Justice Together: Pushing for Justice one City and one Step at a Time

[A version of this piece has appeared in Kansas Reflector and Religious Socialism.]

Back on May 9, something remarkable happened in Wichita, something similar to other remarkable things which have happened in recent years in Lawrence, Topeka, and elsewhere across Kansas.

At the Century II building in downtown Wichita, elected and agency leaders—specifically Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Sedgwick County Commission Chairperson Ryan Baty, the managers of both Wichita and Sedgwick County, and leading representatives from COMCARE, and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services—stood in front of over 1300 people and committed to take certain specific local policy actions to address homelessness and mental health crises. At least one of the commitments they made—supporting the creation of a municipal “Air Capital” ID card--will be controversial, and may already be in the process of being walked back slightly by Mayor Wu. Still, you don’t often see such public support for social justice actions coming from city and county leaders in Kansas, so applause—and encouragement!--for those who brought them to the stage is much deserved.

The group which brought them together and laid out the commitments which gained their assent is called Justice Together, a group I’m proud to have been a participant in from the beginning, though I play no organizational role in it. In early 2023, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, a friend and occasional interlocutor from the Ahavath Achim Congregation here in Wichita, told me about an interfaith group that was coming together to try to move social justice issues forward in Sedgwick County; I’m not a leader in my religious congregation, but I started to attend out of curiosity. At the very first meeting, I was gratified to find Louis Goseland, a Wichita-born community organizer that I remember from Sunflower Community Action and other justice-related associations from more than a decade before. He was back in Wichita as a regional coordinator from the Direct Action and Research Training Center or DART, an umbrella organization that has been working with church congregations and other community groups to help them apply the best lessons of religious activism to motivate their members towards specific social justice goals.

DART started in Florida in 1982, working primarily with church ministries that served the interests of senior citizens; since that time, it been able to help build over 30 additional interfaith movements across the country, including several here in Kansas. DART was instrumental in the formation of Justice Matters in Lawrence, which has raised millions of dollars for a locally managed Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and JUMP (Justice, Unity, and Ministry Project) in Topeka, which is working to bring a mental health crisis intervention program to Shawnee County. Similar interfaith organizations, representing dozens of different churches and faith-related groups, have been formed with the assistance of DART in Wyandotte and Johnson counties.

In Wichita, Justice Together includes nearly 40 denominations—mostly mainline Protestant, but with Catholic, Mennonite, Unitarian, Baha’i, and Jewish synagogues part of the effort as well. Over the past 14 months, they have worked through their church groups to develop specific plans to assist those struggling with mental health (funding to provide free bus passes to those in crisis and to pay for staffing for 24/7 on-call psychiatric help) and homelessness (sustainable funding plans for an integrated agency center, and the aforementioned municipal IDs). It is those plans they asked all these local leaders to support, and which all of them committed to do so.

This is DART’s method, one that they’ve adapted from the history of activism in so many of the churches which they work through, as well as directly from the history of civil protest. Months of research, parishioner outreach, and consensus-building culminates in what they call a “Nehemiah assembly,” an idea taken directly from chapter 5 of the book of Nehemiah in the Bible—specifically Nehemiah 5:12, where the prophet Nehemiah, having heard the cries of the people for justice, presented their pleas to the nobles, rulers, and priests, and “took an oath of them to do as they had promised.”

Justice Together’s strategy, following those of dozens of other similar church-based DART organizations across the country, isn’t directly confrontational; their goal is explicitly not to generate walks-outs and protests. But it does aim to generate tension: to make a well-researched and achievable case, and then publicly, in front of hundreds of newly activated religious citizens (the great majority of whom are, crucially, registered and informed voters!), demand action. This is the kind of tension central to Reverend Martin Luther King’s position, which Justice Together explicitly cites: to raise just enough heat that “a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

It's true that the plans Justice Together developed don’t involve structural change. Their call for more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, and a sustainable budget plan for a Multi-Agency Center to bring together resources for homeless individuals are all needed and important, but not radical; nearly all of these involve projects that the city of Wichita, or the county, or COMCARE already have in front of them. But the fact that Justice Together managed to elicit public support for a free municipal ID program? That is a genuinely transformative step.

Having a reliable form of ID is desperately needed by many in recovery or on the streets when it comes to accessing welfare, getting housing, applying for jobs, and so much more. And it is also something which Republican leaders in Topeka have repeatedly attacked as a backdoor to legalization for undocumented immigrants, leaving aside the complication that access to state services often depends on a simple form of reliable identification. Wyandotte County introduced municipal IDs in 2022, and former Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple had pushed for his city to do the same; both such efforts, as well as those being contemplated by other cities seeking to address this genuine need on behalf of their poorer and unhoused residents, were knee-capped by the Republican majority in the legislature, leaving this small, crucial reform very much in limbo. Mayor Wu’s comments after the commitment-making assembly, during which she said her affirmation “was really a commitment that we will sit together between [the] city and county to talk about this,” reflects the political disagreements which lay ahead.

Thus, a real test confronts Justice Together: will they find a way to publicly hold city and county leaders accountable to their promises. Will they be able to push the negotiations that will have to take place in such a way that the municipal ID goal, which everyone in the movement has extracted a commitment towards, doesn’t get killed by elected and appointed leaders fearful of blowback from ideologues who share the paranoia about illegal immigrants that is unfortunately common among Kansas Republicans? Time, as always, will tell. Whatever their ultimate success, though, the fact of this group’s existence is a reminder of the long history in America of people of faith organizing public support on behalf of specific social justice actions. 

