[Dialogue] The Need for Both Passion and Humility in Politics

[Frank Knutson]

N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer gave this address and it is worth reading.  He
quotes R. Niebuhr throughout.  One of the most reasoned expressions I have
read on foreign and domestic policy.

Frank


Today, I delivered a speech at the Chautauqua Institution that calls for a
politics that balances the passion and power we need to confront the
injustices of our time -- foreign or domestic -- with the humility to make
sure those same qualities do not overtake our fight for change.

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to participate. The Chautauqua
Institution is truly a national treasure. It is a place for contemplation
and a place for reflection, a place where platitudes and slogans can be set
aside and be replaced by thoughtfulness and introspection.

When I last spoke here in the summer of 2004, I talked about our work in the
Attorney General's office - specifically about the failure of
self-regulation in the marketplace and the periodic need for government
intervention.

So it's especially gratifying to be here with you again - both to contribute
my ideas in some small way to this year's program on national security and
to reflect on my first seven months as Governor.

Those of you who know me recognize my core belief that without passion and
conviction in politics we are doomed to fail. What I'd like to reflect on
today - and this may come as a surprise to some of you - are the inevitable
risks that occur when passion and conviction are not sufficiently tempered
by humility. How we manage these risks, it turns out, may be just as
critical as the fight itself.

I will make this case in two distinct arenas: our current foreign policy and
our effort to challenge the status quo in Albany.
As a starting point, I want to spend a moment reflecting on the challenges
facing this country and the world after the last World War. How we
responded, or didn't, to those challenges can help us understand how to
respond today.

After Fascism was defeated, the world faced another system that was just as
vicious and just as cruel: Communism. At the time, the United States was
divided on a basic issue. Some wanted to retreat into the post-war glow and
disengage from the rest of the world. Others wanted to arm and fight
anywhere and everywhere, no matter what the means or the consequences.

One person who attempted to bridge this divide was a Missouri-born minister
named Reinhold Niebuhr - who, I must point out, became a New Yorker, moving
here in 1928 to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and
remaining in New York until his death in 1971.

A Balanced Path

Niebuhr came of age during the worst years of what Isaiah Berlin called "the
most terrible century in Western history." When he toured French-occupied
Germany in the aftermath of World War I, Niebuhr witnessed firsthand the
carnage of war. And as the minister of a church in working-class Detroit, he
witnessed the brutality of poverty and the precariousness that characterized
daily life for too many who struggled at the lower end of the economic
pyramid.

At first, he confronted these injustices with moral persuasion and reason,
subscribing to pacifism.

But his thinking evolved. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression and
on the eve of Hitler's coming to power, he published Moral Man and Immoral
Society, which decried the moralist response, both secular and religious, as
naive. He observed of the moralists: "They do not recognize that when
collective power...exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power
is raised against it."

As he examined the dehumanizing condition of Detroit's working class, the
injustices of Jim Crow racism and the ravages of modern warfare, Niebuhr
concluded that neither religion nor rationality alone could address these
and other blights - that one could not simply reason these injustices away.
Without the use of political power, Niebuhr believed, we could not really
address injustice.

As he grew more realistic about the status quo's resistance to change, he
cast aside his pacifist tendencies and became an influential supporter of
American intervention to prevent the rise of fascism.

If Moral Man and Immoral Society defined the necessity for power, it was
another of Niebuhr's works, The Irony of American History, which defined the
risks attendant to unbridled power.

Twenty years after Moral Man and Immoral Society - after a Second World War
and the rise and fall of fascism - Niebuhr recognized the threat I discussed
at the beginning: the growing specter of Communism. However, he was also
disturbed by what he saw as the two prevailing public responses, which he
saw as equally naive.
He wrote that: "Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce
the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our
soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in
our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause
must be unequivocally virtuous."
Here, he denounces both the wooly idealists and the "us v. them" and "all or
nothing" mentality that would lead to the many misadventures of war, the
imposition of dictatorships, and the domestic hysteria of McCarthyism.

Instead, Niebuhr argued for a third way.

He defended the use of power to confront Communism - but not the kind of
unfettered, unreflective power advocated by some. He cautioned against the
dangers of power with this corollary: "We ought neither to believe that a
nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become
complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt
the justice whereby the exercise of power is legitimatized." Inherent in the
exercise of power driven by moral compunction is the danger of overreaching.

