Return of the Paternalist Theocrats (Part 2)

I come back into the fray against Edward Feser's theocratic paternalism.

Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of my response to Edward Feser’s “Western Civilization's Immunodeficiency Disease.” Feser’s text is block-quoted.
Editor’s Note 2: This is your periodic reminder that my use of “liberal” does not imply a left-liberal orientation but rather a commitment to a doctrine of freedom and personal responsibility, as well as to related institutions, public and private.

The State is the universal ethical will, the driver of all spiritual life.

The State is no abstract thing: it is the real Individual, alive, operating, and forming itself ceaselessly in the life that is conscious of itself, in the will of the One which works, operates, thinks, loves, puts force over matter.

The State is an absolute, before which individuals and groups are only relative values. Liberalism denies the State and affirms the individual.

Pop quiz.

Q: Who wrote the three lines above?

A: Giovanni Gentile, in “The Doctrine of Fascism.” This work informed Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy.

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Let’s jump right into my second installment.

Edward Feser continues:

How does all of this make liberalism comparable to an immunodeficiency disorder in the social organism? The answer is in part that liberalism prevents governments from shoring up the moral and religious orders that in turn uphold the social order—and in part that, even worse, it positively fosters skepticism about the moral and religious orders.

First, what does it mean to shore up religious institutions? Is favorable tax treatment not enough? Beyond that, liberalism—properly construed—doesn’t prevent individuals, groups, and private organizations from “shoring up moral and religious orders.” Technocratic progressivism does, though. And, paradoxically, theocratic paternalism does, too, because just as Alastair MacIntyre asked, “Whose justice, which rationality?” we can ask, “Which morals, which religious orders?” The theocrat might not like such questions, but they cut both ways.

Government authorities have two basic tools at their disposal:

• Dispensing largesse to shape behavior. (Carrots)

• Threatening violence to shape behavior. (Sticks)

The government’s subsidizing behavior is probably the least offensive but also the least effective. Of course, incentives matter, but government incentives too often result in perverse effects.

Prohibition that has the muscle to control behaviors—usually means that punishments don’t fit crimes or the enforcement mechanism is too oppressive, all while creating black markets or forcing forbidden behaviors underground.

To be sure, liberals often reject the suggestion that their position entails skepticism, relativism, subjectivism, and related ideas. And they certainly are not skeptics, relativists, or the like full stop. For one thing, they typically take their own liberal moral and political principles to be objectively true and knowable.

First, a decent philosopher should never make a laundry list of separate accusations because confirming or denying a cluster of items becomes burdensome. Passing over another example of Feser failing to quote quotes, I see plenty of room for skepticism and subjectivism, however, depending on what we’re talking about.

For example, Austrian economists are right to argue that value is subjective and that the labor theory of surplus value is theoretically bankrupt. Liberals are also skeptical about the excesses of political power because, well, history. If liberals share any big-picture view, that view is: We should all be skeptical about concentrations of power. Regarding doctrinal tiffs between, say, Objectivists and Libertarians, Feser is right. Each has his own pet notions about what is “objectively true and knowable,” but neither needs to hold such strident views to qualify as a liberal. Hume, while among the great skeptics, was also a liberal.

They also take us to have much in the way of knowledge, or at least rationally justifiable belief, of a scientific kind, including a social scientific kind. More to the present point, they are not, they would insist, committed to denying that traditional moral and religious claims are true and knowable. They are committed only to preventing or at least severely limiting the influence of these claims on public policy, which, they maintain, should be neutral about such things.

Liberals are not committed to preventing or severely limiting the influence of traditional moral and religious claims on public policy. We are only committed to preventing or severely limiting them if they have no independent secular justification. In other words, faith is a private journey, not the sole basis for social policy. I’m under no illusions that many political actors are willing to punish theft and protect property because Moses had a tablet that said, “Thou shalt not steal.” Of course, we can think of reasons to agree with prohibitions on theft that are not just because the Bible says so. I can’t stand evangelical atheists who point out barbaric Bronze Age things about the Bible, but I must grudgingly admit the scripture contains items that wouldn’t make for very good social policy:

1. Exodus 22:18

2. 1 Peter 2:18

3. Deuteronomy 25:11–12

4. Deuteronomy 22:20–21

5. Leviticus 20:9

6. Hosea 13: 4, 9, 16

I have no idea whether the New Testament is meant to invalidate all that and that the Christians have settled the issue about God and goodness in the Euthyphro, but even if it were possible to take Matthew 22:39 and make it into law, we would still have all sorts of non-Biblical justifications for doing so.

