"Yes, liberalism is seriously incomplete as a model of social order." But I would push back and submit this is by design. Classical liberalism is being criticized for failing to do something it never set out to do. Classical liberalism is intended as a political philosophy, a philosophy of government, not a complete model of social order. It never sought to nurture or mold thymos. This is expressed well in Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, which I will quote here at length:
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
Good government closes the circle of our felicities. It is not itself the complete circle. Culture and religion comprise the bulk of the circle. Government is just the "one thing more." Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..." It is government by Wu Wei.
In this system, thymos is the province of the people. It is the people and cultural and religious institutions of the West, not the political philosophy of classical liberalism, that have failed. They have failed because they have become captured by weak and wicked people and evil ideas. There is simply no political solution to this cultural problem. A country with a rotten culture and rotten ruling class will never be a good country, regardless of the form of government.
You are, however, 100% correct in your attack on status quo conservatism. The unholy alliance between status quo conservatives and progressives is the worst of all worlds. The progressives have seized the levers of political power and actively pulled those levers to erode the culture, with the status quo conservatives aiding and abetting them every step of the way.
So the issue is: Should we become social order conservatives and take back the levers of political power to use the progressive playbook against them, i.e. use tax revenue and deficit spending to attempt top down social reengineering of the culture?
Or should we recommit to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers and destroy those levers, once again ceding the development of character to the individual, the family, the church, the community, and other independent institutions?
We can call this the Boromir/Aragorn debate:
Boromir: "Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the Steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe! Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him!"
Aragorn: "You cannot wield it! None of us can. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. It has no other master."
(yes, I know going to LOTR to support my classical liberal leanings is cliche, and I know the ring has deeper meaning beyond the political, but it's just a good metaphor).
It seems to me that the case for social order conservatism relies somewhat on progressive thinking, setting as a baseline an imagined future in which upright and moral leaders undo decades of cultural degradation and engineer a society of character. But top down social engineering can only destroy character, it cannot build it. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. Also, given the fickleness of electoral politics, all levers that remain in place can and will be used by lunatics to degrade culture if and when the progressives regain their electoral footing.
So I say: cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom (which is in real life a never-ending battle rather than a single act), return to the Shire, kick out the foreign invaders, improve yourself, get married, have kids, run for local office, get involved in your local church, start a local chapter of Turning Points USA, create new cultural institutions to replace the rotten old ones. There is no political solution to the cultural chaos, other than to destroy the political mechanisms that foment the chaos. There are only cultural solutions, which must rise from the bottom up instead of the top down. The government must simply return to its basic function of providing personal security and otherwise leave development of the culture to the people.
Also, don't try to occupy Mordor. The orc strongholds cannot be defeated. They must be left to their own devices and prevented from encroaching upon healthy communities. Containment, not direct confrontation. Conservative communities must become shining cities on a hill that blue city residents look at with envy and over time seek to emulate.
Thank you, Mr. Warby, for consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking.
Lorenzo, thanks...brilliant, as ever.
A welcome bit of momentary relief from observing disturbing current affairs. In Aus media the wheat keeps getting sorted from the chaff...
RIP Charlie Kirk, a good man killed for wanting to talk about ideas.
"Yes, liberalism is seriously incomplete as a model of social order." But I would push back and submit this is by design. Classical liberalism is being criticized for failing to do something it never set out to do. Classical liberalism is intended as a political philosophy, a philosophy of government, not a complete model of social order. It never sought to nurture or mold thymos. This is expressed well in Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address, which I will quote here at length:
"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."
Good government closes the circle of our felicities. It is not itself the complete circle. Culture and religion comprise the bulk of the circle. Government is just the "one thing more." Government does not and cannot forge character, but instead allows character to flourish by providing basic security and otherwise leaving men "to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement..." It is government by Wu Wei.
In this system, thymos is the province of the people. It is the people and cultural and religious institutions of the West, not the political philosophy of classical liberalism, that have failed. They have failed because they have become captured by weak and wicked people and evil ideas. There is simply no political solution to this cultural problem. A country with a rotten culture and rotten ruling class will never be a good country, regardless of the form of government.
You are, however, 100% correct in your attack on status quo conservatism. The unholy alliance between status quo conservatives and progressives is the worst of all worlds. The progressives have seized the levers of political power and actively pulled those levers to erode the culture, with the status quo conservatives aiding and abetting them every step of the way.
So the issue is: Should we become social order conservatives and take back the levers of political power to use the progressive playbook against them, i.e. use tax revenue and deficit spending to attempt top down social reengineering of the culture?
Or should we recommit to the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers and destroy those levers, once again ceding the development of character to the individual, the family, the church, the community, and other independent institutions?
We can call this the Boromir/Aragorn debate:
Boromir: "Why not use this Ring? Long has my father, the Steward of Gondor, kept the forces of Mordor at bay. By the blood of our people are your lands kept safe! Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him!"
Aragorn: "You cannot wield it! None of us can. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. It has no other master."
(yes, I know going to LOTR to support my classical liberal leanings is cliche, and I know the ring has deeper meaning beyond the political, but it's just a good metaphor).
It seems to me that the case for social order conservatism relies somewhat on progressive thinking, setting as a baseline an imagined future in which upright and moral leaders undo decades of cultural degradation and engineer a society of character. But top down social engineering can only destroy character, it cannot build it. The One Ring answers to Sauron alone. Also, given the fickleness of electoral politics, all levers that remain in place can and will be used by lunatics to degrade culture if and when the progressives regain their electoral footing.
So I say: cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom (which is in real life a never-ending battle rather than a single act), return to the Shire, kick out the foreign invaders, improve yourself, get married, have kids, run for local office, get involved in your local church, start a local chapter of Turning Points USA, create new cultural institutions to replace the rotten old ones. There is no political solution to the cultural chaos, other than to destroy the political mechanisms that foment the chaos. There are only cultural solutions, which must rise from the bottom up instead of the top down. The government must simply return to its basic function of providing personal security and otherwise leave development of the culture to the people.
Also, don't try to occupy Mordor. The orc strongholds cannot be defeated. They must be left to their own devices and prevented from encroaching upon healthy communities. Containment, not direct confrontation. Conservative communities must become shining cities on a hill that blue city residents look at with envy and over time seek to emulate.
Thank you, Mr. Warby, for consistently providing such excellent analyses with which to engage and try to sharpen my own thinking.