The American political system is sometimes described as an “experiment in ordered liberty.” The metaphorical scientific language is important. To conduct an experiment, one forms an hypothesis, gathers evidence, tests the evidence against the theory, and makes appropriate adjustments. If the evidence suggests that the experiment is not working, the appropriate response is to posit another theory, not double down on the failed one.
As with any experiment, we must be willing to admit when our “experiment in ordered liberty” has failed. We cannot be so committed to the theory that we ignore evidence that suggests it might be faulty. If it is an experiment, it must be open to empirical observation and evaluation. It must be falsifiable. If no set of empirical observations can ever contradict the theory, it turns from an experiment into an unfalsifiable ideology.
And what is the theory? The classical liberal theory underpinning our political system declares that unfettered individual liberty is the highest political good, to which all other goods (moral or otherwise) should be subordinated. We express this as “unalienable rights” not just to pursue goods, but even to determine for ourselves what “goods” ought and ought not to be pursued.
This is an institutional commitment to the absolute freedom of the individual. All political structures, laws and regulations should be designed to maximize individual liberty, without regard to judgments about the morality of our choices. Government should not take a position about the relative moral goodness of how any of us use our liberty; its role is limited to protecting application of the principle, not suggesting what goods should or should not be pursued in that exercise.
The fictional limits on our freedom
Some will reply that this is not an accurate description, adding something like, “we value the maximization of individual liberty as long as one person’s exercise of individual liberty is not inconsistent with anyone else’s.” This is sometimes colloquially expressed by the bromide that “your right to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.”
But that’s not a limiting principle. Rather, it’s an arbitrary declaration, based upon a fictional “social contract” by which we mutually agree to limit our use of naturally unlimited freedom. If one posits liberty as the highest political good, it is incoherent to say that liberty can have inherent limits. If it has natural limits, it’s not the highest good. The limitation of our pursuit of individual liberty is solely for the sake of compromise, so that we don’t all kill one another. But this is merely a conventional response to the natural right of unqualified liberty. The limitation is not rooted in the theory itself. Rather, it is a voluntary, negotiated exception to it. It is a functional fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.
If the American political founding really is an experiment open to being falsified by empirical evidence, we must have the courage to admit when the evidence suggests that the experiment has failed. Recent events in the life of our nation suggest, indeed, that it has. This should not be a surprise.
Liberty is not the highest human good, political or otherwise. Rather, liberty is the means to the preservation of moral agency in the pursuit of truth. Freedom is at the service of truth or it is not authentic liberty. A theory that suggests liberty to be the highest good is false in its premise. We cannot be surprised, then, when the premise fails. False hypotheses are exposed by contradictory data. We have sufficient data in the United States to see that “the experiment in ordered liberty” has failed.
Political violence and the ‘social contract’
Because the negotiated compromise of our “social contract” is a fictional construct with no basis in the liberal theory of freedom, we do not feel morally constrained to obey the contract when it impedes our liberty in ways we do not like. This includes the liberty not to hear opinions I don’t like or to suffer the presence of people who hold them.
The political left in the U.S. understands this, which is why its members, even its mainstream political leaders, have no hesitation in advocating and justifying political violence. When “liberties” conflict, the solution from the left is to eliminate the source of the conflict, rather than to reach a reasoned compromise. For the left, the fictional social contract is fine when it constrains their political opponents but ignored when it constrains their own.
However, by its continued endorsement of liberty as the highest political good, the right is not free from complicity in this phenomenon. The right wants to insist that leftist political violence is a departure from the experiment in ordered liberty, not the logical conclusion of it. This is whistling past the graveyard.
Political violence from the left is the more consistent application of the principle — absent, of course, the conventional agreement to constrain the use of its freedom for the sake of public peace. The right wants to enforce the fictional contract rather than to repudiate the theory that makes it necessary. But that horse has left the barn. The political left is no longer interested in the compromise except to the extent that it strategically constrains its naïve political opponents. And the evidence is overwhelming that the political left — including its mainstream party leaders — values violence over debate.
A political theory that undermines morality
In a 1798 letter to officers of the Massachusetts militia, President John Adams famously declared that the U.S. government is not “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice … would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
This is an explicit admission that our political theory is not designed to contribute to the morality of its citizens. Instead, it needs an adjunct source of morality in order to work. But this is at least an implicit admission that our government cuts against “morality and Religion,” necessarily eroding their natural place in good government.
While Adams does not seem to see it, his admission is a condemnation of our system, not a commendation of it. If a political theory requires some kind of adjunct or parallel moral theory to make it work, the most generous reading is that the theory is faulty. But it is actually even worse than that. The foundational political theory of the United States undermines the very “morality and Religion” that Adams thought was necessary to its survival. Government that requires an external moral constraint is bad government. Or, to put it another way, government that posits unfettered individual liberty as the highest good is a government that will eventually fail.
Liberty vs. order
In his book, “The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation,” Duke Law School professor H. Jefferson Powell asserts, “The liberty of which [American] constitutionalism has spoken has never been Christian freedom, and so the degeneration of the tradition’s internal rationality is not of itself of grave importance for Christians.” Powell is correct to the extent that we Christians have no stake in advancing the liberal theory of freedom as an end itself. Such a theory is not consistent with a Christian understanding that freedom is a means to achieving the highest good, not the highest good itself. Indeed, the liberal theory of freedom undermines the Christian theology of order.
Of course, the obverse must also be considered. The “degeneration of the tradition’s internal rationality” will result in one, if not both, of two contrasting conclusions. On the one hand, as noted above, the theory leads to political violence when the fictional contract is disregarded. On the other hand, this leads to authoritarian impulses to quell the violence while trying to maintain the theory. The result, of course, is chaos, not order.
The data in our “experiment in ordered liberty” has shown us that, at least as liberty is defined in American political theory, liberty and order are not compatible goods. If liberty is “ordered” toward nothing higher than the individualist pursuit of possessive individual rights, it is not properly ordered. And, at the end of the day, it is not liberty, either. It is chaotic, irrational violence. Thus, our American experiment in ordered liberty is akin to an experiment in married bachelordom. One can have one or the other, not both.
