previous to that spent 12 years as a professional classical musician here and in Spain, including several seasons playing French horn as a member of the City Orchestra of Barcelona, which led, among other things, to reflections on the nature of leadership, prompted by a tyrannical conductor.
He had watched the conductor reduce a 65-year-old flutist to tears, and shared his revulsion with a fellow horn player, whose response was instructive: “A Spanish orchestra needs a tyrant.”
Many people in America, he writes, believe our country “has become a Spanish orchestra — fractious, undisciplined, practically ungovernable,” increasingly threatened by a hardening “culture of contempt” for those who disagree with us. To many of us — and to millions of voters — this was especially evident in Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary “deplorables” characterization, perhaps the quintessential statement of contempt for a broad segment of the American population.
Mr. Brooks takes no partisan positions, pointing to moral inconsistencies on both sides. He has no special brief for Donald Trump, but does make clear that his victory was in no small part the result of perceived violations of human dignity and the feeling that what we value most in America was crumbling.
“Trump won these voters because he saw a crisis of dignity that was unmet by conventional politicians. These voters wanted a leader who would shake up the system. They wanted someone who would smash the marble conference around which the elites gathered and force a new reality.”
Mr. Trump’s orchestra, he tells us, “went from one coercive leader to another,” because they were necessary to manage a fractious assortment of artists. Similarly, “we hear Americans on all sides say we need to shake things up with no niceties — in other words, we need coercive leadership.”
“This is false. Coercive leadership is a surrender to misery. A real solution to our problems, one that lasts and works for us all, is authoritative leadership. I believe that’s what we really want.”
In politics, Mr. Brooks reaches back to the Founders and to Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Lincoln and most recently to Ronald Reagan as authoritative leaders. In terms of moral leadership, he names Martin Luther King Jr.; and among influences from abroad Pope Francis and the Dali Lama, with whom he corresponds and converses. He also quotes from the teachings of the Buddha, and Scripture, from which takes his title, “Love your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt.”
It’s that basic concept of love that he believes unites the figures he invokes and contains the cure for the culture of contempt. Not the mushy variety, but “love for each other and our country. Love is the ’why’ of our leaders that can bring America back together, and of all of us in our families and communities.”
And how do ordinary Americans proceed? “Go find someone with whom you disagree; listen thoughtfully; and treat him or her with respect and love. The rest will flow naturally from there.”
“Think of it like missionary work,” he writes. “Missionaries are generally ordinary people with a vision for a better world that they want to share.” This might well describe the way Mr. Brooks views his life’s work. And except for the word “ordinary,” it fits.
And if there is in fact a strong missionary streak in his life’s work, it will serve him well when this summer he leaves for Harvard Kennedy School as a professor of the practice of public leadership and a senior fellow at Harvard Business School. According to many, Harvard has long needed an effective missionary from the free enterprise system.
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).
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