On (Not) Losing Our (Civil) Religion

On April 3, 1890, in Lehi, Utah, my maternal great-great-grandmother, Martha Mercer Kirkham, joined with other women to form a local chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah, an affiliate of the National Women’s Suffrage Association. Women in Utah had been granted the right to vote in local and territorial elections in 1870, but the Edmunds-Tucker Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Cleveland in 1877, disenfranchised Utah women as part of the national government’s effort to crush the Mormon defense of plural marriage. Kirkham wasn’t a plural wife, but she was a voter, and was deeply frustrated at this right being taken away from her. A humble 19th-century Utah woman, she stood and was recorded as saying:

Mrs. President, Ladies and Friends: 

In my weak way will try to address you a few moments. I believe we are in a good cause. We have our rights but have had one great right taken from us. I, for one, felt bad when my vote was taken away. I only had the privilege of voting a few times. If we live as we should do we would vote the same as our husbands, and he, being the head, should know how to lead, which I believe is his place, and woman to follow. I have always believed that if that good feeling that should be between man and wife existed they should be able to walk along together and be one in council with their family, and also in business; otherwise there is confusion. But the woman should not be looked upon as below the intelligence of man. She has the need of it and should try to keep herself posted with the spirit of the times for her benefit and also for the good of her family. How can she impart what she does not know herself? We have need of all we can learn, for how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters? I, for one, would be pleased to have my vote again; it looks rather gloomy now, but no excellence without labor.

Kirkham never did get her vote back; she died at 37 years old in November that same year, and Utah women didn't get the opportunity to vote once again until Utah was admitted as a state in 1896. And of course, I strongly suspect that no one reading this (unless one of those readers are Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth and his sometimes-spiritual advisor, the anti-feminist and Mormon-suspicious Christian nationalist, Doug Wilson) would be fully comfortable embracing Kirkham's acceptance of patriarchy and headship when it comes to family roles. Still, her insistence that she was not "below the intelligence" of her husband--and, by implication, any other person--and thus should enjoy the same legal rights as he is, I think, the deepest, truest aspect of America's whole experiment with self-government, its whole civil religion, that one can imagine. The fact that hundreds of millions--and not just American citizens--have been inspired by this particular principle ought to be evidence enough of that, unless you're one of those reactionary or postliberal conservatives who thinks the very idea of popular sovereignty is an unfortunate canard.

I’ve associated America’s civil religion with the extension of basic democratic rights—most centrally the right to the vote, and thus the right to participate formally in the kind of collective self-governance which the United States, when understood in light of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, is founded upon—many, many, many times. I recognize the theoretical complications with doing so. What I’m doing is trying to connect what some would call “sentimental,” or “bland,” or even “anemic” liberal practices (and voting can certainly seem like all of the above, sometimes) with something tied up with deeply communitarian or cultural or even spiritual understandings of identity and belonging. Much of the scholarly writing on these topics tends to focus on “nationalism” or “patriotism,” and pose the question as to whether or not such feelings can ever be purely “civic,” or whether there needs to be (or inevitably, however unknowingly, must be) some kind of historical or ethnic or religious or linguistic or racial character to those senses of identity and belonging. Those in the latter camp (Vice President J.D. Vance quite obviously is, or at least wants to present himself as such) look upon the articulation of a civil religion or a sense of American identity that involves mostly just individuals exercising democratic freedoms and choices as nonsense.

My response to that—the response that makes me want to both keep those liberal freedoms and expand them and reclaim them when taken away, as my great-great-grandmother did—is to say that Vance, et al, have an exceptionally narrow understanding of how social ties and senses of belonging are formed in the first place. It is, I would argue, an unavoidable facet of human nature to want to understand the actions of individuals (including oneself) as embedded in some sort of collective, morally (and often religiously) substantive—that is, “truthful”—cultural order. This is the fundamentally dialogic character as human beings coming out: our ability to speak, think, associate, and judge impels us to retrieve from or construct through our social lives an arrangement of meaning. The result, as numerous religious historians have pointed out, is that the arguably “unsubstantive” civic actions that we take—like voting—themselves develop over time (through rituals and practices and terminology and traditions and more) into what might be called "voluntary national religious establishments." Not in the sense of an established church, but in the sense that there are forms of life and routines of expression that we come to rely upon, that we come to view as ordinary, or normal. And yes, as such norms develop and put down their roots, the question of defending them (as well as regularly critiquing them) becomes a part of the equation.

