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Democratic Faith
The American political reformer Herbert Croly wrote, "For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility." Democratic Faith is at once a trenchant analysis and a powerful critique of this underlying assumption that informs democratic theory. Patrick Deneen argues that among democracy's most ardent supporters there is an oft-expressed belief in the need to transform human beings in order to reconcile the sometimes disappointing reality of human self-interest with the democratic ideal of selfless commitment. This transformative impulse is frequently couched in religious language, such as the need for political redemption. This is all the more striking given the frequent accompanying condemnation of traditional religious belief that informs the democratic faith?
At the same time, because so often this democratic ideal fails to materialize, democratic faith is often subject to a particularly intense form of disappointment. A mutually reinforcing cycle of faith and disillusionment is frequently exhibited by those who profess a democratic faith--in effect imperiling democratic commitments due to the cynicism of its most fervent erstwhile supporters.
Deneen argues that democracy is ill-served by such faith. Instead, he proposes a form of democratic realism that recognizes democracy not as a regime with aspirations to perfection, but that justifies democracy as the regime most appropriate for imperfect humans. If democratic faith aspires to transformation, democratic realism insists on the central importance of humility, hope, and charity.
At the same time, because so often this democratic ideal fails to materialize, democratic faith is often subject to a particularly intense form of disappointment. A mutually reinforcing cycle of faith and disillusionment is frequently exhibited by those who profess a democratic faith--in effect imperiling democratic commitments due to the cynicism of its most fervent erstwhile supporters.
Deneen argues that democracy is ill-served by such faith. Instead, he proposes a form of democratic realism that recognizes democracy not as a regime with aspirations to perfection, but that justifies democracy as the regime most appropriate for imperfect humans. If democratic faith aspires to transformation, democratic realism insists on the central importance of humility, hope, and charity.
392 pages, Hardcover
First published July 5, 2005
1 person is currently reading
177 people want to read
About the author
Patrick J. Deneen
21 books224 followersPatrick J. Deneen holds a B.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Rutgers University. From 1995-1997 he was Speechwriter and Special Advisor to the Director of the United States Information Agency. From 1997-2005 he was Assistant Professor of Government at Princeton University. From 2005-2012 he was Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, before joining the faculty of Notre Dame in Fall 2012. He is the author and editor of several books and numerous articles and reviews and has delivered invited lectures around the country and several foreign nations.
Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.
His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.
Deneen was awarded the A.P.S.A.'s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995, and an honorable mention for the A.P.S.A.'s Best First Book Award in 2000. He has been awarded research fellowships from Princeton University and the Earhart Foundation.
His teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought, American political thought, religion and politics, and literature and politics.
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August 23, 2022
Q. This one was a difficult one, wasn’t it? A book where you read it for awhile and then stopped reading it for quite awhile; where you lost your way, lost the thread . . .
I was reading another book while reading “Democratic Faith,” so I’d step away from “DF” for a week, two weeks, and then come back to it. I don’t know if that affected my understanding of the material, but it probably didn’t help. The bottom line is I stepped away from “DF” because the content was dry, for me, as a non-scholar. I don’t have deep knowledge of Socrates, Plato, Dewey, Rorty, or any of the other philosophers discussed in the text, so Deneen’s deep readings of their respective works was tough sledding.
Q. So this was a work of scholarship that was different from “Why Liberalism Failed,” which you really loved?
It was. To be clear, “Why Liberalism Failed” is a wonderful work of scholarship. However, “WLF” was written in a different register than “DF.” I wouldn’t say it (WLF) skimmed over the topics and philosophers’ theses more than “DF” because “skim” connotes a superficiality and a lack of rigor, which “WLF” certainly has, but “WLF” didn’t burrow into specific texts the way “DF” does. Reading “DF” reminded me of what scholars do, or one of the things they do, which is provide close readings of other philosophers and scholars’ work. Scholars parse the arguments other philosophers make: pull them apart, compare them, parse them at the level of the sentence. In this case, Deneen is doing a close textual analysis of what various philosophers over the millenia had to say about democracy: the pitfalls of democratic implementation; the priors and assumptions built into instantiations of democratic rule; why certain philosophers have had more or less faith in the ability of societies to implement democratic rule; what role religion, religious doctrines, and religious practices have vis-à-vis instantiations of democratic rule; how religion and religious practices can temper the excesses of a society built of democratic principles. Deneen’s thesis is democratic faith (the faith societies organized around principles of democratic rule will be “successful”) has been contested over the millenia--sundry philosophers have had more or less faith in the ability of a society to organize on a democratic basis and have had specific reasons why they did or did not believe a society organized on democratic principles would be successful or not.
