How Not to be a Liberal

Liberalism gets a lot of bad press these days. There seems to be a vague dissatisfaction with it. A feeling that it has not delivered. That it may, after all, be defective. Political philosophers show that liberal theory is finally self-contradictory and incoherent. With the publication in 2018 of Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed, which made Barack Obama’s reading list, one could say that the deconstruction of liberalism finally penetrated the province of the redoubtable educated public.[1]

Yet dissatisfaction and critique have not resulted in a significant movement in any other direction. A dearth of new ideas is made apparent by the uncontested dominance of practical political ends. Some speak, for example, of “post-liberalism” and a revival of a “classical” conception of virtue and the common good. However, a predominantly legal orientation, and studied refusal to incorporate any insights from modern philosophy, give the impression of a justification for a practical political program. Others double down on a liberalism present in the American Founding which, understood correctly, is not subject to the deficiencies raised by the critique. In this view, knowledge of the American Constitution and institutions, combined with increased civic engagement – obtained through exhortation and the inducements of prosperity – will set things right. On the liberal left, philosophical stagnation places all theory in direct subordination to the achievement of statistical benchmarks demanded by equity and inclusion. The practical bent of all these approaches suggests that the full flowering of the liberal trajectory includes the atrophy of political philosophy itself.

At the very least, then, it is as defenders of philosophy that we may pose the question in all seriousness: how not to be liberal? However, while we want to transcend mere practice, to argue rightly we must identify what we are talking about. I suggest this means starting with experience and that, at this time, the most fertile path for political philosophy may be a kind of phenomenology of politics.[2] Although such an approach would certainly entail a broad analysis, in this brief essay I will focus on the problem of authority. In the interest of peace and prosperity, liberalism began precisely with the legal and political marginalization of non-liberal sources of authority. My thesis is that, given the reciprocity between the orders of soul and regime – a dynamic so obvious to pre-modern thinkers – the progressive exclusion of non-liberal authority from determining the shape of the lived common order has ended (more or less) by affecting our constitution of social reality (in the technical, phenomenological sense of the word “constitution”). The difficulty in pursuing such an inquiry as I am suggesting is that, for many of us, at this point in history homing in on the experience of non-liberal authority is somewhat akin to finding your room in a hotel where all the numbers have been taken off the doors.

Now, for some, the faintest odor of non-liberal authority is disturbing and unsettling, creating a personal motivation for the advancement of a political project that entails its suppression. Others are merely indifferent, or even regretful, toward this aspect of liberalism, but accept it because they believe it is required by political prudence. Yet regardless of whatever our individual attitudes may be, I take it as evident and agreed upon by all that, over time, there has been a substantial decrease in respect for non-liberal authority in liberal societies. To be clear, by “non-liberal authority,” I mean any source of political decision-making or judgement not based on a claim of freedom, equality, or science. In this regard, I follow the analysis of Pierre Manent, who wrote that “our two great authorities” are “science in the theoretical domain” and “freedom in the practical domain.”[3] I make the addition of “equality,” which I believe is the necessary ideological complement of freedom. Although I do not use the term for various reasons, there is a large overlap between what I mean by “non-liberal” and what we would call “traditional” authority.     

In this essay, I will assume an account of authority I have elaborated elsewhere, which is a reflexive experience of respect for a “command,” the palpable urgency of which is a response to what is apprehended as superior in some capacity.[4]  Authority being thereby the “voice of the good in the world,” the experience of authority is the full human response to this voice – emotional, intellectual, spiritual, bodily, etc. By “voice” of course, I do not necessarily mean a physically audible voice. Rather, it may involve any expression of intelligibility.

Now, a characteristic difference between liberal and non-liberal authority is found in the conception of our relationships with others. Whereas liberalism would place our responsibilities toward others in free choices, for example through the social contract, non-liberal authority asserts a priori obligations. Consider in this regard Levinas’ assertion that “we discern … a responsibility not resting on any free commitment, that is, a responsibility without freedom, a responsibility of the creature; a responsibility of one who comes too late into being to avoid supporting it in its entirety.”[5]  As “creatures” who must “support being,” we are bound to a received common order.

A simple example of a received common order carrying an experience of authority would be the voice of a father in the home, which affects a child in a remarkable way. The child didn’t choose, or understand beforehand, that he would respond with such alacrity and attention to the precise pitch and timber of the father’s voice when used in a particularly authoritative manner, yet he is profoundly affected. In another example, the idea of same-sex marriage may offend, not because one begrudges sexual pleasure or seeks to deny “love,” but because the relationship is seen to impugn an intelligible structure of human relations which is experienced as authoritative. In seeking to authoritatively endorse same sex marriage, then, liberalism has – to adopt the relevant legal terminology – a compelling interest in suppressing the experience of the rightness or obviousness of such a priori intelligibility.

