Alan Wolfe

This was a campaign so scripted that no debate, press conference or gaffe could deter the candidates from remaining, as they liked to say, on message.

How extraordinary, then, that the most predictable presidential campaign in American history was followed by the most unpredictable finish of our times. Facing a tie vote that no one anticipated, Democratic and Republican operatives found themselves having to react quickly and spontaneously to real-world events, and to do so without the benefit of focus groups and tracking polls. And what we saw as a result, beyond the endless discussions of tactics and endgames, were hints about the underlying philosophies of each camp.

Take, for example, the question of truth. For more than 2,000 years, Western philosophy has been premised on the notion that it is possible to make accurate claims about what is true. At one level, of course, politics has little to do with the pursuit of truth as philosophers understand it: candidates for office are not expected to say what they really believe and, once in office, they would be remiss if they did not disguise their intentions and confuse their enemies. During the campaign, both George W. Bush and Al Gore proved themselves adept at that kind of politics; understanding full well that voters might not like the actual details of their tax cuts or plans for Social Security and prescription drug benefits, they adopted the rosiest economic assumptions or simply ignored discrepancies. Had the campaign ended with a clear victory for either man, he would have taken office as just one more politician who was less than forthright in his campaign.

In the campaign’s aftermath, Gore, relentless in his quest to challenge the Florida secretary of state’s certification of the election, necessarily upheld the proposition that the truth of who had won could be established. Bush, by contrast, revealed something deeper than the typical politician’s willingness to manipulate the truth for his own purposes. In his determined effort to prevent anyone from ever knowing who actually won the state, he implicitly endorsed the notion that there was no truth even worth manipulating. When promulgated by left-wing academics skeptical of truth claims held to be timeless and universal — such claims, they argued, denied the proclivity of dominant groups to impose their values on the oppressed or the marginalized — postmodern skepticism has faced derisive rebuttal from political conservatives. But when it was expressed by George W. Bush and his supporters in their efforts to explain why it was unnecessary to count votes, conservatives applauded. Bush will be our first truly postmodern president, the first of whom it can be said that when asked how he came to be the winner, he can respond that it all depends on the perspective one brings to the question.

We know, because President Clinton reminded us, that politicians who lie too flagrantly are hobbled in their exercise of authority, for if they are willing to lie under oath or in front of a camera, why should we ever believe them again? Yet the very fact Bill Clinton was caught in a lie underscored truth’s priority. Only when we agreed that something happened in that case — that Clinton had an affair with an intern — could we punish Clinton. As a postmodern president, Bush will face a challenge to his authority far greater than Clinton’s, for the foundation of his legitimacy will hinge on the proposition that ultimately it did not matter whether his victory was real or not.

A president elected in a world beyond truth and falsity will not find it easy to govern. For all the manipulation and dishonesty associated with politics, there are moments, usually a country’s finest, when political leaders express a truth upon which all people of goodwill can agree. When Franklin Roosevelt rallied domestic support for American involvement in World War II, he did not suggest that the Japanese may have bombed Pearl Harbor; he spoke movingly of the fact that they did. And when the war ended, the truth of the Nazi genocide made it clear to all but the fanatic few why the tremendous number of lives taken in the war was justified.

Without truth, in the end, there can be no politics. There can be no purpose that requires government to take action for the collective good.

The campaign after the campaign also told us much about the way the winner thinks about another perennial question of philosophy: the meaning of justice. Justice is merely the interest of the stronger, says Thrasymachus, a character in Plato’s “Republic,” and ever since, philosophers have tried to show why Thrasymachus was wrong. Their answers have varied, but from the 18th century German Immanuel Kant to the 20th century American John Rawls, one answer has had strong support: Justice consists in doing what is right irrespective of whether we stand to benefit personally or not. Both philosophers demonstrated their point by developing ingenious thought experiments that ask us to consider how others unknown to us might act under the same circumstances.

