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 By 2006, Mailer’s dialogues with his son John in ''The Big Empty'' now had the benefit of some hindsight on how our adventures in the Middle East were turning out. Our “unholy urge to purvey democracy to all countries of the world was not working out.” Nor was our empire-building, because “global capitalism does not speak of a free market but of a controlled globe.” In the post-Cold War world of the 1990s, the political—and economic and military—“exceptionalists” felt the “need for America to become a Roman power in contrast to other nations who will serve as our hard-working Greeks. . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=41, 150}} To a large extent George W. Bush was their man.{{efn|See esp. {{harvtxt|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=71–77}} for an extended analysis of Bush and his administration for some of the root causes of our twenty-first-century adventures in imperialism.}} George W. Bush had something to prove, in relation to his father, in relation to his own vacuous military service, in relation to his corporate and fundamentalist enablers. In one of several moments in both books of what we can now see as prescience, Mailer asks, “How clear will it be in the awareness of Middle America that Kerry was a combat hero and Bush was a National Guard flight suit? It will be interesting to see how the Republicans will look to tarnish Kerry’s war record.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=47}} Mailer hoped that our failures to expand Pax Americana into the Middle East and elsewhere during and since the Cold War might make for a chastened view of our “exceptional” status and powers, might dampen our willingness to expend blood and treasure for the foreseeable future. Certainly, one element of the rise of Left and Right populism is populism’s isolationist tendencies that could be bearing Mailer’s hopes out, but as yet we are still enmeshed in (if struggling to end) decades of our miscalculations in the Middle East.
+In his “Abroad” section of Chapter 4, Ellis considers the founding roots of our Americans’ isolationist preferences. Preferences that should temper our opposing compulsion toward global empire-building. I would summarize it this way: Between them, George Washington and John Adams developed a theory of isolationism abroad and imperial expansionism at home. Adams wanted “commercial relations with all foreign nations but diplomatic relations with none,” as Ellis puts it. Adams feared involvement with the convulsions and controversies of Europe, and Washington, agreeing, wanted the new republic to focus on expansion into the western frontier. Both wanted to avoid entanglements—and especially wars—abroad. Maintaining neutrality during the war between Great Britain and France in 1793 was the first example, despite our agreements with France in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778, a treaty resulting from France’s crucial help during our own revolution.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=192–193}}
+But how can democracy function as an imperial power? It can’t on a global level; expansion westward, however, would enhance the building of our own nation. That was Washington’s conclusion. The western domain and its natural resources were to be the economically depleted new nation’s post-revolution prize and the source of its independence. The prize also would provide a spacious welcome to European refuges escaping war, poverty, and the oppressions of monarchy. Immigration was desirable. Immigrants in the western territories would become citizens. Such would be Jefferson’s argument also for the Louisiana Purchase—a way to extend his agrarian ideals. Jefferson would be asked to chair the committee preparing a temporary government for the western territories, “where neither slavery nor hereditary titles would be permitted.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=175–181}}
+Of course, human fallibility being what it is, political problems arose early and late: The conflicts over whether slavery could be expanded westward; the moral debates over “conquest theory” in the taking of Native American lands; the lurking dangers of European powers who had certain claims to the west. Washington and General Henry Knox struggled to maximize Native American rights. The Treaty of New York (1790) with the Creeks seemed to be a model moral and political breakthrough. (Ellis points out that Abigail Adams, who had been made an honorary Creek and given the name Mammea, looked over the treaty proceedings from the gallery of Federal Hall). But politics being politics, the terms broke down almost immediately when the Georgia legislature defied federal jurisdiction and allowed settlers to pour over the sanctioned border.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=185–191}} And the coming generations of the nineteenth century would violate Native American rights more horrifically than the founding generation.
+Ellis boldly takes on the contradictions of American freedom and slavery and of Native American conquest. These are complicated issues, and I recommend that readers turn to Ellis to understand the nuances and political complexities, the conflicting human follies and nobilities at play. For our purposes, we might say that the horrors perpetrated by subsequent generations in the conquest of western territories over the next century were inexcusable, even if given the troubling history of human nature we might find them unsurprising. There were those Founders who fought for greater rights for slaves and native peoples; there were those who fought against them. There were those who were living contradictions of both positions.
