It’s not hard to see that authority has fallen on hard times in American public life. For generations, activists on the cultural and political Left have exhorted us to “question authority” and Hollywood has served up a steady diet of heroes and heroines to model for us such courageous non-conformity. Conservatives, while somewhat more likely to stand up for religious and perhaps parental authorities, have not hesitated to lay their own axe to the tree of political authority, preaching a political gospel of liberation from “big government”—a term elastic enough to encompass the Social Security Administration and the small-town zoning board. Even the so-called “New Right,” which loves to mock the libertarianism of the Old Right, tends to be authoritarian only when fantasizing on Twitter; in real life, most of its adherents are as likely to jaywalk or open-carry as anyone.
In the intellectual realm, progressives have engaged in a decades-long project of “deconstruction” and “critical theory” to interrogate every received orthodoxy for any hints of “power” and “privilege.” Meanwhile, conservatives, fed up with what they see as the Marxist capture of academia, frequently encourage the American reflex for anti-intellectualism, sneering at the follies of “experts” and instilling a habitual distrust of anything claiming to be “mainstream” or “consensus.”
This crisis of authority was thrown into stark relief in 2020, when public health authorities were seen as little more than tyrants by the Right, and law enforcement authorities were similarly pilloried by the Left. Today, a large majority of Americans cannot recognize an act of political authority as such; they perceive it as either brazen oppression or craven abdication.
Where did this crisis of authority come from? It would be tempting to blame it simply on Americans’ overheated love affair with freedom. Indeed, this is the conclusion to which many “post-liberals” have come, from Catholic integralists to “Christian nationalists.” Having subsisted for centuries on the heady draught of Lockean liberalism, so this narrative goes, Americans have grown drunk on liberty, are obsessed with individual autonomy, and accordingly cannot help but oppose authority—freedom and authority being opposites on this conception. The problem, on this account, lies with our unruly demos, headstrong and restless, in the face of which authority seems powerless.
Although I share much of the post-liberal critique, and agree that our obsession with autonomy has led us badly astray, I do not think this is an adequate narrative of the roots of our present crisis. It is not enough to pin the blame on “too much freedom,” for as we will see, rightly conceived, authority and freedom are not opposites. Our problem with authority stems in large part from our tendency to confuse or conflate different types of authority: specifically epistemic and political authority. This confusion is nowhere so widespread as among authorities themselves. If they do not know how to act rightly as authorities—specifically as political authorities—then we can hardly be blamed for failing to recognize and respond to them as such.
Let us begin, however, by offering a very general account of what authority is, before attempting a more precise classification. As soon as we begin to look closely at the idea of authority, we will discover that far from limiting, restricting, or opposing freedom, authority is what makes free action possible. It is, in the words of Oliver O’Donovan, “the objective correlate of freedom.” This claim has become so counterintuitiveto us 21st-century Americans that it might require a bit of unpacking.
Suppose I am giving a lecture at a conference. Why am I free to give that lecture at that conference? Well, because the conference organizer invited me and the conference organizer is answerable to the board of whatever organization is holding the conference. In other words, the organizer has authority, and on the basis of that authority he had the freedom to act and, in turn, to give me the freedom to act. Without such an act of authority, I might have been free to get up from my seat and step up to the lectern for a minute or two, but presumably after some awkward scrambling and whispering behind the scenes someone would have forcibly removed me. Authority, in other words, authorizes—as the centurion says in Matthew 8: “For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes.”
We may make another related point: in any collective undertaking, which requires coordination of many parts, freedom necessarily rests upon authority. This point was vividly illustrated by Victor Austin in his book Up with Authority by the example of an orchestra. No trombonist, cellist, or violinist is free to play a Beethoven symphony without a conductor to coordinate their actions toward a shared end. They could play their parts in some sense, to be sure, but they would be heard only as constituents of a cacophony, not as parts of a symphony. Without the authority of the conductor, the musicians would not be free. Or, to use another metaphor more appropriate to college football season, even the best running back is very unlikely to be free to run for a touchdown except by submitting to the play-calling authority of his coach and quarterback.