To me, their presence here in Wichita is a blessing in itself.

Bernie Sanders, Patrick Deneen, and a “Left Conservative” Solution

[This is a version of a joint review of new books by Patrick Deneen and Bernie Sanders which I have written for Current, and which follows up on my previous, more in-depth review of Deneen's book here.]

Over the past few months, two books calling for a radical transformation of America’s socio-economic and political status quo have been published. One of the was written by a man long associated with conservative arguments and publications, but really isn’t, in my judgment, a conservative book at all; the other was written by a man long associated with democratic socialism, but his socialist arguments incorporate, in my view, a conservative sentiment which the first book frequently invokes but provides few concrete arguments in support of. Insofar as actual intellectual arguments are concerned, the first book, Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change, is the better one. But if one genuinely wishes to understand and develop responses to the harms of state capitalism and liberal statism, responses which are grounded "conservatively" in the collective achievements and socio-economic struggles which actually exist today, then Bernie Sanders’s much more conventional book, It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, is, I think, nonetheless the wiser one. 

Deneen’s book extends upon his earlier work Why Liberalism Failed, a book that received much praise for its description of the philosophical flaws of liberal individualism which have led to social discontent and cultural breakdown. Deneen ended Why Liberalism Failed suggesting the need for “patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order,” which situated that book firmly within a long tradition of conservative complaints about and localist responses to our liberal order. Regime Change, however, dismisses with that Burkean prudential sentiment; embracing the idea that “conservatism” (at least the conservatism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries) partakes of liberalism’s sins, Deneen insists that the “postliberal” future he thinks inevitable requires an “epic theory” which would challenge the roots of the modern order entirely, so as to recover or rebuild something more authentically natural. 

A central component of the epic theory laid out in Regime Change is a wholesale rejection of the egalitarianism which has evolved over the centuries since the Protestant Reformation, having transformed (in ways Deneen presents as almost entirely negative) the manner in which we moderns mostly understand such ancient concepts as “democracy” or “rights.” For Deneen, the demos deserves respect, but not the right to actually, directly, govern itself. Deneen’s more natural political order would be a postliberal in the sense that it would unapologetically look to the cultivation of an elite “few” who, having been trained in the responsibility to exemplify for the “many” proper rulership, would be able to establish laws that reflected collective norms—both cultural and economic (though, on the basis of the pages spent exploring them in RC, much more the former than the latter)—rather than individual interests as manifest through some kind of social contract. The resulting “mixed regime”—meaning one that would balance the ambitions and abilities of the few with the many’s presumed longing for stability—would, in his view, be able to address the challenges of collective life in a manner both virtuous and non-alienating, unlike what liberalism has given us. He calls this “common good conservatism,” but just what it would be conserving—aside from those particular moral and cultural customs which Deneen thinks the working classes ought to be living in accordance with, even when they, in fact, choose not to—is unclear. 

There is a great deal more in Deneen’s rich—and I think dangerous—book, but that is the gist of its ambitious, revolutionary, and decidedly unconservative, at least dispositionally speaking, argument. Reviewers more aligned with America's conservative movements than myself (Jon D. Schaff, Adam Smith, Ross Douthat, and others), operating with the assumption that, as Smith put it, “the question is not whether there will be an elite, but whether it will be a good one,” are less troubled than I by Deneen’s willingness to invoke an idealized natural hierarchy of a pre-Protestant Reformation, pre-liberal Europe as his postliberal guide. But however seriously one takes Deneen’s diagnosis, the fact remains that he sees himself accomplishing this attack on our present managerialist and statist status quo in the name of what he holds to be the common interests of the people, something which “aristopopulism” is necessary to achieve. 

It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism is similarly filled with ambitious, radical ideas, but it has no such revolutionary gist to it, at least not one which is laid out in such a way as to organize the book’s somewhat rambling arguments. Sanders is, of course, a politician, not a theorist—but he is a politician who, over his career, done more to mainstream the idea that capitalism as it presently operates isn’t a natural or virtuous arrangement of affairs, and to therefore get broad numbers of not-otherwise-radical people to think critically about alternatives. As I wrote about Sanders before, “[Sanders’s] greatest accomplishment wasn’t helping make the Democratic party more comfortable with certain (re-named!) democratic socialist ideas but rather helping bring into the mainstream a fruitful mess of radicalisms, all of which are busy promoting their own alternative democratizing visions…. Bernie Sanders failed to win the presidency, but he didn’t fail to fertilize, with his words and actions, long moribund ideas in America.” It’s Okay to Be Angry shows off the fruit of such fertilization, taking on health care, Wall Street, college education, Fox News, and much more. Those looking for a thoughtful democratic socialist critique of the liberal capitalist state will not find one in the pages of Sanders’s book, especially since more than a third of the book is an interesting but not especially deep rehearsal of the greatest hits of Sanders’s political career and campaigns over the Trump years, and much of the rest reflects a progressive liberalism rather than something explicitly rooted in the visions of his hero, union leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs. But a close reader will see, nonetheless, a focus on productive work which arguably brings a critical unity to Sanders’s case against the “oligarchs” and “billionaires” and the “über-capitalist system.” It is this focus which positions Sanders’s book as a wiser radical response to the problems of today than Deneen’s anti-egalitarian, “aristopopulist” suppositions. 

