Eric W. Cook on The Upheaval

[Eric W. Cook]

The dynamic engine that held the American version of liberalism together and provided the tension and energy that gave us a purpose and power, but also problems has broken apart. That process of breakdown means that the other varieties of liberalism (home-grown and imported - like neo-liberalism, like neo-Marxism) are carrying the day. It seems to me that our engine was built out of Protestant Christianity, classical Republicanism, Natural Law, and Natural Rights (here lies the liberal or most liberal piece - as developed by Locke, et al.) and that all existed and pulled and tugged and drove each other pushing and containing all at once. In that world, Liberalism cannot just be a procedural or constitutional order. Because I see the heart of American liberalism as the issue of rights, namely the individual's ability to be equal to another, to have liberty, to pursue happiness even against the observations of nature, the demands of the Divine, and the lessons of the past/tradition. The issue is truly the issue of rights against obligation. Jefferson understood this and that is why he tried to square the circle with Nature - nature both gives us the source of both - and his sense of proto-rights and political negotiated rights, together allowing for a polity. His is only one thread of course in our liberal order, but perhaps the most important and the one carry the greatest seeds of self-destruction. It seems that the collapse of Protestant Christianity as a restraining power in the dynamics means we are at the point of no return unless the other pieces can be shored up sufficiently to give a new dynamic, but I fear that isn't possible. I don't think it is an accident that deformed and heretical mutations of Protestantism are the central pillar of the emerging Woke-religion, a process that isn't finished. It feels more like the abundance of cults in the 2nd Century, which one will take the place of the old State Religion is yet unknown...but perhaps what is happening is the rise of progressive/liberal Protestantism in the early to mid-20the century was the real story of what caused the morphing and destruction of our American liberal order. The force that once restrained became too closely allied with the liberalism and they ceased to be separate but merged together unleashing forces that could no longer be contained and like a cancer began to eat itself and or perhaps to think of it differently it caused a sort of political genetic mutation.