Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
I really don’t feel up to getting too deep into the weeds with the post-liberals just now. But having read a few more essays from that crowd this week, I have a broad observation or two to share.
William Wolfe wrote a review of a Paul Miller book over at American Reformer. I did not find it compelling for various reasons, but this part did bring me some amusement:
To be frank, this is a book that should never have been published. As such, it is a book that should never have been written.
This is a gentleman who has been a non-stop personal advertising agency for (no relation, I understand) Stephen Wolfe’s The Case For Christian Nationalism. So I think he’s got some wacky standards for what should or should not be published. As for the content, he derides Miller for assuming and presupposing the “goodness” of the liberal order. Well, we could have a conversation about who bears the burden of proof on that score, but it seems to me that William Wolfe would not likely be free to buy the book, write the essay, and publish it for the world to see, or have any reason whatsoever to believe that his opinions matter one whit to our civic order without the “goodness” of the liberal order and the freedom of civic participation it provides. If you’ve got to presuppose and utilize the very thing you’re arguing against, that’s a point in favor of the thing you’re arguing against. It’s sort of like people who get on their iPhone 13 and take to Twitter to criticize modern capitalism and technology.
And then there’s Timon Cline and his recent article, “Conservative No More?” That’s a helpful one because he points you to some other post-liberal essays of interest. But more than that, he just baldly owns up to the agenda: he wants a “party of the state.” Big government and more state power. A conservatism not “afraid” of flexing its muscles. I am glad that we are moving beyond euphemisms—like, for example, when Rusty Reno says “we” need to “invest in” this or that—which actually means, “the government must confiscate money from person/company/industry A and give it to person/company/industry B.” That term, “party of the state” comes from this essay by Gladden Pappin, which—and maybe it is only me—I find almost unreadable. Its smooth conflation of structural pluralism with substantive pluralism makes it decidedly unhelpful.
A second observation. All of these essays have one common thread. Over and over again it is simply declared, “Classical liberalism has failed.” “Conservatism has failed.” “The liberal order has failed.” It is a just a given, an assumption, treated as if it is the most obvious and self-evident fact in the universe. Given Wolfe’s criticism that Miller assumes things that need to be proven, this is an ironic tic among post-liberal writers. I have two fairly simple questions. The first is:
Failed to what?
Bring about perfect divine justice? Bring about perfect economic equality? Foster a society with unbreakable familial bonds? Eradicate poverty? Or, for that matter, eradicate sin from the land? Vanquish all political foes? Imprison them? Execute them? What is the standard to which classical liberalism is being held? Whatever it might be, it is some kind of utopia—either an imagined one just lurking around the bend that we could actuate if we would just do X, Y, or Z, or it is an imagined one of the past that we can “recover” by doing X, Y, or Z. It is imagined either way. It is completely ahistorical and question-begging. Classical liberalism is a political arrangement that regards utopia as impossible; that is, in fact, its starting point and raison d’etre. There will always be sin, conflict, economic disadvantage to varying degrees, as well as injustice. We live in a world of tradeoffs and prudential, as well as moral, judgments. So if eradicating all evils isn’t the goal, it is well-nigh meaningless to criticize the system for “failing” to meet impossible standards imposed on it from elsewhere.
My second question is:
Compared to what?
Classical liberalism has failed in some vague way compared to what, exactly? Even if the nebulous goals could be articulated, what political arrangement would achieve them? There’s no settled answer to this one because the whole project of post-liberalism right now is to figure out what the answer might be, and there are varying proposals and opinions. I happen to think we’ve seen the wreckage of the alternatives littered throughout history. And as far as I can tell, all of the proposed alternatives boil down to some species of Statism. I am glad that post-liberals are losing their shyness about saying so. Individuals are just cogs in a collective political wheel, power must be muscular and concentrated, and must coercively direct everyone and all of society to some utopian “common good.”
I, for one, am unconvinced that classical liberalism has “failed” in its actual goals, and no amount of juvenile and condescending insults to Ronald Reagan or Bill Buckley are likely to convince me otherwise. The past 300 years has witnessed an explosion of equal protection, rule of law, individual dignity, property rights, health, not to mention heretofore unimaginable wealth in the world—well, at least in the places in the world that adopted classically liberal values to some degree. Indeed, the world has seen spectacular advancement to human flourishing on nearly every single measurable metric. If that’s “failure,” I can’t fathom what success might look like. No, utopia hasn’t arrived; but we’ve made some gigantic leaps for humanity nonetheless.
I have suggested an answer for the “burden of proof” question, after all. If you think some species of Statism is a better solution for political arrangements in a fallen and non-utopian world, I think the burden is squarely on you.
That means, of course, that a classically liberal order will continue to be one of tension, conflict, and political persuasion and/or compromise. It doesn’t get rid of bad ideas or people with bad ideas. It doesn’t wave a magic wand and evaporate, say, Critical Studies departments in universities.
The fine folks at the University of Southern California have decided to remove the word “field” from their curriculum. That is, you can no longer talk about the “medical field” or the “tech field” or the “financial field.” From what I can discern, they seem to believe that the word “field” is insensitive to Blacks and immigrants. The idea, I guess, is that the word “field” will call to the minds of their Black or Hispanic students the experiences of 19th century plantation slaves or migrant workers picking fruit in California orchards.
So, sure, the liberal order may not have an easy way of eradicating the insane (and unbelievably condescending) silliness of some university officials.
But, on the bright side, we have the freedom and right to publicly laugh at the powers-that-be. I think that’s a pretty decent compromise.
In Monday’s Off The Shelf I mentioned that I’d managed to order a used copy of A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, featuring the photography of the late Bill Wittliff. It arrived just today, and I thought I’d share with you a stunning example. First off, true to the advertisement, it is an autographed copy! Hooray!
Just take a look at this photograph:
That’s an angle of the scene of Monkey John and Ermoke and gang chasing Gus that you won’t see by watching the film! I have searched in vain to find a print of this photograph for sale. I want to frame it and put it … somewhere! If anybody’s got a way to help me with that, please let me know. Hopefully something more achievable than this signed one that sold for $5,500.00!
Thank you for reading this week’s Square Inch Newsletter. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Compared To What?
I read one of those same essays earlier this week, and definitely felt a neck tendon twitching a bit in the process.
It doesn't really matter if smart alecks today can't satisfyingly name a standard of failure for classical liberalism. Let's not waste our time on them. The founders themselves littered their writings with trepidatious statements about those exact standards of failure. Ad fontes. If we tripped any of their wires, we probably failed. And if we excuse ourselves for tripping any of their wires, do we really believe they gave us classical liberalism?