We need to think big as Americans—and as heirs of our noble inheritance.
It is a pleasure to respond to Spencer Klavan’s graceful and inspired reflections on the prospects for America as we move closer to the 250th anniversary of the founding. He admirably eschews polemics and avoids an excessively narrow preoccupation with the most heated issues of the day, concerning himself with broader and deeper matters. At the same time, he writes as a partisan of the American project and the broader civilization—Western civilization—of which it has been a particularly vital and noble expression. Klavan raises big questions without succumbing to fashionable, or once-fashionable, theses such as “The End of History” or the ideological temptation of Year Zero-ism, which distort the past and present, as well as the prospects for the future.
Klavan’s discussion of Francis Fukuyama’s effort to revivify his “End of History” thesis in the closing days of the Cold War is quite good, although one might wish to go a bit further than he does. He is undoubtedly right that Fukuyama never intended to suggest that events of significance will cease to occur, that history will somehow come to an end. He meant rather that the fundamental political problem had in principle been solved: soft, secular, free, market-oriented, and technologically minded liberal democracies are the only viable political order for the present and foreseeable future. Despite some atavistic holdouts (for example, Islamist fanatics and residues of decrepit Communist tyrannies), liberal universalism would succeed the cacophony of conflicting regimes, nations, and ideologies that had hitherto defined the historical experience of man.
Fukuyama, no Marxist himself but rather a consummate centrist and an extremely well-informed political observer, nonetheless gave a broadly Marxist interpretation of the West’s victory in the Cold War. He attributed it less to some combination of chance, courage, and statesmanship, not to mention the essential contradictions at the heart of Communist theory and practice (although Fukuyama did not completely ignore these factors), than to the vicissitudes of the historical process itself. Fukuyama’s utopian account of liberalism’s triumph was the first reason to hesitate in accepting his thesis.
Moreover, Fukuyama passed over Hegel’s rationalized Christianity and his “conservative” correction of the excessively abstract and disruptive conception of human rights put forward by the party of progress. On these points, Hegel was far closer to Burke and Tocqueville than to the modern revolutionary spirit. Instead, Fukuyama took his point of departure from the Russian-born Hegelian-Marxist theorist Alexandre Kojève, a particularly brilliant French bureaucrat who was the sometime intellectual sparring partner of Leo Strauss.
As Klavan points out, Fukuyama believed that liberal democracy of a decidedly secular kind could more than adequately provide for the “recognition of man by man” without any serious dependence on religious faith, or on enduring verities that find their source and substance in God or nature. His liberalism is parsimonious when it comes to truth, but remarkably deferential to “openness, tolerance, and skepticism about received ideas,” including “the role of religion in politics.” As Klavan’s analysis helps us appreciate, Fukuyama abandoned any robust appeal to tradition, religious convictions, and national or civilizational pride, which he implicitly consigned to the illiberal camp. Is it surprising, then, that these once vital supports of the liberal order very quickly become “anti-democratic” by definition?
No, by this path we arrive at the political phenomenon that French thinkers such as Mathieu Bock-Côté and Pierre Manent have interchangeably called the “extreme center” or “the fanaticism of the center.” This counterfeit centrism is in fact complicit in a willful project to purge historical liberalism of its once fruitful coexistence with the conservative foundations that gave it civilizational heft and moral seriousness. Indeed, one is only a few crucial steps away from the quintessentially ideological act of replacing the perennial moral and intellectual distinctions between truth and falsehood and good and evil with the deeply pernicious and inherently totalitarian distinction between progress and reaction.
Liberal democracy so redefined quickly takes on a post-religious, post-philosophical, and post-national cast. Burke’s “manly, moral, and regulated liberty” and Tocqueville’s “liberty under God and the law,” quintessential expressions of conservative liberalism, no longer inform and enrich liberal self-understanding. Rather, they are relegated to the camp of reaction. So understood, the Enlightenment risks becoming, as Klavan nicely put it, “free-floating and faithless.”
If the best elements of modern liberalism are to be saved, and revitalized in the process, as I think they should be, we must renew their conservative foundations. That requires firmly resisting the temptation to reduce liberalism to modern skepticism informed by indifference or even hostility to religion or the philosophical search for truth.
