2
WHOSE COUNTRY IS IT? And who gets to define what it means to be an American? Just weeks before the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Jeet Heer, writing in the left-of-center New Republic, accused the Right of giving up on democracy, voting for a candidate who was a fascist authoritarian. Heer wrote,
One of the few positives about Donald Trump’s run for president is that he forced us to see aspects of American culture that many instinctively turn away from. . . . Anti-democratic sentiment [is] a growing threat. . . . Beyond this election, beyond even the fate of the Republican party, there is a significant minority of Americans who are giving up on democracy because it doesn’t serve their purposes of upholding a white Christian patriarchy.1
While Heer saw Trump only as a symptom of this growing anti-democratic sentiment, what really worried him was that “even if [Trump] fades as a political force after the election, the underlying disease will remain, and indeed will likely spread.”
Now after four years of the Trump presidency and his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, critics were still seeing Trump as a symptom, and even more worried about the growth of the antidemocratic sentiments, not in a small minority fringe of the electorate, but possibly seventy-four million people. And while critics were relieved that Trump was defeated, many pointed to the riots of January 6, 2021, as proof of the fascism that had been growing for years. In many ways, the impeachment of Trump may have been less about him and more about his supporters. Trump was a symptom; what they really feared was Trumpism, now embraced by half the electorate and that threatens to take over the entire Republican party.2
Consider the opinion piece by Republican never-Trumper Michael Gerson, writing at the time of the impeachment hearings, and making it clear the real threat is no longer Trump but his legion of supporters: “Trumpism Is American Fascism.” After apologizing for going there, Gerson makes clear that anyone who supports and believes in Trump’s populism is really a fascist, clinging to “the betrayal of American identity.” According to Gerson, “the 45th president and a significant portion [how big he doesn’t say] of his supporters have embraced American fascism.” While Gerson doesn’t think Trump came “close to success,” he contends that “the influence of his treacherous ideology is still being spread” and “American fascism needs to be aggressively marginalized.”3
Writing in the left-leaning Atlantic, MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes contends that “the Biden era of American politics is shaping up as a contest between the growing ideological hegemony of liberalism, and the intensifying opposition of a political minority that has proved willing to engage in violence in order to hold power.” According to Hayes, “This fight isn’t ultimately about policy . . . it’s about whether the United States will live up to the promise of democracy—and on that crucial question, we’ve rarely been so divided.” Yet we can’t lose hope; there is no way around this division, and “there is no way to avoid that fight if we’re to defeat the growing faction that seeks to destroy majority rule.” We must, he tells his readers, continue to fight, for “no substantive victories can endure unless democracy is fortified against its foes.” So that is the task, according to Hayes—defeating those who oppose democracy, those who resist the “ideological hegemony of liberalism,” and thus rooting out that small minority who get in the way of America reaching its democratic promise.4
Conservative John Daniel Davidson pushes back on Hayes.5 Davidson, contra Hayes, contends that the division in America really is about policy, and our divide is actually “widening, not narrowing,” and this demonstrates there is a “growing faction” that opposes “Democrat efforts to dismantle our constitutional system.” At the heart of this opposition are differences over the very meaning of democracy itself, which Hayes equates with far-left progressivism, propagated by a one-party ruling class. And opposition to this majoritarian progressivism is really opposition to the will of the people, and this makes a person antidemocratic. Davidson rejects this equation. “You can smear [certain] Republicans as ‘radicalizing against democracy,’” Davidson writes, “but it’s really that Republicans are radicalizing against direct democracy,” and “they know it is the only way to save the republic.”6
Another conservative, Seth Barron, makes a similar case but notices something else. “A curious turn of phrase,” writes Barron, “has slipped into discourse over the last few years.”7 It is the phrase “our democracy.” After chronicling the use of this phrase in current discourse, Barron contends:
Democrats seem not to be so worried about American democracy in general so much as their version of it, which is centered round an agenda of “equity”—meaning careful allocation of all society’s plums to favored demographic categories—open borders, the erasure of sex difference, and a globalized economy.
In this sense, “our democracy” has a very definite meaning and it does not mean constitutional republicanism or what I will describe later as the new vital center.
