Front Porch and Empire: The Blessings, and Limits, of limits

This is an expanded version of a talk that given at the 2019 Front Porch Republic conference on September 14, 2019, in honor of Wendell Berry, who was the keynote speaker.

My mother’s family, the McKees, have a country place on a lake in Mystic, Connecticut. Large quantities of us end up there every summer. The house sleeps twelve in real beds, but cousins stash themselves in every corner, and sleep in hammocks; there are regularly twenty people staying there at a time. It’s more than two hundred years old, and has one electrical outlet, installed over protests during a period of autocratic rule by my great uncle in the early seventies, when he decided we needed a well that went down to the aquifer, and that would require an electrical pump. The family used an icebox until it became clear we would need a refrigerator because the icebox was just not keeping up with the number of children my grandparent’s generation were making. (My mother has five brothers; people used to ask my grandmother all the time, “oh, are you Catholic?” “No,” she would say, deadpan, “we’re just passionate Protestants.”)

I fact checked this with my mother; she confirmed. “Somewhere along the line, recently, though,” she pointed out, “there has been infiltration… quiet infiltration. There was that extension cord with the power strip that someone ran into the living room, which we all started plugging our phones into.” She told me, as we were going up to the house most recently, that the reactionary element of the family had prevailed and that extension cord was now gone. No one misses it. 

“I mean, if you want to get into the minute theological differences between family members,” she reminded me, “you’d need to talk about Peter, and the savage poem he wrote against electrification; you’d have to talk about the [author’s note: thankfully unsuccessful] protest that the third generation, the boomers, staged against their parents in the seventies when the second generation had decided to install an indoor toilet.”

She pointed out that to a certain degree, this is all arbitrary: The original owners had used whale oil in their lamps; we use kerosene. We’re not going to go back to whale oil any time soon, even though Peter would probably like that. Children are taught early how to light lamps safely, how to refill them when they run low, how to trim the wicks. If I stay there for long enough, I lose the instinct to flick on a light-switch when I go into a dark room; it is replaced with the instinct to grope for a match.

We have lobster boils, we have swimming races, we kayak to the drawbridge in downtown Mystic, tie up our kayaks, go get ice cream. We hike up Lantern Hill and contemplate the purchase of more of the land on the lake-shore; we have committee meetings to deal with complex legal instruments in which we find ourselves entangled; we build bonfires and sit around and talk until the last of the flames die down. We sing. We tell stories. We tell secrets. We play chess, and we play a lot of bridge: children of the family are required to learn it young, in case there’s ever a need for a fourth; they’re also taught how to make an excellent rum smash, which is what you have to do when your partner wins the bid so you’re the dummy. 

Every couple of years we have a formal reunion, to which the whole clan is summoned. When we all show up, there are upwards of a hundred of us. (That’s counting in-laws, who, understanding their non-blood status, refer to themselves as outlaws). 

At the beginning and end of every summer we have work weekends, sometimes more than one, where whatever repairs are needed get done, although there are always other projects going on throughout the summer as well — stairs to be rebuilt, ceilings to be replastered.

My mother is in the process of writing what she describes as a white paper to re-articulate the vision of the family and its relationship to the house in Connecticut. We recently had to cut down a couple of major trees on the property, which we got converted to firewood; her white paper will, she says, also involve a detailed plan for re-planting trees that will not mature for years.

We’re not gun people, but we do like knives. My mother’s cousin Dean makes them, forging the blades and carving the handles; my cousin Harper has a side-hustle sharpening them, which he used to make cash when he was at Yale for architecture. We’re also very competitive. A favorite game is Stretch. How it works is this: two of us will stand about five feet apart, feet together. Cousin A throws a knife, aiming to get it to stick into the grass less than a hand’s-breadth from one of Cousin B’s feet. Cousin B moves his foot to touch the knife, then pulls it out of the ground, and throws it at Cousin A’s feet. This goes on, their feet getting further and further apart, until one of them falls over. If you flinch, it’s an automatic disqualification; if you stab your cousin’s foot, you lose.  

There are other similar games which we’ve developed. There’s the one called Red Hot Chain. There’s the one called Dibble. There’s the one called Under the Raft. No one has ever been killed, not in ninety years and five generations of this nonsense. 

