HEROES and heroes

It appears that some progressive leaders in Congress are disappointed with the HEROES Act (House Democrats' proposal for the fifth coronavirus relief and stimulus bill) that was dropped on Tuesday afternoon. They have pursued against it a reasonable and familiar line of argument: it does not, they say, go nearly far enough (no automatic stabilizers, no paycheck guarantee, etc.). And it is hard to argue with them on that point, as the country takes a nosedive into economic depression.

On the other hand, one might be justified in doubting the value of holding this debate, since the 3.3 trillion dollar legislation is almost certain to never make it past the Senate or Trump's desk anyway. It was drafted without bipartisan negotiations. Republicans, meanwhile, are holding out for things like immunity from liability for businesses, which are not likely to make it far with Democrats, in turn. So, the bill will most likely never become law, at least not in its present form.

So, what are progressives to do about this? Drop some of the features of the bill they regard as critical, and incorporate some unpalatable and even downright dangerous Republican ideas into the text - sullying their hands in the process, but enabling at least a few more relief dollars to make it out the door? Or do they refuse to compromise, keeping their virtue somewhat more in tact, but meanwhile watching passively as the nation's economic and unemployment crisis deepens?

It is a debate with no easy answers. We cannot, however, say it is a new one. The present crisis simply confronts us a little more urgently and starkly with a familiar dilemma: push for tweaks to the Affordable Care Act, which might have a prayer of advancing in a divided Congress, or double down on Medicare-for-All proposals? Vote in the primaries for the career politician who has served in previous administrations and pitches themself as the one able to make deals with Republicans, or side with the leftwing candidate who flaunts their unwillingness to compromise on principle?

Whenever some variant of this question arises on the Weeds—and it comes up a great deal in the era of Bernie v. Biden flame wars—Matt Yglesias will make a reference to Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation." And the lecture is indeed a fine place to turn for wisdom when confronting this dilemma about political compromise. Weber makes a famous distinction between the "politics of personal conviction," and the "politics of responsibility," and it is not difficult—at least not from a certain polemical standpoint—to map these categories onto contemporary debates within the Democratic ranks.

Weber was writing in the midst of the revolutionary mood in Germany that followed the end of World War I; and on the occasion of delivering the lecture, more specifically, he was addressing a group of students who could presumptively be treated as partisans of the revolutionary socialist cause. Weber spoke to them as a committed left-liberal: one who was sympathetic to their ideals, but inclined to question the efficacy of their methods. He was, that is to say, a Biden among the Bernie bros.

When he referred to the politics of personal conviction, therefore, Weber clearly had his audience in mind. The conviction-politician, he states, is one who prizes ethical purity over accepting the moral costs that are invariably associated with purposeful and effective political action. The advantage of this approach to life and statecraft is that it enables one to avoid sinning; the downside is that it means one often fails to achieve concrete change in the world.

The politician who acts out of responsibility, by contrast, is for Weber one who is committed to advancing a cause, over and above preserving their personal moral sanctity. They consider themselves responsible for outcomes, not merely the intentions behind their own discrete acts. Thus, in facing down a question of whether or not to incorporate injurious Republican proposals into a future coronavirus relief bill, they would consider not only whether they are personally willing to accept such a compromise; but whether failing to accept it will mean that the larger cause of getting relief funds to people suffers as a result.

Of course, many people who might be construed as "personal conviction" politicians would likely refuse to accept Weber's dichotomy at the outset. Adopting compromise measures, they argue, is wrong precisely because it sets back the overall cause for which it is supposedly sacrificing. Aiming for somewhere in the "middle," between two arbitrary negotiating positions, validates the terms of the negotiation that the other party has set. In other words, it accepts the artificial limits around the extent of the possible that have been imposed by one's rivals.

If progressives fought for what they truly want to see happen, by contrast, (the argument runs) this would shift the terms of the entire debate in a leftward direction (the old "Overton window" effect). We should not be concerned about what the rival party is willing to accept, therefore, because to do so is already to capitulate to a worldview that renders progressive ideals and priorities somehow "fringe," unthinkable, unacceptable.

After all, every progressive change in history has been won through pushing the limits of what is considered permissible within the mainstream. Or, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor eloquently put it in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, arguing against the segments of the left that settled for Biden and other "moderates" in the primaries: "No social movement begins with the question of what is possible; it is typically fueled by imagining what could be."

Max Weber, it would seem, was not unacquainted with this argument, among the left-wing interlocutors of his time. "It is absolutely true," he writes, "and our entire historical experience confirms it, that what is possible could never have been achieved unless people had tried again and again to achieve the impossible in this world." (Livingstone trans.)