Even trivial decision-making quite frequently rests upon authority. When I go to buy toothpaste at the drugstore, I may reach for the tube that boasts “#1 Doctor-Recommended” or the tube that boasts of its plaque-fighting abilities—not because I really understand what plaque is, but because my dentist told me it was bad. To be sure, authority is not the only source of reasons for acting. I could decide purely on the basis of personal preference—perhaps I am particularly vain about the whiteness of my teeth, and so I choose the toothpaste that promises a “triple whitening agent.” But why should this decision be more “free” than the former ones? Authority and freedom, then, are not in a zero-sum relationship. Power and freedom are, however, and authority is often confused with power, especially by those seeking to discredit it. But whereas power represents simply a capacity to accomplish something—as a tiger or indeed a vice-grip has power, a power that can certainly limit my freedom—authority represents a capacity to undertake, and to enable others to undertake, rational action. By providing reasons for acting, authority avoids the zero-sum game of power: seeing the reason you provide, I want to act, and thus your authority expands my freedom rather than contracting it.
So far, so good. But if you were paying close attention, you might notice an important difference between the examples above—the toothpaste example represented a case of epistemic authority; the others were forms of political authority. So let’s spend some time unpacking the distinction.
Before I do, two caveats are in order. The first is that I use the word “political” for lack of a better catch-all term, but do not let your minds become pigeonholed within the sphere of elections, legislators, or even policemen. What I am calling “political authority” happens on the Little League field, the corporate boardroom, the school, and the battlefield. The second is that these refer to different forms of authority, not necessarily different authorities. One and the same person may at different times and different contexts function as an epistemic authority and as a political authority, although it will be helpful to all involved if he is very clear about when he is functioning as which.
Within the household, for instance, we see parents tasked with exercising both forms of authority vis-à-vis their children. In fact, let us begin there, in the household, to observe the difference between the two. On the one hand, as father, I am tasked with instructing my children in the way that they should go. I do this through times of explicit teaching, through warnings and admonitions, and hopefully through an example that I model. I function as an epistemic authority because presumably I know things that my children do not; my greater education, experience, and wisdom equip me with a greater ability to act, and with the ability to provide them good reasons to act.
For instance, if I am teaching my daughter to ride her bike, I can model the technique, explain the principles, and encourage her to keep pedaling and she’ll stay up. My knowledge provides her a reason to act. However, notice that it does so precisely as it passes over from me to her. She receives this knowledge and acts on the basis of it. A good epistemic authority should quickly work themselves out of a job. I know things that my children do not yet know, but if I teach them well, they may soon be teaching me. My fifteen-year-old son, for instance, is already teaching me as much about Aristotle and English literature as I am teaching him. We may be tempted to think that this is all there is to parenting: sharing knowledge with your children until they surpass you.
But anyone who has parented knows there is a sterner side; there are times when the only appropriate response is not a detailed explanation but “Because I said so.” Why? How could that possibly be a sufficient reason for action? Well, because I am an authority, tasked by God with making decisions on the child’s behalf until he can make decisions on his own. My wife and I make decisions about how much the family should spend on pizza and entertainment, not my kids. To be sure, I may also teach my kids, especially when they are older, about budgeting, but notice the distinction. When I teach my kids how to budget, I am exercising epistemic authority, transferring wisdom to them. But when I simply make the household budget, I am exercising political authority, using my wisdom in the absence of theirs. There is to be sure sometimes a middle term, in which I lead by example, and in so doing tacitly transfer knowledge. But not every exercise of authority has to be justified as a form of teaching; in point of fact, my wife and I do most of our family budgeting after all of our kids are in bed!
While the parenting example hopefully elucidates the distinction I am seeking to draw, it may also confuse in part, because parenting is temporary. As both epistemic and political authority, I ought to work myself out of a job as a father, equipping my child with both the knowledge and the courage to make decisions on his own. It is I think one of the standing temptations of modernity to imagine that all exercises of political authority, all forms of inequality and hierarchy, may be similarly transient. “Upward mobility” is our economic paradigm, describing a dream in which the lowliest janitor may some day find himself in the top-floor executive suite. Similarly in politics, the democratic ideal is one in which any citizen may one day be president. Since we each see ourselves destined for greatness, we think that we each need to be educated for greatness. If I am one day to be manager, then I need to understand what the manager does and why; he shouldn’t just bark out orders to me but needs to patiently explain the rationale for every one of them. If I am going to be part of the legislative process, then as a citizen I need to understand the rationale for every law, and shouldn’t be expected to obey it until I do. There is a healthy Christian impulse at work here. The movement of Scripture is from slavery to sonship, from worship by the letter to worship in the Spirit. The New Testament church is one in which believers are not meant, as in so many other religions, to mindlessly follow the prescriptions of the priest, but to exercise a lively and rational faith, thinking the Master’s thoughts after him. This basic Christian impulse, purified and given fresh life and vitality at the Protestant Reformation, has lain behind the astounding literacy, social mobility, and democratic participation of modern Western society.