This [liberal neutrality] is indeed true at least in principle. The trouble is that it cannot work in practice, consistent with the realization of liberal outcomes. Consider that even liberal statesmen routinely have to appeal to fallible and controversial knowledge claims, and could hardly do otherwise without making government utterly unworkable. 

Perhaps. This isn’t just a problem for liberal statesmen, though. It’s a problem for everyone. I guess that makes me a skeptic. But it doesn’t make me wrong.

For example, in formulating and implementing policy, they have to make use of current scientific theory, economic data, social scientific analysis, and the like, and even moral judgments (about fairness, for example). They regard this, quite rightly, as perfectly legitimate despite the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable views about these matters. They don’t think that the fact that free individuals disagree about the scientific, social scientific, and moral ideas in question entails that governing authorities who make use of such ideas are ipso facto threatening individual freedom.

This feels like vapor in that specific examples would be helpful. At first blush, it strikes me that on the one hand Feser could be right. We can imagine basing policies on the best available scientific evidence, but that evidence is disputed. On the other hand, the more liberal one is, the more he tends to rely on basic principles, common law, and local knowledge. In other words, a liberal system is builds in skepticism about national policy, precisely because we are epistemically limited. Feser seems to be confusing liberals with technocrats.

But then, why couldn’t governing authorities also appeal to (say) Christian theological claims, or natural law arguments about sexual morality, in formulating and implementing governmental policy?

Oh. Because scientific evidence is meant to be claims of fact—even when such claims are in error. But moral claims and policy claims are claims of value. Now, this is not to argue that one should never use a claim of science (or a claim of faith to) shape his opinions and, therefore, policy—although it’s clear that during COVID, most public health policy was not “the Science” at all but rather a series of faith-based initiatives.

Eh hem, anyway, I’d love to hear about the “natural law” of sexual morality. Feser conveniently avoids examples, again, probably because most people—even most people of faith—would be horrified by the idea that authorities would imprison people for sex out of wedlock or chemically castrate buggerers.

For most of human history, people have been governed by a parallel natural law: to get laid. While I acknowledge that promiscuity and perversion can be taken to unhealthy extremes, it’s hard to see how such behaviors—when privately undertaken and regulated by reputational effects—are destructive to society. I have pronatalist sentiments. I also agree that families with two well-adjusted parents are good for kids. But we’re already starting to see a renaissance of such commitments that don’t require velvet gloves or iron fists.

The answer can’t be that those ideas are uncertain and controversial, because as we’ve just noted, liberal governing authorities make use of uncertain and controversial information all the time. The only justification for refusing to make use of such moral and theological ideas is that they are somehow even more doubtful and unworthy of the label “knowledge” than the uncertain and controversial ideas liberal authorities are happy to make use of.

Again, I can’t really speak to the vague “controversial ideas liberal authorities are happy to make use of” because Feser doesn’t tell us what those are, much less who gets to count as a liberal these days.

It’s not so much that traditional moral or theological ideas are more doubtful and unworthy—though many are. Some traditional morals can be highly evolved. It is rather that we transmute moral suasion into political punishment by authorities. As with many issues, I am highly skeptical that constantly threatening people with violence or prison for victimless so-called moral crimes is good for the “social order.” The likes of Al Capone didn’t improve the social order. Nor will it be improved by the emergence of underground porn syndicates or horny teenagers sitting in jail because they threw the book at private acts.

Or consider the foundational arguments claimed to establish the correctness of liberal political philosophy. Suppose, for example, that one agreed with Locke that in the state of nature there is no governmental authority, yet individuals governed by reason and who respect the law of nature would agree to leave the state of nature and establish a state. But suppose also that one argued that these individuals would have rational grounds for establishing a Catholic integralist state that looked to the Church for guidance on policy. Naturally, no Lockean would regard this as an acceptable outcome of Locke’s social contract scenario.

I’m not wild about Locke’s or any other hypothetical social contract theories. It’s been a source of great philosophical mischief.

