<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Can we ever get beyond “left” and “right” by synthesizing each side’s better elements into a way of life that’s old and honored but also new and responsive? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
American conservatives’ oft-proclaimed commitment to “ordered liberty” can’t survive their lockstep reliance on financialized and conglomerated riptides that are deranging ordered liberty\u2019s ways of communicating, culture-making, and enforcing mutual obligation.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other conservatives, instead of acknowledging that market-driven lockstep and its costs, displace their frustration into scapegoating ethno-racial minorities and\/or women and\/or leftist excesses and hypocrisies. But both left and right have been gaslighting us by condemning capitalism’s affronts even while relying on them more than they acknowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some conservatives finesse their contradictory celebrations of “liberty” and corporate capitalism by urging sacred, \u201cthrone and altar\u201d guidance for our eternally divided human hearts. They promote a coercive state capitalism — sometimes authoritarian, sometimes religious — to channel the accumulation and distribution of private wealth amid ongoing economic, technological, climatic, migratory, demographic, and cultural upheavals. No one is riding these global riptides constructively. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some conservatives try to make ethno-racial differences a central organizing principle of public life, hoping to achieve order and peace by putting every group in its place, with a label on its face, under the tutelage of Western (historically white) classical liberalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Progressives accuse conservatives of intensifying capitalism’s dark, destructive downsides instead of challenging its depredations forthrightly. But progressives themselves have often defaulted to racial and sexual identity politics or groupthink, sometimes doing it militantly, in ways that reinforce inequality and economic dispossession and that endorse ethno-racial and sexual separatism. Such progressives may break a structure’s “glass ceiling” with “the first Black woman” or “the first gay man” as its CEO, but without reconfiguring the structure’s capitalist walls and foundations and priorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ironically, some liberal Democrats who tout breaking glass ceilings have rushed to join Republicans in breaking the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, whose repeal Bill Clinton signed in 1999, enabling big commercial banks to speculate wildly in financial markets, thereby helping to prompt the 2008 economic meltdown. Breaking glass ceilings this way cannot excuse or cover for breaking Glass-Steagall and the social justice that it protected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conservatives haven’t always been wrong to condemn leftist progressives for peddling an “illusion that in politics there is anywhere a safe harbor, a destination to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress,\u201d as the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it. Nor are conservatives always wrong to yearn for a \u201cpositive liberty” that accepts social obligations within wisely ordered material, spiritual, and ethno-racial frameworks. A strong civic republicanism balances individual rights and freedoms with mutual obligations in\u00a0a common<\/em>wealth that serves the general welfare by imposing some restraints, without asphyxiating individual conscience and autonomy. “Obedience to Law is Liberty,” reads an engraving on a courthouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I was born. In this website, I explore what this entails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Civic republicanism puts reasonable restraints on commercial, religious, ethno-racial, and individual behaviors, even while it protects a fairly high degree of liberty. It relies on the rule of laws that are enacted democratically; on expectations of mutual respect and rational communication; and on inspiring narratives, “myths,” or “constitutive fictions” that organize our energies for constructive ends. It reminds us and our children that a strong society, like a strong individual, strides forward on two feet — a \u201cleft\u201d one of social equality and provision (public schools, public health care, and Social Security), without which the individual and communal strengths that conservatives cherish couldn\u2019t flourish \u2013 and a \u201cright\u201d foot of irreducibly personal conscience, responsibility and autonomy, without which even the best-intentioned social engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of this balanced stride can come from public undertakings by a state that’s elected democratically. But for that stride to lead to freedom, most of its energy must come from voluntary individual and associational initiatives in entrepreneurial ventures, religious communities, labor unions, cultural organizations, and other undertakings in what we call “civil society,” which maintains some independence from statist and market forces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Civic republicanism also relies on humanistic education — some of it classical, some of it religious — that cultivates intellectual and moral virtues. It shares Aristotle\u2019s view that humans are the noblest of animals when they have deep education and sound politics that prepare them to govern themselves through dialogue, reflection, and authoritative choice, but not through force and fraud. Without that balance, humans all-too-easily become prey to despotic rule. Civic-republican strategies and customs subordinate beastly and despotic inclinations to voluntary, associational efforts, regulated by law. Civic republicans can smell a despot coming from a mile away, and they reject demagogic seductions and intimidations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The following pieces sketch some of the civic-republican strengths and risks that I’ve just mentioned:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion \u2013 BillMoyers.com<\/a> <\/strong>Written in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obama’s 2010 ‘State of the Union’ Address: Pearls Before Swine.<\/a> The Founders Saw it Coming. <\/strong>January 27, 2010<\/p>\n\n\n\n Can Anything Improve the Conversation? This writer tried and came close.<\/a><\/strong> Sept. 21, 2009. Irving Kristol\u2019s bad faith, outdone by Nicholas Thompson\u2019s civic-republican faith in the latter’s book, The Hawk and the Dove.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Defense of Civic Culture, Progressive Policy Institute.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/a> <\/strong>The Progressive Foundation, 1998. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Civic liberals and race, Boston Globe, 1992.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/a> <\/strong>Why civic republicanism resists making racial identity a central organizing principle of public life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jury’s Out, Dissent, 2008.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/a> <\/strong> Dissent,<\/em> 2008. Why jurors should resist racialist thinking, which doesn\u2019t bring justice as often as it compounds mistrust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Duty Bound.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/a><\/strong>, a profile of a young civic republican, The American Prospect,<\/em> 1996 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Decadence \u201cBy Gradual Paces,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>The American Prospect,<\/em> 2004. Written shortly before George W. Bush\u2019s re-election, this carried warnings from the republic\u2019s founders and from Edward Gibbon<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGip, Gip, Hooray!\u201d <\/strong><\/a>Ronald Reagan euthanized American civic culture even while celebrating it. History News Network,<\/em> 1997 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gurus and the American counterculture, Boston Phoenix, 1973.pdf (jimsleeper.com)<\/a> <\/strong>A meditation on the 1960s American counterculture’s decline, prompted in this instance by dismay at the weird popularity of a teenaged guru, The Boston Phoenix,<\/em> 1973 <\/p>\n\n\n\n When Immigrants Were Welcomed : Democracy Journal<\/a> <\/strong>\u2013 and how <\/em>they were welcomed, with civic-republican expectations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShould American Journalism Make Us Americans?\u201d<\/a><\/strong> How American media companies profess \u201cdiversity\u201d but foster division. A 1998 discussion paper that I wrote for Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Americans Want a Better National Story Line. How about this one?<\/a><\/strong> Salon,<\/em> 2019. This recounts some of what I learned in teaching a seminar at Yale on “New Conceptions of American National Identity” in the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n