Weber goes on to suggest, however, that what is required in order to achieve transcendent, impossible, inconceivable things is not a refusal to accept imperfect reality. Rather, it is a willingness to pursue the concrete realization of perfect ends through imperfect means; it is to incrementally work in a fallen world for tiny, undramatic steps in the direction of ultimate goals. And, Weber suggests, there is a kind of moral heroism in that—one less showy and perhaps less obvious than the renunciate's total refusal to act under conditions of moral imperfection, but all the more real for that.

Weber's argument is that to do anything purposeful in the field of politics is already to have taken upon oneself the guilt of using imperfect means. The state, he writes, is in essence a system of organized violence. To wield it toward any end is, he unforgettably observes, to make a pact with satanic powers. These powers of evil he contrasts with the ethic of the Gospel, which can have no place in politics. Jesus's commands, to Weber's mind, are perfectly clear. Be perfect, as your father in Heaven is perfect. Do not return evil for evil. And to actually put these into practice would require refraining utterly from any involvement in the state.

In so arguing, Weber associated the politics of personal conviction with the kingdom of God (which is, after all, not of this world), and the politics of responsibility with the kingdom of Satan. In a sly turn, however, he suggests that the truly heroic spirit is willing to ally itself with the latter, darker power, as in some ways the more noble one: noble because it means being willing to employ means that implicate one in sin, for the purpose of advancing a cause that is of transcendent moral significance. He cites Machiavelli to this effect: that the greatest sacrifice is the one borne by someone willing to imperil their own souls, for the sake of their country.

This is apparently a most blasphemous argumentative move. Yet, it is not one that is entirely without scriptural precedent. The suffering servant of Isaiah, after all, is numbered among the transgressors, and willingly takes sin upon himself. In the moral hero of Weber's lecture—the politician of responsibility—we can see a kind of Christ figure. One who accepts the country's sins—accepts the necessity of becoming implicated in morally imperfect means—and in so doing commits the greatest self-sacrifice—the most truly altruistic moral act imaginable—for the sake of a transcendent ideal.

In which case we find an ultimate reconciliation of Weber's Kingdom of God with his Kingdom of Satan—what William Blake would call a "Marriage of Heaven and Hell." The forgiveness of sins, the atonement for sins, is a kind of invitation to sin. Expiation of sin is thus participation in sin—Christ and Satan reconciled.

Is Weber right? Or is this a particularly dangerous kind of casuistry—one that could in theory be used to justify virtually any type of wrongdoing or moral compromise? There is a scene in Bernard Malamud's baseball novel The Natural, in which a sinister crime lord is trying out this line of argument on our protagonist, in an effort to convince him to throw a big game. Does it not happen every day, he argues, that good things come out of questionable actions, committed with impure motives? To this, the protagonist replies: "Woe unto him who calls evil good and good evil."

For my part, I expect that Weber is correct that moral perfection is impossible in this world, and that the advancement of any great purpose requires some element of compromise. One can imagine a Weberian Christian-Satanic moral hero in the form of a politician who votes for a piece of legislation that they know will do some harm, but greater good, and thereby accepts upon themself—in a manner quasi-Christlike—the opprobrium with which history and the "conviction-politicians" of the age will view them. I find such a person sympathetic and compelling... to a point.

The point beyond which they are no longer sympathetic and compelling, of course, is that at which the good advanced by the legislation is no longer so much transcendently greater than the harm it inflicts that it justifies the later. So too, the conviction-politician is heroic, so long as they are holding out in opposition to a bill that genuinely is not worth the moral costs it entails. They cease to become so, as soon as their unwillingness to accept moral sacrifice puts a truly worthy and necessary and greater good in jeopardy.

We cannot simply rule all forms of moral compromise out of court, therefore. We have to ask whether any given sacrifice of virtue is worth it. As Saul Alinsky once put it: the question "'Does the end justify the means' is meaningless as it stands. The real and only question [...] is, and always has been, 'Does this particular end justify this particular means?'"

In my case, there are horrors and abominations—torture, human rights abuses, fundamental violations of civil liberties, that I could not countenance as justified under any circumstances—even to advance the most seemingly urgent and all-important of ends.

Then there are things like being willing to accept a public option with private healthcare plans still on the market, if it would mean getting a bill passed, rather than holding out for a single-payer provision that would have to wait decades or centuries to become law. That just seems very obviously within the bounds of moral costs that could be outweighed by moral benefit.

Perhaps what can best be said of Weber's argument, therefore, is that it is true in the way that many observations of human nature are true—it does provide guidance under some circumstances, but it cannot be used to justify any and all courses of action. As Weber himself would no doubt insist, it must be applied only with wisdom and maturity—and with a responsible regard for the outcomes it will provoke.

For, as Hazlitt once wisely noted it in his essay on the character of Edmund Burke: "That which, if applied as a general observation on human affairs, is a valuable truth suggested to the mind, may, when forced into the interested defence of a particular measure or system, become the grossest and basest sophistry."