How did we get so polarized? When did we lose any sense of a shared definition of “our democracy,” that is, what it means to be an American? How did we lose our vital center? That is the story of this chapter.
HOW WE LOST THE VITAL CENTER
I grew up in the 1970s, living in a small coastal town in New England. After school most days I would play for hours with the neighborhood kids, free from parental oversight; some afternoons we roamed freely around the neighboring woods, built forts, or rode our bikes through trails; we played stick ball, street hockey, or played in neighbors’ backyards. An hour before dinner my mom would ring a bell, and we knew it was time to go home and wash up before family dinner. It was a great time to grow up. But it wasn’t perfect, and it was changing fast.
The ideas unleashed in the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, were already being felt at that time, changing the culture. Our nation’s political life was in turmoil. By the time I was ten (1975), America was divided over the wars in Southeast Asia, shocked by the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, stunned by Watergate, and offended by Hollywood’s campaign to disrupt traditional values. Our economy was racked by double-digit inflation and lines at the gas pump.
But in spite of the changes happening in American culture, politics, and economics, in spite of the fact that America had a long way to go in providing equality for African Americans, growing up in an American suburb in the 1970s was still fairly idyllic. I look back on my childhood with nostalgia. Is it wrong to look back to those mid-century decades for guidance today?
Yuval Levin thinks so. In Fractured Republic, he says that “our political life is now exceedingly nostalgic. . . . This nostalgia is at the core of the frustration that so overwhelms our politics now.”8 Traditional liberals, he says, look to the fifties as a golden era when government and the economy worked well together, unions were strong, and we seemed on the verge of achieving the “Great Society.” Conservatives look back and see a time of traditional values, strong families, God in school, and the freedom to pursue economic dreams. Both sides are now disappointed with the present crisis in politics and culture, and thus, he says, we look back to the fifties with nostalgia. Yet Levin says this is a mistake. It keeps us from dealing with the present challenges of modern life, devising solutions to our real life in America now, which he points out will never again look like the 1950s after so much technical advancement, “diffusion,” and “deconsolidation” in American life. “If we could see our way past it, we might gain a much better grasp of the nature of the problems we face and the shape of potential solutions.”9
Time and again Levin hammers away at nostalgia, calling his readers not to a golden age of the fifties but to a realistic assessment of our present discontents. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work solving the problems that beset our society. Until we give up this longing for a bygone era, we can’t move forward. But what if in moving forward we solve more problems and gain more technical sophistication but in the process we lose something even more important, something that unified all Americans, a common political culture? By losing this political unity, aren’t we just creating more problems?
So could it be that it’s not a misguided nostalgia that has led to a fractured nation but the fact that we have nothing in common, no consensus, to facilitate working and living together? He raises this possibility: “If the problem we have is not that we are increasingly failing to live up to our own moral standards, but that we increasingly do not have such standards in common, then wholesale solutions become ever more difficult to imagine.”10 While he doesn’t spend much time pursuing this line of argument, he is right. Without a common consensus on moral standards, it is difficult to get anything done in politics. If we can’t even agree on the basics, it is hard to work together, and the last time we had some agreement was the mid-twentieth century. So is it possible that our nostalgia for the fifties isn’t for the economy or even the culture but for something else: a longing for a lost vital center, a common creed, a mutual covenant, a shared history, a glue that bound us together? This common consensus is now gone.
