The Antiliberal Revolution 反自由主义革命

Reading the Philosophers of the New Right 阅读新右派哲学家的著作

By Charles King 由查尔斯·金完成

July/August 2023 2023年7月/8月Published on June 20, 2023 2023年6月20日发布

or more than half a century, the luminaries of the mainstream American right had a clear mission and sense of where they came from. If liberals were fixated on quixotic schemes for building a perfect society, conservatives would be on hand to do the sober work of defending liberty against tyranny. Conservatives traced their roots to 1790, with the British statesman Edmund Burke’s warnings about the dangers of revolution and his insistence on the contractual relationship between the inherited past and the imagined future. They counted the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the Austrian émigré economist Friedrich Hayek as ancestors and viewed public intellectuals, such as the American writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and people of action, such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as fighters for the same cause: individualism, the wisdom of the market, the universal yearning for freedom, and the conviction that solutions to social problems will bubble up from below, if only government would get out of the way. As Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and forefather of the modern Republican Party, put it in The Conscience of a Conservative, in 1960, “The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order.” 在半个多世纪的时间里，美国主流右派的杰出人物们一直有着明确的使命和自我认知。如果自由派一心追求建立一个完美社会的异想天开的计划，保守派就会冷静地捍卫自由免受暴政的侵害。保守派将自己的根源追溯到1790年，英国政治家埃德蒙·伯克对革命危险的警告以及他对传承的过去与想象中的未来之间契约关系的坚持。他们将英国哲学家迈克尔·奥克肖特和奥地利移民经济学家弗里德里希·哈耶克视为祖先，并将公共知识分子（如美国作家威廉·F·巴克利）和行动者（如英国首相玛格丽特·撒切尔和美国总统罗纳德·里根）视为为同一事业而战的人：个人主义、市场智慧、对自由的普遍渴望以及解决社会问题将从底层涌现的信念，只要政府退居二线。 正如亚利桑那州参议员、现代共和党的奠基人巴里·戈德沃特在1960年的《保守派的良心》中所说：“保守派将政治视为一种实现个人最大自由的艺术，同时又与社会秩序的维护相一致。”

Over the last decade, however, this account has given way to an alternative reading of the past. For a vocal cohort of writers and activists, the real conservative tradition lies in what is sometimes called “integralism”—the weaving of religion, personal morality, national culture, and public policy into a unified order. This intellectual history no longer reflects the easy confidence of a Buckley, nor does it advance an argument, formed primarily in conversation with the American founders, for government resting on a balance-of-powers constitution and enabling a free citizen’s pursuit of happiness. Instead, it imagines a return to a much older order, before the wrong turn of the Enlightenment, the fetishizing of human rights, and the belief in progress—a time when nature, community, and divinity were thought to work as one indivisible whole. 然而，在过去的十年中，这种观点已经被一种对过去的替代解读所取代。对于一群有声音的作家和活动家来说，真正的保守传统在于所谓的“整体主义”——将宗教、个人道德、民族文化和公共政策编织成一个统一的秩序。这种思想史不再反映出巴克利的轻松自信，也不再提出一个主要与美国创始人对话形成的关于政府基于权力平衡宪法并促进自由公民追求幸福的论点。相反，它想象着回到一个更古老的秩序，回到启蒙运动错误转向之前，回到过度崇拜人权和进步信念之前的时代——一个自然、社区和神性被认为是一个不可分割整体的时代。

