Global Culture Wars
In February, the Kremlin announced that Russia is tighteningits ban on same-sex couples adopting Russian children. A new law prohibitssingle people in countries that allow same-sex marriage from adopting childrenfrom Russia, one of the world’s largest sources of children for adoption.(Adoptions by Americans were banned early in 2013 for different reasons.) Thisfollows a pattern. Last year, Putin signed a law prohibiting “propagandapromoting non-traditional sexual relations” that can be seen by minors. Justbefore the Winter Olympics in Sochi, he allowed that gays and lesbians couldattend but urged them to “leave the children in peace.” At present, a bill isbefore the Russian parliament that would ban people in “non-traditional” relationshipsfrom contracting with surrogate mothers.
Commentators ascribe this moralism to domestic Russianpolitics, arguing that Putin is shoring up his conservative base of support. Nodoubt that’s true, but that’s not the whole story. Putin is thinkinginternationally as well, positioning Russia to lead an anti-Western coalitionalong moral as well as geopolitical lines. In a speech last December, hepledged to defend “family values” and reject moral relativism, pointedlyobserving that this message appeals to “more and more people across the worldwho support our position.”
The message resonates. When it comes to culture, America andWestern NGOs are global aggressors. For a long time, we’ve been promotingcontraception and abortion throughout the world. More recently, we’ve promotedgay rights as well. The U.S. Department of State’s Global Equality Fund,dedicated to advancing LGBT rights, is one among many initiatives, somegovernment sponsored, others carried forward by international organizations. Inthese and in other ways, progressives in the West are carrying the war ontraditional culture to the rest of the world. Reproductive rights, gayrights—they’re the new White Man’s Burden.
The Catholic Church has experienced the cultural aggressionof Western progressives. A recent report from the United Nations Committee onthe Rights of the Child chides the Vatican for failing to adopt “acomprehensive child-rights based approach,” which of course means adopting theusual progressive views about gender and sexual morality. Not only does thecommittee’s report require excluding the “discriminatory expression ‘illegitimatechildren’” from canon law, it also expresses concern “about the Holy See’spast statements and declarations on homosexuality which contribute to thesocial stigmatization of and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, andtransgender adolescents and children raised by same sex couples.”
This sort of browbeating goes on throughout the world,backed up with the carrot of funds for special projects or the stick ofsanctions, including withdrawal of foreign aid. For example, in 2011, DavidCameron pledged to cut foreign aid to countries deemed unfriendly tohomosexuals.
This new imperialism, like the old imperialism, is bound tocreate ill will. In response to Cameron’s threat, a Ugandan official rejectedthe “bullying mentality” and said he was “tired of these lectures” that treatUgandans as “children.” Actions have followed. The Ugandan legislature passeddraconian antihomosexual legislation. Recently, Nigerian president GoodluckJonathan signed a law criminalizing homosexuality. Whatever one thinks of themorality or wisdom of these laws, they’re not coming forward in a vacuum. Theyrepresent calculated counter-responses to Western pressure. They win praisefrom those in Africa who see the West as representing unalloyed libertinism.The same is true in the Middle East and elsewhere.
And who can blame them? In early February, U.S. ambassadorto the United Nations Samantha Power joined forces with two members of the rockband Pussy Riot to discuss “disturbing trends” in Russia. In 2008, the bandparticipated in a staged orgy designed to mock then-presidential candidateDmitry Medvedev’s call for Russian women to have more children. In 2012, in Moscow’sCathedral of Christ the Savior, the band engaged in an uninvited protestperformance for which they were arrested and eventually sent to jail.
In itself, the episode at the U.N. was unexceptional. Poweris the sort of person who likes to compliment herself for being a progressiveamong progressives. But an astute foreign observer notes the context. Americanforeign policy is at present trying to domesticate Iran and salvage democracyin Ukraine, neither of which is possible without Russian cooperation. Thus, themessage is clear: When it comes to American foreign policy, our culturalimperialism takes precedence over our geopolitical goals. Power is so confidentin the triumphant rectitude of her moral sentiments that she doesn’t thinktwice about the diplomatic costs of promoting the cause of Pussy Riot.
