On all sides, key public intellectuals, activists, politicians, and the various institutions they represent have, for all practical purposes, given up trying to work through their differences. Few, it would seem, have the appetite for it. What, they might plausibly ask, would be the point?
Making matters more challenging, of course, is the depletion of the deep cultural reservoirs from which Americans had long drawn to sustain the liberal democratic order through its many trials. There is now no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively. Even more perplexing, the emotivism that has come to dominate public ethics on all sides obviates the possibility that they ever will be settled definitively. Likewise, any bold vision of national purpose has been abandoned, replaced by a stripped-down pursuit of partisan power. Not least, the concept of “citizen” has been reduced to a range of politicized identity markers and the rights demanded by those who claim them. Rarely if ever is the question of corresponding civic responsibilities addressed. In all of these ways and others, the cultural logic of the hybrid-Enlightenment that underwrote the liberal democratic regime has dissolved as a working logic of the public sphere.
In his version of a liberal utopia, Richard Rorty believed that “democracies [were] now in a position to throw away some of the ladders used in their own construction,” ladders such as “reason” and “moral obligation.” He wrote this in 1989. It is fair to say that he got his wish.”
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 367.