America's broken commonwealth

New Statesman​

22-05-2025

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'Everything is politics, but politics is not everything.' This formidable book begins with a variant of the familiar maxim, underlining the difference between the 'politics of culture' and the 'culture of politics'. The former is to do simply with the struggles for dominance or survival between systems of value – one form among others of political conflict; but the latter is the overarching discourse that makes political organisation, rhetoric and institutions possible – the framework within which we are able as a community to argue, decide and change, without mutually annihilating violence.
James Davison Hunter is a seasoned and sophisticated commentator on the American scene, whose reputation was first established by a brilliant study in 1991 of the phenomenon of culture wars – a term he is credited with popularising if not inventing – and here he offers a comprehensive history that aims to clarify the roots of today's crisis of democratic accountability. The book was obviously completed before the election that returned Donald Trump to the White House; all that Hunter has to say only seems more pointed and urgent in the light of the present chaos.
The overall thesis is that American politics has been shaped by what Hunter calls a 'hybrid Enlightenment' mindset – a distinctive blend of the Enlightenment values of emancipation, opposition to sacralised authority, civic activism and reverence for rational discourse with something more organically and theologically grounded. This other element is a diffuse but deep religious sensibility, much influenced initially by the Calvinism of the first generation of English (and Scots) migrants, but increasingly modified by the less doctrinally precise piety of the 18th century. The alliance between rational ethics, often identified with the virtues of classical republican Rome, and fervent but doctrinally loose devotion survived well into the 20th century as a common national myth, maintaining its hold even through successive evangelical 'Awakenings' that intensified popular religious practice. 'Evangelically infused republican virtue' became the default setting for public and private life.
But this myth, says Hunter, was holed below the waterline well before the end of the 19th century, its force steadily eroding as a result of the Civil War. The myth had presented the United States both as a model of rational and egalitarian political life and as an earthly sign of the coming heavenly kingdom – a nation established by the sovereign providence of God to offer both challenge and hope to other polities. As other scholars have argued, it depicted the US as a kind of church at least as much as a nation, a community created by divine guidance, consolidated in a 'covenantal' understanding (God's solemn promise to the nation reflected in the mutual commitment of its citizens), legislating and educating on the basis of Christian principles.
But it was impossible to ignore indefinitely what the myth conveniently obscured. This sacred commonwealth, participatory and democratic, a nest of responsible civic communities peaceably negotiating their internal and mutual differences in patient deliberation, was in fact ruthlessly exclusive of a whole series of collective 'others' – Catholics and some other Christian dissidents (including Mormons by the later 19th century), indigenous Americans and, above all, the enormous population of enslaved black people. The debates over slavery before and during the Civil War showed that the theological authorities seen as upholding the cultural solidarity that made virtuous public life possible were the same texts appealed to by many to support the institution and practice of slaveholding, and the radical dehumanising of black populations (enslaved and otherwise). The evangelical/republican, hybrid Enlightenment model was coming to look deeply flawed and, worse, deceitful.
When the kind of solidarity encoded in a myth like that of the youthful US is undermined, when it is obvious that its unity is shored up by a series of nakedly violent exclusions, what suffers is the political energy and cohesion of the state. As Hunter says, once you have lost the authority of a common ethos and narrative, values ultimately have to be imposed by force. A solidarity deficit leads ultimately to authoritarianism.
As the 20th century advanced, growing numbers of American intellectuals worked at constructing alternatives to the founding myth that might do a better and more honest job of providing political discourse with a set of shared values and conventions. Hunter discusses the attempts of figures like John Dewey and Walter Lippmann to develop a 'public philosophy' adequate to this job. They argued for a perspective that was humanistic in the broadest sense, taking the value of the individual and the cultural virtues of imagination and empathy as fundamental – hence their advocacy of a clear and influential role for the humanities in education (the novelist and critic Lionel Trilling, not directly mentioned by Hunter, would be another significant presence in this lineage).
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But the problem with these and other efforts, he argues, is that they slip in an apparently groundless sense of obligation to collective human good, a 'natural' commitment to the neighbour, that fails to deliver a durable basis for political civility across disagreement and tension. If the only alternative to this is a direct appeal to straightforwardly religious doctrine to establish foundations for all social order (and there are currently a fair number of essays in this vein), there is a decreasing possibility of real cultural solidarity: the primary thing is to win, to gain control of the tools for enforcing your view. Hunter shows how even a sophisticated and ironic relativist like Richard Rorty in effect echoes the assumption that there are some people just not worth talking/listening to; all you can do is try to mock them out of their certainties and make sure they do not get too near any mechanisms of power. There is no idea of 'losers' rights' in the political process, or of the provisionality and necessary fluidity of political loyalties. Political loyalty is absolute because it is identical with moral identity. The opponent is wicked, not just misguided.
Hunter spells out the likely practical consequences of this void at the centre of a democratic process divorced from shared values, unanchored in a common 'culture of politics'. Among those possible consequences is civil war – not the large-scale battlefield conflicts of the 19th century (war has changed substantially since then),but guerrilla violence, the creation of no-go areas in cities and states, the discrediting of the rule of law. Not inevitable; far from unthinkable.
