by Richard Schulman
As the 2020 elections approach, Republican thinkers have been trying to come to grips with three problems:
- How to square traditional Republicanism with Donald Trump’s presidency,
- How to account for the Progressive takeover of the country’s educational and cultural institutions, and
- What to do about the decline of the family and local community.
Many regard the debate as having intensified after Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s post-New Year’s diatribe against Milt Romney, finance capital, and the decline of the American family. In March, a more sweeping attack, “Against the Dead Consensus,” appeared in the High Church publication, First Things, targeting traditional conservatives. The attack conceded that
Consensus conservatism played a heroic role in defeating Communism in the last century, by promoting prosperity at home and the expansion of a rules-based international order…. But even during the Cold War, this conservatism too often tracked the same lodestar liberalism did—namely, individual autonomy. The fetishizing of autonomy paradoxically yielded the very tyranny that consensus conservatives claim most to detest.
By “liberalism” the First Things writers mean what we would, more accurately, call “Progressivism.” The First Things writers blame traditional conservatism (“consensus conservatism”) for failing
to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, … the pornographization of daily life, … the cult of competitiveness.
“Consensus conservatism’s” alleged dogmas are:
free trade on every front, free movement through every boundary, small government as an end in itself, technological advancement as a cure-all. [These] foreclose debate about the nature and purpose of our common life.
Prosperity, the First Things writers imply, has led to “the soulless society of individual affluence” (emphasis in the original).
As with Tucker Carlson’s diatribe, no evidence is offered. The logic, to the extent there is any, is post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e., correlation rather than causality.
Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed
Notre Dame political scientist Patrick J. Deneen carries this one step further in his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed. Of this book Wall Street Journal reviewer Tod Lindberg writes:
While the failure he alleges does indeed encompass the progressive element in American politics, Mr. Deneen’s target is much bigger. The “liberalism” that has failed, in his telling, is the very project of modernity itself, whose origins date to the 16th and 17th centuries and whose signal political achievement, arriving in the 18th century, was the founding of the United States…. Liberalism went wrong from the beginning, in Mr. Deneen’s view. Its fundamental innovation was to define politics around the liberty of the individual, the protection of whose rights is the purpose of government.
Columnist William McGurn, writing in the same paper, adds:
At the root of Mr. Deneen’s critique is a rejection of the entire Enlightenment view of the human person. As he tells it, the classical pre-Enlightenment understanding saw man as finding his fulfillment in his attachments—primarily to God, family and town. The Enlightenment, by contrast, viewed these as constraints from which individuals needed liberation, mostly by science and reason, so they could make their own choices. The problem, according to Mr. Deneen, is that once severed from these attachments individuals find themselves alone, vulnerable and in need of help, and the only institution powerful enough to offer it is the centralized state.
The rights and wrongs of the authors’ analyses
First, let us state at the outset that while the authors’ indictment of individualism and prosperity is nutty, their concern about the decline of the family and local community is 100% on target. One index of the decline of the family is the increase in children born out of wedlock: “In 1960, nonmarital births were quite rare. Today, about two-fifths of all births are to unmarried women,” Robert Verbruggen writes.
Contrary to Carlson, First Things, and Deneen, it wasn’t Mitt Romney, finance capital, individualism, the Enlightenment, and the Founders who are responsible for this state of affairs but birth control technologies, such as The Pill. This has enabled married couples to plan better how many children they have and when they have them. But it has also overthrown, among the unmarried, previous norms as to what happened if sex resulted in a pregnancy. As a 1996 Brookings Policy Brief explains:
Until the early 1970s, shotgun marriage was the norm in premarital sexual relations. The custom was succinctly stated by one San Francisco resident in the late 1960s: “If a girl gets pregnant you married her. There wasn’t no choice. So I married her.”
Since 1969, however, shotgun marriage has gradually disappeared. For whites, in particular, the shotgun marriage rate began its decline at almost the same time as the reproductive technology shock. And the disappearance of shotgun marriages has contributed heavily to the rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate for both white and black women….
What links liberalized contraception and abortion with the declining shotgun marriage rate? Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. Even women who would be willing to bear children out-of-wedlock could demand a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy.
The increased availability of contraception and abortion made shotgun weddings a thing of the past…. Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships.