Or suppose one agreed with Rawls that a just society would be one chosen by individuals in the original position bargaining behind a “veil of ignorance.” Rawls allows, as he has to in order for the thought experiment to work at all, that these individuals have at least some general knowledge of the human condition (matters of psychology, economics, and so on). But suppose one argued that these individuals could also make use of moral knowledge derived from natural law theory. And suppose that one judged that individuals in the original position would, accordingly, choose to live in a society whose governmental institutions respected and upheld natural law views about sexual morality, abortion, and the like. Naturally, no Rawlsian would regard this as an acceptable outcome of Rawls’s thought experiment.

Rawls’s theory is even worse than Locke’s and is more egalitarianism lite than liberalism, notwithstanding Rawl’s characterization. So, I guess I wouldn’t be impressed with any such “veil of ignorance” arguments, liberal or illiberal.

But there is no way to justify these judgments unless the liberal regards the claims of Catholic theology, natural law theory, and the like as somehow more doubtful and unworthy of the label “knowledge” than the information individuals in Locke’s state of nature or Rawls’s original position are allowed to make use of in deciding what sort of political order to establish.

I guess I’m just a radical. People can import all manner of weird justifications to fashion some civil association with ideas of the good that I find curious. They just can’t force me to join it. The point of liberalism ought to be exit options and, otherwise, to strike balances in favor of peace. Unlike Rawls, Locke, or Gauthier, I’m a hard-core contractarian for whom a social contract is something you sign. Otherwise, strong property rights and muscular tort law ensure that offenders make the injured whole, and local flavors bubble up through common law protections and highly localized governance. In such a scenario, some form of liberalism has to be the master doctrine. If not, we’ll be happy to have theocratic neighbors as long as those neighbors don’t embark on any crusades against us.

Thus, and to repeat, in practice, liberalism has to treat the moral and religious ideas it wants to prevent from having influence on public policy as if they were unknowable, subjective, or otherwise epistemically second-rate.

Yes and no.

Yes, in the sense that liberalism is mainly a second-order doctrine (meta-doctrine) resistant to first-order doctrines that claim the One True Way. (Feser would call this subjectivism. I would call it skepticism of political power.) No, in the sense that liberal toleration and localism make room for diverse claims that might inform different local policies, even claims that are epistemically second-rate. Liberalism permits people to test experiments in living—within certain bounds—just not impose those experiments upon the whole social order, which would be antifragile in Taleb’s framing. Politics is, after all, an imposition.

Hence, and again to repeat, liberal societies not only refuse to use the power of the state to shore up these ideas, but tend positively to undermine them. And in doing so, they destroy the immune system that protects the social order from forces that work to undermine it.

Feser speaks in euphemisms. Remember that the “power of the state” is hypostatization. There is no state, just a group of people who threaten violence. Feser can use all the metaphors he would like about immune systems or vague talk about state power, but the immune system metaphor only does so much work. If we drill down into the metaphor, we can see how it can be dangerous. First, an immune system is a process for attacking or eliminating foreign bodies or pathogens. Feser’s claim is that bad ideas and/or certain behaviors (and people) are pathogens. But what kind of body is a nation? What constitutes a healthy body? what ideas or behaviors are pathogens? What is an appropriate immune response?

I am American enough to get out the gloves and Clorox when I imagine the kind of Church plus Civil Code that colonized South America. But I digress.

In Part One, I expressed concerns about the supposedly slightly more fallen controlling the slightly lesser fallen. I am reminded of John 8:7: “When the scribes and Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery and sought to stone her, Jesus said, "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

If one looks at social and political questions through the lens of natural law theory, the specific ways in which liberalism has in fact now largely destroyed this immune system should be obvious. For example, it’s not just that liberalism is loath to use the law to discourage abortion, divorce, pornography, contraception, etc. It’s that liberalism’s fixation on the freedom of individuals to live as they like tends positively to promote the attitude that concern about these things reflects an irrational prejudice rather than sound moral thinking. The way is thereby opened for ideas and ways of living inherently subversive of the family to flood into the social order like a virus.

Even if we were to accept that all of Feser’s list of sins here is socially destructive—and to be sure some are—Feser is more keen to blame an abstraction than the sinners. Ultimately, the sinners are to blame—not to mention those who should be guiding sinners to the light but have been ineffective, namely those acting peacefully but powerfully in their private capacity of moral suasion. Even liberals have a concept of sin, which is more or less that one ought never to initiate acts that make anyone else worse off in their person or property—i.e., harm them. This is meant to be basic to peaceful, reciprocal relationships. I doubt Jesus would disagree, though he might add acts of compassion and pacifism that belong to the realm of moral practice rather than that of political enforcement.

