ENEMIES OF THE dEEP sTATE:

Now we turn to the other baby abused. Compared to the great benevolent monotheisms, which started in the ancient world, the 'baby' we turn to now is, like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, 'classical' only within the modern period, as Constant said. This little angel is younger than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

If liberalism means what the integralists say it means, then one must be sympathetic to large parts of their critique. Yoram Hazony's characterization of the liberal tradition is not entirely satisfactory, yet he remains a stalwart of constitutionalism in his recent book Conservatism: A Rediscovery. We sympathize with his criticisms of abstract rationalism but much prefer the mix of principle and prudence to be found in the conservative liberal traditions. And as Richard Reinsch has noted in his review of Hazony's book, Hazony's "historical empiricism" seems to depend on a sort of "biblical positivism" to do the work of practical reason. Hazony also rejects any appeal to "natural rights," rather than tying them in a salutary way to older moral understandings that give the exercise of rights heft and balance. To be sure, Hazony's "conservative democracy" provides some guidance for addressing our crisis. But conservative democracy is hardly conservative, prudent, or sober if it positions itself aggressively against the classical liberal tradition. 

By denying the possibility of a conservatism that includes the best liberal theory and practice, the integralists have largely left behind the conservatism that Americans rightly associate with Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, George Will, and Thomas Sowell.

The integralists tend to create a 'liberalism' strawman. Sometimes they bundle, when they should separate, Smithian liberalism and the leftism that for more than a century has in certain quarters of the world passed itself off as 'liberal.' Contrary to various representations of the integralists, Hazony, and others, Smithian liberalism: 

is not rationalistic or axiomatic, 

is not favorable to radical autonomy, 

is not unappreciative of custom and tradition, 

is not wedded to social-contract theory, 

is not hostile to natural law or the notion of a moral order to the universe,

is not of the view that every moral obligation stems from a social act of consent,

is not anti-clerical, 

is not insouciant about virtue and blind to the exaltedness of higher things, 

is not unfaithful to the common good, 

is not reductionist and scientistic, 

is not at odds with patriotism nor even with a temperate, humane, practical sort of nationalism,

is not inclined toward a fanciful, decontextualized liberty, abstracted away from real-world institutions,

and is not unaware that liberty represents a duty as well as a right, as liberty depends, as Constant said, on civic virtue, on responsibilities fulfilled.

Understanding the distinction between voluntary and coercive behavior, a distinction rooted in our very constitution as organisms distinct from one another, Smithian liberalism understands that the governmentalization of social affairs is, by and large, destructive of cultural integrity and human vitality. Government itself is a reality to be coped with, and Smith wrote without irony of "the greatest and noblest of all characters, that of the reformer and legislator of a great state." Smith's liberal principles are presumptive only, and they would contour our best approach to sustaining virtue in modern circumstances. Those principles seek to sustain some basic social grammars, to keep the wild, spontaneous grove of social poetry relatively peaceful. Thomas Sowell always asks: Compared to what? Whatever it is that the integralists are proposing, how could it not give a central place to Smithian-liberal principles?

Those of us who try to preserve the best of classical liberalism are sometimes derided as "right liberals," indifferent to the good and complicit in a subjectivist erosion of civilized liberty. But Burke, Tocqueville, Aron, and the co-authors of this article reject radical subjectivism and affirm a 'God is watching' duty to the good of the whole, just as much as the integralists do. Truth, goodness, and virtue are indeed correspondent. But in policy and politics, the integralists tussle with strawmen, and not, say, Burke's orientation toward 'practical liberty.' 

Sohrab Ahmari is right to reaffirm the common good as a meaningful category of human and political life. But as Pope John Paul II reiterated, authentic religion aims to persuade, not coerce. It is striking how ambivalent the integralists are about religious liberty, a liberty defended as the first of our freedoms by the contemporary Catholic Church. "Common good constitutionalism" is by no means a contradiction in terms. The integralist version of the concept is vague and often evasive. It often seems more coercive than constitutionalist and forgets that in decisive respects virtue must be freely chosen. The integralist version of the concept lacks sufficient confidence in people, in their private affairs, to conduct themselves responsibly, or to learn to do so. By denying the possibility of a conservatism that includes the best liberal theory and practice, the integralists have largely left behind the conservatism that Americans rightly associate with Burke, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Are Ahmari and the others 'post-conservative' as well as 'post-liberal'? They give us ample reasons to think so.

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