Let's Restore Liberalism
Globalist Marxisms and tribalist nationalisms, despite fierce, unbridgeable disagreements, both undermine the Protestant free society of the U. S. Founding.
Dear Friends and Supporters:
Below is the substance of my talk delivered to CCL’s 23rd annual symposium in the San Francisco Bay area December 2, 2023. As always, the discussion was gracious, vigorous, and thoughtful.
Our social, cultural, and political situation is confusing and even chaotic. One of the biggest problems is that we’ve seen dramatic changes in the political landscape over the last 10 years. Perhaps the best way to explain this change is from the angle of my title: let’s restore liberalism. What are liberals? That question’s a little harder to answer than you might think. If you were paying attention to American politics from the 50s to the 90s, when you think of liberals, you think of JFK, Lyndon B. Johnson, George McGovern, Tip O’Neill, and Walter Mondale. What were the marks of this liberalism? Well, they believed in a much more aggressive government role in the economy. They supported the welfare state, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and beefier labor unions. They tended to be soft on communism; they wanted to dialogue with communism rather than defeat it. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
But this isn’t the original liberalism. The original liberalism started in the 18th century, and mostly in England. It actually had roots in the Protestant Reformation.
Old-Time Conservatism
This classical liberalism (CL) was against the conservatism of those days. What was that conservatism? Well, it included the ideas and practices like hereditary monarchy; economic guilds rather than free markets; and a strong, hierarchical society, largely a caste system. The first liberals opposed all this. They wanted to say that the individual is very important to God. Within the bounds of God’s moral law, the individual should be free to follow the dictates of his conscience. Politics should be minimal and the individual and family and church and business and other non-state actors should be maximal.
By the way, you’ve probably also noticed that these terms, conservative and liberal, are culture-dependent. They don’t have absolute meanings. A graphic example is what happened in the last days of the Soviet Union. The communists were considered the conservatives, and Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were considered the liberals, pushing for liberty from Communism. This was a big irony, because the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin had sent millions to their death for being conservative or “counterrevolutionary.” This is why we need to define these terms: to understand what they mean today.
Classical Liberalism ( = Modern Conservatism)
Conservatives in America in the 20th century (like us at CCL) are basically classical liberals. What does this mean? It means we stand for individual liberty. The government exists to protect the individual citizen’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those are the words of the Declaration of Independence. That was a dramatic new experiment in world history. For almost all of human history, government (or the state) existed to create citizens to conform to a pre-established plan. The state existed in ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, for example, to conform you to what the political leaders thought you should be. This is very clear in Plato and Aristotle also, and it goes back even further than that. There’s a “common good,” and the state exists to enforces it.
The U. S. Founders turned that idea on its head. They believed that the state exists only to protect the liberties of individuals. Make no mistake: they did believed in a common good. There has to be a glue to hold a society together. But they believed that glue was supplied by individuals in their families and churches and other non-political associations. The political common good of CL is individual liberty. The non-political common good of CL is virtue, shaped by Christianity. When you have a virtuous civil society you don’t need a virtue-imposing political society.
This included a strong belief in religious liberty. All the Founders had come from England, where there was a national church, the Church of England. They were almost all either Christian or strongly influenced by establishment Protestant Christianity. But they had seen the danger of entangling a national church and the state. It caused both active and passive religious persecution. The national church got special favors, including a pile of tax money. The U. S. Founders didn’t believe in separation of the state from God, but they did believe in the separation of church and state, properly understood. Within the bounds of God’s moral law, you should be able to worship according to the dictates of your conscience. Christianity has nothing to fear from this arrangement. We have the gospel and the Bible and the Holy Spirit’s power. Islam gets victory by the power of the sword. We claim victory by the power of the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Therefore, we can support religious liberty.
And then there’s economic liberty, what we today term free markets. The Founders established a business-friendly society. Why? Not just because of man’s God-given rights. It’s true that men should be free to make voluntary economic exchanges, start a business, benefit from it, and so on. But the Founders also had a pragmatic reason. Business is a strong check on political power. If the state can’t control a lot of property and money, it can’t control people. This is why almost all dictatorships end up needing some sort of state socialism. Business power is a check on political power, and the Founders wanted this.
