Many have observed this, and traced its causes and consequences, including a number of important recent diagnoses of the fragility or even failure of liberalism. It seems to me that some of these diagnoses, acute though they may be, have left out or at least underplayed something simple but important: a deep human revulsion at this muffled, perpetually repressed, and indirect anti-political politics. One cannot perpetually stand at a remove from the substance of our common life, pursuing a shadowy half-life of consumerism in the commercial Market while seeing the civic Forum through a glass darkly. Human nature wearies, sickens, and eventually rebels. The Second Vatican Council speaks of man’s restless desire to “live fully according to truth.” It seems to increasing numbers of people that living fully means living according to the truth not only in the family and local community and marketplace, but in the polity as a whole. Liberalism, in its myopia, has left this out of its calculations, and as a result the liberal order is not ultimately compatible with the deepest desires and beliefs of its subjects. The Achilles’ heel of liberalism is this hunger for the real as expressed in politics, the hunger to come to grips with the substance of the common good.

The most interesting conversation I’ve had lately in an academic setting was with a colleague—a man of the left who thinks of himself as “secular,” but who is in fact animated by a vibrant faith in the progress of history—who asked me to lunch and pressed the question “in a fully Catholic polity, the sort you would like to bring about, what would happen to me, a Jew”? (Nothing bad, I assured him). This was no second-order discussion of “political liberty” or “rights” or “overlapping consensus.” This was a passionate concrete question about the fate of an individual, a people, and the shape that a polity might take, all inseparably linked. It was, at last, after all the academic workshops on “procedural justice” and “tolerance,” a genuinely political conversation.

We are witnessing, with increasing tempo on many fronts, the outbreak of rebellions against anti-political politics. This is a phenomenon of both the “left” and the “right.” That very fact suggests that the left-right dimension is no longer, if it ever was, a particularly useful guide to our politics, and that we need categories more relevant than the seating-chart of the French National Assembly. Trump, Brexit, the recent electoral results in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland and elsewhere — none of these are easy to fit into a standard left-right frame.

One way of understanding the fault-lines emerging in many liberal polities is to cast them as a conflict between liberal elites of the “center” on the one hand, and “populists” who contest the center’s fanaticism on the other, as witness the coalition of left and right populists in Italy. It is sometimes suggested that the main issue is economic — that populism is a reaction by the have-nots against the self-dealing of the haves. In a somewhat more sophisticated variant, the idea is that populism reacts against not only the economic superiority of the haves, but their insufferable cultural smugness, born of conviction of their own merit.

Although all this unquestionably captures something, I don’t think it is the whole story, in part because it leaves out the essentially spiritual dimension of the hunger for the real, of the desire to live fully in the Forum as well as the Market. Consider the offspring of liberalism that goes by the name of “progressivism.” (Let me bracket here inevitable and interminable controversies about taxonomy—whether progressivism counts as a species of the liberal genus, as a corrupted version of true liberalism, or what have you. In my view progressivism is a descendant of classical liberalism, especially in its Lockean and Millian variants, and may justly be termed “liberalism” in the same way that the child traditionally takes on the family name of the father—even if, as in this case, the child and the father are often at odds. Yet these taxonomic and genetic questions are not critical for the questions I pursue here.) In some versions, at least, progressivism gets one big thing exactly right: It attempts to grapple with the real, to make politics and our common life fully and vibrantly political again. And it does so because of the animating faith of its adherents, complete with liturgies and sacraments and hope for salvation and an account of final things, of the end times. To be clear, I believe it to be a corrupted and heretical faith, an odd and distinctive mix of Pelagianism and Gnosticism, but it has this one excellent quality, that it hopes to escape the spectral underworld of liberal politics.

