Democracy After Nihilism

In my neighborhood in Queens, New York, my precinct was the tipping point in the red wave that swept across the city. My block voted 51% for Trump, but you walk one block to the right and the share increases sharply to 70%. Similarly, you walk one block to the left and the precincts afterward voted for Harris by 25%+ margins. My neighborhood, Ridgewood, has been experiencing a boom in development as gentrifiers from Bushwick and Williamsburg have moved westward, seeking the cheaper cost of living enjoyed by the local Hispanic and Slavic residents. The change, reflected in volatile precinct votes, is evident on a physical level. One block in my neighborhood has a beloved pizza restaurant frequented by the historic community.

However, one block over is a new bookstore café that houses books advocating for the abolition of gender, the dismantling of the American Israeli colonial empire, and the redistribution of capital. I have never seen the same person enter both places, except me. My neighborhood is coming apart all within the same 20-block radius. Like my neighborhood, America is coming apart, shuffling into left and right ecosystems, with a broad diversity of classes, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds constituting a center. And just as my childhood neighborhood became unrecognizable, America is increasingly becoming unrecognizable to multitudes. 

How did this happen? How can we go forward? For James Davison Hunter, the answer lies in tracing the deep structures of American culture since the founding to today. Building off his earlier book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Democracy, and Solidarity engages in part history, part theory, and part cultural commentary to sketch a timeline of America’s cultural dissolution. For an ambitious work, Hunter’s framework is elegant and compelling.

For Hunter, the promise of American democracy is “e plurubus unum"—"out"of many, one." Hunter traces how that statement was made true in America since its founding. 

First, the “one” that Hunter seeks isn’t rational consensus—but solidarity. “Where consensus suggests conscious and deliberate assent, what more typically binds us together in solidarity is the complex interweaving of the rational, affective, psychic, and sociological elements of human experience, things that cannot always be put into words.” In other words, the “one” that America has felt is a past and destiny shared across differences. Hunter contends, compellingly, that the source of this unity was a shared religious and philosophical culture—part Enlightenment and part Calvinist—that provided a framework of tolerable difference politically. This hybrid enlightenment drew boundary lines that defined what it meant to be an American.

However, as America “worked through” its contradictions, it exhausted the culture that underwrote its solidarity and challenged the authority of the hybrid enlightenment to draw boundaries. Solidarity based on shared concrete religious and philosophical values gave way to solidarity based on shared faith in “democracy” or “Judeo-Christian values” which eventually gave way to solidarity based on agreement in procedural liberalism, and even this is now called into question as a source of shared agreement.

Hunter also excels in diagnosing the present moment as dehumanizing and nihilistic. I take this nihilism to first arise from a lack of shared moral consensus and vocabulary. Hunter notes, “‘rationality’ has given way to multiple and competing rationalities, none of which is privileged. Sociologically, there is no single truth, only multiple truths, each with its own public.” The diverse sources of information and the lack of a prevailing authority mean that our culture dissolves into subcultures with their own ecosystems of truth. “There is now no authority by which questions of truth, reality, or public ethics could be settled definitively.” The dissolution of public knowledge has given way to incommensurable public discourse about morality. “Public discourse as a rational exchange of competing positions is difficult and perhaps impossible in our public culture.” As a result, as a culture, we are unable to define the value of human life. 

Hunter, here, picking up a thread laid decades ago by Alasdair Macintyre in After Virtue, carries it out to its conclusion in our culture today. For instance, we currently have the most sophisticated medical technology devoted to sustaining the lives of neonates. My wife, a neonatal ICU nurse, has unique protocols for taking care of a premature infant each week. She and the other nurses and doctors on her floor work nonstop to maximize the child’s chance of survival—even to the point of doing procedures in the dark to conserve a 24-week-old's calorie consumption so that he has enough energy to breathe. Our technological sophistication and talent allocation to save a neonate are unprecedented.