Integralism was born on the Catholic right, but its reach has transcended its origins, now as an approach to politics, law, and social policy known to its promoters as “common-good conservatism.” In states such as Florida and Texas, its worldview has informed restrictions on voting access, curbs on public school curricula dealing with race and gender, and purges of school libraries. Its legal theory has shaped recent Supreme Court decisions that narrowed the rights of women and weakened the separation between religion and public institutions. Its theology has lain behind the bans on abortion passed by nearly half of U.S. state legislatures. Its proponents will be present in any future Republican presidential administration, and in their fight against liberals and cosmopolitans, they are more likely than earlier American conservatives to look for allies abroad—not on the British or European center-right but among newer, far-right parties and authoritarian governments committed to unraveling the “liberal order” at home and abroad. “They hate me and slander me and my country, as they hate you and slander you and the America you stand for,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a crowd last year in Dallas, at the annual Conservative Political Action Coalition conference, a gathering of conservative activists, politicians, and donors. “But we have a different future in mind. The globalists can all go to hell.” 整体主义起源于天主教右派，但其影响已超越了其起源，现在作为一种被其支持者称为“共同利益保守主义”的政治、法律和社会政策方法存在。在佛罗里达州和德克萨斯州等州，其世界观已影响了对选举权的限制、对涉及种族和性别的公立学校课程的限制以及对学校图书馆的清理。其法律理论已塑造了最近的最高法院裁决，缩小了妇女权利，并削弱了宗教与公共机构之间的分离。其神学支持了近一半美国州立法机构通过的堕胎禁令。其支持者将出现在任何未来的共和党总统政府中，在与自由派和国际主义者的斗争中，他们比早期的美国保守派更有可能寻求国外的盟友，而这些盟友不是英国或欧洲中右派，而是新兴的极右翼政党和致力于解体国内外“自由秩序”的威权政府。 “他们憎恨我，诽谤我和我的国家，就像他们憎恨你，诽谤你和你所代表的美国一样，”匈牙利总理维克多·奥尔班去年在达拉斯的年度保守政治行动联盟大会上对一群人说道。这是一个保守派活动家、政治家和捐助者的聚会。“但是我们心中有着不同的未来。全球主义者可以都去见鬼。”

For all these reasons, reading right-wing philosophers is the first step toward understanding what amounts to the most radical rethinking of the American political consensus in generations. Theorists such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Yoram Hazony insist that the United States’ economic ills, its political discord, and its relative decline as a world power spring from a single source: the liberalism that they identify as the dominant economic, political, and cultural framework in the United States since World War II and the model that the country has spent the better part of a century foisting on the rest of the globe. Yet these ideas also point toward a deeper change in how conservatives diagnose their country’s troubles. On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun. 出于这些原因，阅读右翼哲学家是理解美国政治共识最激进的重新思考的第一步。帕特里克·德宁、阿德里安·韦尔缪尔和约拉姆·哈佐尼等理论家坚称，美国的经济问题、政治纷争和相对衰落作为世界强国都源于一个根源：他们认定为自二战以来美国主导的经济、政治和文化框架——自上世纪以来美国一直试图强加于全球的模式。然而，这些观点也指向了保守派对国家问题的更深层次诊断的变化。在美国右翼，越来越多的人有一种直觉，即自由民主的问题不仅仅在于形容词，也在于名词本身。

THE BEST PEOPLE 最优秀的人才

In Regime Change, Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, is motivated by a desire to rescue a country and civilization he finds in obvious decay. He decries the obscene inequalities of wealth in the United States and writes scathingly of an avowed meritocracy that really works to reproduce privilege. He sees dissolution in growing political factionalism, a weakened affinity for the nation, and what he calls the addictions of “big tech, big finance, big porn, big weed, big pharma, and an impending artificial Meta world.” 在《政权更迭》一书中，圣母大学的政治理论家丹宁受到一种拯救一个明显衰败的国家和文明的愿望的驱使。他谴责美国的财富极度不平等，并尖锐地批评了一个公开宣称的精英统治体系，实际上只是在复制特权。他认为，不断加剧的政治派系主义、对国家的减弱亲和力以及他所称之为“大科技、大金融、大色情、大大麻、大制药和即将到来的人工元世界”的成瘾现象，都在导致社会的解体。

According to Deneen, liberals have purposely eroded the basic forums of social solidarity—“family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community”—and now govern as a minority against the demos, the popular majority. In the institutions they control, from academia to Hollywood, they preach that the only reasonable life is one liberated from the constraints of duty and tradition. The assumed course from adolescence to adulthood is to learn “how to engage in ‘safe sex,’ recreational alcohol and drug use, [and] transgressive identities . . . all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the ‘culture’ comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods.” In the process, liberals have abandoned anyone not in the “laptop class”—mainly coastal urbanites—and have left the country’s geographic middle hollowed out and in despair. 根据丹宁的说法，自由派有意削弱了社会团结的基本形式——“家庭、社区、协会、教堂和宗教社群”，现在他们以少数派的身份统治着民众，即大多数人。在他们掌控的机构中，从学术界到好莱坞，他们宣扬唯一合理的生活方式是摆脱责任和传统的束缚。从青少年到成年人的过程被假定为学习“如何进行‘安全性行为’、娱乐性饮酒和药物使用，以及违规身份……所有这些都是为了在几个全球城市中过上一种‘文化’意味着昂贵和独特消费品的生活。”在这个过程中，自由派抛弃了那些不属于“笔记本阶层”的人，主要是沿海城市居民，导致了该国地理中部的空心化和绝望。

