"But I have not witnessed any EA driven rationale for something that would truly cause someone a lot of social static, such as arguing that for EA reasons we should shut down or significantly curtail international migration. Surely, if EA is true, it should generate at least some positions that go against the current elite consensus in ways that are unpopular and socially risky to hold."
Maybe I see EA as thinner than it may be, but I don't think it has much to say about AI policy per se. My understanding is basically as Aaron said: make the most money possible and give as much of it as possible to causes with the highest ROI (which may be measured in terms of life years saved - seems like the thing right now is mosquito nets).
Does this necessitate generating at least some positions that go against the current elite consensus? Perhaps, but maybe strategically they are not great to emphasize. The existence of EA implies that most charity is ineffective, or at least not effective in the way they would like. I suppose they could go around telling people who donate to most things, "Hey, all this money you're giving to animal shelters is actually a consumption good for you," or point out how most of the giving by Jeff Bezos's ex-wife is for leftist activism rather than actual charitable causes.
But I don't think EA necessitates generating anti-elite positions. It certainly points to a counter-cultural lifestyle of living frugally and radical generosity, which may be threatening to certain elites.
I highly recommend "Who Are We?" by Samuel Huntington.
When I hear that America is all about freedom, I wonder if people believe that the citizens are not free in Switzerland or Iceland or various other places. Is the essence of America the marginal improvement in rights (e.g. gun rights) compared to some of these places? If we appreciate our own heritage in the ways Huntington outlines, we will find identity in a mix of attributes from that heritage (e.g. religious dissenters bringing a strong emphasis on religious liberty and opposition to a national church; many aspects of Anglo-Protestant culture; moralism).
These attributes really do distinguish us from other affluent and highly free countries.
“Provocative” is one of those great value-neutral adjectives. “Give me liberty or give me death” is provocative, as is getting up in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner and throwing the turkey out the window. I was having trouble figuring out what Michael Lind was arguing for (as opposed to who he’s arguing against) until I got to the end. He makes that provocative opening statement, quotes some Americans throughout history who supposedly had little use for the Founders (racists and segregationists [at least that’s how he frames them], communists, progressives, libertarians, etc.), criticizes people like George Will, and then finally makes the commonsense statement that we actually can look to the founders for guidance on modern problems, and that “their relevant views can and should be defended on their merits, without deferring to a sacral authority.” Well, d’uh.
It's all the same with the new right populists. I know who they don’t like, but I have a hard time figuring out what they’re arguing in favor of that other factions aren't already offering.
Aaron is definitely right to argue that if conservatives want to appeal to voters they should talk more about their vision for the future rather than have it appear like they’re trying to restore some golden, bygone era. But the real mistake isn’t looking to the wisdom of the founders; it’s coming across sounding like the 1940s-50s was that bygone era and that we need to get back to that.
Regarding the founders not "having the answers to today's problems", I think that profoundly misunderstands what those problems actually are. Madison's take on the fallibility and corruptibility of humans, and the implications that has for government is fairly timeless.
And as far as turning to Pitt the Younger for guidance, while far from perfect he's light years ahead of BoJo or what's her name who lasted all of six weeks in office: "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." That's as relevant today as it was in 1783 when he uttered it, and the hapless Mr. Johnson should have minded it instead of caving to the shutdown mongers (among other misdeeds).
I think that forward looking conservatism was started many years ago - it is called neoconservatism- the Neocons which has fallen into disrepute. If you melt their idea down to its essence, it was to make the world over in our image. That hasn’t worked out too well. The Libertarians in my mind most closely hold to the Constitution, yet too many of their elites are not Christians so they have no universal ethic to get back to the good old days where we can self-govern.
RETVRN is dead on arrival. To me, the frontier or at least A frontier for us to explore in the 21st century is how to make community make sense again in a globalized, tech-obsessed world. The answer might be to restore some of what was lost but it can't just be moving to rural America and raising chickens.
It requires innovation and building of smaller, agile and attractive networks of religious and family oriented people. Which people interface with the mainstream of America more as a communal block, rather than individually.
The issue with the Founding Fathers is significantly more complex than that, and I could probably write a book-length account of the issue. The late J.G.A. Pocock, who passed away last month, was the world's preeminent expert on the topic of republican Founder cults.
But the simplest I can make it is this: any political society has to deal with the existential crisis of national continuity. Who are we, where did we come from, and how can we continue into the future? In order to convince human beings to contribute to a national political project, they have to believe in the legacy and continuity of that nation. They have to believe that what came before is good, worth preserving, and will continue in the future. For most nations, this need is provided by ethnonationalism or an essential religious identity. The legacy and project of the community is tied to the blood-nation or the state as agent of a god or gods.
