TAP Symposium: Postliberalism & Union

In the spirit of building a formidable union, let us create a polity that allows us to be ruled by “the better angels of our nature."

The American Postliberal Symposium: Saving the American Union

The American Postliberal is pleased to present a symposium in consideration of how to solve our crisis of national unity, in light of the recent film “Civil War,” directed by Alex Garland. We firmly believe that a civil war is not only unlikely, but that a “national divorce” is unwarranted and would be destructive to the American way of life. Therefore, the question of how we maintain the common good and national cohesion in a time of great polarization is of the utmost importance. This week, we will explore the thinking behind the film, the probability of national disunity, and finally, why maintaining our union is critical to the postliberal political project. Read the fourth and final essay, “Postliberalism & Union,” by Tom Sarrouf, below.

There is a statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park in the heart of New York City. This may be surprising, as Webster was not from New York, but the inscription on that monument perhaps reveals why New York would dedicate a monument to the Senator from Massachusetts: “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.”

Offered in a speech rebutting Senator Robert Hayne’s theory of state sovereignty, Webster reminded the young nation in the midst of a threat to the Union why the country came together in the first place. In the midst of a breakdown in the national zeitgeist, and with speculations of a second civil war on the rise, it bears examining whether the sprawling American Union is still tenable.

Before considering the case for Unionism, it is worth considering why the case against it is growing in popularity. Both present circumstances and long-standing debates throughout our history offer enticements to abandon the American Union.

First, our country is already in the midst of a cold civil war. There is no longer a shared moral universe in America. Historically, the American creed professed the belief that “all men are created equal” and that America, while imperfect, offered the hope of liberty, prosperity, and justice more than any other place on earth. That creed inspired millions to pledge allegiance to the flag, stand and sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and pay homage to the many honorable men who fought to make that promise a reality.

However, the Left has appropriated the language and symbols of America to suggest radical egalitarianism that promotes gay marriage, transgenderism, economic socialism, and abortion, while discarding the rest of America (which is to say, almost all of American history and most of the historical Americans including our Founding Fathers) as irredeemably racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted. Simply put, if a “house divided against itself cannot stand,” then our house is one load-bearing wall away from collapse.

On a higher theoretical plane of inquiry, perhaps the collapse of a shared consensus reality was an inevitable facet of the American project. By creating an extended republic and a Union out of a band of states with different laws and customs, and thus attempting to forge a singular way of life for an entire people, it was only a matter of time before reality re-emerged and tribalism re-asserted herself. On this thinking, the idea of an “American creed” seeks to forge a nation from an abstraction, which is a function of the modern liberal political project.

Phillip Blond’s essay in Modern Age last year focused on this mistaken tendency of appealing to nationalism, which is “liberal in both origin and in practice.” Historically, he pointed out, the wars appealing to nationalism created a monoculture and “eradicated the very differences that they claimed they wished to protect, and they created in ideation the ethno-nationalist states that then produced in the following century inestimable conflict and destruction of human life.”

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed also argued along similar lines: the tendency to move from the particular community and local polity towards higher and higher levels of organization such as the nation are based on abstractions that untether us from our particular communities in the name of the liberal individual. At its extreme, the global citizen is the perfect atomized individual, which could come into existence only by imagining such a reality that allows us to neglect our unchosen connections in favor of chosen associations. 

Deneen hones in on this point when attempting to demonstrate this tendency in the American Founding. Citing Hamilton in Federalist 17 and Madison in Federalist 46, he shows how the Founding sought to usurp man’s “natural fidelity” of his local attachments in favor of the more remote central government, under the illusion of “better administration.”

This tendency in the Founding was amplified throughout our history by classical liberals and progressive liberals, leading to the current crisis and failure of liberalism that occupied his book. The sequel, Regime Change, suggested remedying the pervasive, systemic separations that ail America and offer various integrations to bring us back to a politics of the real.

With the above, I hope that I have “steel-manned” the argument I now seek to refute. Postliberalism is right to discard illusory political principles, as liberalism is, as one writer in these pages remarked, “an invitation to unreality.” So much of the disorientation of the contemporary crisis stems from the populace suffering from spiritual and intellectual fevers that blind us to what is true about politics, history, and human nature.

That said, the American Union was created out of a common affinity between American colonists who fought a war together after evolving into a society distinct from the British motherland. Far from a set of abstractions, the United States was real before the Constitution.

The efficient cause of the Constitution was the Constitutional Convention spurred on by the failures of the Articles of Confederation. After fighting the Revolutionary War, the newly-independent country was weary of granting too much power to a central authority. The result? A chaos reminiscent of what Hamilton and Madison would call the “petty republics” of classical antiquity.

The classic example is Shays’ Rebellion, where former Revolutionary War veterans led by Daniel Shays attacked the Massachusetts government after their debts were called. What is often forgotten is that the veterans were owed money by the new national government under the Articles of Confederation, but because that government lacked the power to collect taxes, they were unable to pay American soldiers, who then had to default on their loans. This phenomenon was common across the entire country.

Shays’ Rebellion is not only an example of the failures of the structure and balance of power in the Articles of Confederation, but also of the “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” nature of man and the propensity to faction. In Massachusetts, it was debt collectors from the Eastern part of the state (Boston and the surrounding area) bankrupting and then seizing assets from farmers in the West.

Shays sought redress in the state legislature, but received no relief. The common good in this situation would have suggested seeing the bigger picture, and that temporary relief was warranted given the widespread debt issue. But socioeconomic factionalism led the day, ending in insurrection and chaos.

