Conservative Democracy

From First Things

But by 1948 we find, for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court banning voluntary religious education in public schools that offer simultaneous Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish classes. Here, Justice Hugo Black writes that:

A state cannot, consistently with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, utilize its public school system to aid any or all religious faiths or sects in the dissemination of their doctrines and ideals.

Looking back, we can recognize that this was not an isolated decision. It was rather an early indication of the turn that would put an end to the old republican conception of the United States, establishing among its elites the alternative conception now known as “liberal democracy”—a form of regime that recognizes only liberal principles as the basis for the legitimacy of the state; and withdraws its concern and sanction from the religious, national, and historical-­empiricist principles that had for many centuries held such a prominent place in the Anglo-American constitutional tradition.

The claim that liberal-democratic regimes of this kind can be maintained for long without the conservative principles they have discarded is a hypothesis now being tested for the first time. Those who believe that a favorable outcome of this experiment is assured draw this conclusion not from historical or empirical evidence, for we have none. Rather, their confidence derives from the closed Lockean-­rationalist system that holds them captive, preventing them from being able to anticipate any of the other quite possible outcomes before us.