Indeed, it was the combination of these two forces - power and humility -
that allowed Niebuhr, as the late Arthur Schlesinger observed, to vehemently
oppose without contradiction both Joes at the time - Joseph Stalin, the
embodiment of Communism at its worst, and Joseph McCarthy, the
personification of the paranoia that gripped some in our nation throughout
the 1950s.

Niebuhr understood that the exercise of power can be shocking and, at times,
corrupting. But he also understood that power is absolutely necessary to
fight the battles that must be fought. The trick is to fight these battles
with humility and constant introspection, knowing that there is no monopoly
on virtue. Moreover, this combination is simply more effective. For power
untethered from humility is certain to eventually fail.

Power and Humility in Foreign Affairs

So how can our understanding of these principles strengthen our fight
against global terrorism - the central question of this week's program?

I understand it is somewhat easy to wax critical on the current state of
foreign affairs from the relative comfort of a state capital, but,
nevertheless, allow me to explore this for a moment.

Think back to the time when the United States was founded. We began a
national experiment in liberal democracy, based upon a set of principles:
individual rights, checks and balances, free enterprise, the free exchange
of ideas, the rule of law and democratic government - principles of
tolerance - of a certain realistic view of human nature that echoed James
Madison when Niebuhr wrote: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy
possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."
At the time, such a democracy was unprecedented. It was based on ideas that
had only been written about, but never fully tested.

And so the rest of the world looked on and waited for our experiment to
fail.

But in the last 200 years, something remarkable has happened. Liberal
democracy has thrived. During this stretch, at least a half-dozen other
governmental systems have fallen by the wayside. Not just the monarchies,
tyrannies, aristocracies and theocracies that dominated 200 years ago, but
also systems like fascism and communism - each of which had their run at one
time, but, with important exceptions, have been discarded into the dustbin
of history.

It is liberal democracy that has emerged as the dominant form of government
- so much so that at the moment of the Soviet Union's collapse, one leading
thinker ventured that we had reached "the end of history." Francis Fukuyama
wrote that "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War,
or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of
history as such - that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and
the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government."

At the time, however, some people with a broader view pointed out: "Wait a
minute. You're forgetting about the rise of fanaticism" - and, implicitly,
terrorism.
What makes the fight against terrorism so different than any we have faced
in the past? My former political science professors probably would have
better answers, but several reasons come to mind.

First, it's because of the convergence of fanaticism and technology -
weapons of mass destruction, electronic communication, the Internet - that
allows individuals or groups of individual terrorists - without the support
of state infrastructure - to wreak havoc on a level unmatched in our
history. Terror bred by fanaticism has always been present. Yet it's this
opportunity presented by technology that fundamentally transforms it today.

Second, because terrorist groups have become trans-national - their
ideological moorings not necessarily tethered to the needs or interests of
any one place - our old paradigm of negotiation through diplomacy, the
balancing of power, and containment and deterrence is far less central.

And third, it's because many of the old dynamics that fostered stability are
no longer as relevant. For many terrorists, mutually assured destruction is
the objective, not the deterrent.

So how have we responded to this threat? Not with power tempered by humility
- but by pure, untempered, hard, raw, shock-and-awe power.

We must begin with the premise that terrorism is an insidious threat, and
that we must not shy away from directing the full measure of our power
against it. But, this represents only one half of Niebuhr's thinking, and
our national leadership has forgotten the corollary.

In the wake of World War II, Niebuhr warned that "we are so deluded by the
concept of our innocence that we are ill-prepared to deal with the
temptations of power which now assail us."

Yet, that is exactly what has happened in the wake of 9/11. Niebuhr's
warning means just as much today as it did back then. Because while the
threat has changed, human nature remains the same.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shook our nation to
the core. Americans were deeply frightened, sad, and angry, and they rallied
around a President who, at the time, showed impressive certitude and calm.

In that moment, with the public and the world fully behind him, with no
Congressional opposition to speak of, and with extraordinary national wealth
at his disposal, President Bush had enormous, nearly unprecedented power.

And yet he failed.

Why?

I believe it goes much deeper than the reasons we usually hear -
stubbornness, a refusal to hear differing perspectives, an inability to
adapt to changing circumstances on the ground and a misunderstanding of
other cultures.

These are all true, but they are each symptoms of a much more fundamental
flaw.

At the heart of it, the intervention in Iraq has failed because the
Administration lacked any sense of humility and embraced a
self-righteousness, which destroyed their judgment.