Q. Yes?
. . .
Q. Yes?
Who cares? Do you care? Does anyone care?
Q. I care. I follow you. Having faith in democracy has been contested over the millennia. What else?
It’s hard to put into words. Progress. We believe in progress. We stand here like morons at the end of history, here in 2022, at the vanguard of forward motion through time and believe we have arrived at the most advanced point of history. We are progressing. We are moving in the right direction. The decisions we make at the edge of our movement through time represent the cumulative wisdom from the past; the cumulative wisdom embodied in the decisions we make today in the name of progress will usher in a continued era of glory in the following months and years.
Why do we believe this? What if the “greatest” point in history was 1314? Or 1910? Or 243? Or 310 BCE in what is now Brazil? Or 1423 BCE in what is now Siberia? By what metric are we measuring why this is the most successful point in human history? Is progress always good? These are some of the questions that are latent in Deneenn’s analysis.
Q. That’s interesting. So the moment we’re standing in--2022, in the United States--might not be the “best” moment in history. We might be making mistakes. We might have wanted to “stop” at an earlier point, say 324 or 1323 BCE, and realize that was the point at which humans had it figured out and maintained the traditions, practices, and beliefs of that point?
Yeah, sort of. What is it to “conserve”? To conserve something? To be a conservative? A progressive on the other hand is the juvenile attitude; the juvenile posture. The posture of the adolescent, the juvenile, the young adult. It’s one of the least intellectually rigorous postures and orientations to have towards the world, and it’s why it’s almost universally the philosophical and political disposition of adolescents and young adults. I, the adolescent, the young adult, am seeing life for the first time, and I see it is going to get better; we (my generation; my cohort) have the answers that earlier generations didn’t have; we are going to do things in a way they (older generations) didn’t do.
It’s essentially a solipsistic disposition towards the world. I, I, I. I’ve figured it out, or we’ve figured it out. It’s essentially solipsistic because it’s premised on the adolescent or the young adult’s conflation of seeing things for the first time with seeing things anew for the first time. The disposition is concomitant with the notion one is seeing things no one else has seen, or no earlier generation has seen. Which is true, in the most discrete and circumscribed way. Adolescents and young adults are seeing things no one else has seen because it is they as individuals who are seeing things for the first time. In addition to seeing things for the first time, they are feeling things for the first time, contemplating things for the first time, interacting with people for the first time, falling in love for the first time, making connections about themselves vis-à-vis the world for the first time. And whatever pops into their heads is new. It is new, fresh, unique, sui generis. To them.
Q. You started to talk about conserving and then quickly veered of into a discussion of the “progresssive”? Did you have something more to say about the conservative mindset?
I think in the case of Deneen, the type of conservative of which he’s representative, is someone in discussion with the past in an intellectually robust way, which isn’t an interesting statement because he’s an academic. But he’s in discussion with the past in a way “progressives” and “leftists” aren’t. When I think of “progressives” and “leftists,” I think of spoiled, entitled children. The “left” is awash in censoriousness, imperiousness, and condescension. The defining characteristic of the “left” in the United States today is a cocksurendess that speaks to the sopilsitic notions I discussed above: a belief in the veracity of one’s feelings with such cocksuredness and imperiousness--specifically one’s new feelings about seeing the world in a completely “unique” way--so that one becomes physically unable to countenance differentiating and oppositional points of view. Hence, the entire discourse around “doing violence,” “doing harm, “putting lives at risk,” “making people and places unsafe,” ad nauseum. Its (the left’s) discursive and rhetorical dispositions is consoriousness to the point of authoritarianism. It’s grotesque and non-communal; particular and isolating; austere and cold; graceless and punitive--
Q. I’m going to have to stop you for a second. I’m confused. Why are you just bashing the “left”? What does this have to do with what you were saying about Deneen’s book? About “DF”?
