A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance committed political heresy: he said that Richard Nixon’s “historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance,” and joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow “it would be like a 12-hour news story”. Cue the media freakout. CNN ran a story with the headline ‘Why JD Vance is downplaying Richard Nixon’s corruption’; Joe Scarborough took to his morning perch to warn that Vance’s take on the former president was “dangerous”. Vance’s comments hit a deep nerve with the liberal media class—and it seems likely that Vance knew exactly what he was doing. What is at the root of this reaction and what does it mean for American politics today?

America’s 37^th president, Richard Nixon, was no saint and certainly not perfect. Which president was? Nixon did, like all of us, have personal flaws and, as the release of the Nixon tapes revealed, perhaps said some things in his life which he would regret. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding about the true causes of the event, Watergate was obviously a massive scandal and, as the tapes revealed, Nixon clearly did want to cover it up, although his knowledge about the break-in is disputed.

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If you go to a philosophy department in Oxford or, especially, Cambridge today they will glow with the pride of carrying on a tradition. Of course, these colleges tend to emphasize the importance of their tradition regardless, but there is a big difference between pointing to the historic traditions of an institution and claiming to be part of an intellectual tradition. The former is a sort of adornment – a nice supplement to the status of the intellectual work being produced at a university – but the latter is different; it dictates the type of intellectual work being produced.

Their tradition is generally known today as “analytic philosophy”. Of course, analytic philosophy is also very influential in the United States and many of its key proponents in the 20^th century – like Searle or Quine – were Americans. But the British lay claim to the movement’s origins. It all started at Cambridge with the work, first, of G.E. Moore and then of Bertrand Russell. Europeans were soon imported into the mix. Ludwig Wittgenstein first – who would achieve mythic, or perhaps even mystical status – and later Karl Popper.

English ‘Wit’ as Argument

Today the analytic tradition seems stale. Early promises of a complete, potentially mathematical formalization of philosophy were not new – the idea of the Mathesis Universalis goes back to van Rooman and Descartes in the early-17^th century. Nor was the failure of these ideas anything new – the Mathesis Universalis came to naught, so too did the totalizing ‘logicism’ of Frege, Russell and Whitehead. It is arguable if the edifice of analytic philosophy ever even really held together – Wittgenstein’s later writings, for example, famously become cryptic to the point of mysticism, the very thing that the analytic philosophy was supposed to cure philosophers of. Yet despite its problems, the overall vision that analytic philosophy created structures the late liberal world that we have inhabited since the end of the Cold War. In that sense, analytic philosophy is, as Marx would say, a tradition that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

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This week I appeared on the Seeking Truths From Facts podcast with Alf Beckinsale. Alf is a student at Oxford University, an independent podcast host and a postliberal enthusiast. His podcast is focused on geopolitics, history, political philosophy, and more. In the podcast we discuss postliberalism, its critics, Hegel, the British analytic tradition and much more. Well worth giving it a listen.

Seeking Truth from Facts

Seeking Truth From Facts: Episode 19 - Philip Pilkington (Part 1)

I was very pleased to discuss postliberalism and geopolitics with Philip Pilkington, a macroeconomist, columnist at UnHerd, and co-host of the Multipolarity podcast. In part one, we focus on postliberal philosophy, its ancient antecedents, and examples of postliberalism in practice around the world…

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12 days ago · 5 likes · Alf B.

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The rhetoric of human dignity is commonplace today, both in secular liberal circles and in the Church. It is often treated as if it were moral common ground between them. As Alasdair MacIntyre has warned, this is an illusion, and such rhetoric is in fact problematic and even dangerous. For it is like an empty vessel into which very different contents can be poured, some salutary but others poisonous. Everything depends on how human dignity is defined and grounded, and when this is left vague, ideas that are at odds with traditional Christian thinking can be smuggled in under a Christian guise. I discussed some examples, and the Kantian roots of contemporary rhetoric about dignity, in an earlier Postliberal Order article.

In her neglected essay “The Dignity of the Human Being,” the eminent Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe provides a model for how this subject should be approached. She is rigorous where others are woolly, and orthodox where others are unsound. (The essay can be found in the collection Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe.)

Rational animals

It is often said that all human beings are in equal possession of a special dignity that cannot be taken away from them. Anscombe agrees with this. But what does it mean, exactly? It cannot be a matter of being equal in goods such as wealth or voting rights, since these things obviously can in fact be taken away from people, and yet they remain human all the same. Nor is it any good to say that it has to do with everyone being equally human, because one could just as well say that all cats are equally cats. That hardly affords them any special dignity.

