Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis
By James Davison Hunter.
Yale, 2024.
Hardcover, 504 pages, $40.
Reviewed by Brad Littlejohn.
Being of a chronically pessimistic disposition, I used to enjoy picking out Despair.com posters for my father for Christmas each year. The site featured clever satires of popular motivational posters, replacing saccharine workplace slogans with more brutally honest takes on “Teamwork,” “Perseverance,” and “Customer Service.” My personal favorite featured an image of circling vultures silhouetted against a darkening sky, and in large print the word “HOPE”—below which, in smaller print, followed the words: “may not be warranted at this point.”
My thoughts frequently returned to that delightfully dismal warning as I read through James Davison Hunter’s new book, Democracy and Solidarity, which may turn out to be the magnum opus of an already storied career. To be fair to Hunter, he himself insists on distinguishing “hope,” which must ever spring eternal, from “optimism,” which, he feels quite sure, is not warranted at this point. But when such a giant of American sociology, previously known for his optimistically-titled To Change the World, warns unambiguously that our nation is not merely going through a rough patch, but may be sick unto death, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.
It is not news, of course, that the American experiment is in deep trouble. Political dysfunction has compounded with rampant distrust and a tech-induced anomie to finally dent the relentless optimism of the American people. Today, for the first time in generations, most Americans do not expect their children to inherit a better life than they themselves have had; many, in fact, don’t see the point in having children at all. Few disagree that the body politic is sick, but diagnoses diverge wildly. Some argue that the chief culprit is corrupt elites, who must be replaced (so Patrick Deneen, Regime Change), or constitutional and institutional decay, which requires structural reform (so Yuval Levin, American Covenant), or unaccountable neo-feudalistic corporate power (so Sohrab Ahmari and Joel Kotkin). But each, however dark the picture they paint, ends in typical American can-do fashion by sketching out a few action steps we might take to reverse and repair the problem—publishers, after all, demand as much.
But what, asks Hunter, if there are no such solutions at this point? “Under the circumstances, it is worth considering whether contemporary American democracy can be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem that has no obvious or no easy remedy, certainly not one that is a matter of public policy?”
For Hunter, this dark conclusion follows from a simple observation: no society can survive, much less thrive, without solidarity. As much as we might like to proclaim that “diversity is our strength,” celebrate the rich potpourri of American pluralism, or insist that our constitution was designed from the outset to cope with profound differences, Hunter reminds us that “in any society there are limits to the difference that society is willing or able to tolerate.” Every civilization will draw boundaries, “determin[ing] whom we recognize and include and whom we exclude…those we adulate, accept, or at least tolerate, and those we find more or less repugnant and therefore reject.” Functional societies, especially those aspiring to some measure of democratic self-government, must rest upon and continue to cultivate sources of solidarity, which is to say, “a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place.”
Now, Hunter notes that solidarity certainly can be generated negatively, more by common objects of fear or hate than by common objects of love. Such negative solidarity, however, in the absence of “other shared beliefs and commitments, not to mention shared affections and hopes” will be “weak” and “ephemeral, lasting only so long as an enemy seems a threat.” Accordingly, Hunter is chiefly interested throughout the book in the sources of affirmative solidarity, the shared practices, ideas, and ideals that through the generations have made an unum out of the American pluribus. And while avoiding the cliché of America as a “creedal” or “propositional” nation, he is convinced that creeds and propositions—or more fundamentally, a complex of basic ideas and ideals—have always been a central part of American identity.
Specifically, Hunter identifies American culture as suffused from the outset with a worldview he describes as “the hybrid-Enlightenment.” With this concept, he essentially cuts the Gordian knot of the decades-long debate over whether America was founded as essentially a Christian nation, or on the premises of rationalistic Enlightenment deism. Both were present at the outset, and ever since, in different ratios and mixtures. And indeed, the two are not neatly distinguishable, since Christian ideas of natural theology and natural law often complemented, rather than contradicted, the ideas of reason advanced especially by the more conservative Enlightenment figures who chiefly influenced the American context. Moreover, Christian millenarianism—so powerful in the United States due to the Puritan influence—readily made common cause with Enlightenment ideas of progress, so that the two strands are often almost impossible to disentangle.
To be sure, this framework was broad and elastic, encompassing figures as diverse as Timothy Dwight and Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, and shot through with tensions and conflicts over who could claim to authentically represent it. But, Hunter argues, this was part of its strength. The best sources of solidarity will be symbols and ideas that are “opaque enough for people in all of their diversity to read their own beliefs into them.” Over the course of American history, he argues, the rich and sometimes contradictory sources of the hybrid-Enlightenment have been mined by different statesmen pursuing different agendas, and its constellation of ideas have been repeatedly reconfigured—sometimes in more religious, sometimes in more secularizing directions. But this process of durcharbeiten, or “working through” the contradictions of a shared tradition, is itself a means of continually generating and re-generating solidarity.