The paranoia some feel about how the changes which extending the notion of equality into ever more arenas and ever more aspects of life (from property and religion to race and gender, from voting and military service to marriage and participation in high school sports) may threaten those norms is not unreasonable. But what is unreasonable is the claim that the push and pull over our norms and social constructions, over the bonds and beliefs which constitute our civil and religious order(s), is itself somehow beside the point, and that really all that matters is some kind of sovereign declaration of identity. (Which necessitates a nation-state with a unified executive capable of issuing such declarations, perhaps.) Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded that the difficulties people like Vance highlight are short-term ones, ones that—in particular in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.” That is substantive stuff—that’s what makes for strong citizens, and thus strong families and strong neighborhoods. (As my great-great-grandmother Kirkham put it, “how great is the mission of woman, and why should she not be able to have a voice to make law, to govern her sons and daughters?”)

As a matter of theory and history, the complications in making these connections are many. Saying that America’s Jeffersonian creed, the affirmation that “all men are created equal,” and that therefore—especially once the U.S. Constitution was forced, following the Civil War, to bring the principles of the Declaration into its fundamental law—the affirmation that American citizens by right enjoy the ability to vote and act and build lives unconstrained by some natural hierarchy, itself constitutes our civil religion, our “voluntary establishment,” in an entirely substantive and not merely “civic” way, is to claim a lot. Some would argue that it claims too much, and that it would be much better to seek to articulate a liberal vision of equality and democratic participation and anti-hierarchy without messing around with claims which necessarily require a faith in an establishing “people” who are substantively articulating themselves in the first place. I find those arguments fascinating. But I’m enough of a liberal republican, a believer in both individual democratic rights and in the places and communities—the many diverse publica of the American nation—wherein we collective exercise them, to trust that, whatever else was wrong with the Founders original understanding of this American experiment, these principles, the principles that my great-great-grandmother humbly hoped to be able to exercise again before she died, are ones that this country can still run with, can still both defend and critique, can still build upon.

I don’t think America has lost its civil religion yet. I still believe in the power of ordinary people to organize (as those women in the Lehi chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah were), to express themselves (as Martha Mercer Kirkham stood up to do), and to vote, thus placing themselves, as citizens, on the same level as everyone and anyone else. Understanding the challenge posed by those who threaten that which binds these practices, these perspectives, this power, together with their own personal demagogic declarations, whether as performers of anti-democratic epic theory or just plain old-fashioned bread and circuses, is probably the first step to making sure we won’t. 

 

 

An Urban History of Prosperity’s Menace, and Those Who Sought (and Still Seek) to Tame It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Regarding Abundance

One of the big topics of conversation among left-leaning and liberal pundits, politicians, and intellectuals so far in 2025 has been “abundance.” The key idea—mostly tied to the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book of that title, but also related to many other claims that have been building for years—is that the United States has forgotten how to build things, and in particular, how to build things for the common good. Making policy changes so as to prioritize the government getting homes built, grids wired, bridges erected, etc., as opposed to prioritizing other, more egalitarian or environmental aims, is the best way to create an electoral constituency for otherwise popular progressive goals, or so the argument goes. 

The data behind the argument is hardly original; libertarians have talked about how America has paralyzed itself through regulations for decades, and socialists have talked about how America’s obsession with profit has resulted in bloated corporations sucking up our inventiveness for just as long. But Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is significant because it uses this data to make an argument that challenges America’s liberal establishment directly (an establishment that both authors are very much a part of). The book itself is open-ended about the direction of that challenge. Is it a call for a return to the New Deal, with the government taking a direct hand in boosting basic industrial and economic projects (but mostly only those)? Or is it a neoliberal apology for big business, who would be happy to lend their productive powers to America’s state capacity in exchange for being released from various democratic restrictions and procedures? (That the Trump administration has gleefully ignored Constitutional process in the name of “getting stuff done” has only complicated the call for, and the costs of, an “abundance” orientation.) 

