Moderation as Pursuit of Justice: John Kekes and Aurelian Craiutu ask what virtues make a society truly good. (Daniel J. Mahoney, February 3, 2025, Modern Age)
John Kekes’s lucid and for the most part compelling book begins with a self-correction. As the author of several books making the case for conservatism and taking on academic egalitarianism on the left, he now wishes to emphasize what his “moderate conservatism” has in common with a “moderate liberalism” that also wants to preserve the American political system against extremists on the left and right. In making this change, he has clearly been unnerved by certain forms of populist activism and by soi-disant conservatives who refuse to acknowledge what remains valuable in liberal theory and practice. At the same time, however, he remains deeply skeptical of theorists and activists on the left and right who appeal (in Adam Smith’s phrase) to “ideal plan[s] of government” that treat “the different members of a great society” as “different pieces upon a chess-board” to be moved about at will. With Smith, Kekes opposes as “the highest degree of arrogance” the pretension of ideologues and abstract theorists that their “own judgment” is “the supreme standard of right and wrong.” Tocqueville aptly called this destructive propensity “literary politics,” as if these irresponsible theorists believed they were free to write a political play that ignores historical experience and the limits that define the human condition. This preference for abstract theorizing over practical reason and historical experience is shared by reactionary thinkers and those who hold up models of a “postliberal” utopia, along with the far more numerous class of “progressive” ideologists.
In a striking passage, Kekes takes pointed, and well-deserved, aim at those “motivated by an immoderate moralistic fervor and indignation at the history of the wrongs that have been done to those they suppose themselves to be defending.” These purveyors of egalitarian dogmatism and “crusaders” for liberation and emancipation are angry, “immoderate and intolerant,” and thus “blind to the complexities of moral and political evaluations.” They weaponize the law “against their opponents” while ignoring or being “unaware of external threats and of the domestic necessity of maintaining order, peace, and security.” They are feverishly committed to untenable “overriding ideals” and are contemptuous of the moral achievement that is a constitutional order rooted in liberty and law, which has the great merit of having “met the test of time.”
In contrast to this attitude of unrelieved repudiation and negation, moderate conservatives display gratitude for what has been passed down from previous generations and support gradual and cautious—moderate—reform when it is called for. They studiously avoid indignation and prefer “civility” to “contempt” in dealing with fellow citizens. They want “to heal the nation’s wounds,” in the noble words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and not to irresponsibly exacerbate them. They prefer thoughtful citizenship to reckless activism. This is a noble and emphatically non-utopian “ideal” precisely because it is much more than simply an abstract ideal.
In a manner befitting what some have called “conservative liberalism” and what he calls “moderate conservatism,” Kekes defends the full range of common decencies that “make possible political moderation” and “peaceful coexistence with others in our society.”