The liberal republicanism of the American Founders is unthinkable without confidence in the sanctity of the person that owes infinitely more to the Christian inheritance than it does to skepticism or desiccated rationalism. More generally, the founders did not equate a “new order of the ages” with a break in the continuity of Western and Christian civilization. They drew freely on the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans, the Christian centuries, and the moderate Enlightenment (for example, their political understandings of Locke and “the celebrated Montesquieu”). Theirs was indeed a revolution, but “a revolution of sober expectations,” to use Martin Diamond’s fine phrase, that based politics squarely “on the capacity of mankind for self-government” (Federalist 39). One must do justice to both sides of that equation.
The Christian Foundations of the Liberal Order
In his correspondence and in the marginalia of the voluminous European works of philosophy and political philosophy that he devoured, John Adams mocked the utopian political pretensions, reductive scientism, and hatred of biblical religion so apparent in the writings of the most radical French philosophes (see the fascinating comments by Adams collected in Zoltán Haraszti’s 1952 book John Adams and the Prophets of Progress). As his biting comments suggest, Adams thought them pretentious fools, mere “literary politicians,” to adopt a fitting phrase from Tocqueville. His son John Quincy Adams, so well cited by Klavan, did indeed criticize the European Old Regime with its “theories of the Crown and Mitre,” where “man had no rights.” At the same time, however, he was appalled by the fanaticism of the French revolutionaries, with their politicized atheism, disregard for law, support for mob violence, and hatred of the most precious features of our civilizational inheritance.
In preparation for the election of 1800, fearing that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans might emulate French-style political and ideological extremism if victorious, John Quincy Adams even translated Friedrich Gentz’s The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution, Compared with the Origins and Principles of the French Revolution, a lucid defense of American prudence against French revolutionary fanaticism. Gentz was the German translator of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and later an advisor to the famous Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich.
In his introduction to his translation, Adams endorsed Gentz’s account of the “essential differences” of the two revolutions, one firmly committed to moderate, humane, and rational principles, the other to “the levelling frenzy of ideology and the ferocity of the enraptured Jacobin,” as Russell Kirk aptly put it in his own introduction to the book. The differences between the revolutions, as Adams insisted, were in the end “the difference between right and wrong.” One could not put it more directly: here one finds no moral equivalence between the two revolutions from the great American statesman.
At the same time, John Quincy Adams, like his father before him, never ceased denouncing “the gangrene of slavery,” as he called it in his speeches. Alexander Hamilton, who was no fan of the senior Adams on personal rather than philosophical grounds, also shared the same deeply principled opposition to chattel slavery and Jacobin fanaticism. He was appalled by any identification of the American Revolution with one directed by “fanatics in political science.” Even Jefferson, who equivocated on the Revolution and sometimes even excused its terroristic excesses (see a particularly disturbing letter to William Short dated January 3, 1793), remained a prudent advocate of American neutrality in the war between France and Britain as secretary of state.
Thomas Paine was the most zealous of the bunch—an admirer of the French Revolution whose enthusiasm for it led him to travel to France as a “political pilgrim” only to be arrested by the Jacobins for advocating leniency for the king and queen after the National Convention convicted them of treason. Years later, Theodore Roosevelt would dub Paine, somewhat cruelly if not completely unjustly, “a filthy little atheist.” Fortunately, James Monroe used his political and diplomatic connections to have Paine freed after he spent months in a Jacobin prison.
John Quincy Adams also thought long and hard about the essential connection between liberal and Christian America, that is, about the inescapably biblical foundations of any adequate defense of human dignity and of persons made in “the image and likeness of God.” A Unitarian in theology and religious affiliation (and the vice president of the American Bible Society for 30 years), he nonetheless lauded Jesus Christ as Savior.
Adams spoke eloquently and profoundly about the Christian resonances of the Declaration of Independence, even meditating upon the relationship between Christmas Day and July 4 in a notable oration at Newburyport, Massachusetts, delivered on July 4, 1837. (That fascinating reflection has recently been published in book form by W.B. Allen and David Zanotti as An Oration: John Quincy Adams’ Christian America, with the original texts accompanied by discerning exegesis and commentary.) As Adams stated in that thought-provoking speech, Jesus and his apostles taught “lessons of peace, of benevolence, of meekness, of brotherly love, of charity—all utterly incompatible with the ferocious spirit of slavery,” lessons essential to lives well lived in freedom and dignity.
