An Illiberal Moment

In yet another narrowly contested election year in the United States, the country’s liberal political order has come under increasing attack, both intellectually and practically. It is an illiberal moment in political life. These challenges, which have emerged more broadly in the Western democracies, come from both ends of the political spectrum, which in a curious way are united in their analysis and their criticism. These illiberal trends also find a home in authoritarian regimes, and are arguably inspiring the war in Ukraine, and the threat of war in other places. Christians have good reasons to be concerned at this convergence and its challenge to the liberal political order of the West.

This liberal political order, of course, is not the same thing as “liberalism” in an American political context. A liberal political regime is characterized by an emphasis on the freedom and equality of the individual, and the individual’s rights; under the influence of the 18^th-century Enlightenment, by a belief in reason and the possibility of progress; and in the Anglo-American tradition particularly by a respect for the rule of law. What makes a society “liberal” has little to do with matters of the political right or left.

Though the extent of the Enlightenment’s influence on American constitutional order has been disputed (for example, by Russell Kirk in The Roots of American Order, 1974), it is truer to say that the influence is complex. In Peter Gay’s measured appraisal, the political system supported in The Federalist Papers was “constructed on distrust of human nature and hostile to utopian optimists,” yet at the same time the writers’ defense of that order was marked by “hopeful realism” (The Enlightenment: the Science of Freedom, 1967, p. 566). For Gay, the influence of the Enlightenment and the possibility of progress are undeniable.

For illiberal critics of the political order of the West, on both the right and left, the Enlightenment has provided a convenient target. Mark Lilla, in The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (2016), briefly chronicles the history of Counter-Enlightenment thought, which turned a new page with Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). After Virtue posited a break with the earlier tradition of virtue ethics, as “the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for acquisitive capitalism, Nietzscheanism, and the relativistic liberal emotivism we live with today” (p. 74). Lilla believes McIntyre’s assessment is overly simplistic, but he notes that it was “one of the most influential books of our time” (p. 74).

Isaiah Berlin reminds us that ideas have lives of their own, and like Frankenstein’s monster can take off in directions unforeseen by their originators (“Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism” in The Sense of Reality, 1996). There is not a direct path between McIntyre’s analysis and criticism of the liberal political order from the right; but the trend in intellectual history revealed in After Virtue seems now to have been hijacked by anxiety about society’s moral decline, criticism of “wokeism,” and economic populism now aimed at activist corporations. On the part of illiberals on the right there is now a new revolutionary willingness to run roughshod over the law and its procedural protections in pursuit of a more “virtuous” society, or even one that just confounds their enemies.

“Wokeism” brings us to Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke (2023), a defense of the Enlightenment from its rising critics on the left. Neiman writes as a philosopher who sees “a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress” (p. 2) as intrinsic to Enlightenment thought, and to left-wing political engagement. Yet these are the very principles threatened by woke intellectual trends. “It’s now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views supporting colonialism” (p. 38-39). The tribalism of identity politics is a two-edged sword, with a legacy of grievance that ultimately disempowers. In the face of wrongs perpetrated against women, blacks, or LGBT communities, “for those who believe that only tribal interests are genuine, calls for other people’s outrage in the face of such crimes make no sense” (p. 33).

Neiman faults Michel Foucault as the intellectual force who popularized the notion that everything is about power, which squeezes out not only the idea of justice but other things as well. “The insistence that power is the only driving force goes hand in hand with contempt for reason (p. 75). As the possibility of progress is abandoned, “one thing is predictable with absolute certainty: if we succumb to the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost” (p. 121).

Both Lilla and Neiman cite the crossover influence of Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist and member of the Nazi Party, who has now become influential in “the academic far left” (Lilla, p. xix). For Neiman, both Schmitt and Foucault reject “the idea of universal humanity and the distinction between power and justice,” sharing “a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress” (p. 80). Neiman shows how Schmitt’s conviction that politics is essentially oppositional, depending on a clear distinction between friend and enemy, has become an idea broadly shared by both right and left: hence the oppositional politics of our day. Schmitt “unmasked” the hypocrisy of the colonialist West in opposing Hitler; now Vladimir Putin uses Western interventions in other places to justify his war on Ukraine. If you believe, as Schmitt did, that world history is dominated by violence, the concepts of right and wrong tend to disappear. Or, as Neiman ironically observes, in this calculus two wrongs will make a right.

There are good reasons for Christians to be concerned about these illiberal challenges to our existing political order. First, the liberal order’s very lack of ambition ought to commend it to its Christian supporters. It is a framework, not a program, much less a panacea. Tony Judt writes that liberalism “is necessarily indeterminate. It is not about some sort of liberal project for society; it is about a society in which the messiness and openness of politics precludes the application of large-scale projects, however rational and ideal — especially if they are rational and ideal” (Past Imperfect, 1992, p. 313). In other words, there is danger in the grandiose political project: witness Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” or Stalin’s “Worker’s Paradise.”

St. Augustine’s recognition of the inherent limitations of justice in a commonwealth is in keeping with the nature of the West’s political order. “But true justice is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ … in that City of which the holy Scripture says, ‘Glorious things are said about you, City of God’ (The City of God, Bettenson trans., 2.21). Augustine’s diagnosis of the vaulting pride and sinful ambition that undergird the earthly city, manifest in every polity, may not find a cure in the liberal political order, but it might find some mitigation. “Thus pride is a perverted imitation of God. For pride hates a fellowship of equality under God, and seeks to impose its own dominion on fellow men, in place of God’s rule” (The City of God, 19.12). Humility and the forgiveness of sins, as Augustine identifies, are the way of salvation (City of God, 19.27): an enterprise that goes far beyond any merely earthly political exercise. Though a democratic polity is certainly capable of its imperial moments, the modesty of the liberal order, and its procedural focus on the rule of law, create windbreaks and speedbumps along the way.

Even more, the illiberal challenge constitutes both a theoretical and practical undermining of the earthly peace that St. Augustine valued for the sake of the heavenly city. If our polities and our politics are essentially oppositional, as Schmitt would have it, then we have gone a long way toward a state of constant conflict or even violence. His followers, on right and left, have advanced this program, struggling for the levers of power. Yet Augustine points to the pitfalls of the exercise of power. “Let mortals hold on to justice; power will be given them when they are immortal” (On the Trinity, Hill trans., 13.17). From Augustine’s perspective, even a people alienated from God seeks a peace of its own, even though far distant from the peace of the city of God. “It is important for us also that this people should possess this peace in this life, since so long as the two cities are intermingled, we also make use of the peace of Babylon — although the People of God is by faith set free from Babylon, so that in the meantime they are only pilgrims in the midst of her” (City of God, 19.26).

Christianity can mount a criticism of the liberal political order, especially when it abandons transcendence as an ultimate point of reference. As Oliver O’Donovan points out, “liberal society may deserve a reaction, because it is incapable of taking the spiritual capacities of its members seriously” (The Ways of Judgment, 2005, p. 77). Yet this illiberal moment in the West poses an undeniable danger of its own: not only to earthly peace, but to the humility and forgiveness that mark the Church’s authentic political stance.