On George Scialabba and the Left Conservative Possibility

[A version of this piece is cross-posted to Current]

How might one politically categorize the following statement?

[M]y apparently disparate-sounding worries....all result from one or another move on the part of the culture away from the immediate, the instinctual, the face-to-face. We are embodied beings, gradually adapted over millions of year to thrive on a certain scale, our metabolisms a delicate orchestration of innumerable biological and geophysical rhythms. The culture of modernity has thrust upon us, sometimes with traumatic abruptness, experiences, relationships, and powers for which we may not yet be ready–to which we may need more time to adapt....If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities–even the potentially liberating ones–the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive. 

For those whose exposure to or engagement with political ideas is fairly minimal–whether by choice or by circumstance or both–the question would likely seem strange. After all, there are no obvious partisan markers anywhere in this statement, no references to presidential candidates or global events or policy disputes. So what is political about it? But for those who have some familiarity with the history of political ideas and arguments, as well as some of their attendant philosophical formulations and literary tropes, there are flags in this statement which suggest an answer–and that answer, in all likelihood, would be “conservative.”

Not “conservative” in the way most Americans would be likely to use the term today, to be sure. The passage doesn’t provide anything that connects to Donald Trump or lower taxes or tighter immigration or anti-LGBTQ positions or the Supreme Court, at least not directly. But astute readers would pick up on the final sentence’s reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last man,” his vision of a humanity that has succumbed to nihilism, hedonism, and passivity, and thus falls into a kind of groupthink where all individual accomplishments are lost. The passage also speaks warningly about developments and innovations of modernity which humanity, whose embodiment reflects a deep evolutionary grounding in small-scale interactions, needs to be far more cautious about embracing. Hence, the politics of this passage could be–and, I think, would be, if read without any additional context–plausibly coded as small-c conservative, or at least as philosophically anti-progressive. Its implications include a preference for the local, a suspicion of intellectual abstractions, a discontent with the ennui that consumer wealth and technological ease has enabled, and a fear of a too-rapidly pursued future whose liberating possibilities will likely be lost unless they are approached incrementally (if at all). In short, it communicates a respect for, even a valuation of, a more limited conceptualization of our social world–and, aside from certain strains of environmental concern within the current constellation of liberal thought, talk of “limits” is generally seen as the provenance of conservatives, not progressives.

 And yet, the author of this passage is George Scialabba, a man of–as was once not infrequently said of writers like him–“the left.” Scialabba is a highly regarded essayist, book review, and public intellectual, whose latest collection, Only a Voice: Essays (Verso, 2023), is a brilliant collection of insightful readings and contrarian arguments about some of the most important thinkers and writers of the past century, and some from centuries earlier: Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, T.S. Eliot, Leo Strauss, Irving Howe, I.F. Stone, and many more. The essay “Last Men and Women,” a survey of criticisms of mass society and modern democracy, includes the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, but also this plain self-description: “[This]...is where I also stand–with the Enlightenment and its contemporary heirs, and against Straussians, religious conservatives, national greatness neoconservatives, Ayn Randian libertarians, and anyone else for whom tolerance, civic equality, international law, and a universal minimum standard of material welfare are less than fundamental commitments.” Whatever else might be said about that self-description (which was published in 2021), it doesn’t sound at all “conservative,” even in the small-c sense. So should we conclude therefore that Scialabba is simply inconsistent? Or might there be a political categorization which can, in a theoretically consistent way, capture both his progressive Enlightenment aspirations, and well as his worries about the same?

I think there is–though, as with all ideological labels, it’s a categorization with greater use as a conversational reference than as an analytical tool. The label is “left conservatism,” and applying it to Scialabba’s writings–or, perhaps more accurately, using Scilabba’s writings to apply the label more broadly–is an intellectual exercise worth engaging in, especially in our moment when so many other political categorizations seem either overthrown or irrelevant or both.

 The term “left conservative” is hardly new; it’s been coined and re-coined multiple times over the decades. Most recently, the term been revived in some conservative publications to describe a mix of anti-globalist, socially conservative, pro-labor, subsidiarian perspectives which recognize the need for protectionist action to strengthen national economies and local cultures. Those considerations are accurate, so far as they go. But to really dig into the idea–and to assess its fit with Scialabba’s incisive considerations of our moment–we need to look to an earlier expression of it, one found in the third-person self-description Norman Mailer provided in his book Armies of the Night: “Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke.” What is it that Mailer was describing there, this Marxian-style attainment of Burkean principles? By “the style of Marx” one must presumably mean employing a revolutionary, or at least structural, set of intellectual tools, ones addressed to emancipation of persons and goods in society; by “values suggested by Edmund Burke,” one must presumably be talking about local communities and the traditions they give life to, and the need to maintain and strengthen them. So how to put that together?

The most intellectual plausible articulation of this idea, I think, is to say that modernity–whether that is dated to the Protestant Reformation, the Declaration of Independence, the Industrial Revolution, or any other particular historical landmark or era–is simply different from what came before it. The 18^th-century (and earlier) traditions and communities which Burke defended cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, capitalism, democracy: all are genies let out of the bottle, in the face of which traditions of all kinds suffer. (Marx’s famous statement in The Communist Manifesto that, with industrialization, “all-fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away....all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” is an obvious support to this formulation, but Scialabba himself adds one as well, describing Burke’s own writings as “expressions of outraged common sense” in the face of the inevitable—and, he asserts, entirely justified—transformations that came with the expansion of suffrage and other “democratic truths”). Hence, the preservation of Burkean values–acting “conservatively,” in other words--now requires actions which go beyond the expansion of liberal guarantees or the amelioration of socio-economic disruptions.

This reading of Mailer may simply sound like the conservative insight famously expressed by G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy: “If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” But the “revolution” invoked by Chesterton in the name of conserving a particular state of affairs was a formal, not structural one, whereas the better understanding of Mailer’s point about “think[ing] in the style of Marx,” I believe, means something truly “left”in the structural, even radical, sense. Maybe, the left conservative thinks, only a radical shift towards the democratization, the socialization, and the equalization of the products and processes of modernity will be sufficient to enable people to continue to thrive in their communities.

And it really is communities which are central here. (One could argue that “left conservatism” might better be expressed as “left communitarianism,” and there’s some value to putting it that way. But since the connections and commonalities which emerge in the context of communities are, I think, something that human beings, as political animals, always seek to construct and always mourn the absence of–and here I am heavily influenced by the writings of Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, two political philosophers that were frequently labeled “communitarians” when that term enjoyed a boomlet 30 years ago–focusing on the concern to literally conserve that which is genuinely valuable about our communities is appropriate.) Our individualistic age puts an asterisk of suspicion beside all communities, however defined, seeing them all as potential sources of majoritarian abuse or undemocratic tyranny–which, of course, they too often are; as Christians at least ought to be quick to acknowledge, we are fallen beings, after all. But the conservative desire for belonging and rootedness and community, whatever evils it enables, also grounds both democratic and egalitarian possibilities: traditions are forms of meaning and fulfillment which cannot (or at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions and thus be taxed away from you or turned against you by those who wield power. To the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--one could argue, if one is of this particular conservative orientation (as I think Scialabba is, at least partly), that something in the modern world has gone wrong, or at least has gotten too far away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence, truths and necessities which are the necessary (if not sufficient) prerequisites to treating all people as equally capable of self-rule and equally deserving of respect. That’s not necessarily a defense of all communities, especially not national ones, which too regularly employ the coercive power of the state to maintain the definition and borders which those in power decide upon; Mailer’s communitarianism, a term he probably would have blanched at, was decidedly small-scale and anarchic. But the centrality of being in connection with others, and defending those connections, remains.

Not many have picked up on this reading of Mailer’s ideas in the two generations since, to say the least. On the left or progressive liberal side of America’s intellectual divide, as it began to deepen and sharpen in the decades following the upheavals of the 1960s, leftism mostly focused its decreasing energies on various statist parties and platforms, while most liberals came to treat those who worried about the excesses of their individualistic liberatory language as either 1) accidental intellectual traitors (as it was frequently expressed at a UC-Santa Cruz conference on the “specter of  left conservatism” in 1998, these unfortunate folk are genuine leftists whose distaste for the latest theoretical developments has tricked them into allying with conservative forces), or 2) just remnants of an old rural conservative Democrat faction, soon to die out. That’s assuming White voters were the ones being discussed, of course; the religiousity and social conservatism of many Black voters was treated very differently, though not until Bill Clinton was its preferred language given much credence, and even that didn’t last–Barak Obama, our first Black president, reflected very little of that sensibility while in the White House (which, cynically speaking, is perhaps one of the reasons he was able to attain it.)

