The word “liberal” has lots of meanings, but it derives from the Latin word for freedom. In political theory, “liberalism” refers not just to progressivism but to a political order based on freedom, rights, and democracy. That is, the political ideology embodied in the American constitutional order.
Though conservatives align themselves against liberalism in the sense of progressivism, American conservatism has traditionally been “liberal” in this more technical sense. But today those foundational American principles of democracy, rights, and freedom are being questioned. And many conservatives are embracing “post-liberalism.” What that political ideology means in practice is not clear, but Christians playing around with some form of theocracy (Calvinist dominionists, Catholic integralists, and the Pentecostal Seven Mountain Mandate) are post-liberals, as are overt authoritarians, such as Nick Fuentes.
But what post-liberalism mainly means today is a critique of liberalism and the Enlightenment-era philosophy behind it, rather than a program to replace it. And that critique is not altogether wrong. David G. Bonagura Jr. summarizes two of those challenges to liberal democracy in his article for Law & Liberty entitled The Many Deaths of Liberalism. One of them, though, shows a way to keep the liberal tradition, while avoiding the particular manifestations that have led to the problems.
First, Bonagura summarizes the arguments of Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, the author of arguably the most incisive criticism of this ideology, in his book Why Liberalism Failed:
Deneen argues that liberalism failed as an ideology because it succeeded “at achieving supreme and complete freedom through the liberation of the individual from particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities.” This liberation, however, had the unintended effect of subjecting the individual to “the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of liberation,” chiefly “the depersonalization and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market.”
Deneen identifies two philosophical assumptions that shape the liberal institutions that dominate the West: “anthropological individualism and voluntarist conception of choice.” When put into practice, these assumptions make liberalism “self-contradictory,” for its insistence on “extreme license” requires coexistence with “extreme oppression.” Deneen dedicates chapters to these oppressing forces: technology, education, the new aristocracy of wealthy liberals, and a culture at war with nature, time, and place. Liberalism promised to make man free, but everywhere he is in chains that liberalism unwittingly forged.
In the words of the Amazon description, “liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history.”
Well, Deneen has a point, or, rather, lots of points. Liberal democracy exalts freedom, which has given us the “extreme license” of the sexual revolution, which has undermined the family and thus the social order that human beings need. It exalts “choice,” which has given us the “pro-choice” abortion movement and the general collapse of objective morality, undermining any kind of humane society.
Bonagura also cites the analysis of British historian Christopher Dawson, whose book The Judgment of the Nations, published in 1942 in the early years of World War II, includes a chapter titled “The Failure of Liberalism.”
Dawson, emphasizing the societal element, underscores that the uninspired self-centeredness that liberalism engenders makes it incapable of supporting a civilization and, consequently, leaves it open to be swallowed by stronger totalitarian ideologies that fill the vacuum created by liberalism’s weak philosophical vision.
“Dawson and Deneen arrive at the same conclusion,” observes Bonagura: “when liberalism fails, it collapses into illiberalism.” The problem with liberalism is that it leads to illiberalism. Thus, Deneen is not wanting to get rid of freedom, rights, and democracy. His complaint is that the Enlightenment rationalism that was the impetus for modern liberalism is too weak a foundation for them.
Dawson, on the other hand, says that liberalism, in fact, long predates the Enlightenment. All of its elements can be found in the Greek democracies and the Roman republic. And Christianity played a key role.
The first Christians, caught between the laws of the state and their higher loyalty to God, began to discern a spiritual dimension of freedom, actualized and obtained through faith, that included citizenship in the heavenly city. This broader understanding of freedom, argues Dawson, enabled the Latin-speaking cultures to incorporate the northern barbarians into their way of life and form what we call Christendom.
This freedom took political form in the self-governing medieval cities (which, I would add, would become hotbeds of the Reformation):
The growth of medieval towns and cities created the conditions for this conception of freedom to become part of the fabric of political life. . . .As guilds rose to prominence, their leaders stepped beyond their associations to seek control of political and juridical tasks that had lain within the province of the local bishop or noble. . . .Medieval towns and cities succeeded in integrating “corporate organization, economic function and civic freedom.” In this, the representative principle of government as we understand it today was born for societies that functioned as living organisms whose flourishing hinged on their many organs performing their respective functions—including that of governance—for the good of the whole. . . .From this experience grew “the medieval idea of liberty, which … was not the right of the individual to follow his own will, but the privilege of sharing in a highly organized form of corporate life which possessed its own constitution and rights of self-government.”. . .
Dawson. . . recalls that “at the roots of the development of Western freedom and Western democracy there lies the medieval idea that men possess rights even against the state and that society is not a totalitarian political unit but a community made up of a complex variety of social organisms, each possessing an autonomous life and its own free institutions.”
For Dawson, liberalism is what largely defines Western civilization. The Enlightenment version, which both Dawson and Deneen criticize, was a narrowing of this tradition. The broader classical and Christian version is not hyper-individualistic; rather, it is grounded in community. Freedom is not “excessive license”; rather, governed by a moral order, it is the liberty of participating in society. This classical, Christian liberalism counters the Enlightenment’s drift towards state totalitarianism by upholding decentralized “free institutions,” such as the family, the congregation, and local governments.
The average American in 1776 had probably never heard of John Locke, but was well-aware of the Magna Carta, which limited the power of kings, and the principles of Puritan republicanism, which for awhile overthrew the British monarchy.
To preserve liberalism in light of the failures of Enlightenment-style liberal ideology, says Bonagura, we must recover the liberal tradition.
The central problem of liberal ideology is pushing God into the realm of private opinion and deifying the individual in his place. The doctrine of the individual unmoored from and superior to family, community, and nation has shaken all three units to their core.
The way forward after liberal ideology’s failure is not a replacement of the US Constitution with a new, postliberal or nonliberal form of governance, nor is it primarily one of political reform. Rather, what is needed is to replant the individual in the soil from which he came—that of family, community, and nation with all their attachments, including religion. True human dignity and freedom are found there, not in a disembodied and rootless understanding of the individual as a self-determining and autonomous agent. And the liberal tradition cannot be properly understood apart from the Christian tradition that situates the individual and his freedom within a grander order with a supernatural goal and purpose.
Photo: Christopher Dawson by Levan Ramishvili – https://www.flickr.com/photos/levanrami/51414620320/in/album-72157719755653166/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117487663
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