The Town Hall as Advent Calendar, Neustadt an der Weinstraße, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
Last April, during Holy Week, a Catholic neighbor of mine in Madrid corrected me when I wished him “Happy Easter” in the middle of the week. You don’t say Felices Pascuas until Sunday, he explained, because that’s when Christ was resurrected. That made perfect sense given that the joy of Easter can only be understood in the context of the story of Jesus’ persecution and crucifixion.
It occurred to me that in the U.S. our greetings sometimes lack nuance and squeeze the meaning out of celebrations whose significance are as much about process as they are about outcomes. Public culture in America is deeply secular and, therefore, time is generally seen as linear. Things are assumed either to get better over time or to fall off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.
While European societies have been thoroughly secularized, the memory of ancient, circular liturgical time is still baked into the language and ways of celebration. Their language still implicitly retains the wisdom that Catalán architect Antoni Gaudí articulated so well. “The straight line belongs to man, the curved one to God.”
In Germany, where my wife was raised, Advent, the four-week season leading up to Christmas, is widely observed publicly by media and political figures. In my wife’s hometown, the city hall is turned into a giant Advent calendar with a new window being opened every night to reveal a picture behind it. The final window is opened on Christmas Eve.
That helps explain why each November, wherever we are, I buy my wife an Advent calendar so she can count down the days leading up to Christmas. Ticking off the days and enjoying the calendar’s embedded chocolate treats only enhances her anticipation for the holiday. And that’s the point.
Yet, I still had not fully learned my lesson about the importance of process and anticipation. A few days ago in Madrid, a friend rebuffed me for wishing him a happy new year too early.
In Spain, he told me, we wish people una buena salida y entrada de año (good exit to this year and entrance to the next) in the days leading up to the New Year. That, too, makes sense. Ending this year well helps ensure a good start to the next.
In Germany, where I am today, I’m determined not to make the same mistake. Today, I am wishing people Guten Rutch, a good slide into the new year, another saying that places the meaning in the process of transition rather than merely on the culmination of a story or the start of a new one. Only after midnight on December 31, will I begin to wish folks a Frohes Neues Jahr.
Tomorrow, we’ll fly back to Spain to prepare to celebrate the arrival of the Three Kings, another story whose ultimate meaning can be found in their journey and their search for Jesus.
But the denouement of the story of the Magi also carries tremendous meaning which I’ve always found appealing. Having been warned in a dream of Herod’s desire to have Jesus killed, the Three Wise Men journeyed home by another way to keep the Christ Child’s location secret. Their willingness to make a last-minute change of plans may be the best advice of all on how to approach a new year.
The Cloister of the Basílica de San Isidoro, León, Spain. (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Madrid, Spain
You know how learning about ancient cultures can give you insights into the mysterious habits of contemporary humans? Well, the same goes for learning about complex modern institutions. Pondering their pre-modern origins can help bring their fundamental mechanics to light.
It was in this spirit that I boarded a train to visit a medieval sandstone cloister in the northwestern Spanish city of León. Believe it or not, I was hoping my quick trip to the Basílica de San Isidoro would teach me a few things, about, well, modern democracy.
Americans tend to sanctify their Constitution in ways that obscure its real value and purpose. I suppose this sanctification is a way of symbolically embracing a country that lacks as firm an ethnic or cultural anchor as, say, any European nation. When it was ratified, America’s Constitution was indeed the opposite of an anchor. In 1787, Francis Hopkinson, the Pennsylvania lawyer who attended the Constitutional Convention in addition to signing the Declaration of Independence and designing the American flag, called it a “roof” that united “the strength of 13 rafters.”1 In other words, the Framers created an overarching legal structure–a roof–long before a unifying cultural foundation developed on the ground. Similarly, historian Daniel Boorstin has written that Americans view the Constitution as an “exoskelton,” something akin to a lobster’s shell that we filled out over time.2 Through the generations, it was the human interaction created by commerce and migration that forged the cultural ties that bound a heterogenous people together into a nation.
