LONG FORM: Whose Culture? Which Solidarity?

Further reflections on James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity

James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis is a big and important book. I am grateful to the editors at Current for giving me the opportunity to review it. Despite the generous word count allowed in my first review, I believe there is more to say. In what follows, I will further examine aspects of Hunter’s analysis and prescription that I find inadequate, particularly those related to his understanding of morality, authority, and, yes, “solidarity.”

Let’s start with solidarity, a concept I largely took for granted in my review. In my defense, Hunter also seems to take the word for granted. Though he front-loads the concept in his argument, it also remains something of an elephant in the room. Raising solidarity as a problem, he then identifies the problem as “solidarity on what terms?” This question assumes that readers basically know what solidarity is—yet that they also need to be made aware of the patterns of “inclusion” and “exclusion” that have characterized solidarity in America throughout history. He identifies the “fundamental contradictions” present within American solidarity as “the promise of freedom and equality and universal justice and yet the denial of those goods to large swaths of the American population.” From this, we can surmise that solidarity consists, at least in part, in freedom, equality, and universal justice.

I suppose Hunter is free to choose and define his terms. He invents the term “hybrid-Enlightenment” to capture the mixing of secularism and Christianity in early American political culture; as a neologism, the term carries no historical baggage and simply provides Hunter with a useful shorthand for identifying the cultural consensus of the time. Not so with solidarity. That is a word with a rich history coterminous with, yet directly opposed to, the American hybrid-Enlightenment. Solidarity has historically been the rallying cry of various strains of socialism that opposed the “individualism” advanced by various regimes of liberalism, including America’s hybrid-Enlightenment. Yes, the American political tradition has made nods to the common good and community. But it has deliberately excluded the term “solidarity” due to its association with socialism. 

Why this allergy to socialism? Because socialism challenged the sanctity of private property, which America’s hybrid-Enlightenment insisted was the foundation of freedom, equality, and universal justice. Hunter’s virtual silence on socialist challenges to his account of American solidarity reflects his general silence on issues of property and class, preferring to focus on culture as the arena for contestation among rival versions of the hybrid-Enlightenment. As Warren Susman and Michael Denning have shown, the world “culture” itself rose to prominence in the 1930s as an ideal of unity that would not challenge the foundational American principle of property rights. In this, Hunter proves himself a good American. 

So what’s in a word? A lot. Perhaps because of some general awareness of its radical past, the word solidarity has a sharper edge than culture, now bland and flabby from overuse. Solidarity allows Hunter to be provocative while still staying within the bounds of a hybrid-Enlightenment whose best days are clearly behind it. The current vogue of solidarity among liberals—see, for example, Leah Hunt-Hendrix’s Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea—is part of a general rebranding that began with the shift from the term “liberal” to “progressive” some time after the fall of the Soviet Union. Like the communitarian writers of the eighties, these progressives are looking for alternatives to individualism yet also wish to avoid the charge of sentimentality and nostalgia often leveled at communitarians: Solidarity is community with rhetorical teeth. 

Upon closer examination, those sharp teeth deliver more bark than bite. Yes, progressives may challenge property rights when it comes to corporations, yet they remain ever more committed to the non-economic property rights associated with the range of issues swirling around sex, abortion, family, and personal liberation. This is the essential “contradiction” of what remains of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment. It is now becoming commonplace to see America divided between two strains of libertarianism: on the right, those who seek to maximize economic freedom; on the left, those who seek to maximize cultural (i.e., sexual) freedom. The last forty years have seen a maximization of both, with each side denouncing the other’s freedom while insisting on the universal justice of their own. 

This is a contradiction that defies Hunter’s critical standard of inclusion vs. exclusion. Libertarians would seem to be the enemies of solidarity, yet they can also claim to promote the most inclusive ideology of freedom: I will let you explore your sexuality to infinity so long as you allow me to make as much money as possible. But wait—what happens if one person’s freedom interferes with another’s? This is the classic liberal dilemma, which liberalism has been unable to solve beyond merely brokering compromises that can never provide true unity—or, to use Hunter’s term, solidarity. 

Hunter cites Reinhold Niebuhr’s identification of this dilemma and holds up the Civil Rights Movement as an example of transcending compromise to attain true solidarity. Is this, perhaps, one last shining moment? Hardly. Niebuhr’s insights and King’s achievements certainly reflect Hunter’s ideal of solidarity, but they stand as examples of a particular solidarity within America rather than an inclusively American solidarity. The Civil Rights Movement was incredibly divisive. White Southerners never accepted it and their rejection caused a major realignment of political parties, creating a new, Republican “solid South.” Northern whites who accepted civil and voting rights in the abstract objected when they judged their own rights to employment, housing and education threatened by the promotion of African American rights in those same areas. Once again, liberals faced the dilemma of conflicting rights with no higher principles to adjudicate the conflict; once again, America muddled through by brokering compromises among various interest groups, compromises that could bring no satisfaction, much less solidarity. 

