Government Reforming Society

Some wisdom from Daniel McCarthy:

As actual morality disintegrates, politics becomes deeply moralistic. This is not a paradox: it is always easier for the virtucrat to demand that government reform society than for him to reform himself or his own neighborhood. Conservatives no less than liberals have indulged in morality by proxy, according to which the measure of a man is not how he behaves but how he votes and what ideology he professes. Control of government has become a substitute for leading a good life—as Robert Nisbet warned in The Quest for Community, “power comes to resemble community, especially in times of convulsive social change and of widespread preoccupation with personal identity, moral certainty, and social meaning.”

What the American order lacks is not power but integrating institutions that stand apart from ideological warfare and the clash of personal interests. Red Toryism has a chance in Great Britain because that country retains a handful of institutions that keep alive the idea of the nation as spiritual community. The monarchy and the Church of England may be badly degraded, but they preserve at least the memory, and thus the psychological possibility, of a pre-liberal society predicated on something other than the nexus of cash and power. However feeble their voices may be, when Prince Charles praises beautiful architecture or when the Archbishop of Canterbury criticizes a war, some moral instruction takes place. They can shame the selfish interests of commerce and politics.

America does not just suffer from the absence of similar institutions to give authoritative voice to counter-values. We have national institutions, but not of the traditional, pre-liberal kind. Ours are the White House, the Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve. Everything else is the domain of wealth and private interest—including Congress and our churches. We do, however, have a national religion: the cult of American Exceptionalism that unites everyone from Pat Robertson to Christopher Hitchens. Its high priest is the president, to whom we turn in times of danger when divine help is most besought, such as after 9/11.

What happens if one injects an uncompromising critique of rights, individualism, and liberalism into this national machinery? The product may not be Red Toryism, but more executive secrecy, deficit spending, war, torture, and disempowerment of civil society. No wonder, then, that for all our national-greatness conservatives laud Benjamin Disraeli, they never sound like Tories. They are instead in the tradition of Caesar and Napoleon, of mass democracy and militarism.