When George Shultz was secretary of the State Department, he had a little ritual for new ambassadors. He would call them into his office before they were sent overseas, hand them a map of the world, and ask them to show him where their country was. The excited diplomats would point to Uruguay or wherever, but the old Marine would shake his head. “This is your country,” he’d tell them, tapping the United States.
I have been thinking a lot about Shultz since his death, at the age of 100, last week, including the unflashy yet unflinching patriotism he embodied. In today’s political climate, he would be howled down as a RINO, an insider’s insider, or an East Coast aristocrat far removed from the concerns of ordinary people. Even at the time, many conservatives considered him vaguely suspect. Perhaps it was his well-cut suits, his unfailing courtesy, or the fact that he had worked for Richard Nixon, but for whatever reason, many Reaganites had him down as a mealy-mouthed centrist, a bureaucrat imposing State Department groupthink on their guy.
In fact, it was 180 degrees the other way around. Quietly and politely, Shultz was imposing Reaganite foreign policy on Foggy Bottom conciliators. Being both gracious and self-assured, he never felt the need to make bellicose noises about the Soviet Union. Instead, he worked diligently to bring about its defeat and liberate hundreds of millions of people from tyranny.
The New York grandee did not think it helpful to gabble about how much he loved his country, nor, to my knowledge, was he in the habit of wearing a baseball cap that advertised his patriotism. Although he was too courteous to say much about it, he must have shuddered at the way former President Donald Trump, for all his talk of American greatness, abased himself before Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pondering this difference in approach, my mind went back to a conversation I once had with Roger Scruton, the greatest conservative philosopher of our age, who died last year. Scruton used to talk about the politicians who were “nationalists without being patriots.” He meant the type, prominent in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, who would make great play of ethnic grievances, real or imagined, yet would sell their countries for personal gain at the drop of a hat.
I never thought to see such politicians in the West. Democracy, I used to tell myself, was habit-forming. With every passing generation, precedents would become, by stages, acknowledged norms and then unbreakable taboos. We Westerners, surely, would see through charlatans of the Slobodan Milosevic or Hugo Chavez type.
Over the past decade, though, an odd thing has happened. Instead of the newer democracies getting the hang of things, as we expected in the 1990s, the established democracies have become more similar to the places whose leaders wear sashes and sunglasses. I am not talking about the overthrow of democracy so much as its degradation. Putin still holds elections, in which the votes are more or less fairly counted. So does Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. So did most of Latin America’s Bolivarian caudillos — including Chavez, though not his lamentable successor Nicolas Maduro.
But the act of filling in a ballot every four years does not, in itself, guarantee pluralism, freedom, or open society. Those things depend on a series of tacit assumptions and unwritten rules — the notion, for example, that losers should accept an election result with good grace and that winners should display restraint. Or the idea that power should be transferred peacefully, without the losers being harassed by the judiciary. Or the belief that the rules matter in themselves and are not secondary to getting the candidate you want into power.
For a long time, these norms were accepted in the West, especially in English-speaking democracies. But the surest way to undermine them is to portray yourself as your country’s only defense against traitors who want to destroy it, to treat your opponents not as people with a different vision of where to take your nation but as its enemies. That was happening in the U.S. even before the coronavirus. The pandemic has accelerated the trend, leaving voters warier and the country more authoritarian than before.
It has now reached a point in which to behave like Shultz — to listen to people who disagree with you, to treat them with consideration, to assume that their motives are honest — risks dooming any candidate in a party primary.
When a great public figure dies, it is common to say that his or her death marks the end of an era. At this juncture in U.S. politics, I fear that those cliches may, for once, be true.