Where to look for higher principles? Hunter makes a plea for ethical renewal, but as I mention in my review, he also shows, via MacInytre, the limits of such appeals across groups with incommensurable ethical principles. 

Ethics alone cannot address the full range of issues Hunter engages in his book. The Aristotelean-Thomist tradition MacInytre narrates is, however, embedded in a broader intellectual tradition that does address the full range of Hunter’s concerns: Catholic Social Teaching (CST). This is not the place for an overview of CST. Those unfamiliar yet interested should read Matthew Walther’s excellent summary in the Times. Regular contributors to Current such as Dan Williams and John Fea have written approvingly of it; suffice it to say it has appeal beyond those who identify as Catholics. Nadya Williams has recently called attention to the existence of a relatively new political party that actually takes its platform from CST: the American Solidarity Party! All this would seem to make it quite relevant to Hunter’s argument. Yet the tradition receives no mention in his otherwise comprehensive tome. Instead, with respect to contemporary Catholic thought, Hunter seems content to wave the bloody shirt of Romanism, concerned to remind his readers of the continued danger of Catholic authoritarianism.

It is fruitless to speculate on the reasons or motivations behind Hunter’s curious editorial decision. His demonization of Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic “integralist,” obscures the real stakes of technocracy: not top-down vs. bottom-up but rather secular vs. Catholic integralism. The problem with the Cass Sunsteins of the world (Sunstein, also on the faculty of Harvard Law, is one of Vermeule’s interlocutors) is not their insistence on the need to guide the ignorant masses with an undemocratic “nudge” but rather their commitment to a society that disproportionately rewards people who possess the particular skill sets and lifestyle choices that reflect those of Sunstein and his peers. I am sure that Sunstein has nothing but the best intentions. Harvard has been very good to him and he would like nothing more than for everyone to have the opportunity to have some position equivalent to a Harvard professor and enjoy similar rewards. After all, the alternative is failure.

I do not mean to demonize Sunstein. His “nudge” is really but an afterthought to the big push represented by America’s full-scale social, economic, and political commitment to universal, compulsory education. This modern system imposes a control over individual lives far beyond anything available to (or even desired by) the Catholic Church in the bad old days. Hunter acknowledges that public education has, from the start, sought to impose certain normative models of citizenship on a diverse and unruly population; still, his narrative quickly leaves this critique behind to focus on authoritarian threats from outside the education system. One does not have to be a full-scale Foucauldian to see the power dynamics of public education: It imposes norms. Educators believe these norms are legitimate because they promote “true” freedom. The public has at various times, including quite recently, thought differently. 

The current revolt against the educational establishment reflects only in part a conflict of values. It also reflects a fearful sense of receding options. The majority of students dragged through our public education system over its long history have not shown much particular interest in learning; many have been free to ignore their teachers, confident that, once they jump through the hoops of school they can get some good paying job that will not require them to read boring books. Increasingly, and ever more intensely, they are now being told that school is their only path to success and that they must be all-in or they will end up losers. Gilded Age Social Darwinists used to command: “Root, hog, or die.” Their tech geek equivalents now command: “Code, hog, or die.” Anyone not willing to get with the program deserves what they get—or more properly, what they don’t get. 

What could solidarity possibly mean in such a world?

I certainly do not wish to affirm any solidarity with the vision of the good life promoted by contemporary secular elites. I am sure they would not wish to live in a world guided by CST, at least with respect to the issues relating to sex, marriage, and family. How do people with such different beliefs live together? They don’t. 

And this underscores another part of the problem with Hunter’s argument. Despite his repeated appeals to localism, he seems to think that solidarity must be national. It has rarely been so in American history, with the possible exception of the middle decades of the twentieth century. Hunter titles an early section of the book, “E Pluribus Unum,” invoking that Founding Era motto as an ideal we need to recapture for our own time. He wrongly equates the “pluribus” with the word “diversity,” as if the Founders were affirming diversity in something like the modern sense. They were not. The “pluribus” refers to the several states, the “unum” is the nation. The Founders did not celebrate the diverse forms of Christianity present in the early republic; rather, they acknowledged the differences, accepted them, and tried to minimize national conflict by leaving religion to the states. This was much more “live and let live” than any kind of rainbow coalition of solidarity. 

Westward expansion, with its accompanying political, economic, and cultural centralization, doomed this state-based diversity almost from the start. The trajectory was relentless, but the process was slow and uneven. Pockets of true diversity survived, though often as backwaters, losers in the great game of modern progress. The South remained the most stubbornly resistant, but was left with, to quote the Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle, “the hind tit.” The population feeding on that tit has grown to encompass much of the old industrial heartland. They seek a solidarity that education cannot provide. What does Hunter have to offer them?

Solidarity with MAGA is no more appealing to me than solidarity with Harvard. I could imagine feeling solidarity with those who embrace the governing principles of the American Solidarity Party, but I understand that many other Americans would not. This leaves us with the question: Can America allow for diverse solidarities? 

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).