Not much introductory throat-clearing this time aside from thanking some readers for alerting me to typos and brainfarts, and letting you know that Chapter 5 will consist of four parts in total, so two others after this one. Now, picking up right where we left off:
Chapter 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy, part 2
. . . I concur. The replacement of classical liberal values, only some of which concern economic life, with morally vacuous consumer choice—the atomic particles of today’s burgeoning transactional reasoning—ultimately laid the basis for the angry populism we see today in a world where technological changes (the net effect, again) have mightily advantaged a minority of well-placed “meritocratic” individuals and corporate oligarchs relative to the rest of society.
Better to say, then, that free markets are potentially good because, under certain conditions they work better to assure the efficient use of scarcities than any other method ever found. Competition spurs innovation, production, and the lowest average cost to consumers and thus is anti-inflationary all else equal—again, under some not historically uncommon conditions. But the accurate point Gray and others—Helena Rosenblatt, Samuel Moyn, and most recently Alexandre Levebvre—have made is that classical liberalism was not in its origins or earlier history the same as laisse-faire economics.[1] Only in a still-positivist-minded culture where everything gets reduced to numbers, and economics emerges as a supposedly law-like science, can the richness of the former be reduced to the desiccated shell of the latter.
In other words, classical liberalism was not, not ever, anything like contemporary lighter-than-air market fundamentalist libertarian mysticism. No market in a monetized economy has ever existed without social-political parameters, and these parameters invariably defined some culture-specific measure of fairness as a moral good as well as efficiency as a benefit to the commonweal. Efficiency defined as some broad macroeconomic condition cannot be the only objective of a market; markets also have a moral function in the avoidance or at least the control of bias is the assignment of value and thus contribute to liberty—the well-known “free minds, free markets” mantra so cherished by many conservative thinkers. But efficiency needs also to be balanced by consideration of the broader public welfare, and that consideration necessarily involves moral reasoning and judgment as well as technical-legal stipulations (against monopoly behavior and for a revised definition of the core value of antitrust jurisprudence, for example).
Transparency is good. We are now told, however, that we need far more transparency, which makes compromise and conciliation all but impossible, since bargaining in glass houses is not conducive to pragmatism. Nor is it good for moderation in general; too much transparency among political activists who dominate U.S. primary elections is one of several reasons our politics now tends toward equal but opposite extremes.
Equality is good. In our case it is very good because the rugged road of progress toward genuine equality over the years has opened up new landscapes of opportunity for many who, in earlier times, would have been denied by hidebound tradition. Women and African-Americans of genius and talent can now contribute to the commonweal in ways and at levels that were all but impossible a century ago. One thinks back, perhaps, to the reaction of Emily Dickinson’s father when she informed him on a winter evening in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1850 that a first poem of hers was about to be published in a magazine. Edward Dickinson practically accused her of wrecking Western civilization itself with such arrogant audacity.
We are now told, however, that we endlessly need more equality, now often redefined in group terms as “equity.” As already discussed, even sans the identity politics overgrowth on the basic idea this ignores the fact that natural inequality is baked into nature and can never be fully expunged to created equality of outcomes except through some combination of brainwashing and coercion, which runs against the grain of other values we cherish.[2] With the overgrowth we behold a conflation of language, opening up a true mess of meaning, that requires a brief digression to sort out.
As any historically literate person knows, when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration that it was self-evident that “all men are created equal,” he was referring specifically to the illegitimacy of permanent aristocratic, or “blueblood,” privilege associated with monarchy and the by-then already long moldering concept of the divine right of kings. He was in July 1776 distinguishing the monarchy that was Britain from the republic that the aborning United States would be.
