I read James Bradshaw’s review of Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right with great interest and have put it on my “books to read” list. Bradshaw points out that the pagan tribalism of (genuinely) far-right parties can be tempting for those conscious of the failures of liberalism, socialism, and globalism. Against this, the proposal of the far right is to retreat into “national solidarity and cultural identity, not individual liberty”, which, according to Rose, represents a revival of pre-Christian pagan tribalism. That said, it is certainly not the case that much that is derided as “far right” in contemporary discourse is anything other than a legitimate challenge to “left-wing” politics; as Bradshaw says, “Some populist or nationalist parties are certainly unpleasant, but others are radically different from the pagans whose views are dissected here.”
It strikes me that one of the toughest things we must do as responsible citizens is to give our support to the best political systems and the best politicians possible. But how are we to know what and who are best? Politics is a messy business. As the “art of the possible”, it lacks the clear-cut lines of “the ideal”. There is a kind of inbuilt and necessary hard-boiled realism, verging on cynicism, in politics, in that it can never forget that ours is a fallen world in which the ideal may only ever be aspired to, but can never be attained. Indeed, it is precisely those political systems that treat the ideal as the possible that produce gulags and concentration camps. Perhaps the doctrine of original sin is the one doctrine all politicians need to believe in—and not primarily the original sin lurking in the hearts of others, but in their own.
One of the wisest things I have read about politics is a line from St Josemaría Escrivá: “There are no dogmas in temporal affairs” (“Las riquezas de la fe”, ABC, Madrid, 2 November 1969; Scepter Booklet no. 5, Life of Faith). There can be no debate (for a Christian) about matters of dogma—the Trinity, the Incarnation, and so forth—only discussion with a view to further clarification. But politics is all about debate, and debate is all about intelligent speech. For this reason Aristotle, in The Politics, considers that man—uniquely among the animals—is truly social, because he alone has the capacity to envisage intellectually and to share verbally a vision of a life in common with others. Thus the quality of any human community (whether a friendship, a marriage, a family, a group of friends, or a State) will depend in large part on the quality of communication of shared fundamental values.
Politics is something we must think about and discuss deeply, but it appears that this does not happen. As Bradshaw puts it, “All of this requires deep reflection—the sort of deep reflection which does not occur in politics any more.” In large part this is probably due to a “dogmatisation” of the political in recent years. Political differences are treated as tantamount to profound religious differences, leading to increasing polarisation—for example, between Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Marriages between people identifying as Democrats and Republicans are rare and have become rarer over time, with only around 6–9 per cent of married couples being mixed-party in recent years.
In November 2024 I had the unsettling experience of being asked by a Dublin politician whom I know quite well whether I would support Biden or Trump in the then ongoing US presidential election. I candidly answered that, given Biden’s clear pro-abortion stance and his even clearer cognitive decline, I would prefer to see Trump win. The reaction was explosive and somewhat incoherent in its irritation (in light of which I wonder why he asked me the question in the first place). He could not believe this; he would be telling everyone he knew that I was a Trump supporter (when in fact I would say I was more of a Biden non-supporter than a Trump supporter). Reflecting on his intemperate reaction, I found myself wondering how a man who had spent the previous thirty or forty years of his life immersed in national and local politics could be so deeply intolerant of a more or less informed and legitimate political opinion.
Do I like the way things have shaped up with Trump since his electoral victory? Certainly not in every respect. With hindsight, in a year or two I might even decide that Biden (or even Kamala Harris) would have been the better (or less bad) choice—but not by my lights in November 2024. And, of course, I am not a US citizen, so the question was merely speculative. If I were a voting US citizen, I would have had a greater obligation to know more about the pros and cons of each candidate.
It is a shame that calm, respectful political debate is so lacking. It also impoverishes politics, because the respectful to-and-fro of debate is essential to the formation of one’s own political ideas. It is no accident that the epicentre of national politics is called a parliament—that is, a place in which the principal activity is not shouting, nor fisticuffs, but parler.
To cut off conversation with stony silence or incoherent irritation is an exercise in censorship—“micro-censoring”, we might call it. This does not augur well, since speech (free speech) is the very soul of political life. The suppression of freedom of speech is normally associated with the demise of a true State, as under the rule of tyrants.
And besides who doesn’t love a great debate about things political?