From this point, there are two ways to go wrong. The politics of reality might be, from anyone’s own standpoint, the wrong politics, substantively speaking. A stock liberal claim is that this possibility is so fearsome that everyone prefers or at least ought to prefer public “neutrality”—as among religious views, visions of justice, or any of the other things that people care about most deeply. On this claim, all are risk-minimizers, and liberalism will emerge in equilibrium as the cautious second choice of all. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that this “neutrality” is just another substantive view about who should be allowed into the Forum for what purposes, and what may be said there. The hunger for the real might then make people so desperate, so sick of the essential falsity of liberalism, that they become willing to gamble that the Truth (what liberals would call “their version of truth”) will prevail—or at least willing to gamble on entering into coalition with other sorts of anti-liberals, as in the Italian coalition of “populists” of left and right. In an even better version, the willingness to take one’s chances with post-liberalism is not the spirit of the desperate gambler, but is rather the spirit of faith—never certain, but inspiring and inspired by theologically-inflected hope. This last answer is hardly confined to, say, Catholic traditionalists. The faith in the triumph of a secularized-but-providential history that animates so many strands of progressivism manifestly also fills its adherents with a (warped) version of theological hope. Of course it is true—it’s obvious—that there are versions of non-liberalism that are worse than liberalism. At a certain point, however, people can no longer abide perpetually living in fear of the worst-case scenario. A “liberalism of fear” is ultimately intolerable for creatures fashioned to live in hope.

There is another and somewhat more subtle way that things can go wrong. Liberalism muffles the political in second-order concepts like “civility” and “tolerance” and “choice,” and the hunger for real politics rightly rebels against this. But it does not follow that these concepts have no value at all, when rightly placed within a larger ordering to good substantive ends. If civility, tolerance, and their ilk are bad masters, and tyrannous when made into idols, they may still be good servants. The shibboleths of liberalism all have chastened, nonliberal counterparts, justified in nonliberal terms. J.F. Stephen, the withering Victorian critic of John Stuart Mill, was clear-minded about this, pointing out the many reasons why a prudent sovereign ordering affairs to the common good might choose for that very reason to leave particular matters to individual choice, or might be reluctant to employ the “rough engine” of the law even where serious wrongs occur. “Free trade” and “the free market” are idols, but merchants benefit the community and must be given a duly regulated scope within which to ply their trade. “Civility” and “tolerance” may be cryptic terms in which to measure and regulate the substantive bounds of the views and conduct that will be permitted in a rightly ordered society, but such a society will also value charity, forbearance, and prudence. Hence rejecting liberalism doesn’t entail that men should be allowed to assault teenagers wearing offensive hats. Most generally, as Aquinas observed, a well-ordered society will not use law to suppress all vices and to prescribe all virtues, except to the extent conducive to the common good. Such a society, after throwing down the idol of Liberty, will allow liberties. But even where the nonliberal order happens to reach the same conclusions as a liberal order, it justifies them in different ways and on different grounds.

My main suggestion is not so much about what should be done, but about the constraints that man’s political nature places on what can be done. Ought implies can. The prerequisite for successful political arrangements is that they must in the long run be compatible with the ineradicable human impulse to live fully in a political community ordered towards the truth. As Joseph de Maistre observed, following Aquinas and Aristotle, “before the formation of political societies, man was not a complete man.” Now this impulse to live fully in the civic community of the Forum, not merely in the half-way life of liberalism, is alarming in many ways, but it cannot be denied altogether. It follows that in one way or another it must be controlled and channeled into substantively admirable directions; there is no alternative. The hunger for a real politics must, in some way or another, be sated. Better that it be sated through a sacramental feast.

Header Image: Honoré Daumier, Idea for summer parliament.

In honor of Prof. Ryszard Legutko and his book, The Demon in Democracy,  the Consul-General of Poland, Maciej Golubiewski, convened an event on May 9, 2018, to address the following topic: “Democratic Reformers or Illiberal Backsliders? Poland and the challenges of sovereign politics in the West.” Professor Vermeule has kindly agreed to allow us to publish the illuminating remarks that he delivered at this event. One need not think democracy is the best form of government to realize that it is not, in and of itself, liberal. Liberalism, however, needs democracy, or more precisely it needs the “periodic ceremony” of democracy.
–The Editors

I want to thank the Consul-General for arranging this event. It’s always a pleasure to have a chance to honor Prof. Legutko, whose book helped to awaken so many of us from our modernist slumbers, into the light of a new dogmatism.

The title of the panel is “Democratic Reformers or Illiberal Backsliders?” And my answer is “Both.” Let me start with a puzzle. I know, or know of, a number of U.S. and U.K. academics, journalists, and other intelligentsia who spend their careers in a state that can only be described as professional hysteria, particularly directed at Poland, Hungary, and Brexit. In this state of hysteria, the meanings of words are redefined. The Polish election, although free and fair, represents a threat to “democracy”; the passage of legislation according to constitutional procedures, such as the Polish parliamentary law on the judiciary, becomes a threat to the “rule of law”; and so forth. What is the root cause of this extraordinary reaction?