As for America’s rightward flank, the rise of a pro-business, anti-socialist libertarianism as a component of the Republican coalition from the 1960s through the 1990s made any kind of liberal egalitarianism, much less leftism, unwelcome there. Occasionally you see attempts to import into American conservative discourse “Red Tory” formulations more common to Western European conservatism generally, but despite gestures in that direction (George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” for example), none of them have in any significant way shaped the overall conservative coalition in the U.S. Of course, some would insist upon adding a “until the rise of Donald Trump in 2016” to that sentence, and it is true that Trump’s profound lack of ideological (much less ethical) grounding has arguably presented an opening for leftist ideas to experience a revival in Republican circles. But while in today’s America you are, in fact, more likely to hear talk of structural or revolutionary changes to our liberal capitalist and democratic order coming from the Trumpist corner of the Republican party than from the Democrats led by Joe Biden, that talk is generally, and tragically, reflective of a fascist-adjacent authoritarianism which too many social conservatives, following Trump, seem to have become comfortable with. Even thoughtful and nominally worker-friendly treatments of the integralist argument in favor of more firmly supporting traditional community-based values seem to presume egalitarianism itself to be the real problem, and what limited appreciation for the solidarist approach to building economic equality–meaning unions, mainly–which still exists in America today is found coming the Democrats and the White House, not Mar-a-Lago.

All of which means that the left conservative position lacks a broad constituency in American politics. But that does not mean it lacks a voice. Perhaps most influentially, the historian Christopher Lasch, long a hero to many dissident and contrary conservatives (even as he remained personally a committed Democratic voter and a firm-if-worried supporter of the liberal egalitarian project overall through his life), and someone who himself never used terms like “left conservative” or “communitarian” in a self-descriptive way (even as close students of Lasch work subsequently used both), articulated at least the outlines of what could be called a left conservative ideology as well as anyone. And Scialabba presents, in multiple essays, Lasch as perhaps the most valuable of all the “antiprogressives” (which is not the same as “conservatives”) whom he holds that fans of the Enlightenment, like himself, must learn from.

That learning, he writes, involves grappling with the best thinkers’ “combination of discrimination and democratic passion,” defining the latter as “the constant remembrance that democracy entails not merely that the people should be governed well but also that the people should govern.” Mourning the tendency of intellectuals and politicians of all stripes–including both what he calls “the business party” and “the Progressives”–to ignore this fundamental principle, Scialabba’s cast of heroes includes, as he lays them out in his introduction to Only a Voice, scholars and activists and writers who, in one way or another, demonstrate a “moral intelligence” that “allowed them to make relevant distinctions and get the difficult decisions right.” This means, rather than simple apologists for the Enlightenment, such figures as Randolph Bourne, George Orwell, Irving Howe, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Richard Rorty, Bill McKibben, along with Lasch, earn his praise. These are people who, in his view, take seriously their “democratic obligation to persuade people before legislating for them”–and that means taking seriously the “anxieties about modernity” which confront all those whom these thinkers and writers, like Scialabba himself, attempt to clarify the democratic options for. The responses to this anxiety which these writers all wrestled with obviously vary greatly, from Rorty’s advocacy of setting aside worries about “self-creation” in the name of a bland yet vital “tolerance,” to Howe’s insistence that the ideal of socialism “will need to be reimagined in every generation,” to, perhaps most centrally, Lasch’s populist insistence the “the democratic character can only flourish in a society constructed to the human scale.” Yet Scialabba thoughtfully considers–and by so doing, makes it possible to learn from–them all.

That this practice of thoughtful learning includes giving sympathetic attention to what he calls “perhaps the most significant strain of social criticism in our time,” the “antimodernist radicalism” of limits one can find in writers like D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, or Lasch himself, is not entirely pleasing to even some of Scialabba’s most enthusiastic readers. In a review essay on Only a Voice in Commonweal, Sam Adler-Bell gently suggests that Scialabba misunderstands that modernity’s anxieties and doubts are less to be responded to than embraced as actually one of its strengths: the modern person “is not necessarily a conformist, a face in the crowd, incapable of independent thought,” but rather “is someone who detects these frailties in everyone else.” This is a subtle point, and a good one, but it also strikes me as an inverted application of Robert Frost’s famous comment that a liberal is someone too broad-minded to take their own side in an argument. Scialabba is far too conscientious a thinker to deny the immense accomplishment of Enlightenment liberalism in teaching people to be skeptical of the limits and presumptions they inherit or which have been imposed upon them. But he also recognizes, as anyone with even a smidgen of leftist suspicion of the bourgeoisie should, that such skepticism, without a foundation in practices and places and, yes, even prejudices–in the sense of “pre-judgments”–to draw upon, will often result not in robust, democracy-defending free-thinking, but rather in a literally care-less disconnection, a tendency to abstraction which capitalist overlords will be more than happy to use to manipulate and oppress. As Scialabba writes in “Progress and Prejudice,” the first and most overarching essay in Only a Voice, he has come to recognize “with some reluctance” that thinkers like Lasch are correct: that “as long as modernization is involuntary,” then conserving our ability to draw upon and stay within “our own skins—and even, perhaps, within traditional social forms” is needed, if our “every liberation” is not to be “captured and exploited.”

Left conservatism is one way of articulating a set of political convictions that can, at least as a matter of theory, see this needle, the needle which modernity has presented us with, and thread it, thus enabling the continued project of weaving together (or sewing up tears within) our democratic political fabric. Scialabba, through his writing over the decades, like Lasch himself in decades prior, has been an insightful advocate for the kind of democratic learning which all of America’s diverse communities need–a learning which reminds us of modernity’s liberating and equalizing accomplishments, and what must be conserved if the left’s emancipatory project is to continue. Whether this political categorization fits him well or not, his position is one much worth contemplating–an action which would have to begin with reading his most recent, and excellent, book.

Bernie Sanders, Patrick Deneen, and a “Left Conservative” Solution

[This is a version of a joint review of new books by Patrick Deneen and Bernie Sanders which I have written for Current, and which follows up on my previous, more in-depth review of Deneen's book here.]

Over the past few months, two books calling for a radical transformation of America’s socio-economic and political status quo have been published. One of the was written by a man long associated with conservative arguments and publications, but really isn’t, in my judgment, a conservative book at all; the other was written by a man long associated with democratic socialism, but his socialist arguments incorporate, in my view, a conservative sentiment which the first book frequently invokes but provides few concrete arguments in support of. Insofar as actual intellectual arguments are concerned, the first book, Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change, is the better one. But if one genuinely wishes to understand and develop responses to the harms of state capitalism and liberal statism, responses which are grounded "conservatively" in the collective achievements and socio-economic struggles which actually exist today, then Bernie Sanders’s much more conventional book, It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, is, I think, nonetheless the wiser one. 

Deneen’s book extends upon his earlier work Why Liberalism Failed, a book that received much praise for its description of the philosophical flaws of liberal individualism which have led to social discontent and cultural breakdown. Deneen ended Why Liberalism Failed suggesting the need for “patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order,” which situated that book firmly within a long tradition of conservative complaints about and localist responses to our liberal order. Regime Change, however, dismisses with that Burkean prudential sentiment; embracing the idea that “conservatism” (at least the conservatism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries) partakes of liberalism’s sins, Deneen insists that the “postliberal” future he thinks inevitable requires an “epic theory” which would challenge the roots of the modern order entirely, so as to recover or rebuild something more authentically natural. 

A central component of the epic theory laid out in Regime Change is a wholesale rejection of the egalitarianism which has evolved over the centuries since the Protestant Reformation, having transformed (in ways Deneen presents as almost entirely negative) the manner in which we moderns mostly understand such ancient concepts as “democracy” or “rights.” For Deneen, the demos deserves respect, but not the right to actually, directly, govern itself. Deneen’s more natural political order would be a postliberal in the sense that it would unapologetically look to the cultivation of an elite “few” who, having been trained in the responsibility to exemplify for the “many” proper rulership, would be able to establish laws that reflected collective norms—both cultural and economic (though, on the basis of the pages spent exploring them in RC, much more the former than the latter)—rather than individual interests as manifest through some kind of social contract. The resulting “mixed regime”—meaning one that would balance the ambitions and abilities of the few with the many’s presumed longing for stability—would, in his view, be able to address the challenges of collective life in a manner both virtuous and non-alienating, unlike what liberalism has given us. He calls this “common good conservatism,” but just what it would be conserving—aside from those particular moral and cultural customs which Deneen thinks the working classes ought to be living in accordance with, even when they, in fact, choose not to—is unclear. 

