Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
When in post-war memory has a presidential address to the U.S. Congress not invoked the epic struggle between democracy and autocracy, with a nod now and then to social justice? Donald Trump has broken that pattern here, as with so many other norms. His recent State of the Union speech was instead most notable for recasting cultural battle lines, scorning woke staples like critical race theory, trashing “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and emphatically pronouncing to the assembled lawmakers that there are only two genders: male and female.
Culture is politicized when a common vision of the good life is contested. In that context, Alexandre Lefebvre writes in Noema, governing powers are increasingly seeking to assign the moral substance of their vision to the state in place of the neutral proceduralism of liberal regimes that, at least in theory, embrace the diversity of all values without favor.
In this, Lefebvre contends, America under Trump is now joining the illiberal regimes of Russia, China and India, or rulers like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, “which reject the idea that a hundred flowers should bloom within their borders. They claim to know what constitutes a life worth living, are confident that their vision enjoys popular support, and are fully prepared to wield persuasive and coercive powers to advance it.”
Lefebvre does not shrink from acknowledging a reality recoiling liberals generally are loathe to do.
“No doubt, these regimes exercise tremendous social control and can be violent and corrupt. Many of them also emphasize grievances and resentments more than positive ideals,” he argued. “But I firmly believe that they also champion great human goods — goods that liberalism often diminishes or fails to deliver. Filial piety, harmony and respect for hierarchies are central to the selfhood promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. The post-liberal religious right in the United States, for its part, elevates honor, piety and self-sacrifice. These may not be highly valued goods for liberals. They may even be attacked as root causes of oppression. But they are undeniable human goods, and if we fail to acknowledge their appeal to those who see the world differently, we miss the main drivers of the appeal, stability and spread of illiberalism today.”
Lefebvre hastens to point out that he is not defending such regimes but trying to understand the allegiance to them. “Liberals cannot afford to be continually amazed at the success of their rivals. If liberal democracy is to thrive and not just survive in the 21st century, we must develop a deeper understanding of the attraction of alternative political conceptions and their envisioned good life that competes with it.”
After all, it is not as if rights-based liberalism itself does not, in truth, grant a kind of converse moral substance to the state by virtue of the permissive openness it invites, nourishes and protects. With such issues as gender identity in mind, the culturally conservative scholar Patrick Deneen has written that “Liberalism is not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world.”
Lefebvre is thus right to see that since all politics is now cultural, “modern politics will increasingly center on what we might call soulcraft — the cultivation of a sense of self and character — rather than solely statecraft, which focuses on managing political, social and economic affairs. Like it or not, the central political question of our time may well be about the good life — and who gets to define it.”
As Lefebvre himself notes, this is nothing new. “The liberal notion that states should refrain from shaping their members is a historical anomaly.” Across the sweep of human history, going back to Plato in the West or Confucius in the East, “soulcraft, not individual self-determination, has been the norm.”
The Last Sigh Of Liberal Universalism
It appears that the advent, or return, of politics as soulcraft marks the last sigh of one-size-fits-all liberal universalism. Some months ago, I reviewed the British philosopher John Gray’s thinking on the matter as part of Noema’s ongoing conversation about what comes after liberalism.
Gray has long been a discomfiting apostle of pluralism, opposing what he regards as the false idol of universalism under a liberal banner that fails to acknowledge the diverse disposition of humanity.
Back in the early 1990s, when the post-Cold War end of history was still on the horizon, we talked presciently about how liberalism was bound to fail just as Marxism did, and for the same reason.
“Culture is politicized when a common vision of the good life is contested.”
Marxism has no theory of politics among diverse constituencies because it assumes the universality of one class’s interests. Similarly, liberalism falsely assumes its own universality, believing that there can be a consensus on only one conception of “the good life.”
But, as Gray posits, “there is no plausible or defensible theory of rights which doesn’t invoke a theory of human well-being and of human interests — and all such accounts are in some degree rationally disputable.
“Accounts of human well-being and of human interests are contestable in two ways. One way is that different readings of the human good, different ideals of the good and different beliefs about human beings — their fate and destiny and the conditions under which they thrive — will map human interests differently. Thus, different conceptions of human well-being will generate different accounts of human rights.”
He went on: “Another [reason] is that even an agreed conception of human well-being will encompass a variety of interests that won’t always be harmonious. They won’t always make the same demands in practice. They won’t always dovetail. Quite commonly, they will make competing demands.”
Indeed, the great pluralist philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that “good” human values, such as liberty and justice or community and individual freedom, can, and often do, directly conflict with each other. As Lefebvre quotes him, “We must look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate … incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.”
In this, Berlin followed one of his heroes, the German romantic poet Johann Gottfried Herder. In a conversation with Berlin for The New York Review of Books in 1991, he recounted to me how “Herder denied the superiority of one people over another … Each culture was equal in value and deserved its place in the sun … This is why Herder opposed the French universalists of the Enlightenment. For him there were few timeless truths: time and place and social life — what came to be called civil society — were everything.”
Modus Vivendi & ‘Precarious Equilibrium‘
What this implies is that “soulcrafters,” competing for state power to shape the national character, must win over large constituencies to their definition of the good life. Their cultural narrative must first prevail in hearts and minds if the assignment of moral substance to the state is to acquire legitimacy.
The question then is what happens to those who fall outside the post-liberal governing consensus. Would they be protected from the intrusion of the state by what Berlin called “negative freedom” and left alone to live their lives? That hopeful scenario is not the case for gay people, for example, in Russia or Uganda, who are persecuted.
What those outside the dominant good life conception doubtless cannot expect is affirmative support for what Berlin calls the “positive freedom” to pursue their own visions of self-realization. Such is the case in America as Team Trump cancels DEI. Affirmation and support in post-liberal states would be reserved for those within the bounds of the ruling conception, exemplified by Hungary’s promotion campaigns and subsidies for traditional family formation.
In the end, even after state capture, culture wars can never be won decisively in diverse societies. If one accepts that there can be plural, equally valid conceptions of the good life, it follows that, in place of universal claims, one can only strive for what Berlin calls a “precarious equilibrium” among them.
The same is true of relations among incommensurate social and political models around the world, each with its own civilizational inflection. No one nation or group of nations that shares a conception of the good life can be considered “the tutor of mankind on its pilgrimage to perfection,” in theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s pithy phrase.
Gray’s conclusion, with which Lefebvre’s essay agrees, is that “any well-developed conception of the good must recognize not just one human interest, but a whole variety. And that means a negotiation between conflicting interests in the name of civil peace. A ‘modus vivendi’ is the liberalism now in order.”
For Gray, one form such a mode of co-existence might take is a variety of jurisdictions, not unlike city-states in the European Middle Ages, each with their own definition of the good life. Lefebvre suggests something similar for a divided America: “A less aggressive but arguably more radical future could be the geographic decentralization of the United States, where different regions operate under distinct micro-regimes — California embracing thin liberalism, Utah enforcing Mormon rule, Mississippi reviving a racially hierarchical Baptism, and so on. One could argue that the federalist system exists precisely to enable this.”
A last remark with an eye toward the oncoming future. As difficult as socially negotiated tradeoffs will be under present circumstances, one can only imagine the challenge ahead when generative AI and synthetic biology transform what it means to be human.