Sit with the irony.

Feser, in high-falutin prose, seems to say that moral suasion is not enough. We Authorities have to go all medieval and start bustin’ heads for Jesus.

Similarly, it’s not just that liberals are loath to regulate immigration, or to mold the educational curriculum, for the purpose of maintaining cultural cohesion. It’s that liberalism tends to promote the attitude that concern with maintaining cultural cohesion reflects an irrational and even bigoted attachment to local and contingent social orders, one that is at odds with liberal universalism. The way is thereby opened to ideas that are subversive of a shared allegiance to a common homeland, and that foster the replacement of this allegiance by a conflict of ethnic, religious, and cultural factions.

Says who? Again, no quotes, no names. Liberalism, far from viewing local customs, culture, and religion as bigoted, true liberals think that liberal universalism should nurture these local niches. Whether discussing devolution of power, freedom of religion, or panarchy, liberalism and pluralism go hand in hand. Extreme liberals like me think that if the Basques want to secede from Spain, that should be their right. A right of self-determination is liberalism 101.

Where has Feser been?

At the end of the day, anyone who claims to be a Christian theocrat has to pass the King of Kings test, where we imagine that Jesus were politically in charge.

1. As King of Kings, would Jesus promise salvation to those willing to repent for their sins, change their behaviors, and use free will to change?

2. As King of Kings, would Jesus dispatch armed functionaries to enforce his teachings in the absence of repentance and change?

3. As King of Kings, would Jesus sanction authoritarian violence against sinners whose sins create no victims?

4. As King of Kings, would Jesus view those who promote violence in his name as good missionaries or sinful functionaries who have forgotten his teachings?

Remember, theocratic functionaries are sinners, too.

First, liberals are divided on questions of immigration (not to mention abortion). There is very little, if anything, canonical in liberalism (no pun) on the matter. I, for one, think jurisdictions have to control their membranes.

Nor is it just that liberals want to keep Church and state formally separated. It’s that liberalism tends to promote the attitude that theological opinions are more like matters of subjective personal taste …. than they are like scientific or philosophical theses that have respectable arguments in their favor. The way is thereby opened to the widespread collapse of religious practice and conviction, along with the disappearance of the conception of the moral life that such practice and conviction once shored up. For such practice and conviction cannot effectively compete with the world, the flesh, and the devil when they are no longer seen as reflecting objective reality or minimal standards of rationality.

I mean, it is, indeed, controversial to postulate the existence of the devil and hold it up to claims of objective reality or minimum standards of rationality. But I must push back harshly against the claim that liberalism opened the way to the collapse of religious practice and conviction.

Consider the contrast between Europe and America, where American liberal doctrine protected a free-market in religion. Chapman economist Laurence Iannacone has done extensive empirical research on the success of religious denominations in countries with liberal protections for religious freedom. From the abstract:

In a largely ignored chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith laid the foundation for an economic theory of religious institutions. Smith emphasized the importance of market structure, describing in detail the differences between state-sponsored religious monopolies and competitive religious markets. This article builds on Smith's discussion both theoretically and empirically. The author formalizes the concept of a religious market, defends its relevance, and derives predictions concerning the observable effects of religious market structure. Data on the religious characteristics of 17 developed, Western nations confirm Smith's claim that monopoly and government regulation impede religious markets just as they do secular ones. Across Protestant nations, rates of church attendance and religious belief are substantially higher in highly competitive markets than in markets monopolized by established churches.

Now, as one who is quite comfortable with talking about evil—even in metaphorical-not-metaphysical terms—I am not alone in worrying about the devil in political power designed to legislate and enforce morality. (Lord Acton is a good example.)

Again, liberalism does not just happen to have led to these corrosive attitudes. It must foster them in order to preserve itself. If liberals were to treat traditional moral and theological convictions as being no less rational or well-founded than the principles and knowledge that they already allow to have an influence on public policy, then they would have no reason to prevent those traditional convictions from also informing public policy. And the result would be a social and political order that is no longer recognizably liberal.