The sanctification of the Constitution has also involved no small amount of ethnic chauvinism. The blessings of American democracy, we’ve been taught, are inherited exclusively from England, where the very first written constitution, the Magna Carta, was issued in 1215 and the first parliament was called fifty years later.
By the mid-19th century, many white Americans were so convinced that they were the sole inheritors of the love of liberty and the habits of self-governance that they imagined it to be an almost racial trait that was passed down from one generation to the next. In January of 1845, Democratic Representative Alexander Duncan of Ohio told his colleagues that he thought “there seems to be something in our laws and institutions peculiarly adapted to our Anglo-Saxon-American race, under which they will thrive and prosper, but under which all others wilt and die.”3 In the early 20th century, a prominent Oxford historian proudly proclaimed that “parliamentary institutions” were “incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world.”4
Now, I realize that this type of sanctification of the Constitution has had its purposes. Racial aspects aside, it fosters the reverence sometimes required to abide by its more absurd and out-dated elements. But treating America’s legal framework as some sort of mystical tablet also obscures our understanding of its critical role as social contract and source of our rights. The other problem, of course, is that the myth is based on a false premise.
In 2009, in his book The Life and Death of Democracy, Australian political theorist John Keane “politely questioned”—in his words—“this English prejudice.”5 His research had led him to conclude that in 1188, a generation before the Magna Carta, Alfonso IX, the newly-crowned seventeen-year-old monarch of the Kingdom of León, had convened Europe’s very first parliament, or cortes in Spanish, within the cloisters of León’s Romanesque Basílica de San Isidoro.
Of course, it had not been unusual for Europe’s kings to gather with lords and bishops. But Alfonso did something entirely new for European royalty, which was to invite representatives from the towns. This was the first recorded gathering of all three estates—nobility, the Church, and burghers. The most basic definition of a parliament is an assembly involving various social groups of the realm, including representatives of towns.
But why would a king whose power was said to be granted directly by God seek to hold discussions with townsmen? For one, he needed money to fight back the encroaching Muslim armies and plenty of Leonese were unhappy with the imposition of new taxes. Secondly, Alfonso may have feared that an alliance between angry nobles and townsfolk might form against him. In any case, according to Keane, the king was determined “to defend and expand his kingdom, even if that meant making political compromises that might dilute his kingly powers.”6
Operating in the spirit of compromise, the king secured the backing of the three estates in exchange for his promise to “not wage war nor make peace or make any agreement without the counsel of bishops, nobles and good men,” which referred to leading citizens of the towns.7 In a series of what may have been up to 15 documents collectively called the Decreta, the king agreed that private property and personal domiciles were inviolable, that justice would be upheld in a routine, predictable manner including that any charges against a person must be backed by evidence and that detainees had the right to be defended by a third party.
What’s even more significant here, to me at least, is that the citizens of León did not secure new liberties out of some abstract reverence for rights. The social gains they made were the byproduct of a monarch’s inability to raise taxes, maintain peace in the realm, and otherwise rule his kingdom without the cooperation of the three estates.