THE END OF UNUM AND THE RISE OF E PLURIBUS
In his book The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief, historian George Marsden says that
the 1950s would look like a sort of golden age for American intellectuals. An ideal was still intact—the notion that the culture of the nation might be guided by a broad inclusive national consensus—and academics and other intellectuals were more on the inside of that project than not.11
This national consensus was what Walter Lippmann called “the public philosophy.” Lippmann and other proponents of this public philosophy “were passionately committed to principles such as individual freedom, free speech, human decency, justice, civil rights, community responsibilities, equality before the law, due process, balance of powers, economic opportunity, and so forth.”12
No book captured this consensus better than Democrat historian Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center, published in 1949.13 As Marsden writes, “Schlesinger represented the antidogmatic liberal consensus of the era as well as anyone.”14 Trying to find a middle ground beyond the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and the unlimited freedom of market capitalism, Schlesinger said democracy
supported a healthy balance between individual fulfillment and community responsibility and was “a process, not a conclusion [that] . . . dedicates itself to problems as they come, attacking them in terms which best advance the human and libertarian values, which best secure the freedom and fulfillment of the individual.”15
Marsden points out that Schlesinger’s audience in the book is clearly the radical progressive of his own liberal Democratic Party, whom he worried about. Signs that the progressive left threatened his vital center were everywhere, and Schlesinger wanted to shore up a commitment to the American creed before it was too late.16 Like others who stood in this mid-century vital center Schlesinger stood in continuity with the American founders, and the “new radicalism” of the 1950s threatened this continuity.
Schlesinger wrote The Vital Center to warn the mainstream Left about the Far Left that threatened this consensus. The progressive left was pushing a view of human nature that denied original sin and the depravity of man, that promoted socialism, that believed a “new man” was possible if the social structure was changed, that was ultimately utopian. Schlesinger rejected this view of human nature as naive and dangerous, and it threatened to overturn everything our founders fought for: “the conception of the free society—a society committed to the protection of liberties of conscience, expression and political opposition—is the crowning glory of western civilization.” He continues, “Centuries of struggle have drawn a ring of freedom around the individual, a ring secured by law, by custom and by institutions.”17 Yet Schlesinger feared this view was under attack by certain segments of the political left, the radical progressive side of his party who were embracing totalitarian thought, and he wanted to shore up the glories of the democratic liberalism of the founders. Yet while he is constantly warning his readers about the danger democracy faces, his book is infused with a certain optimism, a confidence that his view of liberalism will prevail. He had no doubt that the vital center would hold.18
But the center did not hold. The 1960s unleashed a tidal wave against the vital center. Andrew Hartman, a man of the left and sympathetic to the changes the sixties brought, writes in A War for the Soul of America that “the sixties gave birth to a new America, a nation more open to new peoples, new ideas, new norms, and new, if conflicting, articulations of America itself.”19 Others were not as sanguine about the changes. Roger Kimball, literary critic, writes in The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America that these “new ideas” and “new norms” have been a disaster for our country. “We owe to the 1960s,” he contends, “the ultimate institutionalization of immoralist radicalism: the institutionalization of drugs, pseudo-spirituality, promiscuous sex, virulent anti-Americanism, naïve anti-capitalism, and the precipitous decline of artistic and intellectual standards.”20
Of course this could be dismissed as right-wing hyperbole. But listen to Andrew Hartman: “The New Left blew a deep crater into the surface of traditional American culture. Normative America, though still large, still powerful, was nonetheless disfigured beyond repair.”21 How did they do this? he asks. Not primarily by changing the political system but by changing American culture. When the New Left realized that they couldn’t do away with our system of checks and balances, the Constitution, and separation of powers, they focused their attention on changing culture, succeeding, says Hartman, in “reorienting American culture.”22 New Left intellectuals helped the movement see that the American founding was corrupt at its roots and that it needed to be washed away. As new leftist Theodore Roszak claimed,
The counterculture is the embryonic cultural base of New Left Politics, the effort to discover new types of community, new family patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic.23
In fact, the New Left was attacking the vital center, a consensus that believed what the founders had bequeathed us was good, noble, worth preserving, even though flawed. The New Left wanted a clean break, rejecting the history of America as one of genocide, racism, sexism, patriarchalism, materialism, greed, and power.
In the 1980s the Christian Right rose up against this rejection of the vital center and the ideas of the founders. They decried the cultural revolution of the sixties, pointing out its effects on the individual, the family, and the nation, and called for a return to Hartman’s “normative America” or Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” or what other believers have called Christian America. But not all evangelicals agreed. A tiny but growing minority of progressive evangelicals objected to the Christian Right, throwing in their hat with the forces that rejected “normative America,” and accused the Christian Right of protecting racism, patriarchalism, and imperialism under the guise of “family values” and traditional religion.24
By the late 1970s conservative evangelicals saw the cultural decay all around them and wondered what had happened to their country. They, says Hartman,
were confronted with a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to their way of life and to the Christian nation that they believed the United States once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than anything else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture wars.25
This desire to “take back America” led Protestant religious conservatives into political alliances with Catholics, Jews, and Mormons, groups that differed in their religious outlook from evangelicals and each other but nonetheless became cobelligerents in the fight to reclaim America.