What human dignity does involve, Anscombe says, is our being “intellectual animals” and “having free will and [thus being] answerable for [our] actions.” That is to say, we have the power of reason, and can, accordingly, choose how we will act in light of what reason tells us. Nothing else in the physical world is like this, which is why our dignity is special. And unlike wealth and voting rights and the like, these powers cannot be taken away from us since they are partially constitutive of being human. That is what makes the dignity of all human beings equal.

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There is much that Thomas Jefferson can be criticized for. After all, he sympathized strongly with the French Revolution and held wacky theological beliefs. At the same time, he was one of the American nation’s paters patriae, and his role in the American War for Independence, as secretary of state, vice president, and then president, leaves him second only to Washington. On their own, these things mark Jefferson out as one of the greatest national heroes, independent of his ideological beliefs. However, there are certain aspects of Jeffersonianism which can be separated from Jefferson’s liberalism, and represent a pre-liberal worldview and should be recognized in any American attempts to move beyond liberalism.

Out of all of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson was probably the most liberal. It is common knowledge that Jefferson was deeply influenced by the philosopher John Locke, using Locke’s “Life, Liberty, and Property” when writing “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Rejecting any notion of “the democracy of the dead,” Jefferson held that “the earth belongs to the living generation.” He was hostile to any religious establishment and is responsible for the “wall of separation” phrase that liberals like to throw around in their jurisprudence (this should not be confused with contemporary social liberalism; after all, Jefferson still favored castration as punishment for sodomy). Jefferson sympathized strongly with the French Revolution (though later in life believed that the French should have merely moved towards a British-style limited monarchy).

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Political and ideological processes shape historical understanding. We are witnessing a quiet shift in how Americans think about their country’s history, in both popular and academic discourse, due to political and ideological shifts in the society at large. As a student of history in college, I was taught to think about the concept of historiography, and its development, as the history of how people wrote and think about a particular history over time. As an historian, one should have a strong grasp about how one’s work will contribute to the relevant and existing historiography of one’s focus. In other words, it is incumbent on the historian to ask himself: Why is it that historians in certain places and times interpreted historical events and epochs in distinctive ways? To what extent does the available documentation available in one’s own time validate or invalidate a historiography’s way of thinking? And what caused the historiography to shift in ways of thinking about a certain place, period, and/or person? The answer to these questions, in short, is due to political nature of doing history. How a people of a certain time and place think and write about history is not solely a matter pertaining to the availability of sources but is largely determined by the prevailing values of their time, the political system under which they grew up and lived—as well as shifts between and within systems—and the extent to which that political system permits for an investigation into certain histories.

Let’s take, as an example, the historiography of the Soviet Union. For most of the Soviet Union’s lifespan, Arup Banerji shows, “history and historiography remained subject to specific restrictive constraints.” This is because the Soviet government controlled research institutions, publications, and themes to ensure that historical research did not manifest into output which contradicted the values and historical interpretations that the regime had popularized and officialized as the basis of its historical and political legitimacy. This means that the majority of Soviet historians were prevented from discussions with foreign historians, engaging with foreign publications, and being aware of western debates in relation to their own history. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s “openness” reforms later swept the USSR, how Soviet historians began speaking and writing about their history, particularly of the Stalinist era, changed accordingly. No longer were Soviet historians so fearful about presenting documentation which showcased the extent of Lenin’s or Stalin’s repression and the consequences of their policies, such as War Communism or collectivization. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent opening of the archives to historians from all over the world, revealed decades’ worth of information of secret arrests, disappearances, mass death, and other hidden crimes. This, nonetheless, is not to deny that western historiography of the Soviet Union during the Cold War was not heavily slanted with over-exaggeration with regards to the excesses of the Soviet regime, as history was used as part of the broader ideological struggle to mobilize western populations behind their governments; which partly explains why certain influential Cold War policy hawks, such as Richard Pipes, also wrote histories of the Soviet Union. Today there are growing murmurs that we need to take another look at the historiography surrounding the Second World War.

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Liberalism is collapsing. What, exactly, will emerge from its ashes? Across the world, the most vibrant political projects and the most inspiring political ideas are those that recognize the palpable exhaustion of the liberal, freedom-maximizing paradigm.