As John Keane has eloquently put it, it was out of self-interest that Alfonso IX invented “a new mechanism for resolving disputes and striking bargains among interested parties who felt they had a common interest in reaching compromise.”8 The king’s baseline understanding of his kingdom, then, was not of a society requiring indivisible political community, but one comprised of competing and sometimes conflicting interests. To resolve inevitable conflicts, the Decreta contained an agreement that there would be future assemblies of the king involving representatives from the three estates. A regular parliament offered “the possibility of turning disagreements about reality into binding agreements in support of a common good.”9
Even more amazing is that the representatives of the towns who attended the cortes in the cloister of San Isidoro had been elected by the citizens of their towns. While it isn’t known by what method they were elected nor exactly how many were present, historian Joseph F. O’Callaghan concluded that their “numbers in attendance must have been quite large.”10
The Reconquista placed pressures on other monarchs in the Iberian Peninsula. As they sought to strip people and territory from Muslim control, Christian kings had to “compete with the more advanced Muslim kingdoms in the south for the favours of the merchants and farmers,” and thus were “prepared to respect their property rights and grant them … privileges.”11 In 1126, sixty-two years before the first cortes in León, King Alfonso I of Aragon granted a charter of liberties to “Christians whom I brought, with the help of God out of the power of the Saracens and led into the lands of the Christians. . . . Because you left your homes and your estates for the name of Christ and out of love for me and came with me to populate my lands, I grant you good customs throughout your realm.”12
It would, of course, be naive to draw too straight a line between the medieval origins of the parliament and the spread of modern written constitutions in the mid-18th century. As representative assemblies—and the societies from which they emerged—became more complex, so too did the theories of governance and philosophical worldviews that came to animate western politics.
At the same time, however, as Spanish legal historian Aniceto Masferrer has argued, the enormous differences between the two eras notwithstanding, it is important to make connections between the medieval documents like the Decreta and the emergence of liberal governance six centuries later. If nothing else, Alfonso IX’s savvy political bargaining shows “how medieval Europe started to be aware of the convenience of limiting political power through law.”13
By the time the Framers sat down in 1787 to hammer out the U.S. Constitution, the English House of Commons had long since invented the idea of popular sovereignty as a way to challenge monarchical power. The ideology was developed, as historian Edmund Morgan wrote, to “justify a government in which the authority of kings stood below that of the people.”14 Of course, shifting the locus of sovereignty from the king to the people was not actually designed to put power in the hands of the people, but rather in those of the members of parliament.
For their part, America’s Federalists—who could better be described as nationalists—embraced the idea of popular sovereignty as a way to weaken the power of individual states. Why? Because legislative majorities in most states had passed debt relief laws that the Framers felt threatened the property rights of creditors. (The minority the Framers sought to protect, then, was the wealthy, a class to which most belonged.) The idea–put forth by James Madison—was that the authority granted to the new national government would rest on the power of “the people” at large rather than on the collective authority of the states themselves. In short, he had invented “a sovereign American people to overcome the sovereign states.”15
Popular sovereignty, of course, was as much a “fiction” as was the divine right of kings.16 Indeed, the way it was “publicly presented” in America, political scientist Stephen Holmes has written, bore “a striking resemblance to proclamations in which absolute monarchs [once declared] their sovereign will.” What this meant was that rather than being perceived as an exchange of promises “between classes or factions or territorial subunits,” the U.S. Constitution was portrayed as a charter that “‘we the people’ [gave] ourselves.”17
Paradoxically perhaps, it was this fiction that led the Federalists to argue against the inclusion of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. When Antifederalists, those who opposed the ratification of the new Constitution for fear that it would give the national government too much power, first demanded that the document include a list of protected rights, Federalists called the request a quaint throwback to the time when kings granted concessions to their subjects.
If the government derived its power directly from the people, they argued, then what sense would it make to have the people make concessions to themselves? Because America’s constitution could not be considered an agreement between or among parties, “neither concession nor contract was possible because people and government were one and the same.”18
Conversely, since it was “We the People” who conveyed specific powers to the national government, Federalists could argue, as one did, that the Constitution itself was “nothing more than a bill of rights—a declaration of the people in what manner they choose to be governed.”19
Evidently offended by the idea that a convention had been convened to hash out a mere compact, North Carolina’s James Iredell, a leading Federalist who would become one of the first justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, proclaimed that America’s government was “founded on much nobler principles.” 20
Fortunately for Americans, the Antifederalists were not swayed by those nobler principles and did not give up on the idea that the Constitution was, as one delegate at a state ratifying convention put it, “a compact, agreement, covenant, bargain,” that required the government to put concessions in writing.21 James Madison, of course, ultimately relented to these demands out of political expediency. While he was himself a believer in rights, he nonetheless saw the addition of constitutional guarantees as a political rather than an ideological act. His reason for drafting the Bill of Rights, historian Pauline Maier has concluded, was “less to secure rights,” than to subdue opposition to the Constitution.22 If, as the Framers believed, one of the primary goals of the new Constitution was to protect the property rights of the wealthy minority, then adding amendments to safeguard such popular rights as speech, religion, press, and assembly, was a worthwhile compromise.
