Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part IV
Critique of Pure Liberalism: Raising Babies; Choosing Kings I; How Serious is Philosophy?
Dear Voters and Observers,
This piece is perhaps less accessible than most Signals, indeed, more forbidding than most of my efforts to make sense of the current US Presidential election. I don’t think it is actually more difficult, but the difficulties are on the surface. The artsy stuff tends to go down easier. At any rate, my apologies. If I’d had more time I would have produced something longer, better supported, more instructive. Maybe. That said, a central purpose here is to organize my own thinking, which is sometimes, well, usually, messy. Welcome to the nightmare! And I share it for whatever it might be worth for your own thinking. Seriously, feel free to skip this one if it isn’t your cup of tea. Flowers and megafauna and the like in due course.
This is the fourth installment of Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? I foresee about a dozen, but we shall come to know. So far, we have:
Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part I A Decision as Mosaic
Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part II Why is this election so hard to think, and why does it matter for a diverse polity?
Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? Part III Does Political Speech Matter? The Problem of Demographics
These first few essays take place against an idealized version of U.S. political discourse, a norm against which we might judge our actual politics. At the risk of some misunderstanding, I sometimes call this liberal democratic politics and variations thereon. Why? Because the claim is that political and social life can be formed by agreement among and autonomous political actors, voters, who collectively embody the will of the people, indeed constitute the people, the demos in democracy. Such agreement, in this ideal world, is reached after rational argument.
Liberal democracy is often understood in contrast to a “traditional” society, which understands itself on the basis of shared history, language, enemies, gods, and the like, and which has its own understanding of political authority, perhaps a king, or a clerical caste, or what have you, generally organized hierarchically, by title, caste, gender, and the like. You know, the ancien regime. Liberal democracy is, also of course, the “modern” understanding, more or less explicitly dismissive of what it regards as outmoded forms of political authority and organization. Really.
While liberal democracy is a normative ideal, it should also be remembered that a great deal of U.S. politics has been in fact constituted by argument, some at a high level, for which the Federalist Papers is the leading example.
As discussed in Part II, however, much political discourse in the United States at the present simply does not seem to operate in this fashion. I am not saying that, in this election, the ideal of liberal politics is imperfectly achieved. I am saying that the discourse is SO different, maybe it is operating under some other ideal. But what ideal? We don’t really have another way to talk about politics. Some ideas – the city-state, the plantation, the nomadic tribe, even absolute monarchs – are not really on the table. Others, such as a theory of bureaucracy, are at best emergent.
One possibility, discussed in Part III, is that political discourse, however articulated, actually functions in largely social, even tribal terms, which is the implicit assumption of demographics, political science founded on the same, and elections as sport. People speak and vote like others of their kind (Black men, college educated women, etc.). In relatively scarce cases, double haters, swing voters and the like, rational argument may matter at the margins, but in general, our political language is not addressed to the rationality of autonomous individuals, and is therefore illiberal.
To suggest that our political discourse, which is couched as rational argument but rarely is, is actually tribal in nature only raises more questions: so, this democratic sounding speech isn’t actually about liberal democracy, but what, then, is it actually about? What are we doing when we speak within the tribe? One possibility is the articulation and strengthening of collective identity. Another, non-exclusive, possibility is the articulation of fear, which is said to lend strength.
Parts II and III might be said to be loosely sociological: my arguments are founded upon observation of contemporary political discourse in the United States in the run-up to this presidential election. I have attempted to interpret our scene: Biden/Harris v. Trump, Democrats v. Republicans in the U.S. in 2024. It may fairly be said that this thinking is circumstantial, situated. I am thinking about political alignments in this place and time. Other places, other times, may well be different. True. And I plan on coming back to trying to understand this place, in this time.
Given all this, you might wonder: why am I devoting this Part IV to problems internal to the liberal project? As many others and I have said, our actual politics does not seem to be operating in the fashion articulated our political theory. Why, then, apart from the fun of riffing on Kant, am I discussing a “Critique of Pure Liberalism”?
Indeed, any number of folks like to remind us that we don’t live in a democracy, or relatedly, that our democracy is thwarted by (Supreme Court, electoral college, the Fed, usw.). This sort of writing has become a subgenre. There’s even a crowd of folks who badge themselves “post-liberal,” and I’m not entirely unsympathetic. Here are two pretty good and influential examples of this kind of thinking published in the last few days. NS Lyons The Total State and the Twilight of American Democracy; Michael Lind Trump v Harris is Just a Front.
As suggested in Parts II & III, I am not entirely above this kind of thing, decline of the West/US/democracy etc., etc. But I’m sort of tired of the frisson of naughtiness, the almost breathless quality with which our “real” situation is revealed. You know, that moment that the Greeks were said to prize so much, when the tragic hero comes to understand his doom. Except not so much. More like the moment when we, now enlightened, get to feel just that little bit smarter than the rubes with whom we are flying, at the next table, at work, God forbid our admin., whatever.
Apart from questionable taste, there are at least three substantive problems with the “we are not democratic” reveal. First, more obviously, even such texts tend to hold an implicit view of liberal republican democracy, that which has been betrayed. Without a sense of betrayal, decline, there is no frisson.