Sorry. You’re right. I guess if it’s tangentially connected to what we were discussing, it’s because my jeremiad speaks to the lack of humility endemic to the “left,” “progressives,” “liberals.” All the words are interchangeable because the political commitments, the political project, and the overall discursive and rhetorical disposition of anyone found under one of those three labels would in more ways than not mirror the same commitments and disposition of those who, for discrete and pretty much incoherent reasons, choose to label themselves under another umbrella. Anyway, lack of humility; lack of perspective; an inability to be subjected to opposing points of view; an inability to experience and/or be subjected to discomfort. All of this stems from a human-centric philosophical orientation. What I mean by that is if man is the center of the world; if everything is ultimately man-made insofar as there is no recourse to a transcendental power outside the ambit of man, then everything is socially constructed; everything is a will to power--
Q. I have to stop you again. You’re talking a lot. I’m not following. Why are you going off on a tangent about things being socially constructed?
Okay, I’ll stop. Let’s talk about the religion that pervades the book.
Q. Why?
Because I just read a review of “DF” on Amazon and it pissed me off.
Q. The review pissed you off?
Yes, there are a lot of reviews on Goodreads and Amazon of “WLF,” but very few of “DF.” There are only about six reviews on Amazon and one of them is really negative. I’d like to refer to it and unpack it. Is that alright with you?
Q. Yes, that’s fine.
In this unhinged, ad hominem “review” of “DF” the “reviewer” babbles about Deneen smuggling in convservative Catholicism and reactionary thought in general, to “DF.” The review is barely coherent because of poor punctuation, missing words, etc., but it’s got me thinking about a theme that runs through “DF,” which is the role religious faith, specifically faith in a transcendent God, has in tempering belief in the perfectibility of man. Here’s how the theory goes in the book, or this is how the theory plays out as Deneen plumbs various philosophers’ writings over millennia on how religious practices and religious beliefs interact with, sustain, undermine or temper the enthusiasm various thinkers have had about the viability of democratic institutions and democratic sustainability:
If man is perfectible then we keep getting better and better. Man, as a result of being subjected to more democracy, to living longer within the realm of a democratic society, will keep moving in the right direction. The problem for Deneen, and he fleshes out this specific theme more concretely in “WLF,” is man is not constantly, ineluctably progressing towards being ”better” and “better.” In fact, he might be going the wrong way.
Q. I need to stop you for a minute again--I wanted to ask this earlier. How are we going in the wrong direction? We’re living longer, there is less poverty and famine in the world, medical science can intervene more to elongate life and make life more comfortable insofar as ameliorating disease, pain, discomfort, etc. Where are we going wrong?
That’s an interesting question. Let’s unpack it. We’re doing everything wrong! Alienation, isolation, superficiality, consumerism, commodification, wealth inequality, horrible schools, fentanyl deaths, deindustrialization, loneliness, social media. Everything is horrible--
Q. Wait, I have to stop you. You’re being incredibly negative and throwing everything under the sun into the “it’s bad” bin. That doesn't seem judicious or accurate.
Music has gotten worse, too. I think I am being accurate. We can be Marxian and start with the political-economic: the bipartisan gutting of American industries; the concentration of wealth at the top of the food chain to a degree that is both a moral grotesquerie and also deleterious because of all the knock-on effects in the warped distribution of wealth. Everything economically about our country for the last 40 years has been a disaster for average Americans; for average working-class Americans. The rise of social media, the commodification of every last nook and cranny of our social landscape; the pornification of everything, not to mention the unbridled access to porn and violent images children have access to. I’ll stop. What are the things that make our lives worth living?
Q. Are you asking me?
It’s a rhetorical question. Family, friends, community, embeddedness in a community; a fulfilling job that provides enough so one can live comfortably; good and affordable health care.