Republics have the misfortune of being founded within historical time, and so can't rely on the appeal to ethnicity or myth. England has been English forever, as far as national identity is concerned. The god or gods created the universe. But Florence was founded in 1115 and the U.S. in 1776. They are not eternal entities, the way that the English race or the Jewish faith are eternal and reach back into time immemorial. And everything that begins must end. Republics suffer from an existential awareness of the possibility of their own destruction, because they emerged out of the destruction of another government.
Founder cults provide that stabilizing mythos, and were central to all republican societies: the Romans, the Florentines, and the Americans especially so. Our foundation rests on the virtue of the Founding Fathers, and our society is secure so long as we follow in their footsteps and preserve the Foundation upon which our society rests. This is especially the case because citizens of Republics have nothing in common with each other except for the Republic. There is no common ethnicity, no common religion, no commonality between citizens other than the Constitution, which is the concrete legacy of the Founder(s). Without the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, nothing makes us Americans. We're just consumers sharing a common marketplace.
And no, there is no such thing as the "American Creed" outside of the Founders. Propositional nationhood is transparently partisan in America, its principles little more than the political self-interest of the New York "creative class," and is demonstrably insufficient to provide a basis for national identity and fellow-feeling. I'm not going to argue either way as to whether a Civic Nationalism or Propositional Nationhood is possible in principle. I'm undecided, but lean against it because I'm convinced by Pocock's work on republican self-identity. In practice, it's a club that the urban UMC use to bash the rest of the country into accepting their partisan, sectarian, and class self-interest.
In short, when we finally get to the point that Americans reject the Founding Fathers as totems of aspirational unity, and we will get there soon, then we've expunged the only basis to say that such a thing as an "American" exists. At that point, we're just strangers at a nation-sized mall, fighting over scraps left to us by the elites. It's inherent in the nature of intrahistorical republics to live and die by the cult of their Founders.
I think there's a lot of truth here, but also, I'm assuming you've read Darel Paul's arguments here, about "empire" as the key American unifying idea of recent times:
Of course, in the case of Rome, the Republic didn't survive the Empire in the end, but the Republic held together through the first few centuries of Rome's imperial expansion.
To me, this makes intuitive sense as to human psychology: a lot of people will take pride in being associated with the strong horse, for the simple reason that it's strong. This is a distinct concept from the fact that a strong state is often able to subjugate people to its will -- it's about people's vicarious identification with an empire's power, not fear of that power.
Even in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, my understanding is that pride in the strong horse of the British Empire was common among Americans (and it endured among Tories even during the Revolutionary War -- partly responsible for their decision to go Tory).
I'd also argue that pride in the strong horse is largely what held the Roman Empire together, long after Roman identity ceased to be anything but a legal status.
Of course, the trouble with the strong horse holding everything together is that things can fall apart very quickly if the horse proves itself to be weak, even momentarily.
That's funny, because I got in trouble in an American Government seminar decades ago for saying something very similar. In my professor's words, the American Creed was "freedom, equality, individualism, and hard work" instead of "liberty, equality, individual rights, and self-government" but Dr. Paul is right that all of these formulas are essentially meaningless. Everyone says they're for these things, and nobody agrees on what they mean. They're the source of our disagreements, not our unity.
Of course, for pointing that out, I was told to either shut up or leave the classroom.
As I'm sure Dr. Paul knows, many of the classical republican theorists describe expansion as an inherently limited solution to discord in a republic. When you hit the limits of your expansion, all the problems will come rushing back, just as they did in the time of Julius Caesar. This is one of the reasons l love the satires of Juvenal: he exists at a time in Rome's history very similar to our own, and sometimes it feels like he's describing our own society instead of one almost 2000 years older than ours.
Let me add though, that I think it's reductionist to say that "freedom", or "individual rights", at least, is utterly meaningless. America is an extraordinarily individualistic society; atomized, you might say. And if we look at political trends over the last few decades, individual rights have more often than not been the side that has won.
The most notable conservative cultural victory has been the expansion of gun rights. Which happens to be one of the few issues in which conservatives are unambiguously on the side of individual rights. Covid lockdowns and vaccines were another, which was more of a mixed bag, but my understanding is the US retained more freedoms than the rest of the Anglosphere.
Some issues clearly are more about conflicting ideas of freedom: religious liberty vs. LGBT rights, for example.
We also often try to force an individual rights frame on arguments where we appear to be on the side that's against individual rights: a leftist might say that expanding gun rights reduces her right to not be threatened by guns. A conservative can say that expanding abortion rights infringes on a child's right to be born. But in these cases, I think most people sense that one side is valuing something more than individual rights. Safety, or life itself, for example.