As with the truth, we do not expect saintly behavior from our political candidates: The end, for them, invariably justifies the means. Yet a tied election offers a perfect opportunity to consider what justice requires: Since each man knows that but for a butterfly ballot his position could be interchanged with that of his opponent, it is relatively easy for each to understand the gist of the other’s position. Indeed, both candidates were willing to take the identical positions of their opponents when it suited them: asking, for example, that the intent of the voter count when Democratic votes were at stake but not when absentee ballots were missing an identification number, or claiming federal courts should resolve the dispute in some circumstances but not others.

One might expect, therefore, that Vice President Gore and Gov. Bush would each have considered the conditions under which his own victory would have been viewed as unfair by the other man. Although both men fought to the bitter end, only Gore acknowledged there were conditions under which he would recognize his opponent’s victory, no matter how sure he was of his own claim to the office. For Bush and his entourage, by contrast, Thrasymachus said it all: They were the stronger; therefore their claims were the most just. On the question of truth, Bush showed himself a postmodernist. On the question of justice, he reverted back to the pre-modern Athenians.

It is not so surprising that Bush identifies justice with strength. Kant and Rawls developed their ideals of impartial justice to undermine claims by monarchs or autocrats that unearned privilege could nonetheless be justified. By background and temperament, Bush belongs to a tradition of noblesse oblige in which aristocrats dispense justice as they see fit, not as universal standards demand. From such a worldview, loyalty counts for more than justice; indeed among the virtues, loyalty and justice are opposites. Only by demonstrating his immunity to claims of fairness does the acolyte prove his loyalty to the chief. And no better indicator of loyalty can exist than those personal ties of kinship so distrusted by Kant and Rawls. Bush put his faith not in a just outcome, but in a brother in Florida and a cousin at Fox News.

As president, Bush will have to deal with people with whom he shares no ties of blood or even belonging. How will he understand them? The power of justice does not lie in taking the concerns of others as our own; a president who tries to feel everyone’s pain cannot distinguish between illness and hypochondria. Justice only asks us to allow the claims of those foreign to us be judged against commonly agreed-upon standards. A president unwilling to acknowledge that a fellow citizen, whether Republican or Democrat, has a claim to victory is unlikely ever to understand why Europeans, Asians and Africans might believe their concerns about global warming, disease and poverty have warrant. When loyalty counts more than justice, we can be sure that parochialism will guide our affairs more than principle.

Ethics — doing what is right, shunning what is wrong — is a third preoccupation of philosophy whose contours can be revealed in an unscripted election campaign. At times of widespread religious belief, God’s commands are usually understood as the foundation of ethics: Murder and adultery are wrong because they are forbidden by the Ten Commandments. In the pre-Florida phase of the campaign, both Sen. Joe Lieberman and Bush invoked their religious beliefs to make the point that they were ethical people with a strongly inscribed sense of right and wrong.

So long as the campaign was scripted, candidates had numerous occasions for the proper expressions of piety, such as speeches in church or invocations of compassionate conservatism. But when the script was torn up, we could see the degree to which their religious pronouncements influenced their conduct. For all his single-minded determination to win, Lieberman, perhaps because his God knows something of vengeance, never seemed a hypocrite. Such was not the case with Bush.

Not once during the campaign after the campaign did we see Bush display Christian virtues. His early triumphalism conveyed the exact opposite of Christ’s humility. He could barely hide his inability to forgive his brother for messing up Florida. No sense of charity could be detected among his zealous supporters. He chose not to consort with the meek and the lame. Whatever his words, Bush’s acts proved that we do indeed live in a post-Christian society in which agreement on what is ethical and what is not can no longer be deduced from common religious texts.

Had George W. Bush won the election on election night, we would have reason to worry that he would turn into a Republican Jimmy Carter: a man willing to allow his faith to interfere with the realpolitik his office demands. Now that the campaign after the campaign reveals a man so unmoved by any sense of Christian ethics, we face the danger of a man whose conduct will be governed by no ethical commandments at all. Americans have never been able to make up their minds whether they want their politicians guided by ethics or efficiency. Now they know that, when it comes to favorite philosophers, their new president is guided more by Machiavelli than by Jesus. For those who worry about the separation of church and state, relax: Neither President Bush, nor any of his key aides, will be able to invoke Christian piety and sound believable.