A Different, Yet Defining Perspective 

Daniel Wortel-London’s superb new book, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981, appears to have no direct relevance to this debate. But indirectly, Wortel-London (whose politics are clearly leftist, and highly critical of the too-common celebration of capitalist development in American life) presents a way of understanding “abundance” that is, I think, of immense value. Like the very best forms of historical research, The Menace of Prosperity uses a particular place (America’s largest and most influential city, New York) and a particular time (the 1870s to the 1970s, a century during which New York City’s citizens and leaders alike saw, celebrated, and struggled against their city’s transformation from a large urban center to a global financial megapolis) to reveal something general—in this case, something essential to the urban landscapes where 80% of all Americans live. By so doing, Daniel-Wortel also provides readers with something close to a defining perspective on how we should think about economic growth today.

Wortel-London takes his title from a line in Lewis Mumford’s 1938 classic, The Culture of Cities: “From the standpoint of decent metropolitan living one might well speak of the ‘menace of prosperity.’” The specific context of Mumford’s comment was the push in the 1930s by a large number of New York City’s power players for “fiscal stabilization.” Following the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the immense debt being carried by American cities led many urban leaders and bodies (though not, it must be said, anything like a majority of New Yorkers) to embrace a surprising mix of local conservation and progressive reform, some of which echoed the premises of early New Deal programs like the National Resource Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Cities, this argument went, needed to restrict speculation and preserve their locally available economic stock (in terms of land, natural resources, material goods, labor, and productive capacities). As Wortel-London puts it: 

At their most ambitious, these entities promoted a truly radical understanding of municipal well-being: one based not on meeting the whims of the wealthy through debt but on meeting the needs of the city’s working people through its existing resources. Meeting these needs, to be sure, might require deflating the speculative expectations and property values that had accrued in more irrational times. But the reward for this deflation would be abundance: cheaper land would enable more sanitary low-income housing, restrictions on development would enable green spaces, and all this would, in the end, save New York from the instability and social costs that “prosperity” had inflicted upon it (The Menace of Prosperity, p. 121, bold added).

What is being pulled out of this particular moment in Wortel-London’s argument is a different understanding of abundance. Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities means the productive locality upon which one stands. This is not low-tax conservatism, nor is it supply-side progressivism; it is conservation for the sake of democratic empowerment. This is my formulation of Wortel-London’s language, and he may not agree with it, but it shows the value of his research to the abundance conversation—and The Menace of Prosperity has a rich historical tale on its side.

Of course, the insights which history reveal to us will never remain static, and Wortel-London’s careful, sharply detailed unpeeling of NYC’s fiscal evolution demonstrates this well. The particular moment of urban reform which Mumford sought to build upon unfortunately passed, as all moments of reform similarly come and go, some leaving lesser or greater improvements in their wake, but all contributing to the constantly evolving struggle which American cities face. The key point of that struggle is presented at the book’s beginning as the repeated realization by multiple generations of New Yorkers that “the costs of elite-driven growth outweigh its benefits” (p. 2). But why is that a lesson that never sticks?  

The Dilemma of Cities Over Time 

Cities are places of expansion and experimentation. They have been imagined as such in the Western world ever since their emergence as centers of commerce and education in the late Medieval era, promising opportunity and freedom—“Stadtluft macht frei”—to all who relocated there. That such opportunity and freedom were entwined with alienation and poverty was, of course, also understood by many; hence the abiding Jeffersonian preference for an agrarian life. But the specialized material promises of city life—the occupational and social variety, the artistic excellence that even Jefferson admitted to, the tolerance, and the wealth they provide a social space for—have nonetheless continually drawn the masses of humanity into urban environments, meaning that the governance of such cities is always centrally about responding to the demands for growth, and then managing what Wortel-London refers to as their “social costs” (p. 3)—economic stratification, disinvestment in marginalized neighborhoods, community breakdown, and that old Jeffersonian concern, dependency. 

