Category Archives: politics

Lincoln redux

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I’ve had a fondness for Robert E. Sherwood’s Lincoln since I studied the part in high school and performed it many times as we Thespians from Abilene, Texas wound our way through the one-act play competition of the Texas Interscholastic League with a cutting from the first act of Abe Lincoln in Illinois. We took second place in the state competition in Austin in 1955, and I received a Samuel French Award as best actor. I still have the plaque somewhere.

I mention this not so much to take pride in an accomplishment so old that it means very little, as to note a certain vulnerability. I began to think about Lincoln and particularly about the Lincoln myth long ago. I immersed myself in Sherwood’s Lincoln as a kind of alter-ego and internalized, almost as though it were my own memory, Sherwood’s picture of Lincoln as a flawed frontiersman who rose to the occasion of his destiny. I think I still picture Lincoln so.

At Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, one encounters a series of small bronze statues placed in niches in the walls along the way to the burial chamber. My favorite is an equestrian statue entitled “Lincoln the Circuit Rider.” During the eighteen forties and early fifties, Lincoln traveled the eighth judicial circuit of the State of Illinois as an attorney, trying cases and making political friendships that would last, some of them, until the end of his life. Sherwood’s Lincoln is background to Lincoln the circuit lawyer and politician, a backwoods postmaster who owed money to everybody he knew and is forced to ask the political operatives who woo him to run for the state legislature to buy him a suit of clothes.

So that when I read Lerone Bennet’s Before the Mayflower in the late sixties I was not entirely unprepared for its portrait of Lincoln as a white racist. Bennett has since enlarged his campaign against the Lincoln myth, with Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, rearguing the case with a zeal like that of Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America.” This view of Lincoln has never been persuasive for me, though it remains a useful corrective to old-fashioned Lincoln hagiography. The view of many present-day social historians that African Americans “freed” themselves in the nineteenth century, has more robustness, however. That view informs Kate Masur’s op-ed review in The New York Times of Steven Spielberg’s new film, Lincoln.

Masur argues with considerable interpretive skill that Spielberg’s film seems dertermined “to see emancipation as a gift from white people to black people, not as a social transformation in which African-Americans themselves played a role.” I think the criticism is fair, as far as it goes. But I also think the history of emancipation is not the subject of Spielberg’s film. Masur seems to think that the history of emancipation ought to have been Spielberg’s subject, and this apparent conviction leads her to conclude that the film is “an opportunity squandered.”

But I think this misses the point. So far, the most balanced review of Lincoln I have read is that of another Masur (Louis P.) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sets Spielberg’s portrait of Lincoln in the context of other film portraits. You can read that review here. It is entitled “Lincoln at the Movies.” Like Louis Masur, I think of Spielberg’s Lincoln as an appropriation of the Lincoln myth, not as critique or as an opportunity for critique “squandered,” as Kate Masur observed. I see the Spielberg character as an older instantiation of Sherwood’s frontiersman, personally flawed but still possessed of a naive hope for a better world than the one he inhabits, and an iron determination to sieze the moment and achieve at least some small realization of a part of that hope.

It’s sometimes claimed that the Lincoln myth is a twentieth-century phenomenon, but the claim is wrong. Millions mourned Lincoln as his funeral train made the slow passage from the nation’s capital to Springfield:

Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn; . . .

Walt Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” from which I have quoted, was written in 1865, as were a handful of other poems lamenting the President’s death. And Whitman was not alone. William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Stoddard, and many others also wrote poetic tributes at the time of Lincoln’s death.

And it’s well known that the Lincoln myth has a good deal to do with Lincoln’s campaign biography and his own habit of referring to himself as a man who had overcome humble beginnings. This part of the Lincoln myth has been the subject of considerable critique by historians who have followed Richard Hofstadter. At one terminus of this critique one finds Lerone Bennett and a surprising crony, Tom DiLorenzo, whose book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War seems a polemic in support of the cynical oligarchy that now owns Lincoln’s political party.