I think we both sense the contradiction in believing that individuality itself could ever be a solid basis for holding a nation (or any group of people) together permanently, and indeed, it seems to be cracking among the younger generations. But for the time being it remains an American distinctive, and it's not completely without content. It can generate arguments and discord, but also consensus.
I think you're missing the point that a Republic is "rule by law" and for us that law is the Constitution (and the Bible). So once you get rid of that, you no longer really have a republic. (Or maybe that is what you're trying to communicate).
What makes a Republic unique is not rule of law. The British constitutional monarchy had rule of law, the Common Law. The question is "whose law?" For ethnic states, it's the law of the People. Common Law holds in England because it reaches back into time immemorial, to the origin of the English People. In Republics, it's the law of the Founders. Constitutional Law holds in America because it is the Foundation established by our Founders. What makes the Constitution valid is that it is the act which established a People, but it was the Founders who performed that act. When we undo the work of the Founders, we undo the act of creating a People that they performed. When we have contempt for the Founders, as many people do today, then that extends to their work: the Constitution.
We're seeing the disintegration of American national identity today because we've undermined the one pillar atop which any republican self-identity stands: that this nation deserves to exist because the original act of the Founder(s) was good. Republics are inherently contingent entities, unlike ethnic nations. They emerge in history, and therefore don't necessarily survive in history. We had one revolution, and therefore we can necessarily have another, unless we give ourselves a good reason why we should not do so. The only reason that works, and preserves a republican system of government, is a Founders' cult. Otherwise, we should get used to race, religion, ethnicity, and language being the primary identity cleavages of American society, because those are the only other alternatives.
Disagree. If a "constitutional monarchy" is rule of law, then it's just a form of republic, where representatives are just chosen by genetic line instead of a democratic process. When we look at our Republic, we can say that the elected officials are representatives, i.e. stewards, not leaders, the law is what rules. There is a shift that's happened that created kind of an oligarchy that tends to do whatever they want regardless of the law, but that's why we can say something is unconstitutional and we have no moral obligation to obey their edicts (though we may because it's the easiest road). I also disagree that America is based on a Founder's cult. It's based on principles that they implemented, and we are disintegrating because we are abandoning those principles. The Founders just did a good job of putting those principles in our documents.
Thank you, Aaron, for the post. I'm just starting 'To Change The World' and so can't speak with knowledge to faithful presence, but I can say with conviction that we are porous, easily influenced beings, and it's difficult to stay 'salt and light' amid the influences of elite careerist pursuits. I worked for many years in asset management in NYC and SF and found the greed, materialism, single-minded careerism, and instrumentality inevitably seeped into my thinking. Happily I now live in Maine and work remotely and that makes all the difference. From the little you write here, I'm skeptical of the promise of faithful presence. The costs of playing the game are too high.
I feel like my wife and I are at the end of a three or so year long attempt to do the return and Benedict option thing. We found that it didn’t fit our personalities and put too much of a burden on us and the community around us. We do have to accept the limitations and conditions of the modern world in their good and bad aspects.
Many seeking to return might look back to Aristotle, but I am struck that Aristotle held that humans were city dwelling animals (“ political”).
Thanks, Jonas! One thing we did was live further out from the city, in St. Louis. As a result, we have to drive further to a lot of places, and we’re further from a lot of the people with similar intellectual interests. We live in a walkable, new urbanist development, but Christian school and good church are both 30 minutes or so away. We’ve had hopes of creating our own Christian community out of the pieces of this, but have to accept that starting a Christian school or founding a church is not really in our wheelhouse. We also tried homeschooling temporarily over the summer, and found that my wife and I didn’t feel good at it, or desire to do it ultimately.
Chickens and generally having a suburban homestead all was not quite the way we wanted to spend our time in the end either. Doing our work that we enjoy and caring for our children without getting too stressed or angry is top priority. As opposed to trying to do everything ourselves and pretend to be self-sufficient. The main thing this taught us was that that model just doesn’t work for everyone, even if it does work for some.
And in terms of expectations, we end up expecting community, church and school to be magnificent Christian community, almost serving the function of family, and then are disappointed when they don’t. My take away is that people who do knowledge work or computer jobs would benefit in terms of community by being in a city, even though technically we could live anywhere. This has tempered my sense that there’s a clear Personal and Home-based solution to our political problems.
Super interesting, Joel. In another life, I lived in a Zen monastic setting. There were families and kids that lived there, too. Livability was superb for everyone largely due to shared labor, shared ethic of contribution and care, and shared resources. As you describe the life above, it sounds rather like more obligation and separation without more shared labor and community -- and that sounds really hard.