+But it is hard for us in the twenty-first century to remember that our nation’s Founders (flawed human beings like ourselves) were emerging in their corner of the Western Enlightenment from a five-thousand-year ''global history'' of normalized warfare, conquest, captivity, enslavement, torture, and slaughter of innocents practiced across many racial, ethnic, tribal, and geopolitical lines. Founders such as the active abolitionist Dr. Benjamin Rush were of course exceptional but not alone in 1780s and 90s America.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Fried|2018|}}. Benjamin Franklin and John Dickinson, for example, joined with Rush in their early abolitionism. Rush not only fought for the emancipation of slaves, but for the formal education of African Americans, women, and immigrants; he was also instrumental with Jefferson in passage of Article VI of the Constitution furthering religious freedom in the new democracy. Rush also wrote the first book in America on mental illness and addiction, against the horrific incarceration and treatment of the mentally ill common at the time.}} That the Founders as an assembly were able to do only so little in their moment to solve such an historical train of abuses of what we now call human rights—that their best instincts were crushed by the politics and compromise of their worst—we can hold against them. That they began the political processes and the debates that would expand human rights for future generations perhaps we can conditionally credit them. Some progress has been made, but it’s not as if the generations that followed the Founders right into our own in the twenty-first century have resolved what feel like eternal problems of racism and greed. Let alone the problems of looming economic and environmental crises we are leaving for the generations who follow us. Nonetheless, we should learn from the Founders’ skepticisms, built into their debates and founding documents, that global imperialism, the sort of American empire-building begun in the nineteenth century and accelerating since the Second World War, would place our own homeland security and sovereignty in danger.
+Washington’s “Farewell Address,” as Ellis points out, is the key document here. The Jay Treaty (1796) had negotiated the removal of British troops (who were inciting Indian wars) from the frontier and paying off America’s debts to Britain. But the political imbroglio that accompanied the treaty’s passage shook Washington deeply. He now saw the enormous, baleful potential for demagoguery in domestic politics, especially over foreign policy, that could threaten the new republic. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign relations,” Washington said in farewell, “is in extending our commercial relations, to have them with as little political connection as possible . . . . ’Tis our policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=199–201}} Of course, that was then; this is now. But might one be forgiven for making the case that twenty-first-century “originalists” and “conservatives” are the last people who should be thumping our founding documents in support of conducting preemptive wars or invasions to transplant democracy or extend American empire abroad?
+It is our global empire-building since the Cold War that Ellis examines in the final portion of his book, entitled, “At Peace with War,” the “now” to the 18th-century “then.” Like Mailer, Ellis views with jaundiced eye America’s hegemonic role, the assumption that we can now create, in President George H. W. Bush’s phrase in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Saddam Hussein, “a new world order” that would remake the world in our image. The consequence has been an improvisational foreign policy rather than a comprehensive foreign strategy. That improvisational quality of the policy made us easier prey, so to speak, for demagogues. And after September 11, 2001, we found a new Evil Empire (to use Ronald Reagan’s old 1983 formulation) to rationalize the expansion of defense and security budgets, executive powers, and foreign invasion. An all-voluntary military made it easier to sustain a “fully militarized foreign policy.”{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=208–212, 215}}{{efn|Andrew Bacevich, a former career military officer and professor emeritus at Boston University, has also written extensively about our militarization of foreign policy. See for example, {{harvtxt|Bacevich|2002|}} and {{harvtxt|Bacevich|2010|}}. Benjamin Rush perhaps foretold such skewered militarism in a democracy when in 1793 he wrote a satirical piece advocating a Peace-Office as counterpoise to the Department of War, recommending demilitarization and even gun control (see {{harvnb|Fried|2018|p=343}}).}}
+Ellis points out that the founding generation left a legacy of American exceptionalism that means the opposite of what that term has come to mean. Jefferson believed, idealistically, that our unique democratic principles would be destined to be spread ''by living example'' throughout the world. In the next generation John Quincy Adams agreed we could become a role model, but he was clear in a Fourth of July speech that we shouldn’t import our ideals and institutions by force: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” On the contrary, the Founders looked to Tacitus on the Roman Empire and to Britain’s colonial policies as examples of the cyclical demise of empires—chiefly by the over-extension of economic and military resources into vast foreign holdings. Ellis summarizes:
+{{cquote|These voices from the past . . . constitute a chorus in sounding three clear notes. First, the United States has committed the predictable mistakes of a novice superpower most rooted in overconfidence bordering on arrogance; second, wars have become routinized because foreign policy has become militarized at the same time as the middle class has been immunized from military service; and third, the creedal conviction that American values are transplantable to all regions of the world is highly suspect and likely to draw the United states into nation-building projects beyond its will or capacity to complete.{{sfn|Ellis|2018|pp=215–216}}}}
+Is it possible that thinking American citizens would have found a living dialogue between Mailer and Ellis on the publication of Ellis’s book in 2018 of great interest? Mailer’s death in 2007 closed that possibility of a final dialogue between a member of “the Greatest Generation” and an historian who came of age in the 1960s, one generation later. Both men have devoted much of their lives to writing about democracy in America. And as we had seemed to arrive at a state of national political crisis by 2018 when Ellis published his book, the dialogue between the two writers might have helped stimulate a hard look at where we’ve allowed ourselves to be at this moment in our national destiny. We’ll have to settle, instead, for the charged political season of the 2020 presidential campaign. Maybe Mailer’s and Ellis’s published dialogues could have some small effect on the debate, but would anyone put money on it?