Second, even if we had something to else to put in the place of liberal democracy, surely the political thinking and conduct of the North Atlantic nations for the last quarter millennium or so ought to be instructive? By way of analogy, I would like to know more about the governance of Venice under the Doges, of Amsterdam in its glory days, and for that matter, about Chinese governance through mandarins, especially at the level just beneath the emperor. But life is short . . .
Third, “we are not really a democracy/enlightened republic” claims to disabuse us of our now traditional armature for political thought, but does not, by itself, offer us a replacement. Saying, for example, “the US is just an oligarchy” (which is often said) does not tell us much. Oligarchy is hardly self-evident, as Venice suggests. Have you actually met any rich people? Maybe you are rich? Is everything clear now? So even if we concede our fallen state, we are still left with the questions with which Democratic Rock or Republican Whirlpool? began, viz., what the hell is going on here? What does all of this mean? As I’ve suggested, answering such questions might call for more of an art critic than a political thinker, but be that as it may, that’s what I’m struggling for with this series of essays.
Before leaning into interpretation, however, I want to tarry over fairly orthodox political theory, and say a few things about liberal democracy as a way of thinking, what we might loosely speaking call theory, but better, as an imagination of political life. Specifically, in this Part IV I want to discuss three problems that liberal democracy has in principle, that is, regardless of particular circumstances: (i) children and education; (ii) particularization; and (iii) the status of ideas. Of course, these general problems take on their own flavors in (our) specific historical, geographical, and social circumstances. The problems present differently, to use the medical jargon. But the problems themselves are structural, built into the liberal project.
Some of this will be very quick, more of a placeholder than anything else. I worry that, for some of my readers, these ideas will be familiar, requiring only a mention, or real scholarship, but not this cursory explanation. For other readers, the same ideas will be unfamiliar, and this cursory explanation will be far from clear. Sorry. Spirit willing, body weak.
A. Raising Babies
To tell an old and stylized story, an origin story, since Hobbes and the Peace of Westphalia, European political thought on both the national and international levels has struggled to articulate order without shared ideas of the good or at least much in the way of shared notions, i.e., without fighting the wars of religion to theological resolution. Instead, we have a notion of the social contract that individuals rationally enter into, and we have treaties that nations sign. At either level, political thinking starts with a unit (the individual, the state) that is presumed to be, defined as, rational, capable of choice, and capable of binding itself in contract. Such contracts construct social order. By way of even shorter hand, we might say that the liberal (or modern) political order is founded on the autonomous individual.
There are numerous elaborations of this basic architecture. Pretty much all of microeconomics is founded on this structure: rational economic actors constructing markets through free contracts. Such is our general imagination of markets. Similar things might be said of democratic voting: we at least claim to appeal to the rationality of voters through policy argument. And we often structure notions of “progress” around the unfolding of “choice,” that is, broadening the field in which the individual may exercise autonomy. Much of the culture wars (gender, abortion) are fought under this flag.
Morally, we often think in terms of liberty so long as one does not harm/ others, i.e., compromise their autonomy – a position formalized by the Kant of the moral works, notably the Critique of Pure Practical Reason. In diverse and large (alienated) polities such as the United States, politics tend to be misleadingly understood in such moral terms, most influentially (in the US at least) articulated by Rawls with his veil of ignorance. (For a delightful send up of Rawls, see L.P. Koch WTF is an "Accident of Birth?"). All this is more or less familiar, indeed the water in which we swim when we speak publicly of political things.
Problematically, to be obvious, actual people are always situated. They do not somehow come onto the scene as freely choosing. In fact, they come onto the scene as babies, incapable of choice, incapable of taking care of themselves, in fact, not autonomous at all. They are raised under conditions of control – education is not freely chosen. And then they enter into their lives, constrained, shaped, informed, and also empowered, by their families, communities, history, geography, beliefs, language, and all the rest of the human condition in its bewildering variety of instantiations. One may say structurally analogous things about nations. Thus, the existence of autonomous individuals capable of structuring a polity democratically, rationally, presumes a great deal of authority, the lack of autonomy, paradigmatically, parents.
I learned this from a teacher, Mary Ann Glendon, but the received citation for this idea is the so called “Boekenfoerde Diktum” which runs so: “The liberal secular state lives on premises that it is not able to guarantee by itself. On one side it can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society. On the other side, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism.”
[Liberalism has other paradoxes and logical difficulties, by the way, e.g., Arrow’s Theorem, Sen’s Paradox, and I’ll close on a recent on from Adrian Vermuele. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.]
So, as I first suggested in Part II, liberal thought is a very partial solution to the problem of political order under conditions of alienation, a solution dependent on what we might broadly speaking call shared culture. Such culture need not resolve the question of infant baptism, and need not be WASP, but such culture must value and produce a citizenry comprising relatively autonomous individuals, rational voters, in short. Such voters will always be culturally informed, situated, and therefore never purely autonomous (on this, Kant is clear), but we may nonetheless imagine politics with a degree of freedom, a degree of imagination, even sympathy.