With regard to the suppression of the experience of non-liberal order, there is, at the most superficial level, the advancement of characteristic liberal political rationality: “what others do privately, does not, after all, affect me,” “… and after all even if I do not myself agree, he/she/they admittedly may have some plausible reasons for their choices.” There are also, of course, well-entrenched academic accounts explaining that all experience of received authoritative order are in fact the product of an ideology of power or cultural conditioning. A phenomenological description, on the other hand, which illuminates, for example, an essential asymmetry and complementarity of the sexes, is eschewed. Hence, Levinas is roundly criticized for describing the face of the feminine as “absolute mystery,” and love as a “relation between two people which does not unite them but keeps them separate so that they engender a child.”[6]

My thesis is that liberal rationality, entrenched in law, culture, and institutions, tends over time to suppress the experience of non-liberal authority through a programmatic formation – or deformation – of the constitution of social reality. For example, the world is finally apprehended as composed primarily of individuals, rather than of families. People become mere “individuals” displaying gender identities, rather than concretely existing men and women. Now, while the practical requirement of political conformity has always demanded a certain degree of tendentiousness in terms of thought and manners, I would like to propose that there is a special kind of authoritarianism proper to liberalism which arises, paradoxically, from the fact that, in eliminating its rivals, it does not seek to advance any identifiable authority in its place. It seeks only more of itself, which is nothing less than the state enforcement of freedom, equality, and science. 

As independent of all other authority, the liberal state is sovereign. As purely neutral, moreover, and thus as merely reasonable, it demands that the order it produces be judged in terms of a “special status.” According to this special status, the order produced by liberal government is to be considered – through a precarious and characteristic lapse of consciousness – as somehow not residing in the presence of the non-liberal authorities, about which the liberal state alleges to have absolutely nothing to say. Now, maintaining this special status of the liberal order requires a certain mystique, which is tied in no small measure to the reality or the promise of material prosperity, and depends on the avoidance of a too-sharp conflict with any non-liberal authorities that may still hold sway. For there is always the danger that, under the pressure of events, the liberal order will lose its mystique, the “lapse” will be seen clearly, and raw questions of justice and goodness will surge to the fore.

Let me emphasize that in this arrangement the suppression of the experience of non-liberal authority is the greatest of all challenges for liberalism. This is because authority is necessarily apprehended as objective – and of two authorities, one either supersedes another, or a clarification is begged regarding the relationship between the two. The experience of non-liberal authority, in a direct and palpable manner, potentially undermines the plausibility of the liberal justification of order and is therefore a constant threat. Furthermore, as the liberal state matures, the competition between liberal and non-liberal authority becomes more intense. For, when the liberal state is new, and liberalism is proposed merely as a practical means of solving conflicts, there is little confusion between the two. However, as the liberal state’s authority becomes more entrenched, and its sovereignty increasingly felt, any social assertion of non-liberal authority is experienced as an illegitimate intrusion into the public order.  

To examine this dynamic more closely, consider the parallel between the trajectory of modern science, as described by Edmund Husserl, and the impact of liberalism on the constitution of social reality.[7] Both result in similar contradictions and ambiguities by replacing the direct experience with idealizations, which are eventually taken to be the “real reality.” So theoretical science does simply produce models and equations with predictive power but tells me that my experience of the stone I am holding as smooth, cool, and pinkish-gray with brown flecks, is “really” only my subjective experience of colorless and tasteless particles in motion. Similarly, liberalism does not simply provide a process for resolving conflicts in the context of a diversity of opinions. Rather, to solidify its authority, it ends by telling me that my apprehension of non-liberal authority is “merely subjective.” The difference is that, whereas the modern scientific confusion of idealizations with reality is the result of philosophical error, liberalism asserts its idealizations as real sources of authority from the beginning. In both cases, however, the conflicting experience that does not comport with the idealizations is necessarily discounted and undermined.    

In this essay, I would like to advance the thesis that the purest experience of non-liberal authority is the fear of God. For if God is absolutely and infinitely superior, then the profound respect and awe aroused by an experience of God would be of the highest possible degree, inspiring a true moral and existential “fear.” Moreover, because this experience – which is necessarily apprehended as the ultimate truth – reveals all other authority as relative and contingent, it should be no surprise that it is precisely here that we find the hidden principle lying at liberalism’s very core: namely, that all rational validity in discourse, and all political legitimacy, depends on no religion being “the” true religion. Now, because this assumption is so obviously problematic, it can never be articulated as such, and its place in the shadow is guarded by a demand of the greatest spiritual and intellectual tyranny: that you regard what you apprehend and experience as the objective, ultimate truth as, in fact, merely relative to you. I assert a universal right to construct an order contrary to the command of Almighty God.

