Show notes
Richard Reinsch: Today we have Daniel Mahoney to discuss with us all things liberalism. Daniel Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College. He’s the author of many books, essays, and reviews, including most recently The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity. He’s also the author of The Other Solzhenitsyn, and currently is working on a book called The Statesman as Thinker: Ten Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. Dan Mahoney, you are one of the most trenchant, wise voices in conservative political thought out there. We’re glad to welcome you back to Liberty Law Talk. Daniel Mahoney: Oh, my great pleasure, Richard. Richard Reinsch: Dan, a situation that has bothered me, it’s bothered you. It’s a very recent controversy amongst many other recent controversies that keep piling on is the fallout inside the editorial board of The New York Times, a newspaper that bills itself as the leading newspaper in our country. The end of last week and the beginning of this week, the second week of June, there was intense controversy over an op-ed written by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that was published in the initial days of the protests and the riots where he called for the military to be deployed, and the content of that op-ed, as many will now know, led to an internal revolt, particularly among younger editors and staffers at The New York Times who said that this piece constituted violence, particularly against their minority friends, and was unacceptable, and should not have been published. This has now led to the resignation of the editor of the editorial page, James Bennett. Ross Douthat today Friday, June 12th, his column takes his colleagues to task, and he says they are now engaged in something that supersedes liberalism, and is a psychology of anger. It’s a psychology of paralysis, crisis over identities, and seeks to use words really as weapons, not as an attempt to understand truth or political reason. Your thoughts on what, if anything, this crisis might mean for American liberalism. Daniel Mahoney: Well, I think for a long time now American liberalism has been post-liberal or anti-liberal in a very aggressive way. We can talk more about whether the American political order rightly understood is simply a liberal order. I don’t think it’s just a liberal order, but it has a very important liberal component, and that has to do with respect for dialogue, respect for persons, respect for fundamental liberties, a proper prejudice against censorship, against the idea… not that there’s truth, but that any person simply possesses the absolute truth, and has the right to impose that on everyone else, et cetera, et cetera. I think, and perhaps going back to the ’60s where we saw the rise of anti anti-communism, and then a series of cultural issues, a tendency to write off half of the American population as horrible or homophobic, or to make it out like pro-life Americans are anti-woman. These kind of currents have been around for a long time, but in the last 10 days or two weeks we’ve seen a tremendous radicalization of a large part of the left. These are categories as Ross Douthat properly says that are far beyond the liberal order, and that are filled with anger. By the way, I would add these are not voices that defend human dignity because they have replaced one absolutely unacceptable position that some people, some races are superior to another. By the way, very few Americans ever defended that proposition, even when racism was rampant in American society. They’ve replaced it with a different kind of Manichaeism. They are absolutely certain who the victims are. They are permanent victims. They are absolutely certain who the oppressors are, and they demonize the oppressors, who are whole groups of people and not persons who share mutual accountability, and they justify the silencing, and perhaps much more to the future of those who have been demonized. What we are witnessing at The New York Times, and our universities, among the wider intellectual clerisy is a totalitarian logic, not totalitarian yet in practice or fully totalitarian, but it’s heading in that direction. It’s not even a particularly soft totalitarianism. It is the justification of silencing many people of goodwill who do not accept a… It’s the tyranny of ideological clichés. I’m afraid that increasingly are present and unless people resist and show intellectual and civic courage it’s most certainly in our future. The episode of The New York Times is what Charles Péguy called a cas éminent, an eminent case, an eminent case that reveals the new liberal logic at work or proto totalitarian logic at work. Richard Reinsch: When you say totalitarian logic, this position that one group is ontologically a victim, and can do no wrong. Another group is ontologically an oppressor, and can do no right. Where does that lead? Daniel Mahoney: Well, it’s a fully totalitarian logic. As you know, I have written widely on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the greatest human being of the 20th century, and Solzhenitsyn insisted over and over again that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, not through races or classes, nations or regimes, and we need to judge human beings as persons. When we condemn whole groups