Liberalism as an ideal is one thing. Liberalism in history is another.
Christopher Shannon continues our series of responses to Jay Green’s essay that was published on Monday, November 28: “The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse.” Shannon teaches history at Christendom College and is a Current contributing editor.
I was excited when I received the invitation to respond to what was then Jay Green’s forthcoming essay on “The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse.” After a quick initial read, I was even more excited. I found it a thoughtful and generally accurate mapping of the current terrain indicated in the title, as well as a respectful provocation to reimagine the current landscape in ways that might break the seeming stalemate between “left” and “right.”
I could never have predicted the maelstrom of controversy that rained down within a day of the essay’s posting. Many of the most forceful objections have come from people who feel they have been mischaracterized in Green’s efforts to identify major players within each of the four camps he identifies. As a Catholic, I do not feel qualified to comment on what appears to be an intra-Evangelical squabble; on this issue, I can only say that I detected no malice in any of Green’s characterizations, which he seemed to present in the interest of clarification, not accusation. As a Catholic I do feel qualified to say that I found his characterizations of Catholic figures, from Robert George to Patrick Deneen, fair and accurate. Though in what follows readers will see where I take issue with different aspects of Green’s account, I do so with great appreciation for what he has written, and with no doubt as to the integrity of his motives in trying to translate our complex and confusing political moment into manageable categories.
I take Green’s essay as an invitation to conversation. In that spirit, I will pick up where he left off: his concession that his account is “long on description and short on analysis” and his identification with the Emancipatory Minimalist position. The second follows naturally from the first, since the description assumes the norms of liberalism—both as empirical fact and transcendent value—and in effect presents the other three options as deviations from this norm. This assumption—indeed affirmation—does little to address the problem of liberalism’s declining appeal and serves only to leave the opponents of liberalism in the position liberalism always places its opponents: on the side of unreason at best, violent unreason at worst.
I am modern and liberal enough to concede the appeal of Emancipatory Minimalism’s liberal ends: the desire “to preserve freedom and equality of every person regardless of race, ethnicity, religious persuasion, or gender.” I am traditional and Marxist enough to call into question whether the liberal means of “free speech, free markets, individual rights” are the best way to achieve the best version of these so-called liberal ends. The question is not “are liberal values good?” but rather, “are liberal values liberal?” That is, does liberalism accomplish what it says it and only it can?
The Emancipatory Minimalists appeal to liberal ideals. I wish to examine liberal historical realities. The point here is not that liberalism has failed to achieve its ends but rather that liberal means militate against those ends, or at least transform those ends beyond recognition.
The most obviously problematic means centers, of course, on the “free market.” The free market proposes a utopia of consent, where rational individuals peacefully interact, making free choices and free contracts. Any cursory examination of the development of the U.S. economy during the golden age of the free market exposes this ideal as an illusion. Competition produced winners and losers. The winners imposed their ways on the losers, often through the direct violence of private militias or the manipulation of the law to legitimate forms of organization once deemed illegitimate by the law. The inhabitants of nineteenth-century “island communities” were not in fact free “to choose different paths, lifestyles, and cultural traditions.” They were driven from those communities to seek work in the urban industrial centers not by an earlier version of authoritarian Civilizational Maximalists but by “liberal” industrialists who acted in the name of their own version of freedom. Liberal freedom was itself a source of tyranny.
Twentieth-century liberals responded to this dilemma by enacting a variety of reforms designed to smooth out the rough edges of this transformation and secure a more equitable distribution of the material benefits of capitalist productivity. Here again, though, we see not the simple advance of freedom but the triumph of one freedom over another. The freedom to maintain distinct regional and ethnic cultures inhibited the consolidation of a uniform, national economy; reform liberalism gleefully sacrificed these freedoms to promote the new consumer “freedom” afforded by the immense productivity of liberal capitalism. America in 1950 was more prosperous but less diverse than America in 1877. Where, in all of this, is Green’s “rich tapestry of cultural backgrounds and lifestyles” promised by liberal freedom?
Of course, things have changed a lot since the 1950s. Some perceived this new freedom as a great age of conformity and initiated a restless search for new freedoms, most dramatically in the area of sex. Proponents of the sexual revolution invoked “free speech” the way their industrial capitalist forebearers once invoked free markets. Despite some initial reticence, the mass media and culture industry eventually threw their full support behind the sexual revolution. Like a small farmer in the age of agribusiness, a Christian would have to exercise heroic virtue to resist the relentless propaganda normalizing a wide range of sexual practices incompatible with most traditional Christian understandings of sexual morality. The freedom of some to indulge in the sexual revolution inhibits the freedom of others to live their lives according to traditional sexual norms.