There is a great deal more in Deneen’s rich—and I think dangerous—book, but that is the gist of its ambitious, revolutionary, and decidedly unconservative, at least dispositionally speaking, argument. Reviewers more aligned with America's conservative movements than myself (Jon D. Schaff, Adam Smith, Ross Douthat, and others), operating with the assumption that, as Smith put it, “the question is not whether there will be an elite, but whether it will be a good one,” are less troubled than I by Deneen’s willingness to invoke an idealized natural hierarchy of a pre-Protestant Reformation, pre-liberal Europe as his postliberal guide. But however seriously one takes Deneen’s diagnosis, the fact remains that he sees himself accomplishing this attack on our present managerialist and statist status quo in the name of what he holds to be the common interests of the people, something which “aristopopulism” is necessary to achieve. 

It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism is similarly filled with ambitious, radical ideas, but it has no such revolutionary gist to it, at least not one which is laid out in such a way as to organize the book’s somewhat rambling arguments. Sanders is, of course, a politician, not a theorist—but he is a politician who, over his career, done more to mainstream the idea that capitalism as it presently operates isn’t a natural or virtuous arrangement of affairs, and to therefore get broad numbers of not-otherwise-radical people to think critically about alternatives. As I wrote about Sanders before, “[Sanders’s] greatest accomplishment wasn’t helping make the Democratic party more comfortable with certain (re-named!) democratic socialist ideas but rather helping bring into the mainstream a fruitful mess of radicalisms, all of which are busy promoting their own alternative democratizing visions…. Bernie Sanders failed to win the presidency, but he didn’t fail to fertilize, with his words and actions, long moribund ideas in America.” It’s Okay to Be Angry shows off the fruit of such fertilization, taking on health care, Wall Street, college education, Fox News, and much more. Those looking for a thoughtful democratic socialist critique of the liberal capitalist state will not find one in the pages of Sanders’s book, especially since more than a third of the book is an interesting but not especially deep rehearsal of the greatest hits of Sanders’s political career and campaigns over the Trump years, and much of the rest reflects a progressive liberalism rather than something explicitly rooted in the visions of his hero, union leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs. But a close reader will see, nonetheless, a focus on productive work which arguably brings a critical unity to Sanders’s case against the “oligarchs” and “billionaires” and the “über-capitalist system.” It is this focus which positions Sanders’s book as a wiser radical response to the problems of today than Deneen’s anti-egalitarian, “aristopopulist” suppositions. 

Deneen writes often in Regime Change about “the many” or “commoners” or “the working class,” at times criticizing them as “far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the ‘elites’ that they often disdain,” yet nonetheless repeatedly positing them as a non-aspirant, non-managerial loadstone, “more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits and natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars.” That is, Deneen presents those who do practical, material work for living as a static category, a necessary component within a healthy society, but not an actual agent within it. Whereas for Sanders, practical, material work—whether in a factory or a classroom or a farm or an office—is connected to an active democratic dignity, and directly contrasted to those financial elites whose wealth is tied to the flow of the economy itself, rather than to its productive results. Sanders writes, reflecting upon his youthful experience on a agricultural commune in Israel:  

Work, to a large degree, defines who we are, what our social status is, and who our friends are….I don’t pretend to understand everything about human nature but I believe that, very deep in the souls of most people, is a desire to be part of their community to and contribute to its well-being. People want to be productive and have a positive impact on the lives of their families….While the world has obviously changed a lot since that kibbutz was created in the 1930s and since I worked there in the 1960s, what has not changed is the sense of empowerment that grows with working people are treated not as “employees,” but as “owners” who share a responsibility for defining the scope and character of their jobs. The sense of community and worker-empowerment that existed there was something that I have never forgotten. It confirmed my view that there are many ways to organize workplaces, and that we have a responsibility to identity the models that respect workers as human beings, and allow them to realize their full potential….Whether someone is working on a farm, or in an automobile factory, hospital, or school, or delivering mail or writing a book, they want to know that what they do is meaningful and appreciated. They want to have a say about the nature of their work and how it is done….Is it really too much, in the twenty-first century, in the wealthiest country on earth, to begin creating an economy in which actually have some power over what they do for forty hours or more a week? 

Deneen is not entirely silent when it comes to how contemporary capitalism has engendered a financial globalism which has undermined the community-building power of workers, and thus contributed to their suffering. As part of the disruptions to the status-quo which he believes recovering a proper elite would necessitate, he mentions the importance of empowering unions, giving workers direct say on corporate boards (in the style of Germany’s Betriebsrat or workers councils), and using tariffs to slow outsourcing. But those few paragraphs pale beside the long sections devoted to attacking the moral individualism engrained in the policies of the liberal state, and the need to construct a postliberal elite that would model a community consciousness that would lift workers up. 

Sanders, by contrast, goes far beyond Deneen’s acknowledged need to strengthen unions and increase the presence of workers on corporate boards, pushing the radical idea of a social reconstruction of the deeply dysfunction distribution of working opportunities and wages in the wealthiest country in the world, something which Deneen, for all his talk about disrupting the system, never really considers. Sanders, when he can pull himself out of the legislative bubble filled with fights over climate change and infrastructure funding, is clear in wanting to make a full-employment economy America’s social ideal, by way of guaranteeing health care, investing in environmentally sustainable work, redistributing wealth, closely regulating financial actors, increasing taxes on powerful financial interests, easing the creation of worker cooperatives, and much more. 

Admittedly, his invocation of this ideal somethings draws him back into just reciting a laundry list of government programs, in classic progressive liberal statist fashion. But sometimes he is able to see beyond this; sometimes he is able to break through the partisan cant which has been second nature for him for more than 40 years, and talk about the goal of economic democracy—a change which he believes (I think correctly) would enable people within their families and communities to find themselves in alignment with a more virtuous “regime.” While not a religious man, Sanders’s collective vision of higher stage in the democratic evolution of capitalist state is, as I’ve noted elsewhere, downright Pentecostal: 

If we accept that the truth will set us free, then we need to face some hard truths about American oligarchs. This country has reached a point in its history where it must determine whether we truly embrace the inspiring words in our Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”….We have to decide whether we take seriously what the great religions of the world—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others—have preached for thousands of years. Do we believe in the brotherhood of man and human solidarity? Do we believe in the Golden Rule that says each and every one of us should “do unto other as you would have them do unto you”? Or do we accept, as the prevailing ethic of our culture, that whoever has the gold rules—and that lying, cheating, and stealing are OK if you’re powerful enough to be able to get away with it? 

The condemnation of liberalism presented by Deneen and others, whatever its philosophical insight, leads many to assume that talk of democratic equality and rights is incompatible with presumably conservative concepts like “brotherhood” and “solidarity.” To the extent that competitive capitalism presumes that economically empowering individuals can only increase social alienation, and thus allowing corrupt elites impose their ideology upon us all, then Deneen’s prescription may make a dangerous degree of sense. 

But Sanders’s arguments, supported as they are by the example of higher levels of solidarity and public goods in social democratic societies around the world, point to a different way—a more “left” way. This way would be truer to Christopher Lasch’s belief in building a democracy of producers and citizens--a belief which also inspired the teacher, Wilson Carey McWilliams, to whom Deneen admits he is most indebted for his conception of conservatism. Maybe the conservative, or communitarian, value of fraternity is something that individuals, in all their liberal diversity, still can and do conceive and build and maintain, when the social and economic space to do so is offered to them to do; that’s the wise suggestion McWilliams’s daughter, the political theorist Susan McWilliams Barndt, makes in response to Deneen’s book. There are large differences between the content of Deneen’s and Sanders’s radical proposals, but maybe the biggest difference is simply that Sanders presumes that workers still build communities and traditions when socially and economically and democratically empowered to do so—whereas Deneen’s mixed regime seems to presume that such can only be delivered to them from above.

On Philosophy, Religion, Nazis, Conservatives, Leftists, Damon Linker, and Me

[Damon Linker--pundit, author, oft-infuritating centrist, and all-around great human being--recently lost his father, and is taking a break from his Substack to take care of family issues. I well understand how consuming the loss of a father can be, and my prayers are with him, his wife Beth, and their children at this time. I thought about delaying this post for a while, but then decided that it ultimately was, in some ways, a kind of a tribute to him and his, to me anyway, deeply clarifying philosophical journey, with just some perhaps interesting comments on political theory, metaphysical hopes, and regime-threatening racism along the way. Part of me thinks he'll appreciate that odd mix. Anyway, best wishes at this difficult time, old friend.]