The election of 2000 showed us how bitterly ideological and self-interested our political class can be. Yet given how empty of meaning our campaigns have become, the events leading up to the December Supreme Court decision did a favor for the entire country. Finally Americans had a chance to witness why politics, in both its tactical and its philosophical sense, matters. It is too bad that they had to cast their votes before the actual campaign took place. Perhaps on some future occasion they will once again be reminded that when we choose our leaders, we also choose our way of life.

Part of the Kennedy mystique is surely due to the unusual nature of the family. Remember Roger Clinton? What about Neil Bush? The Kennedys, it is frequently said, were a political dynasty. Yet the Bush family constitutes one as well, and during that brief period when Hillary Clinton appeared to be the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, the Clinton name was also burnished with dynasty status. While other families have many who seek power, however, none has had the success of the Kennedys. John, Robert, and now Teddy will all be remembered as major figures in American history. No one can say that about Hugh Rodman or Marvin Bush. Most parents would be happy to have one successful child. Joe and Rose Kennedy produced a slew of them.

The Kennedy family, like many Catholic families of its era, was a large one. It is also one that is unlikely ever to appear again. This is not just because many Catholics have found ways to have fewer children but because the Kennedys were products of a unique period in American history. The immigrant experience for most Americans lies further back in the past than it did with the Kennedy clan. Greater governmental regulation of the economy makes more difficult the kind of swashbuckling capitalism that made Joe Kennedy rich. Women are expected to work these days and not be, as Rose was, a full-time mother. Rarely are families nowadays identified with one particular place as the Kennedys are with Massachusetts; the Bush family is identified with three, Maine, Connecticut, and Texas. When marriages are unhappy, as the marriage of Joe and Rose was at times, people today, unlike them, get divorced; indeed, a significant number of Joe and Rose’s grandchildren are divorced or separated. You could not buy a Cape Cod beachfront compound like the one the family owns in Hyannis even if you were sitting on piles of cash. The Kennedys were not only a family; they embodied the idea of a particular kind of family. Alas, for most Americans, that family simply is no more.

When we contemplate the death of Ted Kennedy, then, we retrieve memories of family life as it no longer can be lived. As much as we may prefer smaller families, part of us longs for the extended clan that made it possible for the number of people in a Kennedy family portrait to approach the population of a small Iowa town. We lead lives; the Kennedys were characters in a saga. We do not read “Pride and Prejudice” in order to find a spouse but to know something about the nature of love. For the same reason, we do not fill our television schedule with scenes of Hyannis to learn how to raise kids. Every retelling of Ted Kennedy’s life will instruct us about success and sacrifice, the pleasures and puzzles of fame and the unbearable pain of loss. With Teddy’s passing — coming so quickly after the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver — we have lost not only two remarkable people but an entire way of life.

Besides the family there were the men. John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Teddy Kennedy are larger than life figures. It was not just their names that made them so dominant but their success. Jack Kennedy was not president all that long and especially compared to Lyndon Johnson did not accomplish all that much. But that is in many ways the point: He had the confidence to name an all-consuming politician such as Johnson as his running mate. Compare that to the selection of a Dan Quayle, a Sarah Palin or, forgive me, a Joe Biden. We are right to remember Jack Kennedy’s guts; especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy encouraged dissent while George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in the wake of their failure in Iraq, quashed it. The man cannot escape our memory life for a reason.

The same can be said of Robert and Teddy. Bobby Kennedy at the time of his death was, along with Martin Luther King Jr., the most impressive advocate for equality of any 20th-century American leader. Alone among American politicians of his era, he combined a prophetic voice with a pragmatic shrewdness. There is no knowing how great a president he would have been if only the violent streak in American life had been stilled long enough for him to take his turn.

But it may come to pass that we remember Teddy the most. Unlike his brothers, Edward M. Kennedy did not just give voice to the idea of making America a more just society but did more to secure that goal than either of his brothers. His accomplishments in education and healthcare recall the days when liberalism was not just the subject of books but the basis for one impressive piece of legislation after another. Although Republicans will no doubt still try their best to kill health insurance reform, the very fact that the country is on the verge of passing any legislation at all has more to do with Teddy than with Barack Obama.

