Illiberalism Is For (Cultural) Losers

No.127: September 30, 2022

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. Today’s edition is a bit longer than usual because I did not want to split it up and carry this topic forward into next week. Enjoy!

John Trumbull, “The Declaration of Independence” (Public Domain)

Dear Friends,

Last week I began a two-part series on the rise of an illiberal strand of political conservatism. This is a view that no longer champions individual liberty but rather subordinates it to a somewhat vague and abstract notion of the “common good.” Our individual freedom is useless (even harmful!) unless it is directed toward some collective aim—and, of course, it is the State that somehow embodies this collective will. It is therefore the State’s job to define that common good and shepherd the people toward it. Way back in the old days conservatives had a grand old time making fun of Barack Obama’s quip that “government is the only thing we all belong to,” but it seems Mr. Obama is having the last laugh.

This, I believe, is a fundamental rejection of the American experiment, which self-consciously understood individual liberty to be the common good which the State exists to protect—the protection of one’s life, one’s conscience, one’s freedom of religion, of speech, of assembly, of press, of property, of due process, and so forth. Each individual person, as our Declaration has it, is endowed by his or her Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In a very important sense—a “creational” or ontological sense—a person is an end, not just a means: a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable expression of the image of God. And the task of the State is not to subsume an individual person into a greater whole—that is, to make them a means to a greater end—but to protect his or her individual liberty and dignity.

So I’m obviously some kind of anarchist or libertarian, right? It must be that I don’t believe in “common” or “communal” goods. I must not believe in the need for a shared worldview or morality or virtue; I must be in favor of everyone “doing that which is right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25), right?

While I do question the widespread political “cult of unity,” as Jonah Goldberg calls it (everyone must be made to pull their oar in the same direction), nothing could be further from the truth.

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Allow me to begin with some familiar words from one of the architects of the American system, John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

I affirm these words wholeheartedly. Morality and religion is the sine qua non (without which, not) of American governance. Without a virtuous people, our system of government is entirely useless. But the deeper question is why? In the fuller context of that quote, Adams explains exactly why: Our Constitution does not contemplate any means whatsoever for the government to make immoral people moral or un-virtuous people virtuous or irreligious people religious.

I’ll give you the whole quote, from his letter to the Massachusetts Militia on October 11th, 1798:

But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep […] simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by […] morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition […] Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other

I kept his original idiosyncrasies of spelling and punctuation (and capitalization!), and I admit it is a bit flowery. So here’s the gist: if America ever becomes wicked, this will be the “most miserable Habitation in the World.” Because—get this—because “we have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and religion.” Widespread wickedness would “break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.” Wonderful metaphor, indeed.

To John Adams’s mind, it is not a question of whether the State can or should define, discipline, and enforce some notion of the “common good.” It is simply a fact that we have no such State. It possesses no such power. It lacks such power by explicit design. That was the entire point: a limited government for a free and virtuous society. Asking whether the American government should shepherd “the People” toward a vision of the “common good” is to ask an irrational question. It’s a Zen koan, the sound of one hand clapping.

That frustrates Progressive idealists and post-liberals alike. Consider this: in an essay for The New Criterion, Rusty Reno quotes an apt warning from Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Reno, without a hint of irony, goes on to argue that, therefore, conservatives should be the masters! This is not to heed Franklin’s caution; it is to become the cautionary tale.

As I contended last week, the extremes of the left and right are seeking power, power not available to them on the basis of the American founding. Now, to head off an obvious objection: by resisting this idea of a “substantive common good” I do not mean to suggest that we cannot pass laws in this country, or that “nobody decides” what is good or evil, or to succumb to some kind of “value neutral” public square. What I do suggest is that whatever laws we persuade enough of our neighbors and representatives to pass will have to be laws constrained by certain fundamental liberties: first and foremost, those embodied in the Bill of Rights. And if there are disagreements over the scope of those liberties in a given scenario, we might have to persuade our neighbors about that, too, as well as make recourse to our weighty legal institutions and traditions to parse. You know, just the way we’ve been doing it, more or less, to varying degrees of consistency, for 246 years.

But that doesn’t quite seem to be what the post-liberals have in mind. Josh Hammer wants the government to break up “woke” corporations and tell social media companies what kind of speech they must allow. Rusty Reno wants to punish industries and businesses that don’t satisfy his view of the “common good” for middle class workers and he’s eager to redistribute wealth (ahem, sorry: “shift funding”) to those people and institutions he deems more worthy. I happen to think forcing people to believe and speak government-approved things and stealing people’s money is immoral. But maybe that’s just me.

Truth be told, these limitations on government power have proven frustrating in American politics since the very beginning. And I would suggest to you that our continued spasms of frustration are signs that the system is working. It is supposed to frustrate would-be tyrants. It is holding fast. The whale has not (yet) broken through the cords of the net, though the net is certainly being stretched.