Were I a political leader in Iran, Pakistan, Kenya, or anyother country worried about the ways in which rapid economic developmentdissolves traditional societies, I’d read this episode as yet another sign ofthe West’s declaration of cultural war. And I’d be on the lookout for a leaderof global resistance.
Recently, Cristina Kirchner hosted Fidel Castro, which manyAmericans misread as indicating approval of his failed economic policies inCuba. Castro is a hero throughout Latin America—welcome in nearly everypresidential palace—not because of his communism but because for more than halfa century he’s given the finger to the United States, something Argentines andBrazilians and Peruvians and others relish because they resent the ways they’vebeen steamrolled by American culture and American power.
Some of that resentment is inevitable, given our nationalinterests and our supereminence. When you’re really big, you cast a largeshadow. But some of the anti-Americanism is a function of our diplomaticarrogance, our smugness, and our surpassingly ignorant belief that deep downeverybody wants to be an American. To a great extent, we’ve created Castro. Ifhe didn’t exist, somebody else would have filled the anti-American role inLatin America.
As people like Samantha Power export our culture wars, Iforesee us doing the same, this time in the large part of the world concernedwith sustaining aspects of traditional religion and morality. For every LGBTmove we make, Putin makes a countermove, positioning himself as the globalleader of traditional values over and against the moral nihilism that, sadly,is becoming the American brand. The goal of true patriots should be to deprive Putinof this easy anti-Americanism by restoring the moral dimension of our vision offreedom.
George Marsden on 1950s Liberalism
After World War II, a consensus about truth gave way to aconsensus about the importance of consensus. The result: a liberal politicswithout principle that required an arbitrary (because without principle) andsometimes ruthless suppression of dissent—which in turn encouraged a committedand sometimes fierce politics of conviction. Thus the culture wars of recentdecades. That’s the thesis of George Marsden’s readable and insightful historyof American liberalism, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1949 book, The Vital Center: ThePolitics of Freedom, was emblematic of the new consensus liberalism.Capitalism and technology, he argued, lever modern man out of traditional formsof social solidarity. The resulting homelessness makes us vulnerable tocollectivist ideologies such as communism and fascism. He proposed a politics ofmediation between the new freedoms of modernity and the enduring human need forsolidarity. It would be liberal, because committed to constitutional freedoms,and at the same time “social,” because committed to using state power to managecapitalism and to direct its creative power toward the common good. With thiscombination, Schlesinger promised to “restore the balance between individualand community.”
What principles were to guide this restoration of balance?None, as it turns out. Schlesinger and others thought America had entered a newphase of politics and culture. In the past, men fought over religiousconvictions and moral principles. Traditional public life was riven by apolitics of conviction that in the twentieth century took rigid ideologicalforms. Schlesinger and others thought providence had been kind to America,however. We were spared the worse excesses of ideological conflict. Moreover,they believed we were entering a new social and cultural phase, one in whichpragmatism and empiricism, not principles, were coming to the fore.
The title of Daniel Bell’s collection of essays, publishedin 1962, captures this vision perfectly: The End of Ideology: On theExhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. By his reckoning, sensible,responsible people of the sort who were running the country had discardedpolitical ideologies, committing themselves to rational, nonideologicaladjustments of the status quo. It was an entirely plausible supposition at thetime. As Marsden points out, “science” was a hallelujah word in the 1950s, usedto sell cars, cigarettes, and social policies. Urban planning and economicmanagement were scientific, and therefore transcended ideology. Although theterm had yet to be invented, the liberalism of the 1950s envisioned governanceby technocrats, which meant reasonable people like themselves who could see thelarger picture and rise above petty partisan interests.
Science also provided a purportedly objective definition ofhuman flourishing. Marsden catalogues the many “scientific” experts cited byBetty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique: Eric Fromm, David Riesman,Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Rollo May, and others. From them she distilled asupposed truth about human nature, which is our need “to grow.” It is “man’s willto be all that is in him to be.”
