Can a people survive when truth is beside the point?
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis by James Davison Hunter. Yale University Press, 2024. 504 pp., $40.00
James Davison Hunter’s new book is a wonderful, provocative, and ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. Wonderful, because in providing, as he describes his book, a “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life,” it is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. Provocative, because those insights and comparisons reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions that most of those who value the American project, now two-and-a-half centuries old, hold dear. And at least somewhat depressing because it is hard to absorb the cultural scope of the deep-seated problems and not think that Hunter may well be convinced that our liberal democracy will not survive its present crisis. This grim note holds despite the book’s coda, where Hunter invokes hope and offers reasons for seeing such hope in America’s future.
Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter refuses to specifically define his terms at the outset. The closest he comes is in his statement that the “ideational centerpiece” of democracy in America includes “premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments.” These in turn necessitate the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing . . . differences in ways that can lead to common goods.” Any of these premises, values, and mechanisms could, of course, be subject to endless philosophical and practical debates—and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those debates is exactly the point.
Hunter repeatedly insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) that solidarity requires. This is because America’s self-understandings were (and are) neither definitive nor clear. Hunter labels the context in which these self-understandings arose America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” a context that involved certain necessary conditions. So long as those conditions existed, the self-understandings that followed were usually opaque, implicit, vague, and inarticulable. That is what made them so valuable: It made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America . . . [and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle . . . evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries.”
Hunter follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?
Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation. Over the nearly 300 pages that make up the heart of his historical analysis, he touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, some of which were inclusive, and others of which involved “boundary work.” Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which all of this played out as singularly foundational, though the condition that comes closest is what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence”—a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.”
He elaborates: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions.” This sense of transcendence was accepted by nearly everyone as the default presumption of practically all argument and contestation in American life—up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy “read the same Bible and pray to the same God.” This common sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the twentieth century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes.
Hunter is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes. On the contrary, he lays out many stages in the articulation, defense, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades following World War II.
While multiple points in Hunter’s tale are challengeable, overall his reading of American intellectual history is deeply persuasive and wise. The story culminates in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric . . . generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions” that were “embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures.” Alas, “it was not to last.”
Why didn’t it last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and educational paradigms. But his analysis is most provocative, I think, in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information—the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’—and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us.” He adds that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate . . . render truth and reality beside the point.”
Hunter never makes the connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis: If liberal democratic solidarity depends upon an inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language, and if the very concept of certain transcendent principles and practices depends upon cultural conditions whose public meanings are opaque, adaptable, and implicit, then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information in which we live could be exactly that which is undermining our democratic wellbeing?
I do not mean to treat Hunter’s complex reading of America’s current condition reductively. But consider this: Hunter acknowledges that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy yet abound at the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face.” But he also concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like . . . render all such grassroots efforts ineffective.” Is it not therefore reasonable to see his fears for America as dwelling primarily in the impossibility of our hybrid-Enlightenment adapting to a world of endless, nation-wide public discourse? One where, as he writes, the very notion of an “authority . . . capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” is nearly inconceivable?
Hunter ends by expressing sober hopes for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” involving a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politic is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate the tendency to associate political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes and instead encourage the depoliticization of much of public life.
I find the ideas behind these conclusions admirable. But I wonder how much Hunter truly believes in their possibility. To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his analysis points towards the need for a more stringent critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload, the politicization of which crowds out discussion of otherwise open-ended and opaque concepts. Such a critique might give us a start toward truly sharing ideas again.
Russell Arben Fox runs the History & Politics major and the Honors Program at Friends University, a small Christian liberal arts college in Wichita, KS, where he has lived with his wife and their daughters since 2006. He is a regular contributor to the localist website Front Porch Republic, the Religious Socialism blog sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America, and the Mormon blog By Common Consent.