There is a woman who lives in the outskirts of a large city in South America who has found a vibrant church community. She was born into a Catholic family, perhaps baptized as a Catholic, but as an adult encountered first the billboards, then the fliers, and then the people of a large Pentecostal Church. She has found a home there. They encourage “family values;” they help people get sober; they have a charismatic pastor who performs healings; and they remember her birthday. The people of this church also reliably vote for anti-democratic right-wing political candidates who are infamous for cutting social services and encouraging money-dealing corruption.
There is a woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts who teaches at Harvard University. She studies people like this woman in South America—ordinary people who turn Rightward under the influence of charismatic religious leaders. As a sociologist, she can explain how people are moved this way politically through social networks, but she does not really understand the psychology of it all: why would they be so willing to surrender their democratic freedoms and their immediate economic interests for moral causes that seem ginned up and far removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary people?
Last week Flávio Bolsonaro became the favorite to be the next president of Brazil. Flávio is the far-Right son of the authoritarian former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. The father is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence in Brazil for plotting a coup in 2022. The son is running for president with designs, no doubt, of getting his father out of jail. Within a year, there is a good chance that both Bolsonaros will be running Brazil.
The Trumps and the Bolsonaros are close allies and in many ways mirror images of each other. The Trump administration has been actively interfering in Brazilian politics in an effort to tip the scales in favor of a return of the Bolsonaros to power. South America, more than any other region of the world, has been amenable to the Trump administration’s aims. A Bolsonaro victory would solidify the hold of Right-wing regimes in the region.
And this hold will be secured on the back of the Culture Wars.
Last week the Harvard sociologist Liz McKenna—the woman above in Cambridge, Massachusetts—published a piece in The New York Times in which she introduced readers to people like the woman I described above: low-income, devout, and newly converted to Right-wing causes.
McKenna argues that the key to the Bolsonaro comeback in Brazil is evangelicals. The percentage of Brazilians who are identified as evangelical now represents a quarter of Brazil’s population, up from just under 10% in 1991. McKenna writes,
The Brazilian right has expanded its reach through a constellation of increasingly influential conservative think tanks and online grass roots networks. These movements lack formal leadership or a coherent ideological program, instead orbiting and exhibiting cultlike loyalty to figures. . . They campaign year-round, say and do what a candidate cannot and recruit activists who have never before cared about politics. Their most visible figures are pastors, gospel singers and YouTubers with audiences in the millions.
McKenna argues that evangelical (specifically, Pentecostal) pastors have stepped into a “vacuum” created by the failure of the Left to take local, grassroots organizing seriously. Local celebrity-like pastors are among the most powerful political influencers in poorer neighborhoods:
A poor Pentecostal woman in the São Paulo periphery is not a born Bolsonaro voter; indeed, evangelicals spent over a decade allied with the PT [the political party of the Left]. But if a pastor is there every week to help her map her faith to politics, a Bolsonaro voter she will become. In return, the faithful—who get little from the state and even less from the parties that claim to speak for them—are given order, sobriety and a community that always remembers your birthday, as one local resident told me.
McKenna is a sociologist. Such findings are entirely consistent with a long tradition of sociological theory that put local affiliations and associations at the center of social dynamics. Indeed, we come back to these ideas over and over here at Civic Fields.
Nevertheless, McKenna has a more specific take on this phenomenon. It is one that is widely shared by educated liberals in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. She writes that residents of heavily populated but poorer communities in Brazil have learned to follow “their pastors’ political cues to vote on moral rather than material interests.”
McKenna assumes that people should put their material interests ahead of moral concerns in making decisions about voting. The puzzle for her is why they don’t.
This is the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” thesis exported to Brazil.
If you don’t know the phrase, it refers to Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? The book asked why Kansans reliably voted Republican even though they kept on getting fleeced by conservative policies. “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what [current] American political life is all about,” Frank complained. “This derangement has put the Republicans in charge of all three branches of government.”
If, by contrast, Kansans were taking their economic interests seriously, they would leave the protest lines at abortion clinics and join picket lines with unions; or perhaps abandon the John Birch Society and join Democratic Socialists of America; or at least stop damning taxes and start demanding rich bastards pay more.