As someone who studied government at Liberty University, there was (and still is), a very strange cult around the Constitution amongst certain conservatives. While I respect others commenting here, what Aaron is citing goes beyond just respect for tradition and Biblical-based principles, but a political movement stewed in resentment to attempt to show the failure of modern government because it did not fit the exact version outlined in 1787 and the vision of the founders.
Also, for all of the talk about the Constitution, I could not tell you a single amendment that anyone proposed. This was fascinating to me. The Constitution gives us the opportunity to change it, but I can't tell you a single proposal that we discussed at length in-class or out-of-class. (I might also add I felt there seemed to be some small disdain for any amendment outside the Bill of Rights, but that may be reaching a little.) The Michael Lind article references things like labor unions, social insurance, healthcare, etc. I would have thought at least sometime with the department might lead to us to discuss amendments that were more in line with issues facing voters today, whether in or out of class. That rarely came up.
While it is coming up on a decade now, Obama faced major gridlock during his time in office. During one State of the Union address, he said that while Congress was gridlocked, he had a "phone and a pen", referencing his ability to whip votes and pass executive orders. (I think I have this story right?) Many conservatives were outraged about this since Obama was pushing his Constitutional limits, but I think most voters did not care. The process by which government does things does not matter as much to the average voter, they want their life to improve. I am only one person, but as I look back, it felt to me that certain conservatives were more outraged that Obama was acting unconstitutionally rather than the average American standard of living, and healthcare, not living up to other advanced nations.
Regular voters are not as enamored with the founders, but with government improving their lives to get better. I think we need to think more about those issues and how to meet their needs.
I feel like quoting Sam Adams and Pitt the Younger to you. Contra Michael Lind, they are very relevant today because the things we remember and quote from them aren't the minutia of leading Parliament or anything like that, it's the more timeless things about human nature.
"Also, for all of the talk about the Constitution, I could not tell you a single amendment that anyone proposed."
Good point. The Constitutional amendment process is something that clearly doesn't work anymore, and we hardly ever talk about it.
Studying the list of Constitutional amendments always triggers that "the past was a different country" feeling. Partly because it was thought that a Constitutional amendment was needed to do certain things that wouldn't cause us today to think twice if the Federal government just power-grabbed it (the income tax, Prohibition). And second, because a highly controversial idea that would change daily life in the country (Prohibition) managed to achieve a supermajority of support in both houses of Congress and the states.
I'm not a law expert, but I believe we could probably use an amendment that regulates the Supreme Court. Perhaps setting up a regular, non-lifetime tenure (I've heard 20 years proposed) while also regulating the Court's size and eliminating the threat of packing it. To me, it also seems like a good idea to formally acknowledge and regulate the process of judicial review, which isn't really in the Constitution. Someone recently argued that discretionary cert should be revoked; maybe that's a reach for a Constitutional amendment, but I'm open to it.
That said, even a procedural, compromise amendment sounds impossible today. Let alone an amendment that actually expands or constrains the powers of the Federal government, or of the President.
“I’m not a law expert...”, you don’t have to be! That’s actually what’s pretty cool about the amendment process to me. I’m not a law expert either, but so much of case law stems from other cases, which come from other cases, which come from other cases, until you get back to the Constitution. Theoretically, amendments supersede all other laws on the book since it’s the now in the Constitution.
But yes, limiting the Supreme Court might be a great one. There’s probably dozens of good ones out there but no one discusses it anymore.
Government doesn't really improve lives. It can do it's job of defending rights and that will keep lives from getting worse, but nowadays it only helps by working around (or getting rid of) laws it already made. It's the bad laws (most of them) that make lives worse. God only instituted Government to handle justice, everything else it does it does inefficiently.
It is astonishing to me to see how fast right-wing support for the Constitution is melting away.
Yes, the American veneration for the Constitution is unusual, and occasionally a bit hokey. But it is central to the concept of tradition. (How about getting rid of the Nicene Creed, because it's not appropriate for today?) And it is one more thing that keeps America away from Communism and Fascism.
When did the Right reject the wisdom of Edmund Burke?
This is yet one more sign that the American Right is becoming post-Christian. A post-Christian Right will have some extremely sharp edges. And it will cut many of those whose appetite is whetted by that prospect. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. If we are headed for a violent age, it is no longer simply the Left who is leading us there.
I think you're missing the point that we look back at the Founding Fathers because of their mostly biblically-based sound principles that our nation was founded on. We don't need technological answers from them, we just need the wisdom they embodied. There's quite a shortage of that today.
"But I have not witnessed any EA driven rationale for something that would truly cause someone a lot of social static, such as arguing that for EA reasons we should shut down or significantly curtail international migration. Surely, if EA is true, it should generate at least some positions that go against the current elite consensus in ways that are unpopular and socially risky to hold."
