WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Hillsdale Interview: James Davison Hunter

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Professor James Davison Hunter — author of the new book, Democracy and Solidarity, and LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia — joins WRFH.    In Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, James Davison Hunter argues that liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice.  While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.” From 06/03/24.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. I'm Gavin Leistro. With me today is James Davidson Hunter, author of the new book, Democracy and Solidarity, on the Cultural Roots of American Political Crisis. I'm wondering if you give the listener a quick overview to understand where this book is coming from, especially in light of your previous books. Yeah, so just over 30 years ago, I published a book called Culture Wars, The Struggle to Define America, which introduced that concept. to public discourse. And the heart of that book was an attempt to understand an axis of conflict that was taking shape that varied fundamentally from the conflict that had existed in our politics through most of the 20th century. Most of the political conflict of the 20th century, at least domestic conflict, was

oriented or deriving from political economy. It was the wealthy versus the poor. It was capitalism and corporate managers against labor unions. And in the last quarter of the 20th century, conflict was taking on a very different task. It was over these cultural issues. Most importantly, of course, was abortion, but it was also about funding for the arts. It was about public education, Christopher Columbus, things like that.

And part of the argument of the book was that these issues were not, in fact, discrete issues, though they were presented that way in newspapers and the news media, but in fact we're linked together in a struggle to define the meaning of America and its dominant institutions. So that book was not just about the politics of culture. It was also about the culture of politics, sort of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of democracy and the meaning of America and the meaning of American democracy. So now, 30 years later, this book, Democracy and Solidarity, is its bookend. It certainly covers a lot of the themes of culture wars, but it's looking at the crisis of democracy from the other side of the coin. It's not just about the pluribus.

It's about the unum. What's happened to the unum? there has always been. I mean, in any society, there has to be an element of glue that binds people together, at least in a democracy. And authoritarian regimes, of course, that glue is imposed by the power of the state. But in democracies, there has to be a kind of organic solidarity. And this book tells the story.

of what happened over many generations to bring us to that this point of crisis that we're in right now. This idea of solidarity that you hint that we've kind of lost, what are examples of us being able to work through our differences in the founding? Because I'm thinking of traditional examples of, you know, Hamilton versus Jefferson. And how did they work through those differences with this common glue that you're talking about? Well, I think the real point is that for all of the differences, of course, well, let me back up and just say this, that we look backward through the founding period, and we generally see a homogeneous society. And in many respects, it was homogeneous, 90% of the population of during the colonial. period and at the time of the founding had come from England and Great Britain more broadly.

So ethnically and religiously, it was broadly homogeneous. But of course, back then, of the just that mattered took place within Christianity. It was it was Episcopalians versus the Methodists and congregationalists. and the like. And those differences meant a lot more back then than they did, than they do now. And of course, this is also the time of the intellectual revolution, we call the Enlightenment, and there were some iconic Enlightenment, secular Enlightenment characters like Payne and Jefferson and the like. And, but in spite of the differences that did exist, they shared a lot in common. There was a cultural system I call the hybrid enlightenment.

And it was broad enough and opaque enough that it could contain the differences between these people. And as a consequence, because they shared so much in common, a common sense of the basis of knowledge, the nature of reality, an ethical system, and not least, a teleology, a sense that America was in a place of privilege, there was a lot that was unspoken that would bind them together and that would impel people to work together to resolve differences. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Gavin Listro, and I'm talking with James Davis and Hunter about his book, Democracy and Solidarity. This hybrid enlightenment you just mentioned, can you go into that a little bit more of what you mean by that? Most people are familiar with the Great Enlightenment. Is this borrowing from that? Is it a conglomeration of a few different things? sure well the enlightenment was an intellectual and cultural revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries and um it was um and it's often spoken about as though it was a monolith it was just one thing

um but the fact of the matter is that the the enlightenment as it took hold in france was very different from the Enlightenment that emerged in England and in Scotland, and it was different still from the Enlightenment in Germany. And in America, it was different still. And a lot of that had to do with the historical contingencies of, that is, the American Enlightenment, a moderate Enlightenment, drew mostly from England and Scotland. And also because so many of the early colonists were religious dissenters,

working out of the broad reform tradition of Protestant Christianity, it took on its own distinct flavor. It wasn't just one thing, the way someone like a Stephen Pinker, might describe it. It was a purely secular phenomenon. Think of it as a hybrid enlightenment, as a reservoir that's fed by multiple different streams. And the streams certainly included a deistic and a secular stream. It included the kind of Lockean individualism. British philosophy at the time, and it was also very much constituted by, as I mentioned before,

by Calvinism. And they were woven together. I mean, obviously, the most important enlightenment figure of the 1700s was with Jonathan Edwards himself, who was a Protestant, Calvinist cleric, but who was wrestling creatively and interestingly

with many of the themes of the broader enlightenment, which was a commitment to science empirical investigation to reason

with a capital R in the sense that that modern societies would be based upon. I think we have this kind of unified idea of the founding, these ideas that came together to shape it, and these men with very similar ideas, putting their heads together. Where has that fallen away in the present day?

And can you kind of show like progression of falling away from these core ideas in this Enlightenment period and the idea of Protestant Christianity? Where did that change as we get to present day? Yeah, well, you find that it's not so much of a falling away. To a certain extent, that's true in the present. But most of American history has not been a falling away from the founding ideals, the founding principles, or even the founding cosmology. Those things have been celebrated. But the problem with the hybrid enlightenment, as with the hybrid, with the, hybrid, with the,

enlightenment more broadly, is that it contained internal contradictions that couldn't be wished away. So in our political documents, we are told that all men are created equal. So we are promised equality. We are promised freedom. But then equality and freedom have been denied to large swaths of humanity. we're promised a certain toleration of different ideas and ideals. And yet we deny that toleration the large swaths of the American public.

