Solidarity About Nothing

Democracy and Solidarity:
On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis
by james davison hunter
yale university, 504 pages, $40

For the last few decades, James Davison Hunter has eloquently chronicled the fracturing of America. When his Culture Wars appeared in 1991, it might have been possible to dismiss as Chicken Little-ism his thesis that America was being riven by two incommensurable worldviews. No more. And since then, as the conflict he identified has escalated to the point of undeniability, Hunter’s succeeding books have continued to circle around a fundamental challenge: that of realizing any vision of the good life in a pluralistic age.

His latest work, Democracy and Solidarity, again explores this theme, this time by investigating the puzzle of e pluribus unum. How has it been possible for Americans to maintain our solidarity and shared commitment to liberal democracy—“among the greatest achievements in human history”—despite deep disagreements? And what explains the erosion of that solidarity today? Hunter believes the answer lies not in partisan politics but in “cultural logics.” His hope is that by exposing how deep our cultural crisis goes, he will reveal how we might end it. In a way, Democracy and Solidarity does indeed accomplish its aim: The book unintentionally makes a strong case for why liberal democracy is not likely to figure in America’s fate, whatever that fate turns out to be. For Hunter’s proposal of renewed solidarity as a cure for our ills is not just insufficient, even on his own terms, but in conflict with his own defense of liberal democracy.

Much of Democracy and Solidarity is a study of the “working through” of “the contradictions of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment.” America was enlightened in its commitment to public discourse, universal principles of rationality, and liberal democracy. But qualifying those Enlightenment ideals were Americans’ Protestant fervor, sense of exceptionalism, and awareness of providence’s guiding hand in the New World. Hence America’s contradictions: on the one hand, a unique, particular national character; on the other hand, a promise of universality and equivalence among all peoples.

American history, for Hunter, is a great endeavor to resolve the contradictions that arise from these opposing universalist and particularist tendencies, and from the effort to achieve, out of many, a one. It is through our common modes of deliberation that Americans have continually interrogated and expanded our bounds of solidarity. By examining that ongoing deliberation, Hunter aims to show that what endangers liberal democracy is not that “we are polarized”—that we disagree, even ferociously, about this or that matter—but that “we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us.”

Democracy and Solidarity surveys a range of thinkers, from the revolutionary period through the present, who show how debates about America have necessarily been debates about who belonged, and who didn’t: The “puzzle of democracy is determining how expansive those boundaries of difference and inclusion should be.” Hunter pairs these thinkers in disagreements, studying both the content—their versions of American inclusion and exclusion—and the form, the manner in which they conducted their discussions. We get, among others, Jefferson and Adams; Douglass and Taney; Dewey and Niebuhr; Rorty and Neuhaus; and as exemplars of today’s illiberal turn, law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule.

These profiles usefully complement the argument of Culture Wars. There, Hunter painted with a broad brush, depicting movements and coalitions; here, he fills in the fine detail of individuals. At the highest level, the story is the same: America gradually brought more people into its fold, but doing so diluted its cultural particularity and thus undermined the very basis of that expanded solidarity. Welcoming Catholics and Jews—and later Muslims, atheists, and others—meant that Protestantism could no longer be the glue that held Americans together. Accommodating former slaves and their descendants, Native Americans, and immigrants from beyond Western Europe prevented race or cultural heritage from serving as common ground. And greater inclusivity toward women and sexual minorities required the “decentering,” as today’s activists would put it, of older accounts of the family as the basis of society. Religion, ethnicity, gender—America’s great achievement has been the slow labor of ensuring that none of these can be a barrier to solidarity.

The problem today, as Hunter shows, is that Americans share virtually no cultural assumptions and hold fundamentally different conceptions of the good life. How then can we continue to live together in peace? We need some foundation on which to renew our solidarity despite our pluralism. But a meddlesome question arises, which Hunter asks on the first page: “solidarity in terms of what?” Shared prosperity? That’s the basis for a commercial enterprise, not a democratic republic. But what other conception of social well-being do we share?

This is the question of Hunter’s corpus, which has continually confronted the necessity and impossibility of agreement in the modern world. Science and the Good, for example, refuted the dream that science would provide an Archimedean point by which to adjudicate moral conflict. The Death of Character exposed the foolishness of replacing a moral education in right and wrong with a therapeutic education in values. As Democracy and Solidarity is a self-proclaimed “bookend” to Culture Wars, one might expect to find in it Hunter’s deepest thoughts on how to reconcile modernity’s pluralism and flux with man’s need for community and solidity. Instead, Hunter not only proposes a solution that can’t work, but identifies the very reasons why it cannot.