as intrinsically evil, as you were saying ontologically evil, evil in their being, and others as victims who… and by the way, the victimization part is just as bad as the demonization part because as somebody like Frederick Douglass pointed out or Booker T. Washington in a very different way, Black Americans, like all human beings and all Americans, need a certain degree of pride, of self-respect, and self-help. When they are told they lack agency, when we’re all told we lack agency, that we’re simply prisoners of fate, that we are either ontologically innocent or guilty, we’ve destroyed the freedom, the agency, the mutual accountability at the heart of human dignity and republican self-governance. When I see our civil institutions, when I see our intellectual clerisy bowing before a Black Lives Matter ideology, I’m not talking about the idea that all Black Lives Matter. Of course they matter. All lives matter, but the ideology that accompanies that particular movement, which is not an anti-racist ideology. It’s an ideology of victimization, and demonization. It’s anti-Black. It’s anti-human. It’s fully totalitarian in its logic and effect. Richard Reinsch: How did it come to pass? I’m just sticking with this thread of The New York Times. A newspaper composed of we might say certainly a class with great credentials. I imagine most of the writers and editors are Ivy league educated. Certainly, we’ve known for decades this is not just the leading newspaper in America, but the leading source of liberal opinion. What made the liberalism of The New York Times susceptible to accepting the logic of these, quite frankly, millennial editors and staff writers that language is violence, and silence is complicity in it or something like that? How did that happen? Daniel Mahoney: Well, it happened because our universities… Gramsci’s long march through the institutions. This ideology that is eating away at our civility, our freedom, our mutual accountability it has been in the universities for a long time now. It colonized humanities departments. It became the default language. English departments don’t teach literature. They teach post colonialism, a kind of para-Marxism. Another version of that ideological manichaenism and ontological demonization we just spoke about. These people weren’t educated in the great books. They weren’t educated in the Western tradition. They weren’t educated in the values of civilized order or with liberty. They were educated in agitprop, and I think I said this many years ago that eventually the spirit of illiberalism, of hate, of ideology that has substantiated their selves at our colleges and universities, and our intellectual class would come to in effect some body politic, and I think that’s what happened. Why do an increasing number of millennials praise Marxist Leninist regimes, think communism is a beautiful idea? Why do they buy into a loathsome “culture of repudiation” to use the late, great Sir Roger Scruton phrase? I think they’ve never been exposed to an alternative. I think the agitprop begins early. You go to school, and instead of being challenged by what Matthew Arnold called “the best that’s been thought and said.” For the most part, unless you know better, you are initiated in this language of victimization and demonization, and there’s a point I made in the Idol of Our Age that I think is more relevant than ever. I argued that our present situation is marked by a mixture of toxic relativism and toxic moralism. When you no longer have rational standards of judgment that are the basis of a regime of stability, then there is no restraints on moral indignation or anger because nothing, no judgment is ever judged before the tribunal of reason. Michael Polanyi called this a “moral inversion” that people are officially relativistic, but morality goes underground and comes back as moralistic indignation and ideological fanaticism. That’s exactly where we are. That pattern of anti-reason, of toxic moralism, toxic relativism, if it didn’t completely dominate the universities, it was the leading force, the leading presence, and now it’s invaded the body politic. Let me add one more thing. In speaking about why so many left liberals were taken in by communism or today, perhaps, by a certain softness for radical Islam, Polanyi says, “They confuse the homonyms where the communists talked about justice, peace, and equality.” They did not mean what Christians meant by justice, peace, and equality or conservatives and liberals mean by that. These were homonyms with a very, very different meaning. Liberation theologians, progressive, Christians have taken, lots of political pilgrims got taken. I think the same thing is going on now. I think a lot of people have goodwill. I’m not sure whether these younger militants are people of goodwill, but many of them are taken in by the homonyms. They think when they endorse anti-racism they’re endorsing anti-racism. We should endorse anti-racism, but on the ground of rational assertion of human dignity and liberty, not on the grounds of ideological demonization, but the rot, the sickness, has been around for a long time, but now it’s metastasized throughout the body politic. Richard Reinsch: The toxic relativism was to clear the way. You undermined. You dismissed, mocked, ignored, laughed at, I’ll say a