How do we make sense of our political moment?
There has been no dearth of commentary on the meaning of the 2016 American presidential election and its political aftermath. Pundits, scholars, and others have expressed alarm about the degree of fragmentation and polarization, the increase in vulgarity in political discourse and the loss of political civility, the weakening of traditional international alliances, the abuse of basic ethics in governing, and the resurgence of nativism, populism, isolationism, and nationalism, all of which could encourage authoritarian behavior among those in or seeking power. There are good reasons to be uneasy.
Yet beyond a pervasive sense of panic, one invariably encounters the belief that whatever problem we face, it is, in the end, fixable. Yes, our republic is deeply fractured and Washington is profoundly dysfunctional. Yes, there is a vast depletion of social capital. Yes, our public discourse is debased. Yes, for all of its power, late-modern capitalism has failed to maintain a steadily rising living standard for average people, making them fearful and politically angry. And yes, the culture of democracy, which has long been the glue holding Americans together, has begun to dissolve. But if we eschew the ideologies of left and right and focus instead on pragmatic solutions to core problems, we can find a way forward.
So, whether from the left, right, or center, the various analyses of contemporary political life unfailingly offer practical, sensible-sounding, step-by-step suggestions for fixing the problems: “If we just try harder, we can set things aright.” Such pragmatic optimism is, of course, a widely acknowledged American trait. As the historian Arthur Mann observed forty years ago, the people of the United States have long had confidence that American know-how can always convert problems into opportunities.
Nevertheless, while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?
These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.
Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”
What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.
The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.
This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment.
The Question of the “Center”
In this light, one can see that however factionalized, any kind of meaningful democratic politics presupposes certain shared understandings and commitments that exist prior to political action. These may or may not represent a social or political consensus on a range of policy issues. More fundamentally, they define the arena in which legitimate political discourse and action take place. This shared cultural space can range widely. At one end of a continuum, it might include a binding consensus on certain ideals that define the identity and aspirations of the political regime. At the other end are agreements usually concerning the administrative processes and procedures that mediate political action. However thick or thin, the social and political solidarity upon which democratic life unfolds is formed through these agreements.
In America, this set of understandings and commitments held in common has been talked about in a variety of ways. In symbolic terms, it has been referred to as the “unum” of the national motto, E pluribus unum. In popular terms, it has been referred to as “the American dream.” In scholarly treatises, it has been framed as “the American creed,” America’s “civil religion,” its “public philosophy,” or its “vital center.” In legal-rational terms, it has been discussed in terms of the binding power of the Constitution.
by James Davison Hunter, IASC: The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
There has been no dearth of commentary on the meaning of the 2016 American presidential election and its political aftermath. Pundits, scholars, and others have expressed alarm about the degree of fragmentation and polarization, the increase in vulgarity in political discourse and the loss of political civility, the weakening of traditional international alliances, the abuse of basic ethics in governing, and the resurgence of nativism, populism, isolationism, and nationalism, all of which could encourage authoritarian behavior among those in or seeking power. There are good reasons to be uneasy.
Yet beyond a pervasive sense of panic, one invariably encounters the belief that whatever problem we face, it is, in the end, fixable. Yes, our republic is deeply fractured and Washington is profoundly dysfunctional. Yes, there is a vast depletion of social capital. Yes, our public discourse is debased. Yes, for all of its power, late-modern capitalism has failed to maintain a steadily rising living standard for average people, making them fearful and politically angry. And yes, the culture of democracy, which has long been the glue holding Americans together, has begun to dissolve. But if we eschew the ideologies of left and right and focus instead on pragmatic solutions to core problems, we can find a way forward.
So, whether from the left, right, or center, the various analyses of contemporary political life unfailingly offer practical, sensible-sounding, step-by-step suggestions for fixing the problems: “If we just try harder, we can set things aright.” Such pragmatic optimism is, of course, a widely acknowledged American trait. As the historian Arthur Mann observed forty years ago, the people of the United States have long had confidence that American know-how can always convert problems into opportunities.Nevertheless, while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?
These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.
Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”
What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.
The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.
This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment.
The Question of the “Center”
In this light, one can see that however factionalized, any kind of meaningful democratic politics presupposes certain shared understandings and commitments that exist prior to political action. These may or may not represent a social or political consensus on a range of policy issues. More fundamentally, they define the arena in which legitimate political discourse and action take place. This shared cultural space can range widely. At one end of a continuum, it might include a binding consensus on certain ideals that define the identity and aspirations of the political regime. At the other end are agreements usually concerning the administrative processes and procedures that mediate political action. However thick or thin, the social and political solidarity upon which democratic life unfolds is formed through these agreements.
In America, this set of understandings and commitments held in common has been talked about in a variety of ways. In symbolic terms, it has been referred to as the “unum” of the national motto, E pluribus unum. In popular terms, it has been referred to as “the American dream.” In scholarly treatises, it has been framed as “the American creed,” America’s “civil religion,” its “public philosophy,” or its “vital center.” In legal-rational terms, it has been discussed in terms of the binding power of the Constitution.
by James Davison Hunter, IASC: The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: The Hedgehog