Many have observed that Poland and Hungary have been experimenting with nonliberal versions of democracy. Assuming this to be true for the sake of discussion, it still does not explain the hysteria; it actually sharpens the puzzle. Why should a country like Poland be more an object of hysteria on these particular grounds than, say, Saudi Arabia or China? After all, those regimes are neither democratic nor liberal in any conventional sense. Why would a regime that is democratic but not liberal be more objectionable than a regime that is neither democratic nor liberal?

I think the key to the puzzle is liberalism’s longstanding anxiety about its uneasy relationship to democracy, indeed its somewhat parasitic relationship. Here I will draw upon Carl Schmitt’s Introduction to the 2d edition of his Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in which Schmitt explains the polemical and political problem that liberalism has faced since its triumph in the long century between 1789 and 1918. As the doctrine of the 19th century politics of parliamentary monarchomachy — the political opposition to monarchy — liberalism made an alliance of convenience with democracy and for immediate advantage helped to cement the pervasive and seemingly irresistible notion that the fundamental criterion of political legitimacy is democratic — something to which all regimes of any kind at least pay lip service today. When this liberal-democratic alliance somewhat unexpectedly came to power everywhere starting in the second half of the 19th century, however, the alliance — now lacking its common enemy, the monarchy — immediately started to fracture. John Stuart Mill, as of 1861, was already frightened by the possibility that democratic majorities would constrain experimental individualist projects of self-actualization by educated elites, who should therefore be given multiple votes in a representative system, among other privileges and other institutional checks on majoritarianism.

It has since become undeniable that liberalism both needs and fears democracy. It needs democracy because it needs the legitimation that democracy provides. It fears, however, that its dependence on, yet fundamental difference from, democracy will be finally and irrevocably exposed by a sustained course of nonliberal popular opinion.

In this environment, the solution of the intellectuals is always to try to idealize and redescribe democracy so that “mere majoritarianism” never turns out to count as truly democratic. Of course the majority’s views are to count on certain issues, but only within constraints so tightly drawn and under procedures so idealized that any outcomes threatening to liberalism can be dismissed as inauthentic, often by a constitutional court purporting to speak in the name of a higher form of democracy. Democracy is then reduced to a periodic ceremony of privatized voting by secret ballot for one or another essentially liberal party, safely within a cordon sanitaire. In the limit, as Schmitt put it, liberalism attempts to appeal to a “democracy of mankind” that erases nations, substantive cultures, and the particularistic solidarities that are constitutive of so many of the goods of human life. In this way, liberalism attempts to hollow out democracy from within, yet retain its outward form as a sort of legitimating costume, like the donkey who wore the lion’s skin in the fable.

We are now in position to answer our puzzle, to explain why democracies that flout liberal pieties are so much more threatening to liberalism than polities that are neither liberal nor democratic to begin with. The democratic polity that rejects liberalism offends on two counts. For one thing, the apostate is always more detested than the pagan. If the democratic but nonliberal polity seemed for a time to be a community in good standing under the liberal imperium, then its turn against liberalism represents a threatening retrogression. On its own premises, given its historicized and immanentized eschatology, liberalism may expand, but must never contract. To adapt something that the defining mind of our era, Nigel Farage, said about the European Union, liberalism has its analogue to the Brezhnev Doctrine that no nation might ever leave the Warsaw Pact.

But this is a contingent issue, depending on the nature of the status quo ante. The second and more systematically offensive thing about a democratic-but-nonliberal regime is that it threatens to expose the elite character of the liberal project. Liberalism is in many respects an enterprise created by and in the service of elites who capture most of the upside gains of ever-greater release from customary, moral, and economic constraints, and who are buffered — economically and personally — from the downside risks and losses. Liberalism’s agents know and fear that the broader demos may reject their aspirations for ever-more-satisfying forms of creativity and self-fulfillment. Liberalism’s agents know and fear that the demos may rebel when the customary norms and liturgies of the people are cleared away to make room for the restless and ever-changing liturgy of liberalism. In this sense, Judith Shklar was right to emphasize the “liberalism of fear,” but in a different way and for different reasons than she offered. The fear at the base of liberalism is that it will be left alone and visibly alone, expelled from the host within which it has fed and sheltered for so long.

