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For years, James Davison Hunter has been referenced as a voice of relative optimism in the never-ending debate over Christianity and culture. While commentators like Rod Dreher may have been dubbed prophets of doom, calling for retreat and disengagement from a crumbling polis, Hunter, with his cheerfully titled To Change the World (never mind its more ambivalent subtitle) held out hope for meaningful Christian civic renewal from the centers of cultural power. No one can accuse his latest, Democracy and Solidarity, of looking at America through rose-tinted spectacles. Observing at the outset, “Under the circumstances, it is worth considering whether contemporary American democracy can be fixed,” he concludes his 400-page tour of the “cultural logics” that have historically bound Americans together by registering his sincere doubt that it can be.
The strength of his argument is its Hegelian framework for making sense of the ideals that have sustained American political order, a “hybrid-Enlightenment” containing within itself ideas from biblical faith and Enlightenment rationalism held together in dynamic tension. In every era since the Founding, these tensions have been “worked through” to produce new syntheses—but lately, the syntheses have become weaker and the poles further apart. “We are now in a period of exhaustion. The endlessly worked-through sources of the hybrid-Enlightenment are depleted and no longer have traction.” The result is a kind of nihilism on all sides, where we no longer believe in the power of persuasion, only the persuasion of power.
The weakness of such Hegelian arguments, though, is their intellectualism, their tendency to treat ideas as historical forces in their own right to the exclusion of more mundane factors. It is perhaps strange that the author of To Change the World, with its all-important focus on institutions, should tend to neglect the role of institutions here, but so it is. In particular, while Hunter observes in passing the role of “changes in the technological landscape, not least in the media of communication” in producing the nihilistic politics of our present, he gives them no sustained attention. I would argue that this omission produces a diagnosis at once too optimistic and too pessimistic.
Too optimistic, because while Hunter claims to “take the full measure of the challenges we face,” it is not at all obvious that he has done so. If Anton Barba-Kay is correct in his A Web of Our Own Making that digital technology represents an “absolute and comprehensive social harrowing,” then no attempt to make sense of our political and cultural breakdowns is complete without consideration of the media landscape that is deforming our discourse. Barba-Kay gives such a detailed consideration in his magisterial recent survey of the nature of digital formation, arguing that digital media are in many ways “at variance with politics as such.” For, while “political life takes place in bonds and bounds…the internet, in contrast, is at basic odds with the attachments of bounded political life. It is a medium of the mind or the unsettled imagination….Where there is nowhere between here and everywhere, political speech cannot take place.”
The frictionlessness, placenessness, and detachment of online discourse allows us the luxury of living in alternate universes, of never having to come to grips with each other, of simply checking out when we can no longer deal with one another. Moreover, the effortlessness of online communication, and its resulting overwhelming volume, results in a kind of communicative hyperinflation, where speech becomes a debased currency—no wonder we are content to talk past each other. Thus “individual agency diminishes and diminishes even as we feel that it grows and grows online. That is the virtual: the bargain by which we can feel more involved at the price of being less effective.”
If Barba-Kay is correct, then nihilism and exhaustion is exactly what we should expect in a world of Very Online people. Samuel James recently penned a provocative essay on his Substack suggesting that what so many have lately diagnosed as our condition of “political idolatry” could really be better described as “political boredom.” “Political idolatry,” he observes, “assumes worship, and worship assumes some kind of confidence in the thing being worshiped,” but few of the people obsessively following politics have much real faith in it anymore. It has become for many a kind of spectator sport, or live-action role-playing, far easier to participate through digital media, yet harder to take seriously. There is a performativity to our culture wars now that I suspect was not there in the 90s.
Perhaps such nihilism—the nihilism of apathy rather than hatred—is the worst of all: “because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth,” the Lord warns Laodicea. And yet there are grounds for optimism in this diagnosis, reason to think that this framing reveals Hunter’s requiem for the hybrid-Enlightenment to be a bit premature. To explain why, let me offer a first-person perspective.
Over the past six months, I have observed two communities of discourse. One, which I’ve observed as a bemused spectator, is the increasingly inane conversation of Very Online Christian Nationalism. Much of this discourse had long since descended into self-parody, but the loss of a clear and present common enemy after Trump’s victory swiftly accelerated a splintering of the movement. At time of writing, many of the movement’s principals were publicly devouring one another over whether, and to what extent, one should blame the Jews for the moral rot of modernity.
The other discourse, in which I’ve been a far more active participant, is that of a kaleidoscopic, bipartisan anti-porn coalition that has come together around the potentially landmark Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. What’s striking about this coalition is just how alive and well the “hybrid-Enlightenment” seems to be within it. Conservative Catholics and Bible Belt evangelicals may be motivated in part by religious authority, feminists and child-rights campaigners by ideas of human dignity, and social scientists by cold hard facts—but strangely, these sources seemed to speak with one voice when it came to the moral status of showing gang-rape videos to ten-year-olds. The other striking thing about this coalition was its non-nihilism. Most of those involved have seemed to display that wonderfully American combination of idealism and pragmatism, guided by real moral fervor but a willingness to focus on actionable goals alongside those of different ideals.
Ironically, the two discourses overlapped for a fleeting moment at last summer’s National Conservatism conference. There, I found myself in a room with members of both coalitions. While a panel made up of members of the second coalition were explaining the legal challenge and the opportunity before us, the conversation amongst the first group reverberated with mockery of the supposedly weak-willed liberalism on display: “They only want to ban porn for kids; a proper Protestant Franco would ban it for everyone.” And yet, for all of their putative fervor in the cause, I’ve not heard or seen one of these folks active in the exciting legal and legislative battles now being joined in most of the fifty states to break the dystopian spell Big Tech has cast over the hearts and minds of the next generation.
In light of all this, I venture a hopeful hypothesis. Where real political action is still happening in this country, the sources of solidarity remain robust, and resilient hope still holds nihilism at bay. Too many citizens, however, feel cut off from the possibility of authentic political agency. In part this is a function of the collapse of what Patrick Deneen has called “aristopopulism”—the brain drain of local elites to a handful of coastal centers, and the consequent sense that there’s nothing much of importance to be part of if you’re stuck in flyover country. In part it is the result of a media culture that allows us all instantaneous vicarious participation in whatever’s happening inside the Beltway. These two trends are mutually reinforcing: as our small-town politics feels less significant, we escape from its emptiness through performative online national politics; and as we fritter away our energies in futile X wars, we have that much less attention to apply to the actual needs of our cities and states.
Our political games, in short, are far more divisive and intractable than our actual politics. If we could tear our inebriated eyes off of the former just long enough to rediscover the joys of the latter, democracy and solidarity—and yes, a Christian society—might again have a fighting chance.