Thirdly, there are the ideas. Something similar to what happens to us when we think of the Kennedy clan happens to us when we contemplate the Kennedys as politicians: We are reminded of an era that no longer seems to exist. It is not just that Democrats are more cautious than they were when Teddy first entered the Senate or that Republicans are more ideological. It is also that liberals lack the confidence in their own ideas that came as second nature to Jack, Bobby and Teddy. It is a sign of the power of the Kennedy legacy that in 2008 a young man ignored the advice of his betters, ran for president against determined opposition and won. It is also a sign of how far we have come from the heyday of the Kennedy years that Obama has little choice but to curtail the ambitions of his programs in order to get any of them passed. No wonder that Teddy Kennedy is being lionized. He reminds us of what politics used to be like before there were such things as Fox News, culture wars, 24/7 fundraising and sound bites.

Finally there are the flaws; no one can speak about the Kennedys without being reminded of their failings as human beings. Jack Kennedy lusted after women in a way that makes Bill Clinton look like a celibate monk. Bobby not only had his reputation as a cutthroat to live down, he also had to overcome his McCarthyite youth. And Teddy, of course, survived two political scandals that might have ended the career of any other politician: a case of cheating at Harvard and Chappaquiddick. It a certainly a cliché to speak of the Kennedys as characters in a Greek tragedy. But we do so for a reason: None of them were perfect.

These days we seem to be less tolerant of the flaws of our leaders. We were informed of George Bush’s alcoholism, but only to emphasize his religiosity. Obama, an Eagle Scout if there ever was one in American politics, save for an occasional smoke, seems to have no flaws at all. We either elect people who are truly remarkable or elect scoundrels adept at making themselves over. It is as if were we to acknowledge flaws in our leaders, we might have to find them in ourselves.

And this, in the final analysis, may be the most unusual of the memories inspired by the death of Edward Kennedy. The Kennedys were rich. Their family was unusual. They were the stuff of myth. Yet compared to politicians who blow-dry their hair and speak only with the help of teleprompters, the Kennedys — Teddy more than all of them — strike us as people who have had to deal with real tragedies and excruciating dilemmas. They were all larger than life because they were not completely divorced from life. Teddy Kennedy will always be remembered for his failures as well as his successes. That, more than anything else, helps explain why we will miss him so much.

McCain’s propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign — I admit they have been few and far between — is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.

Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a “humble” foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.

Bush spoke in 2000 of a humble foreign policy for much the same reason. We now also know that the Bush-Cheney administration was intent on adopting the most aggressive American foreign stance possible, and that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, offered them the public justification for actions they had been secretly planning since taking office. We tend to forget that before Sept. 11, aggressive foreign policy moves were not all that popular. Americans wanted a peace dividend in the aftermath of communism’s collapse and seemed hell-bent on turning inward to their private pursuits. In that context, offering them a humble approach while planning a militant one constituted as dramatic a lie as one can imagine.

I would never challenge the argument that John McCain’s lies in 2008 are over the top. But if McCain is more serial a liar than George W. Bush, it is a matter of degree rather than kind. Bush’s lies, after all, led to thousands of needless deaths, and none of John McCain’s lies, at least to this point, have done that. Were he to find himself elected, McCain would no doubt lie about many things, such as whether the United States has engaged in torture or whether Iran is a genuine military threat to the United States. But the bar has been set way too high; given the mendacity of the Bush administration, I am at something of a loss to imagine that a McCain administration could lie more.

Why do Republicans lie so much? Why is McCain following the Bush script? Why, at the very moment when he wanted a “maverick” by his side, did McCain pick a congenital liar to be his running mate? Republicans engage in what I can only call “structural lies.” To understand what this means consider this: Just about every significant lie uttered by Republican politicians is designed to make them seem less conservative than they really are.