Interestingly, that is not what President Bush spoke of before assuming
office. During a debate in the 2000 election, the president was asked how he
would project America's power in the twenty-first century. The president
answered: "If we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. Our
nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why
we have to be humble."

That is precisely the right point. But President Bush didn't understand that
humility has to be more than just a talking point.

In the wake of 9/11, he ramped up exactly the wrong way. His approach, and
the rhetoric that would define it, perverted our foreign policy with
arrogance and moral complacency - laying the groundwork for the invasion and
occupation of Iraq. We had no exit strategy because the Administration
didn't think we needed one. The President and his neoconservative cohort
were so sure history had ended and that the triumph of liberal democracy was
inevitable. Mission accomplished.

Reasonable people disagreed about the invasion - often because of false
intelligence - but that's not the point. Rather, the point is that the
hubris of this administration clouded judgment and prevented them from
exercising power intelligently. It led to a lack of planning, failure to use
alliances, premature declaration of victory, torture, misrule, and the
undermining of rights. All of these failings were justified by the belief
that any means was acceptable to obtain our stated ends.

Of course, recognizing the importance of humility does not mean we should
abandon what we believe is morally right. The difference between us and
terrorists is clear. The danger of a foreign policy driven by hubris, as
Iraq illustrates, is that we become blind to our own fallibility and make
terrible mistakes.

Yet hubris is even more dangerous than that. In time, without a greater
amount of humility, great power will not simply cause us to make mistakes.
It will be our undoing.
As Niebuhr wrote, "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be
only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that
the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the
hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some
accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

To quote an old saying: "Hubris is terminal."

Going forward in our foreign policy, we must balance power and strength with
some humility. That does not mean that we don't fight power with power. But
it does mean that when we do, we realize that we cannot possibly anticipate
every outcome, so we plan an exit strategy; that our power alone is not
always enough to overcome every enemy, so we build alliances; that, as
circumstances change, our current path may not always be the most effective,
so we must be we willing to admit mistakes and adapt; and that - even if the
danger is so clear and present now - there will one day be a time when our
war is over, so we have to look beyond near-term victory as the only end in
sight.

Changing the Status Quo in Albany

As I have described, Niebuhr attacked those wooly idealists who would not
stand up to foreign enemies and would retreat into isolationism. But he was
equally cutting against those who did not stand up to domestic dangers.

He observed that "the injustices in society...will not be abolished purely
by moral and rational suasion." Instead, he argued, "Conflict is inevitable,
and in this conflict power must be challenged by power."

It was this point that I raised in my Inaugural Address: that only when we
are willing to confront power with power - only when we are willing to enter
what New York Governor and President Teddy Roosevelt called "the arena" -
can we even begin to address the injustices of our time.

So I would now like to shift to domestic affairs and get closer to the
current context in which my own administration finds itself.

To confront the power that drives the domestic injustices of our time, we
have to understand its nature. Fundamentally, the drivers are not the usual
suspects we hear about on TV - such as big corporations, globalization or
the wealthiest one percent.

The most powerful force that drives the domestic injustices of our time is
the status quo. And we will never achieve real progress unless we confront
it head-on.
When I talk about the status quo, I'm not offering up a straw man - that the
status quo simply represents the policies I oppose.

To me, the status quo is a real force, a product of several things,
including: a combination of interests that are directly vested and benefit
from current policy; the resistance to change inherent in human nature; and
the totality of despair, exhaustion and cynicism that have worn people down
and discouraged them from believing that real change is possible.

That's why we need to push as hard as we do. Because we are not just pushing
for certain policies or against certain interests - we are pushing against a
constellation of forces that are financial, psychological and sometimes even
inherent in human nature itself.

Because what we're up against is so powerful, our effort to change the
status quo will sometimes be marred, as it has been, "by dust and sweat," as
Roosevelt said. But that does not mean we can back down.

It was in this spirit that I campaigned for Governor.

I ran for office with the slogan that "On Day One, Everything Changes." Now,
everyone loves to make fun of that. "Hey Spitzer, it still rains." "Spitzer,
people still make fun of me." "Spitzer, my kids still misbehave." What can I
say? They are all right. Every single wrong in New York was not suddenly
righted on January 1st.

But that wasn't my point. The voters knew what I meant was that something
fundamental would change on Day One because there would be a new passion and
energy in Albany to match the power of the status quo.

As I noted in my first State of the State Address: "The status quo always
has powerful friends. But we in New York have our own more powerful friends
- we have the men and women of this state who work and struggle each day to
give their children a better life."