 Damon and I have been friends for over two decades, going back to when we discovered each other in the late 1990s as two young ABDs working on dissertations on the 18th-century German educator and translator Johann Gottfried Herder. That launched a friendship--perhaps not a super-close one, but one that I've been consistently grateful for over the years--filled with deep disagreements and loud laughs over politics, religion, family, movies, music, and much else. Still, it wasn't until Damon started his Substack "Eyes on the Right," and particularly until he published a series of reflective, searching columns over the past couple of months, that I was able to see, via his writings, just how much we shared, and how much we were divided nonetheless

In the first of those posts, Damon identifies himself as "a peculiar kind...of conservative"; definitely a non-ideological, small-c conservative, whose primary motivation is a "persistent hostility and resistance to unpredictable, rapid change." Damon is up-front about how much of this is a particular anxiety of his, rooted in the painful upheavals of his childhood and young adult life. But it is also intellectual; he strongly identifies with the dispositional conservatism of Michael Oakeshott, who described conservatives as being those who "prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." This kind of conservatism obviously barely has any home in the Republican party of today, or the last 40 years for that matter. Damon not only has no sympathy whatsoever to Trump and Trumpist reactionary wishes to "Make America Great Again"; he wasn't particularly sympathetic to Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" call when he was teenager either. So an ideological right-winger in any sense Damon most definitely is not.

But his same opposition to any kind of transformative promise or crusade also stops him from sympathizing with what he sees as Ahab-like obsessions with "getting" Donald Trump. He was long doubtful about both the Mueller investigation and the Trump impeachments, and he's one of the best advocates out there (or so I think, anyway, even though I don't agree with his conclusion) for the position of treating Trump as a wholly political problem, rather than risking further violence from his cultish defenders by reaching for some kind of legal solution to Trump's baleful effects on our elections. Hence Damon is a centrist Democrat and a "conservative liberal;" the kind of worried and frustrated philosophical centrist who'd probably find a lot of agreement with Judith Shklar (or Jacob Levy) and who joins the Niskanen Center. Turning to Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," Damon wistfully observes that, ultimately, what he values is "a place of rest. Constancy. Contentment. Stability. Reaching it, and then holding onto it. Preserving it against the ravages of change."

Those were the lines which struck me most, and sent me off on writing this long post...because that's me. I find everything about that statement simply beautiful, and could not endorse it more. I have a hard time thinking of anything I've ever written or spoken or done even just remotely associated with my obsessive interests in community, simplicity, family, and more that couldn't be summarized by the very same words Damon wrote there.

And yet, my own small-c conservatism ends up pointing me in an entirely leftward direction, however perverse or incoherent that may seem to some. Call it left communitarianism rather than left conservatism if you prefer, but ultimately it's all the same. It's a leavening of Karl Marx's economically-grounded socialism with Christopher Lasch's culturally-grounded populism; a recognition that nothing threatens settled and stable "places of rest" more than (as I wrote) "the dislocating, exploitative social power which the unregulated (and thus invariably concentrating and centralizing) flow of capital gives to those who master it," while also recognizing that any actually democratically empowering alternative to the exploitative, community-undermining reign of finance capitalism should have the aim of (as I also wrote) "jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced...and...done in a manner which [does] not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey--another Progressive!--here) 'the local homes of mankind.'" 

For those whose leftism is fundamentally liberal, which means fundamentally about expanding individual autonomy and opportunity in opposition to collective or environmental limits, or at least is fundamentally oriented around a fear of threats to those liberal goods which, however undeniably bourgeois, have nonetheless made hundreds of millions of lives immeasurably better (no, I don't deny that--I may not be much of a liberal, but I am, adjectivally and procedurally, quite liberal in a Bryanesque way all the same), this kind of thing might only sound like another apology for those invariably authoritarian "red-brown" alliances. As Richard Yeselson once claimed in response to a defense of Lasch by George Scialabba years ago, limiting individual experimentation and expansion in the name of community or simplicity or family or most anything else kills off the engines of liberal capitalism, which only means that there will be less to go around, and "dividing up less [however fairly and justly] leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism." To all that I can only say: yes, I can see that coherence of that terrible intellectual path, and will do my best not to go down it. But my "best" doesn't involve me fleeing from it entirely, particularly not in the direction of Damon's centrism. On the contrary, unlike my friend's pragmatic "distrust [of] romantic longings," I don't think I have ever really even so much as blinked at the prospect of contemplating radically populist, economically mutualist, or religiously communalist collective movements to shore up the things I think must be conserved in the face of liberal modernity. Does that mean I live a localist, agrarian, Luddite life in total support of such things? Not at all. But I don't have any particular distrust of those who aspire to so do, and I try to teach all about them as much as I can.

So what is the real dividing point between Damon and I, the dividing point which led to two people who, in terms of actual electoral choices, are rarely all that different, but whose justifications for those choices and whose hopes for better future choices are radically distinct? Of course there isn't just one thing that led two instinctively small-c conservative people to become a careful centrist liberal and unhappy Democrat on the one hand, and a constantly disappointed but still dreaming utopian and dues-paying Democratic Socialists of America member on the other. Perhaps its as our respective material and cultural backgrounds: Damon grew up in a highly fractured and secular urban milieu, and his conceptions of stability reflect the cosmopolitan pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, while I grew up in very tight and religious and almost-rural milieu, and perhaps unsurprisingly my conceptions of stability reflect the land-based communitarianism of Wendell Berry. (Or, to be utterly academic and nerdy, for anyone who wants to read our respective dissertations, perhaps its because the work of Herder which Damon found most important was his deeply historicist Yet Another Philosophy of History, emphasizing the cultural incommensurability of the rival, particularist goods that different nations will always legitimately conceive and pursue, whereas my favorite work by Herder was the religious anthropology he laid out in Letters for the Advancement of Humankind, emphasizing that there is a centripetal force in all the various expressions of human difference that point towards the unified realization of truly common goods.) But if I did have to pick just one thing, it would probably be the way our personal histories were shaped the undergraduate and graduate educations we received.

In another thoughtful column, Damon talked about how he hopes to "to attain a modicum of wisdom about what mixture or balance of competing visions will be best for the political community as a whole." His unavoidably aristocratic language there, deeply infused with classical philosophical presumptions about the need to "exercise of independent judgment" by "not just standing apart from the various factions on the playground" but also rising above it, reflects his predilection for authors like Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tocqueville, but also his education by scholars working in the tradition of the political philosopher and classicist Leo Strauss. Damon acknowledged that his "own skeptical and somewhat pessimistic liberalism has been shaped by [Strauss's] work," which among other things preaches its own kind of careful moderation, counseling those who aspire to truth to, as Damon wrote elsewhere, "[protect] society at large from the acids of skepticism and doubt unleashed by philosophical questioning, while simultaneously [speaking carefully so as to protect] philosophers from the righteous indignation of citizens who (rightly) suspect that such questioning undermines belief in the gods of the political community and thus corrupts the virtue of its citizens." In this Damon is hardly unique--there are plenty of liberals whose careful, borderline-aristocratic skepticism were at least partly influenced by scholars shaped by the legacy of Strauss. One of those is the historian Mark Lilla, who was an important figure in Damon's intellectual development. But either way, Strauss's presentation of philosophic inquiry as mandating a certain kind of  "esotericism," a hiding of the truth about ultimate goods from the unenlightened, has an unfortunate magnetic appeal: a promise that hard, uncompromising, almost invariably illiberal and undemocratic truths, truths which ordinary people cannot handle, are available to a select few.

That's the sort of appeal, as Damon has discussed at length, has warped far too many young conservative scholars into accepting philosophical criticisms of democracy as not just arguments worthy of contemplation--since, as Strauss himself wrote, "the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life, but only by a life devoted to contemplation"--but as exclusive, comprehensive truths which deserve to be politically enacted. Such exclusivity, when poorly understood, can become an apologia for Trumpist-style America-Firstism. Even more tragically, it sometimes settles in people's heads alongside other, even uglier political exclusions: that the esoteric truth of the world isn't available to those of the wrong background, the wrong gender, or the wrong race. And so Strauss, who fled the Nazis to come to America, planted seeds that sometimes grow up alongside genuine Nazis (one of whom, Greg Johnson, whose name I don't remember but whose face I think I do, very probably--as best I can determine from Damon's research anyway--sat beside me in a seminar on Martin Heidegger, another German radical thinker as well as a one-time Nazi, taught by my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America in 1999, where both of us graduated with our PhDs in 2001).

