The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer and Joseph Ellis: Unsettling Dialogues on Democracy

Written by
Robert J. Begiebing

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Abstract: Late in life, Mailer opened a final dialogue with his compatriots when he published two nonfiction books on American politics and democracy—Why Are We at War? and The Big Empty. It is striking how Mailer returns in these late nonfiction works to many of the questions the founding fathers and mothers faced in the eighteenth century. By 2018 American citizens had come to believe that our democracy was in crisis. Into that crisis, historian Joseph Ellis extended the Founders’ dialogues to us in American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Mailer and Ellis cover much similar territory as they awaken us to our democratic fundamentals by both considering our fragile democracy, our economic inequality, and our foreign policy.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr19begi

“ Nothing but integrity in private and justice in public bodies can preserve a republic. If calamities are necessary to teach us wisdom and virtue, I wish God would rain down shows of them upon us. ” — Benjamin Rush, to John Adams, January 17, 1778

During the final four years of his life Norman Mailer (1923–2007) wanted to clarify his ideas regarding two of his central concerns as a writer and public intellectual. To do so he opened three dialogues. His book On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007) was a conversation with his archivist and authorized biographer J. Michael Lennon on Mailer’s meta- physical and philosophical speculations as they had evolved since the 1950s. He also published two other nonfiction books, both on American politics and democracy—Why Are We at War? (2003) and The Big Empty (2006). The books on democracy opened a final dialogue with his compatriots, including the younger generations. In the former, Mailer was in conversation with his friend Dotson Rader in Part I, speaking with members of The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in Part II, and in conversation with The American Conservative magazine about “Why I am a left conservative” in Part III. In the case of The Big Empty, he engaged in a dialogue particularly with the generation then coming into full adulthood because the book is composed of conversations between Mailer and his youngest child, John Buffalo Mailer, who was just turning thirty when the book was published. “Because the younger generations are more attuned to learning from film, television, and the Internet,” John writes in his introduction to The Big Empty, “our understanding of the past is more easily manipulated by the increasingly sophisticated political and media marketing techniques used by those who hold power today. This is why it is so important that we have these conversations with the older generations.”

The political books offer Mailer’s thoughts on democracy in the twenty-first century based on a lifetime of writing about American democracy and participating in it. In articles and books he had been covering Presidential primaries and conventions since the early 1960s. He ran for mayor of New York City on the Democratic ticket in 1969, once campaigning vociferously beneath the statue of George Washington at Federal Hall on Wall Street and Nassau, where Washington took his oath of office. (Mailer had hoped that a Left-Right city coalition might “make a dent in the entrenched power . . . of the corporate center”). He was one of the earliest activists against the Vietnam war. And as a member of the “Greatest Generation” who fought as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II, one can say that he also fought for democracy against the juggernaut of global fascism. It is striking how Mailer returns in these late nonfiction books to many of the questions the founding fathers and mothers faced in the eighteenth century. To Mailer having the dialogue itself was the necessary thing, as it was to the Founders as well.

By 2018 we American citizens (left, right, and center) had come to believe that our democracy was in crisis, that we might be living, once again, in “times that try men’s souls.” Into our arguments over the nature and fate of our democracy, renowned historian Joseph Ellis inserted his new book examining the original debates among the Founders and extended their dialogue to us as well, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. Ellis’s book served as a crash course in the processes, compromises, hopes, failings, and fears of the Founders. Through a technique of alternating chapter sections between then and now, Ellis reestablishes the relevance of the founding dialogues for our own time.

Mailer in his two books was performing a similar service for his fellow citizens, though he was not as explicit in that purpose as Ellis is. But it is remarkable how much similar territory all three books cover as they awaken us to our democratic fundamentals in the opening decades of the new century. For both Mailer and Ellis, reopening our dialogue on democracy is the key to reclaiming a vital democracy. (It is perhaps fortuitous for our democracy that the National Archives recently created a digitized version of the more extensive founding dialogues—even beyond the debates that ended in the Declaration and the Constitution, beyond the better-known correspondence between Jefferson and Adams, and beyond the Federalist Papers—among six major founding correspondents in “The Founders Online” project.)

Three topics both Mailer and Ellis consider (as did the Founders) are among the most significant—our fragile democracy, our economic inequality, and our foreign policy. These three political concerns are, of course, mutually interactive.

The fragility of democracy (especially as it is susceptible to fascistic temptations) is a sort of undercurrent through much of Mailer’s work, starting with The Naked and the Dead (1948) and ending with The Castle in the Forest (2006), but for our purposes I want to look at Mailer’s straightforward reflections as he approached the end of his life. In 2003, Mailer argued that compulsive, self-serving patriotism was odious. “When you have a great country it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater.” He believed, however, that we were becoming more arrogant and vainer, both “culturally and emotionally.”

“ When America began, it was the first time in the history of civilization that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded on this daring notion—that there is more good than bad in people. . . .Now we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because we’ve been a democracy, it doesn’t guarantee we’re going to continue to be one. Democracy is existential. . . . It changes all the time. That’s one reason I detest promiscuous patriotism. You don’t take democracy for granted. It is always in peril. ”

He saw our promiscuous flag-waving as one way of taking democracy for granted. “You take a monarchy for granted, or a fascist state. You have to.” Compulsive flag-waving is no better than “compulsive adoration of our leaders,” which adoration Mailer calls “poison” for democracies. Likewise, if you love your country indiscriminately, “critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends on those distinctions.” You can be patriotic, you can love your country, you can put your life at risk defending it, and you can still be critical of it. It is precisely because democracy is “beautiful” and “noble” that it is always endangered, always “perishable.” “I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. . . . Democracy is a state of grace attained only by those countries that have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it.” One of the greatest threats to our democracy is the “mega-corporation,” ever doing its “best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.” This threat is a reference to what Mailer has been identifying since the mid-sixties as “corporate totalitarianism.”

Works Cited

• Bacevich, Andrew (2002). American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• — (2010). Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. New York: Henry Holt.
• Ellis, Joseph (2018). American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. New York: Knopf.
• Fried, Stephen (2018). Rush: Revolution, Madness & the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father. New York: Crown.
• Feldman, Noah (2017). The Three Lives of James Madison. New York: Random House.
• MacLean, Nancy (2018). The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Penguin.
• Mailer, Norman; Mailer, John Buffalo (2006). The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books.
• — (January 2004). "Immodest Proposals". Playboy. pp. 90–94, 198, 266, 268, 270, 272.
• — (1971). Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
• — (2003). Why Are We at War?. New York: Random House.