Following the end of World War II, it appeared that America had achieved a more or less satisfactory equilibrium of social forces under the watch of post-war political centrism. Before that, the imminent demise of the First American Republic at the hands of a radical coalition of the working and agricultural classes and the mass of desperate unemployed men—all caused to march under the banner of this or that “totalitarian” ideology, against capital in an apocalyptic final showdown—had been confidently forecasted by both friends and foes of the established order.
After the war, there was an uptick in wages and standards of living. Urban unemployment was down, and a social safety net prevented the unemployed from becoming absolutely pauperized. In the country, regimes of subsidies and price controls intended to stabilize agricultural production were in place. Technocratic central planners succeeded in forestalling acute economic crises by sublimating economic crisis tendencies into a chronic, but more sustainably low-level, permanent crisis. The experience of World War II and the ongoing Cold War, respectively, gave the two great “totalitarian” rivals to liberalism—fascism and Soviet Communism—bad names from which they never recovered. The far-left was quarantined within the university and the Bohemian demi-monde of hipsters; the far-right, within the secretive John Birch Society, the detritus of the once-formidable Ku Klux Klan and offshoots, and the social world of back-alley brawlers. Class conflict settled into the unspectacular and predictable routine of collective bargaining.
By the 1960s, the far-left began to re-invent itself in the intersection of two axes. The first, concluding that the white working classes had lost their revolutionary potential, looked to black militants at home and anti-colonial insurgents abroad for new standard-bearers of revolution. The second was the cultural turn in leftist academia which, much more interested in the latest French literary theories than in the grey details of socialist economic planning, also looked for new champions in the struggle to bring down bourgeois society, and found them in the romanticized picaresque figures of various socially marginalized inhabitants of urban Bohemia, particularly sexual deviants. A new leftist strategy emerged. This strategy would assemble a heterogeneous bloc coalition of identities grounded in various social, as opposed to economic, categories (race, sexual orientation, etc.); and it would deploy these identities as shock troops on a specifically cultural as opposed to economic terrain of battle.
Bourgeois cultural norms—now redefined as specifically white, male, heterosexual, and Christian—were to be flouted as publicly and flamboyantly as possible, and the status order turned upside-down in a Nietzschean transvaluation. The coalition of “oppressed” minorities avowedly would not petition the majority for equal rights, but force the majority to trade places with it in a “decentering” of majority “privilege,” and constantly remind the majority of its new place by means of theatrically ostentatious and intentionally humiliating “transgressive” provocations against majority values, norms, and institutions, especially those pertaining to sexual propriety. Freedom of speech and objective impartial inquiry were to be abolished as both the instrument and ideological mask of white male privilege, supplanted respectively by speech codes and hate-crime laws wherever decision-makers could be talked into enacting them.
The new Left strategy, from the late 1960s onward, was a runaway success. Indifferent to economics at first, it continued to recite socialist platitudes on a pro forma basis, but never seriously threatened big business and, by the late 1990s, was more or less fully integrated into the neoliberal globalist synthesis. Much of the public was more than happy to take advantage of the promise to relax sexual and other norms of public decorum, and the good-faith readiness of the public at large to believe the things it read made it easy prey for the unparalleled cynicism and brazenly shameless duplicity of advocacy journalism and academic research.
However, the constant and ever-escalating series of provocations and transgressions—intended to shock and offend the opposition when out of power, and to humiliate it when in power—could not help but produce blowback. The socially disruptive tactics of the old Left in the form of strike actions, sit-ins, etc. were tactical means to a strategic goal, such as securing higher wages or civil rights; but for the new Left, the tactic of social disruption was the strategic goal. The Left’s street theatrics and legislative successes alike became little more than victory dances in a politics which assumed the character of sport, a game of capture-the-flag on a national scale. This new politics of provocation was viciously divisive by design. It started getting the pushback transgression always secretly longs for by the end of the 1970s in the form of a new populism, initially manifested in enthusiastic support for Reagan and the Republican Party, and in the rise of intentionally coarse-mannered and obnoxiously opinionated populist talk radio—a genre made possible by the new Left’s normalization of vulgarity, provocation, and polemic.
The present decade has seen the emergence of a radical turn within populism, and the politics of the Right more generally, away from the “movement Conservatism” of the Republican Party mainstream, which has proven itself absolutely ineffectual against a Left that now dominates the corporate workplace and civil society in general in addition to its traditional home bases of education, media, and the public and non-profit sectors. This Left also leverages its dominance to threaten anyone who objects in the slightest way to its recent, escalating spiral of provocations—each one more exquisite and more extreme than the last—with loss of employment and expulsion from society. The movement away from the GOP mainstream has also been driven by disgust with the latter’s one-plank platform of unconditional support for neoliberalism and free trade at a time when wage stagnation, structural employment, and uncontrolled migration are seen as menacing much of the white population.