Maybe I see EA as thinner than it may be, but I don't think it has much to say about AI policy per se. My understanding is basically as Aaron said: make the most money possible and give as much of it as possible to causes with the highest ROI (which may be measured in terms of life years saved - seems like the thing right now is mosquito nets).
Does this necessitate generating at least some positions that go against the current elite consensus? Perhaps, but maybe strategically they are not great to emphasize. The existence of EA implies that most charity is ineffective, or at least not effective in the way they would like. I suppose they could go around telling people who donate to most things, "Hey, all this money you're giving to animal shelters is actually a consumption good for you," or point out how most of the giving by Jeff Bezos's ex-wife is for leftist activism rather than actual charitable causes.
But I don't think EA necessitates generating anti-elite positions. It certainly points to a counter-cultural lifestyle of living frugally and radical generosity, which may be threatening to certain elites.
I highly recommend "Who Are We?" by Samuel Huntington.
When I hear that America is all about freedom, I wonder if people believe that the citizens are not free in Switzerland or Iceland or various other places. Is the essence of America the marginal improvement in rights (e.g. gun rights) compared to some of these places? If we appreciate our own heritage in the ways Huntington outlines, we will find identity in a mix of attributes from that heritage (e.g. religious dissenters bringing a strong emphasis on religious liberty and opposition to a national church; many aspects of Anglo-Protestant culture; moralism).
These attributes really do distinguish us from other affluent and highly free countries.
“Provocative” is one of those great value-neutral adjectives. “Give me liberty or give me death” is provocative, as is getting up in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner and throwing the turkey out the window. I was having trouble figuring out what Michael Lind was arguing for (as opposed to who he’s arguing against) until I got to the end. He makes that provocative opening statement, quotes some Americans throughout history who supposedly had little use for the Founders (racists and segregationists [at least that’s how he frames them], communists, progressives, libertarians, etc.), criticizes people like George Will, and then finally makes the commonsense statement that we actually can look to the founders for guidance on modern problems, and that “their relevant views can and should be defended on their merits, without deferring to a sacral authority.” Well, d’uh.
It's all the same with the new right populists. I know who they don’t like, but I have a hard time figuring out what they’re arguing in favor of that other factions aren't already offering.
Aaron is definitely right to argue that if conservatives want to appeal to voters they should talk more about their vision for the future rather than have it appear like they’re trying to restore some golden, bygone era. But the real mistake isn’t looking to the wisdom of the founders; it’s coming across sounding like the 1940s-50s was that bygone era and that we need to get back to that.
Regarding the founders not "having the answers to today's problems", I think that profoundly misunderstands what those problems actually are. Madison's take on the fallibility and corruptibility of humans, and the implications that has for government is fairly timeless.
And as far as turning to Pitt the Younger for guidance, while far from perfect he's light years ahead of BoJo or what's her name who lasted all of six weeks in office: "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." That's as relevant today as it was in 1783 when he uttered it, and the hapless Mr. Johnson should have minded it instead of caving to the shutdown mongers (among other misdeeds).
I think that forward looking conservatism was started many years ago - it is called neoconservatism- the Neocons which has fallen into disrepute. If you melt their idea down to its essence, it was to make the world over in our image. That hasn’t worked out too well. The Libertarians in my mind most closely hold to the Constitution, yet too many of their elites are not Christians so they have no universal ethic to get back to the good old days where we can self-govern.
RETVRN is dead on arrival. To me, the frontier or at least A frontier for us to explore in the 21st century is how to make community make sense again in a globalized, tech-obsessed world. The answer might be to restore some of what was lost but it can't just be moving to rural America and raising chickens.
It requires innovation and building of smaller, agile and attractive networks of religious and family oriented people. Which people interface with the mainstream of America more as a communal block, rather than individually.
The issue with the Founding Fathers is significantly more complex than that, and I could probably write a book-length account of the issue. The late J.G.A. Pocock, who passed away last month, was the world's preeminent expert on the topic of republican Founder cults.
But the simplest I can make it is this: any political society has to deal with the existential crisis of national continuity. Who are we, where did we come from, and how can we continue into the future? In order to convince human beings to contribute to a national political project, they have to believe in the legacy and continuity of that nation. They have to believe that what came before is good, worth preserving, and will continue in the future. For most nations, this need is provided by ethnonationalism or an essential religious identity. The legacy and project of the community is tied to the blood-nation or the state as agent of a god or gods.