Any living myth is an exercise in memory as reconstruction. We reinvent what Van Wyck Brooks called the usable past continually from the perspective of present needs and understandings. Spielberg’s Lincoln is as much about our present political crisis and the constant question, “What is to be done,” as it is about the political conflict over the thirteenth amendment. And as Louis Masur sees it, Spielberg’s “Lincoln fits with our own cynicism about the political process. But it redeems the enterprise by suggesting that hardfought battles can be won, that bipartisan agreement can be reached, even over the most intractable issues.”

But I think Spielberg’s Lincoln is about something else as well, maybe even more important. Abraham Lincoln has been an inspirational figure for utopians like me in the face of the political struggles of my lifetime, both in my country, and in what many of my colleagues still refer to as “the academy,” where I have spent most of my working life. Among other things Lincoln has stood for the transformative power of language, for the proposition that something like The Kingdom of God stands unrealized but realizable in human affairs, in the turmoil and bloody struggle of history—and that our dreams of human flourishing are not forlorn as long as we have poets and orators to speak them.

Kate Masur notes the absence of Frederick Douglass from Spielberg’s Lincoln, noting as well that Douglass was among the White House guests at Lincoln’s second inaugural. It may push the evidence too far to claim that Lincoln and Douglass were friends; though they met several times, and Douglass has recalled that Lincoln was surprisingly cordial to him. But Douglass delivered a memorable oration in praise of Lincoln in 1876 at the “Unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.”

Douglass’s praise of Lincoln is complex and not without an accounting of Lincoln’s prejudices. Lincoln, according to Douglass, was primarily the white man’s President. Douglass listed, indeed catalogued among others, Lincoln’s actions that from the perspective of the twenty-first century could seem those of a racist dictator. But the conclusion Douglass drew regarding Lincoln’s life and legacy is perhaps best summarized in this passage:

The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time. Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.

But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

Somewhere towards the middle of Spielberg’s film, Lincoln’s cabinet challenge him in regard to his assumption of war powers. These are well known, especially Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. Some of his cabinet even claim that Lincoln has destroyed democracy. His reply is something to the effect that if the Union can be saved perhaps democracy will survive as well, as a condition to be achieved. Abraham Lincoln had considerable skill with words, though he had no great voice. But he spoke with a prophetic prescience in an age that valued both poetry and oratory. He has left us with a body of words that still teach us about social hope. We do well to treasure those iconic words.

Of course, as one critic has spelled out, there’s no historical warrant for the opening scene of Lincoln featuring two pairs of soldiers, black and white, reciting the Gettysburg address with Lincoln as audience. It’s a tableau, designed as a mythopoeic moment out of time, as is the flashback that concludes the film with Lincoln speaking the most famous passage from his second inaugural address. The point is that these words lead us on—that is why they bookend the film—that the Lincoln of myth leads us on because the Lincoln of history, like the historic Thomas Jefferson, left us a legacy of words and deeds that on the whole were perhaps better than he was. His career can be viewed as an attempt, not without a steep learning curve, to live up to the best poetic vision of his country he could fashion.

What I did on election day

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I voted, of course, and I was glad to go to bed last Tuesday night with the knowledge that my guy had won a second term. But I also had good memories of having worked all afternoon on election day in a nonpartisan phone bank at one of our local TV stations. Here’s my beloved talking about it with Larry Conners, the Channel 4 news anchor. Our local League of Women Voters is one of the most active in the country. We have produced a voters’ guide in collaboration with the St. Louis Post Dispatch for some years now, and we all hope to continue the partnership with KMOV through future elections.

I worked election day afternoon until the polls closed at 7:00 p. m., answering calls from people with problems. The most common problems seemed to be with registration: people who had failed to file changes of address when they moved, weren’t sure whether they were registered, or didn’t know where their polling place was. In some cases I was able to tell callers how they could vote, but I had to explain to other callers that they had waited too long to register and would have to wait for the next election.

Though we did have difficulty at some polling places in the city, not uncommon in St. Louis. My beloved and I stood in line for two hours when we voted mid morning because our polling place was short staffed and had only three voting machines, a sharp contrast with 2008 when there had been plenty of staff and thirty or forty voting machines at the same site. I answered a good many calls in the afternoon from other voters who had encountered difficulties at the polls, all the way from illegal demands for picture IDs to the one caller who had gone to her polling place shortly after 6:00 p. m. and found it had closed early. We passed problems such as these on to a team of lawyers at the Election Protection group, but KMOV also sent investigative reporters to ferret out information about as many problems as time permitted them to investigate.