This all culminated in the (to some) unexpected 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and in the rise of an underground of renegade young rightists that successfully exploited social and other new media in order to wage some counter-provocations of its own against the Left, as crassly transgressive and methodically offensive in their own right as anything the Left ever came up with, in a tit-for-tat game, which saw the “alt-right” make use of methods that, ironically, were originally elaborated by postmodernist media theorists of the Left such as Guy Debord.
The response on the part of the Left to these counter-provocations has been an unrelenting and obsessive effort to contest the legitimacy of Trump’s election, an amping-up of already amped-up partisan rhetoric, and an extremely aggressive campaign, above all on campus, of censorship (“deplatforming”) of not only rightists, but anyone of any political stripe accused of deviating in any way from a nebulous and ever-shifting Leftist orthodoxy. This effort is carried out by means ranging from the use of weaponized administrative rules to shaming campaigns, boycotts, and finally, violent mob actions. Partisans of the Left are exhorted to immediately disavow and shun any friend or relative known to support Trump, and to try to have suspected members of the Outer Right fired from their jobs and/or (in Canada and the UK) arrested—or, failing that, assault them physically. The populists, for their part, ominously muse aloud in comments sections about exercising their Second Amendment rights and taking to arms. The response of the Left has been an attempt to revive the gun control movement—a favorite tactic of the politics of provocation from the late 1960s through to the end of the millennium, and one whose revival seems driven less by any calculus of the military formidability of the opposition than by pure spite. Where the gun-control movement of old would affect a technocratic stance, with public-health officials in white coats touting gun control as a scientific revolution in crime-prevention, the new one is fronted by sullen-looking teenagers who hurl obscenities and accuse shooting-sports associations of being terrorists and child-killers.
Can all the multifarious factions of American politics be reconciled to one another, and civic unity restored to the Republic? If so, how? Michael Shermer, in a brief but exceptionally suggestive recent article, one full of all sorts of interesting implications that merit being unpacked at greater length than the article itself, thinks he knows the answer. Shermer asserts that:
[T]he answer always has been with us, in the form of precepts shrouded in the mists of the 18th century Rights Revolution. This is when the core principles of classical liberalism took shape through the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, and Jeremy Bentham, among others—which in turn laid the groundwork for both conservatism and liberalism’s modern-day variant.
If “the massive divide between America’s left and right is ever to be narrowed”, argues Shermer, “it will be through something resembling an implicit grand bargain, according to which both sides rediscover the common roots of their respective creeds in classical liberalism.”
Shermer defines classical liberalism in terms of the familiar package of universal suffrage and equality of rights, state monopolization of coercion, the “rule of law”, property rights and unhampered trade, freedom of speech, and for good measure generous social-welfare spending. But for Shermer, what defines classical liberalism above all is that “it identifies individuals, not groups, as the locus of rights.” The supreme end of all government under classical liberalism is the liberation of the individual subject from the stifling bands of group life. After all, it is “individuals, not groups, who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, suffer- and vote”; and from this putative ontological primacy of the individual it follows that, while human beings are avowedly social animals with an instinctual need to affiliate with one another, nonetheless “such instincts should not serve to negate the status of the individual as the primary moral agent, the inheritor of legal rights, the baseline actor in democracy, and the ultimate subject under our laws.”
It seems a little strange to prescribe the rediscovery and revival of liberal individualism as the cure for the ills of a country that has never known any other philosophy of government; one with no feudal past and where it is unlawful for the state to grant titles of nobility or establish a church, founded by revolutionary liberal partisans and ideologues who meticulously hard-coded every liberal precept they could think of into the nation’s fundamental articles of law and governing institutions, and where hegemonic liberalism, as we have seen, soundly defeated the “collectivist” ideologies that convulsed much of the rest of the world in the 20th century. If to Shermer’s mind it makes sense to propose the rediscovery and revival of a doctrine America never abandoned to begin with, and in order to solve problems of social and political fragmentation that emerged under the hegemonic watch of that very doctrine which, by the time identity politics as we know them now appeared on the scene, had long since buried fascism and was standing at the deathbed of Soviet Communism, it is because (here his roots as a self-described fundamentalist are showing) the true Gospel has been corrupted. There has been, he writes, a “deviation”, namely in the form of a:
[P]revailing emphasis on the group over the individual. Under the banner of identity politics, liberals tend to categorize individuals as members of an oppressed or oppressing group, using race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and other crude categories as a moral proxy. Meanwhile, under the banner of faith and flag, many conservatives sort people into collectivities according to religion and national origin. The resulting Us vs. Them tribalism leads to such illiberal policies as speech censorship on the left and economic nationalism on the right. The racial politics of the Alt-Right is the moral mirror image of identity politics of the Alt-Left.