That is not all he meant even at the ripe age of 33 years, however. To add more nuance to what we have now twice called the American Story, note that John Adams had said 13 years earlier, “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” At its idealist best, most of the Founders, including Jefferson, believed that the republic aborning would before long abolish poverty and slavery alike--exactly the opposite of the falsehood that Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote into the 1619 Project, that American independence was designed to preserve slavery.[3] More, the American republic would welcome all the poor and enslaved of the earth to come to construct the Novus Ordo Seclorum, a New Order of the World. We put it on our money and opened our shores. To Jefferson, Franklin, and the other Founders with an intellectual bent, the end of monarchy and aristocratic privilege must eventually lead to the end of poverty and oppression, and with it, in their view, the end of the predatory, exclusivist trading regimes of the imperial European war system.[4]
This, exactly this, was the revolutionary American idea of the day. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, and the other Founders certainly did not mean by that signal phrase in the Declaration that all people were born equally intelligent, or equally comely, or equally witty, or equally virtuous. Had Jefferson so understood it would be hard to explain why he later wrote to John Adams about the “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue.” At the time he probably did not understand equality as being or even pointing to equality of worldly economic opportunity either, and he certainly didn’t mean equality of material outcomes among groups of people—“equity,” yet another perfectly good English word perhaps destroyed forever.
Jefferson did not conflate; he distinguished. Jefferson, who claimed to be able to read Greek along with five other languages, probably knew enough to know not just two or three but, like Plato and Aristotle, as many as eight distinct meanings of equality in classical Greek philosophy. Since we are rehearsing here some fat, old Greek ideas, we might as well do it right.
First there was isotimia, which meant equal respect or dignity for all persons. Both slavery and assumptions of Christian superiority made that a tough sell among many Americans of the independence era, so it was a revolutionary idea in context, making the American revolution just that and not a mere secession from empire. Second was isonomia, or equality before the law. Same problem; not to mention women. Third was isogoria, or equal freedom of speech and hence political agency. Fourth was isokratia, or equality of political power, as in any collective leadership arrangement. Fifth was isopsephia, or the equal right to cast a vote. Sixth was isopoliteia, or equal civil rights, notably the right to an education and to standing in court. Seventh was isodaimonia, equality of wealth and material satiety. And eighth was isomoiria, having an equal share of a business or real estate partnership.
Given all of these differences, it is most accurate to describe Jefferson and his more idealistic associates as holding that men should be equal before the law and equal in political rights not because they were equal in all respects—isodaimonia, for example—but precisely because they were not. That, an insight at least as old as the Hebrew Bible’s insistence on equal justice for rich and poor alike (Leviticus 19:15) with which all the Founders were familiar, was necessary to establish the first and deepest form of equality, isotimia.
It nearly makes one weep to realize how far we have fallen in understanding our own language. To have moved from equality as citizens of a republic to, in the popular imagination, the far narrower materialist idea of equality of economic opportunity, then to the magical delusion of undifferentiated equality, and now to the Marxoid woke notion of group “equity,” would doubtless have left every signer of the Declaration utterly nonplussed—and not sanguine about the republic’s future prospects.
Sanguine or not, we cannot blame our forebears for not predicting the future two centuries and more away. We can, however, blame some of our contemporaries for the stupidities of historicism, specifically for the failure to detect changes in the meanings of abstract concepts as culture changes so to allow the back-reading of today’s norms into the supposed minds of those long since dead. As we learn in sociology 101, or used to learn, as cultures change so do the modal types of persons who are their principal bearers. To be a cleric or a medical doctor in late 18th and then in 19th-century America was one thing in terms of the social system of typifications and relevances then taken for granted; to be them now is another. Of course the meaning of abstract concepts like equality, and many others, will change with the system of typifications and relevances taken for granted, for only in some context do they mean anything at all.[5]
Apparently it is too much to ask present-day woke philosophers to understand this. And that raises yet another contradiction: Socio-cultural change relativizes the meaning of abstract concepts, but for purposes of defaming past progress the historicist error insists on their eternal sameness of meaning—this from a group of mainly postmodernists who deny any extrinsic foundational validity to any moral abstraction. To insist on both simultaneously is impossible, but as was the White Queen’s wont, the ability to believe in six impossible things before breakfast just comes with the territory. End of digression.