Offering a panoramic tour of American cultural history in the main body of the book (chapters 4-10), Hunter argues that for all our differences, Americans have almost always argued with one another from within the shared contours of the hybrid-Enlightenment. Even in our bitterest division, which led to a brutal Civil War, both sides appealed largely to the same Scriptures and same ideals, even if they interpreted them very differently; indeed, even African-American slaves drew from the same religious well-springs of their enslavers! Beginning after World War I, however, the religious and secular sources of American solidarity gradually began to peel apart so that the two halves of the hybrid-Enlightenment, rather than mutually interpreting and correcting one another, increasingly nourished two very different streams of American life, whose champions dueled across an ever-widening chasm. Still, however, until the end of the twentieth century, Hunter surmises, the unifying fabric remained broadly intact, however stretched and threadbare. But no more.
The past generation of American life, on Hunter’s account, has been one of intensifying “exhaustion” and distrust, as the sources of pluralism have multiplied, and the endlessly “worked-through” soil of the hybrid-Enlightenment has come to seem dry and depleted, no longer able to provide plausible accounts of human nature and the meaning of history that a majority of Americans can sign onto. In one very insightful section, Hunter argues that we are essentially all relativists now: whereas the Left “doubted that a truly neutral discourse was possible on philosophical grounds,” by dallying with the fashionable new theories of post-modern deconstructionism, “conservatives came to doubt it on practical grounds,” as they looked around and detected systemic bias in the media, the universities, and other strongholds of cultural power. The result has been the replacement of the hybrid-Enlightenment with a culture of nihilism.
This does not mean, Hunter hastens to clarify, that the majority of American citizens are themselves personally nihilists—most continue to hold, albeit inconsistently, to transcendent moral ideals and concepts of objective truth. It is possible, however, for a cultural whole to be less than the sum of its parts, and this, Hunter suggests, has become true for us. If “the entire system of symbols and rules that constitute a culture” has been evacuated of transcendent meaning, the society itself will find itself embracing a nihilistic logic: “In this way, nihilism operates as a reality of contemporary public life more often than not independent of the sincerity or goodwill of the individual and institutional actors involved.”
The dominant ethos of a nihilistic culture is ressentiment, in which our identity itself is defined by a sense of injury or grievance—so much so that if our government ever actually took steps to redress the grievances against which we have mobilized, we would be angrier than ever at losing our basic raison d’etre. Witness, for instance, the tendency of many on the Right since 2020 to continue stoking anti-lockdown rage, perversely disgruntled that the Biden administration never did impose the “vaccine passports” against which so many had mobilized. On both Left and Right, suggests Hunter, we have reached the point where ressentiment simply is our “emerging ‘common’ culture.” He summarizes:
Its shared cultural logic is defined by a moral authority rooted in rage, anger, and often hatred. Its mythoi or collective self-understandings revolve around narratives of injury and wounded. Its ethical dispositions are defined by the desire for revenge through a predilection to negate. Its anthropology effectively reduces fellow citizens to enemies whose very presence represents an existential threat. And its teloi are power oriented to domination.
Within this new context, “Christian nationalism’s” appeal to Founding-era ideals of a Christian nation no longer has remotely the same meaning as under the old hegemony of the hybrid-Enlightenment. Christians themselves, Hunter shrewdly observes, have learned to reframe their ideals within the dominant logic of identity politics, positioning themselves as oppressed victims and framing their values and beliefs not as public norms but as private rights demanding “religious freedom” protection.
The result of all this is that “there is now no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively.” And since “a post-truth democracy is a contradiction in terms,” it is reasonable to expect the replacement of American democracy with authoritarianism in the not-so-distant future. Indeed, Hunter thinks he catches glimpses of such a shift already in the turn to technocracy on both the Left (e.g., Cass Sunstein) and the Right (e.g., Adrian Vermeule), as elites despair of persuading a crucial mass of the citizenry to act for their own good. Although he ends on a note of hope (but not “optimism”), Hunter feels unable to do more than sketch the necessary preconditions of cultural renewal for American democracy to be salvageable; he leaves it to us to decide whether and how such conditions might in fact be met.
In this review, I have confined myself chiefly to summarizing Hunter’s immensely rich and sweeping argument rather than evaluating it. This is in part because Democracy and Solidarity is a book important enough that every thoughtful civic-minded American needs to take time to grapple with it personally, and in part because I think Hunter leaves little room to gainsay his conclusions.
There is certainly room for pushback around the margins: some features of the historical narrative seemed unconvincing, and some of his contemporary diagnosis seemed to slide into the error of “both sides-ism.” It is simply not the case that Left and Right have played equal roles in tearing the fabric of the hybrid-Enlightenment, although it may be true that within the past few years, conservatives have made up for lost time in mimicking the nihilistic identity politics of their foes. And it is still possible to make counterarguments to Hunter’s deep pessimism; cultural renewal can often begin in unlikely places and assume undreamed-of dimensions, and sometimes a ditch can seem impossible to climb out of until you try. Still, Hunter’s bracing assessment of the depth of the crisis facing us today is a necessary prerequisite for any program of renewal. Only if we first recognize “that the most serious culture war that we face at present is not against the ‘other side,’ but against the nihilism that insinuates itself in the symbolic, institutional, and practical patterns of the late modern world,” can we hope to retrieve and restore the foundations of our republic.
Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and President Emeritus of the Davenant Institute. He lives with his wife, Rachel, and four children in Loudoun County, VA.
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