Why do governments work? Why is it that every year, hundreds of millions of Americans pay taxes and vote, some lesser number serve on juries, and a lesser number still actually serve in government as elected officials or employees?
Having the monopoly on violence, the government can force such participation to some degree, but if everyone, or even a tenth of the population, decided to opt out, it would be pretty difficult for the government in its current form to compel participation.
Thus there is some degree to which governments work because citizens think that enough of their fellow citizens are following the rules that the government could credibly enforce non-compliance. A government with which people comply for the sole reason that they are compelled would be considered totalitarian. It’s widely acknowledged that such a society in which the government is the Hobbesian leviathan that keeps everyone in line is a pretty miserable vision.
So there must also be a degree to which governments work because people voluntarily follow the rules out of a sense of citizenship and solidarity. Building on the understanding that this solidarity is a foundational element of a functional society, James Davison Hunter considers the following questions in Democracy and Solidarity:
Hunter begins the book with a sort of “introduction to political theory.” He presents three primary models for conceiving the foundations upon which governments are established (i.e. how the “rules of the game” are agreed upon). They exist on a continuum. On one end we find, “Foundationalism.” Opposite “Foundationalism” is “Proceduralism.” “Communitarianism” hovers between them.
The idea of Foundationalism is that there is some agreed-upon transcendent source of meaning that guides the disputes and struggles that characterize political life. This transcendent source has historically been religious in nature, but most modern proponents of this view in the West formulate it in terms of “natural law,” which claims that the study of human nature and the natural world can provide guidance that will orient political life. The idea is not that these transcendent sources of meaning provide concrete or settled answers that resolve disagreements, but they do provide a common language and basis for disputation.
On the other end of the spectrum, Proceduralists claim that the basis of politics is simply agreement on the process by which differences are resolved, and that if that process is given, there’s no need for any common ground in the actual content of disputes.
Communitarians, falling between these camps, do believe that there needs to be common cultural ground for disputation, but that common ground does not actually need to be capital-T-true, but only agreed upon provisionally for the purpose and benefit of social cohesion. Hunter ominously teases a fourth model, ‘Agonism,’ which he promises to unpack later.
Few examples are provided of these different models, but in my understanding, something like Foundationalism would be the model of the Puritan colonial governments in 17th century America (e.g. Massachusetts). The one example he does give is Iran under the Ayatollah. Communitarianism is more akin to America in its founding and early National period, where there’s pretty robust disagreement among the young nation’s founders and leaders about the ultimate nature of reality, but there’s sufficient agreement on secondary characteristics of reality that those can serve to frame their disputes. Especially important to the founders were the values of freedom, equality, justice, and toleration, which Hunter labels as the values of the “hybrid-Enlightenment”, indicating the way that the expression of the Enlightenment in America was "hybridized" with Protestant religious thinking.
Recent American history, perhaps starting sometime in the 1960s until sometime between 2006 and 2012 fits more under Proceduralism, as widespread doubt that these values are actually held in good faith by elites and major institutions blossomed and became widespread, leaving behind little but “the democratic process” as a basis for political contests. Now, with the legitimacy of that process itself much in doubt, we seem to be living under some form of the “agonist” model, which Hunter promises to define later in the book.
After this introduction, Hunter begins to trace the way that the values of the hybrid-Enlightenment were "worked out" over American history. This account describes the major tensions between those values and their actual instantiation in society, culture, and politics. Those tensions have been vigorously debated in the public sphere, and the most important of those debates, one that continues to this day, is the question, “Who counts as an American: Who is in, and who is out?”
This question might provoke a fairly visceral reaction today (and framed so explicitly, may have also done so in the past). Many of us have been taught from childhood that exclusion is cruel. "Inclusiveness" is widely held to be a virtue. Surely the question of who is in and who is out is the wrong question to ask? But Hunter makes the case that every society has boundaries. Every society, throughout history, has had to draw lines about who is included in the family of solidarity that comprises that society. It might be tempting to just reference “citizenship” as the criterion for inclusion, but, while this works from a legal point of view, it doesn’t from a cultural perspective. There are many who would want to include non-citizen immigrants within that circle regardless of their legal status, and would want to exclude, say, card-carrying members of the KKK. So it’s clear that legal definitions of citizenship are not satisfactory for most people looking to draw the boundaries of who’s in and who’s out; solidarity is a cultural concept, not a legal one.