Deneen writes often in Regime Change about “the many” or “commoners” or “the working class,” at times criticizing them as “far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the ‘elites’ that they often disdain,” yet nonetheless repeatedly positing them as a non-aspirant, non-managerial loadstone, “more likely to be grounded in the realities of a world of limits and natural processes, in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars.” That is, Deneen presents those who do practical, material work for living as a static category, a necessary component within a healthy society, but not an actual agent within it. Whereas for Sanders, practical, material work—whether in a factory or a classroom or a farm or an office—is connected to an active democratic dignity, and directly contrasted to those financial elites whose wealth is tied to the flow of the economy itself, rather than to its productive results. Sanders writes, reflecting upon his youthful experience on a agricultural commune in Israel:  

Work, to a large degree, defines who we are, what our social status is, and who our friends are….I don’t pretend to understand everything about human nature but I believe that, very deep in the souls of most people, is a desire to be part of their community to and contribute to its well-being. People want to be productive and have a positive impact on the lives of their families….While the world has obviously changed a lot since that kibbutz was created in the 1930s and since I worked there in the 1960s, what has not changed is the sense of empowerment that grows with working people are treated not as “employees,” but as “owners” who share a responsibility for defining the scope and character of their jobs. The sense of community and worker-empowerment that existed there was something that I have never forgotten. It confirmed my view that there are many ways to organize workplaces, and that we have a responsibility to identity the models that respect workers as human beings, and allow them to realize their full potential….Whether someone is working on a farm, or in an automobile factory, hospital, or school, or delivering mail or writing a book, they want to know that what they do is meaningful and appreciated. They want to have a say about the nature of their work and how it is done….Is it really too much, in the twenty-first century, in the wealthiest country on earth, to begin creating an economy in which actually have some power over what they do for forty hours or more a week? 

Deneen is not entirely silent when it comes to how contemporary capitalism has engendered a financial globalism which has undermined the community-building power of workers, and thus contributed to their suffering. As part of the disruptions to the status-quo which he believes recovering a proper elite would necessitate, he mentions the importance of empowering unions, giving workers direct say on corporate boards (in the style of Germany’s Betriebsrat or workers councils), and using tariffs to slow outsourcing. But those few paragraphs pale beside the long sections devoted to attacking the moral individualism engrained in the policies of the liberal state, and the need to construct a postliberal elite that would model a community consciousness that would lift workers up. 

Sanders, by contrast, goes far beyond Deneen’s acknowledged need to strengthen unions and increase the presence of workers on corporate boards, pushing the radical idea of a social reconstruction of the deeply dysfunction distribution of working opportunities and wages in the wealthiest country in the world, something which Deneen, for all his talk about disrupting the system, never really considers. Sanders, when he can pull himself out of the legislative bubble filled with fights over climate change and infrastructure funding, is clear in wanting to make a full-employment economy America’s social ideal, by way of guaranteeing health care, investing in environmentally sustainable work, redistributing wealth, closely regulating financial actors, increasing taxes on powerful financial interests, easing the creation of worker cooperatives, and much more. 

Admittedly, his invocation of this ideal somethings draws him back into just reciting a laundry list of government programs, in classic progressive liberal statist fashion. But sometimes he is able to see beyond this; sometimes he is able to break through the partisan cant which has been second nature for him for more than 40 years, and talk about the goal of economic democracy—a change which he believes (I think correctly) would enable people within their families and communities to find themselves in alignment with a more virtuous “regime.” While not a religious man, Sanders’s collective vision of higher stage in the democratic evolution of capitalist state is, as I’ve noted elsewhere, downright Pentecostal: 

If we accept that the truth will set us free, then we need to face some hard truths about American oligarchs. This country has reached a point in its history where it must determine whether we truly embrace the inspiring words in our Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”….We have to decide whether we take seriously what the great religions of the world—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others—have preached for thousands of years. Do we believe in the brotherhood of man and human solidarity? Do we believe in the Golden Rule that says each and every one of us should “do unto other as you would have them do unto you”? Or do we accept, as the prevailing ethic of our culture, that whoever has the gold rules—and that lying, cheating, and stealing are OK if you’re powerful enough to be able to get away with it? 

The condemnation of liberalism presented by Deneen and others, whatever its philosophical insight, leads many to assume that talk of democratic equality and rights is incompatible with presumably conservative concepts like “brotherhood” and “solidarity.” To the extent that competitive capitalism presumes that economically empowering individuals can only increase social alienation, and thus allowing corrupt elites impose their ideology upon us all, then Deneen’s prescription may make a dangerous degree of sense. 

But Sanders’s arguments, supported as they are by the example of higher levels of solidarity and public goods in social democratic societies around the world, point to a different way—a more “left” way. This way would be truer to Christopher Lasch’s belief in building a democracy of producers and citizens--a belief which also inspired the teacher, Wilson Carey McWilliams, to whom Deneen admits he is most indebted for his conception of conservatism. Maybe the conservative, or communitarian, value of fraternity is something that individuals, in all their liberal diversity, still can and do conceive and build and maintain, when the social and economic space to do so is offered to them to do; that’s the wise suggestion McWilliams’s daughter, the political theorist Susan McWilliams Barndt, makes in response to Deneen’s book. There are large differences between the content of Deneen’s and Sanders’s radical proposals, but maybe the biggest difference is simply that Sanders presumes that workers still build communities and traditions when socially and economically and democratically empowered to do so—whereas Deneen’s mixed regime seems to presume that such can only be delivered to them from above.