stand-in, Jerusalem. You laughed at Athens. You dismiss the bedrock foundation of American constitutionalism as racist. You say our society is built on slavery. All of those things clear the way for something else to replace it. Do we have a coherent sense of what those in the streets right now in June are trying to erect in its place? It seems to me there are a lot of demands. We see corporate America scurrying to try to placate them, try in many cases to enlist themselves in their cause, or to be seen as such. Is there a coherent package yet, or is that to come once they think they’ve got one, if not both, political parties subservient to what they want? Daniel Mahoney: No. There is no coherent project, but it’s a project of intellectual political and moral destruction. That’s why I mentioned Solzhenitsyn. When you see educated Russian society, members, middle class educated people, rich people, regime officials, intellectuals mouthing the slogans of nihilists, a radical culture of repudiation, as you said, you attack our religious traditions rooted in this rich tradition of logos, and ethical affirmation in scripture, and the larger religious traditions. If you reject the metaphysical truths or the practical reason inherent in Athens in our philosophical traditions, if you assault the West as an essentially culpable civilization. One of my favorite lines is from W.B. Yeats, “Come fix the accusing eye on me. I thirst for accusations.” Well, if the West was just the only truly self critical civilization in history, is ontologically condemnable, we’re talking about nihilism. We’re talking about nothingness. So they have no positive program, except self loathing. Well, if these rituals we’re looking at… Again, we haven’t reached the point of blood or official tyranny and, hopefully, we’ll never reach it, but the structure of it is so similar to that self-loathing one saw in Paris in ’68 or Dostoyevsky’s novel, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Somehow the idea that negation is liberating. This is so anti-political because it cannot give rise to rapport. It can only destroy, and I don’t know how this kind of indignation goes on forever. It destroys agency. It destroys dignity. It destroys the pride necessary for common life, but while it lasts, it’s a force of pure destructiveness. Do you remember Eric Voegelin’s definition of ideology that it’s the forcible imposition of a second reality on the real world? I think that’s what we’re seeing now. Richard Reinsch: How does a tough-minded liberalism begin to respond? Daniel Mahoney: Well, a tough-minded liberalism is also a tough-minded conservatism. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Conservative Foundation For the Liberal Order. Pure liberalism has always been a problem; freedom without ends and purposes, progress without tradition. Michael Polanyi once said, “The goals of Tom Payne can only work if they’re wedded to the ideas of Edmund Burke, tradition, continuity, order, civilization.” So a liberal order, first and foremost, can only survive and be worthy of surviving if it repudiates the culture of repudiation. If it renews itself with respect for our principles of our order, which are not racist. I was appalled the other day to see a piece of Public Discourse, an otherwise fine piece by Marco Rubio, saying the American Founders believed that Blacks were three-fifths of a human being, the old canard. It was the anti-slavery North that wanted to count blacks as three-fifths for representation precisely because they didn’t want a slave-owning oligarchy to dominate the new constitutional order. Richard Reinsch: The men who introduced the three-fifths compromise were men from northern states who were opposed to slavery. I think it was Elbridge Gerry and James Wilson, if you read the debates. I’m not sure. Daniel Mahoney: Absolutely. Richard Reinsch: It’s incredible. Daniel Mahoney: By the way, you could not even find a South Carolinian in 1787 who said slavery was good, at least anyone at the Constitutional Convention or in the ratifying debates. That all developed as we know much later with people like George Fitzhugh, and John Calhoun. Yeah, but what’s going to happen is under the guise of anti-racism, a false anti-racism, a racist anti-racism, an ideological approach to things so that our past is going to be erased. For me to publicly make the argument, as Frederick Douglass did in 1852, that our constitution is a fundamentally anti-slavery document, to make the kinds of arguments that the great Abraham Lincoln, and I should also say the great Frederick Douglass, made in his Peoria Address of 1854, and the Cooper Union Address six years later, showing that in no sense was the Constitution pro-slavery. The Supreme Court was wrong in Dred Scott when they said, “The Declaration and Constitution are instruments of oppression.” They’re instruments of ordered liberty, of human dignity, and they were, as Martin Luther King still recognized in his famous speech in I have a dream in November 1963, it’s precisely because of going back to those promissory notes, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, that our political order is able to actualize our founding principles, which are principles of liberty and human dignity. I’m…
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