Green nowhere endorses the sexual revolution, but he counsels Christians to tolerate it as “the price of living in a diverse and free society.” This facile assessment of so momentous a challenge to Christian living betrays an individualism all too common in liberal discussions of sex. According to the liberal view, the sexual revolution simply expanded the variety of legitimate sexual choices and left each individual free to choose among the options. Culture simply does not work this way. Culture is much more like second-hand smoke. I can be health conscious and refuse to smoke cigarettes, but if I go into a crowded bar where everyone else is smoking, I am going to get a lot of smoke in my lungs. Liberals have no problem seeing second-hand smoke in things they find objectionable—smoking, obviously, but even more significantly, racism.
Green concedes that the “liberal order will allow for things that Christians may personally find objectionable.” Will the liberal order allow for what liberals deem objectionable? On any number of issues, liberal moral indignation has followed a historical trajectory from persuasion to coercion, from Temperance to Prohibition. Hate speech is the liberal equivalent of heresy. Error has no rights.
To be clear, I find both the sexual revolution and racism objectionable. Against this single standard, liberalism offers a double standard: If I use my “free speech” against the latter, I am a good citizen; if I use my “free speech” against the former, I am a “hater,” a “sexist,” a “homophobe,” etc. This suggests a kind of maximalism that is hard to locate in Green’s schematic. The issue here is not a “whatever it takes” emancipatory maximalism; my accusers need not call for my arrest and imprisonment on hate speech charges for me to see that it is probably better for me to keep my thoughts to myself. As American Christians once had to confine contentious, divisive theological doctrines to the private sphere, so now they must do the same with their contentious, divisive sexual doctrines.
Still, public life abhors a vacuum. In the same way an idolatrous nineteenth-century civil religion of the sacred cause of liberty filled the void left by theological reticence, so the sacred cause of sexual liberty will clearly triumph (if it has not triumphed already) in the wake of the sexual tolerance advocated by Emancipatory Minimalists.
The reality of these power dynamics leaves me skeptical of the Emancipatory Minimalist position. Yet I do not wish to impose my sexual ethics on others any more than I want to impose my religious beliefs on them.
Might it be that the history of American religion provides a way out of our current dilemma? Why not treat competing sexual ethics the way we once dealt with competing denominations—which is to say, through disestablishment? Marriage equality would not require legalizing gay marriage but rather reducing all marriages to purely private, voluntary associations, akin to membership in a fraternal society or a country club. This may sound trivial, but it has long been the trajectory of marriage in the modern West.
Alas, history shows that privatization is no solution. The repressed elements eventually return to public life, usually in uglier forms. The only way out of this dilemma lies in a third dimension missing from Green’s two-dimensional model: the local vs. the national.
Green takes for granted that the four models of Christian public life he presents vie with each other on a national political scene. At one level, this is fair enough, since so much of our politics is dominated by national concerns. Given this assumption, it is understandable why Green favors minimalism and toleration: The United States is so divided on certain issues that imposing any one maximalist vision on the whole nation would be an act of coercion. At the same time, as I have shown, national integration only arose though certain acts of coercion and has sustained itself through other acts of coercion. The only way to minimize coercion is to shift the center of politics to localities with already existing shared values. Emancipatory Minimalism may be the orientation most appropriate to national politics, but Civilizational Maximalism is the orientation most appropriate to local politics.
For a model of the kind of Civilizational Maximalism I have in mind, I would point to the recent essays in Current on the work of Wendell Berry. Berry is notoriously apolitical with respect to party politics, but his fictionalized Port William “membership” is a model of politics in the classical sense of the common life. His writing has great appeal across a fairly diverse demographic, though I suspect it may be more popular among bookish urban dwellers and suburbanites than among the ordinary people of his native Kentucky. It clearly speaks to the hunger for community experienced by so many living in the rootless postmodernity of contemporary America. The community of Port William is at the same time an affront to the emancipatory instincts engineered into the DNA of American culture. Its vitality reflects an embrace of limits, a surrender of freedom: In Port William, to save your life, you must lose it.
But Berry can only, in the end, tell the story of a world that is passing away. The Kentucky of his youth has gone the way of all “island communities,” a victim of both the free markets and the free speech so valued by minimalists. Reading his work can be an exercise in sentimental nostalgia, or it can be a call to arms.
Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is the author of several works on U.S. cultural history and American Catholic history, including American Pilgrimage: A Historical Journey Through Catholic Life in a New World (2022), available now from Ignatius Press.
“The freedom of some to indulge in the sexual revolution inhibits the freedom of others to live their lives according to traditional sexual norms. … The only way to minimize coercion is to shift the center of politics to localities with already existing shared values. … Civilizational Maximalism is the orientation most appropriate to local politics.”
I wonder if that–the focus on local communities as the proper site for establishing thick moral cultures running counter to modernity–gets us out of the “coercion” game? Such communities in the past were full of rules, as well as rule-breakers. That’s one of the reasons people fled to the cities when they could.
Given that (apparently, if the data is reliabe) a majority of Catholic women use artificial contraception at some point in their lives, even a local community delimited by a common religious idently would need to coerce. Imagine a Hobby-Lobby company town, eg. Or, a state where divorce was impossible to procur.
Well, I do say “minimize,” not eliminate, coercion. I tried to arrive at that point only after going through a historical overview of the varieties of coercion that have characterized liberal regimes of consent. I don’t doubt that any community with strong civilizational norms will have members who find such norms irksome and choose to defy them, most likely secretly or in some cases openly. Where norms are strong, they are not so much chosen as accepted as, well, normal. In America, we have seen a dramatic change in what counts as “normal.” Until very recently, the reality of adultery did not negate the public norm of marital fidelity; the reality of divorce has accomplished what the reality of adultery could not. Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce made him culturally ineligible to run for president in the 1960s. Ronald Reagan, the great hero of conservatism, became our first divorced president in 1980. Is this simply the advance of freedom over an earlier regime of coercion? Did Americans all, of their own free consent, simply choose to change social norms regarding marriage and divorce? Liberal historians are willing to see all sorts of nefarious forces operating behind the scenes and below the level of awareness when they try to explain changes they don’t like, but when it comes to changes they do like, its all just the progressive march of freedom.
“Did Americans all, of their own free consent, simply choose to change social norms regarding marriage and divorce?”
Yes, by most of the usual measures. The divorce rate in 1960 was 9.6 in large part due to state-by-state divorce laws (nation-wide) that made it difficult. Just twenty years later in 1980 the divorce rate was 22.6, in large part no doubt to easing that coercion, again on a state-by-state basis. So, if by “free choice” we mean the usual conservative preference for soutions enacted on the state rather than the federal level, changes in divorce law certainly qualify.
But the change in attitude from Rockefeller to Reagan was due to some even deeper changes, those involving an increase in opportunities for women.
Laws–and norms–against divorce arguably made sense prior to the 1970s given the far more restricted realms of activity open to women then. Divorce was a way for men–especially wealthy and powerful men–to divest themselves of an aging mate and get access to younger more impressive ones, and could be seen as cruel and unjust to the previous wife, who was left with diminished marriage prospects and no means of independent support. The stigma on divorce raised the price men intent on gaining one would have to pay (as with Rockefeller). By 1980 such a stigma no longer seemed as necessary, given the vast changes that had taken place in women’s lives. So yes, I think that change in attitude was as free as any in recent memory.
I suppose there is a sense that–as a certain kind of conservative is prone to claim–their freedom is diminished because they are no longer able to live in a society where, say, divorce is all but unknown, or same-sex marriage is banned, or artificial contraceptives are unavaialable. At least one of our Supreme Court justices seems sympathetic to such claims. Because law and society has changed on such matters, they feel coerced into living in a world of which they disapprove.
There’s no way, I don’t think, of logically invalidating that conclusion. If someone wants to “stand athwart history shouting ‘Stop!'” we can’t prevent them. I think the question then is only whether that’s not a somewhat quixotic stance to adopt, and if it’s really the mission Christians have been given during their time on this earth.
Christopher, thank you for your contribution to this discussion. I think it is an important one. While my article last week demonstrates that I have significant disagreement with Jay I have been sad to see the discussion around his essay failing to engage the ideas because I believe the larger issue he is raising is important.
I thought the most significant portion of Jay’s piece was an explanation of why some minimalists see Trumpism as the there evil of our day while others see the left as the great evil. It seems to me that until the 2010s the minimalists largely saw themselves as parts of the same category. During the Obama presidency that began to change and then Trump broke the rift open. Understanding that break is important. Though I still think Jay’s mapping obscures rather than elucidates perspectives on the “left”.
