THE PLAQUE OF THE TELEOCRATS
This year’s sorry lot of candidates, like Lincoln, distort the Constitution and insist on a terrible outcome
BY JOE SOBRAN

Joe Sobran is an author, syndicated columnist and editor of a monthly newsletter, SOBRAN'S. See sobran.com for more information or e-mail Sobran at joseph@sobran.com. Other stories by Joe Sobran

One should always be wary of politicians, but never more so than this year. Both of the major parties are offering presidential candidates who (except for one Republican) have no inkling of the basic distinction made by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott between nomocracy and teleocracy.

“Nomocracy” means disinterested government, in which the rule of law is applied without regard to any particular outcome; “teleocracy” means government directed to achieving a certain outcome, whether military conquest, territorial expansion, economic prosperity, and so forth. (For a familiar example, think of the old Soviet five-year plans for such industrial and agricultural goals as steel and wheat production.) Such results would be mere by-products (if they occurred at all) under a nomocratic government.

Civilization depends on nomocracy; yet this simple distinction eludes most people, even if they are highly educated, and nearly all of today’s politicians, pundits and voters are unthinking teleocrats, as witness, for example, the way they talk about government and “the economy.” It seems to go without saying that the government is responsible for our prosperity — and virtually everything else, too.

Yet nobody seems to realize that this marks a radical change from the constitutional principles the American Republic was founded on. The words we hear daily now, in every political conversation, are never used in the U.S. Constitution. The political vocabulary of our ancestors has become alien to us. It is hard to imagine a discussion between President Bush and Thomas Jefferson. And we are to assume that there has been some sort of continuity from the one to the other?

A candidate who held Jefferson’s views probably could not be elected to any public office in today’s America, the land of the most astounding changes this old world has ever seen. Jefferson would have been horrified by Abraham Lincoln’s distortion of the Declaration of Independence; Lincoln, after all, invoked that document for the precise purpose of denying the right of “free and independent states” to assert their sovereignty.

Yet today’s historians generally rate the barely educated, unscrupulous and bloody Lincoln — the “Honest Abe” who had never read The Federalist Papers or bothered to acquaint himself with the classic ratification controversy of 1787-89, yet whose war cost more than 600,000 American lives — a greater president than Jefferson. And of course it is the superficial but facile Lincoln, not the much more profound Jefferson, whom our semiliterate politicians want to emulate.

Most of what we are now taught as history is so saturated with propaganda that you wonder why there were ever two sides to the old controversies. Yet Jefferson had severe doubts about the wisdom of adopting the Constitution; he later doubted his own authority to make the Louisiana Purchase! Lincoln opposed slavery for many years, yet he had similar qualms about his own constitutional power to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

When he finally did it, under great pressure from the radical wing of the Republican Party, he justified the step only as an emergency war measure; he never thought he could, or should, “abolish” slavery. In fact, chattel slavery died a peaceful death in most civilized countries. Lincoln was guilty of a self-justifying absurdity when he said, in his second inaugural address, that slavery had necessitated the huge war between the states. Yet that speech has often been called his greatest oration!

I do hate to sound captious, but Lincoln was also a teleocrat. He favored Henry Clay’s “American System,” an ambitious set of unconstitutional projects that would have required the federal government to usurp a number of powers in order to promote “national” prosperity.

But back to this year’s political candidates. A sorry lot, so let me confine myself to just one of them. The whole case against Hillary Clinton can be stated in a single pithy sentence: She is a teleocrat with an abrasive laugh who may be responsible for the death of Vince Foster. Barack Obama may be a teleocrat, too, but the similarity ends there.

Perhaps none of us is entirely free of teleocratic impulses. I confess that I myself sometimes long for a government that would honor Jefferson Davis and burn more heretics. (Yes, I have my own five-year plan.) But one cannot have everything in this world, so I try to resign myself to the world as it is and count my blessings.