All in all it was a good day. I worked for some years as an election judge here until I passed my 70th birthday and decided to retire. During that time I saw a lot of incompetence and misconduct on the part of election officials—so, what I heard on the phone this past election day didn’t surprise me. Still, most citizens here voted without difficulty. It was pretty intense, working in the phone bank, pretty much one call after another for the last three hours or so. But I enjoyed the experience and will do it again if I’m offered the chance. It reminded me a little of working in voter registration drives and precinct politics when I was young.

Habits of the Heart

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I need to append a disclaimer to the beginning of this essay. It isn’t my intention in what follows to attempt a move out of politics or to pretend that I am making an analytical and apolitical rhetorical gesture. What I argue is political through and through, a point to which I return at the end of the essay.

It’s a cliché of political theater to claim that an argument is merely political, as though there were some form of the argument or some similar argument or some site of the same or a similar argument that is free of the taint of politics. There’s no such place, no such argument. It’s politics all the way down; and moreover, politics isn’t a taint. It’s the queen of sciences according to Aristotle. It’s the means by which we are able to act together in groups of all sorts, the index jointly of how we differ and of our solidarity. It’s the creator of the public space in which we reason together, as Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, or do not.

And there’s the rub. Politics is by nature adversarial, the alternative to war and tyranny in civilized societies who take seriously the perception that persuasion is superior to force as a means of settling all but the crudest of disputes. And a corollary is that the cruder our everyday disputes become, the more the public space shrinks as a space for reasoned argument and the closer we come to war and tyranny. The public space has all but disappeared once in the history of the United States of America, and we fought a bloody war as a result. I’m thinking we’re very close to a similar near disappearance in our present public life.

That the present right-wing insurgency in this country is a rejection of politics ought to be very clear by now. Consider just a few phenomena. Since the beginning of President Obama’s term in office, the chief goal of the right has been to ensure the failure of his presidency. Just a year ago Republicans in congress held the entire country hostage and brought us to the brink of public insolvency in pursuit of this goal. Many Republicans now speak openly of overturning the voting rights act and of the partisan intention of current voter ID laws. Republican Mike Turzai”s claim that Virginia’s voter ID law would allow Romney to win in that state has been widely circulated, but other Republicans have made still broader claims for the rash of voter ID laws being passed by state legislatures.1 As conservative columnist Matthew Vadum put it:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

And Minnesota Republican Kurt Zellers has been quoted as saying:

I think [voting is] a privilege, it’s not a right. Everybody doesn’t get it because if you go to jail or if you commit some heinous crime your [voting] rights are taken away. This is a privilege.

My point here isn’t to argue against these actions and claims (I think they are beneath contempt) but rather to present them as examples of the extent to which today’s right-wing insurgency rejects the most basic aspects of our republican tradition, and deeper still rejects politics itself. The ability of citizens to engage in political action depends in large measure on a shared sense of the common good. This is what present-day Republican strategies seem determined to destroy. Moreover, nobody should believe the right-wing insurgency’s claim to speak and act in defense of traditional American liberties. Quite the opposite is true—the right speaks and acts in an orchestrated effort to engineer the appearance of consent and thereby to restrict liberty.2

Republicans will shortly nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as their party’s candidates for the higest offices in the land. Both come from inherited wealth. Romney represents America’s most privileged class; Ryan is less wealthy but still much better off than most middle class Americans. The idea that Romney and Ryan are self-made individuals is equally ludicrous with respect to both men.3 Indeed, it is President Obama who has a reasonable claim to being a self-made person in the traditional sense (problematic for some voters who are sure he has been the recipient of some sort of afirmative action privilege).

Still, in the coming weeks the Republican ticket will attempt, indeed is already attempting, to draw upon a fund of populist support. They may have figured out something that progressives haven’t. In a recent New York Times piece, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff describe the ressentiment that this Republican ticket attempts to enlist. Here’s one anecdote they present:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,” says Gulbranson.