A liberal project that sought to free individuals from arbitrary hierarchies, which finally shed itself of its classical and Christian residues and hesitations in the 1960s and rose to global hegemony in the 1990s, has now, it seems, run its course. This advanced liberalism, valorizing radical autonomy, self-creation, and the arbitrary positing of values, has produced a similar set of destructive pathologies everywhere it has been tried. The collapse of traditional and religious communities, populations unable or unwilling to act on the basic human urge to reproduce the species, the aggressive public celebration of moral transgression, and the harassment of conservative-minded citizens who dissent—all are familiar across all the societies on which liberalism has made its mark, from San Francisco to Seoul.

The differences between liberal societies are variations on a single theme. America’s ritualized politics of racial guilt and Europe’s compulsion to manage demographic and economic exhaustion through mass migration both reflect the same anthropology: man as an interchangeable bearer of expressive impulses, rather than a creature oriented toward higher goods and formed by inherited loyalties, obligations, and ways of life.

During the period of liberal hegemony (hegemony in Antonio Gramsci’s sense: the fusing of state and civil society around the manufacturing of consent to a ruling ideology), acquiescence in liberal domination was secured in large part through the peculiar “parlor trick” of false neutrality. Liberalism, we were told, was “political not metaphysical”: a device for securing justice between adherents of radically different religious and philosophical conceptions of human flourishing, not a rival religion or philosophy of its own. (The devil’s greatest trick, after all, was convincing the world he didn’t exist).

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We are currently at a very strange moment in the recent history of political ideas. Around 10 or 15 years ago there was an upsurge in what presented itself as neo-reactionary nationalist philosophy online. It emerged from a sort of formless collective online Id that was opposed to the extreme progressive liberalism that reached its pinnacle in the Obama administration – especially in its second term. As late as five years ago, there seemed to be hopes that something new would emerge from this upswell. Young intellectuals were casting around reading esoteric reactionary texts from the early-20^th century – the writings of Julius Evola being the most notable – and seemed to be prepared to launch a new type of political philosophy.

At the same time, on the conservative conference circuit, the work of the British philosopher Roger Scruton was seeing a resurgence. Conservative intellectuals were turning to Scruton’s work as an antidote to what they saw as the anodyne utilitarianism of the liberal conservatism that came to dominate after the Reagan and Thatcher turn to neoliberalism. Scruton, it was argued, offered a more grounded form of conservatism that latched on nicely to other trends in the political culture of the past decade – most notably, perhaps, the emergence of the psychologist Jordan Peterson and the tendency for young conservatives to engage more deeply with the cultural symbols of their respective countries. This overlapped especially with the movement for Brexit in the United Kingdom which many assumed would give birth to a new era of British conservative politics.

The tree can now be judged by its fruit. No new political philosophy has emerged out of the ethno-nationalist intellectual experiments of the past decade – and no truly new politics has emerged out of Scrutonian conservatism. Brexit has proved to be a failure. Yet while these intellectual adventures have gone nowhere and created nothing, the upswell of that collective online Id has cashed out in an increasing obsession over migration and ethnicity in Western conservative politics. When I say “obsession” I mean obsession. Migration is an enormously important topic in today’s politics – although, being grounded in half a century of below replacement fertility rates it is much misunderstood by many who discuss it. But migration is not the only relevant topic in today’s politics – nor is it, if you understand the demographic realities that have shaped today’s migration politics, the root cause of our demographic woes. Yet it has become an almost singular point of focus amongst large parts of the right-wing movements in the West.

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For one reason or another, conscription has been in the news recently. In the past few years, several European countries have reintroduced some form of “national service,” with Latvia doing so in 2023 and Croatia doing so earlier this year. More notably, there have been growing discussions and proposals to impose similar conscription in larger Western European countries, such as the hapless Conservative Party government in Britain in 2024, or the increasing possibility of Germany reintroducing a draft. While it is somewhat unsurprising that this would be discussed in Europe, given the anti-Russian obsession of the European elite, similar proposals have been raised in the U.S.

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The second Trump presidency is embedding a new regime, in Stephen Skowronek’s parlance, in American politics. While many continue to debate how to place Trump in political time, that being the time which measures “the years that unfold between periodic resets of the nation’s ideological trajectory,” it can be discerned from his approach to executive governance during the second term thus far that Trump 2.0’s is a reconstructive presidency. By which we mean, Trump is repudiating, rhetorically and institutionally, the conservative insurgency of Ronald Reagan—the last president to reset political time and institute a new regime, which has defined the nation’s ideological trajectory up to this point.