Still, the Federalists’ fiction of popular sovereignty—and a unified American people—lived on in the way Americans think about their country. Each school day, American school children pledge allegiance to their “indivisible” nation. Even when we know that ugly, divisive presidential elections can be won by mere percentage points, we continue to refer reverently to the the voice of “the people.” When we ask a restaurant waiter what’s good on the menu, they’re likely to tell you what sells most as if majority opinion is the voice of good taste and wisdom.
If Medieval “Standestaat”—a state of estates—were thought to be divisible into three separate groups, then contemporary Americans tend to see the primary division in our national political community as being between the few and the many, the majority versus the minority, which they sometimes translate as the strong and the weak.23 So even as we herald the wisdom of the majority, we hail the genius of a Constitution that protects the minority. Indeed, Columbia University political scientist Giovanni Sartori once argued that the only reason to believe in constitutions at all is if “we think that somebody needs protection from somebody else.”24
This insight helps explain why Americans tend to think of rights in moral terms, sacred protections that are heroically demanded and/or benevolently bestowed. This weak/strong dynamic injects no small amount of paternalism into a political process we otherwise think of in terms of bargaining, sausage-making, and horse-trading. Rather than being perceived as a political compromise made to maintain social tranquility, the granting of rights is often portrayed as if it were a morality tale. Which brings me back to Alfonso IX, who clearly saw it as a necessary element of a mutually beneficial exchange.
In his 2012 essay, “Constitutions and Constitutionalism,” NYU’s Stephen Holmes urged Americans to start thinking about rights more through the lens of realism than idealism. Claiming this his observations should be interpreted as instructive rather than cynical, he argued the “democratic constitutions emerge and survive” when society’s “most powerful social forces find that they can promote their own interests most effectively by simultaneously promoting the interests of, and sharing political influence with, less powerful but not utterly powerless swaths of the population.”25
Why? Because it is only “when the powerful discover the advantages they can reap from making their own behavior predictable,” do they “voluntarily submit to constitutional constraints.” Put even more bluntly, when non-elites bring incentives to the bargaining table, “elites respond opportunistically by granting legal protections and participatory rights in exchange for cooperation indispensable to elite projects.”26
Holmes wasn’t the first theorist to make this argument. In 1919, Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, argued that much of modern western democracy was itself a product of national elites’ need for disciplined soldiers to fight wars. It was military necessity, then, that compelled them “to secure the cooperation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power, into their arms.”27 While Weber was not referring to the U.S. Constitution, he was nonetheless recognizing the existence of political bargaining as the essence of constitutionalism in general.
