One of the most basic and pressing problems for those of us seeking to reckon with the unavoidable pluralism of our moment is that the political method most conducive to that task—some species of liberalism—is now widely demeaned on both the right and left.
On the right, this is a long-standing talking point that can, in the Trump era, be traced back to the anti-liberal Catholics, such as Sohrab Ahmari and Patrick Deneen. (I am using "anti-liberal Catholic" to describe both of them because neither explicitly embraced the label "integralist" to my knowledge, or at least never did so in quite as fulsome a way as, say, someone like Adrian Vermeule or Pater Edmund Waldstein. That said, they were obviously fellow travelers with the integralists.)
To their immense credit both Ahmari and Deneen have attempted to make this critique while avoiding the obvious and ugly paths that right-wing illiberalism too often goes down. Indeed, both have been amongst the loudest critics of the turn the American right has taken toward race ideology and fascism.
Their situation, however, is a useful one for explaining the problem facing those of us who would like to preserve a species of liberalism in the aftermath of the Trump years.
For the morally sane members of the more creative pockets of the American right there is a desire to somehow construct a political theory that is all three of these things:
- right-wing
- anti-liberal
- anti-fascist
That trio is basically the Catholic Integralist position, for example. The trouble is that if you care about coherence, you only get to have two of those three things. You can be right wing and anti-liberal, but then you're going to end up fascist. Consider, for example, the fact that it was the Integralists who first worked to mainstream many of the right-wing thinkers, such as Carl Schmitt, now enjoying such popularity amongst the dissident right.
We can be grateful for the fact that the first group of Schmitt readers on the Trumpian right are better men than the second. But that does relatively little to change the fact that the mainstreaming of figures like Schmitt on the American right has produced completely predictable outcomes.
Another option is to be right-wing and anti-fascist, but then you're just some species of liberal, even if not a proceduralist sort. This is the option Ahmari has already taken through his embrace of Christian social democracy, without necessarily acknowledging it, and it seems the inevitable outcome for Professor Deneen as well.
Finally, you can be anti-liberal and anti-fascist, but then you're going to have to stop being right wing.
There is a similar, though subtly different problem, on the American left. Many on that side of our political divide want to simultaneously be:
- left-wing
- pro-liberalism
- pro-gender ideology
For reasons that Matthew Lee Anderson explained many years ago, that isn't really an option either. You can be left wing and liberal, but then crash against the hard fact that contemporary gender ideology seems to be unavoidably illiberal. By its very nature, it construes marriage and the family as being a thing created and defined by the state rather than a thing arising from nature and recognized by the state. That is even before you consider the fraught status of both free speech and religious liberty in nations committed to gender ideology, as seen in the past decade in both the United States and the UK. So you can be left wing and pro-gender ideology, but slide into illiberalism. Or you can be left wing and liberal, but then your own relationship to the gender revolution becomes highly fraught.
This is the problem a figure like Jonathan Rauch, admittedly more a man of the right, is crashing into even now, I think. If I am understanding him correctly, Rauch wants an engaged public Christianity because he sees it, rightly, as the seedbed for a healthy liberalism. But also he wants a public Christianity that is accepting of gay marriage.
So far as I can tell, he doesn't really have a satisfying answer to the problem of how to reconcile the two given Christianity's historic teachings on marriage. He wants liberalism as political method and he wants a kind of 21st century political ideology he calls "liberalism" but these are distinct things and there's ample reason to wonder if the method can survive the stressors imposed on it by the ideology. At minimum, the encounter between the two seems to manufacture John Gray's "two faces of liberalism" problem, which I have written about before.
In short, the challenge is that the particular stressors exerting such force on both the right and the left make each respective bloc's relationship to liberalism immensely complex and fraught.
The most obvious way of resolving the problem forces the constituencies in question to back track in a significant way. The right would need to give up their anti-liberal talking points and, far more important, once again be willing to recognize the validity of outcomes within a liberal system that go against their will, such as the result of the 2020 election or Supreme Court rulings that go against the desires of President Trump. Put another way, they must return to a politics governed by law and not by men.
The left, meanwhile, needs to step back from its radical reimagining of the body, marriage, and the family and its hostility to religious liberty and free speech.
Both outcomes appear unlikely to me, but if I have learned anything in the past ten years it is the danger of making firm political predictions.
Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, The Dispatch, National Review, Comment, Christianity Today, and Plough. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