The ideology underpinning the Reagan regime, which lasted from the 1980s until it eventually ran out of steam under the presidency of Joe Biden (2021-2025), was fundamentally liberal. This regime was defined by the promotion and institutionalization of global free trade, deregulation at home, a highly interventionist foreign policy, and the internalization of the dogma that American identity was not fixed to a certain people or place, as JD Vance proclaimed it is, but that anybody born anywhere in the world could become an American simply by proclaiming that they believed in a set of liberal values. Since America’s primary adversary collapsed not long after Reagan left office, and America was globally preponderant in its power and reach at the unipolar moment, his mythification in American politics had, for the majority of the post-Cold War era, seemingly validated the ideology and politics he represented. This is why every one of his successors, even those from the opposite party, as Skowronek himself has shown, “has been subject to political expectations that he set; everyone has tested and manipulated standards that he established.” For example, a major issue for George H.W Bush, Reagan’s “articulator,” in sustaining his leadership authority was the difficulty of defining himself in relation to Reagan’s overbearing shadow in foreign and domestic policy; ultimately, his perceived betrayal of the Reagan Revolution, through his raising of taxes and advancing a pragmatic yet unlofty form of (small ‘C’) conservatism, contributed to his declining support amongst conservatives.

In order to appeal to a polity who had been captured by the Reagan regime, Bill Clinton and his New Democrats sought to shift the Democratic Party away from its insistence on pacifism abroad and social programmes at home, such as welfare, to reshape the party in accordance with the changes in American politics and economics made by Reagan; leading Jack Godwin to write How Bill Clinton Reengineered the Reagan Revolution by further modernizing the federal government through outsourcing, more budget cuts, as well as continuing Reagan’s deregulatory trajectory vis a vis Wall Street which ended up making big banks “too big to fail.” George W. Bush has been characterized as an “orthodox innovator” who sought to broaden the appeal of the dominant conservative regime to those on the supposed opposite side of the political through constructing new and broader appeals to conservativism, a “compassionate conservatism,” as they called it back then. Thus, Lou Cannon referred to Bush as Reagan’s Disciple.

However, just as Skowronek, the progenitor of the “regime cycle theory” of presidential history, posited was the case with Reagan and his repudiation of FDR’s new deal liberalism (which was the paradigmatic ideology of U.S. national politics until eventually it could no longer be rejuvenated and its legitimacy waned during Jimmy Carter’s years of malaise), Trump’s second term leadership represents something wholly unexpected. And, like Reagan, Trump came into office, in both his first and second terms, on a platform that recalled the great reconstructive crusades of presidential history. Like Reagan, and other reconstructive presidents, and especially during Trump’s first term (2017-2021), Trump met with stiff institutional resistance to his order-shattering authority within “an ever thicker government that can parry and deflect more of their repudiative thrust.”

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The confusion here is so deep that it reaches right down to the most basic definitions. The detractors of postliberalism seem to think that it is a positive political program – like communism or, dare I say it, liberalism itself. But even the term itself suggests otherwise: postliberal – it is defined by a sort of temporal negation. ‘Post’ is a Latin prefix meaning “after” or “following”. Here we might refer to “postbellum” as it is used in American historiography: it simply means the period after the American Civil War. Likewise, ‘postliberal’ simply means “after liberalism”. Postliberals do not really think in terms of postliberalism – that is, postliberalism as an “ism”. But rather they think in terms of postliberalism – that is, the historical-intellectual moment after liberalism.

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Before we get into what makes this election so important, perhaps it is worth saying a few words about the election itself...

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It is not often commented, but judicial textualism bears many of the same hallmarks as philosophical postmodernism. When this is properly appreciated, many of the results of textualist legal reasoning can be better understood. Textualism is founded in much the same principles as postmodernism. Understood in this way, textualism operates as a sort of system of gears allowing postmodern culture to infiltrate the legal apparatus. Since postmodernism’s aim is ultimately to undermine the legal apparatus, textualism thus becomes an instrument of subversion.

These questions have been brought into much sharper focus with the recent ruling in Bostock vs Clayton County where the Supreme Court expanded the protections offered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include not just discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, but also ‘gender identity’ and ‘sexual orientation’.

Those criticizing the ruling have tended to fall into two camps. In the first camp are those that argue that the Bostock ruling was a perversion of textualism. This position is untenable. Textualism claims to be a positive, not a normative theory. If there is no agreement on core issues within the textualist canon then the theory is manifestly a vehicle for something else. In the second camp are those that point out that textualism is an empty formalism and that this leads to a lack of resistance against nihilistic liberal political culture. Recently this second position has been expanded by Adrian Vermeule who posits that the key driver of controversial court decisions is what he calls the “hidden constitution”. This is a set of liberal presuppositions about culture that exert what he calls a sort of “gravitational force” on court decision-making (Vermeule 2020).