The ostensible explanation is that atavistic urges in the form of tribal instincts and pro-social proclivities are menacing and subverting the moral arc whereby science and reason lead humanity to truth, justice, and freedom. (If the language seems overwrought, rest assured that it is taken verbatim from the title of his latest book). Prominent liberals such as Jonah Goldberg of National Review have recently been making the very same argument, which seems poised to become a standard meme in the apologetics of the emerging rear-garde liberal reaction (the so-called “intellectual dark web”) to the new political landscape of the first American Republic in its decadent phase.
Anything’s possible, I guess, but if the cracking of the civic unity of the Republic into so many factional shards is really the product of a vestigial spirit of asabiyyah lurking in the hearts of men, that spirit sure waited a long time to manifest itself in its subversive power, seeing as how the American state has from its inception in the late 18th century been systematically organized in conformity with liberal principles, and its predecessor in the mother country for about two centuries before that. Moreover, that primitive spirit of solidarity sure let itself take one hell of a beating first—for, during that time-frame, the individual has been atomized and released from particularistic group ties to an astonishing, sociologically almost preposterous, extent.
The cities of North America are populated with zoological congeries of every race and type of human being that exists on Earth, all mixed and mingled together; their inhabitants leave the parental home early and gladly, and then rootlessly jet from one such city to another in their native country or outside of it as they pursue a livelihood in the form of serial employment contracts and consultancies. They marry late, if at all, and form families that bring forth few if any children and show a notorious rate of attrition due to separation and divorce, owing in part to regimes of family law that incentivize women to leave their husbands. Church attendance is at unprecedented lows, and traditional fraternal associations from lodges to college frats along with public spaces of fraternization such as the neighborhood tavern and barbershop are extinct or being extinguished; and de-industrialization along with the transitory character of much contemporary employment mean that the average person no longer even has a labor union as a source of exposure to civic participation.
Due to this privatizing and isolating tendency, and also because of strict rules against “bullying” and “harassment” in the workplace, at school, and wherever else interaction with peers remains obligatory, informal social controls exercised by the immediate peer group over the individual have been severely weakened to the point of being altogether obliterated. Individuals are accordingly left free to reject the customary behavioral norms appropriate to their status, notoriously in the area of “gender,” and individuals of both sexes who reject normal gender roles are furthermore permitted and encouraged to encroach on the activities and spaces of the opposite sex by policies avowedly designed to weaken the solidarity and subculture of the peer group even further.
None of this is an unintended consequence of urbanization, technology, capitalist economics, or something else, but the product of a deliberate and sustained effort of social engineering on which amazing amounts of public and private resources are expended. The whole state of affairs has been leveraged into being by rules and regulations at every level from workplace HR policies to Constitutional law; encouraged by endless exhortations and instructional efforts on the part of educators, psychotherapists, and the authors of self-help books; and consecrated by hegemonic propaganda that, incessantly blaring out of every cultural and communications apparatus, exalts the individual who defies group norms and expectations to a status once reserved for military heroes and religious saints.
I could continue, but this very brief survey suffices to make the point that liberating the individual from every social obligation save those imposed by the faceless administrative state is one of the few areas where liberalism really did deliver exactly what it historically promised. Rousseau’s ideal of a liberal order in which men are made completely independent of one another and completely dependent on the state has in North America been approximated about as closely as could be. The individual today does whatever isn’t prohibited by statute (“English liberty” as traditionally conceived), and interacts with his fellow being for strictly instrumental purposes within impersonal instrumental relationships that confer no obligations on the participants other than the enforceable clauses of the legal contract, with formal judicial litigation as the means of choice for settling any disputes that may arise. Meanwhile, all of the needs pertaining to individual security in life and weal, which individuals used to turn to one another to satisfy via their mutual solidary ties in the family, the Church, and the Maennerbund, are now satisfied by the state, with its jealously guarded monopoly on the prosecution of criminal justice and its cradle-to-grave welfare programs.
Thus, Shermer’s reductionist methodological individualism, which is aggressively realist when it comes to the individual but strictly nominalist with respect to the group, while woefully inadequate as the basis of a general scientific theory of sociology or social philosophy, is nonetheless an accurate description of the facts of the contemporary liberal order. The group, having been rendered impotent and stripped of all effectivity as a social force in its own right, is today reduced to a mere fiction, a construct, the name given to a particular set of individuals, and not a sui generis ontological real.
In light of the last point, an alternative explanation of the particularizing fragmentation and polarization of polity and society today is that the phenomenon cannot be blamed on the sudden irruption from out of nowhere of tribal instincts that, if anything, are now more rigorously suppressed and enfeebled than ever before, but comprises a direct manifestation of liberal individualism, not a corruption or deviation produced by extraneous forces. So-called “tribalism” is but the ideological alibi and patsy for certain inherent self-defeating tendencies inscribed in liberal individualism itself, whose internal logic gives rise to a cacophony of partisan factions and politicized “identities” that only superficially appear tribal. Identity politics as we know it exists because of liberal individualism, not in spite of it.
