Recently the newly formed Edmund Burke Foundation held what may be the first of a series of National Conservatism Conferences in Washington, DC to define their burgeoning ideology. The background question: What is the American right after Trump? Of course, leftist hysterics about reviving the term “nationalism” are absurdly exaggerated. The word may be disconcerting and its use is perhaps ill-advised, but it has a much broader history than superficial comparisons to National Socialism suggest. The anti-colonial movements of the 20th century were nationalist. The UN charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include the right to national self-determination. Even liberal notions of the community of nations are based on the reality of nations and their interests. Historically, nationalism has been evoked as often against tyranny as it has as an excuse for it.
The group of conservatives that gathered in Washington was certainly not made up of old-fashioned racists or authoritarians. They condemned the racism of the past and regard such regimes as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy as evil distortions. Indeed, Yoram Hazony, the conference’s organizer, insists that the Nazi state was not nationalist, but imperial — and for that reason wrong. The National Conservatives claimed that the nation-state is the natural, or at least the most evolved and presently appropriate form of political order and that, as a result, healthy, good, and just politics must ultimately stem from a salutary form of nationalism, just as tyrannical regimes emerge from poisonous forms of nationalism.
The National Conservatives are on to something. They talk about solidarity and love of home — they are not wrong to do so. They talk about embeddedness, about concrete life as opposed to abstract categories. They talk, too, about a regime that is truly political, about the common good, about a polity that does not see itself as an artificial creation based on fanciful contract, and that aims at being more than an umpire for the enforcement of private contracts and an administrator of procedural rules. This is all good and right.
But there is nevertheless a fatal flaw in their approach. As long as they see the centralized nation-state as the focus of these noble aspirations, they remain trapped in a world that has little use for such sentiments. If a person’s primary focus of social identification is to a collection of 350 million people, the unity that he finds there might be rooted in the pursuit of pleasure, or power, or glory, or equality, but it won’t be rooted in the pursuit of the common good. The common good is the end of a common life, and a common life is bound necessarily by limits of scale.
The “nation,” as they seem to understand it, is a recent creation. The nation-states of modernity achieved the cultural and ideological homogeneity and unity that brought them into being and holds them in existence only through the destruction of local difference, language, custom, and law and through the simultaneous rebellion against the larger reality of human communion, the Church, and in the case of Europe, the Empire. The nation-state came into being through violence, the unjust use of force.
The revolutionaries, followed by Napoleon, conquered and unified the crazy quilt of peculiar regions and cities that made up the kingdom of France and created, in their place, the nation of France. Bismarck did the same for Germany. Garibaldi did the same for Italy. Uniform ethnicity and ideology were posited as the source of national unity even as they were, in fact, being invented. The nation was brought into being in history as timeless and natural. Once it was there, it was hard to see that it hadn’t always been. But, in fact, the nationalities of modernity were constructed as an integral aspect of the process of state-building. Nationalism was the univocal ideology that served to collapse the complex analogical hierarchies of pre-modern social order which stretched from the village to Christendom as a whole. The unity of nationalism is the unity of a flattened social order. It is the unity of mass politics, of mass media, of mass education, of mass economy. It is the unity of the ununified, of the rootless, of the commodified.
In this new “unity,” everyone becomes a peer, citoyen, and the refusal of recognition of political authority except at the national level translates to a refusal of recognition of hierarchical relationships at any other level. Its function is to isolate individuals from each other and from humanity as a whole so that they might become more effective citizens, workers, and soldiers. The modern nation did not predate the nation-state. The modern nation is the cultural form of the Leviathan, the soul of the beast, and it was born of the same historical dynamic. It is fundamentally the product of violence—of a refusal to recognize the authority both of lower and higher levels of political rule.
Modern states and nationalism are inseparable. Nineteenth Century liberals had to become nationalists in order to gain power; Twentieth Century communists had to become nationalists in order to stay in power. Liberalism, socialism, and nationalism are the unholy trinity of modern politics — and nationalism is the foundation. Nationalism is what makes the modern ideologies work. Napoleon’s soldiers fought for the patrie, not for a universal legal code. The Red Army fought for Mother Russia, not for proletariat solidarity. The G.I. in WWII fought for the American way of life, not for free financial markets. Nationalism is the modern state-building idea. To be a nationalist is to be a statist, and as the ideologues discovered, to be a statist requires, eventually, that you become a nationalist.
