The Great Unraveling of the American Experiment

Sociologist James Davison Hunter on the cultural unraveling behind the culture war

Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and convictions recognize that the entire political ecosystem—not only its leadership and its governing institutions, but also its leading ideas and ideals—is failing.

With this quote, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter telegraphs his fundamentally gloomy view of the future of the American experiment - a pessimism broadly shared by many Americans of various political stripes.

His new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis is an explanation of how we got here, and what it means for our current cultural and political conditions. It is a return to the focus of his early 90s work on cultural conflict in Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War.

This is an important book. It’s not a light read, but for those who aren’t afraid to take on a more intellectual work, I highly recommend it.

Like many such works, Hunter’s book tells the history of America seen through a particular lens. In this case, it’s what he calls the “hybrid Enlightenment,” or the shared cultural underpinnings that enabled social and political solidarity in the US.

The hybrid Enlightenment is a combination of multiple elements, principally the English and Scottish strands of the Enlightenment and a millenarian Christianity of both the austere Calvinistic variety and a sort of populist folk one.

This hybrid Enlightenment was flawed, with various incomplete or contradictory elements that needed to be “worked through” (his adaptation of a Freudian term), such as racial injustice. But this working through, along with the evolution of society, caused the hybrid Enlightenment to slowly dissolve over time to the point where it no long provides a basis for solidarity, of which he says:

Solidarity is not just about the will to come together to do the work of democratic politics. It is about the cultural preconditions and the normative sources that make that coming together possible in the first place…Solidarity in this more capacious sense defines a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place…The power of solidarity is found in the unspoken, often vague or fuzzy resonances of shared identity, shared affections, shared challenges, and a shared destiny.

After tracing his history, Hunter then provides a deeply depressing overview of our current cultural and political climate, one that raises fully legitimate questions about the future of American democracy due to the loss of the pre-conditions of solidarity. He writes:

The contention of this book is that we are at a moment when the answer to the fundamental question about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be assumed—though not because we are polarized, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to work through what divides us.

And later:

That does not mean that democracy in America is dead. It is not. But it is far from healthy, and prospects for its vitality are not at all bright. In all likelihood, it will endure in form, but its substance will continue to be hollowed out. In its wake, the legitimation crisis will continue to harden: confidence in the range of governing institutions will continue to weaken, cynicism toward the leadership class will deepen, and the alienation of ordinary citizens from their nation will worsen. What is there to impede or reverse this course?

Two things stood out to me while reading this book. The first is that he hits essentially every critical element of American history, including many that are frequently neglected. I made a list of items in my head to look for in the book, and by the end he’d hit all of them. This includes things ranging from early 20th century anarchist bombings to managerialism to McCarthyism as a type of ethnic self-assertion by the Ellis Island generation.

The second is the overall fairness of the book. Hunter works hard to be even handed to both liberals and conservatives. I’m sure both will have many issues with his takes. The right might say that he devotes way too much ink to race. The left might say that he legitimizes the illegitimate. But while no one will agree with everything, I thought on the whole he worked hard to be balanced. For example, he gives a lengthy writeup of the Claremont Institute. While my guess is that any Claremont people reading it would disagree with parts of what he said, they would recognize it as a basically fair writeup (in contrast to the typical hit job piece).

Critiquing of Modern America

I want to briefly highlight the ways in which Hunter validates the conservative critiques of modern America. This is not the main thrust of his book. However, Hunter is both an academic and known for his association with Tim Keller. My more conservative and sometimes Keller-skeptical reader base is thus probably suspicious of Hunter as some kind of a liberal. So I want to highlight these factors to encourage you to read the book with an open mind.

In fact, Hunter makes more profound and effective critiques of modern America than many of the right wing critics of “clown world” do.

For example, Hunter views modern American society as dehumanizing:

Needless to say, in the contemporary environment, the sense of the lack of respect or esteem or welcome by so many has been politicized. While politicization may have some merit, it mainly distracts attention away from the broader conditions of the modern and late modern world that form a backdrop of institutional realities that in their nature challenge the moral worth of everyone living under these conditions. This backdrop is overwhelmingly—possibly essentially, even if not comprehensively—dehumanizing. And its reality is tangible, experienced by most people in the course of everyday life. That backdrop is so well established at this point and now so pervasive and commonplace that it is hardly noticed. It is constituted by several interwoven elements, most of which are well known. [emphasis added]

One such factor the bureaucratization (think: managerialism) of essentially every part of our lives.

He also recognizes the negative impact that large scale post-1965 immigration has had on social solidarity.

In this way, pluralism intensified considerably, and with it, waves of people for whom the hybrid-Enlightenment and the American mythos were, at the least, unfamiliar, strange, or perhaps incomprehensible. In turn, the assimilationist ethos that had been prevalent for generations became much more difficult to sustain. The demographic influx of non-European immigrants was parallel to and reinforced the decline of the mainline Protestant churches and the weakening of the WASP establishment and the regnant system of elite privilege, power, and class reproduction.