When we speak of a “prevailing emphasis of the group over the individual,” it is important that we be clear about just who or what the “group” is supposed to be. Shermer himself provides some important clues when he alludes to the “trend by which our society is self-factionalizing into groups tagged by skin color, gender, and sexual preference—a process that has, in turn, encouraged the creation of increasingly militant political and ideological movements rooted in personal identity.”
The first thing to observe here is that the mere fact that is possible at all for individuals to self-select into political and ideological movements based on personal identities that are a matter of individual preference presumes a weakening of social controls over the individual and a rather extensive one to boot—for where the group really is emphasized over the individual, identity isn’t a matter of individual taste and preference, and nor does it depend on allegiance to this or that political ideology (i.e. in modern identity politics, the person who has a politically incorrect party line ipso facto ceases to be a woman or person of color or whatever as far as the movement is concerned). It is assigned on the basis of birth, ancestry, and other non-elective criteria right along with one’s place in a hierarchical status order—what sociologists call an “ascription system”—which fixes limits on status mobility that make no room for what, from the start, has been one of the pillars of the identity politics of the Left, namely the postmodern conception of identity as a “subjectivity”, a “fluid” public identity based purely on private choice and arbitrary subjective identification, subject to change at will simply by publicly announcing it without any societal authorization, and without going through ritual, judicial, and other formal public procedures if and when the go-ahead is given.
On the other hand, and as the other side of the coin, the individual incumbent of a given status in an ascription system can’t be capriciously kicked out of that status and the group associated with it for good just like that—most unlike the sects of the identitarian Left from which a member can find himself expelled for blinking the wrong way, and before he has time to blink. The corollary of compulsory membership in a group which has real jurisdiction over the individual member is that the individual member, once inducted, has a positive right to be there, since an individual who is expelled from the group is one that the group, by definition, no longer has any control over. Hence the difficulty level involved in getting anathematized from the Catholic Church (to give just one example) goes hand-in-hand with its assertion of jurisdiction over anyone who has received a valid baptism. In that organization, and others that are like it in that they really do assert the primacy of the group over the individual in a meaningful way, most disciplinary measures are temporary and followed by the full rehabilitation of the individual once they expire, with permanent expulsion reserved for cases where the member is refractory and unrepentant or has committed an extraordinarily grave offense.
It can hardly be otherwise where being a Christian, a man or a woman, a member of a given caste, etc. isn’t just a “subjectivity”, but an objective status, a position in a social structure. Where this is the case, for obvious reasons it won’t do for there to exist Christians, men or women, etc. who aren’t subject to the appropriate governing authority; and stripping people of their status can’t be undertaken lightly in a hierarchical status order, both because of the extreme disgrace involved, and because descent down the social status ladder tends to be seen as even more threatening to the hierarchy than usurpatory attempts to ascend it illegitimately from below.
By contrast, and as paradoxical as it may seem, the ferocious intolerance and demand for unthinking, lock-step conformity for which the identitarian Left has become notorious doesn’t follow from their insisting on the primacy of the group over the individual, but from their very individualism, behind which stands liberalism. If they stand ready to expel people in the twinkling of an eye over the smallest points of order, it is because their association is purely voluntary to begin with. It lacks any compulsory character, because it can’t possibly have any, and indeed doesn’t even really claim to, since the “subjectivities” it invokes as its organizing principle are self-consciously detached from any fixed social status or other objective grounds that could be used to identify a constituency over which permanent a priori jurisdiction independent of individual consent could be claimed and exercised. The postmodernist manifestos and theoretical statements of leftist identity politics aggressively deny that any such fixed objective grounds of identity could even possibly exist, much less legitimately hamper the individual journey of fluid subjectivity; taking an extreme nominalist stance, they vehemently decry “essentialism” and insist that any subjectivity is but a linguistic construct, an imaginary verbal label and an inherently and irremediably ambiguous and unstable one at that. This way of thinking, in turn, is the artifact of classical liberalism, which recognizes only one status, that of the generic and legally equal citizen. Accordingly, classical liberalism relegates all differences and all modes of consciousness to the realm of private opinions and tastes and insists that it alone has jurisdiction over the individual, and that any legitimate association between private individuals be strictly voluntary and non-compulsory.
Any group with indeterminate membership that cannot actually lay down the law on members who drift in and/or are made to exit without much of a fuss can hardly be considered a “tribe.” For that matter, the postmodern identities don’t seem to otherwise meet enough criteria to even justify calling them “groups” at all in the sociologically strong sense of the term. The theoretical arch-nominalism of the postmodernists, while preposterous as philosophy, is perfectly adequate to the reality of their political practice. The postmodern victim identities amount to little more than politically weaponized verbal tags or labels, and the “communities” in whose name the politics of identity on the Left agitates fictive entities with little or no sociologically substantive existence as such. The figure of “the [victim identity] community” so often invoked in current political debates and debacles is simply the name given to a demographic set of atomized individuals who happen to have some attribute, interest, or belief in common, and on whose behalf a leadership that purports to represent them in the political process undertakes to speak.