Within the last few weeks commentators from various outlets, including The New Republic, National Review and The Washington Examiner, have labelled this growing movement of conservatives as “postliberal.” But this is mistaken, for most of them, though not for all. They are mostly populists, and populism in the American context is a form of liberalism. There are, of course, many things that can be called “postliberal,” and there are disagreements within the Catholic “postliberal” fold. Minimally, postliberalism is just a rejection of the liberal account of political authority. This is why it is so important that Catholics give their postliberalism content. Obviously, not all postliberalism is good. Most, in fact, will be outright evil. We have reached a point, for example, where it is easier to imagine a neo-pagan re-enchantment of our society through the cult of sex and power, than it is to imagine its conversion to justice, courage, and temperance. Christians, therefore, must be very careful in our postliberalism.
Once we reject an exclusive account of political obligations as those which are voluntarily chosen, contracted into, we might accidentally find ourselves claiming that all putative obligations, all demands, which are against the subject’s will are thereby “postliberal” and “good.” This is merely the inversion of liberalism and must be resisted at all costs. Most coercion is bad.
Liberalism is predicated on the sovereignty of the state. In liberalism, the state ultimately decides what is just and unjust, allowed and disallowed. Whether it is established by consent, as John Locke seems to imagine, or force, as Thomas Hobbes certainly postulated, this monopoly means that it can enforce an order and punish what it sees as violations of that order. This is necessary because the state is what provides the framework through which individual desires can be pursued. The sovereign liberal state is nihilistic, then, not because it doesn’t structure society toward some end, but because that end must be invisible to the individuals who operate within the space it produces. The sovereign will is an inscrutable will which establishes the ubiquitous laws of social intercourse from beyond those laws. Individuals enact the sovereign will, then, through pursuing their own desires within the framework that this will establishes. This framework must be totalitarian; otherwise individuals would find themselves bound by extra-legal constraints.
Thus, liberal states are characterized by police forces, a rational and bureaucratic legal system, and the gradual elimination of all extra-legal and therefore rival sources of authority and order. Below them, this means the steady destruction of the family, the community, the city. Above them, this means the nation’s independence from the natural law, from universal demands of justice, from universal calls to charity and solidarity, ultimately from the universal spiritual power of the Church. Liberalism’s sovereign state is the mechanism for the construction and maintenance of the nation as a sole substitute for these destroyed units of belonging, and the nation is a substitute that requires the state’s existence to function.
Therefore, rather than a new nationalism, a Catholic postliberalism promotes a new localism within a new universalism. It asserts that the foundation of politics is the “first society”: the married couple, and that local, personal communities are better able than large ones to distinguish between right and wrong, just and unjust. These communities are better able than large and impersonal ones to justly and effectively enforce their rules. Indeed, local communities are the human groupings actually capable of orienting individuals toward the common good. Face-to-face communities are where politics is most properly politics.
Catholic Postliberalism must assert that a nationalist state is not a substitute for this world of real things, but is rather an imposition upon it. It is a grave injustice. The state cannot order this realm without attacking its very nature because the state cannot make sense of real relationships, but only abstractions like rights, debts, contracts, and, indeed, races, ethnicities, languages. Real people are invisible to the state. These communities of real people, however, must themselves be situated within the pursuit of the common good of their region, of their country, of larger forms of political community, of humanity, and finally of all creation. To fail here is another grave injustice.
We are not saying, then, that an association at the scale of a nation state is a fundamentally or necessarily illegitimate thing. We are saying that one constituted according to the liberal version of the sovereign nation-state is unjust, an act of aggression toward both what is smaller and what is larger.
The National Conservatives oppose libertarianism, and they seem to think that this means they need to stop talking about subsidiarity, about the possibility of state overreach. They seem to think that the counter to libertarianism is an inflationary use of the national state. But this is mistaken. Libertarianism is not a philosophy of a minimal state. It is a philosophy of a total state, even if most libertarians don’t understand this. To the libertarian nothing exists except the wholly particular and the wholly abstract: I exist as an irreducible particular actor endowed with nothing but wholly abstract and universal rights. Every interaction between actors must be, if it is not violent, an exchange of subjective value for subjective value, a contract.