But it is our perennial temptation here, as everywhere, to immanentize the eschaton. The full transcendence of political authority, of the need to obey “because I said so,” will never happen this side of the Second Coming. Even those of us who rise high in the pecking order will still find ourselves, for most of our lives, in myriad relationships where we are called to submit to someone else’s authority without knowing, or needing to know, most of the reasons why they are acting and commanding as they are. A good leader will not ask for blind allegiance—he wants humans, not puppets, after all—so he will often pause to explain some of his reasoning. But frequently it will not be feasible to do so: either because there is no time, or because few are actually equipped to understand him, or perhaps because he himself is not even certain about what needs to be done, and yet something must, in fact, be done.
Hopefully this gives you a clear sense of the basic distinction between political and epistemic authority. Let’s delve a little deeper now into a key implication of it. Political authority must decide; epistemic authority can, however, reflect or analyze more or less indefinitely. Indeed, it is usually considered to be a virtue of good science to be falsifiable, and regularly falsified. Scientists are forever revising their judgments, and this not because they are incompetent, but precisely because they are competent enough to keep digging deeper and spotting new problems and new possible solutions. All the while they do so, they may continue to exercise effective epistemic authority, transmitting to their students a richer and richer understanding of the problems and possible solutions. Political authority, however, does not necessarily have this luxury, for political authority must terminate in action.
This difference has important implications in a world full of uncertainty. In the realm of theoretical knowledge—particularly if we confine our attention to one small fragment of reality at a time, as much modern science does—real certainty is often possible. Some things can be shown to be true by definition, others to be empirical facts. Where certainty is not possible, moreover, the epistemic authority may proportion his confidence to the level of certainty that the data permits, and invite us to do likewise. Scientists are accustomed to this kind of bet-hedging, often offering explanations or predictions with a “90% confidence interval” or a “95% confidence interval.” Such claims come with a proviso: “By all means believe this, but not completely; it could turn out to be wrong.”
In the domain of action, however, such bet-hedging is not always possible. Often we are stuck with the choice to act or not to act. Acting merely 70% or 90% of the way is futile, or perhaps worse than inaction. Consider a man who is unsure whether a particular train is the one he’s supposed to catch. He could take his chances and hop on board, or he could hold back, hoping that if the train was the one he was supposed to take, there will be another one later. What he clearly cannot do (without hazard to life and limb) is 70% board the train and 30% stay on the platform.
And yet it is precisely such 70/30 scenarios (or sometimes 51/49 scenarios) that political authority is called upon to navigate all the time. So it has been with many of our recently politically polarizing dilemmas. One expert might argue for the necessity of wearing a face mask to slow the spread of infection, while another might question the efficacy of such measures and emphasize the psychological harms of impairing face-to-face communication. In confronting such a dilemma, a public authority might choose to order a mask ordinance, or he may refrain from doing so; what he cannot plausibly do is prescribe that everyone wear a mask half on their face and half off, or wear a mask 50% of the time.
The necessity to act amid uncertainty becomes even more obvious in the case of policing. An officer may be unsure of whether a suspect is armed and threatening, but he will need to make a decision—often a split-second one—to shoot or not to shoot. To halfway shoot at the suspect may still get the officer in trouble if the suspect turns out to be unarmed, and it may still get him killed if the suspect is armed. Similarly, when it comes to a disputed presidential election, judicial authorities must ultimately rule in favor of one contender or the other; they cannot suspend judgment indefinitely or invite the rival candidates to share power.