Q. We’re going far afield from this book. Now we’re just having a non-specific discussion about the political landscape of the United States.
You’re right. Let’s go back to the perfectibility of man. Man does not keep getting better. I think that is one of the through lines of Deneen’s work and other postliberals we’ve discussed before: Legutko, Ahmari, Vermeule, etc. Man is an imperfect being. Man is fallible. Man often falls short. Man is not inherently good. I think that is a key one. The Marxian tradition, which I’m sympathetic too, labors under the idea--it’s a prior of Marxian logic, but I think it’s an incoherent prior often absent from analysis for the very reason it’s a contradiction--that the future of socialism, the future of democratic socialism, will be run by “good” people. The idea behind democratic socialism is the working class, in other words, the vast majority of Americans or working-class inhabitants of another country, can and will one day achieve class consciousness, realize their numerical power as a class, and as a result bring to fruition a manner of social organization in which the needs of the inhabitants of that country are met. But what’s the underlying assumption about the character of those future socialists? What is baked into the manner in which they will conduct themselves if it is assumed the vast majority of people will work cooperatively in order to realize a form of social organization that provides the good things in life to the people of the country? What’s baked into that is the notion these future socialists will act morally! That they will act ethically! That they’ll have scruples, honor, kindness, compassion, grace, forgiveness, virtue, honesty, integrity, and judiciousness. In other words, that they’ll be virtuous humans. Maybe not all of them, but the majority of them need to be virtuous, or are assumed to be acting virtuously in this future socialism, because if the majority of them aren’t acting virtuously then we’re right back where started with people getting over one another, using one another, being selfish (which are all variations of the same thing). All the pernicious features of the “old” society will crop right back up.
All the writers of the different socialist/“leftists” journals and magazines; all the podcasters who identify as socialists or communists; they're all thinking, “I’m a good guy. Most humans are good guys. In our future world we’re going to treat each other well.” What’s the irony here? The irony is all the positive attributes I mentioned above having to do with good character are Judeo-Chritian values. They come straight from the Bible. They come from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They come from two thousand years of Judeo-Christian teaching. The foundational moral and ethic tenants socialists imagine their future social organization embodying are Chritian values. Why is that important? Two reasons. First, one is being disingenuous if not downright ignorant to talk about the coming socialist revolution or the future day when society will be organized more equitably and people will behave well toward one another thus allowing for a benevolent social organization to propagate itself without acknowledging whence the characteristics that will ideally make the polity. Second, and more important programmatically speaking, it’s a mystification of what you’re trying to do, where you’re going, and how you hope to get there. By mystifying the manner in which you’re going to establish your future social organization (omitting the virtuous behavior the citizens of a given country will need to have because the success or failure of this new socialist organized country will be inextricably linked to the virtue or lack there of the citizenry) you're not making common cause with those (Chritsians, conservatives, traditionalists) whose moral-ethical commitments are baked into your assumptions about how this future social organization will work.
Q. Okay, I see your point. You agree with the fact humans are “fallen” creatures and in need of a transcendental God that bestows upon them a design for living; a code to live by. Because without that, and if one just has democratic faith in humans’ ability to work things out by themselves, then humans are going to end up somewhere not so good or worse.
Well, I’m not saying I totally agree with your characterization of what I believe, but I’m much more sympathetic to the gist of what you said than I was a year ago. I know we have to wrap this up, so I’ll go back to the book specifically. Deneen . . .
What’s wrong?
I haven’t finished the book. I still have about 30 pages left. Let me finish it.
I was reading another book while reading “Democratic Faith,” so I’d step away from “DF” for a week, two weeks, and then come back to it. I don’t know if that affected my understanding of the material, but it probably didn’t help. The bottom line is I stepped away from “DF” because the content was dry, for me, as a non-scholar. I don’t have deep knowledge of Socrates, Plato, Dewey, Rorty, or any of the other philosophers discussed in the text, so Deneen’s deep readings of their respective works was tough sledding.
