My political credo is that liberal civil society is a fruit of Christian theology and ethics. If this exceptional achievement is not preserved, then intensifying political violence awaits us.
The reason I oppose radicals on the left and right is that they both threaten the tolerance that makes our society work.
A radical seeks to destroy a way of life that sustains real people in order to build a new way of life, one that conforms to his supposedly rational formula. He cherishes this new life as the only path to justice. Once society is reorganized according to the radical’s abstract law, people will not only be free but also virtuous.
Radicals view any compromise of their pure vision, any concession to life as it is now, as a crime. Compromise is a betrayal of justice, truth, and any other holy words like Christendom, Science, Equality, Liberty, on and on.
What should be done with a criminal who betrays the pure vision?
When radicals have power, they put him on trial, dragging him through rituals that shame his disloyalty. The rituals may be in social media, an academic committee, or a courtroom. Then they cancel him, ruining his professional life. Or, if they have enough power, they imprison him. If the criminal doesn’t learn his lesson—or if his crime against the holy words is too extreme—the radicals execute him.
Any overview of the Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s show trials, the McCarthy hearings, or Mao’s cultural revolution will illustrate what radicals do with power.
Often, the radical’s pure vision is about the future.
The French Revolution in 1789 started as a middle class revolt against royal abuses and financial excesses. But it was quickly radicalized. The Declaration of the Rights of Man collected sweeping assertions of brotherhood to lay out the pure vision. The future was one of total equality.
To achieve such a glorious vision, it wasn’t enough to abolish titles and privileges. The aristocrats, the king, and the queen were criminals. So they were executed. It wasn’t enough to occupy the churches and dispossess the monastic orders. The monks and nuns were criminals too, so they had to be tied up in groups and drowned. The revolution overthrew the calendar, trying to criminalize history. It erased provincial boundaries, attempting to transform France from a real country into a grid.
Edmund Burke, the British statesman and philosopher, attacked this frenzy of blood and pretended rationality for destroying France’s way of life in the name of useless abstractions. In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), he predicted the exhaustion of the Reign of Terror and the eventual triumph of a military dictator. Napoleon seized power in 1799.
But radicalism doesn’t always conjure the future. Just as often it sanctifies the past.
The American South became radicalized in the first half of the 19th century, pulling a shroud over its culture—a myth of aristocracy, Christian chivalry, and racial purity. Its leaders devised novel constitutional theories to elevate their states’ power over the federal government. They demanded the extension of slavery westward. The South’s supporters used violent tactics attempting to take over the Kansas territory—a dress rehearsal for the Civil War. (H. W. Brands documents that there was abolitionist radicalism in Kansas too in The Zealot and the Emancipator.)
The real life underneath the embroidered shroud was grim. Plantations had been mortgaged for generations. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the two shores of a single river offered a stark contrast. On the northern shore, there was activity, commerce, and clean streets. On the southern shore, there was lethargy, poverty, and squalid delapidation. Beyond the economic backwardness was the pervasive practice of white men having children by their slave women.
The South plunged the nation into the Civil War rather than tolerate any limit on its racial and agrarian mythology. After its defeat, the pure vision lived on in the legend of Robert E. Lee’s military prowess. Indeed, southerners continued to fight long into the 1870s with guerilla and terrorist tactics. (Ron Chernow’s recent biography of U. S. Grant both documents the murderous crimes of southern belligerents during Reconstruction and dispels the aura of Lee’s genius.)
The best rhetoric against southern radicalism still belongs to the man who broke the Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln. In his Cooper Union speech of 1860, he decimated southerners’ legal falsehoods using constitutional logic, historical analysis, and lethal humor. Addressing southerners, Lincoln said, “Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.” The speech probably made him president that year.
Name any radical who prized a pure vision above real life. History will reply with a bloody story.
I don’t care if it’s DEI totalitarians at the local community college or Christian nationalists at the local church. Both talk themselves out of any concern for civility. Whether they dream up lawsuits or build barricades, neither side can be bothered with the well-being of real people in the middle. They’re both too busy immanentizing the eschaton.
Someone will carp that I am committing “both-sides-ism,” seeking to weasel my way out of choosing light over darkness in this epic struggle for the soul of humanity. The only real choice is between the radical left and the radical right. One side must be good and the other must be evil.
This is a treasured tactic of radicals everywhere: you have no choice.
Every day, in every American neighborhood, people disagree with each other. Often, they disagree profoundly. They even disagree while they live in the same house. In the midst of their disagreements, these real people have a way of life that sustains them in their work, their families, and their worship. It’s a way of life that permits them to cooperate when they agree and pursue their own paths when they don’t agree. It’s messy. It’s not a pure way of life. But it does permit them to go to sleep at night in peace. Whatever their fears, a midnight visit from the Gestapo is not one of them.
I have a real choice beyond the radicals. I will do what I can to strengthen that tolerant way of life. I choose liberal civil society.
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