The connection to Heidegger is important here, because like Damon and some of those mentioned above, I read a lot of Heidegger once upon a time, both at my undergraduate and graduate institutions. And like Strauss, Heidegger's comprehensive arguments about the metaphysical weaknesses of Western philosophy--or, more accurately, the metaphysical flaws about the very structure of and the central apprehensions about human existence which liberal democracies and modern notions of individual rights are the flawed fruit of--can have a seductive appeal. Damon talked about this on a recent episode of the excellent podcast, Know Your Enemy. Responding to a question of how Lilla's skeptical liberal break away from the influence of more extreme interpretations of Strauss might have played a role in Damon similarly not being overly seduced by his philosophical esotericism, Damon reflected:

I mean it's funny; it was partly over Strauss, but it was also over Heidegger. I went through a period in grad school where I was, like, deeply seduced by Heidegger and I was just reading him all the time. Not just Being and Time but a lot of the lectures that at that time were just being translated….There was a period there where I really had a kind of temptation to sort of just take the leap. And Heidegger is one of those thinkers who can inspire that. A kind of…religious conversion, like an all-encompassing worldview. It's also like a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought to pieces...a ready-to-hand tool of deconstruction right there. In this period I already knew that Lilla was very skeptical about Heidegger. There was a point in which I started sort of haranguing him, insinuating in a very-handed, Straussian way: “Why don’t you have the courage to really look at these things? This is the truth!” Lilla wrote a very memorable, hand-written letter back to me, in which he basically insinuated that I have Daddy issues...."You’re always looking for some teacher to kind of show you the light, and then they disappoint you, and you leave them behind; you should be a little more skeptical.” He was just always counseling skepticism. Like: “Fine; try on those garments, see how they feel. But then put them down; keep them around, but don’t make them your wardrobe.” That’s my own awkward metaphor, but it very much was: just be cautious! And I think for Lilla that comes from the fact that he was a teen-age convert to a kind of evangelical Christianity, that he then worked his way out of, and it informs his entirely intellectual make-up; you know–don’t get fooled again! That kind of attitude…he ended up passing on to me to some extent, and by the time I got to a certain point, I had inculcated it enough that I was by then pretty inoculated from it all on my own.

I don't have a story like that, but I have a Heidegger story of my own, the practical outcome of which is quite similar to Damon's, but the intellectual path it took me on--one I'm still on to a certain degree--being very different from his. Basically, I wonder if it just come down to the two individuals most responsible for bringing me to an appreciation of Heidegger's deep critique of modernity being Jim Faulconer, a philosopher at Brigham Young University, and Stephen Schneck, a political theorist and my dissertation advisor at Catholic University of America. They are both serious scholars and devout religious believers--a Mormon who has written extensively on devotional topics, whose essays have been enormously important to my faith life, and a devout Catholic who has spent the second half of his career articulating an alignment between Catholic social justice teachings and progressive politics; currently, he serves as an appointed member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. And while neither were pious in the classroom--unlike some faculty at both universities, neither ever opened their classes or seminars with a prayer--in retrospect, I have realized that they introduced to impressionable students and budding scholars deeply discomforting critiques of the run-of-the-mill liberal, rational, and individual verities which the capitalist markets, the scientific methods, the technological tools, and the democratic principles which Western modernity takes as settled, critiques not just from Heidegger, but Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, Arendt, Rorty, Ricoeur, Wolin, and more, and did so in ways that suggested anything but, as Damon put it, "a wrench that can be used to shatter the entire history of Western thought." On the contrary, to me this introduction to deconstructive arguments--expressed by some of them in the midst of an ugly anti-Semitism, which Faulconer and Schneck never failed to expose as actually undermining the better readings of these individuals' own argument--was received, to use the language of Alan Jacobs, as an "invitation to repair."

Repair what? That which our Western metaphysical presumptions, our capitalist socio-economic confidence, and our distinctly modern belief in the possibility of--indeed the presumed moral requirement of--human technological mastery, all work unknowingly to cover over. To me, the importance of Heidegger's teaching about aletheia, or "unconcealedness" or "disclosure," as that which phenomenologically resides at the heart of "truth," was that it pointed toward, lurking within every claim or discovery, an original and prior revelation, an es gibt--that, in other words, something about that which is, is a gift that has been a given, and that something, that gift, should be attended to. Derrida's articulation of "the trace" functions that way as well; as Jim once wrote, Derrida is can be understood as almost a kind of negative theologian: "the point of his deconstruction is to help us remember what the text calls us to remember but then forgets by its very nature.....deconstruction calls us to the act of remembering, wonder, and praise, and in that to a remembering relation to what we have forgotten rather than to the descriptions of what we have forgotten."  (To those familiar with Heidegger, it should probably go without saying that both Faulconer and Schneck approached his writings with a strong emphasis upon--or at least it appeared to me--the post-Kehre or "turn" towards the poetic in Heidegger, rather than his pre-Kehre work of Being and Time and such.) 

In short, from all these thinkers I received, thanks to Faulconer and Schneck, not an invitation to a potentially threatening truth which warranted liberal skepticism, but rather a philosophical appreciation which communicated more than anything else an appreciate the constructive possibilities of our essential, always particular, but nonetheless collectively shared naiveté. Our very understanding of the world and our place in it, and our ability to think and speak about such things, are conditioned by deep structural "always-alreadys," horizons of understanding--expressions of language, culture, and more--into which we have been thrown and which we can have no other moral obligations towards except the work of tending and care...which is not the same thing as protectively preserving those thrown realities against any change! On the contrary, the aim shouldn't be to distance oneself from the fray, but to authentically engage with it. 

Is that a pretentious (and therefore potentially exclusionary) assumption of one's "authentic" right to engage in acts of tending and building, something which others presumably lack? That the hunt for authentic engagement can become so is something I acknowledge above. But these philosophers, and those who taught me about them, helped convince me that everyone, including those who only wish to exercise a serene, moderate, practical judgment over those still in the cave, are equally subject to thrownness, and thus equally obliged to articulate a subjectivity that puts them in some relationship to the world, even they just wish to survey it. To put it simply, I kind of think we're all unavoidably engaged in the same project-making and meaning-creation. And yes, I do mean creation, which can be just as much directed towards stability as towards reform, revolution, or reaction. You don't have to agree with Marx's Thesis 11 that the point of philosophy is to change the world (though I mostly do)--but it is worth considering, as Stephen once put it to me in a discussion about the German philosophical tradition (from Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger and beyond), the possibly that truth isn't something to contemplate and perhaps, at best, strategically create the conditions for: it is something to be lived. As the sort of Christian who leans more towards abiding notions of grace rather than restrictive notions of commandment, and as a Mormon whose beliefs include a healthy dose of utopianism (however buried over by Mormonism's embrace of modernity those 19th-century ideals may be), how could all that not fail to click for me?

So perhaps that's the story. Not remotely all of it--I could talk about my early exposure to Rousseau and my friendship with Marxists and my years in South Korea and my subsequent fascination with East Asian political thought and the work of Fred Dallmayr (my dissertation advisor's dissertation advisor), and who knows how much more Damon could add to this description of his thinking, even assuming it's accurate (which I hope it is, mostly). But maybe this is enough to add up to a proper intellectual account of where I'm coming from, philosophically speaking, when I read friend's reliably smart but also occasionally disconcerting commentary, and see in it someone whose perspective I both value and understand, and enjoy learning from, but at the deepest level--as opposed to the much more practical and needful political level--I simply don't share at all, however much our justifications for what we believe sound the same. Damon has a small-c conservative sensibility, which makes him want to skeptically push against anyone whom he suspects of wanting to upset the apple-cart, and for that the liberal pluralism of an Isaiah Berlin works far better than any comprehensive philosophical vision, particularly the poorly-read Straussian one too common on the American right today; I also have a small-c conservative sensibility, but since I also believe--thanks to the influence both philosophical and religious visions--that we are all already and invariably in the midst of constant apple-cart-upsetting anyway, I find myself instead pushing to find the space and grace to authentically realize, to locally build or rebuild, that which constituted the cart in the first place. If that makes any sense. 

Oh well. That's friendship for you. It's been years since Damon and I had a proper (non-alcoholic) symposium; this post can't serve as one, and it's the wrong time for one as well, but this heterodox Mormon left conservative raises a class to his mostly secular conservative liberal friend all the same. My memories of you are a blessing, Damon; at this time, I wish your memories of your father to be the same for you.