Further as to the means of democratic government, administrative mechanisms and an apolitical civil service are good, not least because the Founders never intended Congress to regulate the minutia of everyday life and someone has to enforce laws consistently and fairly. But We the People have allowed and sometimes encouraged the creation of huge bureaucracies and given them essentially open-ended mandates with respect to clean water, clean air, access for the handicapped, and so on and on. Anyone who goes looking for dirty water and air, or racial injustice for that matter, will surely find it, so that the supply of problems expands to fill the space lorded over by those whose vocation it is to tilt at them. So, naturally, these bureaucracies do what organizations always do: They keep moving the goalposts to sustain and if possible broaden their missions to garner bigger budgets and more authority over their respective domains. They write hernias’ worth of rulebooks and God forbid anyone should object to one on the basis of its having buried the exercise of common sense.[6]
Compassion is good; we all know, except for the Randians among us, that societies are judged by how they treat the very young, the very old, the weak, and the infirm. We are now told, however, that we need more meliorist sensibility at the Federal level of government, to the point where it undermines the nobility of work, grows bureaucracy beyond prudence, and helps pile up unsustainable debt that, at last count, tops $35 trillion.
Diversity is good; we esteem the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum and put it on our money for good reason. We are now told, however, that we need more diversity--representative diversity, not necessarily diversity of thought and opinion. But without a common telos diversity for its own sake is endlessly centrifugal. Add a few dollops of woke group-defined bio-essentialist magic and you have what amounts to a frenzy of competitive anarchy, as played out on the streets of Portland and Seattle during the “George Floyd episode” with the good wishes of their anti-authority inclined mayors.
This is a key point relevant to our “what the hell is going on?” question. As Plato was at pains to point out in Book VIII, an “anything goes” mentality conduces to radical disorder by ultimately hollowing out of any sense of common bonds. That is when things stop working well, and some citizens who have a stake in order and predictability begin to look for the man on the white horse to re-introduce some form of social discipline. “Where freedom destroys order, the yearning for order will destroy freedom,” wrote everyone’s favorite Longshoreman Eric Hoffer. Nicely put; Socrates, too, would approve.
Revering the Irreverent
We are not yet done with Plato and Book VIII. I recently saw a young woman wearing a t-shirt inscribed in large dark gothic letters, “Fear the Youth.” I do, at least the ones who wear t-shirts like that. But I fear more for democracy and the classical liberal sensibilities that make American democracy the glorious thing it has generally been compared to nearly every previous modes of governance. This young woman was highly unlikely to prove a threat to me. But the liberal democratic ethos cannot long abide a version of We the People with too much fear-baiting, too many adolescent tics pushing against earned experience, and, above all, too much opinion arrogance erupting from adolescent-like self-confidence—especially when they are all moving at the speed of the unsound.
One also espies an unmistakable authoritarian core to both the MAGAts and the current social-justice warrior crusade. Dissent is not allowed within and is excoriated without. Both rush to ban books, just not the same books. But this is a twinned authoritarian impulse with a difference: It is based on the conceit of the contemporary, the idea that any new idea is better than any old idea simply by virtue of the fact that it is new and it is ours. Radical egalitarian pretenses, whether populist-Right or woke-Left, share a visceral disrespect for any idea they or theirs did not hatch and hence do not by definition know how to credit.
Hence, MAGAts did not bat an eyelash at former President Donald Trump’s call to suspend the Constitution so he could regain power. Or at his invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade NATO allies who did not “pay up,” as if a money pot located somewhere on U.S. soil exists for them to feed. Christian nationalist intellectuals, whose definition of the polis and hence of legitimate suffrage boils down to people just like them in belief and skin tone and them alone, have been making anti-classical liberalism arguments for a long time.[7] That has become very much inside-the-tent GOP talk.