This is a question that American society has had to work through from the beginning, constantly revising and refining, expanding and contracting, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. There is inevitably going to be disagreement, and the society will need ways for those disagreements to be resolved (hence, foundationalism, communitarianism, and proceduralism).
Hunter makes the case that at the founding and for subsequent decades, the in-group for purposes of solidarity was defined as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and the society of the United States was quite self-conscious and aware of itself according to that identity. This was, of course, bad news for Native Americans, Mormons, and Catholics, but especially for Afro-Americans. Hunter gives a fascinating overview of the debate over Black inclusion in America and the abolition movement.
One of the key points Hunter makes in his discussion of the abolition debate is the fact that the root of the debate was not over the values of the hybrid-Enlightenment—both sides of the debate were in full agreement in affirming those values—but over the human status of Black people. This is significant in that it demonstrates that there remained, even within such a critical debate, consensus on the substance of the founding ideals. What was debated was not those ideals, but the meaning of personhood.
A second notable element is that this provides an early example of when coercion became necessary in enforcing one group’s preferred boundary of solidarity. This was manifested most intensely in the Civil War, but the application of violence and coercion continued in the Black personhood debate through segregation, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the eventual military enforcement of desegregation. In Hunter's telling, this coercion demonstrates how the hybrid-Enlightenment failed in this area to hold the nation together and peacefully provide the solidarity needed to maintain political union.
The Civil War and the debate over Black personhood also represents the beginning of the public loss of credibility for American religion, which has continued to the present day. This occurred as the core dispute over which the Civil War was fought, the question of Black personhood, was based on particular theological claims. When the war was over the fact that such a catastrophe could have arisen out of a conflict over differences in religious views put the US on a path to bracket such disputes in public life. Hunter traces the strengthening of this development through events like the Scopes trial and Prohibition, and also the prodigious writings of John Dewey in his attempt to re-conceptualize the idea of American democracy as a secular enterprise (and of course, his attempt to mold institutions like American schools to perpetuate this vision). This loss of the credibility of religion as a source of public authority left a vacuum, even as thinkers such as John Richard Neuhaus and Reinhold Niebuhr tried, with only minor success, to re-cast the authority of religion in ways that were broadly acceptable to the public.
It’s often tempting to consider the theological or biblical arguments that undergirded the defenses of slavery to be pretextual or bad-faith, but Hunter portrays those theological beliefs to have been sincerely held, at least to the same degree as those who found a theological basis for human equality. This raises the question of whether the hybrid-Enlightenment, as a foundation for the United States’ public culture, might be particularly vulnerable in its protestant character? Protestantism has long been criticized for its individualist view of authority. With that as the paradigm of the United States, perhaps there could never be any authoritative voice to enforce the recognition of the humanity of African Americans other than force and coercion.
With religion being discredited as a source of authority, on what basis does American society answer its questions of inclusion or values or justice? The values of the hybrid-Enlightenment guided this effort for much of American history, but most of the middle of the book traces the gradual exhaustion of those values as an effective resource for this task. Even as religion's public authority had waned, the notion that America had certain values at its founding and that those values were worth moving toward was generally supported by America’s elite institutions that shaped its culture.
However, the narrative Hunter traces demonstrates that this is less and less the case, and today it's a notion that is largely discredited in those institutions. Now, without those values to draw upon as a source of authority, other strategies must be employed to promote one’s view of the good and one’s preferred boundaries of solidarity. Various such strategies were proposed throughout the 20th century, especially notably Richard Rorty's notion that authority essentially resides in assertion, combined with a mild antagonism and good-natured mockery ("joshing") to pressure dissenters into conformity.
So if the cultural logic of the hybrid-Enlightenment has exhausted its resources for American society to work through its differences, how might the public culture be revitalized? Unfortunately, in Hunter’s account, it’s not the case that there is simply a void where the hybrid-Enlightenment once operated within the culture, but those values have been replaced by the cultural logic of nihilism. Hunter details four ways that nihilism has become the primary mode of operation within our public culture: epistemic failure (absence of knowable reality), ethical incoherence (lack of moral absolutes), existential despair (lifelong struggle to find meaning in life), and political annihilation (“a will to bring enemies to nothing”.) This nihilism has made general solidarity impossible, and the populace has turned to counter-publics (essentially, identity groups) where solidarity on a smaller scale may still be achieved. However, the relation of particular counter-publics to any other groups that are not adjacent to them (or the sources of their internal solidarity) is by and large that of ressentiment.