Putting the Demos on a Pedestal

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

In the preface to Why Liberalism Failed, the manuscript of which “was completed three weeks before the 2016 presidential election,” Patrick Deneen wrote that “the better course”—at least for all those persuaded by his book’s arguments about the philosophical flaws, contradictions, and corruption of modern liberalism—“lies not in any political revolution but in the patient encouragement of new forms of community that can serve as havens in our depersonalized political and economic order” (WLF, 2018, pp. xiii, xv). That perspective reflected well the constellation of localist ideas which Deneen has contributed to over the years. By seeing in liberalism an affirmation of individualism and pluralism that invariably leads to the rise of a contractarian state, an economic materialism, and an attendant technocratic elite, all of which actually undermine the demos rather than empower it, the response by anyone concerned about the flourishing of democratic communities has to be focused on the local. WLF didn’t, in my view, engage seriously enough with the broad range of republican arguments which have similarly challenged the liberal order over the decades, making some of its conclusions too easily arrived at, but the questions it implicitly raised about local democracy along the way were valuable ones, and WLF received much balanced praise for articulating a particular kind of post-“fusionism” conservative discontent (even former president Barack Obama, while disagreeing with the book’s diagnoses, was apparently a fan).

Within a year of WLF’s publication though, Deneen appears to have changed his mind about pretty much all that. Writing in the preface of the paperback edition, Deneen explained: 

I know believe I was wrong to think that [the project of developing a political theory which would succeed philosophical liberalism] could take generations….Instead of imagining a far-off and nearly inconceivable era when the slow emergence of liberalism’s alternative might become fully visible from its long-burning embers, we find ourselves in a moment when “epic theory” becomes necessary….[I]n mere months—having seen the American political order assaulted by two parties that are in a death grip but each lacking the ability to eliminate the other, and observing the accelerating demolition of the liberal order in Europe—I now think that the moment for “epic theory” has come upon us more suddenly than we could have anticipated. Such moments probably always arrive before we think we are ready (WLF, 2019, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

The transition from “patient encouragement” to “epic theory” encapsulates well the thrust of Deneen’s new book, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (which is being officially released today). WLF was a good book, but Regime Change is a better one, and I think will be recognized as such—as well as one that will gain notoriety in a way that the earlier, more academic book mostly did not. Given Deneen’s new focus in RC, that notoriety may well be welcomed by him. Few books are actually “dangerous,” despite the paranoia which censorious activists, clerics, and politicians delight in spreading about them, but the epic—and profoundly unconservative, at least in any sense by which Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, or Russell Kirk would have understood the term—reach of Deneen’s arguments absolutely crosses over into that territory. 

After all, when a book written in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, after hundreds of protestors confusedly but sincerely aimed to violently subvert the constitutional procedures of a presidential election, nonetheless speaks seriously of the need for a newer, better sort of elite to employ “raw assertion[s]” of “demotic power” to challenge American institutions, and blithely quotes Machiavelli praising “discord and division” in his Discourses on Livy, arguing (perhaps facetiously, perhaps not) that “mobs running through the streets” were actually a sign of the vitality of the Roman republic…well, “dangerous” seems to be a fit description (RC, pp. 164-165). Reading Regime Change, it is hard to avoid concluding that Deneen has run out of patience, at least when it comes to what he sees as the wreckage of our present condition. To build upon what Deneen wrote on the first anniversary of the Capitol attack, the ultimate aim of RC appears to be the development of a better, more radical elite, one that could guide the people, unlike former president Donald Trump, towards a “genuine populist revolution.”

The elites which Deneen’s epic theory invokes would be the products of what he calls “aristopopulism,” an elite committed not to the often false (as Deneen effectively documents throughout the book) egalitarianism supposedly as work in the managerial liberalism so prevalent in our late capitalist moment, but rather to what he considers to be a more accurate, classical understanding of “democracy.” On his reading of Aristotle, Polybius, and Aquinas, the regime which gives greatest credence to the needs and wishes of the people as a whole is one of mixed classes, in the classical “Great Chain of Being” sense. Under such a constitutional order, a virtuous elite would wield the responsibility to govern a community through the intentional writing and enforcing of laws, while the demos would articulate over time customs and norms which would have their own quasi-governing power, one which the elites, in their virtuous wisdom, would recognize and help sustain through positive law. Deneen strongly doubts that a direct reconstruction of such an arrangement would be possible through the corrupt institutions of the Western world today, dedicated as they are, according to him, to the social reproduction our progressive culture and globalized economy. Hence the need instead to be disruptive, and possibly even violent—Deneen speaks of the necessity of “the force of a threat from the popolo”—in changing the rules of the game. As he puts it, we must employ “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends” (pp. 167, 185). 