Hunter gestures toward a new basis for solidarity in the form of some expansive communal endeavor: a “paradigm shift within liberal democracy rooted in an ethical vision for the re-formation of public life”; “an ideal that imagine[s] the more capacious possibilities of human flourishing”; a vision that “reframes the story of America towards what it could yet be”; “a common project, a project fueled by the hope of betterment”; “an imaginative and constructive vision for the future of the nation as a whole.”

So far, so vague. But Hunter then suggests that today’s pluralism would actually make this renewed solidarity more robust than the solidarity of the past. “Unlike the humanism of the mid-twentieth century, the universal affirmation of human persons would not be a flat, generic and thus contentless humanism incapable of seeing, much less affirming, difference,” for today we can draw from a greater suite of “humanistic traditions—classical, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, secular, Native American, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Africanist.” All share a “common affirmation of human frailty, need, proneness to error, and suffering,” and ask “universal questions . . . about the nature and purposes of life.” Even better, they give the same answers, each producing “an unqualified affirmation of the supreme and equal dignity and value of all human beings.”

This will hardly do. A society, for it to be a society exhibiting solidarity, and not a mere mass of individuals, needs something stronger than airy platitudes—whether more substantive propositions, or the thicker stuff of a common heritage, language, and so on. But none of these phrases really means anything. To get every religion and philosophy in agreement and thereby make them amenable to the accomplishment of e pluribus unum, Hunter must drain them of all the particularity that makes solidarity possible, reducing each to the same humanitarian glop. Such kumbaya-ism has provided a rationale for erecting an imagined “global village,” but it will not serve as the unifying center of any actually existing nation. Indeed, if it could unify a nation’s disparate peoples, it’s hard to see how our culture wars could have arisen in the first place.

What is so puzzling about Democracy and Solidarity is that Hunter knows his solution won’t work. His historical discussions of the “boundary work” of distinguishing “us” from “them” show the futility of any all-encompassing solidarity. “Every civilization, every society, every social group—without exception—draws boundaries”; “diversity always has limits or boundaries that demarcate the lines of inclusion and exclusion.” The Death of Character even identified a “paradox of inclusion”: “particularity is inherently exclusive. . . . In our quest to be inclusive and tolerant of particularity, we naturally undermine it” (all emphases in original). In that volume, Hunter anticipates the pursuit of community through banality, lamenting, “Where a consensus remains in our moral culture, it does so only in terms of the shallowest of platitudes.” As Hunter knows, every polity must be about something and therefore not about other things. The corollary is that no terms ample enough to include everyone could be particular or substantive enough to generate solidarity.

Why does Hunter propose in Democracy and Solidarity a basis for solidarity that he elsewhere has proven insufficient? I do not think he is guilty of mere shoddy reasoning. Rather, Hunter has fallen victim to a deep contradiction within the liberalism he seeks to revive: namely, that liberalism cannot draw boundaries or recognize difference without violating its own homogenizing principles of tolerance and universality. In this way, liberalism becomes an enemy of solidarity, denouncing boundaries and the limits of particularity—always barriers to an ever-fuller inclusion—in pursuit of universality.

The historical portions of Democracy and Solidarity—especially its praise of John Dewey, who undertook “herculean efforts to work through the hybrid-Enlightenment philosophically” and “viewed liberal democracy as a way of life”—reveal that Hunter’s is a progressive vision of America. In his account, the drama of our history is the process of the nation’s “slowly—very slowly—becoming more inclusive.” But to stay true to this vision, Hunter cannot accept the very borders that he recognizes make genuine solidarity possible.

Hunter’s dilemma at the level of the nation resembles George Costanza’s dilemma in one episode of Seinfeld. George, disturbed by a quirk of his girlfriend, realizes that for their relationship to survive, it will need to be “about something!” All they have in common, though, is their enjoyment of chewing gum. According to George, this is enough; their relationship will rest on the low but solid ground of a common appreciation of gum: “That’s what we’re about! . . . We love gum.” (The relationship does not last.)

I fear that Hunter offers a “Costanza liberalism”: Americans might not agree on much, but hey, we all like gum. This is the dilemma of liberal democracy understood as ever greater inclusion. Solidarity must be about something, and therefore exclusive; but liberalism, if it is to be inclusive, cannot be about anything. Any potential basis of unity that is consequential enough to galvanize loyalty—and to shun disloyalty—will violate the inclusivity that Hunter makes essential to liberalism.

