The post-liberal right wants to replace the principles and rules of the game of liberalism with a vision of the social and political order ordered to the common good. What concrete proposals does this translate into? This is the second article in a series on the new relationship between conservatives and the state. Check out the first.
The term “interventionism” remains too strong for the American right, so reluctant with public powers – from the federal government down – that supplant citizen initiative. However, the truth is that the calls to put state power at the service of conservative ends are repeated among the most representative thinkers of post-liberalism or “common good conservatism”: Patrick J. Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Adrian Vermeule , Sohrab Ahmari and Rod Dreher.
It is also news that prominent republican politicians, linked to national conservatism, want to distance themselves from the laissez faire that marked their party for decades. We will talk about them in the third article of the series.
Goods and liberties
Post-liberals question a series of ideas that liberal democracies took for granted: the ethical neutrality of the State, the vision of law as a mere instrument of peace, the separation between politics and religion, etc.
One of the central theses of post-liberalism is that the best possible society is not one in which an impartial state limits itself to protecting individual rights and freedoms, but one in which the political order makes the good life easier. As Patrick J. Deneen, professor of political philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, explains, it is not enough for the State to guarantee maximum freedom, but it must create the conditions that allow the effective enjoyment of the goods that lead to a full life: a stable marriage, a healthy environment for children, a religious community, a cultural heritage, among others.
How to put this into practice? Deneen leaves some clues in another article, praising Trump for having called for “the use of public power to intervene in both the market and the social sphere”. And he gives as examples, in the economic and social sphere, the imposition of tariffs on foreign products, restrictions on immigration and favorable treatment of national manufacturing production; in culture, taxes on university endowments, the banning of critical racial theory in federal government agencies, and the appointment of conservative judges.
Another author sympathetic to post-liberalism, columnist Nathan Blake, a researcher from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, provides more examples (here and here) of what it means to use political power to order society for the common good. Some proposals are pure European welfare state, like paid leave for family care. But most take a more interventionist line:
— reinstate laws that restrict or prohibit commercial activity one day a week (usually Sunday) to guarantee everyone a day of rest;
— force porn sites to implement effective systems to verify the age of users;
— require online retailers to indicate the country where each of the products they sell was manufactured ;
— penalize companies that import products from countries that do not respect human rights (and expressly mentions China).
The family: “ the most personal public matter”
Family politics is an area where post-liberal conservatives have decided to bury their devotion to
laissez faire
. “Although American conservatives used to think that the state was the main corrosive factor of family values,” writes Gladden Pappin, editor-in-chief of American Affairs and associate professor of political science at University of Dallas, “there is no reason to suppose that state force is inherently more dangerous than market forces.
Here the model is the family policy of Viktor Orbán, whose government is committed to to spend 5% of GDP on families. According to Pappin, what most characterizes the action of the Hungarian executive in this area is the willingness to see it not as a sectoral policy to which resources are allocated from time to time, but as the “essential part of economic activities in all sectors “. It is about conceiving family support as “the most personal public matter”, as stated in a Hungarian law of 2011.
Over the past decade, this vision has been reflected in aid of various kinds. Here are some that Pappin mentions:
—Childcare allowances;
—Personal tax exemption based on number of children and for life for mothers of four or more children;
— allowance for grandparents who care for grandchildren under two years of age;
— facilities for part-time work for parents with small children;
— a subsidy for the purchase of housing, the amount of which increases with the number of children, in addition to the offer of housing finance;
— family training and morale in public schools as an alternative to religion classes;
—measures to reduce the cost of family life, such as free textbooks or a subsidized vacation program for disadvantaged students;
— partial or total forgiveness of university debt depending on the number of children;
— seals or family tourism certificates for establishments that favor families as clients;
The law , master of virtue
Another area post-liberal conservatives want to rethink is law. Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, is promoting “common good constitutionalism” as an alternative to the dominant legal theories on the right and left. If the first affirms that the Constitution must be interpreted according to the public meaning that the words had at the time the Constitution and its amendments were promulgated (originalism), the second defends the adaptation of the constitutional text to the spirit of the time, which often translates into a more favorable interpretation of individual autonomy.
In view of these interpretations, Vermeule maintains that the law does not exist to guarantee the maximum autonomy of the citizen in the face of the power of the State, nor is it limited to conciliating conflicting interests between people with different worldviews. His raison d’etre, he said in an article that sums up his position well, is “to ensure that rulers have the power they need to govern well”; that is, to lead people, the societies they form and the community as a whole towards that which is for its own good.
For Vermeule, this includes the power of the State to legislate on moral issues. Not timidly, as if asking for forgiveness, but with the conviction that “all legislation is necessarily based on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is an essential and legitimate function of authority”. It is about resolutely recovering the idea of the pedagogical value of the law: “Constitutionalism of the common good is not horrified by domination or political hierarchy, because it considers the law to be paternal, a wise teacher and motivator of good habits.”
Farewell to the impartial state
Vermeule’s approach explodes the conception of a neutral State in the face of different conceptions of the world, like itself recognizes by saying that his theory is “illiberal”, in the sense that it does not follow the rules of liberalism.
Common good constitutionalism wants the state to take sides with a substantive vision of the good. understands that it is perfectly legitimate for authorities to order and enforce certain behaviors to ensure public health, order or morality, or “to protect the vulnerable from the ravages of pandemics, natural disasters and climate change.”
In a recent article for The New York Times, he goes into more detail. public health could lead the state to require large companies to vaccinate their employees (or an alternative mask and testing system). And of course his doctrine would mean saying goodbye to the libertarian interpretation of the law on issues such as abortion, free speech, sexual freedoms or property rights.
In Vermeule’s opinion, his view of the law coincides with the one that dominated the West until the 20th century, when the modern legal tradition began to conceive of society as a conglomerate of autonomous individuals. Against this, the classical tradition understood that “laws must be interpreted in the light of the legitimate objective of the State, which is the development of the community as a community”.
The experience of the last decades, adds, in the shows that individuals and families cannot thrive in a community “torn by conflict, anarchy, poverty, pollution, disease and despair. (…) No family or civic association is an island; the health of civil society and culture depends on the health of the constitutional order.”
As furiously polarized as American society is, the Harvard jurist believes it would not be difficult to agree on a number of principles. nouns or agreeing that “stable families, material security, decent work and a sense of social harmony are elements objectively good for everyone”.
However, this is what remains obscure in Vermeule’s view. common good should guide judges in the concrete application of the law? And if a judge understands that the interpretation of the law that most benefits the community involves the aggressive promotion of cultural progressivism, as proposed by the left constitutionalist Mark Tushnet? Hence, to the entire administrative state the logic that Tushnet summarizes: “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won”? It is enough to respond with an argument like “this is what they are doing , so let’s do the same”? In addition to the ethical minimum required of everyone, is it up to the courts to settle the clashes between the different moral visions of the world?
Vermeule will soon publish a book entitled Constitutionalism for the Common Good. We hope it will clarify these questions.
*Juan Meseguer is an essayist, poet, doctor in sociology and editor-in-chief of the Spanish website Aceprensa
.