The immigrant and the private equity partner see America the same way: as a venue for extracting personal gain. This is quite different from the native born citizen, to whom America is also home. America as home means, among other things, a willingness to, on occasion, sacrifice one’s personal self-interest for the public good.

In the past, the children and grandchildren of immigrants could assimilate to America as home. But today, as Hunter describes so well, there’s nothing for them to assimilate to. Our society also explicitly frowns on assimilation. The result is persistent identity groups for whom life in America is a zero-sum competition for personal and group advancement.

Hunter, while noting and rejecting right wing authoritarianism, also validates that the American left is also authoritarian and even eliminationist (at least rhetorically). He writes:

In the competition for invective, Trump walked away with the biscuit, yet this hostility was not altogether unique to Trump or the new Republican Party. In fact, polling in 2019 found that Democrats were somewhat more likely than Republicans to admit thinking “on occasion” that “we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Democrats were also more likely than Republicans to agree that violence would be justified if the other party won the 2020 election. Similarly, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to describe their opponents as “un-American” (by eight points), “un-Christian” (by thirteen points), “dangerous” (by twenty-two points), and “evil” (by nine points).

He shows how accusations that Trump is a “fascist” are designed to give the green light to his opponents throwing out the rulebook and trying to stop him by any means necessary, fair or foul. He says, “If you are fighting a fascist, you are defending humanity itself, and you should go at it with no holds barred. The charge of fascism was intended to shake up the old consensus order in which conservatives were tolerated as the loyal opposition.”

He even talks about Fauci’s Covid lies:

In several notorious cases, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top public health officials told outright lies about scientific findings in an effort to promote what they saw as the most effective collective response to the pandemic.

In short, liberals by no means escape unscathed in Hunter’s account. Again, his critiques of them and of the current state of America are often more incisive than those coming from the right.

Rejecting the Cultural Politics of Hate

If the hybrid Enlightenment is effectively no more, then what has replaced it? Nietzschean nihilism:

There is indeed a void generated by the unraveling of America’s hybrid-Enlightenment, but it is a void now filled with a very different cultural logic, a cultural logic that owes more to Friedrich Nietzsche than to Thomas Jefferson. Filling that void, at least much of it, in our public culture are the cultural logics of nihilism.

Nihilism in its passive variety is result of the dehumanizating conditions of modern American life noted above:

Passive nihilism is the net effect of large, institutional dynamics intrinsic to the modern world—its technology, its bureaucracy, its markets, its pluralism, its entertainment—unfolding in the public sphere.

In a more active form, nihilism manifests itself in ressentiment, a Nietzschean concept that was a major theme in Hunter’s 2010 book To Change the World. Hunter defines it as “a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power.” Much deeper than simple resentment, he points out that it is a psychology as well, and “a cultural logic that is encoded within institutional life.” Ressentiment is not a result of some particular, discrete harm that one has suffered, but rather a general sense of inferiority or woundedness. This may be rooted in a genuine injustice, but one which has overflowed the bounds of simply being wronged.

The result is a cultural politics of hate. This new cultural politics, which spans many if not most groups, is the replacement for the old common culture of America:

Yet there is another story unfolding here as well, a story playing out simultaneously within the deep structures of American political culture. One could describe it as an emerging “common” culture, the form of which is manifest within and across every faction and division in American public life. Its shared cultural logic is defined by a moral authority rooted in rage, anger, and often hatred. Its mythoi or collective self-understandings revolve around narratives of injury and woundedness. Its ethical dispositions are defined by the desire for revenge through a predilection to negate. Its anthropology effectively reduces fellow citizens to enemies whose very presence represents an existential threat. And its teloi are power oriented toward domination. [emphasis added]

It results in part from the loss of the shared understandings of the old hybrid Enlightenment:

Absent any shared notion of reason, revelation, human nature, republicanism, or “revolution” as the grounds to establish claims or to resolve disputed claims—absent any more or less fixed cosmology within which the world could be ordered—authority becomes rooted in subjectivity. This is not news. It is one of the hallmarks of modernity. In the late modern age, however, this culminates politically in a subjective and intersubjective rage that, in turn, becomes the source from which any claims to grievance are made legitimate, from which any claims to redress are justified and made compelling, and from which solidarity within identity groups is formed.

The results are our perverse politics of hate:

Outrage against a grievance caused by others, then, becomes the source of authentic identity and authentic action. In this strange calculus, the more rage the better. In turn, rage, hatred, and the desire for revenge that emanate from injury become the source of meaning and purpose for those who see themselves as victims. Injury, then, is definitional. Identity—formed negationally—depends upon an active and hostile enemy to exist at all….Identity groups become so deeply attached to their own impotence, exclusion, and subordination because they provide the premises upon which the group’s existence depends. [emphasis added]

How do we escape this? It’s easier to get into a culture war than to get out of one. Once a culture war starts, a sort of Prisoner’s Dilemma logic takes over. The possibility that the conflict could existential at the level of the way of life is all too real, as Hunter acknowledges:

Tragically, all actors involved understand the situation in existential terms. The other side is the enemy of all that is or could be right and good about America. And it is to be treated accordingly. For the other side to win is to be stigmatized, excluded, dominated, and oppressed. For those involved, it feels like a life-and-death conflict. They may be right—if not literally, then culturally. [emphasis added]

Thus there is a perverse logic to the culture war that’s hard to escape.

