Are Bari Weiss and Protestant Franco the Only Options?

James Diddams of Providence recently wrote an interesting short column for First Things on the political coalitions that orthodox Christians might seek out in the post-Trump world.

Diddams identified two primary lanes that many conservative Christians of various stripes now seem to find plausible: The anti-woke liberalism of Bari Weiss's The Free Press or the illiberal Protestant Francoism of the Christian Nationalists.

Diddams's argument is mostly pragmatic, noting that Weiss's approach appears to have far greater support amongst voters:

Bearing all this in mind, the right faces two options: a turn toward some form of religious postliberalism, which would necessarily alienate a significant number of “Bari Weiss voters,” or a new “fusion” with former Democrats, newly amenable to conservative arguments. The new fusion would inevitably entail compromise; the Bari Weiss coalition is not likely to accept efforts toward strict abortion regulation, restricting IVF, or overturning Obergefell anytime soon. And yet, given the right’s significant winning streak, it seems plausible that the conservative movement would be better served by working through this emerging coalition.

So far as the pragmatic argument goes, it is hard to argue with Diddams. The aspiring totalitarianism of its proponents as well as the esoteric ideology behind Christian Nationalism places a very hard ceiling on its potential with voters, as even the close allies of the Christian nationalists are now beginning to acknowledge. That said, I think the pragmatic argument is probably the least interesting part of the framing here.

In the first place, I think Diddams's framing is slightly off. He is correct to identify illiberal and liberal strands within the new right and to say that Christians would do well to side with the liberal bloc rather than the illiberal. But in practice the action on the new right isn't "Protestant Francoism" vs "Bari Weiss Liberalism." Christian Nationalism is, at this point, fairly irrelevant politically.

The power broker for the illiberal part of the new right is not Christian nationalism, but something closer to Peter Thiel's gay space fascism. This, of course, is the context in which one should note the White House's support for both a new abortion pill as well as its enthusiastic support for IVF. For this part of the new right, the Christian Nationalists are not really a meaningful influence; they are mostly just a useful and easily manipulated voting bloc. Give them some empty rhetoric at the March for Life and they'll line up to vote for you, even as you prove to be the most pro-choice, pro-Obergefell, and pro-IVF GOP presidency to date. So Diddams's framing somewhat breaks because the choice on offer isn't between a problematic Christian illiberal right or Weiss's less problematic version of the new right. The choice is actually between which deeply sub-Christian political ideology you will choose, with one option being not Protestant Franco, but rather the Tech Right.

And yet if gay space fascism is a bad option, I do not find what we might cheekily call Weiss's gay zionist neo-liberalism to be a terribly compelling alternative. I say that as a reader of The Free Press, to be clear, and as someone who is grateful for their work. But when you remove the specific challenges of our recent cultural moment, what I mostly see from Weiss's coalition is, as Diddams sometimes concedes, a recycled version of the old fusionism—and, of course, it was precisely the failures of that older fusionism that led to the emergence of the various illiberal ideologies of the new right. (And, in any case, one can easily point to the old fusionism's rather horrible foreign policy record to complicate any narrative that simplistically assumes that Weiss's project holds the moral high ground.)

So when we move past the pragmatic case put forth by Diddams, I'm not actually sure where his proposed course of action will lead us: It seems almost to lock us into a cycle in which we do a certain sort of right wing fusionism that isn't altogether coherent but works politically, then that coalition collapses under its own contradictions, begetting a backlash and an interest in harder right wing ideologies, which then fails to galvanize a mass movement, incentivizing people back toward the old fusionism. But given that, why should we expect Weiss's fusionism to avoid the trap of the older form? Why will Weiss's consensus remain living when it is so similar to the dead one that came before?

Most of all, however, I worry that framing the choices for Christians in this way implicitly absolves us of any responsibility to offer intellectual leadership or to try and chart a different course.