At the heart of all properly political authority, then, lies the necessity of making decisions. Such decisions ought to rest, wherever possible, on a long train of careful deliberations; they should not be the product of mere whim or arbitrary fiat. Nonetheless, every decision ultimately requires that the authority figure terminate this train of deliberation and cut off debate. What all this points to is the fact that while neither epistemic nor political authority necessarily undermines freedom, they reconcile command and freedom, heteronomy and autonomy, in different ways. The epistemic authority does so via transmission (or at least potential transmission), the political authority by representation. Let me explain.
Recall our point earlier about authority providing reasons for action. This is most obviously true in the case of epistemic authority. If someone tells me the stove is hot, I withdraw my hand. If a trustworthy scientist tells me that getting a vaccine will reduce my chance of serious illness, I will, all things being equal, get that vaccine. If my own trusted doctor tells me that the vaccine is not a good idea for me, then I may change my mind. In each of these cases, I am acting freely, because I am acting rationally on the basis of information transmitted to me by an authority. Sometimes this transmission is not actual, but potential, as when a chemistry teacher writes a complicated formula on the board and produces a counterintuitive result. If he’s a good chemistry teacher, I am likely to accept his result as true, and if he tells me to set up my experiment accordingly, I am likely to do so, even if I don’t yet understand the numbers involved.
Do I still act freely? Well yes: because he is an epistemic authority, I trust that he has a grasp of the relevant facts, and that if I similarly grasped them, I would know that was the right way to set up my experiment. What he knows, I do not yet know for myself, but I believe it is knowable, and in the meantime, I act accordingly, hoping I will soon come to know it for myself. My action is free, because it represents the act I myself would choose were I fully in possession of the facts. Note however that such cases ought to represent the exception, rather than the rule: since the purpose of knowledge is to be transmitted, I shouldn’t rest content with allowing someone else to know on my behalf.
When it comes to political authority, however, I must rest content with allowing someone else to decide and act on my behalf, because this is necessary if a multiplicity of actors are to arrive at a common action. And I do not, crucially, need to understand and agree with the action that is taken—I do not even have to accept that if I understood, I would agree (as in the case of the chemistry experiment). “Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die” represents an extreme case of obedience to political authority, its reductio ad absurdum if you will, but the phenomenon itself is not absurd. Consider again a football team. The running back may not understand why a particular play is being called. Or he may understand, and think it is a daft idea. But he should still run it, and if it is in fact a daft idea, let the coach or quarterback learn that lesson for himself. The alternative would be an endless series of delay-of-game penalties, as every player argued his case with the quarterback. Obviously on a well-functioning team, players will often understand the rationale for a play, and coaches will seek to educate their players in their philosophy, so political authority should not be divorced from epistemic authority—but it cannot be reduced to it.
If political authority cannot necessarily reconcile freedom to command by means of transmission, how does it do so? By representation. The political authority is one who acts on my behalf or in my place. There is a vicarious nature to all such authority. Since I am free by definition whenever I act for myself, I can also be free, by extension, when another acts as myself, when I act through another. This is a principle regularly recognized in law: if for any reason I am not capable of acting for myself, or if I have contractually agreed to have another act on my behalf, then the actions of that agent or attorney are treated as if they were my own actions. But representation may operate informally as well. In any political unit (again, using that term in the very broadest of senses), the one who leads stands in for those whom he leads, and may act on their behalf—whether it’s a parent setting the household budget or a Little League coach scheduling practice.
I recall first vividly appreciating this in one great scene of an otherwise mediocre movie, Ridley Scott’s 2005 Kingdom of Heaven. The Arab leader Saladin is about to attack a Christian fortification when Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, appears at the head of his army. Saladin pauses the attack, declaring, “Jerusalem has come.” The city or indeed kingdom of Jerusalem can be said to be present on that field in the person of its king. A remarkable conversation ensues, in which Saladin and Baldwin quickly negotiate a cease-fire and Baldwin promises to punish the errant noble who had provoked the conflict. On both sides, many of their followers resent the agreement—it is not the agreement they themselves would have made—but it is made nonetheless. Political authority has acted, it has acted representatively on behalf of the whole, and it has acted decisively, bringing about an action of the whole.