Aided, naturally, by the incentive of real or promised material and social prosperity, the extreme dissonance for any self-consistent personality aroused by such a demand will be relieved by entering into the magical cloud of liberal ideology, emerging into the daylight of liberal society only when – in a moment that will be neither described nor named – the necessary alterations will have been made.

To be clear, the nub of the problem is the experience of authority. For, so long as the common order produced by liberalism is experienced as an outrage to what is good and right, the hearts of men are incited to action. However, having overcome experience through the alleviation of dissonance, a new Founding can be made – the True Liberal Founding – based on the premise (no doubt true) that reasonable minds can differ on questions of religion. With the religious question thus shifted to an epistemological register, the meaning of liberal sovereignty is now, only at the end of the process, safely revealed to people whose greatest loves are their 401Ks and lattes. The religious problem is solved. What begins as a “political” relativization of God’s authority in the name of peace, tolerance, and prosperity, ends with the axiom that God’s authority need not be respected in the world. 

We are describing a dynamic in which, by requiring everyone to act as if blasphemy or the existence of a grossly immoral common order were not evils (you are, of course, free to believe that they are evils) the state becomes an existential “pressure cooker” that alters the constitution of social reality in a manner more tendentious than any “normal” social decadence. Tocqueville describes this power when he notices that, far from creating a situation in which the bonds of thought are loosened, quite the opposite occurs in a democracy. “I know of no country,” he writes, “in which, generally speaking, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”[8]

The master no longer says: “Think like me or you die.” He does say: “You are free not to think as I do; you can keep your life and property and all; but from this day you are a stranger among us … Go in peace, I have given you your life, but it is a life worse than death.[9]

In the liberal state, which claims neutrality regarding all faiths, this same pressure to conform functions to drive religion into the shadows as something unseemly and dangerous. It is no mistake that the legal justification for this process is the reverse claim that religion exerts such power. Hence, in Engel et al. v. Vitale et al., the Court prohibits voluntary, non-denominational prayer in public schools, because it creates “indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform.”[10] Decisions designating religions as themselves would-be pressure cookers give the lie to the idea of religious neutrality and show just how jealously liberalism guards its monopoly on authority.  

Perhaps ironically, even religiously based non-liberal regimes (at least those that do not claim a constitution directly established by God) which understand themselves as existing within God’s universe, are able to make room for non-believers to live and practice their religion based on straightforward ethical and prudential reasoning. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, the rites of “unbelievers … may be tolerated either because a greater good may come of it, or some evil may be avoided.”[11] Evils to be avoided include “scandal or discord,” and the “interference with the salvation with those who if they are tolerated will gradually be converted to the faith.”[12] This approach is based on the explanation that “Human government is derived from divine government and should imitate it,” and just as God permits some evils because “if he did so a greater good might be taken away or a worse evils follow,” human beings should similarly practice “tolerance” when appropriate.[13] In this reasoning, the common order remains existentially open and there is no need to eliminate God’s authority from the whole (or the experience of it).

The appropriateness of religious tolerance is, of course, much greater today than in Aquinas’ time, since there is no dominant religion. Yet, it seems to me that similar principles may be applied to accommodate different ways of life (flowing from different religions, or no religion) while at the same time avoiding the warping of experience entailed by the liberal trajectory. In other words, non-liberal associational entities are possible in which, in the presence of a deep diversity expressed in conflicting ways of life, a workable settlement can nonetheless be reached regarding common political goals. A liberal state, by contrast, is a “space” without God. For it is liberal only when it is agreed that, because reasonable minds can differ about religion, it is never permissible to judge the legitimacy of governmental actions by the will of God. Hence, liberalism entails the reversal of St. Ambrose’s claim that “the Emperor is within the Church, not above the Church,”[14] and moreover a rejection of St. Paul’s assertion that “there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God.”[15] 

Finally, if a political community is indeed a We in any real sense (I capitalize “We” to indicate a concrete unity that is in some sense greater than the sum of its parts) then We cannot avoid the fact that, whatever political system We have erected notwithstanding, We either recognize (i.e., fear) God or not. Now, precious few of even the most radical individualists will go so far as to deny the existence of any common life in the state. Yet, it is of the very essence of authority that, to be in its presence and not to acknowledge it is to deny it. If I wander onto your land without knowing it, I may be excused for not recognizing and respecting your authority over it. But if I come onto your land, knowing it is yours, and (under any pretense whatsoever) act as if it is not yours – this is a rebuke. Yet, if there is a God, surely We live in God’s universe. As an individual within the We I may say: “let everyone else be unjust, yet I will not.” However, the We itself must nonetheless answer to God for Itself. In the Psalm that reads “Thou hast set our iniquities before thy eyes: our life in the light of thy countenance,” it is decisive that the word “life” is in the singular and not the plural (i.e., “lives”).[16]