In Deneen’s view, the makers of this American wasteland are not just people on the left but the country’s entire political, business, and cultural elite. “What has passed as ‘conservatism’ in the United States for the past half-century,” he writes, “is today exposed as a movement that was never capable of, nor fundamentally committed to, conservation in any fundamental sense.” As a result, the problem of politics today is the crevasse that separates the powerful from the masses, a theme that Deneen follows through canonical thinkers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Societies thrive through maintaining a “mixed constitution,” with institutions of varying levels and capacities, from the national to the local, knitting together people of different social and economic classes. 在丹宁看来，制造这个美国荒地的不仅仅是左派，而是整个国家的政治、商业和文化精英。他写道：“过去半个世纪以来，在美国所谓的‘保守主义’实际上是一个从根本上无法实现，也从根本上不致力于保护的运动。”因此，当今政治的问题在于强者与民众之间的鸿沟，这是丹宁通过亚里士多德、托马斯·阿奎那和亚历克西斯·德·托克维尔等经典思想家的观点来阐述的。社会的繁荣依赖于维持一个“混合宪制”，其中包括从国家到地方的各个层级和能力的机构，将不同社会和经济阶层的人们联系在一起。

To restore such an ideal system, however, true conservatives will need to take power by employing what Deneen calls “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” Conservatives have too long acquiesced to a broadly liberal order, he believes, which has meant allying with people who seek “the primacy of the individual,” oppose the “natural family,” and even engage in the “sexualization of children,” a charge that he repeats twice in Regime Change. But today, “the many,” he says, are waking up to their class concerns “as left-economic and social-conservative populists,” desirous of a broadly redistributive economy and a society founded on virtue, responsibility, and predictability. 然而，要恢复这样一个理想的体系，真正的保守派将需要通过采用丹宁所称的“马基雅维利手段来实现亚里士多德式的目标”来掌握权力。他认为，保守派长期以来一直默认了广泛的自由秩序，这意味着与寻求“个人至上”的人结盟，反对“自然家庭”，甚至参与“儿童性化”的人，这一指控他在《政权更迭》中重复了两次。但是如今，“众多人”正在觉醒，关注他们的阶级问题，成为“左翼经济和社会保守主义的民粹主义者”，渴望一个广泛的再分配经济和一个以美德、责任和可预测性为基础的社会。

In the age of revolution that will follow the current “cold civil war,” remaking the country will require “aristopopulism,” a regime headed by a new elite of trained aristoi—from the Greek for “the best people”—“who understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.” This new order will favor what Deneen calls, following the British journalist David Goodhart, “somewhere people” over “anywhere people,” or Americans who are embedded in thick communities of purpose as opposed to the mobile globalists now in charge. To get there, the country will need a larger House of Representatives, better vocational education, revitalized public schools, paid family leave, and reined-in corporations—goals that liberals, too, might applaud—but also more public celebration of the nation’s “Christian roots” and a cabinet-level “family czar” to encourage marriage and pregnancy, an approach that, as Deneen points out, can be found in Orban’s Hungary. 在当前的“冷内战”之后，进入革命时代，重塑国家将需要“贵族民粹主义”，即由一群新的受过训练的贵族精英领导的政权——“他们明白自己在社会秩序中的主要角色和目的是确保为普通人实现人类繁荣所必需的基本利益：家庭、社区、良好的工作、保持和鼓励秩序与连续性的文化，以及对宗教信仰和机构的支持。” 这种新秩序将偏向于丹宁所称的“某处人”，而不是现在掌权的移动全球主义者，后者是嵌入在目标明确的密集社区中的美国人。 为了实现这些目标，该国需要一个更大的众议院、更好的职业教育、重振公立学校、带薪家庭假期以及受限制的企业。这些目标可能会得到自由派的赞同，但也需要更多公开庆祝国家的“基督教根源”，并设立一个内阁级别的“家庭专员”来鼓励婚姻和怀孕。正如丹宁指出的那样，这种做法在匈牙利的奥尔班政府中也可以找到。