So then, we discern a fundamental distinction: when it comes to political authority, I am free paradigmatically because another acts on my behalf; when it comes to epistemic authority, I am free paradigmatically because I learn how to act on my own behalf. With all this hopefully clear, it remains to (1) briefly explain why this distinction has been blurred over the past century; (2) the baleful consequences of this blurring; and (3) finally, how to revive the idea of political authority.
Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century—I will carry on the convenient convention of pinning the turning point at the election of Woodrow Wilson—we witnessed the rise of the politics of expertise. Experts were in high demand, for this was the point in history at which the complexity of human life had radically increased, but the availability of information had not yet caught up. In the age of railway timetables, trans-Atlantic steamships, and Gatling guns, it quickly became clear that the sturdy common sense and hoary maxims of the Farmer’s Almanac would no longer suffice. The world urgently needed men of science who could make sense of the profoundly complex new phenomena that had enmeshed the human race.
Thus civilization increasingly handed over the keys to the car (another of its bewildering new inventions) to a new clerisy of scientific managers who promised to make sense of the complexity. The idealistic declarations of public servants and university presidents in the age of Woodrow Wilson and FDR are quaint not only in their un-self-conscious confidence that they could speak truth and mold policy, but that people would actually listen. And listen many did: Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office with unprecedented margins on the coattails of a sincere pledge to rely on his “brain trust” to solve the biggest economic crisis in history. The cult of scientific management extended the alluring promise to reconcile the American ideal of individual liberty with comprehensive, rational social control, in an age where representation no longer seemed likely to do so.
Consider: by 1900, the explosion of national and international industries that could not be realistically regulated at the state level meant that many policies (as Theodore Roosevelt recognized) had to be made at the national level. But by 1900, this nation contained 100 million citizens. It is not easy for 100 million people to see themselves in a single political leader, to see the authority of national law as anything other than a foreign imposition on their freedom. After all, my freedom is threatened by an external agent if I want to do X while you tell me I must do Y. But what if you can tell me—and demonstrate scientifically—that Y is what I really want to do, or at any rate what I would want to do if I had the relevant information? Faced with the need to make a host of difficult decisions for the common good of an immensely complex society, the bureaucratic emissaries of Wilson’s “New Freedom” saw in knowledge the power to shape the destiny of the nation without the old-fashioned authoritarianism of ordering people around. Rather than risk bruising political debates over what ought to be done, they proposed to let science answer that question. Political authorities would serve merely as the dutiful executors of what the data prescribed. This emasculation suited politicians well enough for it allowed them to disperse responsibility; if something went wrong, it must have been due to some obscure fault in the data.
Accordingly during this period, political authority exhibited a strong tendency to clothe itself in the fashionable garb of epistemic authority, masking as much as possible its distinctively political nature. The Third Reich’s revolt against spineless technocracy, combined with its deification of will over intellect, only cemented the Wilsonian trend among Western nations: Any attempt to ground political action on a less-than-scientific basis was dismissed as fascism. This conflation of political and epistemic authority continues down to the present day, as seen in the “follow the science” mantra.
Unfortunately, the “hide behind the expert” act isn’t working out as well as it used to be. When experts carried immense epistemic authority, it made sense for political leaders to try and borrow some of that authority for themselves. But that only worked as long as there was a clear hierarchy of knowledge, and an apparent unanimity to the voice of expertise. Experts knew this well, and thus sought to hash out their many disagreements behind closed doors. But the internet blew those doors open, revealing a cacophony of arguing voices. Dissident scientists looking for recognition could use the internet to build a following, and the average Facebook user cannot reliably tell the difference between a genius and a crackpot. The authority of expertise has accordingly crumbled, not into dust, but—what’s much worse—into dozens of opposing shards, frequently weaponized against different factions of the body politic. Such open scientific debate (minus the crackpots peddling real conspiracy theories, at least) might actually be a blessing to civil society, but it is a disaster for political authorities who have hitched their wagon to the horse of expertise.
