The resources for civilizational renewal are still available for those who seek them.
This book aims to provide nothing less than a full-throated defense of moral and political sanity against the latest eruptions of ideological mendacity in our time. Its thesis is simple enough, but it needs the full resources of applied political philosophy to explain with adequate clarity and depth. The thesis? That the “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just 35 years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
This was not supposed to happen. Midcentury “progressive democracy,” as the Hungarian moral and political philosopher Aurel Kolnai called it in 1950, had already revealed itself to be an “incomplete totalitarianism” that, nonetheless, was capable, he argued, of rivaling Communism and Nazism by morphing into a “Third Rider of the Apocalypse.” For a long time, Kolnai’s forebodings about a totalitarian turn in democracy seemed exaggerated and not a little overwrought to me. But how prescient this analyst of the utopian mind turned out to be. That Third Rider has indeed come to threaten and repress, as Kolnai feared, all “essential opposition” to Autonomous Man, the human being defined by his desire to emancipate himself from the “alien powers” (as Marx called them) that subjugate Man. Included in these powers are all natural, transcendent, and inherited limits to human will. The totalitarian impulse has thus survived the “official” collapse of the classic totalitarian regimes and ideologies of the 20th century and has come out strengthened, and less “incomplete,” in decisive respects. For a long time, Kolnai wrote, democracy, no matter how “progressive” its ultimate aspirations, had “contained and sheltered” precious “traditions of civilization and fragments of liberty” that it now jettisons with irresponsible abandon. Its “theory”—increasingly abstract, insatiable, unremitting—has come to triumph over its once salutary “practice.” The endless self-radicalization of democracy predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago has come to pass with unerring and unnerving accuracy.
As a result, the constraints and limits that informed the democracies of old have largely been replaced by contempt for the enduring verities that once guided the exercise of human freedom. As Leo Strauss wrote around the same time in his illuminating 1953 essay “Progress or Return,” the crucial error, the root of the evil, was the replacement of the once-venerable distinction between “good and evil” with the ever-shifting “distinction” between “progress and reaction.” That ever-moving distinction not only distorted our understanding of the human world but could be readily invoked to justify draconian efforts to restrict civilized liberty, ordered liberty, in the name of the “Progress” of humanity and the “democratic idea.” It is no accident (as the Marxists like to say) that Marxist-Leninists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere prided themselves on their commitment to “Progressive Doctrine,” in their view the only genuine meaning of democracy rightly understood. The woke closer to home are self-described “progressives” as well, quick to label those who disagree with them as “reactionaries,” “racists,” and “oppressors,” who must be silenced, shamed, and “canceled” in order to promote a fictive liberation and justice, to bury “racism,” “colonialism,” “sexism,” and “transphobia” once and for all. In today’s salient cultural and political dispensation, university administrators, activists, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) officers crudely replace liberal education and Socratic interrogation with cliché-ridden orthodoxy indistinguishable from indoctrination. To be sure, America remains a largely if only partially free country, though markedly less so than even in the recent past. But the totalitarian impulse lies at the heart of this ascendant ideology of cultural negation and civilizational repudiation, and several segments of civil society, along with progressives in government, are committed to “saving democracy” by suffocating it. We no longer live in a recognizably liberal age as a new authoritarian order imposes itself in the name of an obligatory “anti-authoritarianism.” These troubling paradoxes go unnoticed, alas, by too many friends of liberty and human dignity.
If the American Framers were cautiously hopeful about the capacity of a republican people to govern themselves by “reflection and choice” (in the language of Federalist 1), they never confused human beings with angels who could solve the political problem once and for all. Their anthropology, their account of human nature and human motives, was sober, realistic, and devoid of both excessive optimism and debilitating pessimism. Their institutional arrangements drew on Locke and especially Montesquieu and those two thinkers’ new science of power checking power in a modern republic at once representative and commercial. But the language and categories of virtue and vice, of good and evil, of sin and imperfection, still spoke powerfully to their hearts and minds. In them coexisted an admirable moderation formed from classical and Christian sources with a confidence in a sober and constrained version of modern progress. They never for a moment succumbed to what Eric Voegelin has so suggestively called “modernity without restraint,” to utopian dreams and delusions. The political scientist Martin Diamond rightly called the American Revolution that rare sight to behold: “a revolution of sober expectations.”
***
The author of this book is an unabashed conservative and unapologetically so. Without proper deference to our civilized patrimony, without the serious resolve to preserve, and reform, our common life in accord with the noble principles of justice imparted by our forebears, we will founder upon the shoals of nihilistic negation. Intentionally or not, we will impart to the young hatred, not love; despair, not hope; confusion, not self-confidence rooted in tried-and-true wisdom.