The current lie du jour of the McCain campaign is that their man will aggressively take on the greed that is causing the collapse on Wall Street. Given McCain’s lack of interest in the economy, wealthy campaign contributors, and ideological hostility toward government regulation, this stance is laughable. But McCain’s lie unconsciously reveals an important truth, which is that when the economy goes into a tailspin, the public prefers a solution long identified with liberalism. McCain could tell the truth, which is that he is all for the free market and can barely wait until the crisis passes so the rich can go about the business of becoming ever richer. But if he does that, he will lose. McCain wants to win. Therefore he lies.

It is not just the economy that features this structural dynamic. If you were just tuning into the election now — no doubt there are many Americans who have not quite tuned in yet — you would think that the Republican Party loves workers, hopes to redistribute income to the lower middle class, embraces immigrants, favors environmental protection, and hates war. Some of the Republican lies, to be sure have nothing to do with policy, such as false estimates of the size of the crowds attending Republican rallies or Sarah Palin’s announcement that she had sold the Alaska governor’s plane on eBay, but of those that do, the overwhelming majority are designed to make the Republican ticket more humane and moderate than it actually is. Only on foreign policy, where McCain shows no interest in hiding his hawkish instincts, can the ticket claim to be taking an honest position even if the face of public skepticism.

Conservatism is an honorable political philosophy whose most eloquent spokesmen, such as John Adams and Edmund Burke, proclaimed the truth as they saw it. This is a tradition that continues among all those contemporary conservatives who have been appalled at the direction the McCain camp has taken and have been willing to say so publicly. In contrast, the conservative populism that has swallowed up the contemporary Republican Party lies because conservative populism is itself a lie. It claims to be guided by faith when it is run by corruption. It speaks of diversity but remains overwhelmingly white. It uses women to push an agenda that would expose women to harm. It speaks of reform tomorrow to slash the reforms of today. It seeks popular support to enact policies that, if revealed for what they were, would be wildly unpopular.

Like so many of John McCain’s critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well.

And that, really, is Falwell’s legacy. To the religious life of the United States he made no significant contribution. But to the political life of the country, he made one: He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy — one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ — and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

Even Falwell’s political contribution, despite the success of the Republicans during the Reagan years, left a mixed legacy behind. But the Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, prompting the inevitable thought that Falwell’s ideas were neither moral nor in the majority. The movement of conservative Protestants into the base of the Republican Party was far too important a task to be entrusted to a man as oblivious to public relations as Falwell. Once the Ralph Reeds and Karl Roves took over the task of blending religion and politics, there was no room for Falwell. Longing for Washington, he had to settle for Lynchburg, Va.

But then there was cable television, the perfect medium for someone as shallow as this man. Falwell appeared so many times on cable news that one tended to forget how little influence he actually wielded. Had it not been for cable television, Falwell would have been forgotten long ago (and I would not be writing about his legacy). He was perfect for the world created by Fox: extremist, polarizing, Manichaean. (The Manichees, a Persian sect that for a time attracted the great Saint Augustine, adhered to a black-and-white reality in which evil was always in an endless struggle with the good.) Five minutes of hate followed by a commercial break: It is not a format fit for all, but for Falwell, it fit like a glove.

Conservative Christianity has been trying to recover from Falwell for the past two decades. Just as his political views were too buffoonish to make the Moral Majority a reality, his religious sensibilities were too shallow to spread evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism grew in the exurban megachurches, and the megachurches, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, rejected Falwell’s approach to the faith. Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels — these inclusive preachers inherited the mantle of Billy Graham, not Falwell and his great rival Pat Robertson. With the maturation of American evangelicalism has come an interest in social justice, environmentalism and peace. The people who represent evangelical Protestantism’s future want little or nothing to do with injustice, pollution and war.