Hunter does not provide a roadmap here. In fact, he provides little in the way of specific advice or tactics. Instead, he concludes his pessimistic book with a chapter on what a renewed healthy politics would have to incorporate.

But I would submit, and Hunter said similarly in our podcast, that we must reject the cultural politics of hate and recognize the humanity of the other side.

I will address conservatives here. Hunter’s book clearly says that liberals embrace this politics of hate and negation. They do intend to destroy the way of life of conservatives.

But the question is not about them but about us.

Too often conservatives are simply a mirror image of the left. I’m distressed to read statements online like, “It’s impossible to live in the same country with these people.” This is, candidly, eliminationist rhetoric that sees the people rather than the ideas, movements, and system as the problem.

This is one thing that the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin got right in his earlier writings. He would talk about wanting a “velvet glove revolution” (that is, not repressive or vengeful against the citizenry). He’d say that, “We like the people. It’s the government we don’t like.” Government here representing the form of government, which he wanted to replace with a type of outré patchwork quilt of city-states run by sovereign, publicly traded corporations. His ideas of “formalism” and “neocameralism” attest to this focus on the system of government, broadly understood, as the problem rather than the people. His ideas for a replacement are, of course, insane. But he largely avoided the politics of hate.

The problem for us is that there really are people, unfortunately more than a handful of them, on the left who mean us ill. We’ve seen all too many social media mob attacks to this effect. So what do you do?

The first thing is to recognize the basic humanity of your opponent. Hunter says, “The question of the moral worth of the human person, as I have posed it, is the fundamental question for any society that imagines itself to be—or aspires to become—genuinely humane.” And, “It is critical that we rediscover human beings underneath the abstractions of our inflammatory symbolic politics.”

Here a Calvinistic conception of human depravity is helpful in seeing the wrong in your enemy without denying their humanity. Calvinistic Christianity believes that it is impossible for any man to overcome his depravity in the absence of supernatural action in the form of grace. Hence if we see someone in thrall to what we believe are bad ideas, motives, and actions, it may well be that they cannot but be otherwise. It seems to me that the injunction to pray for your enemy is in part rooted in this reality. The prayer might be that they would receive grace such that the conflict could as a result become less existential, and thus open the possibility of resolution.

Boethius made this same point in his Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius, a former high court official in the Roman Empire, fell out of favor and was unjustly imprisoned until a painful execution. He wrote this great work from prison awaiting death. He writes:

There is no place whatever for hatred in the mind of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate good men, and it is irrational to hate the wicked; for if vice is a species of mental illness comparable to illness in the body, since we regard those who are physically ill as wholly undeserving of hatred and deserving rather pity, then men with minds oppressed by wickedness, a condition more dreadful than any sickness, should all the more be pitied rather than hounded.

This doesn’t mean we should passively accept defeat or stand down from political conflict. Nor does it mean that we shouldn’t do things like move to an area populated with more like minded people, which is a completely rational choice in today’s environment. It does means not dehumanizing your enemy, and recognizing that you actually will be living in the same country with them.

The second thing to do is to make sure to establish a positive identity not a negative one. You should know what you are for, not just what you are against (although there are plenty of things to be against today). Too much of the cultural politics of hate is organized around the enemy, as Hunter noted above.

I previously devoted a newsletter to this very topic.

Newsletter #84: Why You Need a Positive Vision

The last point is to recognize that today’s conflict may not be as existential as we think. So much focus is put on the upcoming election. But regardless of the outcome, it does not necessarily mean the end for the loser.

Hunter gave a great example of this, I believe in his podcast with Russell Moore. You would think that if anything would settle something, it would have been the Civil War. But while the Civil War did end slavery, it did not lead to blacks being included into American society or even being given basic civil rights for another 75 or so years after the end of Reconstruction. The South reconstructed a system of Jim Crow to replace slavery that endured generationally.

Similarly, Roe vs. Wade did not settle the abortion debate. Nor did its overturning. Nor will any laws of any type passed today.

Simply acquiring the levers of power, even nearly ultimate power as with complete military victory or a Supreme Court ruling declaring something a constitutional right, is not necessarily decisive.

When Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars came out, the reaction of his sociology colleagues was “What culture war? This is a mopping up operation.” They thought their victory was a foregone conclusion. They were badly mistaken.

So while the election may be important, it probably isn’t the last election ever - or whatever various things people think about it - regardless of who wins. And the future will contain surprises we can’t even guess at today.

Reject the dehumanization of the other. Have a positive identity. And avoid assuming every event has apocalyptic significance.

These are all ways to stay sane and avoid being corrupted while fighting vigorously for what you believe to be right and to preserve your way of life.

Click to buy Democracy and Solidarity.

In case you missed here, here is my podcast about the book with James Davison Hunter.