At a particularly fraught time immediately after the ratification of the Constitution, a discouraged friend of Adams, James Sullivan, lamented:

I am sorry to say that all our fine-spun ideas of democratical governments being founded in the virtue of the people are vanished, and that we find Americans like other people obliged by force only to yield obedience to the laws.

He was lamenting this, but today’s post-liberals heartily agree with it. They believe that governments cannot be founded in the virtue of the people; the government must somehow create a virtuous people, and do so by wielding the levers of power. That is Reno’s explicit aim: the answer to our immorality problem is a government … run by conservatives like him.

And thus do the post-liberals embody Abigail Adams’s greatest fear, which she wrote to her husband, John:

Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind are not made for freedom?

My post-liberal countrymen seem dead-set on justifying that maxim. It is their whole argument: mankind is not made for freedom. Individual freedom is not an end, but only a means; it requires a telos, and that telos—this part follows like winter follows autumn—must be provided by the collective State, the chimerical will of “the people.” Individuals need the directing and guiding hand of the coercive State to help them “perfect their natures” and to usher them into blessedness.

If this is your view, fine; we can have the argument. But I don’t think you should call it American conservatism.

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So where will notions of the “common good” come from, then, if not the State? What will be the source of the morality and virtue necessary for maintenance of our system? How shall “the People” as an aggregate both attain and maintain the kind of common worldview needed for societal peace and prosperity, if not at the behest and direction of the Almighty State?

The answer, as Adams understood it, is the people themselves, in what we call civil society: cultural associations and institutions cultivated by free people to promote and maintain morality and virtue. Individual liberty from government coercion does not mean, for a moment, a lack of community and commonality and social ties that bind. There are myriad institutions that shape and form human beings, and some of them are inescapable—the family, for example (no one chooses them). But civil society encompasses so much more: the church, civic organizations, philanthropic and charitable foundations, educational institutions, industry and trade organizations, the economic marketplace, arts and culture, and more; the whole warp and woof of social fabric is woven by the institutions of a free people. In America, it is free associations that bear the burden of cultivating and inculcating human morality and virtue. We do not look to the State to provide this service—at least we are not supposed to. (The modern public education system is a notable and influential aberration, and we can’t tear the whole thing down swiftly enough for my tastes).

We are ideally to be influenced, tempered, corrected, and shaped as moral persons by our families, our churches, our teachers and professors, our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues and associates, even our beer buddies at the bar. The guys with badges and guns? They are at the very tail end of that line, not the front; and even then their task is limited and constrained.

I admit that sometimes this reliance on civil society doesn’t seem to be working. Immorality and vice is everywhere; one political party seeks to constantly enshrine it in law to lord it over the other half of the country. We are a deeply divided people. We don’t share a common vision or common values. We’ve been morally shaped by antagonistic worldviews.

Whose fault is that? Is it our system of government? Our failure or hesitation or cowardice about “wielding power”? Hardly. It is the failure of civil society. A failure of ourselves and our own cultural institutions. Time to stop the finger-pointing and take a good, hard look in the mirror. The old adage that we get the government we deserve is an adage because it is true.

We are free men and women in a free country. No one is stopping us from worshiping God and discipling others, or planting churches by the thousands. No one is stopping us from proclaiming and teaching and persuading others about the the truths of God. No one is stopping us from starting schools and colleges and universities, or forming cultural and artistic guilds that shape and form people to love truth, beauty, and goodness. No one is stopping us from starting journalistic enterprises or media organizations. But why be so grandiose? Nobody is stopping us from starting a neighborhood Bible study, or even hosting a backyard barbecue where we can talk to our neighbors.

If it seems (and I’m not conceding this point) that an overwhelming majority of people in this country despise our morality and our virtues, is it not due to our own obvious failures? Our churches have failed. Our schools, colleges, and universities have failed. Our think tanks have failed. Our magazines, our journals, our websites, our podcasts, and our newsletters have failed. Our persuasion has failed.

And it is in just such a moment, confronted with our failure, that some of our intelligentsia blame the classically liberal order itself and reach for the silver bullet or the “strong man”—no, better metaphor: they reach for the ring of power that will stem the tide, compensate for our cultural impotence, and enable us to wield the levers of government to “reward our friends and punish our enemies.”

Illiberalism, the deep desire to deny to others their rights of conscience and belief and property that we ourselves enjoy and to force them into conformity to our vision of the common good by way of coercive State power is the last resort of losers. Cultural losers. Abigail Adams would judge that such people are unfit for liberty; or at least they are people who can’t accomplish anything fruitful with it.

I have a better idea. Reform our weak institutions, and where we cannot, we build better ones and be cultural winners. If that sounds like a pretty vague plan, it is still better than the post-liberal plan to take over the government, because A) that plan doesn’t exist, and B) any erosion of civil liberties is an erosion for everyone, not just people the post-liberals don’t like.

In order for us to freely reform and build our institutions, we need the American State to be the American State: the exceptional one that keeps its grubby fingers off the scales.