Mortal Remains
"Dialogue" & the Character of the Republic
by S. M. Hutchens
A friend complained to me that at present the United States is torn between two parties that seem always to be talking past each other rather than engaging in dialogue, where at least partial agreement on many issues might be reached by people who all have the nation's best interests at heart. He believes that both parties, pretty much equally at fault, should calm down and start listening to each other in good faith.
My disagreement with him begins at the point where he assumes the parties to which he is referring are the Republicans and Democrats of an earlier day: both attentive, from differing political viewpoints, to the good of a single nation. It appears, however, that the concern is no longer for one, but two very different countries.
One party—and I am not speaking strictly of the Republican Party, but of a national frame of mind that transcends it and was shared in our youth by most Democrats—represents an original liberalism interested in the welfare of the United States as first constituted, not only in service of freedom, but with checks and balances against human folly and self-interest. The other group, which has in fact seized control of the Democratic Party, attempts to drive the nation into a brave new Arcadia where everyone Nice has the moral and legal right to be happy according to his tastes. Its philosophy, temper, and goals are far more reminiscent of the French than the American Revolution.
The American experiment has in fact been a dialogue of several centuries' duration between numerous points of view operating under a complex, original modus vivendi grounded in a constitutional profession of belief in an endowing Creator. This controlled liberalism has, however, divided on its left side, the sinister part of that division coalescing and hardening into an ascendancy that rejects—albeit still unofficially—belief in God and natural law established by him in creation as direction for and limitation upon human freedom, while its receding residuum in the Democratic Party still reflects the original ambiguous, but as such dialogically conversable, orientation of the nation.
Among the "originalists" of both major parties, if we may broaden the judicial term somewhat, there is still room to continue the national dialogue for which my friend looks on the basis of a shared intuition (at least) of natural law. Out of this conversational medium, however, the new liberals have opted in favor of a neo-Marxist utopia, to be accomplished through Alinskyite anarchism. Its devotees are radically opposed to a Constitution based on the articulation and enforcement of divinely appointed natural rights that preserve men from the natural injustice and cupidity of their fellows, the enforcement of which would bring the force of law to bear upon anarchical behavior.
For them, the old Constitution, as constitutional, must be destroyed in service to the radical idea by rendering it "living," that is, revocable wherever it conflicts with the doctrinaire progressivism of the new left. When faced by calls to dialogue, such as in the attempt at debate between liberal and conservative points of view in the university context, the new liberals' reaction befits their opted-out viewpoint: screaming profanity, burning, breaking, and hostile occupation, all accompanied by the rhetoric of power.
There is no dialogue under these conditions, only a civil war in which the new liberal (the rioting type) regards the old liberal (the dialoguing type) as among those who must be eliminated, along with a Constitution that provided a carefully crafted framework for dialogue. Unless representatives of the original national liberalism are willing to shed their optimism and perceive the new left as a barbarizing force to be defeated rather than a potential partner in dialogue toward the discovery of political good—as my friend fondly imagines they are—the nation as originally conceived will find itself bound by weakness of will to a parasite intent on destroying its host. This parasite holds to an implacable atheism and has no ethics but devotion to the extermination of whatever stands in the way of the Animal Farm.
Wherever the anti-liberals of the new left hold sway, the days of the conversation in which the nation took its rise are over. Indeed, those who spoke during the founding of the Constitution's deeper constitution recognized and alluded to this when they referred to the necessity of a religious and moral people for the success of the government they had devised.
The Christian's Dialogue
This, however, must be added: Those who believe in God, whether Christians or not, have no basis for dialogue with the new liberalism because they are able ab initio to -recognize its atheism and amorality as forces of darkness. Such a basis remains, however, between the believer and the classical liberal who is still willing to listen seriously to what faith in God, even the attenuated version of the U.S. Constitution, has to say.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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