The history of American cities following the Civil War, as the American economy came to prioritize large-scale manufacturing and trade over agriculture and small-scale artisanship, became a history of capitalizing upon land—the land that city-dwellers were moving to occupy, the land that entrepreneurs wanted to place factories upon, the land that investors realized would increase in value. This search for capital was driven by both voters and speculators—and since cities were Constitutionally-defined non-sovereign entities, subject to state and the national governments, that capital could mostly be obtained in only a few ways. Slowly, through taxation, which has never been a popular revenue stream; more quickly, through debt-financing, the easiest and most fiscally devastating stream that cities have relied upon; or most directly of all, through transfers from other jurisdictions and governments, which is the stream they have the least amount of control over. (The additional possibility of cities running, on behalf of their citizens, profit-making public utilities to generate funds has been, as Wortel-London details, sadly reduced as a viable option.) The latter two methods qualify as “elite-driven”—and redirecting these methods of raising capital towards actual democratic, broad-based uses, as opposed to following elite development preferences, was (and is) something rarely accomplished.

The Menace of Prosperity’s hundred-year survey of the “fiscal imagination” of NYC’s (and, across America, other urban) leaders is essentially a remarkable recitation of attempts at this kind of redirection. The pattern is similar: the costs of elite-driven growth are recognized, are responded to with reforms, and those reforms, successful or (more commonly) not, eventually become embedded in the continuing evolution of the city, such that they develop their own constituencies and become a new basis for demands of, again, elite-driven relief. That may sound like a hopeless cycle, but it isn’t presented as such. With each response to every fiscal crisis in New York City’s history, Wortel-London shows us individuals thinking creatively to craft solutions that will improve the life of the city—though he also shows us how the “sunk costs” of previous efforts to tame elite-driven growth and make the productive possibilities of urban spaces more available to all city inhabitants add up over time.

In the 1880s and 1890s we see Henry George and his “fiscal republican” followers fight to institute some version of a land-value tax, one that would “by taxing land at 100 percent of its value….force landlords to either lower land prices in the hope of attracting productive enterprises to their property and making some kind of profit, or to sell their land to those who would….[thus] liberat[ing] urban real estate markets from the distortions of the speculator…[and] making it easier to establish businesses and freeing cities to reach their economic potential” (p. 36). The failure of the Georgist campaign was a great loss—one unfortunately tied to its unwillingness to consider cooperative alternatives, with its hyper-focus upon real estate development undermining its own constituency “once opponents of fiscal republicanism provided alternative policies for acquiring property ownership and achieving local growth” (p. 51).

Forty years later, the once-Georgist homeowners and local producers in New York’s outer boroughs, who had learned to organize—in good local democratic fashion—on behalf of the debt-financed integration of the city’s periphery with the downtown through subways, bridges, and more, were now the key opponents to the aforementioned “fiscal stabilizers.” In the view of reformers, the public sector—which “was not as committed to pursuing speculative profit”—was crucial to the development of an “economically self-sustaining” housing market which could cool the fluctuations of New Deal-era urban economies (pp. 115-116). In one of his more insightful arguments (in a book filled with them), Wortel-London details how elements of the New Deal’s conservation orientation were compromised by its sincere attempt to include “local governments and civic bodies,” with the result that “rather than seek out new solutions,” many in the Roosevelt administration “attempted to supplement older approaches with new financing, standing ready to pick up the municipal slack for assisting realty along the same lines local governments had.” The result—“federal support for suburban homeownership”—predictably “worked against efforts to restrict peripheral growth” (pp. 134, 136). Public housing couldn’t compete with such subsidized expansion. 

By the 1970s, as movements in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment reached their peak, suggestions in response New York City’s latest crisis over growth were perhaps more radical than they had been in nearly a century. While the city’s liberal establishment embraced the post-WWII logic of corporate growth and redistributive taxation, others, inspired by visionaries like Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs, started to push for rebuilding the city’s economy through decentralization, a move towards empowering neighborhoods and communal associations through “close-grained tax allowances” and the loosening of centralized zoning rules, without reliance upon “cataclysmic money” from the national government (p. 177). For the first time in the city’s history, non-Caucasians had a major presence in these arguments, as many Black activists came to see the “lack of local economic control” as a central concern (Wortel-London reports that as of 1960, “four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals” and “four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community”—p. 183). But the immense momentum enjoyed by New York elites—both governmental and corporate—who bet on making the city a center of the globalized economy gave them resources to finance Jacobsian-style reforms in the city’s built environment, all while ignoring the fiscal imagination of these cooperative radicals: 