A Random Thought on Mikey Kaus

A few days ago Robert Farley, of Lawyers, Guns & Money, posted the latest entry in his wonderful "Oral History of the Blogosphere" project, this one focusing on the once-notorious (indeed, widely loathed on the liberal/left/progressive side of the blogosphere), but now mostly-just-grumbled-over journalist and blogger, Mickey Kaus. It's actually a pretty great conversation, if you're into remembering or rethinking what people were arguing about online and why and how they did it, circa 20001-2010. For me, besides enjoying it as I have enjoyed every previous entry in this series (really, if you're a blogger or ever thought you could be one you should listen to them all), it made me reflect on the enduring relevance of a particular ideological niche, however tiny or incoherent it may seem.

I never thought, and still don't think, the loathing of Kaus was mostly due to the controversial positions he took on the dominant political news items in America in the 1990s and 2000s: welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration, the Iraq War, etc. Rather, I think he was loathed because he insisted--to the minds of the aforementioned liberal/left/progressive pundit class, infuriatingly so--that he was taking those positions as a sincere, if appropriately evolved, New Deal Democrat. In a way, I think Kaus occupies the same much-condemned rhetorical space as Ralph Nader: he's someone who is seen as a betrayer, someone who talks the talk of liberal justice and then engages in public actions and intervenes in public debates that seem, to most liberals and leftists and progressives, to entirely contrary to how the liberal political world actually works.

The first minutes of the conversation with Kaus touched upon the legacy of Charles Peters and the magazine he founded, Washington Monthly, which tutored legions of journalists (including Kaus) in a vision of activist government grounded, as Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly's long-time editor, put it, in "the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth." There are, out there amid the sprawling, multifaceted coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party, lines of reflection upon the achievements of the New Deal, both scholarly and activist, which seriously downplay the ethical and civic part of that triumph of positive liberalism and egalitarianism. According to those arguments, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was that it laid the foundation for erecting social democratic institutions in America, for which many are still fighting for: to make health care a human right, to make higher education available to all, to put workers in charge of the economy, etc. As a democratic socialist myself, I agree with those lines of argument! But I'm also a sometime left conservative, a wanna-be civic republican, and a fan of both Christopher Lasch and the Point Huron Statement, and thus find myself agreeing with Peters as well. The leadership of the post-New Deal, and particularly the post-civil rights movement, Democratic Party really did focus mostly on achieving liberal justice through building ever-more effective (and ever-larger) redistributive institutions and practices. The way that focus partly (but not entirely unintentionally) combined a very un-New Dealish individualism with outright bureaucratic statism, and allowed a entirely new kind of meritocracy to flourish in liberal circles, thus taking the focus off the cultural and communal aspects of what a genuinely egalitarian and just society must involve...well, that's the critical space which Kaus occupied. Entirely coherently? In a philosophically rigorous way? Open-mindedly, kindly, and without self-indulgent contrarian snark? Not at all; in many ways, Kaus's voice was a profoundly flawed vehicle for this critical perspective on post-Cold War liberalism in America. But to my mind, at least, he was a vehicle for it all the same.

My primary evidence for this is a wonderful book that he wrote, The End of Equality. The book never got the respect it deserved, I think, partly because of the weird moment it arrived (right at the beginning of the Clinton administration; but was the book arguing against what Clinton was doing, or supporting it, or both?), and partly because Kaus's subsequent career--intransigently defending some of the worst aspects of Clinton's welfare reform, obsessing about family breakdown even as income inequality skyrocketed, etc.--retrospectively made the book's insistence that "Money Liberalism" was a non-starter and that "Civic Liberalism" was the way to go seem like Kaus was auditioning George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" a decade before it nominally (though never actually) arrived. All those criticisms are fair. But I still use selections from the book in my Political Ideologies classes on occasion, because I find so much of it refreshingly clear and free of cant. He is frank about his conviction that most of those with socialist aspirations have been unwilling to recognize the incompatibility of "fraternity, community, and idealism" with the lack of "material prosperity" that only rapacious capitalism seems to provide (p. 11); he is genuinely eloquent in asserting that differing levels of health care don't actually matter to the egalitarian legitimacy of society so much as "that everyone wait in the same waiting rooms" (p. 93); and he is downright prescient in warning that, if the goal of the Democratic party continued to be tweaking the tax code in some Rawlsian way so as to make it fairer and increase the size of welfare checks but in the meantime said nothing about the lack of community-feeling and solidarity in America, the end result will a general hardening of whatever egalitarian spirit the revolutions of the 1930s and the 1960s may have left us with:

Americans may be social egalitarians today. But give the affluent two more decades to revile the underclass and avoid the cities as if they were a dangerous foreign country, two decades to isolate their "gifted" children from their supposed inferiors, two decades of "symbolic analysis" and assortative mating, and we might wake up to discover that Americans aren't such egalitarians at all any more. Then politics would be really dispiriting (p. 180).

That paragraph can be picked apart and even partly undermined in multiple ways (that large numbers of younger and mostly liberal-learning people, including young families, started returning to America's cities throughout the 2000s is the most obvious rejoinder, but not the only one). But I read it, and I see the once at least moderately liberal suburbs, filled with college-educated, white-collar-job-holding, mostly well-off Americans, voting for Trump across large parts of America. Dispiriting indeed.

Anyway, this is just something that occurred to me, when Robert unintentionally invited Kaus back into my mind. So I thank him for that.

Left (not Liberal) Conservatism (or Communitarianism, if you Prefer): A Restatement

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Recently, Tablet Magazine published a lengthy essay by Eric Kaufmann, heralding the revival of "left-conservative" thinking, which the author defined as "a conservative view on cultural questions like national identity and immigration with left-wing positions on economic issues like public services." Leaving aside for the moment whether this "intellectual force" is, in fact, emerging (and how we would know it if it was), the genealogy and analysis of this constellations of opinions provided by Kaufmann is interesting. Most politically informed Americans would, I suspect, look at the above definition and think "oh yes, that's what those legendary 'conservative Democrats' are said to believe; I'm sure there must be a couple of them still around here somewhere." But Kaufmann is trying to distringuish something rather different than that, I think, something similar to what long-time observers of American conservatism might remember from the "Red Tory" boomlet of a decade ago. I don't believe he's successful in making his claim, because--to give away the end of the essay--I think his conception of liberal nationhood gets in the way of his explanation of what left conservatism is or could be in the first place. Still, it provides some intellectual history worth surveying, at the least.

Kaufmann builds his argument primarily around the intellectual journey of two important mid-century Jewish thinkers, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, both of whom came of age--like many other intellectuals in their cohort--during an era and in an environment of leftist radicalism, and went on to be influential academics whose Cold War, anti-communist sensibilities were deeply disturbed (though, I think, in importantly different ways) by the unrest of the 1960s. Kaufmann quotes Glazer as saying: "When I came to Berkeley in 1963, I still thought of myself as a man of the left, and for the first few months of the free speech issue, I was on the side of the free speech people....The key issue that labelled me a conservative, labelled a number of us as conservative, were the student unrest issues post-1964." What changed? Years of student challenges to, in Glazer's view, "free speech, free research and free teaching." As Kaufmann sums it up, the problem for Glazer, and many of his fellow former radicals, was that their preferred "social democratic approach was married to political liberalism," and that meant "standing up for bourgeois liberal democracy." Which is, of course, an obvious course for philosophical liberals to take! But if the ideas Kaufmann traces in this article are rooted in liberalism, in what sense is the "conservatism" they might invoke actually "left."

Ideological terminology and labeling never has been and never will be consistent, so it's a fool's errand to ever claim to definitive identify that one set of beliefs are, or only ever could be, "liberal" as opposed to "left" (to say nothing of "conservative"). Still, attempts to do so are instructive, because if nothing else they can provide landmarks for intellectual wanderers. Most "left" intellectual landmarks that have been articulated ever since the French Revolution--which is when this particular phrasing first arose--have involved have involved one of form or another of liberation from cultural, economic, and social forms and traditions which impose hierarchies and distinctions. In other words, the one thing that can probably almost always be said with confidence about the "left" is that it is egalitarian. Aren't liberals egalitarians too? Obviously much contemporary liberalism, as opposed to classical liberalism, has certainly turned its long-standing valorization of the God-created individual as a rights-bearing being in the direction of thorough-going egalitarianism. But the fact that libertarian thinkers, making use of the same philosophical convictions about natural rights and individual dignity as liberals, can coherently advance decidedly non-egalitarian claims, suggests that leftist egalitarianism must have different roots.

