Part of the problem here is that there has been a misconstruction, across the American intellectual field, of the relationships between a number of phenomena. It has been made to seem that liberalism consists of saying nice, calm things in a gentle voice, and adhering to fictions of neutrality, while the Left subverts or rampages through the institutions. The courageous conservative fighters who cast off liberal shibboleths make loud noises, seize the institutions—and then, like the most hidebound classical liberals, try to wind down the state in order to make way for individual families and private institutions such as Christian liberal arts colleges. The state appears as automatically in the service of the cultural “Left,” as a monstrosity that conservatives, however illiberal, can only try to contain, shrink, or disperse—not wield to escape the culture war through the formation of a new cross-class consensus.
But liberalism means, as Paul du Gay reminds us, that the state and its institutions can declare neutrality and indifference to questions of ultimate value—can tolerate, for example, religious pluralism—because it is so powerful, wields such an effective monopoly of violence, and because it can prevent these questions from rising to the dangerous pitch that would make them appear political. Liberalism can only flourish where Leviathan—an irresistible state staffed by a competent and loyal bureaucracy—rules; or rather, liberalism and Leviathan are one and the same. Moreover, as du Gay insists in his neo-Weberian analysis of the “spirit” of state bureaucrats, the professionals who serve public institutions, such people have a particular form of life and ethos without which the modern state cannot function.
Non-state institutions, by extension, possess in a liberal regime what could be called secondary or derivative neutrality, downwind from the neutrality-as-hegemony possessed by the state. This secondary neutrality consists in institutions being permitted by the state to pursue dedicated ends—promoting aesthetic, scientific, religious, or similar missions—which are understood to be nonpolitical insofar as they do not rise to the level of partisan intensity that would make the advancement of their correlative worldviews a matter of violent conflict with other, alternative views (the staff of museums of contemporary art do not assault the staff of museums of classical art; nor do Episcopalians drown Catholics in a liberal regime). When the regime is functioning normally, or properly, these two forms of neutrality—the one defined by the state’s monopoly on the use of force, the other defined by non-state institutions’ acceptance of the former—tend to go unnoticed or to be taken as a natural and inevitable feature of the world rather than as a special, historically contingent achievement, one that reverses the general tendency of politics toward the violent clash of insuperably opposed worldviews.
The survival of a liberal regime depends on the continual reproduction of cohorts of professionals who work for the state as public servants and for these non-state institutions as managers of artistic or scientific culture and knowledge production, equipped with their own special, historically contingent mental horizons. The state bureaucrat, the agent of the hegemonically neutral state, must act on its behalf, seeing its continuing supremacy as the good to which his office aims. The non-state white-collar professional, likewise, must see the particular aim of his own institution, whatever it is, as both the paramount purpose of his own office and as distinctly nonpolitical—such that he cannot be seduced into acting either as if his institution were higher than the state or that its purpose was to be coordinated with it and other institutions in an overarching campaign to reorder society. The state bureaucrat is committed to the autonomy of the state vis-à-vis the moral and religious (and potentially violently political) commitments of non-state actors whom the state must dominate; the non-state professional is committed to the autonomy of his institution vis-à-vis the political demands that may issue from the state or the passions of the multitude.
These notions of neutrality and autonomy are the forgotten, underlying assumptions that found the modern administrative state and its corollary form of civil society. The wave of wokeness in recent years has exposed their vulnerability. Conservatives are right to seek to roll back this wave but, in a second step—to the extent that they still have any investment in our traditional manner of government—must address these vulnerabilities, which, so far, the only successful forms of anti-woke politics have worsened rather than alleviated. Or they must give an account of how a post-liberal order would offer a way out of the present impasse while improving on the legacy of liberalism.
It is obvious that the professions, including academia, proved incapable and perhaps to some extent unwilling to defend themselves from wokeness. Institutions from universities to museums to medical associations overthrew established professional norms, and their commitments to their own autonomy and neutrality, in order to join in a nationwide political campaign aimed at the installation of a new official morality. Many centrist, moderate liberals—and many traditional conservatives—have still not measured the depth of this disaster, which has, rightly, disillusioned many Americans with the foundational compacts of our regime.
Rufo is in that measure correct to apply an assemblage of tactics taken from the cultural Left and social-conservative Right to organize an anti-woke campaign. Tragically, however, his tactics, mirroring those of his enemies, subject the professions to a further round of politicization and top-down assaults on their autonomy—their basic sense of self-respect and capacity to organize and police themselves, as they pursue their legitimate aims. To which he might well, and again rightly, respond that these professions have shown themselves unworthy of autonomy. But the task of ending the culture war, and of escaping a cycle of woke and anti-woke polemical campaigns through our institutions that continually wear away at Americans’ shrinking faith in their legitimacy, requires moving beyond Rufo’s tactics, his visions of history, and his anti-institutional appeals, and toward a re-founding of the basic compact between the state and the professions.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/the-long-march-of-the-anti-woke-and-its-uncertain-destination/
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by Erős Pista Sun Apr 23, 2023 9:55 am