At their most ambitious, groups holding to this [cooperative, localist] vision claimed that New York’s existing development strategies—recreating the city in the image of its most powerful and profitable enterprises—was both unjust and uneconomic. And at their most radical, they argued that the economic health of neighborhoods could only take place through outright community ownership. Nonetheless, most of these “fiscal communitarians” lacked the agonistic edge that earlier fiscal reform movements held. While White brownstoners were eager to preserve some of the city’s existing housing stock, they had little inclination to displace the white-collar enterprises where many of them worked. And many in the city’s Black neighborhoods were less interested in empowering their communities than in empowering their own enterprises within those communities. Ultimately, New York’s liberal policy-makers were able to meet these demands while further accelerating the city’s white-collar development…. Oblivious to the costs of private growth and unwilling to imagine alternatives, New York’s liberal establishment would keep their faith in the city’s white-collar economy (p. 192).  

An Abundance of Urban Alternatives, If We Can See Them 

 In the end, Wortel-London believes the history of New York City’s repeated reforms of, and frequent failures in redirecting the consequences of, elite-driven growth, teach that “we cannot frame the fiscal dilemmas of local governments in simple terms of economic development versus economic decline” (p. 225). The assumptions of NYC’s elites—that subsidies can provide fiscal solvency, that wealth generation can pay for welfare—unfortunately continue to obtain throughout American cities, despite concerted efforts to show the long-term financial costs and liabilities of expanding infrastructure, and the equally devastating social costs of centering city life around the cult of business development. Growth, very simply, should not be entirely about expansions of supply or increases of goods. Partly because those expansions and increases depend too often upon the exclusionary capitalization of spatial resources that urban communities nominally offer to everyone who relocates to them, and partly because such capitalization invariably cannibalizes itself, requiring the process of seeking elite investment and debt-financing to continue unabated, perpetuating the crises which The Menace of Prosperity expertly details. 

But Wortel-London doesn’t leave his readers without hope. On the contrary, in the book’s final pages he affirms that we can build upon the history of America’s cities, as so many reformers have done before. It’s been more than 40 years since the end of The Menace of Prosperity’s story, and fiscal struggles remain; why not turn again to considering how it is that “locally oriented firms with alternative ownership structures…can provide more public revenue, with less public costs, than seemingly ‘wealthier’ firms,” and that “lodging the ownership and operation of economic enterprises within [a city’s] most marginalized communities….[will] provide these communities with much needed resources while expanding their political autonomy,” thereby working to democratize the finance structure under which all of us who live in cities depend (pp. 225, 227)? 

In a recent essay, Wortel-London looked at the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as the latest potential participant in this ongoing struggle. Many may dismiss him the moment they hear him self-identify as a “democratic socialist”—but for city-dwellers who want (as they should) to take the lessons that The Menace of Prosperity laid out seriously, Mamdani’s talk about municipally owned grocery stores, rent freezes for qualifying tenants, and loan forgiveness for small businesses, ought to provide some food for thought. Financing these programs is the problem, as always—and yet those with urban faith might look to cooperatives, land trusts, public banking, and other innovations (all of which have drawn upon the same lessons this book reveals) as routes to explore. 

The faith that something cooperative, something Jeffersonian, can be built into the operation of urban liberalism may seem a faint hope. But for close to 1000 years, people have come to urban centers looking for opportunities, carrying with them new ideas, hoping for the freedom to build upon them. The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today's context, this vision once more?

On Superman, Sentimentality, and Citizenship (or, What Gunn's Superman Knows About America that J.D. Vance Apparently Can't Comprehend)

Daniel McCarthy expanded upon his New York Post editorial, the one I responded to previously, in the pages of his journal, Modern Age. His expansion—“Superman After Liberalism”—isn’t a rebuttal to my response, but he tagged me nonetheless, so I’m going to take the opportunity to respond once more…particularly since the way McCarthy is pursuing his case against James Gunn’s Superman provides me with an important contract to Vice President J.D. Vance, who recently, on the occasion of receiving an award from the Claremont Institute, gave a speech on citizenship which was about as antithetical to the deeply American moral sentiments of Superman as I can imagine.