We have, it seems to me, as a family an unusually extreme craving for danger and play. Nietzsche thought that this was something that only men need. He was, of course, wrong. 

The most extreme version of this tendency manifested itself a couple of reunions ago. We always have some sort of formalized competition. That year, each of the five septs of the clan built some kind of contraption to fire a projectile at the island in the middle of the lake. One sub-family built a gigantic slingshot strung with medical-grade rubber, one built a potato gun that used hairspray as an accelerant. I can’t remember what the third and fourth families built, but the fifth family, my grandmother’s sister Maggie’s children and their children, built a full sized trebuchet, a medieval siege engine something like a catapult. My mother’s cousin Dean loaded it into the back of his truck and drove it up to the house with Ride of the Valkyries blasting from the sound system. 

We’re freakishly verbal. Dorothy Parker was one of my grandmother’s heroines. How this nets out is that I have recently realized that two of my love languages are sarcasm, and throwing knives at family.

I’m telling you this to explain why it is that I find a certain kind of political theology extremely appealing. 

Recently, in this journal, Andrew Willard Jones, Marc Barnes, and Jacob Fareed Imam made a case for localism that went considerably beyond Bill Kauffman’s wildest dreams, although I shouldn’t say that; I don’t know what he dreams about. Politics, they point out, begin with the married couple, begin with the household. The family is, as we know, the “first society.” The nation-state, with its claim of sovereignty, flattens all other hierarchies, emasculates all other forms of rule. By locating total rulership in the nation, nation-statism denies the claims of both lower and higher-level political bodies: the sovereign nation-state is a rebellion against the family and the city.

Catholic Postliberals, they wrote, 

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.

It was a striking argument. I helped edit the piece; I seem to have added this journal to my collection of mastheads, magazine editing addict that I am, so pitch me. And I did what I have a bad habit of doing — I started editing before I’d read through the piece all the way for the first time. So there I was, going through it, following the logic, testing every knot to make sure it held, beefing up the rhetoric, adding clarifications, adding Oliver O’Donovan references, as is my wont.

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... what virtue is and law is a necessary aspect of this education… 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.

Fair enough. I mean, this is all correct; can I disagree? And then I read this:

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.

That, I will tell you, brought me up short. That is one hell of an esoteric teaching. That’s localism with teeth. 

“What is most valuable,” they go on, 

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... – these are not strange exceptions to the political order. They are where we see real politics breaking through.

Recently, in an essay in Church Life Journal, Scott Beauchamp wrote about what he called the new epidemic of kinlessness. The first demographic transition had whittled the dense kinship network of the clan down to the nuclear family; the second was destroying even that. Many people now live in a world with no close kin, or only a few. It is, as he describes it, an epidemic of loneliness. 

I read that on the day that a photo from last Reunion, of Harper and Will playing Stretch, with a ring of family members looking on, popped up on my Facebook Memories. And I realized that I had literally never for a day of my life had to survive outside a large, dense, landowning, oddly armed kin network. It seems that my family simply failed to get the memo about the first demographic transition.

You can probably tell why the Jones/Barnes/Imam thesis appeals. It seems simply true to life. Although my family are politically as left and as progressive as it is possible to be, their actual practices — their insistence on the sacredness of tradition, on the reality and importance of this clan as something like a political project, surpasses the traddiest of trads. 

Unlike Mr. Berry’s family, we are not farmers, although we are (this is a shameful secret) absentee landlords to a GMO soybean farm somewhere in the Middle. (Indiana? Illinois?) But we have an intense love of and understanding of the boundaries of our Connecticut land; we walk those boundaries as one of our regular activities.

It was in the context of this household that I learned the practices of conservation, of building something good by respecting how the world actually is. What Hannah Arendt wrote about the polis is true about this single house: “physically secured by the wall… and guaranteed by its laws… is a kind of organized remembrance.”

These limits, this wall and these laws, experienced in this house, force this family to exist within history, and not at its end.

Berry speaks, uniquely, across the ideological divide in our country, which is the one that lies between me and my family. That is, he appeals to those both on the right and on the left, because it is through the lens of conservation and ecology, of farming and food, that people on the left can understand what people on the right sense about other areas of life: that limits are real, that limits are good, that we can’t and shouldn’t fight the natural order, but that we should respect it and work with it; that we should conserve it. It is peculiar that many on the right, while they can see this in other areas of life, find it difficult to accept or trust when it comes to conservation. 

