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The Threats In Tucker’s Brain

The Washington Monthly cover story ignores the substance of postliberal critiques, and reads like establishment liberal cope
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I find myself really irritated this morning by the Washington Monthly article about the supposed threat to liberalism posed by me and other “postliberal” thinkers. Aside from the errors of fact in the essay, it doesn’t grapple with the substance of our general critique. Contrary to the essay’s claim, I don’t consider myself postliberal in the sense that I believe in a system of government other than classical liberalism. One major difference between me and, say, the Catholic integralists, is that I cannot envision a system that is preferable to classical liberalism given the diversity of the American population. I am “postliberal” in the sense that I believe liberalism, as it exists today, is incapable of responding to its failures. I’ll explain a bit more below.

Most of my critique of what liberalism has become has to do with the fact that the woke Left, which dominates all our institutions, has abandoned liberalism. I would be satisfied — not happy, exactly, but satisfied — if we lived in a liberal society. But we don’t. In fact, the woke Left has marched through our formerly liberal institutions wearing liberalism like a skin suit. We are fast moving beyond liberalism into a tyranny of wokeness that I call “soft totalitarianism.” The essay by Gabby Birenbaum and Philip Longman never once deals with the problems of contemporary classical liberalism, preferring instead to land superficial blows against postliberals.

For example:

Yet the title of Deneen’s book was Why Liberalism Failed, not Why Liberalism and Conservatism Together Failed. Rather than emphasize a fusion of left and right in common cause against the excesses of corporate monopolies and a captured administrative state, he railed against a strawman version of liberalism that reduced it to libertarianism.

But as any reader of Deneen’s book knows, he uses the term “liberalism” to mean not the politics of the Democratic Party, but rather classical liberalism, which has iterations on both the Left and the Right. In that book, Deneen doesn’t offer a replacement for classical liberalism, but only observes that it has failed because it has succeeded at “liberating” the individual from any unchosen obligations, and from any transcendent framework of meaning. This is a serious, fundamental crisis in liberal countries, but Birenbaum and Longman choose instead to dismiss the critique on its face as wrong, allegedly because Deneen is only going after the Left. Anybody who reads Patrick Deneen knows that he is very hard on the establishment Right too. He might be wrong in his assessment of classical liberalism’s failures, but this essay gives no indication that its authors have understood his critique.

Similarly, they dismiss The Benedict Option as merely recommending “monastic retreat”; I would bet my paycheck that neither has read the book. And they ignore my more recent book, Live Not By Lies, which extends and deepens my analysis of what liberal society has become under wokeness. If you’re going to hold me and my ideas up for ridicule, shouldn’t you at least know what you are criticizing?

The authors are baffled that us postliberals won’t work with the Left to address problems that we both identify, even as they cite examples of some of us doing exactly that! It’s a strange piece from a liberal Washington magazine, an essay that seems to exist solely to bolster its Democratic establishment readership’s conviction that there is something icky and frightening about postliberals. For example:

Since Rod Dreher wrote his first book questioning the Republicans’ inflated faith in markets, he has been on a journey that has included first recommending monastic retreat, then praising Putin’s use of propaganda to promote cultural and religious conservatism, and most recently traveling with Tucker Carlson to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and serving it up as a model of what the United States should be.

As I mentioned yesterday when I wrote about this, it’s just lazy. The Benedict Option recommends that Christians double down on deepening our roots in the faith, and build communities and institutions capable of being resilient in the face of the disintegrating forces of modern life. This is “monastic retreat”? I did not “travel with Tucker Carlson” to Hungary; I was already living here, and besides, I have been very clear that the US is a different society than Hungary, so we couldn’t and shouldn’t try to replicate Orban’s Hungary in America. Still, I have said that there are aspects of Viktor Orban’s political leadership that Republicans would do well to study and figure out how to adapt to American conditions. I can understand why this alarms American liberals, but it’s not the same thing as saying that we should recreate Hungary in North America. If the authors had read my stuff on Hungary beyond what someone said about it on Twitter, they would know this.

And the Putin thing is decontextualized slander. I praised Putin’s criticism of gender ideology and wokeness in the context of saying even our enemies understand how insane this stuff is. But the authors wanted to smear me with Putin poo, I guess.