+Is not a serious, unfrenzied citizens’ dialogue on our democracy, nonetheless, the important thing in our historical moment? We would first have to struggle to put aside our ideological litmus tests and our political correctness on the left ''and'' the right. Mailer suggested this idea when he told his son John: “Political correctness is not a satisfying activity when you get down to it. People may just get tired of mouthing it all the time. It’s a boring way to live and a shaky method for shoring up one’s psyche.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=162}} We would have to try to suspend whatever cherished dogmas or delusions we’ve allowed to close our minds while we ensconced ourselves in comforting ideological enclaves. We would have to give up our cartoons of Enlightenment founding figures as either nothing but bourgeois oppressors creating new forms of subjugation, or as nothing but divinely-inspired Paragons of Reason who created inflexible documents that are not intended to help us adapt to prodigious changes over centuries and epochs. We would have to get back to documented factual analysis and to the best science available. We would have to ask a lot more of ourselves than we have for a long time.
+And we might have to acknowledge the Founders’ courage in rebelling against the colonial system of capitalist empire. Their families, their fortunes, and their very lives were on the line. The Declaration of Independence is arguably the most treasonous document in the history of the British empire. Had the revolution failed, the Founders would have been lucky to be shot or hanged. As an example against future armed revolutionaries, they might have suffered the agonizing demise for “high treason” that John Thelwall, friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and other British radicals faced in the 1790s merely for “seditious” writings and speeches arguing for parliamentary and constitutional reform: they were to be taken to a place of execution to be hanged, cut down alive, their “privy parts” removed, disemboweled, and their bodies quartered. Their body parts could then be displayed or disposed of in any way at the King’s pleasure. Thelwall ultimately was acquitted by jury, but it is worth recalling in this context that during Thelwall’s trial the prosecution held up Thomas Paine’s writings (especially ''The Rights of Man'') as the epitome of treasonous intent. And we might recall as well that both Founder Richard Stockton and General Hugh Mercer, seen as traitorous revolutionaries, were tortured on the battlefield without trial immediately upon being captured. Mailer said in ''The Big Empty'' that “courage is transcendence . . . we are obliged to go beyond ourselves, to transcend ourselves, if we wish to rise so high as courage itself.” When son John then asks Mailer if courage is a virtue, Mailer responds, “Absolutely a virtue—Make it ''the'' virtue.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|pp=144–145}} If we are able to recognize the Founders’ courage, it might be a little easier for us to suppress our smug condescension toward them for their shortcomings and failures (for their imperfect humanity) and perhaps a little easier to learn from what wisdom they possessed in their time.
+Mailer’s words in his two books have been conversational and informal. Ellis’s have been more measured, formal, and deeply sourced, if still styled for a general audience. But both men agree that there seems to be a conversation, an evidence-based dialogue, that we Americans have been avoiding, perhaps at our peril. And during any forthcoming American dialogue our raising of difficult, discomfiting questions would be more important to us at this point than answers, certainly more important than easy answers. As Founder Benjamin Rush put it, “Serious men ought not to flinch from dangerous questions.”{{sfn|Fried|2018|p=425}} Might it still be possible for us to start at least by doing the hard work of framing essential questions? At the end of ''The Big Empty'', Mailer puts it this way: “Let us be ready to argue it both ways. No authorities exist who have certain knowledge. . . . Often I believe we are here to leave the world with better questions than the ones with which we came in. . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=218}} These words valuing questions above answers—and valuing further questions to allow for improving our provisional answers—remind me of what Mailer wrote regarding his own anxieties in 1971 (during another period of national crisis) near the end of ''Of A Fire on the Moon'':
+{{cquote|If brooding over unanswered questions was the root of the mad . . . and sanity was the settling of dilemmas, then with how many questions could one live? He would answer that it was better to live with too many than with too few. Rave on, he would. He would rave on.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=458}}}}
 ===Notes===
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 * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2003 |title=Why Are We at War? |location=New York |publisher=Random House  |ref=harv }}
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 {{DEFAULTSORT: Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis: Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy}}
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 [[Category:V.13 2019]]
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