Yet, that same neonate’s life can be terminated by abortion. As it stands today, the same life can have nearly unlimited resources devoted to its survival or can be killed depending on the will of the mother. A society where these two realities can both take place is incoherent. The value it places on human life is arbitrary.  Consider as well that currently in the West we are having debates over the legality of medically assisted death. At the same time, we place great emphasis on the necessity of mental health and discourage suicide by providing suicide hotlines. How can a society allow someone to choose death and also have suicide hotlines?

The answer I believe Hunter points us to is that we don’t have a society at all. Rather, we have an anti-culture that instrumentalizes humanity. The issue of euthanasia in Western society in particular is instructive because behind the perverse logic of death with dignity is the economic benefit governments gain from a “costly” citizen. The logic here reveals that in the absence of public morality, the only thing that can be agreed upon is economic utility, technological efficiency, and "choice." At the larger level, this anti-culture manifests in the form of government by bureaucrats and technocrats. Hunter writes, “From markets, business, commerce, and entertainment to government, law, public policy, communication, healthcare, and the military," it operates without regard for persons, treating humans as faceless, interchangeable cogs in a machine. 

Audacious as this may seem, I believe Hunter has not fully identified the scope of the problem. In the past three years, we have seen all forms of society embrace AI technology in the name of efficiency. We face the prospect in the next few years of AI replacing entire fields. But what does this say about the majority of human work except that it is literally dehumanizing, meant to form the worker into a cog in a machine? Under bureaucratic government, humans are thought of as simple units of consumption, utility, and productivity. The humanities provide no relief; they too are subject to “efficiencies” in AI or are disposed of for more “useful” fields of study. But it’s precisely the humanities that generate the diversity and beauty of human culture. 

These processes all have one message: What makes us unique is not important. “Local cultures that are the wellspring of particular customs, habits of life, and identities are, if not destroyed, certainly leveled, absorbed, or colonized into a featureless homogeneity.” We are understood as members of an economic opportunity zone. I was taught the McDonald’s thesis of foreign policy: “No two countries that both have McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other.” Even the neighborhood I’m in is nothing but a collection of Zillow listings. Indeed, even the mortgages on the homes around me are bought and sold in an international system for the sake of market efficiency and risk management. The technocratic forces at play, ever since I’ve been alive, have always been like this.

However, these forces have not been without notable responses. 2008 was a key moment in the collapse of faith even in technological efficiency. The economic collapse caused by gross mismanagement and the resulting lack of accountability, slow recovery, and economic malaise has resulted in the rival political factions that exist today as an attempt by average citizens to reassert control. 

Hunter locates identity politics as a response to this dehumanization. These identity groups  “represent a means to power and influence in a world that has rendered average citizens powerless… an assertion of distinctiveness in a world that tends to flatten or level all meaningful differences, the possibility for meaningful belief and purpose…a way of belonging in a world that atomizes our existence even as it weakens the ties of local and organic community, a heartfelt plea for recognition and the dignity it confers.”  But these groups are at best spurious because the distinctiveness, meaning, belonging, and recognition they have is based on nothing more than political interest. They are simply claims to power

But a democracy characterized by nothing more than competing claims to power is at root nihilistic. This is the central issue at root in our politics today. This nihilism is not a belief in “nothing” as such but a rejection of civilizational values above the will to power. 

Later in Democracy and Solidarity, Hunter identifies three competing wills in our day: left authoritarianism, right authoritarianism, and authoritarian technocratic rule. By Hunter’s analysis, Left and Right authoritarianism are de facto nihilist in that they are built of a rejection of civilizational values and institute an American way of life contrary to America as an intervention to the void left by the dissolution of public Christian culture. The paradox of this dilemma, which threatens the success of any of these wills, is that America generated solidarity not through law but through voluntary association.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that, with respect to solidarity, Christianity moderated the otherwise pure freedom granted by American law. “The law [that] allows the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving of everything and forbids them to dare everything… religion…must be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use of it.” As Christianity lost its ability to facilitate social coherence, the reign of private liberty took hold. However, to generate the benefits of Christianity in America, through the wielding of power only, would therefore go against the American culture. Paradoxically, then, even conservative right authoritarianism could not succeed in replacing the cultural logic of America. In other words, these competing wills seek not to reform America but to re-found America. America’s liberal logic has played itself out to show a hollow, dehumanizing core. As one thinker has put it, “the liberal, secularized state draws its life from presuppositions it cannot itself guarantee.” Why salvage it? Such is the logic of our competing movements. Though they promise escape from the abyss, they ultimately lead us further into it by facilitating a complete rejection of American civilization. There is no solidarity in these paths – only perpetual competing wills to power. All happens within the frame of nihilism.