Q. So this was a work of scholarship that was different from “Why Liberalism Failed,” which you really loved?
It was. To be clear, “Why Liberalism Failed” is a wonderful work of scholarship. However, “WLF” was written in a different register than “DF.” I wouldn’t say it (WLF) skimmed over the topics and philosophers’ theses more than “DF” because “skim” connotes a superficiality and a lack of rigor, which “WLF” certainly has, but “WLF” didn’t burrow into specific texts the way “DF” does. Reading “DF” reminded me of what scholars do, or one of the things they do, which is provide close readings of other philosophers and scholars’ work. Scholars parse the arguments other philosophers make: pull them apart, compare them, parse them at the level of the sentence. In this case, Deneen is doing a close textual analysis of what various philosophers over the millenia had to say about democracy: the pitfalls of democratic implementation; the priors and assumptions built into instantiations of democratic rule; why certain philosophers have had more or less faith in the ability of societies to implement democratic rule; what role religion, religious doctrines, and religious practices have vis-à-vis instantiations of democratic rule; how religion and religious practices can temper the excesses of a society built of democratic principles. Deneen’s thesis is democratic faith (the faith societies organized around principles of democratic rule will be “successful”) has been contested over the millenia--sundry philosophers have had more or less faith in the ability of a society to organize on a democratic basis and have had specific reasons why they did or did not believe a society organized on democratic principles would be successful or not.
Q. Yes?
. . .
Q. Yes?
Who cares? Do you care? Does anyone care?
Q. I care. I follow you. Having faith in democracy has been contested over the millennia. What else?
It’s hard to put into words. Progress. We believe in progress. We stand here like morons at the end of history, here in 2022, at the vanguard of forward motion through time and believe we have arrived at the most advanced point of history. We are progressing. We are moving in the right direction. The decisions we make at the edge of our movement through time represent the cumulative wisdom from the past; the cumulative wisdom embodied in the decisions we make today in the name of progress will usher in a continued era of glory in the following months and years.
Why do we believe this? What if the “greatest” point in history was 1314? Or 1910? Or 243? Or 310 BCE in what is now Brazil? Or 1423 BCE in what is now Siberia? By what metric are we measuring why this is the most successful point in human history? Is progress always good? These are some of the questions that are latent in Deneenn’s analysis.
Q. That’s interesting. So the moment we’re standing in--2022, in the United States--might not be the “best” moment in history. We might be making mistakes. We might have wanted to “stop” at an earlier point, say 324 or 1323 BCE, and realize that was the point at which humans had it figured out and maintained the traditions, practices, and beliefs of that point?
Yeah, sort of. What is it to “conserve”? To conserve something? To be a conservative? A progressive on the other hand is the juvenile attitude; the juvenile posture. The posture of the adolescent, the juvenile, the young adult. It’s one of the least intellectually rigorous postures and orientations to have towards the world, and it’s why it’s almost universally the philosophical and political disposition of adolescents and young adults. I, the adolescent, the young adult, am seeing life for the first time, and I see it is going to get better; we (my generation; my cohort) have the answers that earlier generations didn’t have; we are going to do things in a way they (older generations) didn’t do.
It’s essentially a solipsistic disposition towards the world. I, I, I. I’ve figured it out, or we’ve figured it out. It’s essentially solipsistic because it’s premised on the adolescent or the young adult’s conflation of seeing things for the first time with seeing things anew for the first time. The disposition is concomitant with the notion one is seeing things no one else has seen, or no earlier generation has seen. Which is true, in the most discrete and circumscribed way. Adolescents and young adults are seeing things no one else has seen because it is they as individuals who are seeing things for the first time. In addition to seeing things for the first time, they are feeling things for the first time, contemplating things for the first time, interacting with people for the first time, falling in love for the first time, making connections about themselves vis-à-vis the world for the first time. And whatever pops into their heads is new. It is new, fresh, unique, sui generis. To them.
Q. You started to talk about conserving and then quickly veered of into a discussion of the “progresssive”? Did you have something more to say about the conservative mindset?
