One campaign offers a shared culture. The other, disintegrative notions of âdiversity.â
RECOMMENDED READING
Coming to the last days of a presidential election cycle, it is as necessary as it is difficult to get what Whittaker Chambers called âa little height.â We need, despite the polls and the advertisements warning of imminent policy cuts and the revelations yet to come, to climb above the fray for a moment to regain a sense of perspective and proportionâto, in the quiet of thinner air, really see what all this noise below is about. What, setting aside all the rhetoric of hysteria, are the stakes?
When the abstracted hill is climbed and bearings taken there is no essential comfort to be found. This is not a political moment defined by tinkering at the margins, though each campaign advances plenty of marginal measures; nor by grand ambitions, though Elon Musk has decided his dream of conquering the planets faces fatal regulatory risk. The election feels so fraught because it has placed the basics on the line: citizenship and a shared American culture.
A stable political order can bore with debates of technical policy or inspire with manifest destiny, but in either case it assumes with little introspection a shared understanding of citizenship and a dominant national culture. This election puts exactly those things to question. Who are âWe the People of the United Statesâ? How do we constitute ourselves and relate to one another? What does it mean for us to be, e pluribus unum, âout of many, oneâ?
Immigration and citizenship are at the core of this election, as I have written about here before, but both prior to and following from these is the question of culture. Ours is a democratic culture, and when Kamala Harris says this election is about democracy, she is right. Richard Weaver, a too-oft-forgotten father of American conservatism and the author of Ideas Have Consequences, can help us grasp what it means that the idea of American culture is now put to question, as democracy as an end to itself grows to overtake it. In his essay âThe Image of Culture,â Weaver points to a highly developed culture, not the democratic ideal or political fiat, as the only soil in which the equality and plurality Americans value so much can truly flourish.
While some still say that diversity is our strength, ignoring mounting social science to the contrary, Weaver included a vital condition to the sentiment: âAll the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.â Much has been made by both parties of diversity, equity, and inclusion this election cycle, and though it offers plenty to scoff at, it would lack all hold on the imagination if there were nothing to take seriously there; the association of those concepts with the democratic ideal is natural, but reduced to a political expression of the democratic will, they are fragmentary and perniciousâdisintegrative rather than integrative. Self-justifying, without an answer to the question of diversity to what end, of equity in what ways, of inclusion in what form, DEI is simply a tool of political power.
In a healthy society, a shared cultural vision constitutes the center that mediates difference. As a mutual reference-point, a culture orients and contextualizes social relationships in ways that are both horizontal, as when a shared activity or loyalty makes distinctions irrelevant (e.g., in a Dodgers or Yankees bar), and vertical, as when a vocation like the academic study of English in an institution like Weaverâs University of Chicago createsâreflecting different aptitudes and qualificationsâa harmonious hierarchy between and among students and teachers. But the tendency of the American legal regime has been impatience, to supplant Americaâs already democratic political culture and its organic development with technocratic imposition and management. The consequence of our metastasized civil rights regime, as documented by Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement for example, has been the multiplication of social frameworks like DEI, dislocated from any shared reference beyond the antagonistic legal process, which fragment and tear at community cohesion.
âOur culture today is faced with very serious threats in the form of rationalistic drives to prohibit in the name of equality cultural segregation,â Weaver wrote, describing this process as it was beginning. âThe effect of this would be to break up the natural cultural cohesion and to try to replace it with artificial politically dictated integration.â More than 80 years after his writing, in our present political climate and presidential election, we are seeing these effects play out. Rather than try to course correct, this dictation of diversity for diversityâs sake is the whole program on offer from a potential Harris administrationâthe only one anyone can say with confidence she and the machine behind her definitely supports. Dubbed the âDEI candidate,â Harris is desperate to shore up support of a population till now taken for granted, rolling out an âOpportunity Agenda for Black Men.â In response to criticism that limiting forgivable small business loans to black borrowers is racist, her campaign expanded the proposal to include Latinos. It is a promise, based on her often-elided efforts to date, to govern not a nation but an electorate, dividing Americans into patronage groups based on race and other favored characteristics, without appeal to something higher than base interest and petty resentments.