The constituents are counted as members of the “community” only exactly insofar as they endorse the program of political action and tow the ideological line set by the leadership, failing of which they threatened with revocation of their standing in the community (a threat, we can note in passing, that the leadership isn’t always in a position to make good on, owing to the sociologically nebulous and fictive nature of the community). Community and identity are thus exhaustively politicized and wholly subordinated to a political program and its associated political ideology.
In other words, what we are dealing with is nothing more than an extension of the familiar old phenomenon of pressure groups and political parties long encouraged and extolled by American ideals of political “pluralism” and “democracy”—pillars of the classical liberal tradition. Any one of these social movements can be said to comprise a sociologically sui generis community of individuals bound into a self-sufficient organic unity through interdependent person-to-person ties of obligation and reciprocity differentially assigned by birth, and binding on a cradle-to-grave to basis, with about as much precision as, say, the National Manufacturer’s Association or the Libertarian Party could be said to, and for the same reasons.
A variation on the latter theme is at work in the nationalisms of the naive alt-right. Shermer is right to say that “the racial politics of the alt-Right is the moral mirror image of identity politics of the alt-Left”—but not for the reasons he thinks. Once again, it’s necessary to at least try to have reasonably clear and distinct ideas about the meaning of words like “tribalism” frequently invoked both by Shermer and other critics of vulgar white nationalism as well as its proponents. The white nationalists draw timely and urgently needed attention to the importance of shared ethnicity to social solidarity and stability, but go about thinking about it the wrong, viz. the classically liberal and individualist way, for the idea of “nation”, however defined, as the great unifying principle of a people and overweening focal point of their allegiance is yet another artifact of the powers, practices, and discourses of the liberal state in its radical opposition to “tribalism” properly so-called.
A “tribe” may, for purposes of a discussion like this, be loosely defined as a (more or less) self-sufficient and self-reproducing group, internally and hierarchically differentiated into a complex of social statuses or positions that confer personal obligations, rights, responsibilities, etc. on the individual incumbents that link them all together into an organically interdependent unity, whose members reckon genealogical descent from a common set of ancestors. The kinship structure is the principle for allocating statuses and their attending rights and responsibilities; one’s position in the status hierarchy and the division of labor is isometric with one’s place in the genealogical tree. Think of a vastly more extensive and complicated version of the traditional North American family: Dad heads the household, and goes out and earns, while Mom attends to the domestic side of things; Junior has to take out the trash at night and take orders from Dad, and also from Mom, who is subject to the final authority of Dad, but still outranks Junior, etc.. Also, as with the nuclear family, in the tribe social solidarity obtains through a web of concrete ties between persons, not just a common allegiance to some abstraction. We will have more to say about this below.
Since common descent is the criterion for determining the boundaries of the group vis-a-vis other groups and distinguishing members from non-members, the members are biologically homogeneous to a greater or lesser extent. But biological homogeneity is as much as the tribal society has in common with the hoped-for “ethnostate” of vulgar white nationalism; for the ethnostate, just like the postmodern victim-identity “community,” is seemingly altogether emptied of sociological substance. In the ideal of the ethnostate, at least in its naive and vulgar formulations, one strains to see evidence of any social structure, hierarchical status order and corresponding rights and privileges, person-to-person ties and obligations, division of labor, and other features of a group in the strong sociological sense. What defines the term, “race,” isn’t the totem-pole, family tree, or other form of genealogy reckoned by a social descent group (family, tribe, etc.), but physico-biological traits in the form of various genetic markers and other anatomical characteristics identified by physical anthropology.
With the crassest positivism, materialism, and biological reductionism, family and tribe, organically and qualitatively differentiated and variegated social entities, are thus dissolved into an undifferentiated quantity or mass of raw genetic material from which, we are assured, all the great miracles of “Western Civilization” directly and immediately sprang forth, and will continue to, so long as the stock of genetic material is kept homogeneous. Since the miracle of Western Civ is a direct emanation of genes, by definition this account, since it is reductionist, is also methodologically individualist, with the details of the social organization of this (individual) biomatter relegated to the status of the accidental and spuriously epiphenomenal. Already we can clearly recognize the ontological duality of realism with respect to the individual and nominalism with the respect to the social—a tell-tale red-flag, we have seen already, of liberal individualism.