Even more telling, most current Republicans are very much at ease with their leader displaying open disrespect for law and open lauding of violence as a political modality. As Stephen Weiss put it recently and accurately: Trump is
. . . just so openly comfortable with criminality and with violence by Americans against other Americans as long as he thinks it’ll help him—I mean, he’s just so transparently open about that. To think that he’s got a coin-flip chance of being in the White House and having basically no guardrails whatsoever, like absolute immunity—I think that’s really unnerving.[8]
Unnerving? To say the least.
At the other end of the horseshoe, the social-justice warrior crusade is particularly Salemesque in nature and tone, albeit with 21st-century technology. It uncannily resembles what used to be called in the fabled Sixties “consciousness raising” and “revolutionary intolerance”—i.e., shouting down, heckling, or otherwise silencing anyone who dares disagree.[9] Cancel culture, in other words. This is what Brett Stephens alluded to when he spoke of increasingly fashionable “unconscious bias” DEI training sessions-- now quickly become a not-so-small corporate supported industry--that “in their sugary tone and invidious assumptions” can “feel like a Cultural Revolution struggle session led by a preschool teacher.”[10] These folks are, by in large, much too earnest and utterly humorless. One can only imagine what would happen if either Randy Newman’s tongue-in-cheek song “Rednecks,” or even the old television favorite “All in the Family,” tried to debut now.
It did not dawn then, back in “consciousness raising” days, and it has yet to dawn on self-righteous moral bigots now, that however wonderful transnational cosmopolitanism seems to them, even without Marxoid critical theory hallucinations, it is not possible in a free society to make people be more open-hearted, generous of spirit, and cosmopolitan than they want to be, and that their own experiences and circumstances enable them to be, simply by shaming, berating, and insulting them. Nor, obviously one would think, is it harmless to try too hard. As Russell Kirk once wrote, “There is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you are going to remake him in your image for his own good.”
This is in no way to disparage the persistent, very real problems with racial justice (and with violence against women) in the United States or to cast doubt on the sincerity of recent reactions to them—especially from young white people who may, in much too likely fact, had never thought much about (or read anything about) this subject before May 25, 2020. It is simply to point out the overweening intemperance and fact-freeness of the outer zones of the response, and the dangers of counterproductive reaction that intemperance always courts.
Into this context we also now have a twist owing much to a separate aspect of the mix and muddle: Older and more experienced, as well as often better educated senior managers afraid to buck the cancel-cultured, authoritarian impulses of their very pious but inexperienced younger staffers. Charles Moore recently listed several examples from across the Pond, notably the reaction to Oxford University historian Nigal Biggar’s recent book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.[11] Moore is old enough to admit that it all reminds him of Chairman Mao’s “the Four Olds—old customs, culture, habits and ideas,” which were of course destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, along with approximately 1.7 million mostly innocent lives. In his Little Red Book, Moore notes, Mao wrote of: “You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. . . . The world belongs to you.”[12]
Moore barely mentioned how widespread the same phenomenon is in the salon battlements of the United States these days. He proffers no mention of what happened to James Bennet at the New York Times, no mention of its 1619 Project and how young Nicole Hannah-Jones and her friends talked down more senior editors and scholarly fact-checkers, or of dozens of other examples ranging from public library staffs banning books to staff at the Smithsonian Institute telling visitors to remove their “pro-life” clothing regalia. These different cases have in common younger folk rolling senior management to get their way. How has this reversal of deference come about, and what does it mean?