In these and other writings, John Quincy Adams perfectly captured how what is new, innovative, and exceptional about the United States is built on inspired foundations rooted in Christianity itself. Our revolution was no mere innovation, a triumphal vanquishing of the old by the new. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was therefore right in his recent Munich speech to state that dogmatic secularism and civilizational self-loathing strike at the “shared Western heritage of America and Europe,” thus paradoxically undermining one of the crucial pillars of American exceptionalism.
The Temptation of Overreach
Let me conclude by addressing two crucial points raised by Klavan’s rich meditation on the American spirit, its discontents, and the prospects for its renewed greatness. A classicist by training, Klavan justly evokes Virgil, whose Aeneid so vividly conveys the Roman sense of purpose and destiny. Comparisons between America and Rome are inescapable, instructive, and not a little unnerving. America must aim high, especially now that our European cousins are so eager to say adieu to a noble if imperfect past they increasingly loathe. As I write, the British are in the process of replacing the great Winston Churchill on the five-pound note with the likes of a squirrel, thus cherishing progressivist sentimentality over respect for human excellence. Year-Zero-ism, alas, is alive and well in contemporary Europe.
But the “imperial republic,” as Raymond Aron called America with no animus in the 1970s, comes with dangers, particularly those of hubris and overreach. While I am generally supportive of this administration’s efforts regarding Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran—which really does pose an “existential threat” to civilization itself—I hope and pray that a sense of restraint accompanies the president’s quest for national greatness. I do not believe that this administration has suddenly converted to an ill-defined neoconservatism, or to global democracy promotion and “forever wars,” whatever the likes of an increasingly execrable Tucker Carlson say. But power can be intoxicating, and empire, formal or informal, coexists uneasily with republicanism.
The president’s senior political advisor, Stephen Miller, recently stated that the conduct of foreign policy should be guided by “strength, force, and power,” and not by “international niceties.” He is right that justice is nothing without the willingness to use force in its defense—something many of our European allies seem to have forgotten. But Miller’s remarks smack of amoral power politics, and not a little hubris. I prefer Raymond Aron’s argument that in the realm of international affairs a tough-minded “morality of prudence” is superior to both an unduly idealistic “morality of law” and a pseudo-realist “morality of struggle.”
A final word about Year Zero-ism. We must take aim at it in its most extreme forms, since the effort to repudiate our civilizational inheritance inevitably leads to tyranny and the worst historical tragedies. We saw that in revolutionary France, where the literal replacement of the old Christian calendar by a revolutionary one (beginning with Year Zero and creating ten-day weeks with no sabbath allowed) led to murderous de-Christianization campaigns and unprecedented political massacres. Communist totalitarianism in its Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist forms in the USSR and China is an extended exercise in destroying tradition, customary morality, religious convictions, and civilized constraints. We all know what Year Zero-ism led to in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 under the tutelage of the Khmer Rouge: autogenocide and a war on the country’s most venerable traditions.
Closer to home, the same spirit is at work in the academic and intellectual Left’s commitment to ingratitude and to a rejection of our civilizational inheritance as a form of existence. They are carrying out an Orwellian “culture of repudiation,” driving a knife into the heart of both liberal education and the moral foundations of democracy. No civilization can survive, not to mention thrive, when it is dominated by a spirit of self-hatred. This spirit must be called out and resisted in every way possible.
Our spiritual, cultural, and political recovery will demand strength of soul and truly arduous efforts. It will require the bringing together of the old cardinal virtues of courage and moderation, while rejecting the facile temptations of moral preening, angry rhetoric, or revolutionary poses that too often pass for political judgment today.
Klavan is undoubtedly right that Trump is a transitional figure, even if perhaps a necessary one: “Nor is Trumpism obviously the way of the future so much as the harbinger of it: Trump inaugurated, but will not be around to direct, the stage we’re entering into.” That next stage, which must have the character of an ascent, will require courage and strength combined with steadiness of purpose—as Americans, and as heirs of our Western inheritance, have done in the past when faced by crises and the opportunities they open up for the energetic, the wise, the prudent, and the politically responsible.
Let me emphatically endorse Klavan’s concluding remark: “Americans will need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project, forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation—but the Western nation par excellence.” Wise words, indeed.