In this essay, I want to expand on this second view and, in a sense, radicalize it. I want to make the case that the “hidden constitution” is, in fact, an anti-constitution; something resembling a legal computer virus that is geared toward undermining the legal apparatus itself by exploding the implicit hierarchy on which it rests. Textualist theory is where the rubber meets the road. Like utilitarianism in ethics, textualism is an instrumentalist theory that allows corrosive, nihilistic and anarchistic theories to gradually undermine the legal apparatus from within. Lacking a positive telos of its own, textualism automatically adopts the anti-telos that has been embedded in our culture by the postmodernists.

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Wishing everyone a very Merry 2,025th Christmas!

Gentile da Fabriano, 1423.

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Searle had been critical of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and was a prominent part of the Free Speech Movement that started in 1964 at UC Berkeley, where he taught for over fifty years. But he also grew alarmed at the excesses that came to define student protests as the decade wore on. As he complained in the 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties:

We attracted to Berkeley the worst collection of kooks and nuts you’ve ever seen in your life. Everybody saw this on television, and they had a completely distorted conception of it. They thought, “What you do is you go to Berkeley, and you riot and you just have a great time. It’s one big political, sexual, drug feast.”

Unsurprisingly, his objection to the radicals’ hijacking of the cause of free speech earned him criticism from the Left. In Searle’s estimation, these new enemies were not much different in spirit from his older ones. In his 1971 book The Campus War, he wrote:

I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee… on the one hand and by several radical polemicists on the other. Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred – one might almost say terror – of close analysis and dissection of argument.

Searle sometimes characterized his approach to these matters as a defense of Enlightenment values. But in fact he was simply upholding the fundamental imperative of philosophy itself, as it has been understood since Socrates – the imperative to allow reason the freedom to pursue the truth. Searle saw those who wanted to stifle free speech as denying this freedom. And he judged those who abused this freedom to be uninterested in the pursuit of truth.

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If we look at the modern day European Union, for example, we cannot understand it without reference to thinkers like Alexandre Kojève who not only influenced, either directly or indirectly, most of the European thinkers after the Second World War but also played a large role as a French civil servant in the creation of what would become the European Union. Kojève viewed the creation of the European Union as an explicit project to realize Hegel’s universal and rational state. We see something similar if we look at the American empire that developed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The key ideologist for this empire – this liberal empire – was of course Francis Fukuyama who saw it as a manifestation of Hegel’s End of History.

None of this is a coincidence. Philosophers, especially those in the European tradition, have long seen it as their goal to supersede Hegel. But try as they might they never do. Whenever a liberal thinker requires a philosophy to justify liberal institutions they inevitably end up back with Hegel. Serious philosophers in this tradition tend to find themselves following the same trajectory. Whether they start with Nietzsche or with Heidegger, they inevitably find themselves, in one way or another, dealing with issues they find in the old German master. There is a very concrete reason for this: in the modern European tradition Hegel really is the philosopher par excellence. Alfred North Whitehead once said that all European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. We might say that all modern European philosophy is a series of footnotes to Hegel.

In a recent review of my book The Collapse of Global Liberalism, Peter Leithart has questioned my use of Hegel to chart the collapse of liberalism – both as an ideology and as embodied in concrete institutions. He is not the only one to do so. Theologians and philosophers with a background in religion have tended to be the most attuned to liberalism’s recent collapse – and they have, for the most part, asked why I insisted on dusting off Hegel to chart the rise and fall of liberalism. In this essay I would like to explain the rationale for this – because in doing so we can better understand just how interdependent liberalism and Hegel really are. In a sense, Hegel is liberalism and liberalism is Hegel, to paraphrase Hillaire Belloc. In tracing out the broad developments of Hegelian thinking and its offshoots we can better understand the trajectory that liberalism has taken as a concrete political philosophy since the Enlightenment period.It will then become clear why the only way out is through: only Hegel can bury liberalism, and he can only do so by simultaneously burying himself.