Republics have the misfortune of being founded within historical time, and so can't rely on the appeal to ethnicity or myth. England has been English forever, as far as national identity is concerned. The god or gods created the universe. But Florence was founded in 1115 and the U.S. in 1776. They are not eternal entities, the way that the English race or the Jewish faith are eternal and reach back into time immemorial. And everything that begins must end. Republics suffer from an existential awareness of the possibility of their own destruction, because they emerged out of the destruction of another government.
Founder cults provide that stabilizing mythos, and were central to all republican societies: the Romans, the Florentines, and the Americans especially so. Our foundation rests on the virtue of the Founding Fathers, and our society is secure so long as we follow in their footsteps and preserve the Foundation upon which our society rests. This is especially the case because citizens of Republics have nothing in common with each other except for the Republic. There is no common ethnicity, no common religion, no commonality between citizens other than the Constitution, which is the concrete legacy of the Founder(s). Without the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, nothing makes us Americans. We're just consumers sharing a common marketplace.
And no, there is no such thing as the "American Creed" outside of the Founders. Propositional nationhood is transparently partisan in America, its principles little more than the political self-interest of the New York "creative class," and is demonstrably insufficient to provide a basis for national identity and fellow-feeling. I'm not going to argue either way as to whether a Civic Nationalism or Propositional Nationhood is possible in principle. I'm undecided, but lean against it because I'm convinced by Pocock's work on republican self-identity. In practice, it's a club that the urban UMC use to bash the rest of the country into accepting their partisan, sectarian, and class self-interest.
In short, when we finally get to the point that Americans reject the Founding Fathers as totems of aspirational unity, and we will get there soon, then we've expunged the only basis to say that such a thing as an "American" exists. At that point, we're just strangers at a nation-sized mall, fighting over scraps left to us by the elites. It's inherent in the nature of intrahistorical republics to live and die by the cult of their Founders.
I think there's a lot of truth here, but also, I'm assuming you've read Darel Paul's arguments here, about "empire" as the key American unifying idea of recent times:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-republics-glue-loses-its-stickiness/
Of course, in the case of Rome, the Republic didn't survive the Empire in the end, but the Republic held together through the first few centuries of Rome's imperial expansion.
To me, this makes intuitive sense as to human psychology: a lot of people will take pride in being associated with the strong horse, for the simple reason that it's strong. This is a distinct concept from the fact that a strong state is often able to subjugate people to its will -- it's about people's vicarious identification with an empire's power, not fear of that power.
Even in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, my understanding is that pride in the strong horse of the British Empire was common among Americans (and it endured among Tories even during the Revolutionary War -- partly responsible for their decision to go Tory).
I'd also argue that pride in the strong horse is largely what held the Roman Empire together, long after Roman identity ceased to be anything but a legal status.
Of course, the trouble with the strong horse holding everything together is that things can fall apart very quickly if the horse proves itself to be weak, even momentarily.
That's funny, because I got in trouble in an American Government seminar decades ago for saying something very similar. In my professor's words, the American Creed was "freedom, equality, individualism, and hard work" instead of "liberty, equality, individual rights, and self-government" but Dr. Paul is right that all of these formulas are essentially meaningless. Everyone says they're for these things, and nobody agrees on what they mean. They're the source of our disagreements, not our unity.
Of course, for pointing that out, I was told to either shut up or leave the classroom.
As I'm sure Dr. Paul knows, many of the classical republican theorists describe expansion as an inherently limited solution to discord in a republic. When you hit the limits of your expansion, all the problems will come rushing back, just as they did in the time of Julius Caesar. This is one of the reasons l love the satires of Juvenal: he exists at a time in Rome's history very similar to our own, and sometimes it feels like he's describing our own society instead of one almost 2000 years older than ours.
Let me add though, that I think it's reductionist to say that "freedom", or "individual rights", at least, is utterly meaningless. America is an extraordinarily individualistic society; atomized, you might say. And if we look at political trends over the last few decades, individual rights have more often than not been the side that has won.
The most notable conservative cultural victory has been the expansion of gun rights. Which happens to be one of the few issues in which conservatives are unambiguously on the side of individual rights. Covid lockdowns and vaccines were another, which was more of a mixed bag, but my understanding is the US retained more freedoms than the rest of the Anglosphere.
Some issues clearly are more about conflicting ideas of freedom: religious liberty vs. LGBT rights, for example.
We also often try to force an individual rights frame on arguments where we appear to be on the side that's against individual rights: a leftist might say that expanding gun rights reduces her right to not be threatened by guns. A conservative can say that expanding abortion rights infringes on a child's right to be born. But in these cases, I think most people sense that one side is valuing something more than individual rights. Safety, or life itself, for example.
