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Conservative Democracy

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Conservative Democracy Conservative Democracy By Yoram Hazony, February 12, 2019 A version of this essay appeared in the January 2019 issue of First Things. You can read the original here. The present moment is one of growing discomfort, both in America and in Europe, with the regnant liberal political theory often described as liberal democracy. It is frequently said that the only genuine alternatives to liberal democracy are Marxism and Fascism, but I don’t believe this is true. I want to sketch an alternative viewpoint that I will call conservative democracy. This position is closer to the spirit of traditional constitutionalism in both America and Britain than the liberal political theories of our day. Moreover, it is far better equipped to maintain the free institutions of these nations than liberalism. There are prominent scholars and public figures who are convinced that “things are getting better” in almost every way. As for me, I find it difficult not to see the Western nations disintegrating before our eyes. The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal coherence and stability—the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family—are not merely under assault. They have been, at least since the Second World War, in precipitous decline. In the United States, for example, some 40 percent of children are today born outside of marriage. Overall fertility rate has fallen to 1.76 children per woman. American children for the most part receive 12 years of public schooling that is scrubbed clean of God and Scripture. And it is now possible to lose one’s livelihood or even to be prosecuted for maintaining traditional Christian or Jewish views on various subjects. Add to this the fact that the principal project of European and American political elites for decades now has been the establishment of a “liberal international order” whose aim is to export American norms and values to other nations, and you have a stunning picture of what the United States has become—a picture that in certain respects resembles that of Napoleonic France: An ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalist power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force. The present revival of nationalist sentiment in Britain and America seeks, in one way or another, to resist this trajectory. Perhaps 70 percent of President Trump’s votes came from Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics, and a similar pattern of support for the parallel “Brexit” movement seeking independence from the European Union can be observed in the UK. I know that some conservative intellectuals are inclined to see Brexit and the Trump movement as signs of the disease at least as much as harbingers of a coming recovery. Nonetheless, I think it is undeniable that a vast Christian public in these countries (as well as the great majority of Orthodox Jews) recognizes in the current nationalism an attempt to avert the complete collapse of the traditional Western order. What we see before us, then, is a contest between two powerful movements—a “liberal” movement that has been dominant for some time, and a nationalist movement that openly seeks to resist it. In public discourse today, the existence of these two camps is seen clearly. But what they each stand for is not so clear. I will try to bring what is at issue between these rival camps into greater focus. II. I take “liberalism” to refer to an Enlightenment political tradition descended from the principal political texts of rationalist political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau and Kant, and reprised in countless recent works of academic political theory elaborating these views. By “rationalist,” I mean that this kind of political thought is intended to imitate a mathematical system, which begins with axioms taken to be self-evident and proceeds by supposedly infallible deductions. The three axioms on which the liberal system is founded are these: 1. Availability and Sufficiency of Reason. Human individuals are capable of exercising reason, which “teaches all mankind who will but consult it” (as Locke puts it). By reasoning, they are able to discover universal truths that hold good across all human societies and in every historical time frame. 2. The Free and Equal Individual. Human individuals are by nature “perfectly free” and “perfectly equal” (as Locke puts it). 3. Obligation Arises From Choice. Human individuals have no obligations to political institutions until “by their own consent they become members of some political society” (as Locke puts it). These three fundamental axioms are important not only for understanding a certain stream of early-modern political rationalism. The axioms of the liberal-rationalist system have continued to dominate discourse wherever liberalism has advanced in Europe and America up until our own day. Attempts to alter these foundations of liberalism are well known (consider Mill or Hayek). But they have ultimately been of little consequence. It is these Lockean assumptions that continue to characterize liberal discourse, and if anything they have only received an even greater emphasis in recent years. Of course, one does not have to accept the liberal axiom system as a closed and complete system. I don’t doubt, for example, that many individuals have embraced some or all of these Lockean premises while at the same time believing in God, or in the binding character of Scripture, or in the sanctity of the family, or in the national state as the best form of political order, and so forth. But the crucial point is that none of these things—God, the Bible, the family, and the independent national state—can be derived from liberal principles. That is, there is nothing in the liberal system that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation. If one is committed to these things, it is for reasons that are entirely “external” to the liberal political system. Now, the fact that conservative political institutions such as religion, family, and the national state derive from sources external to liberalism is not, in principle, fatal. In theory, one can imagine a world in which liberalism co-exists with the sources of religion and nationalism—and even that these might be complementary to liberalism, providing it with crucial resources that it itself cannot generate. This is, implicitly, the strategy of those liberals who say that liberalism is “only a form of government designed to permit a broad sphere of individual freedom.” On this view, liberalism has no aim and no consequences other than to ensure that no one is coerced, for example, into becoming a Christian; or that no one is coerced into conducting his personal life within the framework of a traditional family. These things, it is said, can be relegated to a separate sphere of privacy and personal liberty—a sphere in which religious tradition, national cohesion, and the family, will flourish, even as liberal premises are made the official governing doctrine of the state. But I think that this proposal has by now been empirically refuted. Both in Europe and in America, the principles of liberalism have not brought the flourishing of religious tradition, national cohesion, and the family—but the opposite. Everywhere it has gone, the liberal system has brought about the dissolution of these fundamental traditional institutions. Nor is the reason for this hard to find. For liberalism is not “only a form of government designed to permit a broad sphere of individual freedom.” In fact, liberalism is not a form of government. It is system of beliefs taken to be axiomatic, from which a form of government can, supposedly, be deduced. In other words, it is a system of dogmas. About what? About the nature of human beings, reason, and the sources of the moral obligations that bind us. This means that liberal dogmas concern many of the same subjects that are at the heart of biblical political thought. However, liberal dogma offers a very different view from that of, for instance, the Hebrew Bible: Whereas Hebrew Scripture depicts human reason as weak, capable only of local knowledge, and generally unreliable, liberalism depicts human reason as exceedingly powerful, offering universal knowledge, and accessible to anyone who will but consult it. Similarly, whereas the Bible depicts moral and political obligation as deriving from God and inherited by way of family, national and religious tradition, liberalism makes no mention of either God or inherited tradition, much less specific traditional institutions such as the family or nation. And while the Bible teaches that all are created in the image of God, thus imparting a certain dignity and sanctity to each human being, it says nothing about our being by nature perfectly free and perfectly equal. Thus there are no grounds for the claim that liberalism is merely a system of “neutral” rules, a “procedural” system that can make traditional political and religious structures work all the better while leaving them in tact. Liberalism is a substantive belief system that provides an alternative foundation for our views concerning the nature of human beings, reason, and the sources of the moral obligations that bind us. This alternative foundation has not co-existed with earlier political tradition, rooted in the Bible, as we were told it would. It has rather cut this earlier tradition to ribbons. For example, the liberal belief that reason is powerful, universal and reliable has meant that there is, in principle, no need to consult with national and religious tradition, or even to accord such traditions honor and respect.
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