Norman Mailer's self-description as a "left conservative" can be instructive here. When Mailer called himself a left conservative in his strange and magnificent The Armies of the Night, he said that he aimed to "think in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke." one possible way of articulating this vision (which Mailer himself admitted was an oxymoron which he had to redefine every day) is to say that modernity is different from what came before it (whether you want to date that to French Revolution or the Declaration of Independence or any other landmark). The traditions and communities which Burke defended simply cannot exercise the authority they once did in a world in which individual subjectivity has conditioned our very understanding of the self. Technology, social fluidity, democracy: all genies let out of the bottle. Which all, of course, rings as conservative in the fullest sense. As I once argued in an attempt to make sense of left conservatism more than 15 years ago, conservatives value tradition and community in part because they are the only things that cannot (at least cannot easily) be turned into abstractions which in turn can be taxed away from you or turned against you; to the extent that the modern world sees profits, procreation, wars, borders, religions, holidays, families, markets, marriages, and more as institutions and events best understood, conducted, and transformed in light of some abstract principle--whether that be individual rights or personal conscience or democratic harmony or economic progress--then one could argue that the modern world has gone wrong, gotten away from the instinctual truths and embedded necessities of human existence.

There are possible reactionary responses to this, whether a jihad-like revolt against modernity or a St. Benedict-like retreat from it. But neither of those were Mailer's response. As the above-linked essay explains, Mailer "hoped to subvert most traditions that governed American life," no doubt in part because so many of those traditions were products of "corporate power and its influence on American culture." So his response, instead, was to imagine a Marxist response, carried out on behalf of Burkean communities and traditions. Marxism was and is, obviously, deeply implicated in grand theories of historical determinism and revolution, which Mailer himself condemned ("I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances"). But you can still make use of Marx's central--and, yes, illiberal--insights regarding alienation, commodification, imperialism, and so forth, without all the historical materialist baggage. Why attempt to do so? Because (and I've suggested before) Marx recognized the anthropological truth of the Burkean (though for him it was really more Hegelian, and therefore Rousseauian) insight into the human connection between personal subjectivity and communal, historical, material reality. Repairing the human consciousness does not mean an eternal project of subjective liberation, world without end, which can never do more, I think, than aim to make the burdens of modernity privately manageable (with that emphasis on the private perhaps explaining the tendency many liberal thinkers have for assuming that the liberation of identities will go hand-in-hand with socio-economic equality). Instead, the true leftist must address the issues of power and production which make the transformations of modernity into alienating, divisive, and dependency-inducing burdens in the first place--and that means taking seriously the communal and traditional spaces where those transformations take place.

(An aside: did I just put Rousseau and Burke into the same sentence? Yes. But the only reason that sounds strange, I think, is that the deep Burkean tradition has evolved into a position which basically accepts the collapse of the modern project: with the end of the authority of tradition comes the impossibility of community, a banal emotivist future, and the likely decline (or violent overthrow) of the West. In short, to borrow a point from Michael Walzer, such Burkeans are the sort of communitarians who think that we are at the point, or nearly at the point, where our communal nature is irredeemably broken up. The problem with this argument, however, is that--given that the human race, even in the decadent liberal West is, well, still here--it implies that community and tradition must not have been part of our "deep structure" after all. Whereas the Rousseauian perspective says, fine, okay, our original nature has been lost, we're in chains. The liberal response is to deny the chains, or insist they aren't relevant to individual life anyway; the conservative response, especially in its more religious iterations, is to say something like, yes, the chains are real, it's a catastrophe, but in a sense the chains have been there since the fall of Adam, so let's just make the best of it until the eschaton. Rousseau's response preserves true conservative seriousness, but rejects the identification of specific social and economic and cultural problems with original sin. Instead, it respects the need for embeddedness and connection by suggesting that we remake our chains. Why can we do that? Because within and through modernity the deep structure abides; we're just having difficulties actualizing it, because we've been so intent in fighting internecine battles within liberalism that we've ignored all the other ways in which we could be responding to the world.)

Kaufmann never mentions Mailer in his piece, which is unfortunate, because the way Mailer expressed his attachment to what he considered a proper conservative sensibility--one which, among other things, made him very sensitive to the need to fight centralizing abstractions and systems, and insist upon the value of realizing equality in terms of empowerment--would have been a helpful correction to Kaufmann's own articulation of the "left conservatism." Kaufmann's historical arguments about the capture of the "adversary culture" by America's corporate class over the past half-century, and how the alignment of those increasingly-elite (and therefore no longer entirely "adversary") conceptions with technological and educational shifts in America's economy over the past 30 years, thus contributing to a deepening of class divides along urban and rural lines--all of those are, I think, both true and worthy of serious thought. But Kaufmann's notion of that which the left conservatives he is imagining want to conserve is rarely actually a matter of local communities or traditions. Rather, the focus is on national stability, particularly ethnic national stability. That high levels of immigration can be a serious challenge for local norms is a truism that no serious person should deny. But to build a model of the conservative sensibility around the nation state, connecting Robert Putnam's important work on social capital to "collective tradition, memory, and nationhood," and posing the proper conservative goal as "a nation-state with a common culture," is to, frankly, ignore the best that conservatism has to offer: a respect for (though not, of course, an unthinking obeisance to) local spaces, and the communal and traditional patterns which emerge there.

Kaufmann concludes with the prediction (or hope?) that soon governing power in Western democracies will be held by--or at least will be regularly and seriously contested for by--"national conservatives endors[ing] left-wing policies such as protectionism, infrastructure spending, and support for welfare programs like Social Security, alongside conservative ideas such as immigration restriction and nationalism." But we know what that is, and it isn't necessarily leftism; rather, it is the redistributive liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, of America's manufacturing unions in their heyday, of finance capitalism given freedom to expand alongside the American state, so long as appropriate levels of taxation keep schools and programs all fully funded. From an egalitarian perspective, there's much to applaud there! That's part of the reason why, from the 1930s to the 1970s, so many radical democratic and socialist thinkers, with intellectual roots extending back to the populist challenges of the early 20th century, found at least some degree of unifying comfort with the Democratic party. But once American capitalism went fully global, the bankruptcy of that egalitarian bargain was, slowly but surely, revealed, and those on the left (including those with whatever degree of conservative sympathies) found themselves having to either embrace or disentangle themselves from the neoliberalism that eventually become dominant. Kaufmann captures some of this, but the orientation of his argument around the likes of Bell and Glazer, two comfortably ensconced academics, members of an ethnically marginalized but nonetheless (at least within university circles) fully vouchsafed members of the American intellectual elite, perhaps inevitably makes him begin with and return to a leftist (but actually liberal) construction that can only conserve a nationalist conception which the aforementioned New Deal world created as a byproduct. Besides Mailer, he would have done better to seriously consider the historian Christopher Lasch.

Lasch--who, to my knowledge, never used the phrase "left conservative," though the political theorist Ronald Beiner used "left-wing conservatism" to describe Lasch's thought--does make a brief appearance in Kaufmann's argument, serving as part of, in his term, the "Protestant Populist-Progressive" complement to the "anti-communist socialism" which, in the thinking of New York intellectuals like Bell and Glazer, he sees the roots of left conservatism. Unfortunately, his use of Lasch's ideas--which shouldn't be at all unfamiliar to students of American conservative thought, though unfortunately still often is--doesn't serve the man's overall philosophy well. He writes that Lasch "castigated America’s elites for their post-national detachment from popular national identity," but that assumes the Lasch made any kind of argument for a genuine "popular national identity" in the first place, which many readers of the man (myself included) would firmly dispute. It's not that Lasch denied that modern individual subjects can and often do build an identity through, and develop cultural attachments in connection with, a community as large as a nation state; he knew that he had himself (as he wrote in 1954, he recognized that he was "a part of America, whatever that means, except that the one thing it means is that wherever I go I cannot not be a part of it"). But the populism which Lasch called for--a populism that was, itself, distinctly left-conservative, at least if we hold to the idea that one can put together both an insistence upon the equal empowerment, in social and economic terms, of all communities, and an equal respect for the local norms and traditions which democratic majorities within those communities wish to live in accordance with--was never nationalist, never statist, and certainly never ethnic. It was, if anything, both cognizant of (even, in a way that many conservatives never are, respectful of) the moral opportunities which which modern subjectivity and the liberation of the individual self had made possible, while insistent upon the need to never valorize such liberal possibilities as foundational. Eric Miller thoughtfully captured Lasch's mature thought this way:

Populism, [Lasch] wrote, "stands for things most American still believe in and are willing to defend," however submerged those beliefs might be beneath the glitter and gigantism of the market and the state....Against those who had argued that "populism" was merely an ideological haven for racially intolerant, ignorant provincials, Lasch began to recover and define a kind of populist cosmopolitanism....