Ressentiment is a term of art that Hunter acknowledges can be a bit difficult to define. It’s the word adopted by Nietzsche from French to describe a kind of resentment that is not just an anger at an injury, but a whole identity forged around injuries, real, imagined, or even anticipated, which the injured party feeds, nurtures, and cherishes. Hunter quotes from Nietzsche,
The sufferers, one and all, are frighteningly willing and inventive in their pretexts for painful emotions; they even enjoy being mistrustful and dwelling on wrongs and imagined slights: they rummage through the bowels of their past and present for obscure, questionable stories that will allow them to wallow in tortured suspicion and intoxicate themselves with their own poisonous wickedness.
It’s this ressentiment that locks the conflicts of identity into an impasse.
In Hunter’s words,
The dependencies of the aggrieved upon their injury, subordination, and powerlessness actually subvert the aim to transcend them, leading them for all practical purposes, to reproach equality rather than live constructively into it, to reprove empowerment rather than work toward it, to disdain freedom rather than practice it and enjoy its benefits.
As the logic of ressentiment freezes out the will to work toward progress through compromise, and the collapse of authority forecloses any appeal to obligation or virtue, the only ways to wield influence become authoritarian.
This authoritarianism impulse crosses and transcends partisan affiliation. Hunter’s authoritarianism of the right includes theories about the legitimacy of non-democratic government, such as so-called “common good conservatism”, as well as statements about “extra-political confrontation” (which one hopes are more rhetorical than material, January 6th not withstanding.) Hunter describes the authoritarian impulses of the left in terms of a continuation of Rorty’s authority by assertion, with his affect of geniality having been rejected in favor of ever harsher “cancelations”.
Notwithstanding the clear continuity between Rorty’s thinking and today’s cancel culture, there are some important distinctions. Rorty viewed his tactics as a revision to the “rules of game” — the method of building and enforcing consensus regarding contentious issues. The new game that is being played today is to use the practice of boundary-making itself to enforce consensus. That is, you no longer win by “joshing” people until they join your side and agreeing with your preferred boundaries; you win by asserting the other side to be illegitimate.
However, even this strategy seems to have historical precedent. As there has always been an “out group,” there have clearly been instances throughout US history where political opponents are delegitimized through association with that out-group. Thinking back to abolition, popular depictions show advocates for slavery referring to abolitionists as ******r-lovers. McCarthyism discredited leftist people and organizations by associating them with communism. Wokism likewise delegitimized anyone espousing conservative values by labeling them as “white supremacists.” Trumpism got its start by questioning whether Barack Obama was even a legitimate American citizen, and President Trump’s rhetoric more broadly is characterized by its dehumanization of his opponents. In all these cases you have one political movement expanding the definition of a group that is already considered outside the boundaries of solidarity so that their political enemies now fall within that definition. That said, while “cancel culture” may be nothing new under the sun, I think it’s safe to say that it’s gone from a fringe tactic to mainstream, on both sides of the political divide.
There is a third authoritarianism that Hunter describes as technocratic authoritarianism, where those in the know “nudge” the unwashed masses into making choices that will bring optimal benefit. In his discussion of these authoritarian impulses, Hunter circles back to his earlier reference to “agonism” and discusses how some theorists see our current political dispensation to require that we put aside notions of reasonable debate, compromise, and mutuality and accept the reality that politics is at its heart the struggle to dominate.
Even as Hunter lays out the history of the erosion of America’s cultural foundations and its move towards authoritarianism, I can’t help but wonder how this account interacts with other contemporary trends. There have been historical contingencies that have no doubt made things worse, like the Great Recession of 2008 and the Iraq War. There’s also the technological context that influences politics. A few years ago, Jonathan Haidt published an article in The Atlantic that attributed the ills of America’s public culture to Twitter.