Stepping back, half a millennium on, it should have been clear that, in its flight from the wars of religion, the liberal solution was itself rather theological, just quietly so. If we imagine our humanity in these not expressly Christian ways, we might imagine choices and promises, and perhaps that is enough to build a social order?
B. Choosing Kings I
Kant speaks of pure reason (our conception of the world) and pure practical reason (our conception of our actions in the world, hence “practical,” which is akin to “moral”). In either case, he is dealing with concepts and their logical relations. The effort is to refine a structure of thought, an edifice that articulates what is available to reason as such, “pure.”
This is a literally idealistic project (hence the later “Kantian Idealism”), that is, it is about ideas. As Kant knew, actual people, even absent-minded philosophers, are not purely conceptual beings. So how do ideas attach to the world?
A lesson from quantitative finance that I learned from my son might be helpful. One may be very good at probability, that is, figuring out the relationships between various more or less likely outcomes, and perhaps taking positions accordingly. These are mathematical problems, and they are to be solved in the abstract, that is, to use a phrase from the related field of computer science, they are medium independent. But that is not the same thing as estimating, that is, assigning a number to a specific phenomenon or a particular situation. Discovering relationships among numbers, concepts, is not the same enterprise as using numbers to describe things. You can be good at one, and not the other.
Something similar happens in law, often unnoticed. Traditional doctrinal argument involves the relationship of concepts (rules, principles of decision, propositions derived from legislative intent, policy considerations, and so forth). Such things are abstractions ab initio (“fairness”) or are quickly abstracted (“Brown v. Board of Education stands for the proposition that ___________”). But deciding actual cases, any political act (imposing a tax, perhaps) is always a situated, particular enterprise. Almost all depends on how that situation is characterized.
In short, there is a gap between our mental equipment, which tends to the abstract and general, and the world in which we must live, where we encounter the particular. As I’ve tried to suggest, this is an old problem, central to the human condition, and maybe inaccessible to philosophy. Kant tried, in the Critique of Judgment. Do not tell me about “Beauty,” tell me why this painting is beautiful.
And here, perhaps strangely, we return to politics in the ordinary sense (Arendt). In an election, the nation chooses a particular person to be President. In choosing among, praising or disfavoring, the candidates’ particularities, we cannot claim anything like conceptual rationality. This is painfully obvious in the present election, which raises questions about political process. But even if we had two truly admirable candidates, the gap between how we think, and the necessity of particularization, would remain. And the gap would be filled, because the polity needs a President, by various “reasons,” “preferences,” and that strange form of collected projection we call “representation.” Topics for another day, maybe. Sounds like “thinking,” and we don’t have a better word for it . . . well, judgment. Like appreciating a painting. Which is why I started with interpretation. But we are far from the Enlightened certainties with which the American and French Revolutions announced “modern” politics.
C. How Serious Is Philosophy?
As suggested above, liberal ideology can be stated propositionally, so that inherent logical difficulties emerge, like rocks from a receding tide. Adrian Vermeule provides a recent example:
Is liberalism committed to the following proposition? (Is there a version of liberalism that isn’t committed to the proposition?)
“If the individual reproductive choices of free persons lead eventually to the total and irreversible extinction of Homo Sapiens, that is either a morally indifferent outcome or a morally acceptable price to pay for the higher good of that individual exercise of choice.”
Legal academics and pundits sometime have an unfortunate tendency to think that demonstration of logical inconsistency obligates opposing forces to withdraw. (Laws of chivalry and all that, maybe?) So, it is tempting to argue that problems inherent in liberal democracy logically imply that liberal democracy must fail, has already failed but the citizens in the provinces have not heard the news, and the like. By extension, one might wonder whether and to what extent the American project writ large is workable.
I’m fairly confident this is not what Vermeule is doing, or at least is not his chief intent. The point here is that liberalism, our house ideology, is impoverished, insufficient on its own terms to make sense of our politics and our law. Something else is needed, what Vermeule calls “common good,” perhaps backed with an inkling of nature, maybe even grace.
I happen to agree. But at some level, we already knew this. To play fast and loose, any logical system complex enough to make self-referential statements is either incomplete or inconsistent (Goedel). Liberalism, seen as a propositional system sufficient to articulate and legitimate political life, is logically bound to fail. And so, as I said above, we add supplemental rules and commitments, fill in, help. Our logic, the stuff we defend, is a partial and excessively clean articulation of our actual “thinking.”
The Christian in me shrugs. Have I done anything more than point out that we don’t do politics, or anything else, in a world where truth is any more than fleetingly accessible? So, politics is fallen. Really? It must 5:00 somewhere.
Insofar as liberalism survives (and in vast and diverse contexts, I see no other option for ordinary politics), it will do so by accommodating its structural limitations in some fashion. Doing so requires a reformulation of what liberals and, again and latterly, “progressives,” mean by “democracy.” And perhaps a bit more humility about how the exercise of power is logically justified, even necessary.
-- David A. Westbrook