It is interesting to see how differently each person comes to these questions. I agree with your questions about the fruit of liberalism but I never would have thought to take a more local approach. I will have to think about this more. My initial concern is that a local Civilizational Maximalist may actually increase suffering, reduce justice, and limit the pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness. Minority groups within more homogenous localities often find their protection not from their local neighbors but from farther away. “States Rights” has long been a dog whistle in the fight to oppose equity in areas of race and gender. It has been, in part, the movement away from the local that allowed me to not attend a segregated school in California as my father did. One county over from where I live now I Tennessee, there has been a candidate for congress who ran on the platform of “Make America White Again.” That will obviously never happen on the national stage… but it may be more likely in Polk County.
Well, John first.
I don’t doubt that people “chose” divorce, for many of the reasons that you have given. This doesn’t address the issue of how these attitudes changed and why. Yes, much of the early push for divorce actually came from men who wanted to trade in their wives for a younger model. Perhaps men have always had these feelings and in the old days would act on them through surreptitious adultery. At some point, and historians have seen this as part of the revolt against “organization man” conformity, men decided to forgo the restrictions of husband and father and adopt a Playboy lifestyle. Heck, the James Bond films raised this life-style to a Cold War ideal. So do we just accept this? When Trump brags about grabbing women, do we just chalk it up to changing sexual mores? Your characterization of “a certain kind of conservative” seems to imply alternatives of consent or coercion. Those may be the options when making contracts, but my point in invoking Berry is that the common life is not about contracts, consent and coercion. You misread me if you think I am saying Christians should rally in opposition to the RMA; I am saying that supporting it in the name of pluralism is as naive as opposition to it may appear quixotic. Pluralism is not neutral. It has a direction.
But speaking of standing athwart history, the author of those lines actually did succeed in redirecting history, first in 1968 with Nixon and then in 1980 with Reagan. I do not support that kind of redirection, but history shows it not to have been so quixotic after all. And how did liberals respond when change did not go the way they thought it would? They stood athwart history and yelled stop. They cried foul, or claimed “backlash,” as if they and only they understood the “true” direction of history. After four years of continued slaughter in Vietnam and civic unrest at home, Nixon won in a landslide in 1972. Americans chose Nixon as freely as they chose divorce. Do we just accept all this as extraneous to the Christian mission? I suppose the Apostles never questioned Rome, and if that’s your position, it is hard to argue against it.
Rondall,
Thank you for your comments. Yes, I think that both of our posts in different ways raise the issue of the limits of liberalism. I understand your concerns about localism and oppression. In fact, the repeated objection against localism is that it is, as you say, a dog whistle for racism. Certainly the “state’s rights” tradition in America bears this out. I guess I tend to approach history primarily through the lens of class, and this gives me a different perspective. Farm and labor opponents of capitalism were often able to get local and even state authorities on their side, only to have capitalists appeal to the next higher level of government to defend their property rights. State legislatures passed laws to regulate the railroads operating in their states, only to have the Supreme Court declare those laws an unconstitutional restraint of trade or null and void due to the federal authority to regulate interstate commerce. Not all God’s dangers are local. Wendell Berry, America’s poet of local community, has addressed the legacy of racism in his local Kentucky, yet he remains committed to a local life purged of racism. Sadly, liberal nationalists have too often used the history of racism to purge the country of localism. Beyond the specific limitations imposed by racism, to them, localism represents the principle of limitation itself. LImits are the enemy of freedom and freedom is the goal of liberalism. Justice is simply the maximixation of freedom. I cannot listen to such talk of freedom and not think of the names Carnegie and Rockefeller.
Christopher, this is a fair critique. I will even concede that monied interests, especially on the national level have used the history of race in our nation to manipulate folks to support their interests. I tend to see a lot of connections between the interests of the ethnic minority and the poor whites and see all those without social capital just as at risk under localism. But, a national approach is no panacea. I think somehow a balance needs to be pursued.
I don’t think either localism or a national approach is the answer. They are both open to corruption as we see with my example of racism and your example of extreme capitalism. That is why a central part of my schema is the tension between individual freedoms and responsibilities. In our examples, both the racist and the capitalist are focused on their individual freedoms and neglect their responsibility toward the common good.
I often say that the best form of government is a benevolent monarch. The problem is that there is no way to ensure that the next monarch isn’t a tyrant. I think this may be analogous to maximalist localism. If the ruling class is benevolent and focused on their responsibility to the common good then things can go well. On the other hand, there are no constraints.