I am under no illusions about the size of the electorate for such alternative proposals, to be clear. But, then, significant democratic movements do not often begin with a critical mass of voter support. Rather, they begin with credible intellectual and moral authority which over time produces significant voter support. That, I think, is the opportunity for Christians today. As the left continues to be lost in the wilderness and the right is increasingly tolerant of deeply cruel and inhumane and frequently illiberal norms, it seems to me that Christians have a unique opportunity to model a healthier and authentically liberal politics—in the best sense of that term.

So what should our alternative to these two sub-Christian political visions be?

To answer that question sufficiently would take more time and words than I have here. But to begin, let me propose three core principles that should define our political project:

First, human weakness, vulnerability, and contingency are normal parts of the human experience. Healthy political projects recognize this and account for it through a robust account of human dignity and a deep concern with encouraging practices of care for the weak. This means we must be robustly pro-life and anti-euthanasia, but it also means much more than just that.

Second, we should recognize that one responsibility of government is legislating morality under certain situations when the harm of failing to do so is sufficiently great and the risk of doing so is sufficiently small. This is why we should ban online gambling and pornography, for example. But it is also why we should have severe restrictions or even bans on social media use for minors. There is a rightful authority the government has as a moral protector that can be easily abused, to be sure, but when government abdicates from this role altogether the evil forces set loose on the population are quite horrific, as we are now witnessing.

Third, we should, following Augustine, recognize that political projects cannot create utopias, that our chief end and greatest need cannot be fulfilled by politics or anything else in this life, and that political perfectionism is a dangerous temptation that will always lead to abuse, corruption, and arbitrary power.

What does such a project look like taken as a whole?

• It would be robustly and pervasively pro-life.
• It would seek to make it easier to be good by removing easy ways of being bad, particularly those uniquely novel ways now facilitated by digital technology.
• It would recognize that what we are seeking is not perfection, but rather the creation of civic society in which we can patiently endure with one another amidst our deep differences as we seek the good together.

That is a messy program, of course, and one that does not remotely fit with the dominant blocs of either party. (It does, of course, fit quite obviously with Catholic social teaching as well as the seeds of Protestant social teaching one can find in the early 20th century Dutch Calvinists.)

This project presupposes that we must not only practice tolerance, but even mercy—choosing to forego chances to punish our political enemies when they come to us and even when they did not extend such mercy to us. It also recognizes that we have a thick enough idea of the good that we can be honest about the fact that we are legislating morality and that is OK within certain bounds and limits.

Such a program seems to me to be almost entirely at odds with the tech right's vision of political life. Certainly the tech right has no use for weakness, or, rather, the only use it has for the weak is grinding them into dollars or raw materials to be used by the tech overclass. Nor will the tech right have much use for the ambiguity and imperfection one must accept as the price of patiently enduring with others in civic society. Indeed, the pervasive humanism of this vision is entirely alien to the vision of the Tech Right.

But neither will the above program be easily reconciled to what one might call the Bari Weiss Right. It seems to me that their account of virtue is so thin and their account of freedom so individualistic that they can't really reason morally about why IVF would be wrong, or even why abortion would be wrong. Certainly they cannot arrive at a proper definition of marriage, given that the movement's namesake is married to another woman. It also is not at all clear to me that their foreign policy will allow them to recognize the immense suffering imposed on many Arab Christians and others in the region by the foreign policy of the Israeli government.

In fairness, however, Weiss's Right does at least recognize the folly of political perfectionism and the need for a certain modesty about one's political goals. This is the common ground we can identify with them and is why Diddams's is correct in saying we should favor liberal versions of the new right, such as Weiss's project, rather than the illiberal visions of the Christian Nationalists. But, as I said, that is the least interesting part of the conversation.

The more interesting question is how to continue our nation's extended experiment in liberal democracy at a time when we have so little understanding of what the human person is or what demands are placed on us by the dignity of each person, both of which are questions we really need to have settled before we can begin to work out the implications of sharing a project of self-governance with those persons. Figuring out how to articulate that as a viable political project will be difficult, and yet the opportunities we might discover as we articulate a robust solidarity conservativism are practically endless.