Appelbaum and Gebeloff focus on Chisago County, Minnesota, where “Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year,” pointing out that Rick Santorum won 57 percent of the vote in the recent Republican caucuses there with his rhetoric about “the narcotic of government dependency.” Not all Chisago residents share Mr. Gulbranson’s views or his frustrations, as some of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s other interviews illustrate. Still, the weight of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s researches seems to justify this conclusion:

[A]s more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it.
………………………………….
But the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears.

Thirty years ago a team of social scientists led by Robert Bellah published a book entitled Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.5 The aporias that Appelbaum and Gebeloff detail remind me of some of the interviews recounted in first part of Habits of the Heart, narratives whose subjects encounter difficulty in resolving issues of commitment and relationship because they are trapped in a “culture of radical, privatized autonomy.”4

Bellah and his colleagues characterized the two large political discourses of modernism as welfare liberalism and neocapitalism. The problem with both as visions of our public life is that they share investment in an individualism that is empty of any conception of civic virtue and offers a vision of the good life based entirely upon accumulation and consumption. Ki Gulbranson wants to think of himself as a self-reliant individual, but his individualism cannot cope with the fact that he relies on elements of the welfare state in order to survive. As he puts it, “I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government.” But he does need the government, and his individualism gives him no ground for self-respect given that need. Nor does his individualism help him when he tries to think in terms of civic virtue. “You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing,” he says mournfully.

Both modern political discourses reify individualism, the left primarily in terms of therapeutic self-actualization or traditional civil rights, the right primarily in terms of economics. We have come to see individualism as the only alternative to tryranny in contemporary social life. The left accuses the right of fostering a tyranny of wealth, and the right accuses the left of fostering state tyranny. Both are partly and sometimes right and partly and sometimes wrong, but the corrective is not to be sought in either, any more than it is to be sought in a retreat from politics.

Bellah and his colleagues claimed, I think rightly, that we Americans need to renew our civic life by reviving those habits of the heart which Alexis de Tocqueville long ago experienced as the foundations of our society. Tocqueville defined such habits loosely, as collections of notions and mental habits, but also as habitual practices involving religious, civic, and economic life. What is missing in our present social life is the understanding that such habits are public. For Tocqueville, indeed for his age, the notion of a private citizen would have been an absurdity. We are spouses, farmers, teachers, physicians—above all we are citizens. These roles and many others like them, together with the habits of mind and practice that shape them, are the forms of our public life, not items of reified private identity. Habits of the heart attach to our shared humanity, something we still experience (or at least some of us do) in “communities of memory and hope”6 such as churches, schools and universities, where vestiges of mutuality and shared obligation remain.

Churches, schools and universities are communities too small to effect a renewal of our social life. Tocqueville’s conception of American life was tied to a small-town, agrarian culture that hasn’t existed in this country since the late nineteenth century. Much of our American mythology nostalgically evokes images of that culture, but if we are to reconstitute a large-scale American community of memory and hope, it will surely possess outlines far different from the community Tocqueville experienced in the 1830s. One thing is certain, however. If we do seek to renew our social life, we will do so by a return to politics. It’s the only means we have. Part of any such return will inevitably involve the perception that present social and economic dislocation proceed (at least in part) from, and are exacerbated by, our present structures of inequality as well as by the level of incivility that characterizes our popular culture. As I write this my beloved is listening to President Obama’s press conference in the next room as she works on a syllabus for the coming school term. It is refreshing to hear the civil tone of the president’s conversation with reporters. Time will tell.

Notes

1The linkage beetween the broad Republican effort to restrict voting and the American Legislative Exchange council (which claims to be non-partisan), the Koch brothers, and other rightist foundations and corporations is now well known. See here, and here, and here.
2Noam Chomsky makes this point forcefully in a recent essay at the Huffington Post, “Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta.”
3About Romney and Ryan’s relative wealth see this. On Ryan’s inherited benefits see this and this.
4For the quotation see “Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” a lecture delivered by Robert Bellah at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1986.
5Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. A new third edition has been available since 2007.
6The term occurs pervasively in Habits of the Heart.