The highpoint came in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. But by the end of his two terms, evangelicals still bemoaned the rapidly decaying culture—the loss of God in the public square, the breakdown of the family, the secularization of education, rampant abortion, the degrading of biblical views on sexuality, and the increase in those who claimed no faith. They felt that not enough had been done to turn the tide and they blamed people in the GOP for not doing more. But even as they blamed certain politicians, the religious Right was unable to see how much they had contributed to the erosion of the culture.
In their opposition to creeping socialism and the growth of big government, they didn’t see how their alliance with big business engendered market forces that dissolved civic virtue and harmed the working and middle classes. In their marriage with utilitarian libertarians, crony capitalism, unrestrained greed, and putting profits over the common good destroyed much of what conservatives valued. In placing their bets with free trade, unrestrained immigration, and deregulation of hedge funds, the Christian Right, quick to praise the benefit of cheap consumer goods and a growing economy, didn’t realize that these would be achieved by offshoring jobs and the destruction of small towns, hollowing out the working and middle classes in the process. What has followed is decades of high unemployment, widespread drug addiction, broken families, and the disintegration of entire towns.26
So, while the progressive left was attacking our common culture and redefining politics, big business, championed by forces on the right, was undoing the very culture that religious conservatives wanted to preserve. And bipartisan members of Congress and the clerisy class worked hand in glove with the titans of Wall Street to transform the economics of our country. Eventually these transnational corporations and their CEOs grew tired of the religious Right, and its foot-dragging over globalization and the attempt to tie trade with China to improvements in human rights, and abandoned the Republican Party altogether, aligning with the Democrats and further angering the Right. But that story will be told later.27
THE HEART OF THE CULTURE WAR
In the 1990s, no one described the frustration and anger over cultural change better than James Davison Hunter, an evangelical who teaches at the University of Virginia. Writing twenty-five years before Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America, Hunter recognized the cleavage at the heart of the conflict.
The nub of political disagreement today on the range of issues debated—whether abortion, child care, funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, values in public education, or multiculturalism—can be traced ultimately and finally to the matter of moral authority.28
What Hunter means by moral authority is “the basis by which people determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and so on.” Hunter says these conflicting views of moral authority and the worldview it engenders create “the deep cleavages between antagonists in the contemporary culture war.”29
For Hunter, while there are many worldviews competing in the public square, they basically can be boiled down to two main impulses—“the impulse toward orthodoxy and the impulse toward progressivism.”30 By orthodoxy he means a commitment to an “external, definable, and transcendent authority,” whether that is the Bible or natural law. “Within cultural progressivism, by contrast,” he says, “moral authority tends to be defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism.”31
Generally, those who embrace the orthodox view are conservatives and those who adopt the progressive view are liberals. And while these two camps differ on a host of social and political issues, “the source of the conflict is found in different moral visions.” And this conflict of visions spills over into what it means to be an American, how we order our lives together in this country, our national identity, and the meaning of America itself.32
While the 1980s and 1990s saw the Christian Right push back on progressive liberalism, they had little success, other than defining the battle. The Left marched on, winning one cultural political battle after another. As Hartman says, with approval, the 1960s counterculture has won. What Hayes called the “ideological hegemony of liberalism”33 is a reality. Commentators on the right, with deep sadness, would agree.34
WHY THE CENTER COULDN’T HOLD
So, clearly, the vital center of the 1950s didn’t hold. Why not?
According to Marsden, while Schlesinger and other classical liberals warned their camp about the radicalism of the New Left and ultimately put their faith in liberalism to triumph, they were naive about the power of the New Left and the threat that it would metastasize into something more radical, eventually calling not for reform but wholesale revolution, the upending of everything Schlesinger found dear.
