E-Pluribus | August 14, 2024
Land of the free, home of the religious; liberalism won't save itself; and Democrats should learn to take their media medicine.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jon Gabriel: Keeping the Faith
Why should we be tied the old-fashioned ideas of a bunch of slave-holding white men from two centuries ago? is a common refrain today, and not just in a political context. At Discourse Magazine, Jon Gabriel argues that trying to divorce God and religion from present-day American society and politics is to ignore a large part of what has made this great experiment so successful, politically and otherwise.
The last half-century of hypersecularism is an oddity in American history. Our first public education law was created by the Massachusetts Bay Colony to ensure children could read the scriptures. Even famed atheist Richard Dawkins declared “a native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.”
Yet the antireligious panic boils over when even the slightest mention of faith enters the public square. Religion, or at least personal virtue, is as essential to the civil order as the Constitution itself—at least according to those who wrote it.
As John Adams wrote in 1798, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” A less-quoted line in that letter states, “we have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.”
For the past several decades, America has scrubbed every last indication of spiritual life from the public square. It has been replaced with a weird secular issue du jour based on the latest moral panic. One year it’s #MeToo, the next climate change, then Black Lives Matter, all under a rainbow flag with more stripes added all the time.
Since our “elite” culture views faith traditions as unseemly, government tries to maintain order by adding thousands of laws and tens of thousands of regulations. Browsing the headlines shows that doesn’t work—and never has. As Cicero wrote of ancient Rome, “the more laws a society has, the less justice.” A century later, the great Roman historian Tacitus rephrased it as, “the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Allowing public affirmations of faith is a far cry from an establishment of religion.
[. . .]
[The founders] knew America’s success depended on the virtue of our people, not the virtue of our legislation. A good people courageously defends the rights endowed by their Creator, by ballot box or by defending our shores. But a crass citizenry would cede those rights for a fleeting sense of security. As Princeton’s Robert George explains, “people lacking in virtue could be counted on to trade liberty for protection, for financial or personal security, for comfort ... for having their problems solved quickly. And there will always be people occupying or standing for public office who will be happy to offer the deal.”
Since the framers knew man was selfish and imperfect, they found it ludicrous to entrust government with instilling virtue, let alone faith. They reserved that job for the individual, the family, the church—and yes, even educational institutions.
Read the whole thing.
Alexandre Lefebvre: Liberal Soulcraft
While some are rather sanguine about liberalism’s prognosis, Alexandre Lefebvre isn’t so sure. In an excerpt from his new book at Persuasion, Lefebvre calls for all-hands-on-deck urgency in preserving the ideas and principles that gave rise to prosperity and freedom in the West.
Governance in many liberal democracies is mired in dysfunction, inequality continues its relentless march, environmental catastrophe is the new normal, mass migration destabilizes international politics, and ideological polarization generates alternative epistemic realities. With respect to my own argument, to say that liberalism is on its way out would mean that a critical mass of citizens in liberal democracies no longer believe in it as a fair system of cooperation. And frankly, that might seem like an accurate reading of the landscape. The far left speaks as if it had lost faith that liberalism, in anything resembling its present form, can be rehabilitated. Captured by capitalism (and for some critics, racism and patriarchy too), utopian possibilities no longer seem to inhere in it. The far right launches a frontal attack, denying that society should be understood in terms of fair cooperation in the first place. Populist and authoritarian rhetoric is defined by a politics of suspicion, and its main message is that liberal elites are busy giving our stuff to them while taking away from me and mine. When you see the world like that, pretending that so-called liberal societies are even trying to be fair systems of cooperation is like bringing a picnic basket to a global and intergenerational knife fight.
But let’s take a page from Tocqueville. His approach is to always look at the mores of a society—moeurs in French, a word that spans the values, customs, embodied practices, and ways of living proper to a society. A glance, expectation, courtesy, or flash of anger is where the regime and its future (or lack thereof) lies. My claim is that liberalism is the water of our times: Not only does it saturate the public and background culture, but it has percolated down to the bedrock of mores—which is to say, that in idea and emotion, ambition and deed, so many of us are liberals through and through.
