Sohrab Ahmari’s Confused American Political Philosophy Would Horrify the Founders
He tries to claim their moral authority while aspiring to undermine the system they designed
An essential strain of the post-liberal argument, as presented by New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari at the Catholic University debate with National Review’s David French, is that the powers of the state should be exerted to discourage behavior that traditionalists like Ahmari find objectionable. This argument is informed by Catholic integralism — the idea that the state should actively defend the standards of the Catholic Church in moral matters.
While integralism is a product of 19th and 20th-century dissatisfaction with various secularisms and liberalisms, its aim is one of the oldest political impulses of humanity.
Centuries before integralism or even Catholicism came on the scene, Aristotle constructed a political theory around the idea that the ultimate purpose of the polity was to enable its citizens to live the good life (read: the virtuous life). Society ought to boast citizens who are morally virtuous, capable of serving, and acting consistently with that virtue. However, Aristotle believed such ends were best achieved when rulers were comprised of aristoi, the best persons. So, if virtue was the goal, democracy was a poor vehicle.
America’s Founding Fathers, whose mantles Ahmari likes to claim, studied Aristotle, Plato, and the rest of classical antiquity carefully. Yet they went in a different direction. As the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution:
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs. They heightened the colonists’ sensitivity to ideas and attitudes otherwise derived.
While the Founders learned much from the experience of the Greeks and Romans, they expressly rejected Aristotle’s premise for government in favor of one grounded in Enlightenment liberalism. For the Founders, the always fragile liberty of individuals required protection from ever intrusive power of the state. More specifically, using state power to compel virtue would violate the fundamental concept of individual sovereignty. Individual sovereignty, not individual virtue, must be the foundation of the republic.
In this context, Ahmari’s fight is not really with David French—it is with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, et al. And while the Founders may not have confronted the Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library, they were intimately familiar with the fall of Rome. They understood the threats posed by degenerating morality and civic virtue to an empire. They affirmed a political foundation of liberty.
It is not that they were unconcerned with virtue. They hoped—and many of them expected—the citizenry to embody it. But while the American Founding was infused with elements from the natural law tradition—the role of virtue, the importance of a “common good,” etc.—the design of government was centered around individual sovereignty as its fundamental ideal. All three of “life,” “liberty,” and “the pursuit of happiness” depended on it for their preservation. This meant that the character of the Founding was fundamentally liberal—ultimately, the design of America was an event in the social contract tradition, not in the natural law tradition.
This is not to argue that all is well with liberalism in 2019. Ahmari’s unease, if not his prescription, has merit. Since World War II, our cultural embrace of the individual prerogative of classical liberalism grew, while the concurrent civic expectation on the individual receded. Stripped of religious faith or civic virtue, the cultural framework around America’s modern expression of liberalism bears little resemblance to the ecosystem that produced and nurtured the liberalism of the Enlightenment.
Montesquieu, the intellectual co-forefather (along with John Locke) of the American experiment, wrote that political virtue, defined as “love of homeland, love of equality,” was the “spring” that animated republican government. However, he cautioned, “When virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it, and avarice enters them all. Desires changes their objects: that which one used to love, one loves no longer.”
James Madison, the driving force behind the architecture of the American Constitution, repeatedly wrote about the indispensability of virtue as the foundation for a free republic. During the Constitutional Convention, he argued, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea” — an example of how the Founders believed civic virtue was a crucial component of social and political durability.
The destruction of public virtue as an animating value could be the most significant casualty of America’s culture war. Drag Queen Story Hour may be justifiably offensive to the religious, but using it as a pretext to gut viewpoint neutrality in the application of the First Amendment should offend the political virtue of any citizen regardless of ideology. After all, integralists may want to use that same public library to hold a Bible study, a practice also protected by the provisions post-liberals would strike.
If society is losing the culture, as Ahmari and his fellow travelers believe, changing the rules will not turn the tide. Moreover, adopting the “rules of the left” further depletes an already dangerous deficit of political virtue. Ahmari, the post-liberals, and the integralists, would be much more productive if they expended their energies engaging the culture to propel a moral and civic reawakening more to their liking rather than grasping for emotionally satisfying but pyrrhic political victories.
Cultural agitation from the progressive left has been a staple of American politics since the dawn of the 20th century. Conservatism, by its nature, will always require a defensive and somewhat reactionary posture. Perhaps conservatives’ sole natural offensive position is as champions of liberty in the classical liberal tradition.
Gutting the political safeguards to that liberty is pure folly. Claiming the moral authority of the Founders to do so is incoherent.