THE HIGHEST GOOD 最高的善

Deneen’s alternative to an exhausted, licentious liberalism is a form of politics that stresses “the priority of culture, the wisdom of the people,” and “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity,” that is, a conservatism that seeks what he and other writers label “the common good.” In their usage, that term denotes not so much valuing the commonweal as building a specific type of society: communal, local, and hierarchical. In the realm of law and practical policy, no one has done more to define this kind of common good than Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School. Deneen提出的一种对疲惫、放纵的自由主义的替代方案是一种强调“文化优先、人民智慧”的政治形式，以及“保护政体的普通传统”的保守主义，也就是他和其他作家所称之为“共同利益”的追求。在他们的用法中，这个术语并不仅仅指价值共同利益，而是建立一种特定类型的社会：共同体、本地化和等级制度。在法律和实际政策领域，没有人比哈佛法学院的教授Vermeule更多地定义了这种共同利益的概念。

Vermeule’s Common Good Constitutionalism is a work of legal interpretation rather than political theory, but his aim, like Deneen’s, is to recover a mode of thinking that he believes predates the Enlightenment. The measure of law is not whether it guards individual rights, which Vermeule believes are not foundational to legal order. It is whether law enables “the highest felicity or happiness of the whole political community, which is also the highest good of the individuals comprising that community.” The common good is “unitary and indivisible, not an aggregation of individual utilities,” a definition that means preferring judicial rulings that promote solidarity and subsidiarity: favoring obligation to one’s family and community, empowering lower levels of authority such as states and towns, and upholding what Vermeule understands as natural law and the “immemorial tradition” of ancient Rome and the modern United Kingdom. Vermeule的《公共利益宪政主义》是一部法律解释的作品，而不是政治理论，但他的目标与Deneen的目标一样，都是要恢复一种他认为早于启蒙时代的思维模式。法律的衡量标准不在于它是否保护个人权利，Vermeule认为个人权利并非法律秩序的基础。而在于法律是否能够实现“整个政治社区的最高幸福或快乐，也就是组成该社区的个体的最高利益”。公共利益是“统一而不可分割的，不是个体效用的聚合”，这个定义意味着更倾向于促进团结和辅助原则的司法裁决：倾向于对家庭和社区的责任，赋予州和城镇等下级权力，以及维护Vermeule所理解的自然法和古罗马以及现代英国的“古老传统”。

At a Trump rally in Mesa, Arizona, October 2022**At a rally for former U.S. President Donald Trump in Mesa, Arizona, October 2022 2022年10月，在亚利桑那州梅萨市为前美国总统唐纳德·特朗普举行的集会上。**The Washington Post / Getty Images 《华盛顿邮报/盖蒂图片》

For anyone not steeped in legal theory, Vermeule’s work can be hard going, but its implications come through. Human rights are legal conveniences delimited by the degree to which they serve the common good. The “administrative state”—the agencies that implement legislation—is not inherently evil, as some conservatives insist. Rather, it should simply be turned toward the realization of the common good, a point that parallels Deneen’s “stewards and caretakers,” the aristoi, who are properly educated, via the Western canon, to recognize good things when they see them. 对于那些不熟悉法律理论的人来说，Vermeule的作品可能会有些晦涩难懂，但其中的含义却是显而易见的。人权是一种法律便利，其界限在于其对公共利益的服务程度。”行政国家”——即执行立法的机构——并非像一些保守派所坚称的那样本质上邪恶。相反，它应该被转向实现公共利益的方向，这一点与Deneen的”管理者和看护人”、即受过适当教育的贵族阶层相呼应，他们通过西方经典教育，能够在看到好事物时予以认知。