I have officially grown weary of Feser’s line of thinking. Even if liberalism and theocracy once competed on foundationalist grounds, liberal thinking has evolved in interesting ways, starting with Nozick’s less-cited Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which Feser has abandoned in favor of nostalgia for Medieval Europe and perhaps an overly generous reading of Alastair MacIntyre.

For this reason, liberals tend to frame debate in a manner rigged so that it rules out from the get go the very possibility of a reasonable challenge to liberalism.

Feser describes Rawls’s work as appealing to that which is “reasonable” by Rawls’s lights, which creates a “heads I win, tails you lose” treatment of competing doctrines. While I think we must endeavor to arrive at some criteria about what counts as reasonable, I don’t view such criteria as the lynchpin of liberal doctrine. Reasonableness is just a rule of good discourse. So, at least, Feser is partially correct in criticizing Rawls this way.

Still, most liberals rule out illiberal challenges because of a fundamental asymmetry between liberalism and any given competing doctrine. The core of liberalism involves elements no other doctrines share in combination, such as:

1. Acknowledging the fact of pluralism, that is, the reality that individuals and communities—nested niches with local flavor—differ from one to the next.

2. Appealing to basic moral norms and shared legal protocols that balance individuals and communities' diverse interests against a) competing rights claims of given individuals and communities and b) social harmony.

3. Appealing to basic moral norms and legal protocols that ensure a tight coupling of freedom to act and responsibility for one’s actions, including the freedom/responsibility couplets that accrue to families.

4. Practicing nonviolence and toleration as virtues, especially as these further peace and pragmatically address the fact of pluralism that theocracy does not.

But Feser thinks Number 4 is bad liberalism that was “baked in from the beginning, even when liberals happened as a matter of contingent historical fact to be more religious and morally conservative than they are now.”  

At long last, Feser quotes a liberal—Locke from Letter Concerning Toleration:

I esteem… toleration to be the chief characteristical mark of the true church. For whatsoever some people boast of the antiquity of places and names, or of the pomp of their outward worship; others, of the reformation of their discipline; all, of the orthodoxy of their faith, for everyone is orthodox to himself: these things, and all others of this nature, are much rather marks of men’s striving for power and empire over one another, than of the church of Christ.

Wow, what a quote! Locke was right. That passage is worth reading twice, then reflecting on the sorry religious wars Europe had seen over the centuries, four of which Locke experienced in his lifetime. Does Feser hope everyone will splinter and fight over his own peculiar interpretations of scripture? (No need! Feser has discovered The One True Way! The trouble is, 100 people differ in their dogmas. If each possesses The One True Way, there will be 100 wars over that way, or 99 people oppressed by the fiercest and most bloodthirsty among the 100.)

“Everyone is orthodox to himself,” with claims to orthodoxy really just a “mark of men’s striving for power” — here we see a surprisingly early expression of the idea that religious convictions are essentially subjective. And toleration, Locke says, is not only something the religious should accept, but is indeed itself “the chief characteristical mark of the true church”!

How many times throughout history have claims to orthodoxy related to men’s striving for power? We cannot count them all.

I hate to speak for Jesus, especially against a pious type, but I dare say Jesus showed signs of agreement with Locke on this point. Jesus said, “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matthew 16:6, Mark 8:15, Luke 12:1). Whether one should call Jesus’s position subjectivism or just Pharisee-skepticism, I cannot say. But Jesus wanted people to tamp down on pharisaic hypocrisies, Mosaic regulatory obsessions, and political power plays—not to mention tally what’s owed to Caesar (politics) and God (morality), respectively.

Acceptance of liberalism is thus made not only a mark of reasonableness, but the one thing that does turn out to be a non-negotiable demand of Christian orthodoxy! Locke is, if anything, here even more shameless in rigging the game in a liberal direction than were successors like Mill and Rawls. 

Locke is not rigging the game. Locke is suggesting that Christians, like Jesus, should prefer peace to war, especially doctrinal wars.

Naturally, liberals of a more secular bent will be untroubled by the examples I’ve given of the weakening of the social order’s immune system. But that is precisely because the logic of liberalism is to “define deviancy down” (to borrow Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous phrase). What past generations would have judged a reductio ad absurdum of liberal principles, the current generation takes to be a more consistent application of them.