While Schlesinger and other vital-center thinkers on the center-left diagnosed the dilemma well—a choice between the radical New Left on the one hand and totalitarian Right on the other—their prescriptions were inadequate. “These moderate-liberal thinkers,” writes Marsden, “who stood near the center of the cultural establishment, were living in the last days before a cultural revolution.”35 They saw the “deep crisis regarding the quality of their civilization” (agreeing with some of the protests of the student new left movement), but “in retrospect, we can see that they had no solutions beyond more of the same.”36 While many of these vital-center thinkers stood in continuity with much of what the founders established (something not shared by many of those on the left today)—that is checks and balances, federalism, property rights, and so on—they did not share the underlying grounding (to use Ceaser’s term) of the American project. They wanted the fruit without the tree.
Most of the founding fathers “took for granted that there was a Creator who established natural laws, including moral laws, that could be known to humans as self-evident principles to be understood and elaborated through reason.”37 Yet Schlesinger and other mid-century moderate liberals had left this view behind, instead, adopting pragmatism, the view that human societies develop their own laws “rather than discovering them in a fixed order of things.”38 To these thinkers the vital center was ultimately grounded on “shared ideals” that could shape the national character and hold the vital center together. They wanted a public philosophy, one that championed American democratic values, but without the grounding of revelation or natural law.
But as we have seen, by the end of the 1960s this vision had proved fanciful, according to Marsden.39 How did they not see this outcome? Marsden asks a similar question:
How was it possible for so many liberal thinkers of the mid-century to retain their faith in what amounted to the enlightenment conclusions of the founders (“liberty and justice for all,” and the like) while dismissing the enlightenment foundation on which those conclusions rested? Why did they not, like Lippmann or conservative thinkers of the day, see that the edifice on which they were building their pluralistic consensus was about to collapse? How could they be both skeptics regarding fixed first principles and believers in the principles of the American way?40
Marsden is right. So was Lippmann. They knew that you could not have the fruit of the founders’ project without the roots. You can’t have the edifice without the foundation. And the edifice couldn’t endure much longer “without the foundations on which the founders had built.”41 The 1960s would not only continue to attack these foundations, the grounding, but eventually the edifice, the very democratic republic of the founders.
THE TRIUMPH OF PRAGMATISM
Sadly, Schlesinger tried to warn his own party about the threat of the progressive wing, but he, along with his party, didn’t seem to have the stomach to root them out. And by not doing so, they allowed the radical progressives to eventually control the party and attack the very thing Schlesinger was so committed to—the classical liberal ideal. “It is not hard to see why the center could not hold,” concludes Marsden. It was based on pragmatism. “But the problem with pragmatism is that . . . it does not provide much basis for establishing first principles or deciding among contending moral claims.”42
This became evident in the late sixties when different groups started claiming their own first principles, even when they were at odds with the founder’s vision of what it meant to be an American.43 Pragmatism has no way of adjudicating the conflicting claims, says Marsden.44 Lippmann understood this and tried to point it out. So did many conservative thinkers. But Schlesinger and other centrist liberals didn’t want to listen. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late.
PROPHETIC VOICES ON THE LEFT WENT UNHEEDED
Interestingly, Schlesinger seems to admit this fifty years after writing Vital Center. By the 1990s, he had lost his confidence that reason and rationality and deliberation alone would be enough to maintain the vital center. In the forward to his 1998 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, he asks, in the face of pluralism, “What holds a nation together?” Without a common purpose to bind a fractured nation together, “tribal antagonisms will drive them apart.”45 And they have.