Of course America’s megachurches offer a thin theology equivalent to 12-step therapy. But Falwell’s contribution to American religion was even less than that. Falwell’s university — Liberty University — never achieved anything resembling serious academic status, although it did produce a decent enough basketball team. Falwell’s church, Thomas Road Baptist Church, with its Scopes-trial era insistence on hell and damnation, was not what American Christians wanted to hear. Falwell’s 1980 book, “Listen, America,” is an embarrassing string of clichés. “Sin is a transgression of God’s law and God’s law is unalterable,” Falwell wrote. “To sin is to voluntarily disobey God and His divine laws.” But it was not the sinfulness of human beings that preoccupied Falwell; it was the sinfulness of the country in which they lived: “Sin brings reproach upon a people. This is the reason we are in a nosedive as a nation.” Less than 50 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Falwell could write of America that “we have become one of the most blatantly sinful nations of all time.” Falwell’s theology, such as it was, never made clear how America could be both the promised land and Gomorrah at the same time.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell’s legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever became a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues — Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind — but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock ‘n’ roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

Responses to Katrina, like responses to Hobbes, can be divided into two broad camps. There are those who say that a state of nature reveals humanity as it really is; we are little more than animals, depraved creatures burdened by sin and self-interest and desperately in need of the firm guidance that only a deity or armed force can provide. For others, by contrast, the state of nature is a reminder of where we would be if we had not invented civilization; we are not animals driven by nature but builders of societies capable of keeping nature at bay. Reminded by anarchy of what a precious achievement civilization is, we transform examples of humans acting at their worst to do everything in power to help them act their best.

Remarkably for a society as modern as the United States, a surprising number of commentators find themselves attracted to the raw brutalities of nature revealed by Katrina. For them, the fact that so many of the victims are black is not just an accident; Africa, and by implications African-Americans, have traditionally been viewed by whites, especially by whites in the South, as one step removed from nature. The ever self-righteous pundits on Fox News find that images of black young men walking off with plasma-screen televisions are just too convenient to ignore. Humans as depraved as these barely deserve our help. “It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s 7 feet under sea level,” as House Speaker Dennis Hastert put it. “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

In the state of nature, no one is responsible for you. The situation in New Orleans may look like chaos, our right-wing brethren say, but in reality it is not that different from a market economy in which everyone is responsible for the choices he or she makes. People may be suffering, but, as Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown put it, residents “chose not to leave the city.” Left unsaid, but implicit in the idea of choice, is that we ought to be wary of extending too much help to people so unable to act in their own best interest that financial assistance is likely to be wasted on them. Of course, it is easier to choose to leave if you can afford a car, but no one ever said that fairness reigns in the state of nature.

Fairness may not run rampant in the state of nature, but vigilantism does. For every commentator lecturing the poor for looting, others find understandable, and maybe even a touch admirable, those who pick up guns to defend their provisions against — well, you don’t really have to spell out whom they fear. Order is preferable to chaos, but if order can only be maintained by a government that might have to raise taxes and call its National Guard home where it belongs, then perhaps chaos is preferable to order.

There is a perverse logic working here: If Americans learn how hard it is to pacify New Orleans, perhaps they will understand why our military cannot control Baghdad.

By contrast, the residents of New Orleans themselves, and the sympathetic members of the media covering their plight, sum up their political philosophy in one word: “help.” That is, in fact, one of the most important words in the history of Western thought. Why shouldn’t desperate human beings be deserving of the help the more fortunate can provide them? Once human beings start helping each other, society comes into existence. And once we have society at our disposal, we need no longer sit back and allow disaster to unfurl, irrespective of whether that disaster is caused by nature or our own ignorance.

For those who think this way, the tragedy of Katrina is a human one as well as a natural one. We knew it was coming. Our government anticipated it and even, when it had more funds available to it, developed plans for meeting it. Far from being responsible for their own plight, the victims are innocent; blame instead belongs to those who cut the funding for disaster relief, sent the troops out to wreak havoc abroad rather than keep order at home, and were so slow to respond because they lacked the empathy to put themselves in the place of those so unlike themselves.

Socially created, Katrina’s chaos can be socially cured. Horrifying as its stories are, they will serve a positive purpose if we use them to talk about race, poverty and disaster planning. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake launched the Enlightenment; since a good God could not have killed so many innocent people, philosophers began to argue that humans were themselves responsible for the good and evil around them. Hurricane Katrina’s devastation could have the same consequence: If government could have prevented it, and if government is required for dealing with it, then could we not at the least stop bashing government? Government, for modern people like us, is civilization; it is what keeps us from descending into the state of nature that, like Lake Pontchartrain, threatens the earthly city in which we live.