The Constitution was created in part to remedy this problem. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 9: 

A FIRM Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection. It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.

Small-scale politics, while “real,” are also unstable and liable to either tyrannical rule or a breakdown of order, neither of which secure the common good. In fact, so often did small-scale republics fail, it was surmised for centuries that self-government was impossible. The ingenuity of the Constitution was therefore to secure the common good and self-government by protecting against faction. 

Madison followed up on this line of argument in the famous (but often misread) Federalist 10, where he defines faction and argues that the extended republic is the solution because it maximizes the number of factions such that none can take hold. While this is commonly used to argue that the Founders sought to achieve the common good by summating individual interests, or that the Founding was built on “low but solid ground,” this is not the case.

It should strike the reader that the Founders did significantly care about the common good in the construction of the Constitution, and see the innovation of the extended republic as securing that good against the tendency of men to use political power to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others.

The interpretive key is to see how Hamilton’s critique of small “petty republics” (referenced in Federalist 6) comes together with Madison’s argument that in small geographical spaces, factions more easily seize power; small-scale politics is unstable because it is too small, and those local attachments breed animosities that trend towards faction. Thus, the Madisonian solution of the extended republic refers back to Hamilton’s “Firm Union” that would secure liberty and security by preventing factions that would otherwise dominate and tyrannize the public. 

It is in this light that I think Professor Deneen’s critique misses the mark. Transferring allegiances from the local to the federal governments is not built on an abstraction or on the force of denying objective realities about our attachments, but more about securing the common good and good government, which was the “great desideratum” of the Constitutional Convention. The states were too often incapable of that goal, with the then-existing Articles of Confederation too powerless to do anything. 

Moreover, the Union was not an abstraction because there were common ties that made for the trappings of a Union. John Jay’s Federalist 2 is a master-class in what makes a united people. The entire essay is worth reading, but the most striking language comes here:

It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities. With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence. This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Americans shared a common land with natural borders, diverse and complementary flora, fauna, and other material resources for commerce and our mutual enjoyment. There was also a shared lineage, shared religion, shared language, shared culture, and yes, even the “American creed” of similar habits and opinions. 

Indeed, the American Union pre-existed the Constitution. As Abraham Lincoln would later argue in his First Inaugural,

The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’

The Constitution was made to better fit the existing circumstances and necessary arrangements of the Union, as opposed to a Union being created out of the new Constitution. Law certainly has the power to create new realities, as Obergefell, Roe, and Bostock have shown, but without a pre-existing understanding of the United States, the Constitution would not have made sense, let alone be ratified. 

In that same inaugural address, Lincoln had to confront the crisis of the regime. South Carolina and a handful of other states decided to exit the Union and create a confederacy of states. This decision, Lincoln argued, embodied the “principle of anarchy.” Taken to its logical conclusion, legitimizing secession would inevitably legitimize total anarchy, for if a whole segment of the population could claim to sever its bonds of affiliation with the greater whole, nothing would stop ever smaller segments for claiming to revolt, spiraling ever downwards to hermitage.

This insight is further reflected in Lincoln’s argument that the Union created the states rather than the reverse; the same insight that led Aristotle to state in the Politics that “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” 

To be clear, postliberalism, as returning to a politics of the real rather than abstractions and ideologies that misunderstand and obscure fundamental truths about man, his proper ends, and the ends of politics, should not be interpreted merely as a call for centralization. Luckily for American Postliberals, the principle of subsidiarity is baked into the Constitution and its federalist structure. The Tenth Amendment most clearly enshrines this principle into practice by reserving all powers to the states not expressly enumerated for the federal government.

Even as the Constitution gave more power to the federal government when compared to the Articles of Confederation, the importance of the states and their role in shaping the mores and laws over their people was and is paramount. For instance, Daniel Dreisbach from American University has argued that the Religious Test Clause of the Constitution — protecting people from being compelled to espouse particular religious views as a condition for holding federal office — rather than being the foundation of a secular state, is really a religious test preservation clause, aimed at protecting existing religious tests for office that existed in various states.

Likewise, church establishments existed in various states up until 1833, even though there was a federal ban on Establishment. The state police powers offer wide avenues for different states to exhibit and allow for its natural diversity wherein states would complement one another in the context of a federal Union. 

America as a Union strikes the right balance of unity and diversity, hence our national motto “E Pluribus Unum.” Diversity, by itself,  is not our strength; it must be ordered and unified into a greater whole, a whole which protects local and natural diversity while firming up those commitments at all levels. Conversely, unity cannot truly mean a Procrustean sameness; genuine and worthwhile differences can and must be protected without losing a sense of the greater whole. 

I want to close this lengthy essay by taking inspiration from Lumen Gentium, which beautifully describes this balance with its aim towards a harmony between different parts. 

It follows that though there are many nations there is but one people of God, which takes its citizens from every race, making them citizens of a kingdom which is of a heavenly rather than of an earthly nature. … In virtue of this catholicity each individual part contributes through its special gifts to the good of the other parts and of the whole Church. … Moreover, within the Church particular Churches hold a rightful place; these Churches retain their own traditions, without in any way opposing the primacy of the Chair of Peter, which presides over the whole assembly of charity and protects legitimate differences, while at the same time assuring that such differences do not hinder unity but rather contribute toward it (Lumen Gentium 13).

How beautifully expressed is this mission of our Church! May we ever continue to take the teachings of our Church to heart, and with Her as our guide, create a polity that allows us to be ruled by “the better angels of our nature,” in the spirit of building a formidable union.

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