Past Supreme Court decisions grounded in expansive individual rights, Vermeule believes, will have to fall. “The Court’s jurisprudence on free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters will prove vulnerable under a regime of common good constitutionalism.” But conservatives overconcerned with individual liberty are also a problem. Government can and should judge the “quality and moral worth” of free speech. There is no absolute right to refuse vaccination if it is necessary for public health. Libertarian “property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.” 维尔缪尔认为，以个人权利为基础的过去最高法院的决定将不得不被推翻。“在共同利益宪政体制下，法院对言论自由、堕胎、性自由等相关问题的法理学将变得脆弱。” 但是，过于关注个人自由的保守派也是一个问题。政府可以并且应该评判言论自由的“质量和道德价值”。如果接种疫苗对公共卫生有必要，就没有绝对的拒绝接种权利。自由主义的“财产权和经济权利也必须放弃，因为它们阻碍了国家在资源的使用和分配中执行社区和团结的责任。”

Throughout Common Good Constitutionalism, what purports to be a theory of law is in fact a wholesale rethinking of legitimacy. In Vermeule’s view, the basis for rightful authority is not custom, charisma, or rationality, as the German sociologist Max Weber had it, but the “objective legal and moral order” that common-good constitutionalists are best placed to perceive. Democracy and elections, Vermeule says, have no special claim to delivering the common good. A “range of regime-types can be ordered to the common good, or not.” Liberals have erected a constitutional order in which legitimacy derives from rights-bearing individuals who periodically choose representatives to write statutes, judge disputes, and keep the peace. But if those structures produce outcomes contrary to the common good, they will have to be dismantled. This worldview, Vermeule concedes, may prove “difficult for the liberal mind to process.” 在《共同善宪政主义》中，所谓的法律理论实际上是对合法性的全面重新思考。在弗梅尔的观点中，合法权威的基础不是习俗、魅力或理性，而是“客观的法律和道德秩序”，而共同善宪政主义者最能洞察到这一点。弗梅尔表示，民主和选举并没有特殊的权利来实现共同善。他说：“各种政权类型都可以被用来追求共同善，也可以不追求。”自由主义者建立了一个宪法秩序，其合法性源于享有权利的个人，他们定期选择代表来制定法规、裁决争议和维护和平。但是，如果这些结构产生与共同善相悖的结果，它们将不得不被拆除。弗梅尔承认，这种世界观可能对自由主义思维来说“难以理解”。

BONDS OF LOYALTY 忠诚的纽带

To chart how conservatives might recover the heritage from which Deneen and Vermeule derive their theories is one of the aims of Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Like Deneen, Hazony, an Israeli American scholar and president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem**,** vividly describes the hell­scape produced by the liberal order and prophesizes its impending collapse. But he is open to the idea that “anti-Marxist liberals” might be brought into an alliance with conservatism properly understood, which he defines as “the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” The most important step, Hazony believes, is to overturn the separation of church and state and “restore Christianity as the normative framework and standard determining public life in every setting in which this aim can be attained, along with suitable carve-outs creating spheres of legitimate non-compliance.” If liberals monopolized the public sphere by privatizing conservative values—encouraging one group of students to celebrate sexual diversity during Pride Month, say, but banning another from using school property for organized Bible study—then a renewed conservatism would simply flip the script. Public life would return to being unapologetically nationalist and communally religious. 为了描绘保守派如何恢复Deneen和Vermeule所得出的理论的传承，是Hazony的《保守主义：一次重拾》的目标之一。与Deneen一样，Hazony是以色列裔美国学者，也是耶路撒冷赫尔茨尔研究所的主席，他生动地描述了自由秩序所产生的地狱景象，并预言了其即将崩溃的命运。但他对“反马克思主义自由派”可能与保守主义真正理解的联盟持开放态度，他将保守主义定义为“恢复、重建、阐述和修复民族和宗教传统，作为维护一个国家并使其在时间中强大的关键”。Hazony认为，最重要的一步是推翻教会与国家的分离，并“恢复基督教作为决定公共生活的规范框架和标准，在每个可以实现这一目标的环境中，同时创建适当的例外区域，以确保合法的不服从。”如果自由派通过将保守价值私有化来垄断公共领域——比如，在骄傲月期间鼓励一群学生庆祝性别多样性，但禁止另一群学生在学校使用财产进行有组织的圣经研究——那么，一种复兴的保守主义将会简单地改变这种情况。公共生活将重新回归到毫不掩饰的民族主义和共同宗教的状态。

