Rusty Reno is the editor of First Things magazine, an influential NYC journal on religion, culture and public life.
WHAT WE NEED in THE BATTLE OF THE STRONG GODS by Rusty Reno
For an entire generation, Democrats and Republicans have allied to pursue a double-pronged project of cultural and economic deregulation under the banner of liberalism. The left emphasizes cultural deregulation, though plenty of fusionist libertarians also endorse this agenda. The right emphasizes economic deregulation, and Clintonite neoliberals affirm its main thrusts as well.
By and large, establishment Republicans have conceded cultural power to progressives. This happens because they prioritize economic liberalization: de-regulation, free trade, lower taxes, relaxed immigration policies. For the most part, the establishment Democrats have signed on to this project as well. The upshot is a hyper-competitive, winner-take-all system that increasingly invades and dominates all spheres of life.
The liberal end game is easy to formulate. Ideally, we would reach a state of affairs where people would feel no loyalty to non-economic goods such as family, community, or nation. This would free them for the liberal dream of complete autonomy (the final end of cultural deregulation). It would also make them more available as mobile, productive workers and eager consumers unhindered by disciplines or compunctions that have no utility value, thus fulfilling the liberal dream of non-coercive market coordination of all aspects of life (the final end of economic deregulation).
Freedom often needs to be encouraged and protected. But responsible citizenship requires knowing what diseases threaten the body politic. Today, we are coming apart. Our families are fragmented. Our civic life is tattered. People distrust their leaders. Meanwhile, the reparative power of moral and religious communities has greatly diminished.
Faced with civic wounds far deeper than anything afflicting us today, Abraham Lincoln appealed in his Second Inaugural to the mysterious judgments of God, not the treatises of John Locke. This invocation was not “cultural,” or cordoned off in order to protect soi-disant liberal principles. It was among the most powerful political gestures in American history, which is why it’s inscribed on the north wall of the Lincoln Memorial.
We need to find our way toward the something else that’s needed in twenty-first-century America. This does not mean jettisoning everything now bundled under the heading of liberalism or its close cousin, civility. But it does mean knowing that they cannot guide us forward. Liberalism’s freedom project lacks the resources for renewing solidarity. Civility is an establishment-preserving ethos, one unhelpful when the political establishment is the source of our problems.
As Lincoln recognized, the something else every society needs to bind its wounds and renew its covenants has the aroma of the sacred. It speaks of love, loyalty, and sacrifice. [excerpt from writings of Rusty Reno in First Things]
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