To keep a farm productive, I am told, you must follow the law of the soil. The Bruderhof farmer-poet Philip Britts wrote just after the Second World War that 

Adam was charged with the double task to “subdue and replenish” the earth. If a graph could be plotted of the subjection of nature by man, it would show a line, rising slowly at first, through several thousand years, then abruptly and very steeply in the last few years. A graph of the replenishment of the earth by man would probably show a slow rise throughout the centuries, but instead of following the sharp rise of the line of subjection in modern times, would perhaps curve downwards. This in spite of the extensive use of fertilizers, because chemicals without humus do not give lasting or balanced replenishment.

Subjection and replenishment, in other words, go hand in hand. Adam was called to both. To impose your will on the land is good, to bring it in to order, but you must do good to it, too, you must give it what it needs, and not merely take; you must allow and encourage its own being, bring it to its own order, according to its nature, not impose an alien order on it. Voluntarist farming is a recipe for agricultural disaster. “Become what you are” is what the farmer should say to the land, as it is what God says to the farmer. 

This is something that those on the left can see with regard to the environment, to conservation. But Britts goes on, getting considerably less woke: this subjection 

can only realize its full meaning in the context of an organic life. Man’s relationship to the land must be true and just, but this is only possible when his relationship to his fellow man is true and just and organic. This includes the relationship of all the activities of man, the relationship… of science with art, the relationship between the sexes, and above all the relationship between man’s spiritual life and his material life.

Even orthodox Christians have often presented limits, the need for work, the world that pushes back against you, as the result of the Fall, and they likewise tend to present politics itself as a postlapsarian thing. Adam and Eve lived in a world of infinitely effective will, they seem to think, and an apolitical world; we will return to that world in the New Jerusalem. 

But this is false. Humans, as long as they are human, have limits; and first, the fundamental boundary of the skin that says “This is me, and that is the world.” And it was before the Fall that God gave Adam and Eve their charge, the mandate to fill the earth and subdue it. Even before the Fall, there was work to do, productive and creative work, the human work of culture and agriculture. 

This is a subtly different vision of the world than the classical vision. “Fundit humo facilem victum justissima tellus” “The infinitely kindly earth pours forth an easy sustenance,” says Virgil, of the Earth in the age of Saturn; “before [the age of] Jove,”

Fields knew no taming hand of husbandmen;
To mark the plain or mete with boundary-line—
Even this was impious; for the common stock
They gathered, and the earth of her own will
All things more freely, no man bidding, bore. (1)

Or, to quote the hymn to Persephone which another poet puts in the mouth of Orpheus,

Liba Apolloni fructibus Telluris
nil quam spirare redditor petitum
cepisse vita solum credidisse
  nutriat Ceres

Aderit horno nobis messis satis
cratera abundat cuique terra cordi
cupiditate nisi rapta vero
  copia cornu. (2)

In that prelapsarian earth, Virgil thought, there was simply not much to do. There was nothing to be conquered, nothing to be tamed: all was tame enough already. It was, after all, Arcadia. The only culture needed was, perhaps, a young man with a lyre. And there was no need for boundaries or for the imposition of the will of man. In the Saturnine earth, in other words, there were no economics, and no politics. It was only after the Fall — after the conquest of the Titans by the Olympians — that

The great Sire himself [i.e. Jove]
No easy road to husbandry assigned,
And first was he by human skill to rouse
The slumbering glebe, whetting the minds of men
With care on care, nor suffering realm of his
In drowsy sloth to stagnate.

The necessity to cultivate, and name, came as the result of the Fall: Jove “shooed from the leaves their honey, put fire away, and curbed the random rivers running wine” in order

That use by gradual dint of thought on thought

Might forge the various arts, with furrow’s help
The corn-blade win, and strike out hidden fire
From the flint’s heart. Then first the streams were ware
Of hollowed alder-hulls: the sailor then
Their names and numbers gave to star and star,
Pleiads and Hyads, and Lycaon’s child
Bright Arctos…

The Christian (and Jewish) vision is almost shockingly different. For the Biblical authors, and for the tradition, the marks of human rule and human culture are in principle not only phenomena of the postlapsarian world. The names of animals (and of stars?), Roman roads and Abbasid maps, Petra and Heliopolis, Grand Central Station and the Hofburg, novels and songs, vineyards instead of merely wild grapes – these are, or could be, a working out of the original world-smithing project. Work itself is not a curse. Sure, Adam and Eve didn’t actually get to much of this, pre-Fall. But they would have. The task was already at hand, God’s gauntlet already thrown down.