Plato, once again, comes to the rescue. He described it all well in the mid-4th century BCE. In an un-guardrailed democracy fully unfurled, long into its arc of rise and fall, Plato has Socrates tell Adeimantus,
. . .a father tries to seem like a child and lives in fear of his sons; and a son goes on like a father and no longer has any respect for or fear of his father or mother—all to make it clear that he is free. . . . And the schoolteacher, under these conditions, is in fear of the children and has a great desire to please them, and so it is not surprising if they look down on their teachers and pay them no attention. And in general . . . the old [are] copying the young in order not to seem responsible or like people in authority.[13]
The point, of course, is that when the egalitarian ethos spills over the banks of balance and feelings matters more than objective reality, the elders abdicate their authority almost without having to be asked. It is Toynbee’s “schism of the soul” staring right at us, driven by the emotive crowdsourcing of political truth. It is well nigh irresistible in a flattened authority environment if only because almost no one who has earned elder status dares resist it. What has come to matter is exuberance signing for sincerity and conviction signing for piety, not reflection and contemplation in search of messy truth—exactly what one would expect in a cultural environment in which appearances matter more than substance, images more than words. That is what Mr Moore was actually writing about by way of examples, albeit sans theory.
The impulse to be irreverent in the face of authority is probably universal. A society can tolerate only so much sanctimonious presumption and something or someone has to push back if only for the sake of basic dignity. That said, some cultures at some times are more prolific at it than others. Not far from Mr Moore’s writing desk, the Irish furnish an excellent example, perhaps the result of chaffing under English rule and Church rigidity for so long. Whatever its cause, it is not every society that will casually refer to a statue of one its literary icons as “the prick with the stick”—as the memorial to James Joyce, depicted with his cane, is very widely known in Dublin.[14]
The Irish, however, cannot hold a candle to Americans when it comes to informally sanctioned and well-appreciated irreverence. One has only to look to America’s all-time famous writer Samuel Clements to get the full treatment. Wrote Mark Twain in “The Facts Concerning My Recent Resignation”: “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.” Fast forward a decade or two to the Ragtime era’s “so’s your old man” locution, then to every Jimmy Cagny role ever filmed, then to the introduction of the celebrity anti-hero with James Dean, and those still hale and hearty can finish the sentence by citing a skein of celebrity comic in-your-face working-class heroes--in John Lennon’s locution for it—from Lenny Bruce to Archie Bunker to Andrew Dice Clay to Lewis C.K.
Americans revere the irreverent like no other society on earth. It has been from the start a characteristic of the nation’s democratic cultural attitude. The frenzied proto-religious explosions of American history, and now of contemporary life, are part of the celebrated irreverence of American culture. To protest the staid and respected is to breathe the very air of liberty.
It may in the longer run be worth the trouble it causes; this is, after all, part of the pattern of American advance as applied to Abolition, women’s suffrage, the rights of labor, and more. It can be true, as someone put it long ago, that if it were not for those who would go too far the rest of us might not go far enough, and it probably is true, as Plato’s elder guide Heraclitus said, that “all things necessarily come into being through strife.” Historical patterns give evidence for the general argument. Many instances of radicals moving the Overton Window only to have centrists and even outright conservatives take over the reigns and guide major change well short of revolutionary upheaval can be cited. Disraeli and Bismarck are stellar cases from 19th-century Europe; the transition from Samuel Adams and Tom Paine to John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and George Washington illustrate the same point closer to home.
But it may not always be worth it; it depends on context. It is one thing to put sanctimony, stuffiness, and condescension in their proper lowered places from time to time. It is another to elevate irreverence to absolute good in and for itself—in other words, for a schism of the soul to so permeate a social order that Plato’s description, speaking through Socrates, of generative mayhem becomes irreversible. So it was with tongue in cheek but brain still in head, Charlotte Hays asked a decade ago, When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? Her subtitle pointed back to Toynbee: “Why Obesity, Tattoos and Velveeta Prove that Arnold Toynbee Was Right.”[15]
Hays came across as a stiletto-jabbing educated Southern belle looking down from her plantation-style mansion on the hill at the rubes below. She needn’t have written, for example, that yellow mustard had become the quintessential white trash condiment. But that does not mean she lacked a keen eye, or a point. The headlong proletariatization of taste does mean something in the trajectory of a culture. In extreme form it amounts to a form of group self-worship, to a heedlessness of mountains of virtue still to climb. It is thus a special kind of hubris, and as always hubris brings in train what Socrates would have called atë, that untranslatable koine Greek word meaning ruin/folly/delusion all at once. After atë comes ruination, at least in the original myth, in the godly form of Nemesis.