I think in the case of Deneen, the type of conservative of which he’s representative, is someone in discussion with the past in an intellectually robust way, which isn’t an interesting statement because he’s an academic. But he’s in discussion with the past in a way “progressives” and “leftists” aren’t. When I think of “progressives” and “leftists,” I think of spoiled, entitled children. The “left” is awash in censoriousness, imperiousness, and condescension. The defining characteristic of the “left” in the United States today is a cocksurendess that speaks to the sopilsitic notions I discussed above: a belief in the veracity of one’s feelings with such cocksuredness and imperiousness--specifically one’s new feelings about seeing the world in a completely “unique” way--so that one becomes physically unable to countenance differentiating and oppositional points of view. Hence, the entire discourse around “doing violence,” “doing harm, “putting lives at risk,” “making people and places unsafe,” ad nauseum. Its (the left’s) discursive and rhetorical dispositions is consoriousness to the point of authoritarianism. It’s grotesque and non-communal; particular and isolating; austere and cold; graceless and punitive--
Q. I’m going to have to stop you for a second. I’m confused. Why are you just bashing the “left”? What does this have to do with what you were saying about Deneen’s book? About “DF”?
Sorry. You’re right. I guess if it’s tangentially connected to what we were discussing, it’s because my jeremiad speaks to the lack of humility endemic to the “left,” “progressives,” “liberals.” All the words are interchangeable because the political commitments, the political project, and the overall discursive and rhetorical disposition of anyone found under one of those three labels would in more ways than not mirror the same commitments and disposition of those who, for discrete and pretty much incoherent reasons, choose to label themselves under another umbrella. Anyway, lack of humility; lack of perspective; an inability to be subjected to opposing points of view; an inability to experience and/or be subjected to discomfort. All of this stems from a human-centric philosophical orientation. What I mean by that is if man is the center of the world; if everything is ultimately man-made insofar as there is no recourse to a transcendental power outside the ambit of man, then everything is socially constructed; everything is a will to power--
Q. I have to stop you again. You’re talking a lot. I’m not following. Why are you going off on a tangent about things being socially constructed?
Okay, I’ll stop. Let’s talk about the religion that pervades the book.
Q. Why?
Because I just read a review of “DF” on Amazon and it pissed me off.
Q. The review pissed you off?
Yes, there are a lot of reviews on Goodreads and Amazon of “WLF,” but very few of “DF.” There are only about six reviews on Amazon and one of them is really negative. I’d like to refer to it and unpack it. Is that alright with you?
Q. Yes, that’s fine.
In this unhinged, ad hominem “review” of “DF” the “reviewer” babbles about Deneen smuggling in convservative Catholicism and reactionary thought in general, to “DF.” The review is barely coherent because of poor punctuation, missing words, etc., but it’s got me thinking about a theme that runs through “DF,” which is the role religious faith, specifically faith in a transcendent God, has in tempering belief in the perfectibility of man. Here’s how the theory goes in the book, or this is how the theory plays out as Deneen plumbs various philosophers’ writings over millennia on how religious practices and religious beliefs interact with, sustain, undermine or temper the enthusiasm various thinkers have had about the viability of democratic institutions and democratic sustainability:
If man is perfectible then we keep getting better and better. Man, as a result of being subjected to more democracy, to living longer within the realm of a democratic society, will keep moving in the right direction. The problem for Deneen, and he fleshes out this specific theme more concretely in “WLF,” is man is not constantly, ineluctably progressing towards being ”better” and “better.” In fact, he might be going the wrong way.
Q. I need to stop you for a minute again--I wanted to ask this earlier. How are we going in the wrong direction? We’re living longer, there is less poverty and famine in the world, medical science can intervene more to elongate life and make life more comfortable insofar as ameliorating disease, pain, discomfort, etc. Where are we going wrong?
That’s an interesting question. Let’s unpack it. We’re doing everything wrong! Alienation, isolation, superficiality, consumerism, commodification, wealth inequality, horrible schools, fentanyl deaths, deindustrialization, loneliness, social media. Everything is horrible--
Q. Wait, I have to stop you. You’re being incredibly negative and throwing everything under the sun into the “it’s bad” bin. That doesn't seem judicious or accurate.
