Sen. Rubio, we need better philosophy

Philosophy took a hit on the GOP presidential debate stage last week. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accused the Federal Reserve of being run by “philosopher kings” and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, advocating greater support for trade schools, said, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”

The anti-philosophical rhetoric is no surprise in a democratic republic. Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th century interpreter of American democracy, noted, “Less attention is paid to philosophy in the United States than in any other country in the civilized world.” We were and still are a people of practical interests.

Though populist rhetoric plays well on the political stump, philosophy majors have more going for them one would think. They are the top performers on the law school admissions test and among the top for admission to business schools. They also show the highest income growth among college majors. Billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel was a philosophy major as was Rubio’s competitor on the stage, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.

But America needs a philosophically studied population, at least in some part, because the American political system was uniquely founded on philosophical ideas. “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” is a philosophical claim. In declaring the justice for our nation’s cause in 1776, we invoked “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The founders drew conclusions about political right by reflecting philosophically on the nature of things. The Declaration of Independence is saturated with the language of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. Alexander Hamilton identified our Constitution as a product of the modern science of politics. He had in mind philosophers like Montesquieu, whom he called “that great man.”

Because of the philosophical foundations of American politics (in addition to the theological ones), it is uniquely exposed to subversion by competing philosophical ideas.

Five out of nine justices on the Supreme Court hold a philosophy incompatible with the Constitution and our political order. Their theory of a “living constitution” bypasses the necessity of popular consent to amend the Constitution and empowers them to recognize “evolving standards of decency” that they read into the text or even impose on it if necessary, as they did in the same-sex marriage case.

Campus radicals from the New Left in the 1960s to the activists at University of Missouri and Yale University, clothed in Marxist symbols, are schooled in philosophical ideas that are hostile to our system of ordered individual liberty.

At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, advocates for an aggressively ever-expanding regulatory state have a philosophy of government and of what a human being is that is wholly incompatible with the philosophy of our American political tradition.

Sen. Rubio is right. We need welders. Philosophy isn’t for everyone. But if we’re not training our future leaders in the philosophical tradition that gave us self-government, we will soon not even have the liberty to weld.