The righteousness of history

Democrats claim to embrace pluralism and to tolerate disagreement, but many ultimately believe in an unforgiving and judgmental God, the God of history.

Written by Bo Winegard

Have Democrats embraced pluralism?

In an interview with the Bulwark’s Tim Miller, Jon Favreau, one of Barack Obama’s longtime speechwriters, related that Obama “…has been talking a lot over the last year or so about pluralism.” And that he even “wanted to give a pluralism speech.”

In a similar but folksier vein, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, has repeated the line, “We’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business!” And while this saying might not express the transcendent moral wisdom of Jesus or Kant, it does express the visceral worldview of the average libertarian.

Kamala Harris herself has claimed that her campaign is about choosing freedom over “chaos, fear, and hate” and has prominently featured Beyonce’s song Freedom on the campaign trail and in commercials.

Freedom, pluralism, minding your own damned business! Sounds as though Democrats are sick of moral arrogance and certainty. Sick of scolds and finger waggers. Sick of woke imperialism. Ready to endorse a new more pluralistic vision of society.

Pluralism is related to (small l) liberalism¹. As defined by William Galston, liberalism “requires a robust though rebuttable presumption in favor of individuals and groups leading their lives as they see fit, within a broad range of legitimate variation, in accordance with their own understanding of what gives life meaning and value.”

The important point for the pluralist is that it allows a “broad range of legitimate variation” in lifestyles and social arrangements. It does not seek to impose a unifying or totalizing narrative, a summum bonum, toward which communities are to be oriented. Instead, it allows communities of freely associating individuals to choose their own good and to arrange their own institutions in accordance with their values.

Obviously this has limitations. Liberal pluralism is not anarchy nor is it relativism. An advocate of liberal pluralism can make distinctions between objectively better and worse social arrangements. Like the musical critic who praises both Beethoven and The Beatles, but not Bush or Britney Spears, the liberal pluralist celebrates variety but does not refrain from all judgment. National Socialism was not one of many competing and legitimate social arrangements. Murder, rape, and robbery are wrong in any morally acceptable community.

Perhaps one can profitably compare liberal pluralism’s attitude about ideology and sociopolitical arrangements to diets. Despite confident (and often profitable) assertions otherwise, nobody seems to know what the optimal diet is. Or perhaps more accurately, there is no such thing as the optimal diet. Rather, there are many equally healthy (or nearly equally healthy) diets, some full of fruits, vegetables, grains, and fish, and some full of potatoes and steak. So long as a person does not consume too many calories, many diets are consistent with health and fitness. Most disagreements about diet thus are caused by aesthetic preferences and identity-related concerns, not by objective empirical evidence.

What is true of diets, according to liberal pluralism, is true of sociopolitical arrangements. And in the United States, tolerance of differences in lifestyle and social organization is crucial. The country is enormous, stretching thousands of miles from Atlantic to Pacific through sundry climates and landscapes with diverse communities, from small towns organized around humble churches to big cities sprawled around towering skyscrapers. The God of our distant ancestors still haunts the imagination in one, while the God of commerce reigns in the other. And of course, there is nearly limitless variety between.

Because of this diversity in climate and community, and because of the natural diversity of humans, Americans inevitably embrace different values and different conceptions of the good. A twenty-five-year-old professor of philosophy in New York City might be a skeptic who loves the controlled chaos of crowds and commerce. Whereas, a forty-year-old plumber in the Upper Peninsula might be a fervent Christian who loves familiarity and routine.

As different as these two might be, they would still share many values and interests. They would probably both love friends, children, cooperation, sunsets, and Pulp Fiction. But their identities, their life narratives, would be vastly different and would lead to different cultural and policy preferences.

The plumber might be chary of generous immigration policies and changing norms around sex and gender, valuing continuity and tradition. The professor, on the other hand, might celebrate open borders and gay marriage, valuing openness and disruption. We can call these competing narratives traditionalist and progressive, respectively. (Other dichotomous terms have been forwarded, including closed and open or nationalist and cosmopolitan.)

Liberal pluralism accepts both traditionalism and progressivism as legitimate orientations to the world and argues that healthy societies should carve out space for each. The plumber should be able to live in a traditionalist community that largely shares his values and, within Constitutional limits, enacts the policies that promote and preserve traditionalism. Similarly, the professor should be able to live in a progressive community that does the same for progressive values.