Hegel, In Himself and For Himself

Let us start with Hegel himself. What makes Hegel the liberal thinker par excellence? Certainly, Hegel is not the most articulate exponent of liberalism as a political ideology. No professor teaching a course on Liberalism 101 would reach for Hegel’s work – not even as a primary source. The key to understanding why Hegel is so important for understanding liberalism is rather because Hegel’s philosophy represents liberalism in its most stable form. In my book I distinguish between what I call ‘hard liberalism’ and ‘soft liberalism’. Hard liberalism is liberalism in a purified form. It is what happens when liberalism is taken literally and the abstract diktats that undergird it are applied directly to society. We have seen a lot of hard liberalism recently – and it has inevitably led to the collapse of the ideology itself. Soft liberalism, on the other hand, is liberalism alloyed with ideas from other traditions. In the West these ideas tend to be broadly Christian in origin. My argument in the book is that soft liberalism is somewhat “stable” because the non-liberal ideas provide ballast for the liberal ideas and prevent them floating off toward self-destructive extremes.

Hegel’s philosophy represents the most comprehensive and stable form of soft liberalism ever proposed. Hegel explicitly recognises that hard liberalism is dangerous and risks tipping into instability due to its extreme individualism or, at a societal level, into a cacophony of irrational desires. For example, in his Philosophy of Right Hegel says the following of the hard liberal ideas of Jean-Jacque Rousseau:

Rousseau considers the will only in the form of the individual will… and regards the universal will not as the rational will as such, but only as the common will which proceeds from the individual will as conscious wills. The result is that he reduces the union of individuals in the state to a contract and hence to something based on their arbitrary will and opinions, and on their express consent given at their own discretion.

The solution to this is not to give up on liberalism as such but rather to temper it and channel it into rational institutions and laws. This is the goal of Hegel’s political philosophy. He does not want a society stripped of its substance, as some of the liberal thinkers seem to espouse, but rather one that integrates purely formal rights with morality. Hegel calls this fusion “Sittlichkeit” which translates to the “ethical life” or the “ethical order”. Hegel’s idea is to explicitly integrate the moral structures of the society that he lives in – broadly, Lutheran Christianity – into the state structures. Other thinkers in the liberal tradition tend to add the moral dimension as an afterthought, but Hegel integrates it directly into his political philosophy. In doing so, he provides the fullest expression of what I call soft liberalism.

Yet Hegel’s thought contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Hegel is still a liberal after all – and if I am correct, liberalism is an inherently unstable ideology. Hegel’s philosophy fails because it has only a purely formal conception of morality. If the reader searches in Hegel’s writings for concrete pronouncements on what constitutes the Good Life – on what morals the ideal State should follow – he or she will come up empty. Morality in Hegel is merely the allusion to morality. He never grasps the nettle and deal with complex moral questions like, for example, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle do. Hegel seems to broadly take morality for granted.

Related to this is Hegel’s reading of Christianity. Deeply influenced by his Lutheranism, Hegel expounds what today would be recognised as liberal Protestantism. While he never explicitly states it, he seems to view the New Testament as a largely mythic doctrine – something that would be more perfectly espoused by Hegel’s student, David Strauss. No doubt he views the morality that the New Testament embodies as being evolutionarily superior to the morality found in other religions across time and space. But nevertheless, he seems to view this morality with the same hypersubjectivism that one would find in extremely liberal Protestant churches today. For Hegel Freedom is the highest virtue – and while this Freedom is certainly not libertine freedom of the sort promoted by liberals today, it is nevertheless highly subjectivised. It is far closer to the liberal conception of freedom than it is to the Augustinian. Hegel seems to want an absolute minimum of rules governing personal behaviour and maximum scope for creating one’s own life in line with one’s own “reason”.

Hegel, like the soft liberalism that he perfects, wants a minimum of constrictions on human freedom – and, importantly, that freedom is seen as coming from within. It is written on the heart of every man and in the process of living it is realised through a dynamic process of interaction with the world. Social and political institutions are primarily there to channel these sentiments of the human heart and form themselves in its image. This is sola scriptura transformed into a political project and a blueprint for the ideal State. It is ultimately a bet. Give a man a Bible and the freedom to read it and he will become a model citizen. Set up a State that integrates the whims of this model citizen and you will create a model society. In this framework any imposition on the citizen’s right to form his own conception of the ethical life is seen as an arbitrary impingement on his freedom. Hegel, and soft liberalism more generally, reluctantly defend some hierarchies in society – but only what they see as a minimum necessary for channelling the Spirit of Man. This is the Geist – the Hegelian embodiment of the march of Enlightenment ideals. The Geist is definitively liberal Protestant.

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PLO: You’ve described global liberalism as a “delusional” post-Cold War vision about a frictionless free-flowing global economy. Can you tell us what made that delusion plausible for a time?

PP: To a large extent late liberalism just cannabilised what was left of the pre-liberal social capital. On my reading, liberali…

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To be sure, the Executive Order itself is, on a close inspection, less radical than some have supposed. It does not pretend to undo the Court’s decision, but emphasizes finding ways to prosecute those who happen to burn the flag in connection with other offenses. But it provides a good occasion to revisit the more fundamental questions. Was the Supreme Court right to hold that flag burning is speech protected by the First Amendment? And do individuals have, in any event, a moral right to flag desecration? I would answer both questions in the negative. Let’s consider them in reverse order.

Natural law and flag burning

It should go without saying that what is at issue here is the burning of one’s country’s flag, specifically. I am not claiming that it is always necessarily wrong to burn flags of other kinds. Nor, of course, can it be denied that there are some conceivable circumstances where it would be licit to burn one’s country’s flag – for example, if it had somehow become contaminated with deadly pathogens and had to be destroyed so as to prevent infection.

What is at issue is whether it is licit to burn one’s own country’s flag as an act of protest, and in particular as an expression of hostility or contempt for what the flag represents. This sort of act, I argue, is immoral. Some critics will object that this is merely an emotional response. That people feel offended by the practice does not, they will say, entail that it is wrong.

It is certainly true that flag burning generates strong emotions. But the critics who dismiss opposition to it as grounded in nothing more than emotion get things backwards. It’s not that people judge flag burning to be immoral because they find it offensive. Rather, they find it offensive because they judge it to be immoral.

To be sure, the average person may not be able to give a philosophically sophisticated explanation of why he judges it to be immoral. But that’s true of most commonsense moral judgments. The average person is also unlikely to be able to give a sophisticated explanation of why adultery, stealing, oreven murder are wrong. That hardly entails that he is mistaken in judging these things to be immoral. And neither is he wrong to judge flag burning to be immoral. His negative emotional reaction to it – like his negative emotional reaction to adultery, stealing, and murder – reflects an inchoate understanding that these practices are all contrary to natural law.

The key to understanding why flag burning is wrong lies in what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the virtue of piety. Piety is the disposition to show gratitude and respect for those on whom one depends in a fundamental way. For example, one owes such gratitude and respect to one’s parents, and ultimately to God above all. But in between one’s parents and God comes one’s country, on which one also depends and to which one also owes gratitude and respect. Patriotism is thus a component of piety, analogous to the honor one owes one’s parents and the reverence one owes God. Hence, just as it is wrong to show contempt for one’s parents or to blaspheme against God, so too is it wrong to show disrespect and ingratitude toward one’s country.

This is what flag burning does, and that is the reason most people find it so offensive. Defenders of flag burning lump it in with criticism of political leaders or of government policy, but it is not at all like that. The flag does not represent this or that leader, party, or policy, nor does it represent even any particular form of government. It represents the country itself. The flag burner is not like someone who merely disagrees with his father. Rather, he is like someone who publicly burns a picture of his father or otherwise publicly shows contempt for him. Political disagreements are like quarrels between family members. Flag burning, by contrast, is like declaring that one not only disagrees with other family members, but has contempt for the family itself.

Now, just as patriotism, on Aquinas’s analysis, falls under the virtue of piety, piety in turn falls under the virtue of justice. In this way, flag burning is a sin against justice, because it iscontrary to the respect and gratitude to which one’s country, like one’s parents and God, is entitled. But it is also a sin against charity. In particular, sins that tend to undermine the unity of a social order (such as discord and schism) fall, on Aquinas’s analysis, under the category of sins contrary to charity. And flag burning of its nature tends to undermine unity. For the flag burner’s act evinces his own alienation from the larger social order, and by its public nature it tends to (and indeed is typicallyintended to) encourage others to feel a similar alienation.

If parents tolerated such expressions of insolence from their children, their authority would be undermined and the stability of the family threatened. For a country to tolerate public expressions of contempt for it such as flag burning tends to destabilize it in a similar way. That is not to say that the analogy is exact or the danger as grave. Obviously, one or two insolent children in a family of six are more destabilizing than one or two flag burners in a nation of sixty million. All the same, because flag burning of its nature tends to undermine unity to some extent, the more common it becomes and the more tolerant people are of it, the greater the disunity that will prevail in a country.

The state thus has a legitimate interest in curbing it. To be sure, making flag burning illegal may, under certain circumstances, do more harm than good. Hence there may be practical reasons why, though a government has a right to make flag burning illegal, it would be better for it not to exercise that right. The point, though, is that it does have that right under natural law. Whether to exercise it is a matter of applying the virtue of prudence to concrete circumstances of time and place.