For Hazony, the common good can be divined from an open-eyed examination of history and nature. People are born into existing units of loyalty, such as families and nations, a fact that in turn produces obligations toward these collectives. A family propagates itself biologically, while a nation develops its unique language, religion, and laws to ensure its existence into future generations. Hazony follows these principles through the history of English constitutional law and the rise of the Federalists, whom he sees as the original American nation builders, to the fatal abandonment of “Christian democracy” in favor of “liberal democracy” after World War II. 对于哈佐尼来说，共同利益可以通过对历史和自然的睁眼观察来揭示。人们生来就属于现有的忠诚团体，比如家庭和国家，这一事实反过来产生了对这些集体的义务。家庭通过生物方式传承自己，而国家则通过发展独特的语言、宗教和法律来确保其存在到未来的世代。哈佐尼通过英国宪法法律的历史和联邦主义者的崛起来遵循这些原则，他将联邦主义者视为最初的美国国家建设者，然后在二战后将“基督教民主”抛弃而选择“自由民主”，这一选择被他视为致命的错误。

Hazony’s treatment of legal and political history is serious, if tendentious, but when it comes to philosophy, Conservatism is at base a manifesto, a literary form that aims to buck up the already converted and, as such, substitutes serial assertion for argument. “Human beings constantly desire and actively pursue the health and prosperity of the family, clan, tribe, or nation to which they are tied by bonds of mutual loyalty,” he writes, a claim that raises the question of why liberals have had such an easy time subverting them all. Overall, his point of view is that of an analytical and programmatic nationalist. He believes in the unchanged continuity of culturally defined nations through time, their immemorial primacy as a form of social organization, and their universal role in underpinning legitimate states—propositions that decades of evidence-based scholarship in history and the social sciences have shown to be, to put it simply, false. Many liberals are patriotic, community spirited, and religiously devout. It is just that they do not typically feel the need to mobilize the entirety of the past to sanction those commitments. Hazony对法律和政治历史的处理是认真的，尽管有些偏见，但在哲学方面，保守主义本质上是一种宣言，一种旨在鼓舞已经信仰的人的文学形式，因此用连续的断言代替了论证。“人类不断渴望并积极追求与他们通过相互忠诚的纽带相连的家庭、氏族、部落或国家的健康和繁荣”，他写道，这个说法引发了一个问题，即为什么自由主义者如此容易颠覆它们。总的来说，他的观点是分析性和纲领性的民族主义者观点。他相信文化定义的民族在时间上保持不变的连续性，他们作为一种社会组织形式的古老优先性，以及它们在支撑合法国家方面的普遍作用——几十年来历史和社会科学的基于证据的学术研究已经表明，简单地说，这些主张是错误的。许多自由主义者是爱国主义者、有社区精神和虔诚信仰的人。只是他们通常不觉得有必要动员整个过去来支持这些承诺。

A theme that Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony return to again and again is the family, which is often code for their disapproval of the existence of gay and transgender people. With regard to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, Vermeule finds the decision to be a textbook example of liberal overreach—but not for the reason one might think. The real problem was not that the Court usurped the power of Congress, as a conservative might once have argued. Rather, it was that “marriage can only be the union of a man and a woman” since that definition accords with biological reproduction. The ruling thus established the “ultimate valorization of will at the expense of natural reason” by separating marriage from its role in perpetuating “a continuous political community.” For Deneen, too, families headed by gay couples are the preeminent example of the limitless lives that liberals feel empowered to think into being—which, like the entire “liberationist ethos of progressive liberalism,” must necessarily make a victim out of people like him. As he writes, the “presumption seems to be that the only true path to human reconciliation is through the effective elimination of the one oppressor class in existence—white, heterosexual Christian men (and anyone sympathizing with them).” As with the extreme right in Russia, the European Union, and elsewhere, it does not take a deep reading of these writers to find an unshielded bigotry at the heart of their civilizational angst. Deneen、Vermeule和Hazony一再提到的一个主题是家庭，这往往是他们对同性恋和跨性别人存在的不赞成的代号。关于奥伯格费尔诉霍奇斯（Obergefell v. Hodges）这个2015年合法化同性婚姻的最高法院案件，Vermeule认为这个决定是自由主义过度扩张的典型例子，但原因并非人们所想的那样。真正的问题不是法院篡夺了国会的权力，正如保守派曾经争辩的那样。相反，问题在于“婚姻只能是一男一女的联合”，因为这个定义符合生物繁殖。这个裁决因此建立了“以意志为代价的自然理性的最终肯定”，通过将婚姻与其在延续“一个连续的政治共同体”中的作用分离开来。对于Deneen来说，由同性恋夫妇领导的家庭也是自由主义者感觉有权力创造的无限生活的最重要例子，这必然会使像他这样的人成为受害者，就像整个“进步自由主义的解放主义精神”一样。 正如他所写的，“似乎有一种假设，即唯一实现人类和解的真正途径是通过有效消除唯一存在的压迫者阶级——白人、异性恋基督教男性（以及与他们持同情态度的人）。” 就像俄罗斯、欧盟和其他地方的极右派一样，不需要深入阅读这些作家的作品，就能发现他们的文明焦虑中存在着公然的偏见。