McCarthy’s argument against Gunn’s vision of the Superman character isn’t changed by his expansion, but he does elaborate on his thesis in some interesting ways. He’s not wrong that “the problem of reconciling the exceptional with the egalitarian” has been a subtheme to telling super-heroes stories ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster essentially evented the genre (and if McCarthy had either the pop culture knowledge or inclination, he could have made the obvious point that recent comic, cinematic, and television incarnations of Superman—from Christopher Reeve in Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie to Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel to many, many others—have all taken different positions on how to address this narrative problem). Nor is he wrong—though he is, I think, incomplete—in suggesting that Siegel and Shuster’s original solution, and the one that supposedly served the character so well for decades, was to write Superman as motivated by a New Deal-era confidence in liberalism as a form of patriotism, the result of his, through his adopted parents, “assimilation into Kansas and America as the land of the free.” I don’t see how anyone remotely online—to say nothing of comic books fan over the past 85 years who have (likely unlike McCarthy) actually consumed Superman media—could be unaware of this aspect of Superman’s history, especially given how relevant it is to debates that McCarthy (and Vance) are deeply involved in today.

McCarthy sees the Superman of the James Gunn film as having abandoned this confidence, as American liberalism has also abandoned it (or maybe, depending on how much and what sort of postliberalism McCarthy embraces, it was fated to turn away from it, in favor of identity politics and government-managed pity). Instead, he sees the Superman played by David Corenswet as unexceptional, bland, and weak (McCarthy makes much of how Superman’s unwillingness to kill makes him reliant upon other heroes capable doing the necessary “dirty work”). And while he allows that there probably could have been, even within his framework, a way of telling the Superman story that asked the “right questions,” this one absolutely isn’t it; in Superman, he sees only a left-liberal film that is so frightened that “fascism has already taken over this country” that its titular character lacks “a place of his own,” leaving him to articulate only lame liberal sentiments with no moral strength of their own.

I’ve already talked about how wrong this argument is. The lame liberal sentiments that McCarthy sees in Superman’s wonderful final words to Lex Luthor—

I’m as human as anyone. I love, I get scared, I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human! And that’s my greatest strength.

—could, I suppose, be understood as validating a kind of moral individualism and even fatalism. That they lack much by way of realpolitik thinking, and thus arguably open the door to a hypocritical Machiavellianism, showing a face of kindness and sympathy to the crowd while justifying self-interested actions behind your back, is also perhaps true. (Superman didn’t seem too worried about the fate of his clone, for example.) But of course, it’s not like the downsides—the exclusionary classism, racism, sexism, and more—so frequently present in more rigorously particular moral systems are difficult to identify either.

More importantly, to fail to understand the moral strength—and, on an admittedly somewhat attenuated level, what I think can only be understood as an aspect of self-sacrificing Christian love—that is just as possible to be found within this kind of compassion-driven ethical universalism is a major mistake. It’s one that has been made by haters of Rousseau and every attempt within the context of modernity to follow the path toward moral legitimacy—a civil religion based on rights and consent and small-d democratic efforts to build communities of action and legislation—which he suggested for centuries now. I have no idea if James Gunn or David Corenswet have ever heard of Moral Therapeutic Deism, and I definitely reject the idea that what viewers of Superman saw on the screen is just another version of some self-centered, MTD, make-it-up-yourself-morality. But denying that there is any moral substance, any heroism, to someone who puts forward, first and foremost, kindness and concern and sentimentality and good deeds, absent any explicit patriotic attachment or sectarian confession or nationalist vision, is simply a complete misreading of the moral thinking at work in this long, centuries old, deeply important liberal Christian tradition. It’s a complete misreading of the religious sensibility that, as a resident of Kansas, I still see plenty of evidence of all around me, obtaining in communities and families that are interconnected and wired and far less self-sufficient that many who prattle on about “heartland values” insist on making them out to be, but which issue in friendliness and service and charity nonetheless. And finally, frankly, it is a complete misreading of American republicanism as well.

