Adrian Vermeule on Sacramental Liberalism and Ragion di Stato

well we have to be ready the gentleman is really a pleasure to welcome all of you here this afternoon for 2019 herbert no new Bond lecture as you know many of you know this is the big event annually in a Madison program and we're absolutely delighted to have a speaker Hammond is Adrian formule to be our bottom lecturer this year before introducing a professor Emil I've got a couple of other items to take care of first I want to remind you because anyone who's here who's interested in a man's work and in the topic of this lecture will undoubtedly be interested in the conference we have coming up next week which is open to the public this is on religious particularity and moral universality of some type of faith reason and natural law this is our annual jibra conference it will be Tuesday May 14th in Wednesday May 15th at frist Campus Center room 301 frist Campus Center room 301 and those of you who are familiar with the program know we always use the and will give our conference to honor a distinguished scholar and this year we'll be honoring a great ethicist and a scholar of Jewish law Rabbi David Novak of the University of Toronto so again Tuesday May 14th and Wednesday May 15th first Campus Center to Rio one religious particularity and more Menominee faith reason and natural walk this lecture was and down by my beloved friend the great Mossman lawyer long widely long as we give him why they was also known as the man who built the Boston skyline he was the lawyer who supervised all of the legal work on great buildings such as the Prudential Tower in the John Hancock building in Boston many others as well he was also a person was profoundly interested in issues of moral and political philosophy and especially constitutional law in the gift for the endowment for this lecture he specified that the director of Madison program tonight of the honor to be should read a statement of his he died a few years ago but to read a statement of his which I will now read by Gruber w vaunted endow this lecture at Princeton University to promote an advanced understanding of the founding principles and core doctrines of American constitutionalism what Alexander Hamilton said to the Americans of his day remains true for Americans of every generation and here he quotes Federalist one but it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country by their conduct an example to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing a good government from reflection and choice or whether they are forever destined to depend political constitutions before their political constitutions on accident and force unquote and then mr. bond back and his own voice says in my judgment the Constitution of the United States is the greatest practical achievement of political science it's a testament to the extraordinary gifts creativity prudence and high-mindedness possessed by the founders of our nation maybe be guided and inspired by their genius that you meet the challenges of the present day and with the express permission of mr. bond we ask to be able to interpret the terms of the lecture broadly to include discussion and reflection on the great traditions of thought that fed the American Founding the great traditions of moral and political reflection from Athens and Jerusalem so I now have the pleasure of introducing my great friend Adrian Vermeil waitress one it was brilliant and creative original thinkers working in philosophy of law and political philosophy today I had the pleasure of teaching twice with a degree at Harvard and it's just such a treat he's the Ralph Tyler professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School before joining the faculty at Harvard he was the Berger D Meltzer professor of law at the University of Chicago he's the author or co-author of nine books including this is book titled laws abdication from laws empire to the administrative state as well as the constitution of risk and the system of the Constitution he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 but subsequently was in protest of the Academy's political biases his research focuses on administrative law in the administrative state the design of institutions and constitutional period his graduate of Harvard College and received his law degree from Harvard Law School please join me in welcoming adrian belew thank you so much Robby it's it's been an enormous pleasure for me to teach with Robby the past two years illuminating every time and he's such a kind friend to invite me here I was hoping actually to be deep platformed I told Brad Wilson at dinner last night that I feel I am one of the few people who hasn't been deep platformed and all the cool kids are doing it but this is probably the wrong campus for that yeah but but so thank you for having me um my topic today is the political theological and even liturgical dimensions of liberalism a concept I'll shortly define the motto for the talk is Cardinal Henry Edward Manning's dictum that all human conflict is ultimately theological and the central thought I will advance is that liberal rulers systematically tend to undermine their own rule and in this sense behave irrationally in an instrumental rationality sense although not in a value rationality sense and I insist on this distinction because I don't think it's been brought out adequately in recent debates liberal rulers are compelled by the peculiarly dynamic character of their faith in its accompanying sacramental liturgy to violate a central precept of the natural art of politics the raji onda state oh the great tradition of Catholic reaction to Machiavellianism and the precept they refer to is to not unnecessarily disrupt the traditions mores and life ways of the broad mass of the population or where those traditions must be disrupted in substance at least to preserve the outward forms of tradition liberalism in my views in cape respecting this constraint because to do so would betray its inner nature which is to publicly and conspicuously celebrate its great liturgy the dynamic overcoming of the unfreedom of the past if this is right then the dynamism of liberalism is structural and that it's not contingent it constantly disrupts deeply cherished traditions among that subject populations stirring unrest animosity and eventually political reaction and backlash expressed through the electoral process and democratic policies put in terms familiar at the University of Chicago in whose dark boundaries I was apprenticed as a very young boy liberal rule stands upon a sacramental political theology that creates a problem of incentive and compatibility I also believe and this is the part where my evidence will be at best stylized and at worst woefully under the underdeveloped that this mechanism I identify accounts for some important share of the increasing conflicts between liberalism and various populist democratic forces and movements in recent years I'll offer some stylist stylized episodes as examples but my name main aim really is just to suggest a mechanism not a social scientific law it's to show a causal process by which liberalism's departures from the benchmark of political prudence supplied by rajion just a toe result from the distinctive character of its sacramental commitments so one must have a definition especially for their professional academics and the audience so what is liberalism we have to distinguish liberalism as a theory in the history of political thought from liberalism as a regime in actually existing societies I think this is a crucial distinction often ignored in the latter sense liberalism is a concrete type of political theological order that we can study sociologically in anthropology and the theory and the regime are related but they're only related that is the relationships between them are complicated and contingent I take liberalism as theory to be a family of doctrines which theological political and economic liberalism are the main branches all of these descend from a common ancestor what Gerald Gauss calls the fundamental principle of Liberty the master commitment to the autonomy of the individual of the individuals reason and desires for many but not all liberals this implies that the main aim of political action must be an ever greater liberation of human capacities from the constraints political social economic even biological that hamper the maximum fulfillment of that autonomy consistent with a like fulfillment for all but liberalism is theory isn't my interest here let alone the recondite versions of that theory worked out to the aunt decimal with distinctions among perfectionist and anti perfectionist liberalism and so forth I will be impatient with complaints that I have not spoken to the latest paper on rauzein ISM in the Boston review although it turns out I will in fact speak to the latest paper on