But don’t individuals themselves have a moral right to express themselves in this way, even if we concede that it would be better for them not to do so? Isn’t this especially so if the flag they burn is their own private property? The answer to both questions is No, at least given the account of rights developed by natural law theorists in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.

As I explained in a previous Postliberal Order essay, according to natural law theory, rights have a teleological basis. That is to say, they exist for a purpose, namely the purpose of facilitating the realization of the ends set for us by our nature. For example, as rational social animals, we are by nature directed or aimed toward discovering what is true and good and communicating itto others. We could not do this if others were at liberty arbitrarily to interfere with our attempts to communicate it. Hence we must, under natural law, have the right not to be interfered with in that way. This is the foundation of the right to free speech. It is better thought of as the right to express what is true and good.

But if communicating what is true and good is the aim or point of the right to free speech, then there can hardly be a right to communicate what is false or evil. Now, this does not entail that your speech can be interfered with merely because some other particular individual, or the government, or the majority of one’s fellow citizens judges that what you are saying is wrong. For their judgment might itself be wrong. And the way we typically find out which side is wrong is through the give and take of debate. Hence, though there is no right to express error as such, the right to free speech nevertheless must be broad enough to tolerate a certain amount of error.

All the same, since we are by nature rational social animals, the right to free speech cannot be so broad that it would allow for speech that is positively destructive of reason itself or of the very social order. That would be perverse. Hence governments can legitimately suppress speech that tends to be destructive either of reason or of the social order. This is why, as even the most ardent advocates of free speech typically acknowledge, it is perfectly legitimate for a government to suppress speech that attempts to incite others to violence, or which defames others. The natural law theorist simply points out that there are also other, less extreme cases where governments have the right to suppress speech that is inherently subversive of the social order. And that remains true even when there may be good circumstantial reasons for a government not to exercise that right in a particular case.

What is true of the right to free speech is, according to natural law theory, true also of the right to private property. That right too exists in order to facilitate our flourishing as rational social animals. As I have argued elsewhere, when worked out in detail, the natural law account of property entails a wide-ranging right to use our possessions as we see fit. But that right too has limits. It cannot be so broad as to permit what is positively destructive of either reason or the social order.

In light of these principles, we can see that because flag burning of its nature tends to be corrosive of the social order, a person’s rights to free speech and to his private property cannot be strong enough to entail a right to burn the flag. There simply can be no such right under natural law. Again, it may nevertheless be imprudent, under certain circumstances, for a government to suppress the practice of burning the flag. The point, though, is that it would not be unjust for a government to do so.

The constitution and flag burning

Even readers who sympathize with this argument may judge it to be moot. Suppose that natural law theory would indeed permit a government to suppress flag burning. The U.S. Constitution, it might be objected, nevertheless does not permit this. So, the reader might conclude, natural law considerations are of purely academic interest. For all practical purposes, the question has been settled in favor of the flag burners, at least in the American context.

But there are two problems with this reply. First, the overturning of Roe v. Wade should make anyone think twice before confidently asserting that some controversial matter of constitutional law has been settled. And Texas v. Johnson, I would argue, was, like Roe, simply wrongly decided. The Framers of the Constitution did not lay the foundation for a right to flag burning any more than they laid the foundation for a right to abortion. Many conservatives suppose otherwise because Justice Antonin Scalia sided with the liberal majority. But ironically, dissenting liberal justice John Paul Stevens was closer to the truth when he stated that the majority were essentially “judicial activists” when pretending to find a right to flag burning in the First Amendment.

The First Amendment rules out laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But no one supposes that the Framers intended this in an unqualified sense. For example, no one thinks they intended to rule out laws prohibiting libelous speech or speech that incites violence. And if the words of the First Amendment do not protect even all forms of speech, they can hardly be said to protect also “all expression” beyond speech (as Scalia claimed they do).

Certainly the First Amendment was intended to protect the expression of certain ideas. But as Stevens and Justice William Rehnquist pointed out in their dissenting opinions on Texas v. Johnson, to prohibit flag burning would in no way prevent the expression of any idea. For any idea the flag burner might want to express in that way could be expressed instead in another way, such as in words. Moreover, while Scalia was correct to hold that the First Amendment was intended to protect “speech critical of the government,” it is simply a non sequitur to conclude that this protects flag burning. For as I argued above, flag burning goes beyond merely criticizing a particular official,administration, party, policy, or even form of government. It is an expression of contempt for the country itself.

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