Liberalism’s Achilles Heel – Christopher F. Rufo
We re going to be talking today about the long march through the institutions. It s a phrase that originates with the West German Marxist activist Rudi Dutschke, but in some ways takes its most impressive form in the United States. I d like to explain why the United States was vulnerable to this kind of strategy and discuss the capture of state institutions from the 1960s to the present, the emergence of a new left-wing bureaucratic morality, and then suggest what can be done about it.
I think the key question that provides the foundation for all of this is the United States longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. This is part of our history, a very basic tenet of our form of government. And the idea at the time, which was developed by English philosophers and then adopted in the United States during and after the revolution, was that a solution to the religious wars that had ravaged Europe for centuries was to have a strict separation of the church and the state, or the civil society and the government. And the idea was that if you could delegate religious or theological questions to the private sphere in the United States, we had a pluralistic tradition of many different churches and religious faiths and then have the government administer the state institutions in a more neutral way. You also had a common moral consensus that was able to downplay some of those doctrinal conflicts and depolarize what is called the theological-political problem.
And, for a long period of time, this worked quite brilliantly. But the problem is that this form of governing had three presuppositions. First, it presupposed a limited government, the idea that the government should be small and limit itself to only securing the basic liberties of the people. Second, it presupposed a robust civil society. This is something that the United States has always had. Even observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville saw that Americans were born organizers and had these very strong networks of non-governmental institutions. And third, it presupposed a basic consensus on Christian morality or Christian ethics, in other words, that all of the people of the time had the same basic Christian ethical framework, even if they had debates about doctrinal issues, they could be delegated to private society.
Pretty interesting.