[T]his required that he first deconstruct the self-image of those who fancied themselves the true cosmopolitans....Whereas democracy's health required a rooted loyalty to particular places, the new elites [of America] were "international rather than regional"....Such upper-class cosmopolitanism was of course the true provincialism, a species more dangerous than the variety the despised lower-middle class might possess. 

Against this faux cosmopolitanism Lasch proposed a vision of citizenship rooted in loyalty to place and kin yet also informed, enriched, and instructed, in a dialectical manner, by the fruits of high culture. "Those who welcome cultural fragmentation in the name of pluralism," [Lasch] wrote...."have lost the sense of 'twoness,' as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, that formerly shaped writers attempting to navigate between the subcultures in which they had been raised and the world culture they had acquired through education"....The liberationist project of the elites, premised on the need to free "the imprisoned self," [Lasch] noted...yield[ed] simply a "detached, formless, free-floating self--a self without prejudices, without a point of view of its own that is put at risk by others....Without a home culture, as it used to be called--a background of firmly held standards and beliefs--people will encounter the 'other' merely as consumers of impressions and sensations, as cultural shoppers in pursuit of the latest novelties. It is important for people to measure their own values against others and to run the risk of changing their minds; but exposure the others will do them very little good if they have no minds to risk." [Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch (Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 371-373]

While it might seem to take away from the policy focus of Kaufmann's original argument, Lasch's taking of his populist synthesis of a conservative or communitarian concern for place, tradition, and culture, on the one hand, and the leftist concern for equality and empowerment, on the other, in the direction of the arts is, I think, a much truer way of expressing the potential of this ideological construct than by simply endorsing strong welfare provisions and strong immigration restrictions at the same time. The latter is simply a grab-bag of policy positions that can be construed as representing the interests of some particular demographic quadrant of society, however historically important such a constellation of priorities may have appeared to Cold War American intellectuals at the time. The former, by contrast, can, when pushed, be revealed to incorporate a deep engagement with political and social theory, far more than loose talk about the consequences of the rise of immigration and the decline of unions. As a host of critcs, philosophers, and scholars argued in a symposium on left conservatism over 20 years ago, long before anyone at Front Porch Republic rediscovered the term, left conservatism is a way of articularting, while still recognizing the full, degrading and dependency-creating effects of the racial, sexual, and class hierarchies of our late capitalist moment, some sometimes discomforting and no easily reputed arguments (none of which the participants in the above symposium were particularly sympathetic to, even as they recognized the challenge they posed). First, that materiality matters, which presents real limits up, or at least complications within, any project which equates equality and empowerment with the liberation of the subject. And second that attacking foundations, whatever the (often quite real and necessary) strategic value of doing so, can never on its own create a politics that truly matters to social life.

There is arguably a parallel to all this, if only Kaufmann could have seen it, in the fate of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. In a recent column titled "The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders," Ross Douthat made the argument that the wave of protests which have arisen in the five weeks since George Floyd's murder, whatever their justice, represent a departure from the democratic socialist vision of Sanders, and its replacement by a leftism that fits right into the ideological movement that Bell, as Kaufmann presents it, sketched out over 40 years ago. Left agitators, according to this prediction, inevitably lose their interest in democratizing the economy so as to empower and equalize conditions for the working class, and focus instead on non-economic hierarchies whose destruction will be more acceptable to cosmopolitan educated members of the capitalist class. The result is a liberalism which consumes the leftist emphasis upon, as Sanders constantly repeated, the deprivations of the billionaire class, thus losing any connection to the poor for the sake of maintaining influence over the educated. As Douthat claimed:

Throughout his career, Sanders has stood for the proposition that left-wing politics lost its way after the 1970s by letting what should be its central purpose--the class struggle, the rectification of economic inequality, the war against the “millionaires and billionaires”--be obscured by cultural battles and displaced by a pro-business, pro-Wall Street economic program....

Now, under these strange coronavirus conditions, we’re watching a different sort of insurgency challenge liberalism, one founded on an intersectional vision of left-wing politics that never came naturally to Sanders. Rather than Medicare for All and taxing plutocrats, the rallying cry is racial justice and defunding the police. Instead of finding its nemeses in corporate suites, the intersectional revolution finds them on antique pedestals and atop the cultural establishment....

[T]his revolution has been more unifying than Sanders’s version--uniting the Democratic establishment that once closed ranks against him, earning support from just about every major corporate and cultural institution, sending anti-racism titles skyrocketing up the best-seller list, even bringing Mitt Romney into the streets as a marcher and inducing Donald Trump to make grudging noises about police reform....All this, from one perspective, vindicates critics who said Sanders’s vision of revolution was too class-bound and race-blind all along....

[But the] anti-racist reckoning unfolding in colleges, media organizations, corporations and public statuary, may seem more unifying than the Sanders revolution precisely because it isn’t as threatening to power. The fact that corporations are “outdistancing” even politicians...in paying fealty to anti-racism is perhaps the tell. It’s not that corporate America is suddenly deeply committed to racial equality; even for woke capital, the capitalism comes first. Rather, it’s that anti-racism as a cultural curriculum, a rhetoric of re-education, is relatively easy to fold into the mechanisms of managerialism, under the tutelage of the human resources department. The idea that you need to retrain your employees so that they can work together without microaggressing isn’t Marxism, cultural or otherwise; it’s just a novel form of Fordism, with white-fragility gurus in place of efficiency experts....

Yes, serious critics of structural racism have an agenda for economic as well as cultural reform. But that agenda isn’t what’s being advanced: Chuck Schumer will take a knee in kente cloth, but he isn’t likely to pass a major reparations bill, and the white liberals buying up the works of Ibram X. Kendi probably aren’t going to abandon private schools or bus their kids to minority neighborhoods. And in five years, it’s more likely that 2020’s legacy will be a cadre of permanently empowered commissars getting people fired for unwise Twitter likes rather than any dramatic interracial wealth redistribution.

I am a cynical conservative, so you can dismiss this as the usual reactionary allergy to the fresh air of revolution. But it’s also what an old-guard leftism, of the sort that Bernie Sanders attempted to revive, would predict of a revolutionary movement that has so much of the establishment on board.


Douthat is honest enough to acknowledge a major hole in his argument: specifically, that "the demand for police reform at the heart of the current protests doesn’t fit this caricature." Which is surely how Sanders would defend himself from this accusation, if he felt inclined to articulate his vision of society in these terms: it is the poor (which includes a proportionally greater number of historically deprived and discriminated against persons) that have suffered so often from police forces which cannot help but be organized more around the interests and priorities of the wealthy; hence, a democratic socialist vision, or really any left vision for that matter, would have to include a challenge to the most visibly coercive of all our racial and class hierarchies.

Yet even with the column's central weakness, Douthat has a point, a point that any properly reflective leftist would have recognize. If the focus of leftism is not simply liberal redistribution, welfare payments, and the recognition of private subjectivities, but rather the public democratization of the social and economic order as a whole, then any movement that is so readily interwoven into the therapeutic managerialism of the corporate and knowledge class, such that Lasch so effectively identified and condemned, has to give believers in real economic democracy pause. And that would include left conservatives. Not so much--as one making use of Kaufmann's articulation of the term might think--because this kind of intersectionality challenges deeply felt ethnic, racial, or sexual hierarchies and thereby troubles our national community. That isn't, I think, a left conservative concern that is worthy of the name. Rather, a Laschian left conservative would recognize that any kind of reform movement, much less a revolutionary one, which allows itself to get centered around emotional or psychological abstractions, as opposed to the material realities of actual social and economic inequalities, whether in education or publishing or policing or anything else, is likely to captured by the forces of capital, and channeled into disputes that, whatever their legitimate need for resolution, will once again fail to connect with the communities where people live, the material lives they live there, and the traditions they build through those lives.

It is those actually existing habits of life which make life worth living. A democratization that does nothing to address the chains and dependencies which restrict and warp the full organic development of those lives, and the attachments they are constructed out of, is only at best a liberal equalization, delivering goods to individuals without much acknowledgement of the communal and local structures they are part of. To the extent that the goods are desperately needed, even a liberal distribution of them is very much worth it, and if the mix progressive economics and conservative politics that Kaufmann sees flowing from the insights of men like Glazer and Bell can effectively, democratically, deliver them, then more power to them. But such deliveries will do little, theoretically anyway, about the place-destroying global unfolding of capitalism; perhaps some small resistance will be made to it, but the neoliberal argument for managed expansion will remain dominant nonetheless. A philosophically consistent left conservatism, such that could be built out of the writings of Marx and Lasch, and perhaps the irascibleness of folks like Mailer and Sanders too, would, I suspect, better serve the human need for both community and equality all around.