So now let’s turn to Vice President Vance’s partly thoughtful, but mostly pedantic speech, one that Superman would never be pretentious enough to give. In talking about citizenship, Vance starts by making a serious, complicated point:

Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we're doing [in the Trump administration] is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It's hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

That social bonds and civic strength develop organically over time through the routines of ordinary life is an undeniable communitarian truth; the whole notion of “social capital” is built upon that understanding. And hence, it’s not unreasonable to see the challenges of ethnic, religious, racial, cultural, and (I think especially) linguistic diversity as genuine ones, ones which immigration restrictions might be an at least partial solution to. There is good research in support of this—but also evenmoregood research that challenges it, making the argument that the obstacles posed by diversity are actually, when one controls for technological distractions and economic barriers which prevent people from interacting as humans (anthropologically social creatures that we are) normally would, quite small, and in any case that such obstacles, absent political polarization, actually fall quite fast.* Robert Putnam, the scholar who developed the idea of social capital, essentially concluded in a later study that the difficulty Vance highlights is a short-term one, one that—in immigrant societies like the U.S.—is always being negotiated by the emergence of “cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities.”

Presumably, Vance—or at least his speech-writers—are smart enough to know all this. Which means that in holding to this argument, he unintentionally (or, who knows—maybe intentionally!) reveals that his hope through serving in the Trump administration isn’t to fine-tune immigration policy, but rather to change America  away from being an immigrant society at all. And his case for this is plainly ideological—or even, I think, theologico-political, and not in a good way. In the most notorious passage in his speech, he claims:

If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself. If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence, that's a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.

Some of the reasoning here is obviously puerile. (“Must we admit all of them tomorrow?” So, you’re assuming that “hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence”—perhaps in part because their own French or Japanese or Canadian or British or Italian or Australian or Norwegian political cultures have long socialized them to accept similar principles of government by consent and natural rights—actually would all want to come to the United States in the first place?) And some of it worryingly strange. (As John Ganz pointed out, the Anti-Defamation League is hardly a “woke” entity these days, but somehow Vance nonetheless thinks it important to insist to castigate them, suggesting that he really does think that anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and others so-inclined should be given a pass, presumably because they had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.) But the parts of it which bother me the most are, I think, anti-republican in the most malicious way.

The republicanism of Thomas Jefferson has been endlessly analyzed, and no doubt will long continue to be. But broadly speaking, Jefferson’s republicanism was a fascinating—some would say incoherent—mixture of the aristocratic and the democratic, a mixture of Enlightenment confidence, agrarian sentiment, and noblesse oblige. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is not a crystalline distillation of all those ideas, but it does hit all the main points of it, especially as its ideas were later amplified and refined through centuries of American experience and practice. Jefferson’s vision was one of rational human beings exercising their natural right to collectively achieve independence, not solely or even primarily in order to remain virtuous farmers, or to instantiate through the power of a new social contract their own preferred res publica, but simply in order for their personal and communal development, as productive citizens, to be free from the interfering interests of powerful others in their civic spaces. Whatever the inconsistencies one might find in this theoretical framework, it is a substantive one, reflective not of unstated assumptions about some natural necessity regarding borders and identity, but rather of the explicitly stated assumption that a God-and-nature-given sensibility will show the rightness of a free people being able to work out their independence as part of civil order they choose for themselves, absent any distant hierarchy (whether spatially or temporally).

No one actually familiar with the philosophical and historical arguments here can deny that notions of sovereignty—of the right of a people to collectively define and govern their communities, including the borders thereof—were an important component of these republican visions that shaped America’s political culture. But Vance would have us believe that sovereignty needs to be the central concern of anyone concerned about citizenship and freedom:

What does it mean to be an American in 2025? For one, I think it has to mean sovereignty. More precisely, American citizenship must mean belonging to a nation that guards the sovereignty of its people, especially from a modern world that's hellbent on dissolving borders and differences in national character.