The United States was the first great experiment in CL in world history. There were strong hints of it in England, but it really came to the forefront in our country. The state is not neutral. Far from it. It stands for the rule of law; for blind justice; for checks and balances on political power; for overlapping political jurisdictions, like the nation, the state, the county, and the town. CL fears more than anything else consolidated political power. But it knows that a free society must be sustained by a virtuous people. There can be no political liberty without virtue, and this means religious virtue, and for the founders that meant Christian or Christian-influenced virtue. This is CL.
From Classical Liberalism to Modern Liberalism
But this isn’t the liberalism most of us think about when we hear the word. That revised liberalism basically started late in the 19th century. CL was strongly opposed to consolidated power in society. Remember that classical liberals believed in individual liberty. In the 19th century, big business got very big. Some classical liberals started to believe that this was a danger to liberty. A good example of this way of thinking late in that century and the early 20th was Teddy Roosevelt, the well-known presidential trust-buster.
These liberals became modern liberals. For them, the problem wasn’t a big state but big business. In fact, business was getting so big that it was dominating people’s lives — or so they thought. They were mistaken in this assumption, but that’s what they were thinking. Their solution was to give the state greater power to break up big business: trust-busting, e.g.
But over time this big state breaking down big business morphed into a big state to do all sorts of other things. This is modern liberalism. It is statist. What do I mean by statist? That politics is the best means of solving just about any social problem. Think of Franklin Roosevelt’s way of dealing with the Great Depression (which was caused by government interference) — increase the power of the state, ironically. Create political (that is, statist) works projects. Soak the rich. This is how modern liberalism — big-government liberalism — got started.
The little guy is being crushed economically in society (allegedly), so we need to help him out. This is Robin Hood economics: tax the rich to give to the poor, or more accurately, the less-than-rich. This form of modern liberalism almost totally captured American politics from the 1930s on. FDR’s program was called The New Deal. In the 1960s it included Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. There was LBJ’s War on Poverty. The way to win the war wasn’t to get the state out of the way so that individuals and businesses could create wealth. That’s the way it works in society, every time, no exceptions. By contrast, modern liberalism used the state to equalize incomes. That’s how the welfare state started. This basically is modern liberalism. You see how different it is from classical liberalism. Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter were all modern liberals.
Remember that CL was preserved in modern conservatism, a minority viewpoint, in people like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley. Please understand, they weren’t modern liberals; they were modern conservatives, which means they were classical liberals, old-time, pro-liberty liberals.
(Some readers will be asking, “But the real question is: Is classical liberalism biblical?” I don't address that in this post, but I do in chapter 2 of the book advertised below.)
The free society our U. S. Founders secured by God’s blessing with their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” is under withering assault today from the Left and Right. Some critics believe the Founding basis (including its indisputably Protestant distinctive) has outlived its usefulness. Others argue the nation was a botched experiment from the start. Still others simply hate and wish to destroy our common heritage, which ironically provides these ingrates the freedom to criticize it in the first place.
Globalist Marxisms have captured huge swaths of the U. S. Left and the Democratic Party. Usually this is Cultural Marxism, which sees the Founding as inherently oppressive: white supremacy, heteronormativity, self-centered individualism, enslaving patriarchy, greedy capitalism, Western imperialism, and the last residue of Christian culture are entrenched, retrograde oppressions that must be overthrown to pave the way for the revolutionary, just (egalitarian) society ruled by a bureaucratic Leftist elite. The goal, as in all other Culturally Marxist societies, is to harness the state to marginalize and emasculate the family, church, and business. This is how Globalist Marxism destroys the glorious and God-glorifying American Dream. This destruction is unfolding before our eyes.
Tribalist nationalisms, on the other side, have transformed generous sectors of the American Right into a European-style, blood-and-soul conservatism the U. S. Founders were intent to abandon. Their war on economic liberty, their identity-politics collectivism, their centralizing nanny statism, their institution-destroying nihilism, their lust for a Great Leader to enforce their will (all often sprinkled with racism) poison the American Right and the Republican Party. I denote specifically some National Conservatives, the Integralists, the New Right, “Christian” Nationalists, and the Bronze Age Mindset new masculinity (the “Lost Boys of Conservatism”) — all ideas not merely “post-liberal” but also post-Christian in practice.