If Nemesis is nigh, we should by now know why: Because we have applied the high-octane booster of spectacle to depict our romance with irreverence. The Greek myth of hubris, atë, and Nemesis has an alluring poetical appeal, as does Greek myth generally amid its symmetrical cyclical premise. It need not have much to do with actual history playing out, however, unless we supply the link. And that is what we have done by relentlessly dousing the culture with anti-authority, pro-Everyman (and Women) piffle delivered on every manner of shiny-object screen machine invented in the past seven decades. In the process too many have forgotten, if they ever knew that, as Lord Acton put it, “Liberty is not the freedom to do what you want; it is the freedom to do what you ought.” In mimetic thrall to our screens, we have avidly, constantly, and loudly thumbed our nose at refinement, humility, and civility, and now the bill has come due.
That, in turn, is probably why some radical pulses that might have done their work and run their course, as in the past, have not run their course and are not contained. It is, in short, why what is worthy in the traditional American order of manners and morals is not being preserved. If the woke 10-12 percent in America today who embrace some version of postmodern Marxoid “critical theory”—and 10-12 percent is all it is at most—are trying to advance American principles and fulfill American promises, that is one thing, but it is an unlikely thing. If, more likely, they mean to demean and uproot the founding, that is something else—and in the face of that advocacy being spectacalized for the unassuming masses of people, how can any retort or pushback that needs to rely on education in the form of the written word stand a chance?
Example: When you hear the false claim of the 1619 Project, meaning in this case an ahistorical claim, that the Constitution was by design a pro-slavery document, or that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery in America from wider European trends, that is when you recognize the tilted playing field on which any contemporary discourse must take place. It functions in effect as a “have you stopped beating your wife?” canard. This particular false claim has been promoted from on high by the New York Times and is carried forth via endless forms of bumper-sticker orality; to refute it requires examining texts and knowing some actual history. Spectacalized falsity can be communicated in an instant; no refutation of it can possibly take less than at least twenty terribly tedious minutes—by contemporary standards—of focused attention.
This doesn’t mean that those who would dress American history in feet of clay are bound to succeed, but that depends on whether enough people remember and care about the basis of the American republican order, as amended through Civil War and more besides since 1865. The problem is, as already suggested, that spectacalization cum technique is not neutral. It favors the simplistic over the complex, the oral over the deeply read, the quick over the deliberate, and the emotional over the rational. It lacks rules of evidence because it cares nothing about evidence, only postmodernist feats of persuasive rhetoric. It takes the form of opinion-cum-mob, which is something Plato would recognize without hesitation.
This is, whatever else it may be, demoralizing. Yeats spoke in 1919 of the center not holding; in our case, as an 83-year old mathematician suggested to me some months ago, it may be a case of “the center not giving a shit.” Hold that thought, for it too bears on the wages of stupefaction and fantasy—our joint contemporary form of “circus”—that we will return to again in due course.
True adulthood evinces certain character traits: patience, humility, and a recognition that a decent life is built on tradeoffs, and on coming to terms with both mortality and imperfection. “Our paradise is the imperfect,” wrote Wallace Stevens, a poetic thought that the fringe BLM-supporting woke crowd appears flatly unable to understand. The impulse to dash rather than to walk for the long distance suggests that our collective national risk assessment frontal lobe region has come to resemble that of a typical 15-year old male. Barack Obama, it is worth noting, put the main point directly in October 2019 when he told a gathering of young activists that:
. . .this idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically “woke” and all that stuff--you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.[16]
Obama made good sense in October 2019, but it is not clear that his advice has been heeded. And he did not address—has never addressed, to my knowledge—the tradeoffs involved as the mythopoetical core of the American identity morphed from one at ease with limited and self-limited government into one far more meliorist in nature, one that has tried to substitute or compensate for the erosion of social trust and informal communal authority at the hands of an unsettling modernity.