The Declaration is by no means a culturally placeless document; among the particulars that Jefferson levied against King George were claims that his actions were stirring up the continent’s native inhabitants to war and allowing the Catholic French to establish a dangerous foothold in Canada. Jefferson was not so idealistic as to ignore all concerns about security and identity. But the power of the document—and really, the power of this kind of liberal republicanism in general—is the way it connects with sentiments of liberty whose natural rightness were, in Jefferson’s view, becoming undeniable with the transformations which moved Western civilization away from the ancient and medieval worlds, and towards a more rights-based one. Jefferson’s embrace of the Enlightenment is hardly defensible in every particular, especially when it comes to race and religion. But the fact that America’s political culture became entwined with Jefferson’s hopes—his belief that, as he put it in one of the final letters he ever wrote, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”—is inseparable from what this country has meant to the history of the world. To reduce that all to obsessions over sovereignty (and apparently not so much, in Vance’s mind, popular and democratic sovereignty, which is a crucial aspect of self-governance, but rather martial sovereignty, since he seems especially worked up about the fact that “so many young people…say that they would not die for their own country…[or] put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation”) is a serious conceptual loss.

Fortunately, the history of America is filled with people who have understood this country’s civic self-conception more accurately than Vice President Vance does. President Abraham Lincoln, for one, who in perhaps his greatest and most influential speech, emphasized that the carnage of the Civil War, and the kind of community those who waged it were motivated by, was one characterized by a simple, singular “proposition”: “that all men are created equal.” But also, how about the political theorist, and refugee from the Holocaust, and naturalized U.S. citizen, Hannah Arendt? There’s isn’t a smidgen of flakey idealism to be found in her writing—and yet, her whole understanding of her adopted country began with her appreciation of the power of the demos to build civic spaces and secure liberty through revolutionary action, action which is not dependent upon some kind of prior security, but upon a spontaneity available to all. There is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader, devout (however flawed) Christian, and democratic socialist, whose commitment to all three of those collections of moral principles formed the pillars of the “beloved community” that he believed all free people ought to and someday would be able partake of, with Jefferson’s words in the Declaration guiding him towards his refusal “to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” And what about Zohran Mamdani, the likely future Mayor of New York City? On July 4^th, he posted his sentiments: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.” And Vance—kind of like McCarthy, come to think of it—found that bland statement of liberal patriotism simply horrifying. “There is no gratitude in those words, Vance ranted. “He dares on our 249th anniversary to congratulate [America] by paying homage to its incompleteness and to its, as he calls it, contradictions?....Who the hell does he think that he is?”

Well, for one thing, he appear to think—if only in terms of structure, not substance—pretty much the exact same way Vance himself thinks, if he were only honest or self-reflective enough to notice it, since our Vice President actually ends his own speech saying “we must get to work”—which I think must mean that even he agrees that the work of American citizenship is, well, “unfinished.” But that’s just more puerile rhetoric from angry man, or at least a man who knows his position in the Trump administration and the plaudits he receives from the MAGA base depends upon his performative anger.

A better answer, of course, is that Mamdani, like all good Americans this summer, may not think he’s Superman, but he’s surely been inspired by Malik Ali, the falafel vendor who believes in Superman, jumps into a crater to help him up during his first tangle with the Hammer of Barovia/Ultraman, and then is pointlessly murdered by Lex Luthor while the latter tries to get Superman to tell him the location of his home. Because Superman does have a home, a place—a place of homely, maybe even “bland” liberal republican and Christian virtues, all that not particularly sovereign stuff about doing good and feeling compassion and treating everyone equally and trying again and again, despite all his and our limitations and mistakes. It’s the sort of place that teaches a person to, when offered a falafel by a vendor after saving someone from being hit by a taxi, accept it gratefully.

Did the Kents introduce Superman to falafels while he was growing up? Probably not—probably he came to like them because he’s just another struggling modern person, appreciating the good food and other good works human beings can achieve. There is a substance to this very American, very liberal, very “bland” struggle. It’s a substance I’m happy to admit is in some ways parasitic upon, and therefore must necessarily connect to, all sorts of deeper traditions and values and visions; there’s a reason why I call myself a communitarian and a civic republican and a Christian, after all. But to allow the fact that the Christianity and republicanism and community attachments of modern Americans (like, I think, James Gunn’s Superman) tend to be rather liberal to become a reason to reject their sources entirely is the worst sort of cutting off your nose to spit in your own face. Of course, when you’re talking about a political movement that’s all about reacting against the America that actually exists, not to reform or improve or correct it but rather to just reject its reality, then maybe that kind of cutting and spitting is what passes for respectable thought. It wins awards from the Claremont Institute, apparently.

How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.