This author loves liberty of a “manly, moral, and regulated” kind, as Edmund Burke so eloquently put it at the beginning of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the founding text of a modern conservatism committed to the preservation of ordered liberty. He is also an American patriot who cherishes our republican institutions and our constitutional forms. He remains committed to the “honorable determination” (Federalist 39) of a free people to vindicate the human capacity for self-government, to “liberty under God and the laws” as Alexis de Tocqueville so suggestively put it in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). To truly love liberty, ordered liberty, is to be a liberal of sorts, but not the kind who sees “no enemies to the Left,” or who turns a blind eye to the totalitarian temptation with its cruel impulse to localize evil in suspect groups who are guilty less for what they have done than who they are. My qualified, if real and subordinate, liberalism is thus anti-totalitarian to the core.
I cherish civility and what Harvey C. Mansfield has called the “forms and formalities of liberty.” But I disdain a faux moderation that succumbs, in whole or in part, to woke nostrums in a desperate effort to stay relevant or to have a seat at the progressivist table. True moderation should not be confused with a lukewarm acceptance—or rejection—of the old verities that still deserve our undying commitment, or a misbegotten belief that moderation is primarily “geographic,” as if being in the middle in the struggle between good and evil, and truth and falsehood, is ever advisable. To succumb to the fantasies of gender ideology, for example, is to eschew reality and to reject human nature as in any way relevant to judging the thought and action of human beings. True moderation must always be grounded in the Real, in the natural order of things, if it is to be both efficacious and morally choice-worthy.
This author prays every day that the “center will hold,” to borrow a phrase from W. B. Yeats. But with Pierre Manent, I acknowledge that a “fanaticism of the center” has taken hold of what the late Angelo Codevilla called the “ruling class.” These increasingly unaccountable elites defer blindly to the tyranny of experts, thoughtlessly prefer fashionable cosmopolitanism or globalism to humane national loyalty and prefer faddish relativism and moral experimentation to the old moral norms. In contrast, true moderation requires what the classics called “order in the soul,” salutary self-control and self-limitation guided by right reason, and not the emancipation of the human will from all humanizing—and civilizing—restraints. Too many contemporary liberals and centrists have forgotten the crucial moral, cultural, and spiritual preconditions of our political order. They dispense with them with remarkable ease. But liberty without law, including the moral law, is unworthy of human beings and is ultimately not in accord with the order of things.
To the so-called New Right, I caution against the urge to latch on to something superficially new, vital, and exciting at the expense of jettisoning the classical and Christian wisdom of old. Impatience with traditional affirmations, a distrust of biblical morality, and facile appeals to masculinity in place of spiritually demanding manliness, in the end provide an alluring road to nowhere. To be sure, one can delight in Friedrich Nietzsche’s fierce poetic eloquence about the “last man” devoid of high aims and noble purposes. Nietzsche rightly takes aim at sentimental humanitarianism and a cult of tenderness that ignores the severe and demanding virtues. Nietzsche’s evocative and thrilling rhetoric undeniably puffs young men up, making them feel like members of a small spiritual aristocracy of the wise and the strong.
But, in truth, true political and spiritual wisdom sides neither with rank sentimentality or the kind of cruelty and hardness celebrated by Nietzsche. Against the humanitarian Left and the atheistic Right, I instead recommend the noble and elevated conception of “political freedom” put forward by Tocqueville in his foreword to The Old Regime and the Revolution. In a particularly beautiful passage, Tocqueville noted that political freedom rightly understood “takes men out of themselves to live in a common world, providing the wisdom for judging their virtues and their vices; only political freedom allows them to see themselves both as equals and as distinct.”
In the spirit of Tocqueville and the American Founders, we are in pressing need of a return to rational debate and discussion. But such debate and discussion require crucial preconditions which we have forgotten at our peril. As Eric Voegelin argued in his 1965 essay, “What is Political Reality” (from his book Anamnesis), common sense long flourished in the Anglo-American tradition, keeping alive a truncated (if somewhat inarticulate) version of the rich and varied accounts of ethics and practical reason to be found in Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s On Duties. In doing so, it largely kept irresponsible and ideological politics at bay. But already by the time Voegelin was writing in the mid-1960s, this tradition was fraying. Adherents of common sense were losing self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. Common sense was losing its roots in the ratio, right reason in the form of intellection of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and in the political realm, in some larger understanding of the virtue of phronesis or practical reason, and how to cultivate it. In his essay, Voegelin tellingly added that common sense, as precious as it is, cannot begin to overcome the ideological deformation of reality without a vigorous return to right reason (what the Greeks and Romans called nous and ratio) in all its amplitude. That return requires the renewal of liberal and civic education as humanizing enterprises fully committed to the pursuit of wisdom about the best way for human beings to live. Only then can the dignity of republican self-government be appreciated once again by citizens attuned to the good use of freedom and the rewards and challenges of lives well lived. The road forward is steep, but the resources for civilizational renewal are still available to all those who seek them.