Frank and McKenna share an outlook that I think is representative of the basic liberal defense of democracy. I think this outlook is shared not just by self-identified liberals, but by many Americans, including many who might vote Republican. “Liberalism” here refers to a widely shared mindset across political parties, not just Democrats or those on the Left.
The broad liberal outlook says this: democracy is morally justified because it is the best mechanism for the pursuit and protection of material interests in a manner that does not prevent other fellow citizens from also pursuing their material interests.
This is the “mutual advantage” case for democracy that I discussed last week.
As I discussed last week, the “mutual advantage” case for democracy was made at the end of the 1990s by the political scientist Russell Hardin. Hardin argued democracy—better than monarchy, oligarchy, or one-party authoritarianism—affords the opportunity for different individuals, indeed many individuals, to each pursue their advantage in a manner that does not necessarily keep other people from also pursuing their advantage. Democracy, therefore, is morally justified because it best satisfies the moral criterion of “mutual advantage.”
Put slightly differently, democracy is justified because it best allows us to pursue the things that matter to us without necessarily negatively interfering with the pursuits of others.
This, I think, is the dominant liberal case for democracy today, one shared by many who would identify themselves as “conservative.” It is a thin one, and intentionally and willfully so. It is thin because it does not presuppose a strong theory of justice or, importantly, any concept of human welfare or flourishing. It simply says that democracy works better for an aggregate of individuals to pursue their interests than any other system, particularly when it comes to material interests.
But this is exactly where the Culture Wars muck everything up.
The Culture Wars, in Mckenna’s words, encourage people “to vote on moral rather than material interests.”
Beneath this critique of the Culture Wars is a strong skepticism about thick moral communities. Indeed, Hardin is explicitly skeptical of what he calls “communitarianism.” Frank and McKenna are implicitly skeptical of the same. McKenna identifies evangelicals as the problem in Brazil because they represent thick communities that subordinate material interests to moral ones.
“Communitarianism” is a loaded word, and a relatively new one. But the basic idea behind it, at least as Hardin (mis?)understands it, is that group identitarian interests should trump individual interests in politics.
In its most idyllic form, communitarianism might best be represented by the Amish. There, a vision of communitas takes precedence over individual interests or desires. In its most destructive form, communitarianism might be represented by religiously motivated terrorist cells. In between these extremes are a whole range of communitarian possibilities: Mormons in the Great West, hippies in Northern California, Hasidic enclaves in New York, or thickly Francophone communities in Canada. But the point here is that communitarianism centers group identity, at the core of which is an emphasis on a certain way of life.
Indeed, Hardin wants to expand “communitarianism” to include any form of politics that is based on what he calls “census groups.” He therefore also means to include much of what we today call “identity politics.”
Here I want to applaud for a moment such a consistent liberalism. If one is going to argue in liberal individualist fashion that individual interests should trump protecting a particular group’s identitarian existence, it is only logical that such a person should be skeptical of identity politics. Hardin was in this camp. So is Frank. (I am not sure about McKenna.)
However, many today seem to want to have it both ways: democracy, they implicitly argue, is a way of maximizing mutual advantage understood in terms of individual interests, and democracies should go out of their way to create advantages for certain people based on their “census group” identity. (Again, I am not just talking about Lefties here—the political Right in the United States today is organized around a combination of economic and white idenitarian interests.)
Hardin said we should not have it both ways. We should be individualists. Today Andrew Sullivan is a good example of this kind of consistent liberal: a gay Catholic who is nevertheless a very sharp critic of identity politics.
Nevertheless, while I respect consistent liberalism, the individualist “mutual advantage” approach to democracy concerns me because it is quite vulnerable to a particular kind of political attack from precisely those communitarian or quasi-communitarian groups at the center of liberal skepticism.
Indeed, liberal skepticism of thick moral communities is a big part of the reason why the Culture Wars work.
I need to be clear: I think the Culture Wars are a tool of domination, not liberation. Those who drive the Culture Wars are using moral issues in order to secure amoral or immoral forms of political and economic power. While there are indeed real and substantive moral differences among people, the Culture Wars are a form of ideology in the classical sense: a means of mass manipulation.
Nevertheless, the Culture Wars work, and work quite powerfully. They work not so much because they are inherently persuasive, but because collective defenses against vigorous moral claims—especially when those moral claims are skillfully wielded as pretenses for domination—are simply too thin in liberal society.
Liberalism asks us to believe and behave in the public and political realms as though we were essentially ego-centered creatures, putting self-interests ahead of all other interests.
That is what “mutual advantage” is all about.
It’s what “it’s the economy, stupid” is all about.
It is also why many liberals have traditionally been skeptical of communitarianism, appeals to the common good, and other forms binding moral claims for corporate wholes beyond individual rights.
It is true, in the last thirty years liberals have learned to embrace a type of semi-communitarianism: moral claims for corporate wholes tied to what Hardin calls “census” identity. In other words, identity politics.
But this again is why the Culture Wars work. Census identity drives the Culture Wars. Indeed, today census identity seems only capable of being comprehended in the terms of the Culture Wars. The Culture Wars have become a mechanism through which contemporary liberalism can and does construct binding moral claims for communities and not just individuals, but not to our advantage. The Culture Wars are like a fungus that forms around a vulnerability—a thicker “moral” edifice indeed, but one that is there to destroy, not to heal.
The fundamental strength of contemporary liberalism—its moral thinness, which allows different visions of justice and moral goods to co-exist—had become the fundamental problem is with liberalism. The problem all along was that liberalism did not take seriously enough the fact that everyday people as such, apart from their political identity, are already morally thick animals.
Contra liberalism, one of the most obvious things to say about everyday people is that they cannot be described as essentially ego-centered creatures. Many people will sacrifice their own individual interests for the sake of helping other individuals or groups—even to the point of death. Indeed, most every culture in history has celebrated such self-sacrificial actions as morally praiseworthy.
By contrast, contemporary liberalism on the Left end of the spectrum struggles to celebrate self-sacrifice. This is attested to by the fact that today a robust political ethic of civil disobedience, which was so central to the Civil Rights movement, is almost nowhere to be found in the American Left right now—they want the right to protest, it seems, without exposure to the strong arm of the law.
The Right, by contrast, can and does justify self-sacrifice today, but only by abandoning liberal and democratic categories altogether and turning instead to the religiosity of the “Christian Nation”—all the while while retaining the liberal emphasis on individual material and idenitarian interests. The Right, because it is open to religion, because it is open to patriotism, nationalism, and indeed racism, is simply better a compensating for the vulnerabilities of thin liberalism than the Left. It adds to the basic liberal framework fungus-like ethnocentric superstructures that inherently undermine democratic claims.
What I am arguing here is not new. There have been many critiques of liberalism along these lines, most famously in recent years Patrick Deneen’s highly influential Why Liberalism Failed, a book central to “intellectual” Trumpism (and endorsed by no less than Barack Obama).
What is slightly new here perhaps is that I am explaining the success of the Culture Wars against the backdrop of the “thin” moral justification for democracy within liberalism. Deneen’s book was influential in fueling the Culture Wars further because contemporary liberalism is easy pickings for any vision of community and humanity that presents itself as morally thick, even if that vision is anti-democratic (which Deneen’s is) and tied to a project for ruthless domination (which Deneen’s is).
The Culture Wars work because they implicitly say to people, “You are morally thick beings! Join our morally thick cause!” Even if it means destroying democracy.
Contemporary liberalism offers a weak defense against such “thick” if ultimately disingenous moral claims. Even more, contemporary liberalism reinforces the Culture War machine the Right dominates by relying on Culture War binaries and oppositions in order to construct a semblance of a view of “community” that is based on oppositional identitarian categories.
But I ask, why can’t democracy, even under liberal auspices, become a morally thick project? There’s no political, philosophical, or structural reason it can’t.
Next week I am look back into the history of liberalism to discover a different liberalism that could provide a morally thick justification for democracy even as it allows for different visions of justice and moral goods to co-exist.