And we need all of these friends. Because in Albany, as in anywhere else in
the world, moral and rational persuasion, while necessary, are not enough to
change something so entrenched and so powerful as the status quo.

Take any number of issues we have fought for in our first seven months.

We inherited a health care system that was funding the wrong kind of care in
the wrong kind of setting, and we were breaking the bank to do it. New York
spends more on health care per capita than any state in the nation and yet
15 percent of our population lives without health insurance; a greater
percentage of New Yorkers die of a chronic disease than anywhere in America;
one in four children have asthma, and one in twelve have diabetes.

Our Medicaid bill was at $46 billion per year, growing at a rate of eight
percent annually without generating the results to warrant those
expenditures.

In January, we came in and said, "Wait a minute. How can the most expensive
health care system in the country produce these kinds of results?"

The answer was simple: the status quo. What had happened was that health
care decision- making had been co-opted by every interest other than the
patient's interest. So we were left pumping billions of dollars into a
broken system with no deliverables and no accountability.

That is what we set out to change.

We proposed a budget that, at its core, was an effort to move from an
institution-first health care system - in which policy and funding decisions
were driven by large health care institutions - to a patient-first system,
in which every decision, every initiative and every investment we make would
be designed with the patient's interest first.

But the health care system was not going to restructure itself. The powerful
health care interests were too invested in the status quo, and there was
absolutely no reason for them to change. So they didn't.

When we got here, we started pushing back, and something powerful emerged. A
coalition of patients, providers, advocates and legislators, who had long
realized the failures of the current system, emerged to exert the political
pressure necessary to change the system.

To be sure, the status quo responded, and did so with fervor - launching a
multi-million dollar ad campaign - the largest ever by an interest group -
to keep the system the same.

And while we still have a long way to go, in the end our coalition
prevailed. We were not just able to achieve $1 billion in savings - reducing
our Medicaid growth rate from eight to one percent - but we were also able
to expand health insurance to all of New York's 400,000 uninsured children
and were able to begin fundamentally transforming our health care system to
put patients first. And, importantly, we were also able to establish a $600
million fund for stem cell research.

Take our education system as another example. We inherited a system that was
inadequately and inequitably funded. For over a decade, the previous
governor fought an epic court battle to keep the system the way it was.

Just like the health care system, our school aid formula - which had been
frozen in concrete for decades - was not all of a sudden going change
itself. Even a court mandate was not enough.

It took the mandate we were given by the people to force change. We were
able to build a coalition of teachers, parents, advocates and legislators
that resulted in not just the largest-ever investment in our schools, but
the institutionalization of a new funding formula that will allocate that
investment according to academic instead of political needs.

The property tax system that is driving our young people out of the state
and our seniors out of their homes was not all of a sudden going to become
fairer on its own. We had to exert the political pressure necessary for this
kind of change to occur.

Several months ago, we enacted the largest property tax cut in State
history, but we did so in a way that targeted the greatest cuts to those who
need it most - middle class New Yorkers whose property taxes have been
rising too fast for their wages to keep up. Yet, to this day, there are
forces working to strip out the fairness that we fought so hard to make
real.

The campaign finance system that was one of the weakest in the nation was
not going to magically become one of the strongest. Why would those who got
elected under the current system want to tinker with what has worked for
them for decades? But we were able to marshal the support of New Yorkers
everywhere who were fed up with a corrupt system, and prove that it really
was in everyone's interest to change the system.

Several weeks ago, working with the Legislature, we were able to achieve a
bipartisan agreement that will mark the most significant reform on this
scale and scope since the Watergate era. We will for the first time put a
hard limit on soft money contributions. We will ban all contributions from
lobbyists. And we will close the two most porous loopholes in the system,
which have allowed corporations and individuals to contribute unlimited
amounts of money to political candidates. Ultimately, these reforms will
help weaken the special interests' grip on the status quo and increase the
voice of the average New Yorker in Albany.

I could go on, but I think I've made the point: Even if we believed we had
reason on our side in every one of these cases, reason was not enough. We
had to aggressively use the mandate the people gave us to change the rules
of the game.

What it all adds up to is that we have proved in the last seven months that
change is possible - that when you push hard enough, you can galvanize a new
coalition that is more powerful than even the status quo. While a few sparks
may fly, the result in the end makes it all worth it.