At the same time, there is no use in returning to a solidarity based on procedure. Procedural liberalism is a position that united by consensus; it does not generate a common people with a shared destiny. The competing moral visions in America are too vast and there is no way to facilitate discourse since we lack a shared moral vocabulary. Procedural pluralism at best facilitates balkanization without a cultural logic unifying the country. 

Any antidote to nihilism must therefore seek to unify the country by introducing a shared moral vocabulary that transforms consensus into solidarity. The American regime does not need to be re-founded; the American people must be reformed through returning to the cultural logic that made America successful. 

The best option available for reform alongside these means is a return to American individualism moderated by Christian civic virtue and competence. Alongside equality, freedom has been the clarion call of the American cultural logic. Hence, it remains the only cultural concept  rich enough to recenter American culture. However, this freedom must be transformed from private liberty into ordered liberty. This transformation must take place through the coordinated actions of individuals, neighborhoods, churches, and executive action that reject instrumentalizing humanity and affirm human dignity. It must model liberty meant for the advancement of society as a whole. In short, any renewal must combine freedom with the good, not one without the other. The past decade has shown a malaise at functional nihilism—there is a yearning for an opening for a new cultural agenda to unite the country. A movement that renews freedom ordered toward the common good of society, one that resists instrumentalizing logic, can succeed. It can offer belonging, recognition, and thriving by focusing on the promises basic to the common good—security, affordability, and competent public government. 

Similarly, social conservatism can begin to be renewed by focusing on developing the best conditions for the development of children. Initiatives such as blocking phones in school or restricting access to pornography for children have broad support and can be useful entryways to inject ordered liberty in embryonic form. They work by using the shared concern for children as a basis to evaluate and moderate technology. This will in turn allow us to reorient our relationship with technology to serve the common good as a whole. At the civic level, churches must work to provide social cohesion, as they did before, for their community. That is, churches must take communal leadership over their local communities and their well-being. 

We must rebuild the common good needed for solidarity organically and intentionally. While there is a cultural war at play, a vision for the common good recognizes that the majority aren’t partisan but seeking a path that can guide them through life. In this sense, the culture war is really a fight over who gets to build a culture. This culture  must be thick enough to account for massive changes in technology, mediate deep differences, and most importantly, work for most of the country. Christians are well positioned to cast vision for this culture because they have a robust anthropology of the human person that can reaffirm human sanctity. 

But first, Christians must recover and articulate this anthropology, showing that it resonates with the deepest longings of the human experience and can address our unparalleled technological disruption. Second, the Church must embody this anthropology, beginning with the cultivation of its members into not just members of the Church but well-formed public citizens. Third, the Church must incorporate a whole anthropology as part of its evangelistic outreach, proclaiming that Christ offers salvation from nihilism. This whole anthropology must be incorporated into our evangelistic efforts. All of this represents a level of coordination that sets its horizons beyond seeking power and sets out a vision to care for the people wrecked by dissolution. In other words, it works backwards from consensus to eventual solidarity through the long, enduring process of virtue formation. 

Our Lord said that in the end times, “because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” (Matt 24:12). Our Lord warns us of the great temptation to not love the wrong things but to stop loving altogether. As Augustine says, “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.” Then our lack of love puts us at risk of not just being divided, but ceasing to be a people at all. The work of Christians in the next decades must be to, hoping against hope, rekindle a magnanimous national love of virtue. They must rebuild the middle civic institutions integral to democracy through the cultivation of competence, love of community, and a common end of flourishing.