The alternative to this fragmentary artificial inclusion would be to offer a shared vision of America and American culture, a shared center all the different kinds of Americans can look to for meaning and validation. According to Weaver, describing the âimageâ of the essayâs title, at the heart of every culture is an image of the ideal, of a cultureâs excellence or virtue. For culture is by nature aristocratic, in that it enshrines a measure for necessary discrimination between what counts for little and what counts for much. And here lies the culture-making power of this electionâs alternativeâboth the phrase and the movementâMake America Great Again, that despite being populist and anti-elite it offers such an aristocratic measure in âAmerica first.â
MAGA, as a celebration of the common man and forgotten American, derives its strength from the inclusion only made possible from this shared America first principle of prioritization. In its nostalgia and nationalism, MAGA offers a political approximation of a shared culture. âA culture is a means of uniting society by making provision for differences,â Weaver wrote. âDifferences do not create resentment unless the seed of resentment has been otherwise planted. A just man finds satisfaction in the knowledge that society has various roles for various kinds of people and that they in the performance of these roles create a kind of symphony of labor, play, and social life.â This last sentence is key, for in describing the just manâthe living heart of political philosophyâit describes the political virtue needed for the American experiment in republican government to prosper.
In place of this virtue, Harris and the Democrats offer nothing but quantitative âdemocracyâ as an ideal. But as Weaver rightly notes: âDemocracy is not a pattern for all existence any more than a form of economic activity is a substitute for the whole of living. Truly considered, democracy is nothing more than an ideal of equity among men in their political relationships.â Democracy, equityârightly understood both are our means to a certain kind of political justice as citizens equal before God and the law, but they are not the end of political life. What happens when these are presented as ends in themselves? Here Weaver must be quoted at length:
When democracy is taken from its proper place and is allowed to fill the entire horizon, it produces an envious hatred not only of all distinction but even of all difference. The ensuing distortion conceals its very purpose, which is to keep natural inequalities from obtruding in the one area where equality has intelligible function. The reason we consent to treat men as equals in this area of activity is that we know they are not equals in other areas. The fanatical democrat insists upon making them equal in all departments, regardless of the type of activity and vocation.
The American constitutional order is a mixed regime, formally uniting the interests of a few and many who were already united by a shared country, itself sprung from a shared culture. That is not the order we live in now. While the oligarchy that now rules us disintegrates that union by reducing Americans to an aggregate mass of protected classes and legal categories, what is dismissed as populism seeks a restoration of this mixed structure and the civic symphony it reflects, in which the common man can live a life of virtue. Such a restoration requires the efforts of a select few to embody a shared ideal or representative type to present the overarching image of our common good. Donald Trump is the outsider that all constructive cultural critics must be, who has known the weaknesses and strengths of our popular culture as such. JD Vance, too, holds this perspective by both biography and experience, familiar with both the humble and rarified parts of Americaâs social fabric.
Everyone says they want a return to normal, when elections felt less existential and American politics was largely boring. This is the sentiment of MAGA itself. But, to quote Robert Frost: âHe says the best way out is always through. / And I agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through.â Only when the question that defines this election is forthrightly answeredâWho are we the people, as Americans?âand the answer then made a presumption, only then can we again get on to living all the many types of American lives that make this country great. We are not citizens above all, but in civil society we are citizens first, and we must be citizens again to restore everything else that makes a full life.
Recommended Reading
The Borders of Democracy
American immigration policy canât keep ignoring Americaâs citizens.
The American Wake-Up Call
Politicians are still selling a âDreamâ that voters arenât buying
What If Honesty Really Is The Best Policy In Politics?
Data suggests Americans can handle the truth if politicians are willing to tell it