Now, the simplest solution to this situation, so embarrassing for liberalism, is for everyone to stop believing in God. Yet, because it is not so easy to wipe out belief in God altogether, another solution has in fact emerged, which provides an imperfect, yet acceptable remedy: namely, the view is adopted that when offenses to God come about pursuant to the liberal political process, We are excused because God Himself is liberal and understands it is all part of the liberal process. But what God is this?! Is this the God, for example, recognizable in any traditional religion? Hence, despite a certain (decreasing) measure of religious freedom granted in the name of religious pluralism, it becomes evident that it is not actually permissible to believe in God as traditionally conceived. Changes must be made. Short of mandating the disappearance of God altogether, the liberal state – as sovereign – requires that a specific theological dogma be respected: namely, that God must become someone that We need not fear. The God in Whose “sight no man living shall be justified,” and Who requires the sacrifice of a victim on an altar, becomes a God who invites you to a table to give you many good things.[17] 

It may be argued that I have irresponsibly set traditional authority against the modern liberal state. Yet my thesis, if radical, is only so in a spiritual sense. For the recognition of non-liberal authority does not in itself require a single institutional alteration. I would argue it is the only basis for a workable libertarian social policy. It may be further objected that some non-liberal ways of life are incompatible with the approach I suggest, where practical arrangements are made among conflicting ways of life without creating a sealed liberal “space.” I answer that those intolerant to the extent of being closed to practical arrangements, or whose creed advocates its own advancement through force, fraud, and violence, must be resisted as enemies of humanity. This would no doubt have been the case under a liberal regime anyway. To those who would require still greater assurance, I can only echo Madison in Federalist #10 who, when discussing the prospect of dealing with the problem of faction by denying political freedom, remarked that we must eschew any “unwise” remedy “worse than the disease.”[18] Moreover, it is here that a long apprenticeship in liberal goods may show its value. For, as Eric Voegelin understood so well, though human nature remains, political consciousness can and does change over time, as do technological and demographic conditions.

To conclude, in what I have elsewhere called “Phase I” liberalism, a liberal legal and political system functions in a political community that remains existentially oriented to a non-liberal, authoritative order.[19] Although this is an inherently unstable situation, it can nonetheless facilitate a high degree of material prosperity, so long as a contingent homogeneity in culture persists. It was nice while it lasted. Hopefully, everyone had fun! We are now in “Phase II” liberalism, in which, with non-liberal sources of order having been successfully obscured and suppressed, liberal theory penetrates to the level of the constitution of social reality. My analysis indicates that more liberalism will not lead us out of the moral and cultural wasteland it creates, regardless of the most inspiring appeals to patriotism and personal responsibility, or attractive promises of individual prosperity. It seems impossible to me, therefore, simply to return to Phase I liberalism, as many conservatives would prefer.

A non-liberal political entity is free to exist within God’s universe. The fact that there is disagreement about whose God’s it is, or if there even is a God – and the fact that some of us must be wrong – need not preclude those of us who follow different ways of life from having shared political goods and goals. In this regard, I believe the Dobbs decision is of great interest, and moreover an inchoate harbinger of things to come. Caught between the incompatible demands of large and thoroughly convinced segments of the public – a single medical procedure is either willed murder that must be proscribed or a fundamental freedom that must be protected – the issue of abortion short circuits the liberal ideal that all conflict about the good can be resolved by an adjudication of individual rights. In this situation, the Court, making accommodation with reality, returns the issue to the states. Does the decision amount to a diminishment, in some way, of sovereignty in the modern sense? Yes. But so what? For at the same time, it also amounts to an augmentation of political order, which, if it is lived, is always lived where one finds oneself.        

NOTES:

[1] Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press: 2018).

[2] See, e.g., Michael F. Hickman, Husserlian Phenomenology and Contemporary Political Realism: The Legitimacy of the Life-World (New York: Routledge Press, 2023).

[3] Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1.

[4] See Hickman, Husserlian Phenomenology and Contemporary Political Realism, 100.

[5] Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 90-91.

[6] Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge Press, 200), 340.

[7] See, e.g., Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

[8] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1969), 136.

[9] Ibid.

[10] John R. Vile, Essential Supreme Court Decisions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2022) 240.

[11] Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans. & ed. by Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1988), 62.

[12] Ibid., 63.

[13] Ibid., 62.

[14] Philip Hughes, A History of the Church, Volume I: The World in Which the Church was Founded (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1934), 218.

[15] ROM, 13:1 (Douay-Rheims).

[16] PS, 89:8.

[17] PS, 142:2 (Douay-Rheims).

[18] James Madison, Federalist No.10, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 73.

[19] Hickman, Husserlian Phenomenology and Contemporary Political Realism.

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