Some worry that the events unleashed in the aftermath of Katrina will inflame the American culture war. If only we could be so lucky. Our culture war is puny when compared with Hobbes’ war of all against all. As we watch the tragedy of Katrina unfold, we are not talking about relatively insignificant matters such as who should marry whom. We are talking about civilization itself, why its invention has been humanity’s greatest accomplishment and why we should do everything in our power to protect it. That we have so many people in our midst, including in the seats of power in Washington, who cannot understand what an improvement society is over nature is a tragedy fully as destructive as Katrina’s. And when the totality of that tragedy is reckoned, it may cause more death and destruction than nature is capable of doing.

Yet however we think and act in a media-saturated age, nearly every serious philosopher, none more so than the great Immanuel Kant, believed that we would be wrong to act out of emotional identification with a particular person. Especially when an issue is as heart-wrenching as the Schiavo family drama, it is important than we never lose our capacity to act reflectively rather than impulsively. And reflection demands that we consider each case on the basis of rules meant to apply to all cases.

Americans embody Kantian reasoning in the often-cited dictum that we are a government of laws, not of men. The Schiavo case reminds us why that dictum matters. In a case as conflict-ridden and morally wrenching as this one, the courts have reached a decision: Michael Schiavo’s claim that Terri would not have wanted to live this way has been upheld. In relying on its own form of civil disobedience, the U.S. Congress is claiming that we are a government of men, not of laws. Even a moment of reflection suggests why this is a bad idea; governments of men give to whomever is in power the capacity to overrule rights and procedures to get what they want. Another term for that is “dictatorship.” Upholding law might just be more important than preventing a death.

Emotion is a poor basis for making moral decisions for a second reason; it is cheap, while reason is dear. Nothing is easier to offer than sympathy at a distance. Those rushing to Terri’s “side” have no conscience with which to struggle, no doubts to be resolved, no principles to violate. They need not even be consistent, which is why they can urge respect for Terri’s life while ignoring all the deaths their cuts in Medicaid will cause. Emotional appeals surround us. No politician will earn a profile in courage by wallowing in them.

Reason, by contrast, ennobles and inspires, demanding, as it does, that we consider the interests of humanity as well as humans. Far from being easy, reason requires courage. Contrast the posturing of Republican legislators with the dignity of Florida Judge George Greer. In the past two weeks one judge has been shot in Atlanta and the family of another killed in Chicago. Judge Greer knows full well that in the Schiavo case, passions run high and people with links to violence, such as antiabortion activist Randall Terry, are involved. Greer could have taken the easy way out and protected himself and his family. He chose to uphold the majesty of the law. He should be a hero. Zealots could consider him a murderer.

Emotion, finally, fails as policy because hypocrisy is its first cousin. Intent on protecting Terri Schiavo’s right to live, Republicans cannot be oblivious to the benefits yielded by her death. To this point, “liberals” and “activist judges” can only be blamed for trying to resolve the case. Imagine the conservative glee if it is resolved and the feeding tube is removed. Every court ruling will become grounds for appointing only the most conservative of judges. Every Democrat who speaks in the language of rights and reason will be treated as an accomplice to death. The quest for emotional satisfaction can never be fulfilled; Bill O’Reilly will always demand more. We cannot predict Terri Schiavo’s fate, but we can surely anticipate outrage inflation, as every attempt to find moral guidelines in the murky world of death and dying becomes a political football.

This is why a sane society would try to put cases such as Terri Schiavo’s outside the realm of politics. Let us by all means have a national debate over persistent vegetative states, living wills and conflicts between husbands and parents. But let us hold that debate over general principles. Our laws must be designed for unnamed individuals in the future, not on behalf of specific people in the here-and-now.

Choosing the universal over the particular, our framers banned “bills of attainder,” laws that punish single individuals. The bill passed this weekend may not be a bill of attainder because it did not involve imposing a punishment. But we would nonetheless be wise to recall James Madison’s warning, in Federalist No. 44, that “bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation … The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community.”

Tom DeLay is a speculator in the lives of others. A political system that responds to him has come a long way from the ideals of the men who founded it.