Again, as was the case in Schlesinger’s restoration ofbalance, there are no clear principles or criteria. Just what we’re to grow towardremains vague, leading to the strange combination of urgent moralism andopen-ended gestures. This is true not just for Friedan but also for the socialcritics and psychologists she cites. In a great deal of the influentialliterature of the 1950s, criticism of conformism and consumerism had hardedges, but the alternatives tended toward platitudes. We’re to grow towardgreater meaning, toward autonomy and psychological freedom, toward authenticityand integral identity.
One would think that politics without principles and avision of personal growth without limiting criteria would be open andcapacious. Of course, consensus liberals complimented themselves for havingthose qualities (and some actually did). But on the whole, the culture ofconsensus liberalism punished dissent: A higher intolerance followed from itstranscendence of conviction. Pragmatism in politics requires denyingprincipled public arguments and policies. Authenticity in personal life means rejectingthe final say of traditional moral norms over our personal decisions about howto “be all I can be.” In a word: The end of ideology must be policed.
Thus the postwar liberal commitment to consensus gave riseto a new kind of intolerance that in later decades took the form of politicalcorrectness. In the old politics and culture of conviction, people used to bewrong and had to be corrected. Now they are deemed ideological, dogmatic,unscientific, inauthentic, judgmental—all of which is to say, unprogressive.These sorts of people should not be permitted to run the country!
To draw out the political correctness latent in 1950sliberalism, Marsden focuses on a telling episode. In 1955, Walter Lippmannpublished Essays in the Public Philosophy. It was conceived during thedark days just before the outbreak of World War II, when Lippmann feared forthe future of the West’s “traditions of civility.” By his reading of history,these traditions—respect for private property, free speech, and constitutionalgovernment—had been advanced and defended by an often tacit, never fullyelaborated, but influential and widely endorsed public philosophy based on naturallaw. It’s this public philosophy that Lippmann wanted to restore.
Lippmann was a journalist, not a philosopher, and Essaysin the Public Philosophy is more exhortation than analysis. But anyone whohas read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue will recognize the gist ofLippmann’s argument. The “public interest”—a term much favored by postwarconsensus liberals—is a moral concept. We can’t know what’s best for the commongood unless we have a measure, which requires principles of justice and aconcept of human flourishing. Pragmatism can take us only so far. We can’tsustain a genuinely liberal society with a consensus about the importance ofconsensus. We need convictions about moral truth.
Consensus liberals attacked Lippmann. The New Republicdescribed the book as that of a “badly frightened man.” Archibald MacLeishaccused him of tacitly supporting McCarthyism. Although none of the reviewerssaid so, the root of their objections concerned moral truth. Lippmann thoughtit essential. They implicitly regarded it as a threat: a threat to governanceby consensus, a threat to the calm application of scientific principles tosocial problems, and most of all a threat to human freedom and authenticity.We’re to be true to ourselves, not true to truth.
By Marsden’s reading, the 1960s should be understood as areaction against the combination of unprincipled mushiness and clubbyexclusivity that characterized consensus liberalism. The supposed end ofideology brought its opposite: a passionate decade of politics characterized byvarious and sometimes contradictory convictions. First came a rebellion on theright that ranged from William F. Buckley to the John Birch Society andculminated in the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Then came the SDS, theNew Left, the antiwar movement, the Black Panthers, and street demonstrationsoutside the Democratic convention in 1968.
And not just the 1960s, but more recent decades as well.Marsden interprets the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s as areaction against the moral relativism implicit in consensus liberalism. In his1970 book, Dare to Discipline, James Dobson put forward a view ofprincipled parenting, as it were, and he did so in self-conscious opposition tothe open-ended, flexible, pragmatic liberal style. Francis Schaeffer made thepolitical dimension explicit. In A Christian Manifesto, published in1981, he issued a rallying call for Christians to fight against relativisticsecular humanism and restore America as a Christian nation.