And here’s the thing about mores: they have a duration all of their own. Anchored as they are in one’s self-conception and routines, they can be stubborn and resilient. Where, then, do we find ourselves? Yes, the future of liberalism can look bleak. For the privileged behind their computer screens, dire newspaper headlines and the roiling anger of Twitter do not augur well. And for less fortunate citizens, depredation and humiliation seem like features rather than bugs of the system. But to take up Tocqueville’s point of view and judge the present by its mores, next time you’re out shopping, try an experiment: cut someone off in line and see what happens. Or if that seems too risky, ask yourself the following set of questions: How would you feel if someone more powerful told you to keep quiet? How about if they told a stranger the same? How much schlock on Netflix (comedy, action, romance, or drama—it doesn’t matter) do you consume about people finding their true path against all odds? How would you react if you learned your kid is a bully at school? When you get a parking ticket (and can afford it), do you think to yourself, “Oh well, it’s going to pay for something”? Are you OK, honestly, if lower-income housing were to be built in your neighborhood? If your collected answers to the above questions are, roughly speaking, “angry,” “still angry,” “too much,” “with alarm and shame,” “I guess,” and “yes,” it should tell you something about yourself. Liberalism has a hold on you.
Read it all.
James Freeman: Will Friendly Media Doom Democrats?
No pain, no gain. Gold is purified by fire. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Most at least pay lip service to these aphorisms, but living them out is more challenging. At The Wall Street Journal, James Freeman suggests the Harris campaign should take these principles to heart rather than be content with kid-glove treatment from an accommodating media.
This column’s most celebrated alumnus authored the Taranto Principle, which holds that “the liberal media’s uncritical coverage often disserves liberal politicians by making them complacent, thus encouraging bad or foolish behavior.” This helps to explain how the Biden re-election campaign was able to exist for as long as it did. It may also explain why the Harris campaign has been opting out of the unscripted discussion with the public and the press that voters typically expect. More ominously, a biased and broken media shares the blame for the United States continuing to run the risk of a president serving despite cognitive challenges.
[. . .]
If journalists had done their jobs ages ago when Biden started showing obvious signs of being on the decline, and had done even a modicum of investigative reporting, we could have had a strong primary process. Journalists not doing journalism on dems they like is bad for dems!
The fact that we just went through that with Biden — a near disaster caused by a lack of journalistic scrutiny — and now those same people who freaked out over Biden age questions are also freaking out when Harris is subject to scrutiny is maddening. No lessons learned.
Pushing Harris to articulate a clear policy agenda is *good* for Harris. Hard journalism can be healthy. If you think Harris would be a weaker candidate if she outlined her policies, that suggests you don’t think very highly of her! I personally think she could have good ones!
Time will tell whether Ms. Harris will subject herself to a traditional vetting and whether media outlets will choose to perform their journalistic duty during this presidential campaign.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Monday’s Around Twitter (X) included an item on the European Union’s warning to Elon Musk regarding “amplification of harmful content” in his then-upcoming Trump interview. Here, Jordi Calvet of The Future of Free Speech breaks down the problem with this:
Adam Thierer suggests the Biden administration might be passing up a golden opportunity:
And finally, speaking of government overreach, last week the UK government took it upon itself to ominously warn citizens to “think before you post.” Here’s Alan Cole’s pithy response:
Of all the big issues Facing the USA and the West in the November election, and there are many, the one that preoccupies me most is the attitude of American people towards the state of Israel and the Arab world that is trying to choke it to death. Does the USA intend to continue protecting Israel and maintaining the world order or will it, like the UK, cower in the face of Muslim anger and entitlement and simultaneously abandon its diplomatic effort in the Middle East and pander to Islamist militants (including some naive US born students) and their anti-Semitic demands on American soil.
This is the issue on which Democrats and Harris are most vulnerable. At this moment in time Trump is the ONLY western leader who has the courage to resist Islam. All the others are sleepwalking towards obliteration. The mind virus has captured them.
Infinite credit to Douglas Murray for his prescience on this subject.