The key philosophical assumption behind Deneen’s epic theorizing is his near-total rejection of egalitarianism as it has unfolded over the centuries of liberal modernity. Throughout the early sections of Regime Change, he uncomplicatedly stipulates as a natural fact the “ancient divide that pits the ‘few’ against the ‘many,’” a divide which he describes as “the ‘normal’ condition of politics”; it is, in his view, “an endemic political feature of the human condition” that “there is inevitable inequality in the world,” reflected in either “the ongoing presence of arbitrary social differences, or their replacement by natural inequalities due to differences of talent and self-direction” (pp. x, 7, 21). A constitutional arrangement which constructively deals with this division will not attempt to paper over its facticity with promises of equal individual rights—especially since, under finance capitalism, those promises have mostly, according to Deneen, been formulated in terms of a (in his view, presumably hopeless) educational dream of turning “’the many’ into ‘the few’” through a “notional redistribution of managerial status to every human” (pp. 37-38). Rather, a better constitutional regime would turn to “the tradition of the West itself,” which looks not to any kind of transformation through either individual development or collective action, but instead to “[c]ontinuity, balance, order, and stability, grounded in the unchanging truths knowable through human reason and also present in the Christian inheritance of the West”—a “common good conservatism,” one which requires “a virtuous people…maintained through the energies and efforts of virtuous elites” who are “oriented to supporting the basic decencies of ordinary people” (pp. 68, 124).

Deneen admits that the aristocratic-populist elites that he hopes will emerge concomitant to the disruptive, “demotic” challenges to the current order--which they, according to his theory, must simultaneously orchestrate in unspecified Machiavellian ways--wouldn’t be able to play this virtuous role immediately.  But he holds out hope that, once the dominant actors in the present order have been mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into retreat, “a genuine aristoi might arise… through a kind of Aristotelian habituation in virtue” (p. 185). This new aristoi, in the midst of the ruins of a liberal order whose collapse had been accelerated through decisive action, would theoretically be capable of modeling for the people their proper role, and thus enabling an eventual return to the mixed constitution of the few and the many which the classical tradition elaborated. 

The dangerous potential--and to those who share his traditionalist conservative sentiments, the dangerous appeal--of Deneen’s epic, revolutionary theory of regime change is thus pretty obvious. It has been standard for radicals of various stripes, infuriated by the economic inequality, the bureaucratic incivility, and/or the juridical injustice of so much of the liberal capitalist state as it emerged over the 20^th century, to call for either a retreat from or revolt against it. The kind of “conservatism” that has historically emphasized the virtues of community (which, it must be remembered, is as often found on the left as the right) frequently opts to express its radicalism via retreat--that is, via turning towards the patient tending to of one’s own democratic, collective space, conscious of the harms which more systematic aspirations often involve. Hence the localist spirit of so many animated by these concerns, whether it be Wendell Berry’s defense of regional food systems, Bill Mckibben’s push for genuine (not corporate-subsidizing) energy independence, or a hundred other examples. But Deneen’s Regime Change, with its calls for revolutionary change, shifts away from such patient work--which, therefore, also suggests that the postliberal shift may be (as Adam Smith intuited in a recent Front Porch Republic essay) a shift away from localist concerns entirely. And to my mind, that means, inevitably and frustratingly, a shift away from actual democracy as well.

Deneen has elsewhere written thoughtfully—though I also think somewhat tendentiously—about the “crisis of democracy,” asserting that the turn to a framework of moral pluralism and pragmatism in the social sciences in the 20^th century resulted in an “institutionalized relativism,” which itself could only result in attacks upon the “absolutism” present in “the mass of humanity who retained conservative beliefs due to unexamined prejudice or hostility to change.” Deneen’s understanding of pluralism in this particular case could be seriously contested, but leaving that aside, just consider his focus: he sees a crisis not relevant to democratic practices and procedures, but rather pertaining to the beliefs of the demos (though not the whole people, however defined: only “subcultures” of it). Deneen’s concern is apparently with the demos, the people, as a category which holds certain beliefs, not with how (or to what degree, or even if) the people, whatever their beliefs, actually govern themselves, which is the usual meaning of “democracy”--that is, rulership by the people.

Regime Change does lay out a positive vision of the demos, defending “the wisdom of the people,” and showing how liberalism—including both the individualism which produced mass democracy and the materialism which produced post-Industrial Revolution liberal capitalism—has tended to marginalize the virtuous capacities of, and undermine the sustaining social conditions of, communities of people in the name of “progress.” (Deneen’s reading of John Stuart Mill is particularly intriguing here.) But that positive vision depends upon the persuasiveness of his affirmations regarding the source of that wisdom, and that persuasiveness is lacking. He does not deny that what he various calls “the people,” “the working class,” or “the many” are currently in bad shape, writing that “[r]eams of statistics demonstrate that they are far less likely to exhibit certain kinds of virtues related to marriage, family, work, and criminality than the ‘elites’ that they often disdain” (p. 17). But that data does not stop him from constantly hypothesizing about their traditionalist potential, speaking repeatedly of the “instinctual conservatism of the commoners,” who “tend not to view the world as fungible launching pads, but rather, one of inherited homes” (pp. x, 60). (He holds out hope that they are “potentially more numerous” than their hypothesized opposites as well—p. 159).

Repeated incantations, however, are not arguments. Millions of voters (though not a majority) supporting Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is hardly dispositive support for his insistence upon the immanent existence in the United States of what he curiously calls a “nonaspirant” demos: a people collectively longing for an elite to, through their governing behavior, situate and contextualize and thus perhaps validate their presumably stable routines. As regards those routines, he waxes agrarian in depicting them: “grounded in the realities of a world of limits…in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of seasons, tides, sun and stars” (pp. 27, 23). His repeated formulation of the masses as being perversely victimized by elites who present the “remnants of traditional belief and practice… [that inform] the worldview of the working class” as the views of society’s true oppressors (p. 28), makes it clear that (given that a slight but nonetheless real majority of even those Americans lacking a high school diploma consider the legalization of same-sex marriage to have been good for the country, in the same way that a majority of voters with lower incomes voted for Joe Biden in 2020) that the “working class” which Deneen has in mind is probably very much a “subculture” indeed.