Rawls Ian ISM in the Boston review but okay I mean to focus in sociological vein on what I call sacramental liberalism as it lived in very concrete type of political theological order so let me explain liberal orders have spread around the globe but they are no longer as dominant as they were in their heyday after World War two the majority of humanity has probably always lived under non liberal forms of government but recent decades have seen a distinct recession of the liberal tide especially in Eastern Europe Latin America and Asia these orders typically feature a similar array of institutions including electoral institutions that select among elites competing for leadership and Schumpeterian fashioned some version of market economies more or less constrained by regulation and redistribute of Taxation they feature a similar array of public commitments and official rhetoric public secularism a rhetoric of the marketplace of ideas within sharply defined limits sexual permissiveness tolerance accepted the tolerant and aggressive attempts to police non liberal forces externally and sometimes internally liberalism is also pervasively and I believe essentially sacramental and this is the dimension I want to bring out especially it has a critical dimension of political theology and the behavior of liberal agents often can't be understood without this lens liberalism on this view is best understood as an imperfectly secularized offshoot of Christianity whose main features are not only the no stand the notorious eminent test hypothesis of the eschaton but an odd and distinctive mix of flaky and and Gnosticism flaking as a monasticism that I think was beautifully addressed in a recent Vatican document called plateau at deo in this sense liberalism is a lived faith centers around an anti liturgy that I've called the festival of Reason the founding moment of modernity this is the moment when the goddess of Reason was installed in place of the Virgin Mary on the holy altar of notre Dom in Paris in 1793 the festival of Reason celebrates and recapitulates in ever novel guise as the dawning of rational freedom and the overcoming of the darkness superstition and slavish authoritarianism of the irrational past this is a benchmark that necessarily changes with each celebration of the liturgy requiring new enemies to play the part of the villain the essential components of the festival are twofold the irreversibility of progress and the victory over the forces of reaction and taken in combination these commitments give liberalism its Restless and aggressive dynamism the festival of Reason has to disrupt settled equilibria of peace security customs norms tradition in order to fulfill its self expression as an overcoming of entrenched irrational structures of oppression and obscurantism I think only this political theological account explains so many concrete puzzles of lived experience within a liberal order why for example is it possible to encounter people even intellectuals of high intelligence who say things like I'm working for change as though change in and of itself is good by the same token why are the canonized saints of liberalism invariably agents who have produced social or political change rather than those who have se fended off bad change where the celebration of disruption the shattering and overcoming of the past is itself the sacramental compulsion however this fundamentally symmetry is no longer puzzling working for change is value rational action whether or not it is instrumental irrational action another puzzle involves the fact that the liberal imagination has an ever receding time horizon whatever the question the good liberal says we've made some progress but there's a long way to go but of course even after more progress is made the goal never seems to have come any closer if the real aim is always to create a justification for fresh and ever repeated celebrations of the festival however this receding horizon makes perfect sense that's exactly their precondition for the indefinite repetition of the of this of the liturgy a final puzzle I want I've touched on elsewhere why the liberal institutions and intellectuals react so much more aggressively to Poland Hungary and brexit than they do to Saudi Arabia or China this should be deeply puzzling a ladder must be far worse on any measurable dimensions of interest to liberalism the only answer is that the first group embodies four liberalism the horror of retrogression which profoundly threatens the soteriology of continual progress in general one of the features I think of living in an order of this sort is a disconnect between the official rhetoric of secularism and a deep politicized public sphere on the one hand and the in the concrete experience of life within liberal regimes the Furious passion of the urban bourgeoisie the Saturday political marches that seem in some obvious way an act of communal worship or at least a substitute for communal worship the denunciations of politicians and corporate executives and celebrities for the grave sin of believing last year what everyone else believed last year the abject confessions and repentance of those figures the signs testifying that and this is a real sign from a recent political demonstration baito is our Christ the disconnect arises because liberalism is an official theory denies or at least downplays its own political theological commitments this theoretical denial is however ultimately untenable because there's a lip sacramental regime it destabilizes the conditions for its own persistence the theory and the regime are chronically not merely contingently out of sync well there's one final preliminary issue shouldn't we make a distinction here between liberalism and so-called progressivism and this is an issue of interest to many where the wise path the kind of prudent path would be for me to say that I don't need to speak to it but as a slight digression I'm going to tell you what I think is the truth and I think the truth is that there is no such distinction in the following sense historically speaking progressivism is an offshoot of liberalism but it's not as though it's a betrayal or a distortion of it or as though one could return to a liberalism that doesn't give rise to progressivism progressivism is the child and true heir of liberalism it's purified and logically consistent expression progressivism is what happens when the festival's of Reason has overcome the most obvious villains when the Monarchs have been deposed and the priests have been slaughtered and then one looks for new villains to play their assigned part in the great liturgy progressivism is what happens when one follows the logic of human liberation to its endpoint overriding all the culturally contingent limitations and shaky conceptual barriers like the public-private distinction and the distinction between state organs and the corporate form distinctions that progressives like Robert Hale in my view showed to be intellectually untenable when the arts progressive John Dewey speaks in grandiloquent grandiloquent tones of great movements for human liberation it's because he takes himself to be carrying out the liberal project not hijacking or betraying it my friend gladden Papen has a nice quote here he says although some speak of the progressive movement as a corruption of liberalism it's a natural even correct outgrowth of the liberal achievement in a democratic context to be concerned with identifying and expanding the preconditions of Liberty health security safety etc and this expansion was precisely what the progresses that progressives attempted to bring about now this is a very large conversation I'm happy to bracket it for those who disagree but I did want to just offer one central proof of concept case if anyone can be firmly classified as an anglo-american liberal it's John Stuart Mill and if anyone counts as a paradigmatic progressive theorist the kind of terror of the campus that's Herbert Marcuse but it turns out that mark uses a million he explicitly takes himself to be carrying Mills project to its logical conclusion how is this possible well mill notoriously accepted barbarians from his general scheme of liberal arrangements he argued that barbarians like children lack full maturity of their faculties and thus lacked the capacity to participate in a liberal order despotism wrote mill is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually affecting that end Liberty as a principal has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion until then there's nothing for them but implicit obedience to an act bar or a Charlemagne if they are so fortunate is to find one mark user explicitly takes up this point and pursues this logic of preconditions to its consistent endpoint arguing that even in advanced liberal democracies there are many who fit this description there are many barbarians in