The Central "Uniparty" Thesis

Now what Wauck actually wanted to talk about in his "Uniparty" essay, as opposed to the part that interested me, was the failure-by-success of liberalism as discussed by Patrick Deneen.

I will let Wauck's summary of Deneen's argument stand. In brief, the success of liberalism was so complete in the United States that we got a 'Uniparty' because both Democrats and Republicans are liberal political parties. What is meant by the term "liberalism" here is not a common usage, but the formal usage by political philosophers, and a review of the political philosophy immediately demonstrates that there isn't actually agreement there about what it means. Somewhat like God, which is appropriate given that the ideology has assumed an almost godlike power in America, it is easiest to define negatively: we can't say for sure what an infinite being* might be in our finite language, but we can say that he isn't evil or stupid or mean or base. 

So we can say that, whatever liberalism is, it isn't an ideology that suggests that human beings are rightly kept as slaves. There is a kind of presumption that any restrictions on human liberty need to be justified in one of several ways; different kinds of liberals may accept restrictions on human liberty in service to other expressions of human liberty. 

The argument that America embraces liberalism in this largest sense is persuasive. We have so-called 'positive liberals' who believe that humans have a right to things like health care or housing, and thus a right to impose upon other human beings in order to obtain those things; we have so-called 'negative liberals' who reject that in favor a right to be free of compelled labor to provide you with housing or health care. We have Republican Liberals (see the link above: this means Roman Republic philosophy) who believe that the point is to keep everyone free from arbitrary domination. 

We don't really have fascists, as much as the term gets tossed around: Americans don't believe in an all-powerful, all-organizing state. Even the most statist among us have rights they think the government has no legitimate power to transgress: they'll be the first to sound off, in fact, if those rights are violated. Your finest "the government should take over the family and organize all businesses in order to ensure that health care and housing are provided and everyone has the right not to feel oppressed" is still going to squawk when the government violates their freedom of speech, of organization, or of political action.

I won't go through the Deneen arguments, as Wauk does that at length. I will say that his idea that liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction is a regular feature of arguments against liberalism and/or capitalism. Marx is all about the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system, and he got the idea from Hegel. For Hegel, all ideas of any sort have internal contradictions that ultimately render them insufficient, requiring us to first confront the difficulties of the contradictions and then find a way to transcend them. Hegel thought this was part of a grand cycle for created beings, beginning at much lower levels of consciousness than humans and continuing beyond anything we have yet attained. Eventually it leads us back to God, he believed. 

Deneen thought we could no longer make sufficient arguments for tradition or authority because even objections to them have to be cast in liberal terms in the American model. There's definitely something to that idea, which I will briefly discuss in a third post on the subject.

*Whether or not infinity is even an appropriate description for the divine is disputed. Some philosophers have really liked to use that concept: see e.g. Nicholas of Cusa, who even liked to draw mathematical diagrams to illuminate the problem of trying to understand God from a finite perspective. Others -- convincingly to me -- explain the infinite as still functioning as a limited concept within Creation, and reject it as appropriate to apply to a being that genuinely sits beyond and outside of Creation. Liberalism is not God, though, and is a created 'being,' so there's no similar issue for our present analogy.