Historian Linda Colley concurs with—and expands on–Weber in her remarkable 2021 book, The Gun, the Ship, and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World. The rash of new constitutions in the 18th century was, in part, a product of the rise in the number of bloody and expensive imperial, transcontinental wars. The new countries that emerged from this warfare “progressively elected to experiment with written constitutions as a means to reorder government, mark out and lay claim to contested boundaries” as well as to “legitimize their systems of government anew.” These new constitutions—including that of the United States–helped to “rally wider support and justify expanding fiscal and manpower demands.”These documents sometimes “functioned in effect and in part as bargains on paper. Male inhabitants of a state might be offered certain rights, including admission to the franchise, as a quid pro quo for accepting higher taxes and/or military conscription.”28
This description is not pretty. It’s not mystical. Nor does it pretend that all parties to the negotiation are equal. But it does provide a framework with which we can think about rights in terms of compromise and mutual benefit rather than merely in sacred principles and abstractions. This doesn’t mean that the Framers didn’t infuse the document with a desire for reform or utopian hopes, just that the harsh realities of geopolitics—particularly threats from Britain to the north, Spain on the Mississippi, and Native Americans throughout the inland frontier—were never far from their minds. The Constitution that was drafted in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, writes Colley, “was often approached at the time less as a ‘blueprint of a liberal democratic society,’ . . . than as a grimly necessary plan for a more effective and defendable union.”29
So what did I learn in León? I learned that from the very beginning constitutions are practical political documents that formalize the results of bargaining between competing sectors of a given political community; that they are amoral rule books that set the boundaries of future debate, establish the obligations each sector owes to the other, and constrain the actions of members of signatory groups long after the signers of the parchment are dead. Most importantly, I learned that if they are to survive, all parties must continue to persuade the other that they can more effectively get what they want if they agree to support each other. And finally, that, while inspiring, America’s universalist language of rights can be deceiving; that our civil rights—liberties derived from membership in a particular polity—are a far more powerful source of freedom than human rights–liberties that all persons should theoretically enjoy.
Paul M. Zall, ed., Comical Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Humor of Francis Hopkinson (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1976), 191. ↩︎
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, 191. ↩︎
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 227. ↩︎
A.F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1920), 3. ↩︎
John Keane, “The Future of Parliaments,” (keynote address, EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments, León, Spain, June 30, 2023). ↩︎
John Keane, The Shortest History of Democracy: 4,000 Years of Self-Government—A Retelling for Our Times (New York: The Experiment, 2022). 79. ↩︎
María Esther Seijas Villadangos, “Origin of Parliamentarism: An Historical Review of its Crisis: León (Spain) as Cradle of Parliamentarism,” Revista Acadêmica da Faculdade de Direito do Recife 88, no. 2., (July/December 2016): 22. ↩︎
John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 176. ↩︎
Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “The Beginnings of the Cortes of León-Castile,” The American Historical Review 74, no. 5 (June 1969): 1514. ↩︎
Jan Luiten van Zanden, Eltjo Buringh, and Maarten Bosker, “The Rise and Decline of European Parliaments, 1188-1789,” The Economic History Review 65, no. 3 (August 2012): 839. ↩︎
Joseph F. O’Callaghan, History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 285. ↩︎
Aniceto Masferrer, “The Spanish Origins of Limiting Royal Power in the Medieval Western World: The Córtes of León and Their Decreta (1188),” in Golden Bulls and Chartas: European Medieval Documents of Liberties, ed. Elemér Balogh (Budapest: Central European Academic Publishing, 2023), 31. ↩︎
Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 56. ↩︎
Stephen Holmes, “Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy,” in Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995,) 146. ↩︎
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 541-542. ↩︎
Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 541. ↩︎
Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 446. ↩︎
Daniel Chirot, “The Rise of the West,” American Sociological Review 50, no. 2 (April 1985): 185. ↩︎
Giovanni Sartori, “Constitutionalism: A Preliminary Discussion,” The American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (December 1962): 855. ↩︎
Stephen Holmes, “Constitutions and Constitutionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, ed. Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 215. ↩︎
Holmes, “Constitutions and Constitutionalism,” 214-215. ↩︎
Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), 325. ↩︎
Linda Colley, The Gun, The Ship, and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 7. ↩︎
It might surprise you to learn that the first time the term “liberal” was ever used to describe a political group or agenda was not in France, England, or even the United States. It might surprise you even more to learn that it was first used here in Andalucía, Spain, in 1810, in the ancient port city of Cádiz.
Last Friday, I caught an early train to Cádiz not simply to escape the heat in Madrid. Sure the coastal breeze has its charms, but what I was really after was a glimpse of the church that hosted the cortes —the representative assembly–that drafted and approved the Constitution of 1812, what was then the most liberal governing document of its time.