mark users view the view holds that background conditions in society disparities of wealth failures of public education and other forms of unequal power may infantilized the faculties and distort or [ __ ] the rationality of almost everyone apart from what mark you sees as ruling of lead to enjoy genuine intellectual autonomy this is in a deep sense authentically million in spirit it's exactly why mill wanted to give extra votes to the highly educated mark Hughes has a different remedy given the background structures and conditions of intellectual heteronomy what he sees as true liberation and what he calls a faithful execution of the million project requires dispossessing the knowledge monopolist of their power precisely so that the preconditions for a wider liberation of humanity can be brought into being the problem is and this is Mark use to create a society in which man is no longer enslaved by institutions which vitiated self-determination from the beginning freedom is still to be created even for the freest of the existing societies and he continues in Mill every rational human being participates in the discussion and decision but only as a rational being and only the rational beings do so where society has entered the phase of total Administration and indoctrination this would be a small number indeed and not necessarily that of the elected representatives of the people the problem is not that of an educational dictatorship but that of breaking the tyranny of public opinion so when mark you speaks of repressive tolerance he doesn't mean to condemn it as though he were writing a critique of campus radicals although his phrases often twisted to that use rather mark uses condemning the repressive tolerance of the status quo of free speech conservatism this is his outlook which radical movements for liberation of humanity from oppression are constrained by the false tolerance of the marketplace of ideas and he's praising a new form of repressive tolerance that will repress the forces that block the enterprise of liberation he calls this good form of repressive tolerance liberating tolerance precisely because liberation requires repression of the forces that would otherwise exploit background conditions of power wealth for example to constrain the behavior and even the thought of the oppressed it follows from our cues that the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices and the educational institutions by which they're very methods and concepts serve to enclose the mind within the established universe in discourse now I don't mean to endorse any of this that's not my point my point is that everything the million here finds objectionable about progressive tyranny on campus is argued by Mark used to flow precisely from a thoroughgoing execution of the million project and I think it is incumbent upon those who would distinguish liberalism from progressivism to show where Mark Hughes goes wrong well as I said that's a bit of a digression and not essential to the main thrust of my argument I'm now in position to turn to my core claim which is that liberalism sacramental dynamism tends to undermine itself by violating the natural principles of rule embodied in the Raji onda stato tradition so this tradition tries to elaborate principles by which a ruler could secure the famous threefold hallmarks of the common good which it refers to his abundance peace and justice by doing so the ruler could secure with Giovanni Botero called firm rule over people and used as a definition of the state the Rajee owned estado tradition is essential here because it focuses us on the equilibrium conditions for rule that is the conditions under which rule will be self-sustaining an incentive compatible or will instead undermine conditions for its own continuation Botero urges the ruler to adopt a stance of great prudential caution about disrupting the mores traditions and life ways of the people he writes nothing is more hateful in government's than to change things which have acquired esteem through their antiquity whereby hateful Botero means hated by the mass of the ruled crucially the issue isn't only changed but the rate of change and whether changes public and conspicuous especially involving the change of names and titles Botero rights do not make sudden changes because such actions have something of the violent and violence rarely succeeds Charles Martel aspiring to become King of France did not want as majordomo of the King suddenly to usurp the title of King but took the title of Prince of the French nobility his son Pepin then easily obtained the title of King and the Kingdom the Caesars from perpetual dictators that's of course not our modern sense became Tribune than princes and finally emperors and absolute masters well as the last sentence shows the great example of prudence prudence on this dimension for Botero and throughout the raja and estado literature's of course Octavian who has Augustus adopted the titles and forms of the republican constitution in Macaulay's famous description the caesar's ruled despotically by means of a great standing army under the decent forms of a republican constitution yet they could safely indulge in the wildest freaks of cruelty and rapacity while their legions remained faithful so there are two distinct issues here that is preserving traditional practices and preserving traditional forms and that Botero believes that it's imperative to try to minimize disruption to both and that where disruption must occur it should be effected gradually if at all possible he writes if rulers have to make changes it's necessary that they perceive little by little and as it were imperceptibly imitating nature which has not moved directly from winter to summer nor from summer to winter that places to temperate seasons between them well why exactly are these councils of imprudent so important for the rajion de sade why do populations react so badly to the rulers disruption of traditional practices and why even more puzzling Li do they focus at least as much on forms titles and names as they do an actual behavior and the actual behave offices Machiavelli gives us a typically highly quotable yet nearly tautological explanation he says the generality of men feed on what appears as much as on what is and are more moved by things that appear than by things that are but this doesn't explain the phenomenon there's just a restatement of it I think boat arrows emphasis has a suggests at least a better explanation and here I draw on modern positive political theory models of rebellion against an incumbent ruler so let me explain these models we have a silent currently unorganized super majority that's passive due to coordination problems so we have let's say two groups in the population that could together overthrow the ruler if they could coordinate and their problem is to overcome the rulers divide and conquer position as incumbent what's necessary for this widespread coordination to occurs what the game theorists call a focal point a salient point such that it becomes common knowledge among the ruled that a line has been crossed how exactly large groups converge on focal points is too circumstantial and case specific to generalize about very much but it's very plausible that flagrant violations of traditional norms often amount to focal points of this sort and because names and titles are the least costly for the public to observe this theory explains why change of names and forms are especially likely to serve as focal points it's much easier to observe whether Caesar accepts a crown in the name of Rex on a salient occasion in the forum than it is to observe the quotidian use Octavian makes of the Tribune ition power so on this view Bo Tara's advise to proceed through gradual discrete change the respects for and names is best understood as advice to the ruler not to commit actions the transgress transgress highly-visible focal points and thereby trigger coordination among the public alright I can now complete my thesis there's a standing structural tension between sacramental liberalism and the basic principles of Rajoy and estado we've been examining politics and existing liberal regimes feature a continual dynamism a continual creative destruction of tradition that undermines and disrupts preexisting practices among the populace this dynamic changes itself the steady-state sacramental liberalism requires not merely an overcoming of the darkness a pre rational tradition but and this is the crucial part and explicit public visible overcoming the community must see that the forces of reaction have been vanquished and they must see that the vanquished see that and so on so the triumph of Liberty and the defeat of the darkness of the past has to be common knowledge the consequence is that it's inconsistent with the whole essence and point of sacramental liberalism to follow this