Underthrow readers will notice that I—despite being a liberal—am not only referring directly to the teachings of Jesus to defend liberalism against theocracy, I am doing so in a manner that assumes Jesus said many reasonable things. Indeed, I would argue that Jesus said liberal things because, in many respects, liberalism borrows from Christianity (and Judaism and Zoroastrianism).

One of my favorite liberals, Thomas Jefferson, was influenced by Locke, yes. But he was also influenced by Jesus’s teachings, especially those emphasizing compassion, integrity, humility, and prioritizing spiritual over material matters. Jefferson tried to distill what he saw as Jesus's authentic doctrine in his influential work "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which focused on Jesus's philosophy. Notwithstanding Jefferson’s sins, can it be argued that Jefferson’s liberalism was all Locke and no Jesus?

Let’s ask Jefferson:

Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do...

Without citation, Feser goes on to argue that we liberals think everything that flows from liberal doctrine is progress, or at least that we are blind to social decay that flows from liberalism. But who? That would be like arguing that nothing evil flows from theocratic paternalism. (And nobody thinks that.) What we think, or at least what I think, is that theocratic paternalism begets “habits of hypocrisy and meanness,” which almost invariably flow from possessing the Ring.

But increasing disconnect from moral and social reality is not the only problem with this attitude. There is also the fact that the universal acid of liberalism is bound eventually to eat away at liberal principles themselves.

On this point, I have to give the Devil eh hem, Feser, his due. All fallible systems run by fallible people are bound to eat away at themselves, including liberalism. Furthermore, because liberalism bakes in toleration for the sake of peace, it doesn’t mean that those who live under its auspices will always be tolerant. Just look at the progressives who stole the name liberals, or worse, the social justice zombies burning down the country from 2020-present. I’d fight for their right to speak, but not for their right to occupy colleges, destroy property, or demand tax dollars to inculcate my children with leftwing puritanism and perversion.

So Feser is right in that liberal toleration has to figure out what to do about illiberal intolerance (including Feser’s) without turning us illiberal=. If we don’t, we truly are “AIDS.”

This is inevitable when the mere fact of pluralism, of deep moral and theological disagreement among citizens, is claimed to show the need for a liberal political order. 

Guilty as charged. This imperfect transition from top-down to bottom-up was a beautiful innovation. Alas, it was never the End of History. So, we have to keep tinkering and improving our doctrine and its implementation.

For liberalism itself is, of course, hardly less open to criticism and reasonable disagreement than Christian theology, natural law theory, and the other moral, metaphysical, and religious views the liberal wants to keep from having any influence on the political order.

I hope that, by now, the reader is satisfied that most liberals don’t want to keep religion from having any influence on the political order. That would be impossible. We want to limit that influence and keep illiberal views—and illiberal people—from gaining total control of society. And that’s looking more difficult standing as we are in a war between two different species of authoritarian.

Those who do not consent to liberalism are bound to regard it as no less oppressive, as no less arbitrary an imposition on them, than the moral and religious ideas that the liberal regards as oppressive.

Here? Now? This close to the end, Feser appeals to consent? So lemme get this straight. Feser not only doesn’t consent to a consent-based order, he feels oppressed by legal rules that privilege relationships of consent over central authority. Just when I thought the postmodernists had cornered the market on irony, contradiction, and word games.

I repeat that liberalism can and should build in a right of exit or self-determination. So, I must move on with a sigh of resignation.

Thus do we see today the rapid spread of ideologies like Critical Race Theory, which regard liberalism itself as something from which we need liberation, and liberal ideals of free speech, due process, neutrality, and the like as masks of an oppressive power.

Well, yes. But how is this functionally different from what Feser just claimed?

Thus do we see in Western countries the rise of large populations of immigrants who understandably see no reason why their communities should not be governed by their own ancient religious law, whether or not it conforms to the demands of liberalism.

The demands of liberalism being the idea that we cannot and should not fully integrate Caliphates, for example, which are non-papist and non-protestant theocracies.

Liberalism itself has fostered the conditions in which these threats to its survival have arisen. It is in that way the facilitator, not only of the West’s suicide, but of its own. What remains in question is not whether the future of the West will be postliberal, but exactly what sort of postliberal future awaits us.

If the choice is between Catholicism uber alles or a Caliphate uber alles, God help us all.

I’ll take Jeffersonians with checks, balances, and guns any day of the week.