Real pluralism does not contend that one community is better than the other. Instead it contends that, like shopping carts filled with different but equally healthy groceries, the communities reflect distinct but legitimate underlying preferences. The small town that rejects modernity is as morally acceptable as the bustling city that champions it. As consequence, pluralism rejects the whiggish view of history in which human society ascends from the darkness of ignorance and superstition to the light of wisdom and tolerance. New York City is not inherently superior to an Amish village in Pennsylvania. Gay marriage, feminism, rationalism, and individualism are not inherently superior to traditional marriage, patriarchy, faith, and collectivism.

And here is the rub for Democrats who claim to support pluralism: They do not in fact embrace social diversity, and they do not accept the basic tenets of pluralism. Rather, they embrace a triumphalist view of social progress based on a limited palette of absolute moral principles. They condemn those who cling to the past as inferior to those who welcome the future. They replace the “backward” God of the evangelical with the righteous God of history. And they replace hellfire with the obloquy of our descendents who will castigate us for having been “on the wrong side” of some crucial moral issue or another.

Consider, for example, this passage from Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention:

To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns — and maybe learn something in the process.

After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast, and that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up. Our fellow citizens deserve the same grace we hope they’ll extend to us.

The attitude here is of moral condescension coupled with an enlightened air of tolerance. It’s the kind of attitude a calculus professor might adopt toward a class struggling with a difficult problem and suggests absolute confidence in the objective superiority of progressivism. The worry is not that the parent or the grandparent might be right—that racial or religious conservatism might be legitimate—but rather that chastising somebody for clutching the past, for refusing to let go of antiquated beliefs, might not be the best way to win them over. But no worry—with the appropriate “encouragement” they might “catch up.”

This attitude is consistent with that displayed by Obama back in 2008 in his infamous speech from a fundraiser:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Alternatives to enlightened progressivism are viewed as symptoms of community decay, not as legitimate ideas about the best way to organize society. This is common rhetoric on the left. Those who are deeply religious or who oppose immigration are not just wrong, they are angry and fearful. Their beliefs are motivated, not rational—more like the standing hair on a scared cat than the well-reasoned positions in a white paper.

This is not pluralism; it is progressive monism.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s gestures toward pluralism and freedom are equally as deceptive as Obama’s.

Two examples.

Kamala Harris consistently rails against the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe/Casey, and has promised that she will sign a bill that once again makes Roe the law of the land. But the Roe framework steamrolled diversity and imposed a top-down standard across the country that conflicted with the desires of many states.

A liberal pluralist should embrace Dobbs and eschew national abortion laws since Dobbs allows for regional variation. In states that are conservative, abortion laws will be more conservative. In states that are progressive, they will be progressive. Let 50 flowers bloom!

Kamala Harris advocates the freedom to “love who you love, openly and with pride.” Presumably this is a defense of gay marriage. But imposing gay marriage across the country through the Supreme Court is not pluralistic, it’s imperialistic. Traditionalist communities are skeptical of gay marriage. And, according to liberal pluralism, they should be allowed to create communities that reflect those values.

Democrats have not embraced pluralism. They have embraced a new progressive triumphalism, albeit one that is tempered by judicious rhetoric and a recognition that chastising people who do not share their worldview is a bad way to persuade them to vote for Democrats.

Beneath the apparently tolerant attitude and the explicit talk of pluralism is a supercilious confidence in the superiority of progressivism. In the end of time, the blight of traditionalism will be eradicated. And the spirit of tolerance, of cosmopolitanism, of enlightenment will triumph. In the meantime, progressives, for the sake of decency and political strategy, must bear with amiable patience their benighted brethren.

The problem is that the underlying contempt is as easy to see as the political subterfuge. Democrats can’t placate traditionalists by pretending to care about their views or refraining from calling them bigots. And they certainly can’t placate them by putting a small-town football coach from Nebraska with extremely progressive values on the ticket.

Instead, they would have to offer policy concessions and commit to real cultural compromise, recognizing that maybe, just maybe, they are not mainlining the secret truth of the universe. Until then, Donald Trump will happily take the votes of disgruntled traditionalists and others alienated by the arrogance of liberal progressivism. Perhaps if he wins yet again, progressives will come to see him more as Judge Holden in Blood Meridian than as Satan in Paradise Lost—as a figure who challenges rather than confirms the singular goodness of creation and the ultimate triumph of the righteous.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor at Aporia.

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1. This relationship is complicated and because of limited size of this essay I cannot explore it in detail. The chief question is this: Does liberal pluralism require that all communities conform to the basic principles of liberalism? Or does it allow for communities that are not liberal? Can the liberal pluralist endorse the Amish? My own preliminary view is that liberal pluralism describes a political philosophy at the national level. Thus liberal pluralism can accept non-liberal community arrangements. And, in fact, a kind of liberal pluralism that insists upon pan-liberalism becomes imperial and non-pluralistic.