fundamental precept of Roger and estado to respect even the names and forms of tradition let alone its substantive practices it's not that this is an iron necessity it's a causal mechanism it's a description of a causal process that explains her illuminates I think certain cases or episodes without purporting to supply necessary and sufficient conditions for predicting when the causal process will or will not occur it occupies the space of what I would call structural propensity lying between distinct from the simple modal categories of either necessary of necessity and contingency but fortunately for liberal rulers the disrupted the subjects of sacramental liberalism have their own views where liberalism has made an uneasy alliance with democracies it did to varying degrees during the 19th and 20th century those who views are expressed through electoral backlund let me offer a few stylized examples of this backlash process first I have a pair of puzzles from the crucial period 2014 to 2016 in American politics when the tempo of Sacramento liberalism increased sharply in both cases the puzzles that political incumbents executive actors in one case judicial actors in another took actions that were flagrantly ill-advised from the standpoint of the regime do stato revealing deeper sacramental commitments and impulses so value rational but not instrumental irrational the first was the Obama administration's relentless attempt to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to either fund abortifacient contraceptives or at least to take action to pass their responsibility for doing so elsewhere I remember vividly commentators at the time criticizing the seemingly inexplicable stupidity of the administration's approach which created a highly salient example of repressive regulatory liberalism secular liberalism and thus radically antagonized Christian conservatives who proceeded to vote for Trump in large numbers it's plausible to think there's a causal connection between those two although it's hard to pin that down one way or another but the commentators criticism well entirely valid from a rajion gustado perspective I don't think reached the root of the matter because I don't think it understood the value rational logic of what the Obama administration was doing the point of the administration's conduct in my view was not or not only to force one smallish order of nuns to provide contraceptives indeed the very fact that the administration offered a voluntary opt-out conditional on merely making a few bureaucratic affirmations underscores that the real objective lay elsewhere rather the objective was in my view ceremonial was to force the nuns to publicly acknowledge the liberal states just authority over the subject matter the authority to require either provision of contraceptives or the exercise of an opt-out as the state saw fit the main point then was to stage a public sacramental celebration of the Justice of liberal our acknowledged by its very targets and subjects another example involves the puzzle of obergefell the same-sex marriage decision and I include here the administration's representation at oral argument in the Supreme Court that institutions not supportive of same-sex marriage might have to lose their tax exemptions as contrary to public policy the puzzle is not only why the administration would make such an inflammatory threat but also why a judicial decision was necessary at all when the tide of politics was running in favor of same-sex marriage anyway simple non intervention by means of any of the standard techniques described by Alexandra Bickle and available to the liberal justices would have attained the same policy ends or consequences with no decision at all as far as instrumental political rationality went all that was necessary was to do nothing and ones goals would be achieved but a conspicuous judicial conflict with the settled mores of millennion it was of course the very point of the exercise from the liberal standpoint it was right and just to have same-sex marriage not merely embodied in law but declared a requirement of constitutional justice coupled with a conspicuous defeat of the forces of reaction over cofell's radical and public dismissal of tradition as unreasoned prejudice and animus which certainly contributed to evangelicals evangelical support for Trump was no contingent mistake that the liberal order might have corrected by better appreciation of the Rajee owned estado the dynamic sacramental commitments of liberalism are here illuminated precisely because it departs from the Prudential benchmark of caution about the disruption of tradition so far I've mentioned examples from the sphere of marriage and the family it's important to emphasize that that the ideology of free-market economics is as pervasively sacramental as our social expressions of liberalism the celebration of creative destruction is just the festival of Reason festive with citations to Austrian economists or in a form of hard obscurantism with equations I've argued elsewhere and I won't recapitulate the argument here the claim that the invisible hand of the market will indirectly conduce to human goods is an imperfectly secularized notion that having rejected its own underpinnings and providential as political theology inevitably degenerates into fede ISM without adequate evidence the relentless celebration of disruption in the name of liberation disruption of local industries sick communities and their ways of life house without question I believe been instrumentally irrational even from the standpoint of the Masters of the economy it's been a cause of widespread resentment and destabilizing political backlash as many have observed well I'm almost done I want to conclude by eliciting a crucial assumption in the foregoing discussion consider the cases in which the backlash generated by sacramental liberalism is expressed through democratic means and which liberal parties begin to lose elections and hence their grip on power there's an obvious way that liberal incumbents may react to this effect which is to constrain the institutions of democracy itself this is not to say of course that they can entirely escape the force of public opinion but it's possible within limits to slow the translation of hostile public opinion into formal legal and political power and indeed in recent years we have seen precisely this in case after case let me briefly mention some of the observable instances repeated votes and vote nullification so sometimes liberal incumbents are forced by public opinion to grant a referendum vote on the validity of liberal policies or else seek they seek democratic legitimacy I doing so if they miscalculate badly is that the major party leaders with the brexit referendum in 2016 never fear one can perhaps force the people to vote again until the right result is reached this remains a serious possibility in the brexit Bateson just yesterday politically critical Tories came out and said that the only way forward is to have a second vote the reason this would be the only way forward of course is that the both incumbent parties were never fundamentally committed to to brexit in the first place the main liberal tactic deployed after the brexit referendum however was kind of open-ended indefinite talk the endless conversation of liberalism here becomes a concrete means of sidestepping and thwarting a particular focus Democratic vote at a given place in time sometimes one may simply ignore and nullify the result of the vote de-facto after a long period of conversation so this is happened when French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed new constitution for the European Union in 2005 many of the important provisions were then adopted inter-governmental II in the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 through a process that involved no referenda at all another major tactic is the so-called cordon sanitaire the cordon sanitaire is a norm that holds between liberal parliamentary parties whether the social liberal left or the economically liberal right and the norm holds that it is incumbent on these parties to enter into a cross-party coalition in an attempt to keep out of office parties who deviate from the liberal consensus on critical issues such as in the European context immigration so powerful is the intra liberal norm of the cordon sanitaire that it can in some cases even override immediate political self-interest so liberal parties in Germany refused to cooperate with the AFD party that desired immigration restrictions even though any of the main liberal parties could have formed a government in alliance with AFD when the liberal parties cannot themselves form a majority in combination but can prevent anyone else from doing so this can lead to extraordinary delays in forming governments this occurred recently in both Germany and Sweden the cordon sanitaire is to politics as collusion by firms of market power to block entry by competitors is to antitrust law now these tactics of course carried their own risks they may simply exacerbate the backlash when it comes and we've seen that in particular cases as well here too it's plausible to think that liberal parties are deciding without regard to the ordinary benchmarks of instrumental political rationality were the German parties for example to include FD in parliamentary coalition's of doctor adopting compromise proposals that is plausible to think and many argue that AFD would be domesticated and the public demand that fuels it would be dampened the recent liberal parties refused to do so as a dynamic of purity and contamination the fear of association with The Heretic I believe that there is ultimately no escape from this dynamic and that liberalism cannot ultimately escape its systematic conflict with natural principles of rule I believe that sooner or later perhaps in our lifetimes liberal democratic orders will become systematically and increasingly undemocratic in order to remain liberal and at that point their long-term sustainability comes into serious question let me finish with the quotation no political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power to the political belongs the idea because there's no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief liberalism's dilemma is that it's paradoxically anti-authoritarian sacramental ethos it's compulsion to celebrate the overcoming of unfreedom oppression and hierarchy is ultimately consistent with straightforward Prudential principles of rulership and in that sense undermines its own incumbency or so I claim thank you [Applause] thank you a very good all right time for Q&A let's see if any students would like to begin the discussion if not we'll open the floor to everyone but students are also allowed to join in once they later on others others thing going yeah professor talk do we have microphones for the video no we don't Channel just speak up Allen yeah sure this why I very much enjoyed your talk thank you I wonder though that the example used over the right place be used for Brown versus Board of Education was like well I don't I have nothing at stake and there being a difference that is the point isn't that these decisions are bad you understand the point is that they are disruptive and they're made on this grounds other than instrumental political rationality I think I actually think Brown is a is a great example of this that in some ways cemented Republican dominance of the South for for many decades now this is not as many complications here and the legal historians and political scientists have a lot to say but that let me just clarify I hope anyone didn't take away the point wasn't normative the point was about incentive compatibility that is repeatedly routinely making sacramental eyes decisions without regard to instrumental political rationality tends to undermine one's own rule by inducing backlash now from a normative standpoint it may be that the things disrupted needed to be disrupted and anything be that the things disrupted didn't need to be disrupted so my own normative views are that the brown was good and that the Little Sisters of the Poor example was terrible but those are questions are orthogonal to the causal mechanism that I've put put forward yes professor Stern thank you so much for your canvas so the area that you're most well known in the in the legal world Yanni's administrative law yeah I was trying to think of 20 state does your account of liberalism you know take into account what does it think of administrative agencies because one could see from aphasia that they seem to arise at the same time as the progressive movement in the United States that one characterization of administrative agencies is that they tend to be instruments of change and also then instruments to prevent record what retrogression one of the characteristics you identified so what are your thoughts about the relationship between liberalism in the Minister of State yeah so a couple of things I think it's very important not to be too parochial here in kind of historical and comparative perspective there is no structural kind of intrinsic connection between bureaucracy and liberalism as an undergraduate I studied the formation of the Chinese bureaucratic state in the third century BC and its justification by men named master han fei who's not at all liberal to say the least so that although in particular liberal polities it may be true that bureaucracy is put to liberal ends that's just a feature of the commitments of the polity not of anything else and it's certainly possible to have bureaucracy that does does other things now I do think it's true that bureaucracy amplifiers the power of the incumbents and their commitments whatever those commitments may be my name is a public law scholar has been to critique legal liberalism and that's been that kind of master theme of my work to the extent one can retrospectively create coherence but if you look at a book called the executive unbound at the constitution of risk you'll see me go on about this endlessly so mcc's tent that legal liberalism is undermined it wouldn't be an undermining of the of the bureaucratic apparatus it would be a suggestion that it should be put to different purposes yeah I think there's there well-known debate so if I wrote won't rehearse and that people in this room understand far better than I do about what counts as religion what are the necessary and sufficient conditions or is the whole inquiry into necessary and sufficient conditions misguided and we just have family resemblance complexes and so on my point is that there is something about liberalism that is fundamentally ceremonial and that is best processed by us through analogies to religious liturgy and religious sacrament and part of the ceremonial character of liberalism or the two parts of it or value rational action that should be common knowledge that is it should be focused ceremonial moment in which a self expression of commitments occurs and is common knowledge to all the participants seen by them seem to be seen by them and so forth and that is the those are the fundamental features that make it I think structurally inconsistent with boat arrows Council but what boat arrow argues that if you must you know disrupt do it in a low visibility way and it's that council that sacramental liberalism can't follow structurally I have two questions my question is critiques of liberalism are climate as old as liberalism itself so you're arguing a tradition that feels like pretty familiar including the claim that liberalism is at war with itself and I'm wondering what you make of that like how do you position your own argument in that tradition what's what's new is there is there something special about this moment and that brings this kind of argument into the surface for you yeah let me just do that one first it in and then go on to the second one I think that's a good question I think that I'm trying to be a bit delicate here because I have to say something slightly critical about work that I very much admire work like patent Ian's recent book I think I think what this work has not adequately taken into account is the political theological dimension of liberalism there is nothing about this in de nimes book or or they're they're scattered hints but they're never assembled into a film frame and I think that until one understands this component which I've just you know spent 45 minutes talking about and won't recapitulate one can't understand the the self undermining dynamic of liberalism and its relationship to the Prudential baseline set by the regime to stato so I do think that's that's the contribution I want to me but sorry I interrupted what was your second question one of the defenses of course is that like there's it's sort of the least battle turning it right like that so it's true that their detentions within the system yeah but you're the alternatives are much worse so wonderly what what do you view is the alternative well again I just I want to be misunderstood this argument I've just given you is not about the best regime not even about the best regime relative to constraints it's about the incentive compatibility of liberalism that is the right frame for locating the argument is all implies can that is if there is some kind of causal dynamic the results in the results in the self undermining of liberal orders then our normative theories however interesting they may be are neither here nor there and I think that there is a massive fact we need to explain just out there in the world which is that in the past couple decades especially in the past decade we have seen a global kind of wave of backlash against liberal orders expressed often through the Democratic components of those orders that is a that's a fact that needs to be grappled with and that's what I'm trying to grapple with so for me the kind of normative political theory is is secondary today I'll just say very briefly that the idea that liberalism is the least bad alternative isn't I think depends on one's normative commitments for me it's not the least I'd alternative and because it blocks the public sphere from addressing things I think public sphere needs to address but that's a whole other conversation dr. Thomas was your hand up yep sir is literal isn't really in having this what you called sentient compatibility problem with Raju and a stopped-up I mean it seems like any strong political movement is going to grow up against this deference to tradition and custom it's going to have some claim to justice right it's going to rub up against this credential right deference to that they are primary it is unique in the sense that there's no one can have a conception of justice that itself builds in that respect for the traditions more is in folk ways of the peoples itself at least a component of justice and perhaps maybe the core of justice and there have historically in the history of political thought been a number of conceptions like that so what is I think peculiar to liberalism is this sense which I I feel strongly in a pre theoretical way is just kind of observably true the sense of the the celebration of overcoming of the past and we see this over and over again at crucial moments in the kind of history of the growth of liberalism as a regime in Europe the sense of that there is an entrenched oppressive obscurantist past that needs to be shattered we see it in 1793 we see it in 1848 we see it in 1870 in Rome and I think there's something there that is a structural feature of liberalism and that makes it unique and democracy and let me explain fly a little bit and then see what what you have to say my thought is that a lot of that critique sympathy for those who work on this dynamic and then end up with an elevation of democracy liberalism elevation of the people versus liberalism it strikes me though that you are using as your point of origin for modernity a moment and where your associate liberalism with the Jacobean impulse but we also see it the notion of the people or the notion of how the people's experience validates within the format of the nation-state is something that has itself created of that woman so that we might say the dynamic of liberalism is one that produces democracy as as an alternative so the debate between liberalism versus democracy is itself a creation of yeah I think I think that's a historical contingency so I have appe if you're interested in this I have a paper called liberalism's fear about the relationship between liberalism and democracy and I'm here following an account not my own but the account goes the following way that in 1789 one has in you know that 1793 one has a contingent alliance between liberal and democratic forces visa vie a crown in aristocracy which are neither liberal nor democratic and that in those circumstances one can coherently speak about liberal democracy as a political force over and against those the problem arises in the nineteenth century especially after 1848 when we have increasingly democratic orders that pose a problem for the role of liberals within the democratic order and that's when the alliance starts to come apart and we have increasing tensions between them and we have a series of political tactic pursued by by liberals to try to either maintain the alliance in working order to try to kind of dampen the conflict and in part of what's happened I think in Europe in the past period however we wanted to find that period is that the Alliance has increasingly come unglued and been destabilized social or cultural today and I think a lot of the people engaged and invested do not care about legal or economic liberalism and you know they don't I don't see you know the Kazi of Cortes for example celebrating features of legal or economic liberalism even as I think she's especially sacramental figure on these social and cultural questions and I'm just wondering what you make of it I mean I know it doesn't seem to me that the things where the you see as highlighting geological character of liberalism today our traveling is a package with all beliefs and venues that went together in the liberal order nor did I say they they have to I mean I said liberalism as a family with different branches and just like any family they can sometimes be working in tandem or sometimes be working at cross-purposes what what gives them descent from a common from a common principle is this commitment to autonomy but it's familiar that different branches of the liberal clan pursue this commitment in different spheres some in the social and sexual sphere some in the economic sphere some in the theological sphere and that these can sometimes work across purposes to one another so it's no part of my account that liberalism is all one thing it's not yeah I'd like stay on this for a minute and join it that's so Adrienne what you've got me thinking about yeah is the question what is contingent and what is necessarily in liberal ideas about politics and principles and policy yeah we tend and I have tended to think that what makes something liberal is the content of a particular position this is the liberal view of this that's the conservative view of this or the libertarian or the socialist view of this but now you've got me wondering maybe that's not right you know so take a couple of examples the liberal or progressive movement got to anti-racism in desegregation got there ahead of the conservative movement considered as a as an organized political movement but it still got there late hmm early progressives well racist right the name Wilson I'm staying out of this one scientific racism was not something that came out of rootedness in tradition right all right that was progressive ideas and then when we turn to eugenics the liberal or progressive movement got there early all right and stuck as I pointed out back to the race issue if you take the Japanese internment cases the Korematsu decision and its companions you find who behind the movement to intern the Japanese and to justify in American law you find Earl Warren Attorney General of California leading progressive figure yeah calling for the attorney you find Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepting the call and putting through the policy through his Congress which you know when we voted office on his and then when the issue gets to the Supreme Court you have his three leading just the three progressive leading justices on the court Hugo black would give them Douglas and Felix Frankfurter voting to uphold the constitutionality of the intern who's against it Frank Murphy happened to be a Roosevelt right Roosevelt to point to you and what's it say about Frank Murphy or his opinion for those of you who know what some of my students will know this he occupied the catholic seat and appealed to natural law as his argument for what was fundamentally an injustice against the internment it also happens that another major important figure that that opposed the internment was J Edgar Hoover histories on isn't it right so what what all that makes me wonder is were these policy positions and principles arrived at because there's something in the liberal theory that Truvia there and even if it took a while to get there they what were they contingent because it's not actually the content of the policy that's driving okay it's something else now if it is something else it seems to me that really heavily support your sacramentally right that's it that's exactly right Robby thank you that's very helpful and insightful I I don't think that liberalism is about first-order policies or commitments I think it's about a commitment to a certain type of justification or structure of justification and that's this master principle of autonomy and so one can have policies that have either a liberal justification or an entirely different sort of justification that could perfectly well converge and that's why like we live in a non liberal structure of justification we might observational II have a lot of the same policies that you have an illiberal regime just justified in a different way yes just just take the segregation versus working with Martin Luther King well there's some right Jeff Jeff just just makin black side of that equation yeah there are some who would count as progressives theologically right King himself Frank right and there are others like Shuttlesworth Frank and wearing king's own father right who would count as anything but liberals were right before progressives take take those who who though not black came to the assistance of King you had left-wing progressive secular students from New York three monitors and down derive and who are they marching alongside the most traditional Catholic nuns in their full bright paths exactly the same not the same structure of justification so if I get a liberal in my sense and a Catholic Nam would roll in the same room and I say what do you think about racism they should both say it's bad but with different structures of justification the Catholics should be reading mitt Fernandez or gay and pointing you know importantly to this revealed structure of of the brotherhood of man and basing basing their commitments on them and right so perhaps trying on the spherical example what would you say is the kind of backlash that might motivate the girls to sacrifice some women some value rationality for instrumental rationality and therefore very respects yeah I this isn't it this is something I haven't I've tried to think about and haven't made much progress on in myself exculpation is that it's hard to make progress on and let me explain there we frequently see agents with value rational commitments that have kind of cost over odds that is when the instrumental instrumental irrational costs of pursuing the value rational commitment exceeds some high threshold and they will temper or even abandon their value rational commitments and that's a very common structure it's like a famous example is the institution of the Vendetta where we have the following very funny set a combination of things one is a value rational commitment to revenge without regard to whether revenge will in the long run make things better for the revenge of the revenge errs family we combine that with exceedingly fine grained instrumental rationality about how to achieve revenge so we lie in wait for the well for our target and maneuver subtly in the Sicilian landscape or whatever to try to get at our target um but then the third thing we see is that sometimes the Vendetta is in fact just abandoned because people are too scared or too worried about their children getting killed and this is this is an example of the same structure so I don't have well-developed thoughts on that it's entirely it's entirely possible what it would mean is it would temper the force of this mechanism but it wouldn't wouldn't fundamentally undercut it if they make sense yes about the administrative state that I was wondering if you could speak to another structural like institution of liberalism as we experienced it and that is the institution of separation of powers and checks and balances yeah is it possible to disambiguate these institutional practices from liberalism as you understand it and if not why not because it seems to me like these institutions are more traditionally part of Civic republicanism could potentially be defended by a theology other than liberalism and you could make arguments about a mixed regime best approximating exactly no I think that's I think this is a great example in the category of Robby's point about justifications for liberalism certain classes of justifications for institutions not the institutions and it should be you know obvious to us that you know when polybius is kind of originating the discourse about something is probably not justified in the same terms that Rawls would give to justify her right so that we could have non liberal justifications for a regime of mixed government and you know the whole day regno is about this in some ways and incidentally also non liberal justifications for important elements of democracy within the framework of mixed government so I think that's absolutely a great example about lugol's in states like California New York and New Jersey writing laws legislators right boys and their judges interpreting the noise and impact religious belief and then wondering what effect is this going to happen the country these Lords are are not being challenged except within their own States are you referring to the bill that would break the seal of the confessional yeah okay yeah I don't know what to say I mean I think that you know our constitutional framework the only possible justifications for these are for opposing these sorts of laws are either positivism or liberalism and positivism is of course just the autonomy of the lawmaker so as people have observed its has fundamental connections to liberal political justification but yeah you can't oppose them on this sort of grounds I would want to oppose the one now there are people who do heroic work kind of arguing within the framework of liberal legalism against such laws and I have nothing to say other than to commend them we passed many victories and the current Supreme Court looks like a favorable one for four more victories the really interesting constitutional question is what the bill about Oregon against Smith which was handed down with a if not a bipartisan a by ideological majority in the early 1990s which made it more difficult for claimants to win free exercise of religion cases on constitutional grounds and so things shifted to a federal in their state religious freedom raishin at statutory grounds but there's clearly now support a substantial support on the court for overruling Smith now I myself have just full disclosure on myself it said Smith was [ __ ] and continue to think Smith was actually correctly decided constitutionally but I suspect whether I'm right or wrong either I suspect the point is generally visited it might in fact reverse it and if it reverses it that's kind of significant strengthens hand of religious liberty claimants of all of all traditions you know everyone from Native American Indians who are worried about things like photographs on driver's licenses and disruptor in ancient burial grounds and things like that to the Little Sisters of the Poor the big cons of cases that Adrienne was mentioning to Muslim claimants things having to do with headgear for example and so forth so that I think is if not more than other questions that said of course is conversation they have again yeah but maybe for getting a gesture here the walls one reason is that the very project of wait four seasons in order to do so both work for change go out strap choose your moral exemplars and an area your political history wise work birth reflective people agreed work for overlapping in sentences for slice Lee so as to not disrupt the customs of the people of masses too quickly no disability why is that not potentially within their reasons of state discourse I understand that maybe he's still going to be a near view a classical liberal who's driving by a master console economy that's just trying to fulfill itself and that he should just look inward for the source of his frustrations but Halsey and did want to say well been pretty remarkably resilient for a self-contradictory politics so on your political science review why hasn't it class well they're a couple there are a couple different questions involved here all of which are good but I would want to disentangle them one is one is the question of self undermining I think that there is no the nature of advancing argument about mechanisms is that it both frees me from one argumentative Burton and means I can't carry one argumentative burden which is one cannot give anything like predictions about okay what I do think is true is that mechanisms don't support predictions but they support explanations and if we want to understand what's observably happening in the world around us we want to understand what's common between let me see if I can do all these Hungary Poland Italy Slovakia brexit Trump the list goes on Vox in Spain there seems to be some common dynamic at play in these cases and what I'm trying to do is offer a kind of account that helps us get at the causal structures here that's all one point that point about the Rawls Ian's is I you know I'm I just as I tried to say I'm skeptical that that kind of official theoretical discourse captures the the actual dynamics of the regime oh I mentioned I wanted to get in a quick it says right so the idea so this is a article in Boston review where we have a conference of Rawls Ian's agonizing about what's what's happening and it's focused 2xs on Trump and not on what I take to be the the comparative phenomenon which is very striking but the argument is well what we just need is more solidarity we need solidarity between incumbents and subject populations and when we have this solidarity will reduce this backlash dynamic but the problem is to explain why this solidarity will be supplied that as we need a causal explanation of what the motivations of liberal agents are and why they haven't been supplying the solidarity up till now and my suggestion is that the structure of liberal motivation and behavior is that value rationality Trump's the instrumental rationality of supplying solid yes well yeah I mean as you I'm sure you could do this better than then I can there's a well-known debate about how to classify republicanism as non domination and whether it counts as a species of liberalism or not I just say that insofar as the republicanism is non domination impulse produces this Sacramento urge to kind of overthrow the Dominator it's extraordinarily destabilizing I think that part of that part of liberalism is it's very much at play in what people call foreign policy and neoconservatism the idea that we need the sacramental moment of overthrowing the Dominator in Libya in Afghanistan in Venezuela whether or not it's ultimately instrumentally rational to do so and we saw in cases like little kid that it's almost certainly turned out to be not instrumentally rational to do so and has destabilized areas of the world in ways that actually hurt US interests in my view and I asked about this please you know that so on Eric's first question yeah yeah on the traditional judeo-christian moral underpinnings yeah of most of these societies is less than 50 years old they're about 50 years old hmm you don't really get it until 60 yeah oh just look at the United States from from the founders through Lincoln dr. Wilson through FDR yep all the way until you know roughly Abington pshh yeah right now you've got our Marxist analogy you've got a you've got the structure of Lee but it's sitting atop the base of judeo-christian morality to which all of those theorists appeal then the reason they appealed to it is that it was it was functionally the public philosophy of the people look I think oh this I read about you know the about 60 should you begin especially with the supreme force it's okay you know Roosevelt you've all heard or read Roosevelt's prayer on d-day you know the the prick and when he announces the d-day invasion he he says a prayer and bites the American public to pray with him it everybody's right longer you can to me that that is as much the governing structure of the country is the Constitution at the end of the United States my inaugural address and so forth the real gap that begins to open up where liberal elites find themselves really rejecting that in serious ways they see that as now problematic and ill liberal is about the sixties so when we ask why haven't the internal contradictions of Patriots right about there being them why are those internal contradictions caused the collapse well maybe that's you know it's but too soon to tell it's 50 years you know it's 50 years in and right I mean I think that's that's also an excellent point Robby I would just say that well I would love it if that point helped me out of the bind Eric's put me in which is to give a kind of point prediction about but I don't think it does that is the holdover of non-liberal norms and values in a liberal society that event that eventually corrodes under elite pressure is a real mechanism but it doesn't tell us like when the corrosion will rule such a point yeah exactly so right I didn't see it as a response to Eric's point but I tried to say that I had exempted myself from the force of Eric's point by just simply not even trying to very good yeah something else in yeah please subject so intro for 30 years at least maybe more but at least for 30 years the Republican establishment has lamented that the party is dependent in a way that is bad for the party long term on evangelical Christian and other socially conservative voters and that there should be a way and we should find a way to present ourselves as a party yep that is economically conservative and which also means economically liberal in the more traditional sense I'll bring three markets in free-trade right and get rid of the albatross of these social issues which dramatic us down and cost us relax so Donald Trump comes along and he seems to have perceived that the Republican establishment got it exactly it's the reverse of what you thought you've probably seen the graphic examples right yeah 1 2 6 my never in notebooks right it's the conquer of economically conservative and socially liberal so Trump himself abandons his social liberalism which on social issues for the entire life you've been on but not a liberal extremely he abandons that he embraces social conservatism and runs against free trade free markets exactly and this is why I think that the beginning of wisdom about Trump is not to focus too much on the u.s. case and not to become obsessed with the US case and to put him in some kind of comparative perspective because what we see in all the cases I mentioned it's exactly this pioneering of electoral actors actors competing in electoral politics who move to the upper left quadrant and succeed wildly by doing so I think this describes Orban and hungry for example the Hungarian government has pursued family policies which have turned out to be strikingly successful that could only be described as dirige East that is they try to direct families towards having more children through elaborate schemes of subsidies and employment regulation and so on and that's exactly this move towards towards the upper left towards a combination of social conservatism and rejection of at least absolutist free-market but maybe the problem is something diagnosed by Christopher lash where you have this chasm developed between them off states that are but this is my point this is exactly my no I you could see my whole piece as a as a I don't know Chicago wised version of lash but this is exactly right in that the problem is that the my suggestion was about a mechanism by which liberal incumbent rulers that is elites and liberal polities undermine their own position through this commitment value rational commitment to a sacramental dynamism and and this is entirely consistent when you rehearse the lastest is the way Christopher Laska clash who was a sociologist and social critic who wrote a number of important books and the two that are relevant here ultra of narcissism with that and the revolt of the elite are they replacing them or are they just are we really down a path where they're going to make himself extinct they're going to take care of themselves and resolve quite seeing the force of that distinction then they make themselves extinct where they prevail yes yeah well no I agree I think yeah I think in the short run so as it's getting in at the end of the short one what you see is in the increasing divorce between liberalism democracy's polities in which liberal incumbents try to reduce democratic input in order to preserve their position now the question is how long can that strategy be sustained and that's that's what I've got out towards you you've had your hand up for so long and I'm sorry to agree with you the Liberals fight between themselves and because of that and perhaps because they're trying to compromise between themselves and between everybody else outside the policy and all of that comes comes out muddled the way we would you have gone to but the question I think is you're using the failure of liberalism because of what is going on in Europe and elsewhere and and my mind pushback on that would be is a desert zone exactly if the opposite thing that happened it is a result of all the unbridled capitalism that moved into markets where labor laws were non-existent and and taking advantage of those movement of the capital and the people along with it including the corrupt regimes that were out there that absolutely we're totally against liberalism per se and result was that we have a massive failure throughout the world of prosperity and progress that stopped because mother entirely followed the categories but I don't see that as the opposite of my story see that is part and parcel of my stories I tried to say after in the part after obergefell economic liberalism expressed an ideology of creative destruction and disruption is exactly part of the phenomenon that's caused backlash both in America and in Europe and this is I think obvious in the case of brexit where communities especially in the mid and north of England who voted powerfully for brexit are the communities who feel disrupted by globalized trade by neoliberal policy economic and immigration policies and who use the Democratic tools to fight back in a certain point regardless of whether that's good or bad sorry yeah well it's it's discussions like these after wonderful lectures like that that make me so grateful the Princeton University for allowing us to launch the Madison program nearly twenty years ago and to carry on for all these years and Adrienne I want to thank you thank you Robert [Applause] you

Channel: James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions

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Keywords: liberalism, vermeule, princeton university, princeton, harvard, harvard law school, james madison program

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Length: 88min 59sec (5339 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019