This is a vision completely dominated by the state. If every human interaction is contractual, if every interaction is ultimately an exchange, then the libertarian state is ubiquitous, the state sees all. There is not one human interaction that it can’t describe and so control. One place is the same as the next, one right the same as the next, one relationship the same as the next, one dollar the same as the next. The state, crucially, can and must negate all relationships that are not contractual, through either denying that they really exist or through their active suppression. Libertarians need the state to structure the individual’s every conceivable move, to maintain his near total freedom of action in abstraction from the real community of persons in which he is actually, as a matter of human nature, embedded. This is the only way for some approximation of their conception of the autonomous individual to come into being.
The National Conservatives are right to oppose libertarianism. They are wrong that countering it is a matter of getting control of the state and expanding its use. Rather, a true opposition to libertarianism would find victory in transitioning much of the authority now residing in the national government to other levels of authority appropriate to the task — which may be higher, but which will more often be lower.
Catholic Postliberalism must reject an all-embracing statism. In this sense we are not interested in giving up the small-government foundation of American conservatism. The good in our intellectual patrimony should not be traded away so cheaply.
What about integralism, that other specter haunting current Catholic political discourse? Integralism is often understood as the conviction that the polity, however it is manifested, must orient its citizens toward their highest good, which is the beatific vision. In other words, temporal politics, if it is rightly ordered, must serve spiritual ends. This is, we think, clearly Catholic teaching. However, we must be careful about this. It is not clear that this teaching is very easily mapped onto a situation in which the nation state, as a fundamentally modern creation, is the object of that right order. For most of the last two thousand years, Christians have pursued their spiritual end outside of the existence of centralized states, and certainly outside of the existence of the state understood as a sovereign entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and united through the constructs of ethnicity and mass culture.
In fact, the emergence of the national state and the emergence of de-Christianization are obviously two aspects of the same historical phenomenon. It is not merely that states and their nations are not necessary to Christianity. Nation-states were built as an alternative to Christendom. The nation-state broke both the institutional bridges between kingdoms that culminated in the papacy and the ideological commitment to Christianity as a universal bond. When the French Revolutionaries finally nationalized the church and then attempted to eliminate Christian devotion, they were following through on the promises of Gallicanism and Absolutism. Sovereignty is jealous of its rights. This is why confessional states always come to lay the emphasis on the “state” side of the equation, while the “confessional” side becomes mere ideology or mere aesthetic.
It is not that we think that politics and religion should be dis-integrated. Quite the opposite. It is that we believe that Christianity is a politics, a politics that demands and enables charity and peace. Total states are for the totally fallen, and Christianity is nothing else than humanity moving into its redemption. Catholic Postliberals ought to be opposed to the state because it idolatrously claims for itself a divine attribute, undivided and self-referential sovereignty, and attempts to order our world according to its will. We would order the world according to the will of God, and such an attempt could never claim such seamless power. Rather, each instance of human power must be for the good of what is below it while being subject to that which is above it in a hierarchy that is not quantitative, not a matter of relative or delegated power, but is qualitative, a matter of analogical ascent, wherein each level is fulfilled in its ascent to what is higher. Only God is not situated in such mutual dependence. Only God is, in that sense, sovereign.
But human rulers can, and must, properly image God in his rulership. We are not anarchists, because we believe that political authority, expressed at all levels of government, is a good thing, and no injustice. Law is necessary for the construction of its fulfillment in virtue. People must be taught and must be shown what virtue is, and law is a necessary aspect of this education. We are not pacifists because we believe that, in a fallen world where the peace is broken often, and where men commit injustice and threaten the wellbeing of others, force is no crime. Indeed, for a person to fail to use force when force is called for is a failure in the virtue of justice. And this is not simply a matter of self-defense, nor simply of vindication for the sake of the victim. As Oliver O’Donovan notes, justice does not only demand retribution for the sake of the victim; punishment is also something that is a ruler’s duty to an offender: it tells the truth about the offense.