In 1807, the Spanish Crown allowed Napoleon’s troops to pass through Spain on their way to invade Portugal. But that double-crossing Napoleon wound up occupying most of the peninsula, setting up his older brother Joseph as the king of Spain, and placing Spanish King Fernando VII under house arrest in a chateau in the Loire Valley. Despite laying siege to Cádiz, however, he could not bring this dynamic, international city built on imperial trade to its knees.
In the absence of a legitimate monarch, this is where nationalist leaders ultimately hunkered down to form a resistance government during what became an all-out war to push out the invading French. In what must have been a moment of inspiration, they chose to resurrect the cortes, the medieval precursor to the modern democratic parliament that had not been used for centuries, to create a written constitution to govern the Spanish Empire in a dire situation.
It may or may not come as another surprise to learn that the modern parliamentary assembly was invented in León in northern Spain in the late 12th Century. During the Middle Ages, various Spanish kingdoms convened similar assemblies. According to Australian political theorist John Keane, the “modern practice of parliamentary representation” was “born of despondency” during the struggle between Christians and Muslims over the Iberian Peninsula.
King Alfonso IX of León knew he couldn’t continue to impose taxes to pay for battles to push back Muslim armies without making compromises to his realm’s most powerful estates that would inevitably dilute his powers. So, in 1188 he assembled a parliament of representatives made up of nobles, bishops, and wealthy citizens. This assembly in León was “of profound importance,” writes Keane, because visitors to the court–the origin of the term cortes–were no longer expected to simply vow allegiance to their sovereign’s will. They could now demand that their interests be taken into consideration if the monarch wanted political and financial support for his policies.
Given the state of the Spanish Crown during the War of Independence, the government council knew that they had to root the legitimacy of the monarchy—they continued to support King Fernando VII in exile—in the people of Spain rather than in God. They were also responding to the incipient independence movements in Latin America. Thus, for the first time in Spanish history, deputies were elected from across the empire—the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and the Philippines—to make decisions on behalf and for the future of the monarchy.
The liberales was the name given to the group of political and economic reformers who made up a narrow majority of the Cortes de Cádiz. What did they believe in? Mexican political theorist Roberto Breña argues that “the first Spanish liberalism was a mixture of traditional and revolutionary elements.” It placed individual liberty at the center of Spain’s political design for the first time in its history. The liberals’ handwork can be found in the most enlightened articles of the document, including one that protects individual rights, another that insists that the purpose of government is to care for the wellbeing of the individuals that make up the nation, and the right to free expression. The 1812 Constitution also called for the division of powers, freedom of the press, the privacy of the home, universal manhood suffrage, and significant restrictions on the power of the king.
As fate would have it, Fernando VII returned to Spain in 1814 whereupon he rejected the constitutional monarchy established by the Cortes of Cádiz and reestablished the absolute monarchy he had left in 1808. But the Constitution of Cádiz lived on. In 1854, no less a figure than Karl Marx observed that “far from being a servile copy of the French Constitution of 1791, it was a genuine and original offspring of Spanish intellectual life.” And that hints at why the story of liberals in Cádiz is so important. While they did not carry the day politically in their own time, their document lived on to become an extraordinary symbol to reformers in Spain, its former colonies, and beyond for decades and centuries to come.
Liberals–and liberalism–have come a long way and taken on many forms since the term was first used in 1810. For instance, the liberals in Cádiz were proud Catholics and supportive of a constitutional monarchy while other forms of liberalism have been decidedly republican and anti-religious. Likewise, contemporary American liberalism, which prioritizes individual rights and fairness, is very different than the liberalism of the New Deal era, which focused on reigning in the excesses of capitalism.
The story of the Constitution of Cádiz reminds us that liberalism started as a movement to both include people in–and liberate them from–government. Today’s resurgence of populism is a byproduct of the imbalance between the desire to empower people versus the desire to free them–between democracy and liberalism.