That isn’t to deny that a liberal democratic society ought to enable subcultures to organize and collectively articulate their own communal norms (at its root, that's what any and every "populist" movement, from the People's Party to Occupy Wall Street, have always been about). The atomization inherent to liberal capitalism absolutely should be resisted, and there are important ways in which the organization of local and regional democratic practices and procedures, as both socialist and subsidiarian thinkers have argued, can help accomplish those ends. (It is perplexing that when it comes to the actual political organization of the demos, Deneen gives almost no thought to cities or counties or states; he is critical of what he sees as liberalism's tendency to breakdown "the onetime solidarity of subnational communities," but nonetheless his national conservatism basically leaps from the family and neighborhood--with a nod to the communitarian truth of Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" manta--to the nation-state and the international society beyond--pp. 221, 225-226).)

While even just thinking of the American demos as simply national, Deneen’s recommendations for establishing a foundation for his theorized revival of a true mixed constitution between the few and the many—such as increasing the scope of democratic representation by expanding size of the House of Representatives, or strengthening the power of labor by putting workers’ councils on the same level as corporate boards when it comes to determining company policies and wages, or dramatically mixing the American people across regional and class differences by re-instituting the draft (pp. 168-171, 173-174)—include many excellent suggestions that would promote civic strength and identity, and thus counter the less democratic elements of our current order. But the content of that civic identity—which is, today, profoundly urban and pluralistic—is simply not what Deneen imagines it to be. Nor will it be, not unless his revolutionary aspirations actually include using state power to forcefully inculcate inegalitarian attitudes upon the people, which isn’t something he ever mentions. (He does allows that, in the midst of other imagined, Machiavellian disruptions, “forms of legislation that promote public morality, and forbid its intentional corruption, should be considered,” but as during a recent debate Deneen participated in alongside Diedre McCloskey, a widely respected transgender economist, he demurred from voicing specifics as to what those forms should be—p. 181). 

In the end, I think that if Deneen wants the demos to find his theory of regime change at all plausible, his articulation of it should show less uncomplicated assurance in the enduring accuracy of what Aristotle, Polybius, or Aquinas wrote about the culture of “the many” in the centuries before the rise of industrial technology, mass consumerism, and urban patterns of life made possible the movement of yeomen into a professional, specialized middle-class, and more explorations of the way that a constitutional order beyond our own would address the demands for greater democratic and socio-economic empowerment. Because such demands are there. As John Médaille observed as part of a response to Deneen years ago, “culture is downstream from breakfast,” and it was the demand for breakfast—not just the ability to obtain it, but also the ability to make decisions about how and where and with whom one should be able to obtain it—which truly gave birth to liberal modernity, far more than John Locke’s philosophical abandonment of the classical mixed constitution. Locke’s ideas, and those of subsequent liberals, arguably served the needs of those seeking breakfast quite poorly in the long-run, making it increasingly easy, over the centuries, for an individualism which prioritized efficiency over community, and progress over common sense, to warp our understanding of the democratic authority which the people came to believe should be equally shared among all breakfast-seekers. But that warping cannot be simply wiped away, much less mocked or frightened or voted (or pummeled?) into hiding by the potential threat of some angry mob.

Deneen’s epic, dangerous, anti-egalitarian theory shows great love for “community,” but it is a love which places the demos of the community on a pedestal, presenting their supposedly static traditions and routines as enacted beliefs that will inspire and guide the governing elite, but which denies them any formal ability to make decisions for themselves, or at least not any beyond what Deneen calls “the slow accumulation and sedimentation of norms and practices over time” (p. 132). Deneen has always been suspicious of overly romantic, quasi-religious idealizations of democracy, preferring instead what he once called “democratic realism.” Well, democratic realism has to include, I think, dealing with the people as they actually and presently exist, in all their busy, urban, depressing, glorious, subcultural plurality. Nothing in Regime Change suggests that Deneen places himself in the position of the East German apparatchik mocked in Bertolt Brecht’s famed poem "Die Lösung": Would it not be easier….To dissolve the people / And elect another? Still, one hopes that he will make the effort, in subsequent writing, to make it clear that any postliberal readers who draws that unfortunately not unreasonable conclusion from his book are in the wrong.

Justice and Inclusion: From Isaiah’s Pen to our Eyes and Ears

[Cross-posted to Religious Socialism. A version of this post originally appeared on By Common Consent]

Back in 2014, I embarked on a read of the complete Old Testament, with a close focus on the text. It took me two-and-a-half years to finish, and my insights along the way were hugely important to the way I have come to think about scripture and what it has to say about my life. Last year, I decided to repeat that read, because Robert Alter, whose translations of various books were central to my first journey through the text, had finally finished his edition of the entire Hebrew Bible, and wanted his poetic sensibility and commentary to guide me through what I’d missed before. Of those missing parts, none were more important than Isaiah (the image here is Marc Chagall’s surrealist interpretation of Isaiah 6:6, when one of God’s seraphim descends from heaven and touches the prophet’s lips with a burning coal taken from God’s altar, thereby cleansing his lips and calling him to reveal God’s will).