Two factors unite both globalist Marxisms and tribalist nationalisms, despite fierce, unbridgeable disagreements: (1) a numbing, base ingratitude for the United States of America; and (2) an eagerness to employ the sledgehammer of the state to enforce their “common good” will on society.
Order hard or digital copy here.
From Modern Liberalism to Progressivism
But you may have noticed something strange happen over the last 15 or 20 years. You never hear Leftists like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or Barack Obama or Joe Biden refer to themselves as liberals anymore. Rather, they now use the P word. No, not preposterous, but progressive. By this they basically mean that the measure of linear history is the measure of moral improvement. As things go along, our morality just naturally gets better. We throw off all the tyrannies like the tyranny of marriage, the tyranny of heteronormativity, the tyranny of sexism and male dominance, the tyranny of “systemic racism,” and so on.
How does this differ from modern liberalism? Well, modern liberalism was predominantly about economics: equalizing incomes. But the progressives basically want to re-engineer all of society. It’s not just incomes we should equalize. We should equalize almost everything else too. There can’t be a hierarchy, and certainly not sexual hierarchy. All sex is permissible as long as it’s consensual. Are you a homosexual who wants to marry someone of your own sex? Who are we to stand in your way? If you’re a white business owner, you’re somehow living off the backs of the enslaved blacks of the Civil War and that kind of culture. Women shouldn’t just be equal according to the law (that’s what CL and the Bible teach). Rather, they should be given special quotas, just like blacks and Hispanics should be. In other words, not the rule of law, but rigging the law to get the outcomes we want. This is progressivism.
Now, let me put the contrast this way. FDR and Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were modern liberals. They were statists. But they weren’t pressing for special homosexual rights and gay marriage and racial and sexual quotas and special protections for transgender people, the last of which Joe Biden has. John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was pro-life as a proud Catholic. So were most of the other modern liberals, though not Catholic. They weren’t trying to reengineer society. They were just trying to help out the little guy by stealing from the big guy. Put another way: Democrats today are very different from Democrats 30 to 100 years ago. Today they’re progressives; they’re not liberals at all.
From Conservatism to the New Right
You might be thinking: well, it’s a good thing the conservatives and Republicans haven’t changed. But you’d be wrong. Just as the liberals and Democrats have changed, so have the conservatives and Republicans.
Remember that for most of the 20th century, conservatives were basically classical liberals. But that has changed in the last decade. What happened? Well, the progressives accelerated their victories in the culture. We all know the story. Over the last few decades, the progressives have captured virtually all of the great cultural fulcrums except politics, ironically. While conservatives and Republicans have won quite a few political battles, they’ve lost almost all the cultural battles. Almost everywhere. Almost all universities and colleges surrendered to wokeness. Almost all the mainstream media is committed to progressive talking points. Big business, which was once conservative and Republican, has moved in the woke direction: an obvious example is Silicon Valley. Of course, Hollywood has almost always been Leftist, but now it is solidly progressive. Almost every new show must have a winsome trans or gay character. Women are almost always taking the lead and men are in subordinate positions on TV. We correctly talk about a culture war, and progressives have been winning that war everywhere. It’s the political war that they haven’t won. There actually is a hot battle going on in politics. Culture, not so much.
Well, over the last 7 to 10 years a big pushback has occurred. This is where the New Right, or we might say the newest version of the New Right, comes in (this tends to include groups like the NatCons, Christian Nationalists, Integralists [RC version; the integration of church and state], and the New Masculinists). This is basically a broad coalition of younger conservatives sick and tired of losing culturally. This is good. But their solution is not usually to win back to culture. Rather, it’s to win politics to crush their cultural enemies. The flashpoint was Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library, which they rightly abominated, but their solution to this problem and related ones is to capture politics, so they can crush their enemies. Many of them are quite bold in using this very language.
They basically are saying this: the state is powerful. The state is coercive. Therefore, we should elect people so we can destroy the progressive agenda. They usually don’t say quite how they’ll do that, but that’s what they say they want. They want to become statists. Good statists, of course, and not bad statists. Unlike Gandalf, they’re willing to grasp the ring of power to use it for good purposes.