Music has gotten worse, too. I think I am being accurate. We can be Marxian and start with the political-economic: the bipartisan gutting of American industries; the concentration of wealth at the top of the food chain to a degree that is both a moral grotesquerie and also deleterious because of all the knock-on effects in the warped distribution of wealth. Everything economically about our country for the last 40 years has been a disaster for average Americans; for average working-class Americans. The rise of social media, the commodification of every last nook and cranny of our social landscape; the pornification of everything, not to mention the unbridled access to porn and violent images children have access to. I’ll stop. What are the things that make our lives worth living?
Q. Are you asking me?
It’s a rhetorical question. Family, friends, community, embeddedness in a community; a fulfilling job that provides enough so one can live comfortably; good and affordable health care.
Q. We’re going far afield from this book. Now we’re just having a non-specific discussion about the political landscape of the United States.
You’re right. Let’s go back to the perfectibility of man. Man does not keep getting better. I think that is one of the through lines of Deneen’s work and other postliberals we’ve discussed before: Legutko, Ahmari, Vermeule, etc. Man is an imperfect being. Man is fallible. Man often falls short. Man is not inherently good. I think that is a key one. The Marxian tradition, which I’m sympathetic too, labors under the idea--it’s a prior of Marxian logic, but I think it’s an incoherent prior often absent from analysis for the very reason it’s a contradiction--that the future of socialism, the future of democratic socialism, will be run by “good” people. The idea behind democratic socialism is the working class, in other words, the vast majority of Americans or working-class inhabitants of another country, can and will one day achieve class consciousness, realize their numerical power as a class, and as a result bring to fruition a manner of social organization in which the needs of the inhabitants of that country are met. But what’s the underlying assumption about the character of those future socialists? What is baked into the manner in which they will conduct themselves if it is assumed the vast majority of people will work cooperatively in order to realize a form of social organization that provides the good things in life to the people of the country? What’s baked into that is the notion these future socialists will act morally! That they will act ethically! That they’ll have scruples, honor, kindness, compassion, grace, forgiveness, virtue, honesty, integrity, and judiciousness. In other words, that they’ll be virtuous humans. Maybe not all of them, but the majority of them need to be virtuous, or are assumed to be acting virtuously in this future socialism, because if the majority of them aren’t acting virtuously then we’re right back where started with people getting over one another, using one another, being selfish (which are all variations of the same thing). All the pernicious features of the “old” society will crop right back up.
All the writers of the different socialist/“leftists” journals and magazines; all the podcasters who identify as socialists or communists; they're all thinking, “I’m a good guy. Most humans are good guys. In our future world we’re going to treat each other well.” What’s the irony here? The irony is all the positive attributes I mentioned above having to do with good character are Judeo-Chritian values. They come straight from the Bible. They come from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They come from two thousand years of Judeo-Christian teaching. The foundational moral and ethic tenants socialists imagine their future social organization embodying are Chritian values. Why is that important? Two reasons. First, one is being disingenuous if not downright ignorant to talk about the coming socialist revolution or the future day when society will be organized more equitably and people will behave well toward one another thus allowing for a benevolent social organization to propagate itself without acknowledging whence the characteristics that will ideally make the polity. Second, and more important programmatically speaking, it’s a mystification of what you’re trying to do, where you’re going, and how you hope to get there. By mystifying the manner in which you’re going to establish your future social organization (omitting the virtuous behavior the citizens of a given country will need to have because the success or failure of this new socialist organized country will be inextricably linked to the virtue or lack there of the citizenry) you're not making common cause with those (Chritsians, conservatives, traditionalists) whose moral-ethical commitments are baked into your assumptions about how this future social organization will work.
Q. Okay, I see your point. You agree with the fact humans are “fallen” creatures and in need of a transcendental God that bestows upon them a design for living; a code to live by. Because without that, and if one just has democratic faith in humans’ ability to work things out by themselves, then humans are going to end up somewhere not so good or worse.
Well, I’m not saying I totally agree with your characterization of what I believe, but I’m much more sympathetic to the gist of what you said than I was a year ago. I know we have to wrap this up, so I’ll go back to the book specifically. Deneen . . .
What’s wrong?
I haven’t finished the book. I still have about 30 pages left. Let me finish it.
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