Finally, I will concede that while it was once said that all politics are local, it now seems that all politics are national. I don’t think that has been a good change. It removes the personal from politics and makes the opponents a far-off other- even if in reality they live next door. It makes all politics about broader ideologies rather than finding practical solutions. I’m not advocating for nationalism just reminding us of the dangers of localism. There needs to be a balance between the two. Where that balance lies is a difficult question we won’t solve in the comments section on Current or probably even in our life times.
“But speaking of standing athwart history, the author of those lines actually did succeed in redirecting history, first in 1968 with Nixon and then in 1980 with Reagan. I do not support that kind of redirection, but history shows it not to have been so quixotic after all. ”
I suspect Ho Chi Minh and the Ayatollah Khomeini played larger roles in the ’68 and ’80 elections, respectively, than WFB did, but, whatever role he may have played, it wasn’t one of stopping history. Both those presidents not only presided over, but positively enacted, advances in modernity, from federal interventions to protect the environment to setting the precedent for unlimited federal deficits. Just to mention a couple of things.
Rondall,
“All politics is local.” Music to my ears! Tip O’Neill lives! Well, only partly. He was perhaps the last of a generation of Irish Catholic politicians who lived by that principle, one largely abandoned by the Kennedy trajectory toward the nation. Republicans discovered this principle, took over state legislatures and now have disproportionate influence in national politics. The irony here is that localism requires national action. The question is one of means and ends. Republicans have used the means of state and local governance to advance the same old national and international economic vision, though at the same time time thinking they can maintain a cultural localism through banning abortion or forcing patriotism in public school education. This is a losing battle, as a national and international economy draws us into a national and international culture, one in which Christianity is a liability (best keep it to yourself if it is in any way at odds with that dominant culture.)
I agree at some level for the need for balance, but I am not clear what that could or should mean in our time. Both parties will still invoke sentimental localism–e.g., the phrase “kitchen table issues”–but neither has any real program for or interest in sustaining viable local life. Perhaps some notion of priority or proper ordering would be a better guiding metaphor than balance. In the Catholic tradition, there is a concept called “subsidiarity,” in which problems should be addressed at the appropriate institutional level , i.e., local institutions should deal with local problems, national institutions should deal with national problems. This found its most significant expression in the Church’s support of labor unions: workers, as those most directly involved in the production process, should have control in decision-making processes of industry. A nice ideal, but in the end unions traded control for good wages and benefits, and those in control eventually shipped jobs overseas to avoid high labor costs. Still, with such lessons learned, I think subsidiarity is still a decent guiding principle. The problem is that in one sense all problems are not just national but international, so all solutions must to some degree operate at that level. The key is the goal: do we privilege local or international life? I think that local life is more personal and human, more “natural” than international life. Being some place is more human than being any place. In our world, this registers simply as my personal preference, or, as John indicated in his comments, nostalgia.
Another area where balance may not be the best metaphor is your invocation of rights and responsibilities. Yes, we need both, but the question is how they relate to each other. In modern liberal political discourse, everything is a contract, a deal, a trade-off: I will give you this right if you accept this responsiblity, or you must accept this responsibility and I will give you this right as compensation. What liberalism tends to remain silent on, and what Catholic social teaching has continuely stressed, is the issue of the broader moral and spiritual context within which rights and responsibilities operate. Catholics often get accused of trying impose a broader moral and spiritual context on the unwilling (again, see John’s comments above), but the fact is that liberalism’s silence on these matters simply hides, obscures its own unspoken context, which assumes the primacy of a rights bearing individual free from constraint and bound only by the limit of not imposing limits on others. As I argued in my original post, this is simply never how liberalism has worked in history, yet it continues to defend itself in these terms, at least when it comes to social and cultural norms. The New Deal era recognition of the need for limits in economic freedom is at odds with the current emphasis on, in effect, libidinal anarchy in culture. There are limits to the New Deal model, which in the end comes down to “balancing” interest groups, but liberals still need to come clean on this near-schizophrenic approach to “freedom.”
John,
Sorry, I did not see you recent comments when I responded to Rondall. Yes, of course, Nixon and Reagan were modernizers, as are all contemporary politicians and yes, Buckley did not single-handedly master-mind ’68 and ’80. My point is simply that Buckley’s comment refers to collectivism, and he and the conservative movement did reverse the tide of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. I don’t like their alternative, but it is a fact. Free-market economics, the language of what we now confusingly call “neo-liberalism”, is alive and well. At least half of our political culture speaks the language of the Gilded Age, even if the size of our government and the growth of deficits under Republican administrations suggests a disconnect with reality. Cutting taxes and regulations, busting unions and opposing health care are real and work against the tide of history that Buckley saw in 1955.
Yes, I hear that!