The consequences have been severe: a sharp rise in children being brought up by a lone parent. Brookings adds, with emphasis,
If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great. The policy implications of the increase in out-of-wedlock births are staggering.
We don’t think more abortions or more public school classes on how to use birth control technologies is the way to go, morally or practically. Our proposed solution will be ridiculed by Progressives, but it’s worth a shot. Our inspiration for suggesting it comes, interestingly, from Yoram Hazony, whose analysis we otherwise dislike for its animus, like that of Deneen, against the Enlightenment. But Hazony importantly and correctly notes the significance of the absence of Bible instruction in the public schools since the end of World World II. Without that background knowledge one cannot understand the mental outlook of America’s Founders and what the country stands for. To make his point, he comments on Justice Hugo Black’s decision in Everson v Board of Education (1947):
In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in FDR’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. Religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms, the very form of the American Constitution having been the result of the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America.
It is here that we find the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: One in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to ensure that no child in the country is taught religion in any publicly supported school. Within less than two decades, the Supreme Court had banned not only religious instruction but prayer and devotional reading from the Bible in schools, placing the great majority of the nation’s children in the care of a safe space scrubbed clean of any reference to the place of Christianity and Judaism in laying the foundations of the American republic. Instead of arising out of longstanding Christian tradition, America was reimagined as a product of Enlightenment rationalism: In the high school I attended in New Jersey, we heard not a word about the Bible or the common law, but we were taught about Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
Clearly school choice would be necessary to free schools to reintroduce Bible instruction. This need not have a denominational flavor. The Bible was a crucial part of the US cultural heritage as every 18th century American historian is fully aware. It’s also essential if students at all levels are to understand and appreciate the art, literature, and music of earlier centuries. Hazony also makes an interesting case that the Bible is not taught as part of the philosophy curriculum because of the malign influence of 19th century German anti-Semitism on the prescribed scope of the field.
There will be skepticism that, even if Bible instruction is reinstated in school curricula, this will promote a return to earlier moral norms such as the shotgun wedding. But since there would be more assured benefits as well — a better understanding of the context and meaning of the American Founding and of Western culture and thought — this is surely an educational reform worth campaigning for and an additional argument for expanded school choice.
The decline of local community
All the writers cited above decry the decline of local community, and they are right to do so but wrong in placing the blame for this on conservatives, the Enlightenment, and a too-successful American Founding. Cohesive, caring local communities are essential for support of the sick, injured, addicted, and unemployed and for a concerted attack on recovering from economic setbacks and becoming vibrant communities once again.
Healthy families are a key part of vibrant communities. Auguste Meyrat notes the relationship in an article in The Federalist, “How A Shift To Majority-Childless Adults Will Deeply Change American Culture.” We [at Founders Broadsheet] suggest that high housing prices and high student debt are having a strongly negative effect on child-rearing and even marriage. Housing needs to be addressed by local zoning reforms and removal of counter-productive building codes. High college debt can be reduced by keeping the economy running at full employment so that employers aren’t so demanding of education-heavy resumes. Educational costs can also be lowered by expanding online instruction.
The vibrancy of local communities depends heavily on the political powers available to them to use. There is no point of town meetings and neighborhood solidarity if all powers have been sucked away to distant capitals. The Democrats are particularly addicted to this centralizing vice out of their preference for elite span of control over larger and larger numbers of deplorable subjects. With the retreat of effective political power to Washington DC and state capitals, local newspapers have been either bankrupted or become reprint services for the NY Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press.
Final words
The First Things writers, Deneen, and Hazony all use the word “liberal” sloppily. Unfortunately, they repeat a practice that is widespread in the US but not Europe. By so doing, they obscure the important distinctions between Progressivism, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. Classical liberalism as we understand the term was the outlook of the Founders and of 19th century European liberals. Earlier traditional religious, classical, natural and common law traditions were fused with Enlightenment thought and new ideas from economics. As for Enlightenment thought, it was extremely diverse — not only between English and French-centered versions but within both and encompassing Italian and German contributors as well. Deneen and Hazony fail to acknowledge this diversity.
That cavil noted, we recommend Hazony for his discussion of reintegrating Biblical instruction into the school curriculum and his argument for the Bible’s place alongside the ancient Greeks in the study of philosophy.
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