The Necessary Partnership of Liberty and Virtue

Does the fact that virtue is a prerequisite for ordered liberty mean that classical liberalism must end in civilization's decay and replacement by anarcho-tyranny?

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

One of the great mysteries of modern life is why intellectuals’ and politicians’ ever-increasing claims to be in favor of ever-greater individual freedom have been accompanied by an equally persistent increase in the power of government and other enormous, intrusive social institutions, especially multinational corporations and supposedly nongovernmental organizations.

While those on left and right alike claim to favor greater individual freedom, the average person is increasingly squeezed by powerful pressure from government, businesses, addictive media, and other forces that are all but openly malign. In last year’s presidential election, Democrat candidate Kamala Harris continually (and risibly) tried to present her oppressive progressive-left agenda as being pro-freedom. Those on the right have claimed to be pro-liberty for decades while embroiling the nation in “forever wars,” abetting the rise of powerful multinational corporations divorced from the interests of everyday Americans, continually giving way to the left’s destruction of individual morality and social cohesion through welfare-state moral hazard and micromanagement of personal and business relationships, and so on.

Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research is a classical liberal who truly believes in liberty. Writing at Law & Liberty, Gregg addresses responses to his earlier article “Preserving Liberty in Illiberal Times,” in which he laid out current “developments across the political spectrum [that] are ‘illiberal, insofar as they reflect a willingness to compromise, or even overturn, key markers of a free society,” all of which will be familiar to readers of this newsletter.

In his current essay, “Searching for a Robust Liberal Order,” Gregg explores why U.S. nongovernmental institutions (such as academia and cultural organizations) have persistently undermined public cultural support for liberty. In large part it’s because they are Communists being paid by Communists, or degenerates being paid by degenerates, though Gregg does not mention that. In addition to that, there are intellectual trends playing out here, as both Gregg and I have observed over the years:

[T]hose concerned about the rise of illiberalism need to ask themselves a preliminary question, one posed by Michael Lucchese in the third response to my article: why have so many such institutions “proved so weak in the face of illiberalism?”

Lucchese believes that the answer is less to be found in politics than in the realm of morality. While constitutional structures and protocols are vital, he argues, too many defenders of liberty have lost sight of an older tradition: one that holds liberty and virtue together on the basis that: 1) a critical mass of virtuous individuals and communities is an indispensable safeguard for a free society; 2) freedom is an indispensable prerequisite for living a good life; and 3) the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice, is knowable to the human mind. Lucchese describes this outlook as belonging to the tradition of “republican liberality.” This was, he contends, the foundation for self-government as envisaged by American founders like George Washington and John Adams: men who understood themselves as belonging to the party of liberty.

I made that very point a few weeks ago and have regularly discussed how virtue is a prerequisite for ordered liberty. In particular, Gregg is dismayed that so many people on the right, the most obvious heirs of classical liberalism, are now openly attracted to elements of illiberalism: “Today’s postliberal right often portrays outspoken support for things like liberal constitutionalism, market economies, religious toleration, and rule of law as disguising an underlying reluctance to embrace thick concepts of the good or even a preferential option for moral relativism.”

Gregg is obviously referring to the New Right, where ideas such as Catholic Integralism thrive. I would add that much of neoconservatism, National Review fusionism, “compassionate conservatism,” the post-911 construction of the surveillance state, libertarianism (with its indulgence toward institutional destruction of public morality), and nearly all other movements on the right between World War II and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 were and are strongly infected by elements of illiberalism. Gregg continues:

This integration of liberty and virtue is not sufficient to resist illiberalism from the left and right, but it is essential. But do sufficient numbers of classical liberals today understand this and accept what it means? Lucchese is skeptical. I worry that he is right.

One consequence of the rise of left and right illiberalisms is that it has surfaced a long-simmering division among contemporary classical liberals. On the one hand, there are classical liberals who believe that virtues can be known and lived and that this need not imply aggressive state intervention into the private sphere of life. On the contrary, they hold, it puts principled limits on the scope for state action. Other classical liberals, however, give the distinct impression of regarding the idea of virtue as ephemeral at best, as inhibiting social experimentation, or as providing postliberals with an excuse to extend state intervention even further into society and the economy.

When one looks at the classical liberal tradition as a whole, the former position is far more common than the latter. People with impeccably liberal credentials like Lord Acton and Alexis de Tocqueville (both of whom star in Hayek’s pantheon of liberal heroes) did not believe that a people without virtue would remain free for long—not least because the resulting social and political disorder would open the door to the state, often led by illiberals, trying to fill the void.

My proposed remedy is that the right return to the place where it left the classical liberal path: the abandonment of the Old Right in the run-up to World War II. The small-government, local-control, pro-liberty, self-reliance, sound-money, traditional-values Christian orientation of that era is still available to us. It is in fact the driving force of the MAGA movement. Let us embrace it and acknowledge that economic freedom is central to all of it.