I think we both sense the contradiction in believing that individuality itself could ever be a solid basis for holding a nation (or any group of people) together permanently, and indeed, it seems to be cracking among the younger generations. But for the time being it remains an American distinctive, and it's not completely without content. It can generate arguments and discord, but also consensus.
I’ve never read any Juvenal, but I’ll take a look!
I think you're missing the point that a Republic is "rule by law" and for us that law is the Constitution (and the Bible). So once you get rid of that, you no longer really have a republic. (Or maybe that is what you're trying to communicate).
What makes a Republic unique is not rule of law. The British constitutional monarchy had rule of law, the Common Law. The question is "whose law?" For ethnic states, it's the law of the People. Common Law holds in England because it reaches back into time immemorial, to the origin of the English People. In Republics, it's the law of the Founders. Constitutional Law holds in America because it is the Foundation established by our Founders. What makes the Constitution valid is that it is the act which established a People, but it was the Founders who performed that act. When we undo the work of the Founders, we undo the act of creating a People that they performed. When we have contempt for the Founders, as many people do today, then that extends to their work: the Constitution.
We're seeing the disintegration of American national identity today because we've undermined the one pillar atop which any republican self-identity stands: that this nation deserves to exist because the original act of the Founder(s) was good. Republics are inherently contingent entities, unlike ethnic nations. They emerge in history, and therefore don't necessarily survive in history. We had one revolution, and therefore we can necessarily have another, unless we give ourselves a good reason why we should not do so. The only reason that works, and preserves a republican system of government, is a Founders' cult. Otherwise, we should get used to race, religion, ethnicity, and language being the primary identity cleavages of American society, because those are the only other alternatives.
Disagree. If a "constitutional monarchy" is rule of law, then it's just a form of republic, where representatives are just chosen by genetic line instead of a democratic process. When we look at our Republic, we can say that the elected officials are representatives, i.e. stewards, not leaders, the law is what rules. There is a shift that's happened that created kind of an oligarchy that tends to do whatever they want regardless of the law, but that's why we can say something is unconstitutional and we have no moral obligation to obey their edicts (though we may because it's the easiest road). I also disagree that America is based on a Founder's cult. It's based on principles that they implemented, and we are disintegrating because we are abandoning those principles. The Founders just did a good job of putting those principles in our documents.
Thank you, Aaron, for the post. I'm just starting 'To Change The World' and so can't speak with knowledge to faithful presence, but I can say with conviction that we are porous, easily influenced beings, and it's difficult to stay 'salt and light' amid the influences of elite careerist pursuits. I worked for many years in asset management in NYC and SF and found the greed, materialism, single-minded careerism, and instrumentality inevitably seeped into my thinking. Happily I now live in Maine and work remotely and that makes all the difference. From the little you write here, I'm skeptical of the promise of faithful presence. The costs of playing the game are too high.
Great piece! I found this piece helpful for understanding what RETVRN is, for anyone interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/emmaecollins/p/the-retvrn-fallacy?r=k9yk0&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post.
I feel like my wife and I are at the end of a three or so year long attempt to do the return and Benedict option thing. We found that it didn’t fit our personalities and put too much of a burden on us and the community around us. We do have to accept the limitations and conditions of the modern world in their good and bad aspects.
Many seeking to return might look back to Aristotle, but I am struck that Aristotle held that humans were city dwelling animals (“ political”).
Thank you, Joel, for sharing. Can you be more specific about the struggles? What specifically were the burdens? Thank you! Jonas
Thanks, Jonas! One thing we did was live further out from the city, in St. Louis. As a result, we have to drive further to a lot of places, and we’re further from a lot of the people with similar intellectual interests. We live in a walkable, new urbanist development, but Christian school and good church are both 30 minutes or so away. We’ve had hopes of creating our own Christian community out of the pieces of this, but have to accept that starting a Christian school or founding a church is not really in our wheelhouse. We also tried homeschooling temporarily over the summer, and found that my wife and I didn’t feel good at it, or desire to do it ultimately.
Chickens and generally having a suburban homestead all was not quite the way we wanted to spend our time in the end either. Doing our work that we enjoy and caring for our children without getting too stressed or angry is top priority. As opposed to trying to do everything ourselves and pretend to be self-sufficient. The main thing this taught us was that that model just doesn’t work for everyone, even if it does work for some.
And in terms of expectations, we end up expecting community, church and school to be magnificent Christian community, almost serving the function of family, and then are disappointed when they don’t. My take away is that people who do knowledge work or computer jobs would benefit in terms of community by being in a city, even though technically we could live anywhere. This has tempered my sense that there’s a clear Personal and Home-based solution to our political problems.
