Is Fauci America’s Hero?

A professor in graduate school gave me a useful way of analyzing the history of ideas (especially political and social ideas). He said to always ask this question: for this thinker, and for this culture, who is the hero? Who is the person that is lifted up and valued? When you go through the major figures in the history of political philosophy, you might get the following results if you take this approach. For Plato/Aristotle, the philosopher is the hero. For Augustine and Aquinas, the saint is the hero. For Machiavelli, it’s the prince. For Hobbes, the sovereign saves the day. For JS Mill, the free thinking individual is the one who’s lifted up. And for Nietzsche, it’s the overman.

I raise this point because it’s a question that any society should ask. It’s also a question our society should ask.

In American society today, who’s the hero? I’m not sure I have a great answer.

When you look at American history, many candidates emerge. For my purposes, I want to focus on just the Lockean strand.

In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke argues that God gave the earth to the “use of the industrious and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.” The world belongs to the hard-working, not the lazy. For Locke, then, who’s the hero? It’s the property owner, the businessperson, the person who sweats and toils to make something of the earth. Not the wasteful, but the useful. For those who would complain that they don’t have as much as their neighbors, they have only themselves to blame. Work harder, try harder, toil harder.

This strain of thought has had immense influence on the modern world, especially the West. Think only of the conflict between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. You could argue that the dispute between Hamilton and Jefferson was over the meaning of the Lockean legacy. For Jefferson, the hero is the hard-working farmer. America was to be an agrarian society full of small farms and virtuous farmers. For Hamilton, the hero is the merchant. America was to be an urban society full of cities and virtuous businesspeople.

As history unfolded, Hamilton’s vision won out. The Rockefellers and Carnegies were the “industrious and rational,” the captains of industry, the creators of growth and wealth. They were our heroes.

But while Hamilton’s vision won out, what bound him together with Jefferson was the Lockean root: that the hero is the individual who works, who does something with his property to improve it and create wealth.

Then the Great Depression occurred, and Franklin Roosevelt gave us a new hero. In his Commonwealth Club campaign speech in 1933, FDR observed that in recent history the giant corporation had undermined the ability of an individual to make a living. The old hero was now the villain. The expansion and growth of the 19th century had come to an end, and now it was time for “enlightened administration” to ensure the security of the worker. The Lockean hero was the worker who provided security for herself through the development of her own private property. The Rooseveltian hero was the enlightened government administrator who provided security by redistributing our massive national wealth to those who could no longer provide financial security for themselves.

And so we have the development and expansion over the course of the 20th century of the federal government, full of enlightened administrators led by the most enlightened of all, the President of the United States.

Which takes us to the present day.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci has been the enlightened administrator par excellence, the full realization of FDR’s hero. Tasked with the distribution of information instead of wealth, Fauci has embodied the marriage of the modern world’s greatest achievement — science — with the ability to command, instruct, and help the American people without fear of electoral reprisal. Presidents come and go. Fauci and the bureaucratic apparatus remain. Fauci is America’s hero.

Right?

But of course I cannot believe it. Not only is Fauci despised by the right-leaning half of the American populace, it’s not as if Americans in general have a high view of the enlightened administrator or bureaucrat. If we did, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and not the Harvard MBA program would be the school of choice. We still admire, lift up, and value the person who can make a buck. We want to be that person. Don’t we?

If FDR’s desire was to change the hero of the American story from business person to enlightened government administrator, I can’t say he was completely successful. Is it then unclear who our hero is? What kind of person do we lift up, value, and want to be? Who is the American hero?