The issue is ultimately how we avoid nihilism. If all political conflict is an absolute and irreconcilable clash between comprehensive systems, it can afford to ignore persuasion, negotiation, reasoned defence, manageable compromise. And, as Hunter notes, it is not a problem only on the political right, however much that is currently the most visible site for inflammatory rhetoric; he is able to quote a fair bit of absolutist and morally contemptuous language from 'progressives'. JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he mordantly observes, have more in common with each other than either does with Franklin Roosevelt – or Jimmy Carter or even the first George Bush, we might add, let alone Abraham Lincoln. To talk of 'nihilism' does not mean that individuals are left with no value systems at all. But it is to say that there is no overarching social and ethical vision that offers to hold together the diversity of such systems, so that they threaten to become tribalised in a way that blocks intelligent and non-violent exchange.
When common culture fails, what remains is legislating. The French philosopher Simone Weil observed that most human moral problems arose from trying to solve by will what really required a shift in imagination; the parallel political mistake is the attempt to solve by lawmaking issues that need a shift in culture. And when the legislature itself becomes openly politicised, when indeed 'everything is politics', the idea of the rule of law has undergone a dramatic change. Objectively, whatever belief systems are held by differing political agents, we are in the Hobbesian world of sheer contest of power; a world in which the habits of mutual attention and interrogation within a common language are no longer trusted to deliver either practical or ethical wisdom.
Yet in one sense, Hunter notes, there is a common culture of sorts in the US, shared by left and right, one in which 'moral rage has become a form of capital'. It is a culture of ressentiment – Nietzsche's word for the kind of discontent that actively feeds on itself and looks not so much for resolution but for more evidence of its justification. 'Ressentiment becomes a perverse ontology,' says Hunter; that is to say, it is a means of making discontent, the sense of injury, basic to what we as human agents are. As he painstakingly explains, the great Civil Rights movements of the 1960s – movements whose major spokesmen like Martin Luther King almost achieved the Herculean task of restoring and transfiguring the American social myth by reviving something like the old fusion of classical and evangelical ethical ideals – played a massive part in the American imagination. But this was not always constructive in its effects. It offered a paradigm of successful moral intervention in political life through foregrounding experiences of unambiguously demeaning and discriminatory treatment, manifestly at odds with the society's claims about its moral identity. Trimmed down to basics, this was the script that was then deployed for a series of emancipatory battles, especially over sex and gender issues.
Dr King had managed to create what Hunter calls a successful 'counter-public', a movement that understood how to build an overwhelming moral pressure against what looked like deeply ingrained cultural habits by redeploying the still deeper resources of the shared myth. But more recent identity politics is less interested in such a strategy. The goal is not so much building a different version of public culture, public ethical convergence, as successfully enforcing claims against a majority culture assumed to be both hostile and morally corrupt. Hunter does not fall into the trap of blaming political decline on identitarian excesses, or deploying the word 'woke' as an unthinking trope for divisive and supposedly petty grievances. But he does echo those who have warned against replacing the very idea of shared culture with a set of atomised agendas that do not shift the balance of society in the direction of equity and participation. Hence the reactive triumphalist victimhood of the Maga supporter: we are the real victims, not just the 'silent majority' of Reaganite conservatism, but a community united in the belief that we have been made powerless, that our deep cultural convictions have been despised and ignored. As the Trump vote suggests, it is more attractive to many to have their grievances played back to them and to have clear enemies identified for them than to have any meaningful share in deliberating ways of making things better. But that also means that they too have experienced the lack of losers' rights, and we ignore this at our peril.
It is a sombre picture overall, and Hunter does not hold back in filling in the details. What, then, is to be done? He admits to a degree of residual hopefulness. Despite all he has said about the dangers of romanticising local community politics, he still obstinately believes that smaller social units do actually mandate habits of cooperative action and speech. It is harder to ignore the reality of tasks that can only be successfully performed together. The plain pressure of necessary common labour balances out and often outweighs the depth of ideological difference. The Polish priest and philosopher Józef Tischner, pastor to the leaders of the Solidarność movement, repeatedly stressed the idea of work itself as a kind of conversation, a process in which mutual recognition and respect could not be indefinitely avoided if anything was actually going to get done.
So the question of how democracy recovers a grounding in solidarity turns out to have something to do with the question of what democracy is trying to do. Is politics work? Yes, if there is a possible shared language of what a participatory society might look like and why it is desirable. That language needs an 'anthropology', a sense of what is properly, adequately human. It even needs a 'theology' of sorts – a belief, however implicit or confused, that we are accountable for what we do, both to one another and to The Way Things Are. But all of this will only come into focus when we are 'working through' (a favourite term for Hunter) our tensions, with patience and realism, in the light of something that will secure dignity for all.
Few will need reminding of how far this is from the default setting of modern politics in a growing number of nations. But this wonderfully intelligent book, impressively readable despite its length, is all the more necessary for readers, on either side of the Atlantic and beyond, who both want to understand how we got to a place where no one seems particularly happy in their political landscape and also want to know what they can sensibly hope for and work towards.
Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis
James Davison Hunter
Yale University Press, 504pp, £17
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[See also: Not in my name]
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