It’s true that in the postlapsarian Earth, for Adam’s sons, it is not just hard work that conquers the world, but what Virgil called “labor… improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas”—  “unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is hard.” But even before the Fall, there was a quest. Even before the Fall, there was political rule: of God as High King over Adam and Eve; of Adam over Eve; and by Adam and Eve as viceregents over the created order, with letters of marque and reprisal to bring that unexplored wilderness to heel, to make it more fruitful according to its nature, to make it become itself.

Even before the Fall, there was a world to win. After the Resurrection, as we begin to live out now our lives as redeemed men and women, it is this task that we are still called to carry out: culture and agriculture, exploration and discovery, adventure and risk, a political and historical mission in a world that — thank God! — pushes back. 

And, presumably, when the New Heavens and the New Earth are inaugurated, we will continue to have this task. Astonishingly, what has been called the Faustian spirit of man (not, as Spengler thought, of European man) seems to find a place in the God of Abraham’s original and unthwarted intent for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve.

In a recent piece for First Things, Sohrab Ahmari pointed out that even many on the right reject this vision of the world. Right-liberals and their more consistent libertarian brethren, he says, share in the vision of the progressives that the purpose of politics is autonomy maximization, a life without limits. For liberals on both the left and right, 

The unfettered life is the best life… [But] our classical and biblical heritage holds a different lesson: that we are not free merely to the degree that we are unregulated, unrestricted, and undisciplined...[N]early every social indicator suggests Western polities badly need limits — limits, which, if they aren’t to be rejected as arbitrary, must arise from a reasonable account of the true ends of man, in his private and collective lives, and the true ends of political community. 

It is this truth, the truth and goodness of limits, that the progressive left tends to see in regard to nature, to the environment, and to be blinded to in all other regards: in regard to the implacable reality of male and female bodies, in regard to the binding nature of the ties between the generations, in regard, even, to the need for police to enforce order. All constraint except for the constraint of the biosphere, they experience as tyranny. But this is nonsense: Not just in the case of environmental destruction, but in other ways too, reality bites back, and that bite is not tyranny. That bite is good.

And part of the reality, the nature, that bites back is moral reality, and so all non-tyrannical political rule is precisely that which aims at re-orienting the subject and the community to the natural moral law, towards their own true ends, and to the true political common good. “You can’t legislate morality,” we are told. But as Adrian Vermeule has pointed out, the liberalism that asserts this leaves out of its calculations “the deepest desires and beliefs of its subjects. The Achilles’ heel of liberalism is this hunger for the real as expressed in politics, the hunger to come to grips with the substance of the common good.” This desire is, and should be, expressed in law.

If liberals, though, are twitchy about the idea of coercive justice at all, especially retributive justice, conservatives are twitchy about the idea of restorative justice. And they should not be. Coercion in the civil realm, the punishment of a crime, can be an act of love and even an act of mercy, because it commands attention, prevents an offender from evading reality. Just civil punishments are just the most dramatic way of "setting limits," of enforcing those healthy barriers to action that are needed in order for any meaningful action at all to take place, any final commitment. 

And the same is true, again, of the household. To keep a clan going, you must follow the oeconomia, the household law, of that family. My family’s household law has to do with learning to keep an eye on the little ones when they’re swimming, learning how to care for the kerosene lamps to avoid setting the house on fire, learning that you need to pitch in when there are dishes to be washed, and learning that there will be consequences if you don’t. We are just to each other by not freeloading, we are just to each other by helping shuck corn, rather than only eating it. Us younger ones, the fourth generation, honor our elders by taking over Reunion planning, and by playing as much bridge as is required, and by carrying groceries in from the car.  

It’s not always a pleasant process: children are naturally lazy; I can remember crying as I stood at the sink, age ten or so, washing dishes because my uncle was making me, seeing to it that I helped out, and I really didn’t want to. But you learn, because the desire to be part of the family project, the desire to please your elders and to show yourself to be worthy of their trust, and to be useful, is a real thing. You learn, because being part of a family is another one of those things like learning to play the piano: you push against your limits, you discipline yourself, you grow in virtue in order to be able to experience a better good, even a better pleasure, than the pleasure you might have had in slacking off. 