The Book of Isaiah has, of course, been heavily proof-texted and read selectively by Christians for centuries. No other set of Hebrew poetic and prophetic texts that made their way into the canonical Old Testament have had as massive an impact on how Christians, from ancient to modern times, articulated the faith which the recorded statements of Jesus and the accounts and letters of his early followers inspired. It’s not just that Jesus himself is shown in the Christian Gospels to be quoting from or referencing Isaiah more than any other older text besides the Psalms; it’s that Christianity’s entire cultural and theological approach to and interpretation of Jesus’ message and meaning comes through a heavily Isaian lens–the language of Handel’s Messiah being just the most obvious example. (And with the commemoration of the Messiah’s birth just a couple of days away, this seems like a good time to revisit the text.)

Separating myself as a reader from that inheritance was no easy feat, and I can’t say I was entirely successful. Thanks to Alter’s translation, however, a couple of key ideas were made profoundly clear to me. First, that from its beginning, the book of Isaiah–far more than those associated with any of the other Hebrew prophets–is a text that presents calls to social justice on the same level as its condemnations of the cultic failures and ritual sins of Israel. Isaiah 1:14-17 sets the theme for the entire text, with its explicit condemnation of those who hypocritically attend outwardly to religious duties but ignore the needs of those who are part of that same religious community. As Alter renders it:

Your new moons and your appointed times I utterly despise. / They have become a burden to me, I cannot bear them. / And when you spread your palms, I avert My eyes from you. / Though you abundantly pray, I do not listen. Your hands are full of blood. / Wash, become pure. Remove your evil acts from My eyes. Cease doing evil. / Learn to do good, seek justice. / Make the oppressed happy, defend the orphan, argue the widow’s case.

The text of Isaiah regularly connects the evil that must end if the orphan is to be defended with the accumulation of wealth itself, entirely aside from whatever charitable purposes to which such wealth might be set. Growth itself, in a society where land had been–at least insofar as the legends of the Israeli conquest of Palestine suggested to those living in the 7th century BCE, the like era of the author(s) of Isaiah–distributed to every family as an inheritance, risks great evil:

Woe, who add house to house, who put field together with field till there is no space left, and you alone are settled, in the heart of the land. / In the hearing of the Lord of Armies: I swear, many houses shall turn to ruin, great and good ones with none living in them (Isaiah 5:8-9).

Of course, in today’s globalized and financialized economy, far more shaped as it is by speculative, debt-financed, corporate-dominated exchanges of information and images than by productive, non-alienated, land-based labor, such warnings about growth might be easy to dismiss as limited to the agrarian world of ancient Israel. Still, perhaps the pastoral and anti-urban context from which such beautiful visions and invocations of God’s justice were articulated ought to be recognized as potentially inseparable from the repentance that these prophet-authors called for as well, which in turn might suggest hard questions for leftists like myself to struggle with as we contemplate our responses to capitalist accumulation and industrial growth. Consider Isaiah 32: 13-20:

On My people’s soil thorn and thistle shall spring up / for on all the houses of revelry, the merrymaking town, / the villa is abandoned, the town’s hubbub left behind. / The citadel and the tower become bare places for all time, / wild asses’ revelry, pasture for the flocks. / Till a spirit is poured on us from above, and the desert turns to farmland and farmland is reckoned as forest / And justice abides in the desert, and righteousness dwells in the farmland. / And the doing of righteousness shall be peace, and the work of righteousness, safe and quiet forever. / And My people shall swell in abodes of peace, in safe dwellings and tranquil places of rest. / And it shall come down as the forest comes down, and in the lowland the town shall come low. / Happy, you who sow near all waters, who let loose the ox and the donkey.

Pastoral visions like this naturally generate all the usual individualistic reactions–start associating God’s promises with some kind of communitarian ideal, and the next thing you know everyone’s on the hunt to drive out the dissidents, the foreigners, and anyone else who is seen as not fitting in with the community. To be sure, there’s no way to discern honestly in the Isaian voice any kind of validation of liberal concerns; it just isn’t there. Isaiah is concerned with God’s covenant with the descendants of Israel; that is undeniable. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, another concern is there–a concern I’d never noticed until I read Alter’s translation. It is the degree to which the prophecies in the book of Isaiah reflect the Mosaic insistence upon respect for, and even the inclusion of, the stranger–including strangers whose lives (including, at least on the basis of one reading, their sexual lives) might seem to exist in opposition to the mandates of Israel’s faith:

And let not the foreigner say, who joins the Lord, saying / ‘The Lord has kept me apart from his people,’ nor let the eunuch say, ‘Why, I am a withered tree.’ / For thus said the Lord: Of the eunuchs who keep My sabbath, / and choose what I desire and hold fast to My covenant, / I will give them in My house and within My walls a marker and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name will I give them that shall not be cut off…./ For My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the peoples (Isaiah 56:3-5, 7).

Note those final three words. At a time of year when most of us are surrounded with presentations of these prophetic calls in entirely predictive, Christological contexts, it is good to remember that this kind of almost-if-not-quite-entirely universalist sentiment can be found frequently throughout text of Isaiah--especially in the later, so-called Second Isaiah sections--entirely apart from the Christian gloss generally (however sincerely, or even, perhaps, arguably legitimately) placed upon it. That leftists like me can learn from the Hebrew prophets is hardly a new insight, but this year, thanks to Alter’s help, I appreciated the reminder.