ANGER, SORROW, AND FEAR 愤怒，悲痛和恐惧

Many people will recognize the American crisis that torments Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony and perhaps even share their longing for sincere politicians whose goal is to make things better. But a syndrome is not the same thing as a disease. The latter has a clear cause; the former does not. The source of the present troubles, they believe, is the entire liberal order, which, like the term “woke,” ends up being a container for everything they dislike. And since these writers work mainly at the level of grand theory, their arguments skim seductively over social facts without delving into their multiple causes. Falling life expectancy, the hollowing out of public education, gun violence as the leading cause of death of American children, the homeless citizens living in tent encampments from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles—these are the result of specific policy choices, at different levels of government and born of different agendas, not of liberalism run amok. 很多人会认同Deneen、Vermeule和Hazony所困扰的美国危机，甚至可能与他们一样渴望真诚的政治家来改善事态。但是，症候群并不等同于疾病。后者有明确的原因，而前者则没有。他们认为当前的困境的根源是整个自由秩序，就像“觉醒”这个词一样，最终成为他们不喜欢的一切的容器。由于这些作家主要从宏观理论的角度出发，他们的论点在社会事实上只是浅尝辄止，没有深入探讨其多重原因。寿命下降、公共教育的空洞化、枪支暴力成为美国儿童死亡的主要原因、从华盛顿特区到洛杉矶的无家可归的市民居住在帐篷营地中——这些都是特定政策选择的结果，来自不同层级的政府，出于不同的议程，而不是自由主义失控的结果。

Most worryingly, Deneen and Hazony make the grievances of an abused majority out of what are in fact the right-wing, ethnocultural commitments of a numerical minority. On issues such as state-supported health care, a higher federal minimum wage, abortion, and gun control, Americans are about equally divided or on the center-left. Even 56 percent of Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center poll. Public approval of marriage equality has increased steadily since the 1990s, to a record high of 71 percent in a Gallup poll last year. White evangelical Protestants, a mainstay of support for former U.S. President Donald Trump, constitute a historic low of 14 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. The elite, too, is no longer what common-good conservatives might imagine. For more than a decade, the most-educated, highest-earning cultural group in the United States has been not godless cosmopolitans but Indian Americans, principally Hindus and Muslims, nearly three-quarters of whom, according to a 2020 Carnegie Endowment survey, say that religion plays an important role in their lives. In this environment, to claim that “America is a Christian nation” is no more than to say, “I wish it were.” 最令人担忧的是，德宁和哈佐尼将实际上是右翼、民族文化承诺的少数派问题，说成是被虐待的多数派的不满。在国家支持的医疗保健、联邦最低工资的提高、堕胎和枪支控制等问题上，美国人的意见几乎平分，或者倾向于中左。根据2022年皮尤研究中心的调查，甚至有56%的天主教徒认为堕胎在所有或大多数情况下应该合法。同性婚姻的公众支持率自上世纪90年代以来稳步增长，去年在盖洛普民意调查中达到了创纪录的71%。根据公共宗教研究所的数据，白人福音派新教徒，曾是前美国总统唐纳德·特朗普的主要支持群体，如今仅占美国人口的14%，创历史新低。精英阶层也不再是普通保守派所想象的那样。在过去十多年里，美国受教育程度最高、收入最高的文化群体不是无神论的国际主义者，而是印裔美国人，主要是印度教徒和穆斯林，根据2020年卡内基国际和平基金会的调查，其中将近三分之二的人表示宗教在他们的生活中起着重要作用。 在这个环境中，声称“美国是一个基督教国家”不过是说，“我希望它是这样的。”