Schlesinger saw this happening. In sharp prose he contends that the “cult of ethnicity” or identity politics, while bringing some welcome change to America and an appreciation of other cultures, had gone too far—rejecting “the unifying vision of individuals from all nations melted into a new race.”46 Schlesinger seems shocked that his call for a common vision, a vital center, could be tossed aside for an agenda of separatism, tribalism, and group antagonism, and that the history profession, public schools, and universities were being used to promote this destructive agenda that was tearing the nation apart. Multiculturalism had become a “cult, and today it threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of America as ‘one people,’ a common culture, a single nation.”47 But the threat of a counterrevolution is now a reality. It has happened. Mark Lila’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics shows the total triumph of multiculturalism and identity politics today.48
Schlesinger wants to avoid this fate, so he stresses the ideals that for centuries have helped us transcend ethnic, religious, and political division, ideals rooted in our democratic republic. And he remains optimistic “that the historic forces driving toward ‘one people’ have not lost their power. . . . The belief in a unique American identity is far from dead.”49 But he seems incapable of realizing that these ideals, for most of the founders, were based on a “grounding,” and once these first principles were jettisoned, so would be the democratic edifice on which they stand. Pointing the nation back to the “goal of one people,” while noble, isn’t enough to overcome the ideology of multiculturalism that is hell-bent on dividing people into different groups. If the goal isn’t “one people,” he asks, then “what is the future?—disintegration of the national community, apartheid, Balkanization, tribalization?”50 The answer seems to be yes.
But the larger question is why do proponents of Balkanization want this? If indeed “the cult of ethnicity has reversed the movement in American history, producing a nation of minorities . . . less interested in joining with the majority in common endeavor than in declaring their alienation from an oppressive, white, patriarchal, racist, sexist, classist society,” then what is their goal in sowing all their division, asks Schlesinger?51 What is their real goal? If Schlesinger knows, he doesn’t say. But, as we have contended, the goal is ultimately a “twin insurgency” by the ruling class.
While Schlesinger never answers his own question, he is willing to say what is needed. Our only hope, our only solution, he counsels, is to return to “ultimate bond of union,” to the “democratic social ideal.”52 He describes this ideal: “democratic principles provide both the philosophical bond of union and practical experience in civic participation.”53 He is right. But unfortunately, other than referencing the Constitution and our democratic principles, he doesn’t go any further than liberal pragmatic principles. He does say that the nation needs to recover and rally around the “American Creed.” But he seems to think that just affirming these propositions will be enough, that reasonable people can be persuaded to adopt the creed, that is, a belief in democracy and the ideal of one people. But even here he seems to be reluctant to ground the creed in anything more than pragmatism, shorn of any groundings or first principles. Yet without first principles he doesn’t have the resources to understand what is happening and what is needed to reverse the problem.
Here’s the problem. Pragmatism, shorn of a stronger grounding like natural law, natural right, or biblical revelation, isn’t strong enough. And even then one has to wonder if the creed, reduced to a set of propositions (i.e., we were founded on an idea) is enough to unify America.54 Others argue that the creed, while helpful and important, is not enough. Our nation has always been grounded on more than propositions. It has included our common history, character, and religion, which were handed down to us from British and European sources, forged by centuries of English common law, custom, natural-law thinking, and constitution making. You can’t have the American creed without a particular culture.
The problem is that this is exactly what the proponents of multiculturalism don’t want. They reject this grounding, desiring to do away with it so they can create something entirely new, a new kind of democracy. So to appeal, as Schlesinger does, to values that “work for us” but are not true for all people everywhere is to cling to pragmatism that will wilt in the face of multiculturalism, political correctness, and the cancel culture. The ruling class believes it is right, and they will fight for their vision of reality.
In the end, as helpful as his critique of multiculturalism is, Schlesinger’s commitment to secularism wouldn’t allow him to admit that the Western ideals of individual freedom, political democracy, and human rights must be grounded in something other than pragmatism. He doesn’t have the tools to turn back the arguments of multiculturalism or those who are redefining democracy. In sum, Schlesinger knows that America has lost its reigning public philosophy, and he wants it back. But he wants it back without the first principles that historically have underpinned it, first principles rooted in culture, history, and religion. But it doesn’t work that way.
What Schlesinger and other mid-century, left-of-center liberals would not admit is that the vital center held together not because of the American creed, as important as that was, but because moral capital born of Christianity still existed in America—a moral capital that both sides could appeal to in their deliberations, a moral capital that animated this American creed, moral capital that rooted individual liberty, democratic institutions, and human rights in a theological tradition of virtue. But now this moral capital is gone, and the pragmatism that worked well at mid-century now seems naive, replaced by cynical power politics of one group fighting another.