Over the past few generations, liberalism has forgotten the importance of listening to people. Contemporary liberals have not only become much too dogmatic but also way too comfortable using governmental power to achieve their goals, whether the public wants them or not. That’s literally the definition of undemocratic. We’ve even seen the recent emergence of a punitive lock ’em up–or cancellation–liberalism, which is arguably not very liberal at all.
Of all the books and essays I’ve read on the subject recently, perhaps none has done a better job reminding me of liberalism’s potential for renewal than one written for The American Scholar in 1955 by the late U.S. Vice President and Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey.
Liberalism, he wrote, “lacks the finality of a creed, and thus it is without the allure of those dogmas which attract the minds of men by purporting to embody final truth.” If that weren’t reassuring enough, Humphrey insisted that even as liberalism must “preserve the spirit and fact of dissent in the political community,” it must also “recognize its ultimate loyalty to a majority-rule society and to the protection of all the factors which make such a society possible.”
While liberalism and democracy are always in tension, we sometimes forget that the former should always be in the service of the latter. If today’s populist surge is ever going to be defeated, liberals will have to recapture the spirit of liberalism from when it was first born.
I think Pasadena’s Norton Simon is by far the best art museum in Southern California. Its combination of exquisite curation and broad accessibility make it unparalleled. My dad took me there often when I was a little boy. And I loved it. In fact, two of the three images I had in my childhood bedroom were from the Norton Simon–a wild jungle scene with monkeys by Henri Rousseau and a playful Rembrandt portrait of a young boy who may or may not have been the Dutchman’s son Titus. (The third image was a properly framed reproduction of El Greco’s gloomy View of Toledo, but that’s a horse of a different–and darker–color.) But my thoughts turned to the Norton Simon today because one of its treasures–Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose–is on loan at the Prado Museum until June 30. Just this one extraordinarily simple, but precise and meditative painting was brought to Spain to hang with other Zurbarán masterpieces from the 17th Century. My dad had a poster of this work in the bedroom where he died. He bought it at the Norton Simon decades ago. So I came to the Prado as quickly as I could to see it, and I was so moved and grateful to see and feel my worlds converge so seamlessly.
Spain has the longest life expectancy of any country in the developed world with the exception of Japan. There are many theories as to why. The diet. The walking. The custom of complaining and cursing to let off steam. Those may all be factors. But I think it’s also because even the old folks routinely get out to meet their friends, gossip, have a drink or a snack. Two women in their eighties just entered the café where I’m spending this late afternoon to an affectionate chorus of “¡Hola chicas!”
April has been a busy month. I finished an 8,500-word essay I started researching way back in September, 2020. I took detours up to Paris and Frankfurt. Most importantly, I’ve been enjoying the beginnings of spring here in the Spanish capital. Sunday was a spectacularly beautiful day. The whole city seemed to be out and about. I felt like that was the first time I was able to exhale all month.
I’m particularly pleased that I’ve already begun to order books for my next essay. The optimistic part of me thinks I can write this in a year, but, heck, what’s the rush? That said, I’m finding that some of my most productive times intellectually are the lulls between my focused reading, those weeks and months that I’m able to veer off a particular project and just read whatever strikes my interest. My reading over the last six months has been particularly rich and varied. I started the year reading Malcolm Gaskill’s fascinating study of a 17th-century witch hunt in Springfield, Massachusetts, called The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World. Before that, I absolutely loved Zena Hitz’s wonderful Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. I’ve found a new hero in the late political theorist Judith Shklar. I particularly enjoyed her essays in Ordinary Vices and Redeeming American Political Thought. I very much look forwarding to tackling all her work in the next few years. Other favorites include Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, Robin Corey’s The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong, and Timur Kuran’s Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. I also read two popular books on the history and legacy of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Todd Purdum’s An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
I will publish the new essay after it’s edited and I process feedback from some folks who are giving it a pre-read. Meantime, blue skies are luring me out into the streets and it’s about time to find a café table where I can watch the rest of the afternoon go by.
