Uneasy Citizenship teaser: "Embracing Pluralism"
Or, why Christians should support liberalism as a framework for politics and government
Every so often I’ll be sharing something I’ve written for my upcoming book, Uneasy Citizenship. This may not make its way into the final draft of the book, but it’s at least a window into the kind of things I’m focusing on.
Today, I’m sharing a draft introduction to Chapter 6. This chapter focuses on the unfortunate trend toward rejecting liberalism—not the political ideology opposite conservatism, but the values and ideas associated with the American founding, such as individual rights and restrictions on state power—as a framework for the American political system. I’ve (very) tentatively titled this chapter Embracing Pluralism.
I remember exactly where I was when I had the idea for this book.
I was at a faculty retreat sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute’s Initiative on Faith and Public Life, along with a few dozen political scientists, economists, and historians from Christian colleges and universities. During an afternoon session, I found myself weighing how Christians should be thinking about our cultural and political engagement in a divided, polarized age. Inspired by disagreement with one of the retreat’s speakers, I jotted down a term on a piece of paper: uneasy citizenship.
That speaker was Patrick Deneen, a political scientist at Notre Dame and author of Why Liberalism Failed. Following positive reviews from The New York Times’ David Brooks and Ross Douthat, the book, despite being aimed at an academic audience, was a surprise hit. The crux of Deneen’s argument was that liberalism’s focus on individual rights has paradoxically created an environment wholly unwelcoming and inhospitable to liberalism writ large. As a result, he argued America (and the west in general) has moved into a post-liberal era, where culture, politics, and the state is no longer particular friendly to the ideas of classical liberalism, such as free speech and protections for property.
Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, is similarly pessimistic about the future of liberalism. “The unhappy truth,” he wrote in a column for The American Conservative, “is that liberalism as we Americans have known it is probably dead.” Dreher was writing from Hungary, where he had come to admire its authoritarian president, Viktor Orban. Orban is no friend of liberalism, using his time as president to redraw electoral districts favorable to his party, reshape the country’s courts in his image, and crack down on what he sees as unfair media coverage, among other things. In this same column, Dreher wrote,
Our future is almost certainly going to be left-illiberal or right-illiberal. It’s not the future I would prefer, but we are not being given a choice here. While the Establishment right, or what’s left of it, pens its sixty-sixth pointless column denouncing Trumpism while back-door surrendering to soft totalitarianism, and while the MAGA hotheads dissipate their anger in futile performative gestures, the right-of-center thought leaders who want to figure out how to resist effectively will be coming to Budapest to observe, to talk, and to learn.
Dreher later argued that the state bears the responsibility for confronting “woke” ideologies and behaviors:
Which is the only power capable of standing up to Woke Capitalists, as well as these illiberal leftists in academia, media, sports, cultural institutions, and other places? The state. That’s it. This is disorienting to Anglo-American conservatives, who are accustomed to seeing the state as the enemy, and institutions of civil society, especially business, as friends of freedom. It’s no longer true, and people on the Right who want to fight soft totalitarianism had better start to understand this.
A few months after Dreher’s essay, the National Conservatism Conference—NatCon—held its annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. Speakers included Deneen and Dreher, elected officials like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio, and Hillbilly Elegy author and U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance. The message of the meeting was clear: Conservatism must aggressively fight back against an increasingly hostile progressive agenda, or inevitably be steamrolled by it.
David Brooks observed and summarized the meeting in an essay for The Atlantic, titled “The Terrifying Future of the American Right.” He suggested that the future of American conservatism, as observed at one NatCon, should alarm conservatives who value limited government and individual liberties:
This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way.
Not all conservatives, however, were alarmed by Brooks’ account. Josh Hammer, a lawyer, columnist, and leading advocate for “common good originalism,” remarked that Brooks’ description simply made the idea of national conservatism more appealing. “Sign me up!” Hammer concluded.
The chapter will go on to argue that this rejection of liberalism—and, in many ways, pluralism—by too many Americans (including prominent Christians) is short sighted. Despite the challenges ahead for those espousing conservative, orthodox Christianity in the years and decades to come, liberalism remains not only the best framework through which to safeguard minority rights, but also the most in line with the beliefs about human nature and agency central to the Christian faith.
I’m looking forward to developing and supporting this argument in the book, drawing on a number of debates and controversies, past and present. As always, stay tuned.