It’s not just about Darwin

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We’re back from vacation and facing the consequences of the August 7th primary election. Missouri doesn’t allow early voting, but we voted absentee on July 23rd because we anticipated being in Wisconsin on election day. Among other votes I cast a vote against a Missouri ballot initiative hyped as the “prayer amendment” and am disappointed that it passed by an overwhelming margin.

Among those who voted for the amendment was Senator Claire McCaskill, who has attempted to deflect criticism of her vote by claiming that the amendment merely affirms what is already in the state constitution, cavalierly saying she is all for prayer and adding:

I hope everyone is praying for me, I’m going to need a lot of prayers between now and November. I’m not kidding.

McCaskill faces a popular conservative opponent in the general election, and she may need more than prayers if she is to survive that test of her popularity; but I very much wish she had not voted for this ballot initiative, which read as follows:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to ensure:
• That the right of Missouri citizens to express their religious beliefs shall not be infringed;
• That school children have the right to pray and acknowledge God voluntarily in their schools; and
• That all public schools shall display the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution

I wrote about this proposition in a recent post. It is (I think, intentionally) broad and vague. And I’m sure there will be orchestrated attempts in the Missouri public schools to establish religious exemptions from standard school assignments. Initially, I thought this amendment was just about Darwin, but I fear I was wrong. Here’s some language from the platform of the Texas Republican Party that explains why:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Years ago I attended a service club meeting where the speaker talked about the controversy that eventuated in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the United states Supreme Court Decision that allowed Amish children to finish their education at the eighth grade.

I had attended this service club meeting with a friend who was also my priest at the time. I said to him, “Why don’t we just let these harmless people do as they wish?” His answer surprised me. He said, “It depends on who you think is the citizen.” The cognitive dissonance between my question and my priest’s answer informs my thinking about matters of this sort to this day. The Amish won their case, as I then thought they should have done, but my thinking has changed. Back in the early nineteen seventies I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to what I have termed public reason in a recent post.

My thinking then was something like this: the Amish do no harm (at that time I had no idea how much good Anabapbists, Amish and Mennonites, do; I just thought of them as benign), and since they do no harm, why must we seek to control how they educate their chiildren? My priest had brought me up short by reminding me that all children in the United States of America have a certain birthright, which one could claim is the right to be educated for citizenship, as human individuals; and that this right supersedes all claims on their attention made by merely cultural factors, religion, parental authority, loyalty to a social class or ethnic group, etc. It’s the rock-bottom claim of American public education—that the truth will make you free. Additionally, this is the fundamental assumption of Brown v. Board of Education, that all children, equally, have an entitlement to learn. Justice Douglas made this point as part of his dissenting opinion in Wisconsin v. Yoder:

While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. If a parent keeps his child out of school beyond the grade school, then the child will be forever barred from entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today.

Unfortunately, we have extended (and still extend) this entitlement rather crudely, by generally requiring that all children attend school until the age of 16, and more recently with laws requiring bussing and other measures designed to promote equality of access. Still more recently we have added a crude (some would say mindless) emphasis on standardized testing to the enforcement mix in response to growing demands for school accountability (so called). Thus the entitlement to learn has morphed from a right that belonged to students as individuals into a cultural imperative enjoined upon schools and teachers that students must succeed in ways that are statistically measurable.

Still, the ideal of universal education is something Americans seemed more or less in agrement about over time, until fairly recently. What has changed is that public education is now widely regarded as part of a liberal establishment that has been partially undermined by postmodern academic critiques of science and evidence based thinking, particularly rhetorical critiques such as that of Stanley Fish, and that has come to be portrayed in popular culture as effete, elitist, and self-serving by creationists, opponents of global warming such as George Will, antifeminists, opponents of gay rights, religious fundamentalists, and others. This is a vast oversimplification, but I think it’s a fair claim that a now substantial backlash against the liberal establishment of the modern era is in full swing.

This backlash is not so much conservative as it is anti-liberal. Texas Republicans, and now the citizens of Missouri, however much they may look nostalgically towards parts of our history we would do well to forget (i. e. the Texas republic and the antebellum south), are now on the march against what Justice Douglas called “the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today,” using the language of individualism and the guarantees of the first amendment, as Paul Ryan frequently does, to deny legitimacy to the fundamental impulses behind those guarantees.