I get frustrated when people post links to articles from the Wall Street Journal, because the Journal has a very strict paywall and you can’t read the linked articles unless you’re a paid subscriber. And even after “registering for free for access to a limited number of articles”, the WSJ will only show me this much of an op-ed by Ben Sasse …
The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue. It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots. This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges but Americans must realize if we’re going to recover.
Civic pluralists understand that ideas move the world more than power does, which is why pluralists value debate and persuasion.
“Debate and persuasion” is what Socrates called peitho . But as Athanasios Moulakis writes in the Editor’s Introduction to Eric Voegelin’s The World of the Polis …
Unlike other students of the Greek polis Voegelin is not particularly concerned with the “birth of politics,” understood as the development of ritualized, procedurally controlled decisionmaking, relying on speech and persuasion. This to him is a surface phenomenon. True persuasion depends on community of spirit,
founded on the openness of the interlocutors to the order of being.
Or, in Plato’s terminology, you can’t have peitho without homonoia. There is no persuasion if there’s no like-mindedness - a like-mindedness “open to the order of being” (which we should have at least at our parishes, and which we don’t). Without a shared “community of spirit” - and without an openness to the “order of being” - debate and persuasion are impossible. And if you abandon persuasion, the only thing left is force.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes told his audience that the solution to the fact Republicans are in a minority and keep losing elections is to establish “a dictatorship … We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules.”
These people seem to be contemptuous of the nobility of human nature, of the faculties of the soul that distinguish us from beasts: reason and free will, in other words “conscience”. For these people “conscience” is the problem: they are angry that you have one, and so they refuse to appeal to it. They seek illiberal authoritarianism. Salvation from sin is found in dehumanization. Take away our humanity and you fix the problem.
Illiberalism is merely the idolization of force.