Novelist John Dos Passos, a great student of American life, wrote in 1939 that political “means are more important than ends, because means mold institutions which frame ways of behaving, while ends are never in any man’s lifetime attained.” His claim critiqued Depression-era extremism. The author warned that masses of US citizens had lost faith in the Constitution’s basic processes and listened hopefully to propaganda from the Soviet Union’s communists, German Nazis, and domestic demagogues, like Louisiana’s Huey Long. Seeing horrific extremisms abroad during the Second World War and Cold War helped turn the United States back toward healthy traditions, but Dos Passos’s words sound like an alarm bell in political primary season.
Many Americans today treat presidential elections like sports championships. As Green Bay Packers legend Vince Lombardi famously said, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” The two major parties’ fierce supporters give money, time, and attention to the event, hoping through election night for victory. Many spend the next day, or next four years, in tears or festivities. To put it in Dos Passos’s language, the people view the nation’s chief executive as an end – a goal, objective, accomplishment.
Properly considered though, the president is a means, not an end. After all, the White House heads the executive branch, named because the president “executes” the laws of the land: the US Constitution and national and state legislatures’ statutes. To execute means carrying out someone else’s plans, bringing their ideas to life. The president responds to Congress and the states as their tool or means.
So what is the end of American politics, the real goal, the constitutional system’s key outcome? Eminent scholar Willmoore Kendall, in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, showed the noble core of documents from the Mayflower Compact through the US Constitution: the deliberative public. The writings and institutions that underpin the United States’ governance make open, thoughtful, respectful discussion among a human community their aim, their intended outcome. The goal of the system is not utopia, but legislative deliberation. Even the ultimate end of our politics is just a form of healthy process, of excellent means.
That fundamental reality seems lost on primary voters who have recently tossed out respected incumbents following encouragement from the president and other public figures. Of course, President Trump is not to blame for defeats suffered by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Any chief executive would want a cooperative Congress. Anyone would appreciate friendly and productive coworkers. Voters grading congressional representatives according to how well they follow the president’s agenda, however, confuse means and ends. The American system’s goal – healthy public deliberation – requires independence of mind and weighing conflicting opinions. Citizens should judge candidates on those grounds, among others, not on whether a legislator will help the president get things done. Why? As Dos Passos noted, goals “are never in any man’s lifetime attained.” What the president accomplishes over his last two years in office, future administrations will undo.
President Trump reversed Obama and Biden-era initiatives, as their predecessors have done for centuries and successors will go on doing in the future. Some of those efforts have been better, and others worse. None have permanently defined the republic. Healthy public deliberation has been the engine keeping the nation moving at its best, stalling out at our worst, and sputtering today. Through the rest of President Trump’s final term as chief executive, remember the right relationship between political means and ends. To avoid extremism, recall that a healthy legislative process stands above and outlasts shifting waves of White House whims.
Stanley Schwartz is an assistant professor of history at Cedarville University.
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