Liberalism, it seems to me, only works within a culture in which people broadly share the same fundamental worldview. To sharpen the point, it seems to me that it can only really work within a culture that shares the Biblical (Judeo-Christian, if you prefer) idea of how the cosmos is constructed — and in particular, what human beings are. We are losing, and in some places have definitely lost, that, hence the crisis of liberalism. In the US, the neuralgic points of wokeness exist because the postliberal Left — again, which now controls elite discourse and institutions — conflict directly with what the West, informed by the Bible, believes human beings are.

The woke view of race relations, for example, depends on a reductionist conception of race and identity. The woke view on sex and gender identity depends on the belief that sexual desire is at the core of the human person’s identity, and that maleness and femaleness is entirely plastic, and can be changed via technology and legal fiat. Many Christians (and others) believe this is wrong — not merely morally, but scientifically and metaphysically. And on race, Martin Luther King-style liberalism is indeed a fulfillment of liberalism’s fundamental conception of the human person; what has displaced it is anti-Christian, and illiberal.

This is not a coincidence. As the (non-believing) English historian Tom Holland writes in his great book Dominion, most of the things that proper liberals cherish in terms of political and social values come from Christianity. Liberalism, with its human rights discourse and the rest, is a secularized form of Christianity. There is a reason that liberalism emerged in the Christian West, and nowhere else. Can we have liberalism without Christianity (or, if you prefer, a value system based on the Judeo-Christian tradition)? That is a question that we are now living out, and the answer seems to be negative. Liberalism without Christianity, and its anthropology (e.g., What is man? What is man’s purpose?) devolves into woke tyranny, which regards basic liberal principles like free speech, freedom of religion, and equal justice before the law as covers for evil.

The Washington Monthly essay reads like cope for establishment liberals who are afraid to face the profound weakness of their position. By far the greater threat to classical liberalism comes from the Left, not from a motley assortment of right-of-center thinkers who point to liberalism’s failures to serve the common good by creating conditions under which people within society can thrive. As the scholar Eric Kaufmann points out from his research, the prime threat to liberalism comes from Generation Z, which favors cancel culture over traditional liberties. 

How did that happen? What do classical liberals of the Left, like (presumably) Birenbaum and Longman, propose to do about it, to rescue liberalism from the young Jacobins? This, I submit, is by far the more urgent question than how to think about people like Tucker Carlson, Patrick Deneen, and Self. But it’s also a harder question for conventional liberals to answer.

It’s much easier to sling around lies, such as that Hungary has an established church (it does not), than to grapple with the substance of what postliberals are saying. I suppose the authors must have assumed that Hungary has an established church because Prime Minister Orban is forthrightly Christian, and governs by Christian principles. In fact, Hungary is roughly three-quarters Catholic, and one-quarter Reformed (Orban and Hungarian president Katalin Novak are both Reformed). An established church is impossible in Hungary, and from my perspective it’s a good thing — for the church! (This is another area where I diverge from the Catholic integralists.) In any case, Great Britain has an established church, feeble though it may be, but nobody claims that it’s not a liberal democracy. So what is the point of Birenbaum and Longman? Or are they just throwing what they can at the wall to see what sticks?

Old-fashioned Democratic liberalism is being dismantled in front of the eyes of Washington Monthly editors by leftist radicals that have taken over institutions, so naturally they turn their critical gaze to a group of outside thinkers on the Right as the real threat (“Should we also be terrified? Emphatically, yes!”). I suppose it’s much easier to go to Washington social events having declared yourself as opposed to Tucker Carlson and his minions than it is having laid into the illiberal Left, in the name of defending liberalism. But it’s not honest, and it does relatively little to defend classical liberalism.

It’s fair to criticize me for not offering a replacement for liberalism (though as I’ve said, I would be happy with old-fashioned classical liberalism), and the other postliberals for offering unrealistic options (e.g., Catholic integralism). But what do Longman and Birenbaum offer? Do they really believe the system as it exists today is liberal? Do they really find the woke-ification of formerly liberal institutions and communities to be no threat to liberalism? If so, then I would say they are badly out of touch. But if they do find wokeness, which Wesley Yang has rightly called the “successor ideology” to liberalism, to be a threat to liberalism, then they have more in common with postliberals of the Right than they seem to realize. Dealing with that would require them to work harder than merely taking cheap shots at postliberals.

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