Biological reductionism strips the concrete individual of all the accidents of his concrete social being as an individual from a particular locality, with a particular set of relatives and peers, a particular standing in the community, a particular occupation, etc. so as to lay bare his putative real essence as the carrier of a set of genes. The individual, theoretically isolated from all the immediate concrete social relations and ties that go into defining who and what he is, is assigned an identity defined in terms of one, and only one, attribute—that of his genetic composition—and replaced in a sociologically vacuous ethnostate along with other isolated individual carriers of genes, all of which are interchangeable and equal to the extent that they carry the right genetic sequences. Finally, all the individual gene-boxes, theoretically de-socialized and isolated from one another, with their immediate social relations and, a fortiori, particularistic loyalties and allegiances abstracted away, are subsequently re-unified under the banner of a single overarching and supreme allegiance, namely the preservation of the genome, which comprises the nation. Racial/national consciousness, defined above all in terms of a collective commitment to vigilantly maintain national borders against foreign infiltration and keep native birthrates up, by itself appears as a sufficient condition of social solidarity in the white nation, without any need for social differentiation, and the corresponding set of reciprocal ties and relations, other than normal sex distinctions and perhaps, marriage.
Thus, the white nation, intentionally or not, is socially homogenized—that is to say, centralized, leveled and atomized—in the very same stroke by which it is biologically homogenized. It isn’t hard to see how the whole picture just re-capitulates the history of how the liberal state, in the course of unfolding its centralizing and totalitarian designs in radical opposition to local authority and the aristocracy, released the individual from all personal and particularistic bonds, loyalties, and obligations and gave everybody the generic juridical status of formally free citizens, equal before the law, endowed with individual rights against each other, and with no other enforceable obligations of service and loyalty than those they owe to the impersonal central power of the administrative state (“the rule of law not men”). The decomposition, in both formal theory and political practice, of caste and tribus into juridical citizen-atoms, and the subsequent re-composition of the undifferentiated mass of de-socialized atoms in the unity of the liberal state, comprises the true—and indelibly liberal—signification of the term, “nation” in the modern sense, white or otherwise, and historically always has. Nationalism of whatever flavor has always been the sworn enemy of particularism and tribalism properly so-called; the irony is that the naive white nationalists, self-described bitter foes of universalism, enthusiastically embrace one of the privileged ideological instruments with which the modern, inherently liberal state attacked every internal particularism in the pursuit of its universalizing ambitions.
Vulgar white nationalism, then, is no aberration of liberalism, but the product of powers and practices hard-coded in the liberal state from the start. The universalist war on tribalism and every particularism was historically waged by the liberal state not only juridically, but also by means of what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics”: the effort to forge the unity of the liberal nation-state by homogenizing and standardizing the population of the national territory according to some select demographic characteristic or other (race, ethnicity, language, political or religious creed, class, etc.). This demographic and epidemiological enterprise uncovers anti-national elements within the population, which in the interest of demographic normalization are targeted for containment and/or cultural and in some cases, physical eradication; these demographic-epidemiological categories and risk factors, in turn, go on to furnish the basis of the various victim identities of leftist politics.
Thus, when Shermer writes that:
History shows that it is when individuals are treated primarily as units of a larger group that abuses of freedom are more likely to occur—sometimes in a way that leads to dictatorship or even bloodshed. It is when people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin—or by their gender chromosomal constitution, or by whom they prefer to share a bed with, or by what accent they speak with, or by their political or religious affiliation—that liberty fails, and mobs form.
What is left out of the account is that the “larger group” in question is the fictive unity of the liberal nation-state, and that it is not when liberal individualism fails that bloodshed happens and mobs form, but when the liberal state causes those things to happen—all in the very name of the individual freedom and liberty exalted by the classical liberal tradition.
The final issue I shall address here is the polarization of political life, especially along the lines of the two major parties and their respective political ideologies. Shermer himself admits that the polarizing and factionalist tendency was already present in the infancy of the American Republic, and it bears underscoring that if anything, it is Shermer’s understanding of classical liberalism as a grand unifying and reconciliatory principle of state and society that is the corruption and aberration of its original intent. Liberalism was birthed in faction, strife, conflict, and bloodshed, in the American and French Revolutions, and in the turmoil of the long 17th century in England before that, where liberalism initially emerged from the loci of Puritanism, religious separatism, the “Whig” faction in Parliament (the prototype of the modern political party), and the ensuing struggle for political supremacy between Parliament and Crown that resulted in two different civil wars being fought in less than a forty-year span.
