Conserving Virtue, Conserving Freedom
It is always gratifying for a student when a teacher compliments his work. That is why I am flattered by Donald Devine’s engagement with recent writings of mine in The American Spectator. Assessing two essays I wrote about a year apart, he reminds us of the importance of a moral vision to sustain republican self-government. Devine contends that the two chief threats to that vision are a small and ineffective cadre of far-right extremists on the one hand, and a much more dangerous “rationalist left” on the other.
Yet it seems to me that Devine is too soft on the broader “nationalist right” I critiqued. In both pieces, I expressed concern that Americans are losing a shared sense of the common good; liberty understood as a merely “neutral” public square is worthless to my mind, but the rise of power-politics also represents a rejection of freedom’s moral vitality. Republican self-government demands citizens share a definite conception of virtue. Sadly, though, the threats to that moral vision are no longer confined to the Left or a tiny corner of the Right—they are all around us, and they demand a response.
Devine and I agree that progressivism presents a grave danger to the American Republic today. And, to be sure, populism has shaken the Washington establishment in certain salutary ways. For example, the Trumpian wrecking ball has begun the deconstruction of the administrative state and fostered a more general willingness to question the conventional wisdom of the governing elite.
While genuine conservatives may well channel elements of this insurgency in productive directions, I worry about the increasingly ideological turn that many of the New Right’s representatives have taken in recent years. The varied forms of “postliberalism” en vogue around the capital have gone beyond critiquing liberalism as a political theory. They now embrace a power politics utterly at odds with the American Founding, sacrificing both liberty and virtue on the altar of ideology. We can see this trend in the utter boorishness of the New Right’s digital influencers, the moral compromises of its elected politicians, and perhaps above all in the intellectual treason of its so-called “thought leaders.” Popularity and power are the ultimate ends of this new establishment.
Read more in Fusion.