And obviously, anti-Catholicism is one of the dominant themes of American history during the 19th century. Obviously, slavery was the most important contradiction. In the process of dealing with these contradictions, the promise of essentially political flourishing, but then it's denial, the hybrid enlightenment was transformed. It slowly changed. It came to mean more. and it, well, it came to mean different things through that conflict. It was still recognizable with the founding period. By the end of the 19th century, slavery had been abolished. Mormons found freedom in Utah.

Catholicism was being accepted. Anti-Semitism was still pre-Semitism. present, of course, but there were, um, um, the, you know, difference was expanding, but so was the unum. So it came to look different over time. What's happened now, and particularly in the context of the culture war, is that these differences are fundamentally cosmological. They are about, um, they are rooted in a fundamentally different. sense of what is real, how we know what is real. It's epistemology. Fundamentally different ethics. And I would say fundamentally absent teleology. There's no picture of the future that is shared.

the differences that existed through the 19th century were largely over anthropology. Who is a human being and who deserves or is entitled to the rights and protections of citizens? And that difference was big enough to cause a civil war. And of course, its legacy was, carried through with Jim Crow and so on, still wrestling with that one. But the point is that the hybrid enlightenment has been this powerful intellectual and cultural legacy that did not remain the same. It evolved and it evolved through conflict, and that's a big part of what this book, the story, this book tells. In more recent times, I would say that the

the adversaries are weary of the conflict. They are exhausted. Adversaries no longer have a stomach for talking through differences. And even if they did, on what basis would they talk these things through? On what basis would they find common ground? As Alistair McIntyre famously said, these are differences that go all the way down. People are essentially giving up on the process of working through these differences. And it's not just because they're exhausted. It's because they're no longer the cultural resources to get to the other side of them. This is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.

I'm Gavin Listro, and I'm talking with James Davis and Hunter about his book, Democracy and Solidarity. How do those cultural differences that people are exhausted of working through, map on, something current, like the conversation of abortion and what is a human life? How does that map onto that modern issue? Well, can you remember at any point in any recent years while you've been politically attentive of any serious and substantive discussion among adversaries about abortion? There's a lot of name-calling. There is a lot of accusation. There is a lot of but no serious and substantive democratic debate about these things. People just don't do that anymore, and they don't do this about anything.

People just each side declares what is right, and the culture war now is essentially taking shape among two competing hegemonic projects, the goal of which is simply achieving power. I see a lot of that kind of polarized either or option for political stances, a lot on the federal level, taking the sides and then people kind of being dispersed among these two sides. Can we change that by being more local and talking about things and kind of having that solidarity between the people that you just interact with on a daily basis? Does that help remedy that kind of polarization? Well, there are initiatives that are trying to bridge the divide. And, you know, some of these initiatives are, I mean, you do hear of them. I'm not saying that they don't exist anymore.

I mean, especially at the federal level that they don't seem to exist at all. But at the local level, even, they're pretty rare. They do exist, though. And the problem is that they don't scale very easily. They require a lot of time because those initiatives are and should be face-to-face. It requires a lot of emotional energy, and honestly, they're hard to sustain. It's hard to build upon it, and it's very hard to scale, particularly in a national discursive environment where the new communications technologies and the algorithms that drive them

push toward polarization so much more. In a way, the local initiatives get eclipsed by the power and the rage that emerges from the national discourse. You're talking about these issues with scaling and these efforts that are doing their best, but maybe aren't completely hitting the mark. Is this, do you think this is a fixable issue, or is this something that's been kind of set in the founding and has been slowly playing out,

and there's nothing really we can do? What is the conclusion to this? Yeah, it's a good question. Having written culture wars over 30 years ago, I would say that the culture war continues. It's gotten worse. It is also more alarming. Democracy is, among money and other things,

It is an agreement not to kill each other over our differences, but to find common ground through talk. Discourse, serious and substantive engagement with each other as fellow citizens. That's not happening. And it wasn't happening 30 years ago. It's happening even less now. So this is a real problem for our democracy. But the heart of this book is about the sources that make democracy vital, that would possibly renew democracy. And those resources, I argue, have largely been exhausted in a different sense.

They have been depleted. But all societies have, I mean, all societies have a culture. and our political culture now, there is, in fact, an emerging common culture that underwrites our politics today. And that's a culture of nihilism. This is – and in the book about nihilism as being both passive and active, I look at the contours of that nihilism, and a kind of tragic irony, both right and left, draw from that culture of nihilism in its political engagement. That's going to be, ultimately, as I argue at the end of the book, the real enemy is not the other side. The real enemy is the nihilism that insinuates itself within all of our public institutions and not least higher education.

So I take a stab at it at the very end of the book in a coda called imaginaries of hope. But it's a bigger problem than simply coming together and talking through our differences. I wish it were that simple. Then it would be a matter of political will. If we could just muster up enough political will and good intentions, We could save this thing, but as I argue, the problems are far deeper than that. And they reside in an emerging political culture that is fundamentally nihilistic and that it affects all sides of the culture war today.

Our guest has been James Davis and Hunter, author of the book, Democracy and Solidarity, and I'm Gavin Leastrow on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM.