The Threats In Tucker’s BrainBy Rod Dreher
April 5, 2022
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.
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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.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/tucker-carlson-brain-liberalism-postliberalism-christianity/
