In the deepening debate over the future of American democracy, the progressive Left and the religious Right have this in common: They both cling to nostalgic fictions about the past. Their revisionist histories, rooted in secularism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other, would propel our politics in the same direction: toward the Leviathan imagined by Thomas Hobbes, an omnicompetent state that offers security and prosperity at the price of freedom.
On the Right, the rejection of liberal democracy is motivated by a yearning for a premodern world: a society animated by medieval concepts of virtue, faith, and authority. Catholic scholars such as Patrick Deneen argue that, under Christendom, the “cultivation of virtue” and “aspiration to the common good” served as bulwarks against tyranny. But liberalism dissolved these ideas, he writes, replacing them with “civic indifference” and “the unfettered and autonomous choice” of the individual. Likewise, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule condemns the liberal project as the enemy of the historic church. “Both politically and theoretically,” he writes, “hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth.”
Comments