Each generation, Hunter continues, works out its own balance in the tension between Enlightenment liberty and moral authority. In the 20th century, for example, the philosopher John Dewey emerged as the great champion of Enlightenment values. He believed that religion had been discredited but that a public ethic could be built by human reason, on the basis of individual dignity and human rights. He had great faith in the power of education to train people to become moral citizens. (Dewey’s understanding of education remains influential in the United States.)
The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thought this was naïve. He believed that Dewey underestimated the human capacity for sin. He believed that you can’t use science to answer questions about life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. He dismissed the idea that with just a little more schooling, we would be able to educate people out of their racism and selfishness, or that secularism can address life’s deepest problems. “The religious ideal of forgiveness,” Niebuhr wrote, “is more profound and more difficult than the rational virtue of tolerance.”
Dewey and Niebuhr differed, but they both thought it was important to build a coherent moral order; they both believed there was a thing called the truth; they both believed that capitalism preyed on the vulnerable. In other words, across their differences they both operated within the cultural framework and tension that had long defined America.
And over the decades, most Americans lived with one ear attuned to the doctrine of Dewey and the other ear attuned to the doctrine of Niebuhr. If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.
Unfortunately, Hunter notes, this fruitful cultural tension died with King. Starting in the 1960s, America grew less religious. Those who remained religious were told to keep their faith to the private sphere. American public life became largely secular, especially among the highly educated classes, producing what the First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president.
At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book “After Virtue,” the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to “emotivism.” If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his megaselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.
In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension, and with it the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her
own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, “If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.”
Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose?
It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape — there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect.
In public discourse, identity politics is more associated with the left. Progressivism used to be oriented around how to make capitalism just; but now in its upper-middle-class form, it’s oriented around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.
But as Hunter notes, Donald Trump practices identity politics just as much as any progressive. He tells the story of how small-town, less-educated Christians are being oppressed by elites. He alone is their retribution. That story resonates with a lot of people. In the 1950s, Billy Graham assumed that his faith was central to American life. By the 2020s his son Franklin considered himself a warrior under siege in an anti-Christian culture.
The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.
In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. This is the menace of Trumpism. If you read
my recent interview with Steve Bannon, you’ll see that he talks like a character straight out of Hunter’s book.
Democrats are not immune to this way of thinking. In a 2019 survey Democrats were more likely than Republicans to admit to occasionally thinking that we’d be better off as a country “if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Democrats were more likely than Republicans to believe that their opponents were “evil” and “un-American.”
But in this world, in which politics is seen as a form of total war, Biden looks obsolete. In a nihilistic pseudo-authoritarian world, he’s still one of those old-fashioned liberals who reveres the Constitution and his Catholicism. The ideals that animate him and that he uses to give poetry and lift to his speeches fail to inspire millions of American voters. A plurality of voters believe that Biden’s age is a bigger problem than Trump’s authoritarianism because they just don’t see the latter as that big a problem.
The core question in Hunter’s book is: Can you have an Enlightenment political system atop a post-Enlightenment culture? I’d say the answer to that question is: Over the long term, no.
The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.
But the work of building that culture will take decades. Until then, we, as a democracy, are on thin ice.