IS THE AMERICAN COVENANT BROKEN?
According to sociologist Robert Bellah, we are now living with a broken covenant.55 In The Broken Covenant, Bellah, a man of the left, clearly spells out what others like Schlesinger won’t admit.56 The covenant is dead. The America creed has been rejected. The public philosophy of the founders has been rejected. And this is why Americans are so polarized, so divided over the definition of democracy and what it means to be an American.
Like Schlesinger, Bellah agrees that a common consensus is needed to make us “one people.” “Any coherent and viable society rests on a common set of moral understandings about good and bad, right and wrong, in the realm of individual and social action.”57 But, unlike Schlesinger and the other pragmatists of mid-century, Bellah holds that “these common moral understandings must also in turn rest upon a common set of religious understandings that provide a picture of the universe in terms of which moral understandings make sense.”58 Here he speaks of the grounding of public philosophy. In fact, for Bellah “moral understanding” constitutes in America the “external covenant” of democratic republicanism. Yet, if this external covenant is not continuously renewed by the “invisible covenant,” that is, a common set of religious understandings or grounding, the external covenant will collapse. “But in a republic an external covenant alone is never enough,” he argues, contra Schlesinger.59 “The external covenant must become,” he posits, “an internal covenant and many times in our history that has happened.”60
But with the internal covenant dead, the external covenant is also moribund, and no matter how much thinkers like Schlesinger are hopeful it can be revived, Bellah argues that “the external covenant has been betrayed by its most responsible servants and, what is worse, some of them, including the highest of us all, do not even seem to understand what they have betrayed.”61 Nonetheless, the covenant is broken, both internal and external, and all hell has broken loose. Thinkers on both the left and the right have predicted our present predicament and tried to warn us. But their warnings went unheeded. We are now reaping the whirlwind.
So here we find ourselves right back to Hunter and his belief that our current polarization is a clash of two worldviews. Two groundings. Two sets of first principles. Two different views of democracy. Two different external covenants. Two differing edifices. This clash of worldviews is on display daily in our politics.
ULTIMATE AUTHORITY
We are in a cold civil war; we live in a fractured republic; our covenant is broken.
What we are living through is a crisis of civilization. We not only disagree about what America stands for, but we disagree about what exactly our nation stands on. Hunter warned us that the culture war was fundamentally a clash over ultimate authority.
But those writing in the twenty-first century, those who want to return to a common external covenant, thinkers like Levin, make the same mistakes—they want this external covenant without seeing the need for the invisible covenant to breathe life into it. But Lippmann, Hunter, Bellah, and Marsden have shown this won’t work; it hasn’t worked.
Levin wants to move beyond the invisible covenant. We are just too pluralistic, “diffused,” to use his term, to agree on theological first principles.62 He believes strongly that we can have deconsolidation and diffusion on the one hand and great community on the other. He proposes a vision of “deconsolidated subsidiary.” But he can’t explain how these communities won’t be another version of Bellah’s lifestyle enclaves, further fracturing our nation, bringing more Balkanization, more tribes, more identity groups. The external covenant is not strong enough to hold us together. We need the “invisible covenant.” Levin wants none of that.
NEXT STEPS
So we are locked in polarization, a cold civil war. We no longer agree on a shared definition of democracy or what America stands for. The Left believes it can reeducate half the population. Many of the right have given up hope. As Matt Walsh says, “It is Time to Face the Facts: We Cannot be United.”63 Others say it is time to burn it all down.64 But if we aren’t going to give up hope, one thing is certain: to restore a public philosophy that unifies the nation, our next step is to understand our current polarization—why it has gotten so bad and how it is used to tear us further apart, making any return to the vital center seem impossible. Moreover, we have to understand how the current debates in Washington, exemplified so well in the 2021 impeachment trial, are actually conducted not for unity, surprisingly, but to further divide us. And we have to ask the question, while Americans tear one another apart, who ultimately benefits?65 Once we understand this, we might find our way back to a new vital center.