American Founding Fathers such as Jefferson, who hoped no more than twenty years would pass in the United States without armed civil conflict, believed that the key to preventing any single actor within the state from attaining absolute power was to see to it that every actor be kept incessantly fighting against every other actor, and then enacted a written Constitution designed to do exactly do that; hence the hallowed “separation of powers” and “system of checks and balances”, as cornerstones of the classical liberal doctrine of constitutional government. Along with the Revolution and the adoption of a Constitution that deliberately institutionalized political and partisan strife, the proudest moment in American history from the classical liberal point of view was the abolition of slavery and the enacting of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The polarizing tendencies already and by design built into the very structure of the state are exacerbated further by another hallowed liberal institution, namely the adversarial legal system whose presence is ubiquitous in a society in which juridification approximates the absolute, most every relationship is governed by a legal contract of some sort, where the courts can and will weigh in on seemingly every dispute and controversy, and every human action is subject to legal scrutiny.
This institution is consecrated by the liberal myth, immortalized in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and other canonical liberal philosophers, of the origin of the state in a “social contract” in which individuals, unrelentingly self-serving, partial, and belligerent by nature, create and consent to the power of the liberal state in order to gain access to authoritative judicial means of obtaining redress for the wrongs done them and settling their incessant quarrels, which would otherwise spill over into private vengeance and bloodshed on a mass scale in the “state of nature.” Since the individual has an inalienable natural right to see to his own self-preservation, it follows that, in any legal case, he has the right to vigorously and personally plead his side of the case, and his alone, under his own power before a judge instead of passively waiting on the results of a fact-finding inquisition. Hence a legal contest, fought between two parties much as it would be in the “state of nature,” but with legal weapons, and with an officer of the state deciding the outcome.
Every high-functioning person nowadays gains some exposure to this agonistic and adversarial process or directly participates as either plaintiff or defendant sooner or later, with the result that the litigious adversarial spirit metastasizes throughout the social body. Every public discussion of any given issue ends up assuming the form of an adversarial debate in which the participants are either for it or against it, whatever “it” is, and assume the stance of litigants and lawyers making radically one-sided arguments pro and contra as though their lives depended on it, increasingly without even the pretense of objectivity that once moderated political discourse somewhat. Since there is no authoritative judge or formal rules of procedure and evidence in the public square outside the courtroom, these debates tend to spiral out into totally uncontrolled excesses of rhetoric increasingly inflamed to the point of the downright bizarre, and employ the most cynically manipulative and amoral tactics of propaganda including outright fabrication and calumny.
Since what goes on this public square is modeled on a judicial combat in which every participant has the right to do whatever it takes to win by all means fair or foul, as long as legal—or, more precisely, whatever he can get away with—it comes as no surprise that the Left, always one step ahead of its opposition in the field of legalistic chicanery and shysterism, has discovered that it can win public debates before they start simply by petitioning for censorship of the opposition under various specious legal-administrative pretexts of “safety” that activists know will sound convincing to university and other public administrators. This outcome is no corruption of classical liberal individualism, but the very flower of that tradition. Every one of the canonical texts Shermer urges us to return to asserts the immutable facticity, and moreover the perfect legitimacy, of the wholly partial pursuit of individual self-interest—the very liberty men are supposed to have created the state in order to secure. The Declaration of Independence, a handy digest of this canon, made the point most forcefully.
It is right here where the classical liberal will object that liberalism requires a common commitment to a framework of moral values in order to work—Shermer’s whole point. But this is precisely the moment where liberalism enters a failure mode it cannot possibly escape. The disintegration of American civic life is something that is happening, not because Americans are no longer committed to liberal values, but because they are committed, and committed with rigorous logical consistency, to those very values—supreme among which is the value of a “rule of law” in which the law that rules avowedly purports to take no cognizance of morality, which is debased to a mere matter of personal preference that isn’t ethically obligatory in any public way even for those who subscribe to it, let alone those who reject it.
In this respect, anybody who believes that individuals have a moral duty to, say, respect the other guy’s right to freedom of speech when it is not in their immediate interest to do so, and when they are under no immediate legal obligation to, proves he isn’t as liberal as he might think after all. For the law, as Hobbes said, in the final analysis commands what it allows. It rigorously follows from the idea of the natural right of self-preservation—the axiomatic “first law of nature” from which the classical liberal philosophy of public law derived every other individual right in Shermer’s hallowed “rights revolution”—that the individual not only legitimately can screw his fellow man over as far as the authorities see fit to allow, but would be derelict in his duty to himself if he didn’t. The SJW who, feeling menaced by the presence on campus of a speaker whose views she disagrees with, pulls a fire alarm knowing that her doing so will cause him to leave, and that sympathetic university administrators won’t punish her for it, is the one most rigorously faithful to the fundamentals of the liberal “rights revolution” here. Meanwhile, the liberal who can’t help but feel that there’s something wrong that, even though it is 100 per cent conformable to the first principles of liberal dogma, is the one who is allowing his tribal instincts to lead him away from sound liberal orthodoxy and scandalously assert the primacy of the group over the individual.