An excessively activist state is not the only source of social trust erosion, as libertarians claim, or of a culture’s mythopoetical core diffusion. In America, at least, it is as much a reaction to developments sourced elsewhere, and is usually seen by wiser heads as a lesser and necessary evil compared to the founding ideal. It is when meliorism breaks its bounds and turns from expedient into utopian overstretch that it becomes deranged with Tocquevillian Paradoxes and thus makes matters worse. This is when it joins with Plato’s depiction of democracy as a self-immolating regime type, bidding tyranny into its wake.
[1] More on this below, but for a broad assessment of the current arguments concerning the nature of liberalism a good place to start is Becca Rothfeld, “Democracy has made us all liberals, apparently,” Washington Post Book World, July 7, 2024, p. B3. For an application from anti-trust policy, see my “Will Hipster Anti-Trust Cure America’s Economic Ills?” Cosmopolitan Globalist, September 6, 2021.
[2] Discussed and defended in my “Inequality, Ideology, and the American Reconstruction,” The American Interest, June 6, 2020
[3] There is a logic to her claim, based on George III’s pre-1776 statements excoriating slavery and the slave trade. As future king, the then Prince of Wales wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. As King, he declared free those American slaves who opposed the Revolution, following the lead of the royal governor of Virginia, the Earl of Dunmore, who issued a proclamation in November 1775 offering freedom to enslaved people who would support and fight for the British. But no evidence exists to support the assertion that the Crown’s attitudes toward slavery motivated the American Founders. British abolition of the slave trade occurred only in 1807—just after the importation of slaves was banned in the United States—and abolition of slavery itself in 1833.
[4] The classic exposition is Felix Gilbert’s masterful 1961 book To the Farewell Address.
[5] To my knowledge, the best sociological treatment of how cultural change and conceptual language interact—specifically concerning the meaning of equality--is Alfred Schutz, “Equality and the Social Meaning Structure,” in Aspects of Human Equality, eds. Lyman Bryson, Clarence H. Faust, Louis Finkelstein, and R.M. MacIver (Harper & Brothers, 1956), pp. 33-78.
[6] Note Philip K. Howard, The Rule of Nobody (W.W. Norton, 2014).
[7] A good example of someone who prefers the unitary authority of the Church to any other political set-up is Patrick Deneen. See his Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2019). Deneen’s is a particularly Catholic critique of liberal democracy, and it was remarkable after the book came out how slow critics were to recognize the theological source of his core argument. Perhaps the fact that the book was published by a high-status university press confused them.
[8] A story providing context goes with the remark. See Andrew Egger, “Pennsylvania Man Speaks,” Morning Shots (The Bulwark), September 5, 2024.
[9] Note the fevered reaction to the July 7, 2020 Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate.”
[10] Stephens, “Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain,” New York Times, March 1, 2021.
[11] Moore, “Don’t let young workers dictate what we read,” Daily Telegraph, February 13, 2023.
[12] Revolutionaries of all authoritarian flavors love this latter remark, sometimes rendered as “Tomorrow belongs to you” or, in collective first person so to speak: Cras es nostrum. Note, then, the anthem of the Hitlerjugend as so eerily depicted in the 1972 film Caberet: “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
[13] Richards, ed., The Republic, Book VIII, pp. 154-55.
[14] For another wonderful, hilarious example, see “Mrs. Brown’s New Wifi Device Gets Sassy with Cathy,” Mrs Brown’s Boys, Vid 20210327-WA000.
[15] (Regnery, 2013).
[16] Obama quoted in Emily S. Rush and Derrick Bryson Taylor, “Obama on Call-Out Culture: ‘That’s Not Activism’,” New York Times, October 31, 2019.