After all, while a plurality of perspectives certainly must feed into the political process, authority itself must be unitary when it commands: it cannot command five different things at once. And thus it can no longer say, “Let’s just do what the experts say” when the experts are saying five different things; if it privileges one set of expert opinions over the others (whether for good reasons or bad), social media will lose no time in foregrounding the alternatives as reasons not to obey. Indeed, on the premise that political and epistemic authority are the same, there is no reason for a citizen to obey a law unless and until he agrees with it. We have seen that this is one of the crucial distinctions between epistemic and political authority: epistemic authority (ideally at least) is transmissible: it provides information and invites me to form my beliefs accordingly. Political authority however operates vicariously—it does not usually provide all of its reasons, and it demands obedience anyway. When political leaders frame their orders as simply the distillation of the data, they tacitly invite citizens to examine that data for themselves and withhold obedience until convinced. Given that most laws can only function if the vast majority of citizens comply, and many laws will never command more than a slim majority of public agreement, such a posture implies the effective breakdown of political society.
Finally, recall what we said about certainty. Epistemic authority is often able to provide very high levels of certainty, and can usually quantify whatever uncertainty remains. Political authority usually concerns itself with situations of very high uncertainty. By cloaking itself in the garments of expertise, though, it has frequently been tempted to claim (or pressure its experts to claim) much higher certainty for its projections than is plausible. Indeed, as Martin Gurri notes in The Revolt of the Public, government experts have made sometimes preposterously ambitious claims for what certain policies can achieve, and how well they can predict the relevant variables. The predictable failure of these predictions has profoundly weakened the authority of both the experts and the political leaders who have linked their own credibility to them.
We can now venture a pithy definition of political authority as the authority to make decisions between incommensurable goods amid uncertainty, and to compel obedience to these decisions. Such compulsion can happen through mere force and fear, but this constitutes a replacement for authority rather than its exercise. Political authority operates where we recognize that (a) a decision must be made, (b) the situation is fraught with uncertainty, and (c) this leader is the man for the job, whether by virtue of his office or his personal qualities—ideally both.
Political authority requires profound courage. There is a reason why, since antiquity, political authority has been closely linked to the battlefield. It was the task of kings to go out to war, and if they did not do so, whatever captain did successfully lead the people in battle was likely to find himself the beneficiary of a coup. This dependence of political authority on military authority is not nearly as quaint as we might think: From George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower, a startling number of U.S. presidents ascended politically due to their demonstrated martial prowess. The battlefield, after all, throws into sharper relief the perils that face every political leader. In war, decisions must be made; they cannot be put off iindefinitely until all the data is in or full consensus is reached. Despite every attempt at fact-finding or soliciting wise counsel, the general must often act amid terrible uncertainty. He must choose between incommensurable goods: Should he sacrifice lives in order to gain time, or sacrifice time in order to save lives? His decision cannot be merely personal; it must be a binding command. Others must follow and obey, even when they themselves are profoundly uncertain about what must be done and are not privy to most of their commander’s reasons. Anyone who can keep his head and summon others to action in the face of such doubt and peril is likely well equipped to guide a people through the perils of peacetime.
As the battlefield example highlights, effective leadership entails a willingness to embrace risk—even if a general does not lead his men on horseback into a storm of bullets, he must still assume the massive psychological and reputational risk of being wrong, and of being seen to be wrong. He makes high-stakes gambles that could end in humiliation—something that flies in the face of the advice every political strategist and corporate lawyer gives his boss. We live in a culture of risk-management, a society in which every little decision must be data-crunched, focus-grouped, and insurance-hedged before it can be acted upon. With a horde of advisers to lean on, every politician and CEO can rest assured that if something does somehow go south, a dozen scapegoats stand at the ready. This abdicatory approach to leadership turns out to be Faustian bargain: Our leaders might keep their offices longer, but these offices are steadily drained of any real authority; witness Congress’s current approval rating—22% at the time of this writing.
Starved of real authority, society casts about desperately for replacements, latching on to every brash defier of convention as a potential savior. Donald Trump’s extraordinary success was due largely to his willingness to ignore the rules of the risk managers and data-crunchers, his apparent readiness to personally shoulder the burden of calling the shots as political leaders once did—even if, when crunch-time came, he proved more than willing to divert blame onto scapegoats. The uncanny success and bizarre mystique of Elon Musk owes much to the same phenomenon: This corporate leader conducts himself more like a medieval lord on horseback than a bureaucrat in a boardroom.