Los Tres Mulatos de Esmeraldas by Andrés Sánchez Galque, 1599
Madrid
On a gloomy afternoon a few days before Christmas, I snuck up to the Museo del Prado to catch another glimpse of an exquisite exhibition of Latin American art that was shipped to Spain during the glory days of the viceroyalties between the 16th and 18th centuries.
Tornaviaje (Return Journey)— a collection of a little more than 100 paintings, devotional objects, and furniture—has a subtle story to tell about the forgotten legacy of mestizaje in Spain. While the story of the mixing of cultures and peoples in the New World has been widely told—including by me—there’s been little attention paid to its influence at the center of the Spanish Empire itself. The exhibition, which closes on February 13, is perfectly timed. Two hundred years after it lost most of its overseas colonies, Spain is now coming to grips with the influx of hundreds of thousands racially mixed, Spanish-speaking, mostly Catholic Latin Americans over the past few decades. Not simply a part of its colonial past, mestizaje is now a firm part of Spain’s present and future. And not only in the big cities but in small towns throughout the country, you’ll meet dark-skinned Spanish citizens who were born in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.
***
The return journey is not new, however. If you’ve ever been to Asturias in the north of Spain, you’ve seen those gorgeous old mansions built by Indianos. For centuries, Indiano was the term Spaniards used to refer to those lucky few who set off for the Indies, made their fortunes, and returned to flaunt it to all those who remained at home. The mansions standing today, some in better shape than others, were generally built in the 19th and early 20th century. Almost all of them still have a palm tree standing tall somewhere on the property. As if the size and ostentatious architectural style of these casonas were not enough to show off the owner’s status, the tree they planted on their grounds was a symbol of his worldliness.
Many of the items in the Prado exhibition were art works sent back to Spain by Indianos of earlier centuries. Some were shipped to Spain to decorate stately homes or were gifts to religious communities back home. They were commissioned by prominent Indianos in part to draw attention to the prestige they had attained abroad as well as to showcase the wonders of America. Many depict religious themes and iconography that had arrived from Spain and were painted or handcrafted by indigenous or mixed-race Americans using techniques and materials unknown in Spain such as feathers and corn stalk in figurative art. Others document distinctly American events and themes—post-conquest Mexico City, mulattos from Ecuador’s coastal Esmeraldas province, or the Virgen de Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia.
With the exception of their American themes, the art works could be mistaken as Spanish. And that’s the point of the exhibition. If you look closely, the items speak not only of conquest but of coexistence, adaptation, and hybridization.
***
Two weeks ago, I met a man named Elkin at a park down my street. We talked as his two pre-teen daughters ran off to play with their friends. An Afro-Colombian who’s been in Spain for 12 years, he told me about his experience as an immigrant. Has he experienced racism in Spain? Absolutely. He gave me examples of the insults he’s endured. But then on reflection, he said it wasn’t so much different in Colombia. So what is different in Spain? Well, the language, the religion, so much of what he’s come to know here is not so foreign at all than what he knew back home. When pressed, he said he guesses the castellanos are a little “drier” and less friendly than Colombians. Otherwise, he’s completely at home here. I guess you could say that he, too, has made a return journey.
Before I head out to the market this morning, I thought I’d check in. I spend most of my days reading early American history–colonial Pennsylvania, the settlement of the Ohio River Valley, the cultural patterns in U.S. party politics. I now see what a huge advantage it is to think about America without having to ingest all of its nonsense daily. Meantime, my morning visits to the market here in Madrid have opened up a whole new world to me. Mostly, I enjoy meeting and learning from all the vendors. That reminds me, I promised to go see María the cheesemonger today. I’ll soon get around to posting a 5,000-word essay on New England cultural imperialism that I wrote a while back. Until, then, Cheers!