The experience of a common good, and even a political common good, that I’ve had growing up in that family has thoroughly shaped me. 

I was not raised Christian; my father is Jewish, and my grandfather was an ordained UCC minister, but the Protestantism was so attenuated as to be a matter of being in favor of the United Nations, and having a vague sense that it was one’s job to help run the world well, probably by starting an NGO to help promote sustainable development, or, God help us, the “open society.”

But the complicated, satisfying joy of those summers, those reunions, and the grief that at the end of them, each nuclear family had to go back to our own separate households, and the sense that those times together were some kind of preview of coming attractions, was one of the things that helped explain to me the marriage supper of the lamb, the expectation of the New Jerusalem. 

* * *

If that were all, I could end here, on a perfectly household-politics note, a perfect note, in fact, for this conference, and I could avoid getting in trouble with Mr. Berry. But that is not all. 

I have said that the Jones thesis, of politics as fundamentally a matter of the face to face, appeals to me. But that is not the whole story-- not even the whole story of my family. We are not farmers, we McKees. We shouldn’t be farmers. We are academics and journalists and just massive quantities of lawyers, you have no idea how many lawyers. 

My grandfather really did have a sort of assumption that if possible one should deal with professionals within one’s own family; when my second cousin Hannah decided to go to medical school, he said, with satisfaction, “good, we need a doctor.” But there is no possible way that you could mistake us for a complete community. We can cook lobsters but we’re not lobstermen; we can drink whiskey but we’re not moonshiners, and in any case we prefer vodka. We have many correct opinions about cuts of meat, and are skilled at marinating, but we couldn’t butcher a cow, except my cousin Harper, who went to two years of a kind of alternative ranch-college in California before Yale.

And we’re not countrymen and countrywomen. We are urbanites. The family was originally from New York City, with side trips to DC, and, in the second generation, to New Delhi, and there’s always a Sunday afternoon, at the end of every summer, when we’re driving back to the city, and there’s a crispness in the air, and a sense of anticipation: there’s a new academic year, there’s policy to be written, there are conferences to be organized, there are NGOs to be started and cases to be tried and magazines to be edited. 

New York is no complete community either, but there are police there who have the authority to use a degree of coercive power which, despite the Wild West localism of Jones et. al., I am rather glad that my great-grandfather did not have; knowing what I know of him, I’m not sure I’d have trusted him with it. The law by which my great-grandfather bound us who were not yet born in the trust he made to keep that land in the family, the law with which we bind ourselves when we renew the terms of that trust, is not family law; it’s New York State law. 

New York State is, as Kauffman knows, the Empire State, and New York City is the Empire City: it is, very precisely, the city that knows that America is an empire, and not a republic. So be it. As Jones et. al. point out, the modern idea of the “state” is in rebellion not just against lower-level political authority, but against higher-level authority as well: against the Church and against the Empire. Moreover, it is the liberal state, not the empire, that can’t allow Port William to exist as a true political community, a place that is its own place and no other, because it is the liberal state that requires national cultural uniformity, a bland monoculture.

If you let your political imagination be dominated only by the household economy, you will not have the room to breathe.  

What does this imply? Though we have spoken of the beginnings of politics in the smallest society, in marriage, in this case, in my great-grandparents’ marriage, and in the life of a family, it is not the case that smaller is necessarily better, nor that the political community of the imperial city, or of the empire itself, is no true political community. 

The “flavor” of complete political communities, and even such incomplete ones as New York, will be different than the flavor of a clan. The “flavor” of the political common good is more austere: We may have feelings about America on the Fourth of July, but the experience of the common good here is (or should be) the experience of living in a just and well-ordered society, one in which judges are not corrupt and laws reflect the natural law. 

This less-cozy feeling does not imply that these bodies are not true communities. What makes a political community is, at least in part, a common sense of what humans are, and are for; a common understanding of justice, and confidence that justice is and will be done; trust in one’s rulers to be acting in the interest of the community. 