Little has changed. I remember futile arguments I had as anundergraduate about racial diversity and affirmative action. For the sake ofequality, we were to give preferences on the basis of race. Okay, I’d ask, howmuch preference? How long? How would we know when we had a truly “diverse”student body? No answers were forthcoming, or rather lots of answers were, somecontradictory. Beneath, behind, and above these discussions was the convictionthat, justifiable or not, diversity and affirmative action were necessities.Progressive policies had to move forward one way or another, and we could andshould trust the well-meaning liberals in positions of responsibility to makegood, fair judgments—even though nobody could define what “fair” meant in thesecircumstances. Moreover, dissent was severely punished. Just as Lippmann hadbeen accused of McCarthyism, to oppose affirmative action on any grounds inthose days was to risk being labeled a racist.
Today some of the issues are different, but the sameliberalism endures as a mushy but ruthlessly enforced consensus. Why same-sexmarriage but not polygamy? Why a capacious commitment to free speech thatpermits pornography and at the same time endorses punitive speech codes thattreat the N-word as cause for firing someone? How can we say that women aren’tdifferent from men but at the same time need empowerment? Why heap shame onsmokers but remain scrupulously nonjudgmental about sex? Most liberals can’tanswer these questions, but that doesn’t alter their infuriating confidencethat their sensibilities are meet and right.
Pluralism and Conviction
Marsden ends The Twilight of the American Enlightenmentwith reflections on the dead end to which we have come. Consensus liberalismsuffers from a fatal dishonesty. Because it claims to serve the common good andat the same time to sustain authenticity with exemplary nonjudgmentalism,liberalism cannot recognize itself as merely one view among others. It must seeitself as transcending the worldviews competing for control over Americansociety (and, increasingly, over world culture). It is this conceit thatsupports the tyrannies of liberalism, which range from full-blown politicalcorrectness and the politics of denunciation (“opposition to same-sex marriageis bigotry”) to various forms of social exclusion of the kind so blatantlyexpressed by Richard Rorty (“that’s not the way we talk about things”).Thus, higher education doesn’t discriminate against conservatives; the hiringcommittees are merely trying to avoid hiring the bad and stupid people. Thus,NGOs aren’t imposing ideological views of gender, family, and sex; they’redefending “human rights.”
Yet the counter-politics of conviction hasn’t worked either.Francis Schaeffer’s followers haven’t succeeded in “taking back” their country.The politics of conviction runs up against the fact that so many people resistconversion. Intensity punches holes in consensus liberalism: Truth matters! Butit hasn’t been able to govern our growing pluralism, because wheninsufficiently reflective (I almost wrote “jesuitical”), the politics ofconviction tends to view pluralism itself as illicit. And so here we seem tobe: stuck with a self-deceived secular liberalism, which insists that ittranscends the pluralism it claims to manage, and with a religious right oftentacitly, and sometimes explicitly, hostile to pluralism.
Marsden proposes an alternative: a confessional orprincipled pluralism. The idea comes from Abraham Kuyper, the influentialnineteenth-century Dutch theologian and politician who brought peace to aculture war in Holland among Protestants, Catholics, and social democrats. WhatKuyper calls “common grace” (something analogous to natural law) provides thebasis for a general but relatively thin consensus. Meanwhile, the particularconfessional commitments of different communities within the nation are givenlatitude and resources to shape their own churches, educational institutions,social-service agencies, media, and so forth. He put this vision of two-tieredpublic life—a proper demand for conformity with respect to a few things, andspheres of influence of confessional authority over the rest—into effectthrough something called “pillarization,” which meant a limited nationalgovernment that allowed for significant communal control of public life withinthe discrete social groups.