Super interesting, Joel. In another life, I lived in a Zen monastic setting. There were families and kids that lived there, too. Livability was superb for everyone largely due to shared labor, shared ethic of contribution and care, and shared resources. As you describe the life above, it sounds rather like more obligation and separation without more shared labor and community -- and that sounds really hard.
As someone who studied government at Liberty University, there was (and still is), a very strange cult around the Constitution amongst certain conservatives. While I respect others commenting here, what Aaron is citing goes beyond just respect for tradition and Biblical-based principles, but a political movement stewed in resentment to attempt to show the failure of modern government because it did not fit the exact version outlined in 1787 and the vision of the founders.
Also, for all of the talk about the Constitution, I could not tell you a single amendment that anyone proposed. This was fascinating to me. The Constitution gives us the opportunity to change it, but I can't tell you a single proposal that we discussed at length in-class or out-of-class. (I might also add I felt there seemed to be some small disdain for any amendment outside the Bill of Rights, but that may be reaching a little.) The Michael Lind article references things like labor unions, social insurance, healthcare, etc. I would have thought at least sometime with the department might lead to us to discuss amendments that were more in line with issues facing voters today, whether in or out of class. That rarely came up.
While it is coming up on a decade now, Obama faced major gridlock during his time in office. During one State of the Union address, he said that while Congress was gridlocked, he had a "phone and a pen", referencing his ability to whip votes and pass executive orders. (I think I have this story right?) Many conservatives were outraged about this since Obama was pushing his Constitutional limits, but I think most voters did not care. The process by which government does things does not matter as much to the average voter, they want their life to improve. I am only one person, but as I look back, it felt to me that certain conservatives were more outraged that Obama was acting unconstitutionally rather than the average American standard of living, and healthcare, not living up to other advanced nations.
Regular voters are not as enamored with the founders, but with government improving their lives to get better. I think we need to think more about those issues and how to meet their needs.
I feel like quoting Sam Adams and Pitt the Younger to you. Contra Michael Lind, they are very relevant today because the things we remember and quote from them aren't the minutia of leading Parliament or anything like that, it's the more timeless things about human nature.
"Also, for all of the talk about the Constitution, I could not tell you a single amendment that anyone proposed."
Good point. The Constitutional amendment process is something that clearly doesn't work anymore, and we hardly ever talk about it.
Studying the list of Constitutional amendments always triggers that "the past was a different country" feeling. Partly because it was thought that a Constitutional amendment was needed to do certain things that wouldn't cause us today to think twice if the Federal government just power-grabbed it (the income tax, Prohibition). And second, because a highly controversial idea that would change daily life in the country (Prohibition) managed to achieve a supermajority of support in both houses of Congress and the states.
I'm not a law expert, but I believe we could probably use an amendment that regulates the Supreme Court. Perhaps setting up a regular, non-lifetime tenure (I've heard 20 years proposed) while also regulating the Court's size and eliminating the threat of packing it. To me, it also seems like a good idea to formally acknowledge and regulate the process of judicial review, which isn't really in the Constitution. Someone recently argued that discretionary cert should be revoked; maybe that's a reach for a Constitutional amendment, but I'm open to it.
That said, even a procedural, compromise amendment sounds impossible today. Let alone an amendment that actually expands or constrains the powers of the Federal government, or of the President.
“I’m not a law expert...”, you don’t have to be! That’s actually what’s pretty cool about the amendment process to me. I’m not a law expert either, but so much of case law stems from other cases, which come from other cases, which come from other cases, until you get back to the Constitution. Theoretically, amendments supersede all other laws on the book since it’s the now in the Constitution.
But yes, limiting the Supreme Court might be a great one. There’s probably dozens of good ones out there but no one discusses it anymore.
Government doesn't really improve lives. It can do it's job of defending rights and that will keep lives from getting worse, but nowadays it only helps by working around (or getting rid of) laws it already made. It's the bad laws (most of them) that make lives worse. God only instituted Government to handle justice, everything else it does it does inefficiently.
It is astonishing to me to see how fast right-wing support for the Constitution is melting away.
Yes, the American veneration for the Constitution is unusual, and occasionally a bit hokey. But it is central to the concept of tradition. (How about getting rid of the Nicene Creed, because it's not appropriate for today?) And it is one more thing that keeps America away from Communism and Fascism.
When did the Right reject the wisdom of Edmund Burke?
This is yet one more sign that the American Right is becoming post-Christian. A post-Christian Right will have some extremely sharp edges. And it will cut many of those whose appetite is whetted by that prospect. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. If we are headed for a violent age, it is no longer simply the Left who is leading us there.
I think you're missing the point that we look back at the Founding Fathers because of their mostly biblically-based sound principles that our nation was founded on. We don't need technological answers from them, we just need the wisdom they embodied. There's quite a shortage of that today.