Ideally, a polity will have not just a common understanding of what humans are, and are for, but also an accurate one; ideally its understanding of justice, as instantiated in its laws, will likewise be accurate, and its laws will be patterned after the natural law. The true political common good is the virtuous life of the people, pursued together, under the discipline of law that impresses justice in their souls. 

That is not a thing that a family alone can do, any more than a family alone can live commodiously. We can get corn and lobster locally, at the lake house; we harmonize on Sondheim while washing dishes; we make and enforce rules for the kids. But for caviar and full-scale Broadway productions and the civil magistracy, we need to go back to the City. To be drawn up into the proper life of the polity, and finally to the political life of the Kingdom of God, is what completes the smaller and incomplete political life that we experience in our families and in smaller communities.

America is not a family; New York is not a family; the Empire is not a family. All scales of true polity are ikons of the Kingdom of God according to different manners; the imperial scale is an ikon of its grandeur, its magnificence, its universality. The Kingdom of God is not cozy. 

But what the empire cannot do in its universality is to forget the authority of other scales of polity, and to forget how authority itself works.

We have a picture of this in Christ’s encounter with the Roman centurion, when the man asks him to heal his servant, who is ill, suffering terribly. You remember how this plays out: Christ agrees, and says he’ll go with the centurion to his house. The centurion says that he knows that Christ does not need to actually go to his house to heal the man, but that he can command the illness with his word to leave him. And then he says something strange, to explain how he knows this. “For I too,” he says, “am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

Christ, we are told, “marveled,” and said to those with him, “Truly I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.” Faith, here, is the understanding of how authority works. The Centurion knows that Christ has authority from God to command the disease, because he knows how authority works. He clearly is a good master; he cares for his servant, is seeking a cure for him. It is from that position that he can “say to [his] servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” And he can do this because he himself is under authority. He does not fancy that his own authority is the authority of God, sui generis. In this he is wiser than his own master, the “imperator” of the legions —Tiberius, who styled himself divi filius, Son of God, and whose actions betray no love for his servants. 

Still, we are left with a puzzle: Tiberius’ own power as emperor is “ordained of God,” and we must think that the power of the liberal nation states under whose authority we find ourselves is as well. It was under Nero that St. Paul wrote those words with which everyone contemplating rebellion against a tyrant must grapple, and which are death to the liberal account of political authority: 

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 

There are several things to say here. One is that though we moderns read this as a breathtaking claim of absolutist authority, one which Creon could only envy, it is no such thing. Nero would not have found this to be good news. What it says to Nero is that his authority did not come from himself, nor from his own fancied status as divi filius. Rather, his authority was delegated, and he himself was under God’s authority; moreover, his authority is given to him for the sake expressly of promoting the good of his subjects. And part of that good — we see in the case of the Centurion — is understanding that there are others, even others under the authority of the Emperor and in his service, who also have authority that flows from God. One way that Nero might be a tyrant — one way, in fact, that he was — was to fail to recognize those other authorities. 

An America that acknowledged itself as an empire, although not perhaps yet the Empire of Our Lady of Guadalupe envisioned by Professor Vermeule, and that took on the responsibilities of being an empire, would be honest. That would mean taking seriously the claims of our various continental satrapies on the imperial hub. It would mean taking on the imperial responsibility of protecting the integrity of the political communities beneath it, from the family, to the farming town, to the city, in their own exercise of authority.

It’s false that we are still that republic of small farmers and doughty shopkeepers. We will never go back to being such a thing. But the end of that pretense is good. The end of all pretense is good. It was once true that we were a republic; it was never true that the authority with which the U.S. government rules was simply the alienated self-sovereignty of all of its equal citizens. That was just a story we were telling. It is time to tell the truth.  

(1) Rhoades trans., Vergil, Georgics 1:125-129. Orig.:

nulli subigebant aura coloni:
ne signare quidem aut partiti limite campum
fas erat; in medium quarebant, ipsaque tellus
omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat

(2) Charles Carman’s translation is excellent; however, nuance is always lost in translation, and so I will give it in the original English: Persephone, says Orpheus, pours forth easy sustenance, and he praises her for

…The sunshine and the fruit of the vine she gives us every year
Asking nothing in return except that we should live, and learn
to live as brothers in this life, and to trust she will provide
And if no one takes too much, there will always be enough
She will always fill our cups, and we will always raise them up.