Because change is possible. As this becomes more and more apparent, our
momentum will build, our coalition will grow and the hopes of New Yorkers
will be realized.
A New York where every person has the opportunity to realize his or her full
potential;

A New York where no one falls through the cracks;
A New York that we hand over to our children in better condition than the
one we inherited; and
A New York that is built to compete in today's flat world that is both more
integrated and more competitive.

That means more good-paying jobs and economic opportunity; better quality
health care at a lower price; smaller class sizes and more accountability;
less government spending and more tax cuts, housing we can afford to rent
and buy; cleaner air, lakes and land; and a higher education system that is
both affordable and preeminent.
Indeed, we must realize a Progressive Era for the 21st Century.

Now some have said that we have been over-aggressive in this effort.

I do get exercised when I travel the state and meet the real New Yorkers
behind the problems I just outlined. I meet people without good-paying jobs,
people without health insurance and people who have to say goodbye to their
children who are leaving for opportunity elsewhere. I meet homeowners doing
everything they can just to hold on to their homes under the crushing burden
of property taxes. And I meet parents who know that their children are not
getting a good enough education to compete in the knowledge economy.

Some say that I should settle down, go slower and not push so hard, so
quickly for such transformational change. To them, I say that you
misunderstand the size of the problems we face, the strength of the status
quo and the urgency of the people's desire for change.

I promised to take their frustration and their call for action with me to
Albany and channel it into real change. And to a great extent, it's worked.

When asked one time why I push so hard, I answered that "you can't change
the world by whispering," and I truly believe in raising our voices against
injustice and apathy. But it is also true, as one writer said, that the
greatest gift you can give others is to truly listen, and I want to listen
to all New Yorkers, regardless of party or political persuasion, to hear
their ideas for making this state a better place.

As Niebuhr observed, we "need a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom
and power available to us" and "a sense of contrition about the common human
frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's
demonry and our vanities."

That gets me to what I want to conclude with today.

As we engage in our fight for change, we must remember what history has
taught us about the danger of power and passion - the very lesson I
discussed earlier - that without vigilance and humility, righteousness can
become self-righteousness.

Over the past few weeks, it has become evident that this principle was
forgotten. We were fighting so hard for what we believed was right that we
let down our guard and allowed our passion to get the best of us. I have
accepted responsibility for these failures.

In case anyone thinks that my allusions to the Bush administration earlier
in my talk suggest that I am comparing what went on in the last several
weeks to the failed policies in Iraq, let me disabuse you of that. But there
is a thread that binds this all together: whether you're fighting wars
abroad or fighting for change at home - is that we must always balance
strength with humility.

So how does one avoid descending into the self-righteousness that can so
easily overtake good intention?

I can't claim to know the entire answer. But I know it begins with
acknowledging that a layer of self-examination and self-criticism is
necessary. As a public official, the question of how to maintain that
equilibrium must be one of the questions you ask yourself every day.

Another critical part of the answer is that humility comes from remembering
who and what you're fighting for.

As I was saying earlier, I've spent a lot of time over the last nine years
traveling the State and talking with New Yorkers about what needs to be
done. Every week, I take trips like this one, to get out of Albany so I can
better understand the needs and priorities of the people in this state, like
the ones I discussed a moment ago - like the mayor whose inner-city is
crumbling around him, or the family that can't afford health insurance or
the senior who is struggling to pay her property taxes. Their faces and
their challenges serve as a constant reminder of the need to stay grounded
in what our goal must be.

So to maintain the right equilibrium, you can never lose touch with the
people who sent you here. That is why there is no place for
self-righteousness in my administration. That's my renewed promise to New
Yorkers. But, there's also no room to stand down in the face of a still-
powerful status quo. That's the promise that sent me to Albany.
Power must be used, but it must be tempered by soul-searching and the
recognition of our human capacity for error. That is the maxim that should
inform our approach to every challenge, from reforming state government to
engaging in foreign affairs. In both areas, we cannot become so convinced of
the rightness of our cause that we give less scrutiny to the rightness of
our means.

In Albany, going forward, we will apply this understanding as we continue
our fight for a revitalized economy, lower taxes, more jobs, lower health
care costs and better schools.

What happened was clearly a setback. But we are just at the beginning. We
have learned an important lesson. And in the end, our fight for change will
be stronger for it.
I have spent the last half hour calling on a Protestant minister to help me
analyze our current situation, but I would like to close with a proverb from
my own faith. The Jewish prophet Micah once asked: "What is good, and what
does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to
walk humbly with thy God?"

Thank you.
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