While some see these contingencies as being the root of our current problems, I think that the best way to understand these features are as intensifiers of the existing trend. It may be possible to mitigate some impacts of this trend through reforms to our technological ecosystem, but proposals for reform often fail to answer the questions of, “How?” and “Who?” (Not to mention, from the perspective of the current powers that be: “Why?”) The current elites and structures of power are of course the ones that benefit most from the current system — who has both the will and the ability to change it? I confess that I felt a brief period of blissful optimism when Elon Musk announced he was planning to buy Twitter. I thought that maybe he had been motivated by reading Haidt’s article and decided to heroically make the financial sacrifice for the common good and buy the thing to shut it down. In retrospect, I can’t help but be embarrassed by my naivety.
So, if agonism is to be our new political dispensation and this struggle to dominate is to be the key defining feature of American politics going forward, how should we respond? Is there any way out? Hunter is not optimistic, though he does affirm the necessity of hope. His view is that an actual civil war is unlikely due to the geographic dispersion of vying parties, but he anticipates an increasing frequency of political unrest. He himself acknowledges that he doesn’t clearly see what is the way forward for American politics. There are all kinds of “one neat trick” tweaks that have been proposed for our political system that would certainly make improvements to its functioning (expand the House! multi-member districts! ranked choice voting! open primaries!) but as in the potential for technological reform, the questions of, “How?”, “Who?” and, “Why?” loom large over such improvements.
One potential exception to the dominance of nihilism in public culture may be in certain instantiations of local politics. Hunter’s description of the cultural logic of ressentiment and its manifestation in the body politic rings true in general, but fails to accurately describe particular experiences, especially at the local level. I believe that this is because at the local level those cultural characteristics of nihilism can be overcome.
Reality at the local level is actually knowable. You need only walk around and speak with people you know and trust. Additionally, on the local level it is easier to find ethical standards that are broadly shared. Certainly institutions of meaning-making (e.g. families, churches, civic associations) are weakened, and yet they still function. Finally, even after conflicts are resolved, we will still have to live amongst each other, regardless of our politics. This reality should discourage us from seeking the annihilation of local political rivals.
However, in a dominant atmosphere as politically poisonous as our own, local holdouts of solidarity are likely to eventually be overwhelmed. The need for national change cannot be denied. One of Hunter’s final paragraphs is worth quoting in full:
In sum, what we need is a paradigm shift within liberal democracy rooted in an ethical vision for the re-formation of public life, a courageous and visionary leadership capable of enacting it as practices within the entire range of major institutions, a well formed citizenry that would support it and participate in it, a healthy civic ecosystem within which the nonpolitical elements of politics would develop and thicken, all drawing on the affirmations of a renewed humanism that would affirm the humanity of all human beings in their particularity and repudiate any and all political violence toward them.
It would define a new, vital, principled, capacious, and defiant center, the conditions of which would encourage the insight to see the nihilisms that undermine human flourishing, would arouse the resolve to renounce them, but then would inspire the wisdom and ingenuity to imagine ways of seeing and ways of living that move beyond them. It would recognize that the most serious culture war we face at present is not against the ‘other side,’ but against the nihilism that insinuates itself in the symbolic, institutional, and practical patterns of the late modern world, not least its politics.
So what does this mean for Christian engagement in public life? “The Culture War” is often portrayed as being separate and beneath “politics.” “Politics” is concrete and material — defense contracts, tax laws, medical regulations, transportation policy — and “culture war” is ethereal and abstract — language usage and attitudes towards sex and race. Very Serious political pundits always roll their eyes a bit when they are required to talk about “culture war issues.” Christians, however, have long argued for the significance of the “culture war” issues in politics.
Tragically, we are mostly still in the old paradigm, where the main division is where we stand on particular cultural matters. The new paradigm that we need to recognize is that nobody who operates according to the logic of nihilism can be trusted to secure any culture war wins in the political process. The minimum qualifications that any candidate or institution must hold to win our support are whether or not they can affirm that reality can be known, that meaning can be found, that ethics can have integrity, and that our opponents are still human beings, worthy of dignity and respect.
Many questions remain. How might any kind of revitalization occur at scale when the institutions and elites best positioned to enact change are the ones benefiting from the status quo? Who would lead a reform movement, and why would they? Hunter’s call for a “paradigm shift” toward a renewed humanism is aspirational, but it’s hard to see where the momentum for such a shift would come from in a society that increasingly defines itself by what (and whom) it opposes. If there’s a way forward, Hunter doesn’t quite find it—but if nothing else, he forces us to grapple with just how dire the situation has become.