It is the national state that would like to isolate individuals from the burden of coercion, hoarding all such political power for itself and applying it anonymously. In contrast, when politics get local, coercion gets personal. Men should face the coercive reality of politics head on, and not cower behind a statist hegemon. We should use coercion as personally as possible and answer for it as universally as possible. Law is particular. Justice is universal.
By thinking beyond the founding principles of modern politics, we re-imagine the world as one in which what is most valuable is not the state, nor any other mass construct, but the real, embedded, sometimes equal and sometimes unequal relationships in which men and women live and move. Because these relationships are governed by real justice instantiated in local and diverse mores, Catholic postliberals see claims to absolute sovereignty and monopolies on legitimate violence as simple tyranny. A mother's discipline of her children, a man's defense of his friend's honor, a community's use of a right-of-way – these are not strange exceptions to the political order. They are where we see real politics breaking through.
At the same time, a community turned inward and obsessed with its own good without regard to the good of the rest of humanity and creation, will fail. Justice is the path to social happiness and justice stretches from the siblings in the living room, to the boardrooms of corporations, to alliances between countries, and perhaps most dramatically, from the generations of the past, through the present, and on to the future. The particular can only find its good in the good of the universal, the temporal in the spiritual. The local is where politics is most properly politics; it is also where corruption is most profoundly corrupt. The local must be just and justice is universal.
This means that the smaller, the world of proper politics, can be itself only when it is integrated into the larger. Local politics may be the place where law is most properly made and enforced, but proper local law must be itself an instantiation of larger, more general law; this steady expansion ends only with the natural law, with the human participation in divine reason. This means that the smaller can be judged by the larger. But it does not mean that the smaller is a delegation from the larger. The town has every right to rule itself in justice through its own law. The king, however, has the obligation to make sure that they do so. Such hierarchy is almost nothing like the modern understanding of command structures. In this hierarchy, that which is higher has both less power and a wider scope for that power. He commands more of less, but that less is more fundamental. Such hierarchy culminates in the pope, who has no weapons, who controls not a single body, but who speaks with authority in matters of faith and morals, the most universal, and so judges everybody. The strength of the Body of Christ lies in its weakness. The universal power is the servant of all. Justice, properly understood, is the proper order of the whole hierarchy, the whole dynamic political reality of social life, from the living room to the Vatican and beyond to the angels and saints.
The solution to the problems in American politics is, therefore, not more national statism. It is less — less tyranny over the local and less usurpation of the universal. The National Conservatives are right about a great many things. If they could see a way forward without giving them up, many would certainly retain the subsidiarist ideals that have animated the best aspects of the American right, and likewise many would not give up the Christian pull to universal, worldwide solidarity. True Christian postliberalism is that way forward.
If Christians try to get control of and then use the power of the nationalist state on its own terms, they will find Jesus Christ giving way to the gods of power. Christ is the light of the nations, the King of kings. In him there is no longer Jew nor Greek. The curse of Babel is undone at Pentecost: the renewed unity of the human race does not come through uniformity, or at the expense of local difference. His way is the final fulfillment of politics and it is a way that does not lead through the “governments” of Paris, Berlin, or Washington, but through persons pursuing their final end in real communion, which encompasses the local in the universal. Freedom from Pharaoh is not a matter of becoming Pharaoh ourselves, but of undoing the fragmented, demonic world in which his power functions. Christians may indeed be prudent to take national political power, if possible, but only so that we can dismantle the mechanisms of manipulation; only so we can smash the idols of domination, and never so that we can build our own.
We can obey the Letter to the Romans -- we must recognize the political authority of our rulers. What we don’t have to do is believe their account of themselves and of their power-- Nero was not a son of god, even though he claimed to be, and he had no right to do wrong to his subjects, or to deny the authority of the true Son of God. The political authority of the US government is not the alienated self-sovereignty of all of its equal citizens, jostled into a social contract. That’s simply a fiction. Nor is it the political manifestation of some pre-political nation or people. That too is a fiction. And it is time to tell the truth.
Thanks to Susannah Black, whose name does not appear as an author; she is, on some points, unpersuaded.