They want to put a crimp on religious liberty, political liberty, and economic liberty. The classically liberal, and I might add biblical, way is the rule of law, equal treatment under the law. The law applies to everybody equally. We know that the progressives oppose this. They support all sorts of quotas, and they reward the people and “moral mascots” (Thomas Sowell) they agree with: transgendered, homosexuals, illegal aliens etc.
Well, now the New Right wants to do the same thing, except reward different people. Some of them believe Christian politicians should be elected and impose Christianity and even penalize heresy. Others believe that factory workers should be “protected” from competition in the marketplace, in other words, they oppose economic liberty and force customers to pay higher prices. Some have advocated an “imperial conservatism.” By this they mean we should elect a president that is essentially an emperor; he bypasses Congress and uses executive orders to roll back progressivism and culture. They forget the famous aphorism of the Christian thinker Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” They want a conservative president that can crush the progressives. Apparently, they haven’t given thought to what they would do when a progressive president is elected and decides to crush all the conservatives. In fact, they’re convinced this is what Barack Obama and Joe Biden have done, and they want the power to do it to too. Why should the progressives have all the fun?
Basically, their approach is lazy and impatient. For 70 years, conservatives abandoned the culture. They haven’t tried to produce top-notch movies that can compete with a progressive Hollywood. They haven’t stressed a distinctively Christian approach to economics and business. They’ve condemned the mainstream media but haven’t (until just recently) offered legitimate alternatives. They haven’t stressed a conservative higher education (colleges like Hillsdale are tragically a very rare exception). So progressives have won culturally, and now these conservatives are running around with their hair on fire, wanting to get a big Teddy Roosevelt bully club, and beat their enemies down. They’re unwilling to do the hard work of individual- and institution-building that might take 100 years to restore a Christian or truly conservative society. I repeat: they’re lazy and impatient.
They’re trying to win cultural battles on the political battlefield. They’ll lose. You only win cultural battles on cultural battlefields.
Conclusion
Let’s conclude: Some of you might’ve already looked on the flipside of today’s agenda. It contains short descriptions of these terms I’ve used in showing the current lay of the social and political landscape:
For 23 years, CCL has stood for the pro-liberty, Protestant society of the Founders — classical liberalism. If you want to know why we’ve made a big splash about this, we haven’t. We’ve been making a sustained splash all along. It just seems like a big splash because the lake has been poisoned by both Leftist progressivism and the New Right. We stand for biblical law, and that includes biblical law in politics. And that in turn means a very minimal politics. We believe the state needs to get out of almost everything except protecting life, liberty, and property, just as our Founders said. That’s what a biblical/Christian state is supposed to do. It’s not supposed to rig the law to help the people we agree with. You don’t rig God’s law. You obey it.
There’s a positive way to put this. We stand for virtuous liberty. We stand for a society that respects righteousness, God’s law. This doesn’t mean everybody or even most people are Christians. It means that even non-Christians are influenced by the salt and light of Christian truth around them. If Christians are salt and light, they preserve and illuminate the entire society. We don’t believe you can create a utopia before Christ returns. We do believe we can have a largely God-honoring society, and we believe this once again will happen. It happened in colonial America, and it even happened in the early years of the United States. Not flawless by any means, but Christian, or Christian-influenced. A virtuous society.
But a virtuous society must be a free society. It must preserve liberty. The role of the state is to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or property. The goal of politicians isn’t to make people Christians, or better Christians. That’s what the Holy Spirit does, using the gospel, the family, the church, and other non-state actors. The most important government in the world — under Christ’s cosmic government, of course — is self-government: the self-governed individual submitting to God, and his word, living in a free society.
That’s what this symposium is about. This is what CCL stands for. This is what what we’ve always stood for, and this is the formula for the best possible society (a Christian culture) in a fallen world. That’s where we stand, so help us God. I urge you to stand here too.
I’m finished.
Personal
I hope I don't sound glib when I say the symposium was the best ever. It seems every year exceeds the previous one. A few photos are below (courtesy of Gabi Cunningham). We’re now at maximum capacity for this event, and we’ll need to officially cap attendance starting next year. We might be able to do an annual symposium in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as well as on the East Coast or in the Midwest. Many thanks to all of you who attended and for your kind remarks, and thanks also to your donors who made this event happen.
Presenters: David L. Bahnsen, Brian G. Mattson, P. Andrew Sandlin, Jeffery J. Ventrella
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