A Random Thought on Mikey Kaus

A few days ago Robert Farley, of Lawyers, Guns & Money, posted the latest entry in his wonderful "Oral History of the Blogosphere" project, this one focusing on the once-notorious (indeed, widely loathed on the liberal/left/progressive side of the blogosphere), but now mostly-just-grumbled-over journalist and blogger, Mickey Kaus. It's actually a pretty great conversation, if you're into remembering or rethinking what people were arguing about online and why and how they did it, circa 20001-2010. For me, besides enjoying it as I have enjoyed every previous entry in this series (really, if you're a blogger or ever thought you could be one you should listen to them all), it made me reflect on the enduring relevance of a particular ideological niche, however tiny or incoherent it may seem.

I never thought, and still don't think, the loathing of Kaus was mostly due to the controversial positions he took on the dominant political news items in America in the 1990s and 2000s: welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration, the Iraq War, etc. Rather, I think he was loathed because he insisted--to the minds of the aforementioned liberal/left/progressive pundit class, infuriatingly so--that he was taking those positions as a sincere, if appropriately evolved, New Deal Democrat. In a way, I think Kaus occupies the same much-condemned rhetorical space as Ralph Nader: he's someone who is seen as a betrayer, someone who talks the talk of liberal justice and then engages in public actions and intervenes in public debates that seem, to most liberals and leftists and progressives, to entirely contrary to how the liberal political world actually works.

The first minutes of the conversation with Kaus touched upon the legacy of Charles Peters and the magazine he founded, Washington Monthly, which tutored legions of journalists (including Kaus) in a vision of activist government grounded, as Paul Glastris, Washington Monthly's long-time editor, put it, in "the communitarian patriotic liberalism of Peters’s New Deal youth." There are, out there amid the sprawling, multifaceted coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party, lines of reflection upon the achievements of the New Deal, both scholarly and activist, which seriously downplay the ethical and civic part of that triumph of positive liberalism and egalitarianism. According to those arguments, the greatest achievement of the New Deal was that it laid the foundation for erecting social democratic institutions in America, for which many are still fighting for: to make health care a human right, to make higher education available to all, to put workers in charge of the economy, etc. As a democratic socialist myself, I agree with those lines of argument! But I'm also a sometime left conservative, a wanna-be civic republican, and a fan of both Christopher Lasch and the Point Huron Statement, and thus find myself agreeing with Peters as well. The leadership of the post-New Deal, and particularly the post-civil rights movement, Democratic Party really did focus mostly on achieving liberal justice through building ever-more effective (and ever-larger) redistributive institutions and practices. The way that focus partly (but not entirely unintentionally) combined a very un-New Dealish individualism with outright bureaucratic statism, and allowed a entirely new kind of meritocracy to flourish in liberal circles, thus taking the focus off the cultural and communal aspects of what a genuinely egalitarian and just society must involve...well, that's the critical space which Kaus occupied. Entirely coherently? In a philosophically rigorous way? Open-mindedly, kindly, and without self-indulgent contrarian snark? Not at all; in many ways, Kaus's voice was a profoundly flawed vehicle for this critical perspective on post-Cold War liberalism in America. But to my mind, at least, he was a vehicle for it all the same.

My primary evidence for this is a wonderful book that he wrote, The End of Equality. The book never got the respect it deserved, I think, partly because of the weird moment it arrived (right at the beginning of the Clinton administration; but was the book arguing against what Clinton was doing, or supporting it, or both?), and partly because Kaus's subsequent career--intransigently defending some of the worst aspects of Clinton's welfare reform, obsessing about family breakdown even as income inequality skyrocketed, etc.--retrospectively made the book's insistence that "Money Liberalism" was a non-starter and that "Civic Liberalism" was the way to go seem like Kaus was auditioning George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" a decade before it nominally (though never actually) arrived. All those criticisms are fair. But I still use selections from the book in my Political Ideologies classes on occasion, because I find so much of it refreshingly clear and free of cant. He is frank about his conviction that most of those with socialist aspirations have been unwilling to recognize the incompatibility of "fraternity, community, and idealism" with the lack of "material prosperity" that only rapacious capitalism seems to provide (p. 11); he is genuinely eloquent in asserting that differing levels of health care don't actually matter to the egalitarian legitimacy of society so much as "that everyone wait in the same waiting rooms" (p. 93); and he is downright prescient in warning that, if the goal of the Democratic party continued to be tweaking the tax code in some Rawlsian way so as to make it fairer and increase the size of welfare checks but in the meantime said nothing about the lack of community-feeling and solidarity in America, the end result will a general hardening of whatever egalitarian spirit the revolutions of the 1930s and the 1960s may have left us with:

Americans may be social egalitarians today. But give the affluent two more decades to revile the underclass and avoid the cities as if they were a dangerous foreign country, two decades to isolate their "gifted" children from their supposed inferiors, two decades of "symbolic analysis" and assortative mating, and we might wake up to discover that Americans aren't such egalitarians at all any more. Then politics would be really dispiriting (p. 180).

That paragraph can be picked apart and even partly undermined in multiple ways (that large numbers of younger and mostly liberal-learning people, including young families, started returning to America's cities throughout the 2000s is the most obvious rejoinder, but not the only one). But I read it, and I see the once at least moderately liberal suburbs, filled with college-educated, white-collar-job-holding, mostly well-off Americans, voting for Trump across large parts of America. Dispiriting indeed.

Anyway, this is just something that occurred to me, when Robert unintentionally invited Kaus back into my mind. So I thank him for that.