A few analytic notes on ralliement — a notion stemming originally from Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, which urged French Catholics to rally to the Third French Republic in order to transform it from within. The idea has become more general, suggesting that Catholics would do well to rally to and work within a liberal-democratic political order. I have two conceptual distinctions to sketch, merely in the hope of clarifying the terms of the conversation.

Naive vs. Strategic

The first distinction goes to the goals of ralliement. I believe there are actually two distinct ways to understand those goals, which — entirely tendentiously — I will call the naive and strategic versions. In the naive version, Catholics seek a genuine long-term rapprochement with liberal-democratic political orders, hoping to baptize them from within and even to recall liberalism to its best self, while otherwise retaining the regime’s outward character. Speaking in very broad terms, one might see the project of European Catholic Democracy after World War II in this light, although there are obviously many qualifications to be discussed here.

In the second, strategic version, Catholics deny that liberalism has any best self to which it might somehow be recalled. They work within a liberal order towards the long-term goal, not of reaching a stable accommodation with liberalism, even in a baptized form, but rather with a view to eventually superseding it altogether. Pater Edmund Waldstein sees this strategic version as the one Leo XIII himself favored: “For Leo the ralliement was meant as a stage towards an integral restoration of Christendom. That is, Catholics were to work for the common good in the current un-ideal framework of a state that did not recognize the superiority of spiritual over temporal authority, but the hope was that this would lead eventually to a restoration of an integrally Catholic state.“

In the short run, there are superficial similarities between the two approaches. After all, both reject visions in which Catholics retreat from politics into thick local communities. But in their long-run aims, the two versions of ralliement are entirely different, indeed diametrically opposed. Here let me quote with approval an analysis of the difference between Ross Douthat’s backward-looking version of ralliement and my own:

Neither Douthat nor Vermeule retreats into gated communities or enclaves … in the bayou. Indeed, in both men’s visions, you will see intelligent Christians educated at elite schools entering the service of the regime. Some will go into government, some will go into the institutions the government serves, like finance, and others will go back into elite schools to prepare the next wave. In time, perhaps not a very long time, you will see the regime get better. But this is where Vermeule and Douthat’s visions diverge sharply. At a certain point, Douthat and those who agree with [him] will [say that] “Liberalism is itself again.” Vermeule will say, simply, that we are well on our way to our goal.

Parliamentary Democracy vs. Bureaucracy

The second distinction goes not to the goals of ralliement, but to the institutional context in which it occurs. An important objection to ralliement holds that participation in liberal institutions tends to suborn those who do the rallying, in part by forcing them to participate in public practices and discourses that can only ever be cast in liberal terms, and that will bind the ralliés to liberal presuppositions. On this view, “the procedural principles liberal strategies are based on, being the only common ground, the only language anyone can use in public, quickly become the only acceptable creed.”

This is a legitimate and forceful concern, but I do not think it is necessarily a fatal objection. One must ask, I think: ralliement to what sort of institutions and practices, exactly? In one version, Catholics rally to and participate in institutions that have distinctively liberal justifications and modes of operation, including discursive practices. Carl Schmitt argued, for example, that parliamentary institutions, when conceived not as part of a system of estates but as sovereign representative bodies, embody an essentially liberal-discursive set of principles. Rallying to, participating within, parliamentary democracy might then indeed have a pernicious suborning effect.

But even within liberal-democratic political orders there are always institutional forms that long predate liberalism, that have no necessary connection of principle to liberalism, and that will certainly survive liberalism’s eventual disappearance. One candidate for such an organizational form — and there are others as well — is bureaucracy, which has flourished in nonliberal regimes from Sung China to Salazar’s Portugal. (Indeed Schmitt also suggested, tongue partly in cheek, that the Anglo-Saxon Protestant instinctively recoils in horror from  the Catholic Church because the Church is itself “a celibate bureaucracy”). The ideal-type principles of hierarchy and unity of top-level command that animate bureaucracy, especially but not only military and security bureaucracies, are not obviously the sort of principles that threaten to inscribe liberalism within the hearts and minds of participants. Hence my own version of ralliement, which hopes for eventual integration effected from within institutions currently extant in liberal-democratic orders, focuses on executive-type bureaucracies rather than on parliamentary-democratic institutions per se.

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