To some degree, “pillarization” might work to mitigate ourculture wars. As Ashley Berner has pointed out (“The Case for EducationalPluralism,” December 2012), many European countries and Canada encourageprincipled pluralism in education, providing state funds to schools run by Jewsas Jewish schools, by Catholics as Catholic schools, and so forth. Ourconstitutional regime works against such arrangements. Nevertheless, legislationallowing tax credits for scholarship donations specifically targeted toreligious (and other) private schools has been approved by the courts. Ifwidely implemented, it could stimulate the development of a more robustconfessional “pillar” in education.
I’m not sanguine about much beyond educational pluralism,however. As Marsden points out, our national myth is one of individualism, notcollective identities. This leads to the paradox of modern democratic society:The more individualistic our culture, the more powerful and all-pervasivegovernment becomes. We want a very strong and robust state to guarantee ourfreedoms, which is why our political system grudgingly tolerates integralcommunities such as Hasidic Jews and the Amish rather than empowering them, asKuyper’s approach would.
Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, present-day liberalsare very unlikely to convert to principled pluralism. Doing so would requirethem to admit that theirs is a worldview on a par with those of devout Catholics,ardent Protestants, and observant Jews. That’s a galling proposition forconsensus liberals, and it’s not something someone like Penn president AmyGutmann is likely to affirm. The consensus of consensus liberalism is theconsensus of the powerful, and so it’s essential that liberalism should rule.That’s why it so loudly announces itself as the arbiter and manager ofpluralism without ever allowing itself to be a constituent. Unlike Christianityor Judaism (or, for that matter, Platonism or Epicureanism), consensusliberalism can’t exist as a self-conscious minority, which is what Marsden’sidea of principled pluralism requires.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, as forconsensus liberals, the secular state (along with the university) is theirchurch. They bitterly resent the inexplicable refusal of American voters togive them full control over elected office. This frustration reinforces theirdetermined refusal to allow their sacred sanctuaries (the public schools, thecourts, government bureaucracies) to be defiled. Put in Kuyper’s terms, theycannot distinguish between common grace and special grace. As liberal theoristsfrom Locke through Rousseau and Rawls make explicit, liberals see themselves asachieving, for the first time in human history, the natural, universal outlookthat all would acknowledge if they had but eyes to see. For this reason,liberal commitments are mandatory and universal. Which is why we’re not goingto get principled pluralism until we get rid of consensus liberalism. Whichisn’t going to happen any time soon.
Whither Catholicism?
Patrick Deneen thinks the media have it all wrong. Theyimagine the Church divided between liberals and conservatives. However,“liberal Catholicism, while well-represented in elite circles of the DemocraticParty, qua Catholicism is finished.” The “real battle” is taking placeamong orthodox Catholics.
On the one side are neoconservative Catholics like GeorgeWeigel, “who has inherited the mantle from Richard John Neuhaus,” as well as MichaelNovak, Robert George, Hadley Arkes, Robert Royal, and others. They hold theview that “there is no fundamental contradiction between liberal democracy andCatholicism.” As a result, the neoconservative Catholics tend to be affirmativeof both capitalism and American power.
Against them are ranged the “radical” Catholics such asDavid L. Schindler, William Cavanaugh, and Deneen himself. They hold that thefounding philosophy of our nation is antithetical to Catholic social teaching,because it assumes “that human beings are essentially separate, sovereignselves.” This view “is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of marketcapitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary ofthe basic premises of liberal democracy.”
I agree that liberal Catholicism is a spent force, withlittle to contribute to the future of American Catholicism. But Deneen does notpersuade me that neoconservative Catholics need be at odds with “radical”Catholics. Yes, John Locke’s theory of government, one very influential in theAmerican founding, is at odds with Catholic teaching about man, society, andthe common good. But we do not live theoretical lives. Our political vocationsare lived out in the great confusions of historical reality, which is resistantto categorization by theory. That’s what John Courtney Murray meant when hesaid that the founders “built better than they knew.” So it’s entirelyconsistent for me to criticize the theoretical foundations of liberaldemocratic culture, as does Deneen, while at the same time endorsing its actualachievements. Ideas matter, yes, but a man’s character is more than his ideas;the same goes for a nation.