This tribalist deviation from liberal foundations inheres in the very idea of “bonds of affection”- a giant square peg in a philosophy that asserts, as a matter of first principles, that all human relations actually are, and ought to be, purely instrumental; that all seemingly natural, person-to-person social relations whose solidarity obtains from bonds of affection ultimately boil down to slavery and patriarchal “despotism” founded on a primitive conquest of the weak by the strong, and beneath the surface animated by pure fear on the part of the one and exploitation on the part of the other; that individuals have no duty to anyone or anything but themselves, their legally enforceable contractual obligations, and to the impersonal state that enforces the contracts—itself the creature of a contract entered into by individuals for strictly instrumental purposes of individual convenience, and towards which the individual need feel no more affection than he would to some group insurance plan to which he belongs.
Bonds of affection that unite child and parent, wife and husband, student and teacher, men and their captain, and the whole community to memory, to the sovereign and the church, and finally, God—all these, for liberal individualism, are but so many vestiges of tribalist ignorance and barbarism that hold back the individual potential of those unfortunates yet to be enlightened and uplifted by science and reason and properly instructed about their rights. These sentiments are noxious and indeed, treasonous to Republican values of equality, and to the undivided allegiance the citizen owes to the nation and the jealous rule of law above any person or particularity. They are accordingly relegated to the status of what Enlightenment philosophy called irrational, and the medicalized discourse of psychotherapy that followed in its wake calls pathological. Either way, these bonds of affection are earmarked for eradication as a top political and public-health priority wherever liberalism ascends to supremacy.
Shermer, of course, agrees with all that, but seems to want to have it both ways; he very much wants people to be unified by bonds of affection, but indirectly, through shared allegiance to an impersonal ideal. The irony is that formally, this is of a piece with both the leftist identity politics and the white nationalism he derides. The only real difference is one of contents; for Shermer, the shared ideal won’t be “justice” for those who self-select into a protean personal victim identity, nor the preservation of a taxonomical grouping delineated by biological traits and their associated genetic wherewithal, but the founding doctrine of the country. But it should be abundantly clear by this point that mere shared allegiance, by itself, to a common ideal of whatever sort cannot possibly restore American bonds of affection or create new ones; and if it could, it would certainly not be through shared allegiance to liberal individualism, which is the very motor of the fragmentation that presently threatens to altogether unravel campus and civic life, personal rights and freedoms of real substance, and the unity of the state itself. This morbid, cancerously teleological process cannot be halted by more of what set it into motion, nor by patching up its symptoms with public policy band-aids that will simply be sloughed off in time. We need to reconstruct society, to grow it anew from the roots up.
It would be frivolous to propose, in the concluding remarks of a short article, some facile step-program outlining the exact operational details of how to go about doing so, and precociously arrogant, at this particular point in time, to claim to even have one. Instead of saying I have the answers to all the world’s problems, I’d like to suggest that, for now, it is the business of authentically heterodox and dissenting thought to ask the right set of questions instead of peddling easy answers in the form of re-branded banalities of long-obsolete doctrines that, if indeed capable of providing durable solutions, would have done so already. It defeats the purpose of dissent for dissenters to simply walk already long-worn paths that just lead back to their original point of departure.
Bold and adventuresome minds should instead hold the liberal tradition in all its aspects up to unrelenting intellectual scrutiny. For far too long, liberalism has been the sole critical standard by means of which everything else was held up to critical scrutiny. It arrogated to itself the right to ask all the hard questions of every other way of thinking and doing things, while allowing no such questions to be asked of itself, and censoring dissenting lines of inquiry with much more fanatical vehemence and exactingly punctilious rigor than anything the Inquisition ever mustered. But the liberal tradition, examined in the light of its own standards of cold formal reason, contains within itself no answer to the question of why it cannot be questioned (and thus has to resort to stigmatization and censorship to furnish an answer it can’t supply by force of argument). It is not sacrosanct, and on its own grounds can’t even claim to be. We therefore need not be reluctant to identify all its implicit and explicit assumptions, precepts, and practices, and think each one of them all the way through their implications to their conclusions without self-censoring, or deferring to the pretended authority of various self-appointed censors and partisans of either political party, half of the way down the syllogistic chain for fear of committing crimethink.
And, in circumstances where all the deracinated factions of state and society seem only a few more provocations away from what could swiftly escalate in a fully-fledged meltdown, a Hobbesian nightmare in broad daylight, where we find good reason to think that liberal first principles are implicated, we should not hesitate to declare that those principles have to go, and set about looking for a governing philosophy that can foster the growth of organic social relations, unified by bonds of affection between persons as well as to principles; one where the strong protect the weak and the wise guide the strong, and where group identity and individual rights alike are given in roots whose path can be traced to the local graveyard, without waiting on the results of a DNA test, being constructed in the back rooms of sociology and English lit. departments out of a list of grievances and political lobbying agendas, or cut from whole cloth in a fictive social contract that presently threatens to bring about the Hobbesian state of nature it was supposed to end.