This is problem enough for Hunter’s vision of solidarity. But further complicating matters, it is also in tension with his own defense of liberal democracy. Here, Hunter drops the humanitarian liberalism of solidarity and calls instead for a bloodless fealty to rules—a shared commitment to our “procedural Republic.” In this telling, liberal democracy is not an idealistic aspiration to expand the circle of inclusion. Rather, it is a modest enterprise, a means of lowering the stakes of political life to prevent violent conflict. Hunter put it simply in a 2021 interview, repeating almost verbatim a claim from Science and the Good: “Democracy, in my view, is an agreement that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead we’ll talk through those differences.” Liberal democracy is a Mexican standoff of sorts, in which we all foresee the chaos that would result from our seeking to impose our beliefs upon others, and therefore agree to leave each other alone. In a more recent interview, Hunter put even more starkly the stakes of saving liberal democracy, as a choice of either “Jefferson or Nietzsche”—peaceful, rational deliberation, or the ceaseless will to power.

But such an account of liberal democracy, whatever its merits, is quite untethered from any sense of solidarity. Solidarity is precisely what liberal democracy does not need; we consent to liberalism, not because of common ideals or love for our fellow man, but out of individual self-interest—we don’t want to be killed. So why all that talk about solidarity? Hunter offers a choice between Jefferson and Nietzsche, but he vacillates in his own choice between Dewey’s liberalism of high ideals and what Judith Shklar called the “liberalism of fear,” a way of forestalling grave evils such as war and tyranny. Perhaps it is because Hunter exposes the weaknesses of the former that he elsewhere proposes the latter.

In any case, a choice must be made between the two. Hunter’s own arguments suggest that we could accept this liberalism-as-ceasefire only if we rejected any conception of American solidarity, including the ever more copious solidarity marking Hunter’s own progressive vision of American history. As he notes, for much of its history, America “was defined by a secular and biblical millennialism that . . . was united in its understanding of America as exceptional. . . . Millennialism signified that American history had meaning.” But a liberal procedural republic would amount to a regime-sanctioned insistence that American history has no meaning. It would declare that any pursuit of one’s conception of the good, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1630 to the present, has been illicit, inviting anarchy or authoritarianism. All that is permitted is endless discussions whose resolution is forbidden. “We’ll talk through those differences,” but we may not go further and conclude that one side is right, and the other wrong. Without such a conclusion—without some final recognition that this, and not that, is our source of meaning and the rock of our community—no solidarity is possible.

Democracy and Solidarity’s title therefore appears to be a misnomer. We can have, at most, liberal democracy or solidarity—a solidarity that is necessarily exclusive, and to that extent illiberal; or a solidarity-lite democracy that survives only because of its subjects’ continual fear of violent death. Perhaps this very contradiction vindicates the book’s claim that the American hybrid-Enlightenment has always been beset by contradiction. If our history is one big muddling through of our contradictions, how could someone seeking to preserve that perpetual counterpoise not contradict himself in turn?

But this vindication raises a disturbing possibility, which I do not think Hunter would wish to accept: that for all his appreciation of the continual working through of the country’s contradictions, the mess that America finds herself in today is itself a part of that working through. The failure of all the nation’s major institutions, the collapsing belief in core tenets of the American creed, the threat of violence between factions committed to different forms of life—aren’t those just what we should expect if we are approaching the final disentangling of America’s fundamental irreconcilabilities? As it happens, this is precisely what today’s most aggressive critics of liberal democracy contend: that America was doomed from the start because it was committed to ideas that could never sustain themselves. In treating America’s political crisis as the realization of long-standing but confused principles, Hunter might have more in common with liberalism’s opponents than he thinks. Some contradictions are better left unresolved.

Should we then conclude that the civil war of Hunter’s nightmares is inevitable? By no means. One side might yet win out without war; or society’s basic functioning may just continue to deteriorate, as ever more energy is devoted to an unwinnable kulturkampf. But of this we can be confident: Whatever the future holds for America, the liberalism of Hunter’s dreams, marked by a diluted, multicultural ecumenism and the universal celebration of our democratic norms, is not likely to play a part in it.

Robert Bellafiore is director of research at the Foundation for American Innovation.

Image by John Lewis Krimmel, public domain. Image cropped.