On the “alt-right” (or whatever they’re calling it these days), this backlash against spineless political leadership has taken an increasingly troubling turn. Columnists at First Things in recent years have extolled the virtues of the 20th-century fascist dictators Antonio Salazar and Francisco Franco, and in the more uncensored atmosphere of Twitter, self-proclaimed “Christian nationalists” are more than willing to push one or two steps further: why not rehabilitate Mussolini? Heck, why not Hitler? "Man, those were guys who knew how to get a job done. They saw what they wanted, and they went for it. They knew how to mobilize the manhood of a nation, and how to steamroll those lily-livered liberals who stood in their way." In many sectors of this conversation, Nietzschean ideals of unencumbered strongmen merrily making mincemeat of the slave morality of the Marxist masses are enthusiastically peddled by courageous souls hiding behind pseudonyms. The appeal of all this can be thoroughly baffling at first glance, but if my analysis here holds, it begins to make a lot more sense. It is, after all, human nature to seek for every action an equal and opposite reaction. If political authority today suffers from a shortfall of masculine courage, then the natural temptation is to seek the remedy in an almost cartoonish hyper-masculinity. Unfortunately, there is a reason that the advocates of such a Strongman find themselves reaching into the deep pagan past for exemplars—indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted this was the only place one could look, for Christianity had made that kind of libidinous, domineering, unreasoning masculinity unthinkable. Even before Christianity, though, Aristotle was emphatic that courage existed as a mean between extremes. The maximum of courage, in other words, was not courage at all, but mere rashness. Courage had to be tempered by reason, which is to say, guided by the form and measure of all the virtues, “prudence.” Prudence is the crowning virtue of political leadership because it represents the courageous ideal of political authority shaped by constant attention to epistemic authority. Our word prudence comes from the Latin word providentia—which means both “seeing ahead” and “planning ahead”—bringing to bear as much expert counsel as possible to predict the future, but then, on the basis of this, taking initiative so as to boldly shape that future.
The biblical virtue of wisdom, which I take to be largely synonymous with prudence (although somewhat broader) is also the paradigmatic virtue of kingship, as the book of Proverbs attests. It is a virtue exercised by kings precisely through leaning upon (though not abdicating to) epistemic authorities:
“For by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory” (Prov. 15:22).
An abundance of counselors—note. Experts tend to each have their own unique fields of expertise, gained by a lifetime of studied attention to one slice of created reality. They must share that knowledge with the leaders who make decisions, but realize that they do not necessarily have the full view. The leader must be able to synthesize these fragments into a holistic vision of the common good, and act courageously in pursuit of it, knowing that he will likely have naysayers chattering behind his back because they think he is giving short shrift to their own particular slice of concern.
This virtue of prudently courageous leadership is not one easily acquired—indeed, like all of the virtues but perhaps even more so, it can only be truly acquired by example. But where do we look for examples, in a world so long starved of authentic political leadership? Politics is an imaginative enterprise, and we find ourselves today with our imaginations malformed by generations of leaders cross-dressing in lab coats or exhorting us to “just do what feels right.” Consequently, on the rare occasion when a genuine servant-leader combines competence, confidence, and humility, the left derides him as a manifestation of fascistic toxic masculinity while the right pillories him as a namby-pamby compromiser.
The urgently needed reformation of our imaginations, then, and the furnishing of exemplars to follow, must begin in arenas less polarized than national politics. Thankfully, other realms of life exist, although national politics increasingly colonizes them. State politics, local politics, schools, churches, local businesses, and community sports teams: In these grassroots environments, the necessity of authentic authority, and hunger at its absence, is deeply felt. Even in a role as humble as that of little-league coach, a leader must make difficult decisions, in the midst of uncertainty, between incommensurable goods, and then compel obedience to them. This requires wisdom, courage, and charisma, in defiance of the ascendant culture of offense-taking and risk management. We can find in these little platoons not merely schools of virtue, but schools of authority—places where aspiring leaders can learn anew how to act as authorities, and where the rest of us can learn anew how to recognize the phenomenon of authority. If we struggle to discern true political authority within the sphere of politics, then let us call on religious leaders, school principals, coaches, and businessmen to model it in their own local contexts—and let’s cut them some slack when they inevitably fail. Only by doing so can we retrain our imaginations to see and our affections to respond to an authority that transcends mere expertise.