The real worry is that a hardened political minority has already concluded that its only way of reversing these trends is to give up altogether on political participation, an independent judiciary, and human rights. Deneen, Vermeule, and Hazony provide the intellectual backfill for precisely that strategy. All three authors situate themselves inside a tradition they believe stretches into antiquity, but their work recalls a more recent one: the jeremiads about American degeneracy and last-chance renewal produced a century ago, such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was a scientific racist and a progressive, which today’s common-good conservatives clearly are not. But their policy recommendations are in large part the same as his: tighten immigration restrictions, maintain the supremacy of Anglo-American culture, defend the country’s Christian (or, for Hazony, Christian and Orthodox Jewish) core, and shore up the nation against the “dissolute individuals” who have made a “sick society,” as Hazony puts it. At the center of these prescriptions is the belief that what others might see as social change, or even progress, can be nothing but loss. 真正的担忧是，一小部分坚定的政治少数派已经得出结论，他们扭转这些趋势的唯一途径就是完全放弃政治参与、独立的司法和人权。丹宁、韦梅尔和哈佐尼为这一策略提供了知识支持。这三位作者都将自己置于他们认为可以追溯到古代的传统之内，但他们的作品让人想起了更近期的作品：一百年前关于美国堕落和最后机会的忧国忧民之辞，比如麦迪逊·格兰特的《伟大种族的消逝》。格兰特是一个科学种族主义者和进步主义者，而当今的共同利益保守派显然不是。但他们的政策建议在很大程度上与格兰特的相同：加强移民限制，维护盎格鲁-美国文化的至高无上地位，捍卫国家的基督教（或者对于哈佐尼来说，基督教和正统犹太教）核心，以及加强国家对那些使社会“病态”的“堕落个体”的防范，正如哈佐尼所说。这些建议的核心观点是，其他人可能视为社会变革甚至进步的东西，对他们来说只能是损失。

These authors’ engulfing anger produces prose that is by turns elegiac, evangelizing, and blusterous, delivered with the self-assurance of a college sophomore conversant with all of human history. But more important, their anger lays waste to their empathy. Deneen writes warmly of a world made safe for “sound marriage, happy children, a multiplicity of siblings and cousins” and “the memory of the dead in our midst.” Hazony devotes the final portions of Conservatism to a moving account of his love for his wife and children and his thoughts on building a life of honor and virtue. Yet when it comes to other people’s children, communities, flourishing, and love, these authors’ disdain is shocking, like the rumble of a chanting crowd. 这些作者的愤怒充斥着他们的散文，时而哀悼，时而传教，时而夸夸其谈，他们自信地表达着对人类历史的了解，就像一个大学二年级学生一样。但更重要的是，他们的愤怒摧毁了他们的同理心。德宁热情地描述了一个为“幸福婚姻、快乐孩子、多样的兄弟姐妹和堂兄弟姐妹”以及“我们中间逝去的人的记忆”而安全的世界。哈佐尼在《保守主义》的最后部分，感人地讲述了他对妻子和孩子的爱以及他对建立光荣和美德生活的思考。然而，当涉及到其他人的孩子、社区、繁荣和爱时，这些作者的蔑视令人震惊，就像一群高呼口号的人的隆隆声。

There is particular sorrow in seeing erudite men indulge their own cruelty. When they encourage it in others, the sorrow becomes fear. As earlier anti-left writers such as Hayek insisted, any attempt to define the ends of life disconnected from the will of living beings is a form of collectivism, which in turn is the source of unfreedom and, worse, inhumanity. To throw out that line of thinking is to reject a tradition of its own: the array of ideas produced across the political spectrum, from Oakeshott to Hayek to Buckley, from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin, which placed actual people—not nations, races, or classes—at the center of civilized society. 在看到博学的人沉溺于自己的残忍时，会感到特别的悲伤。当他们鼓励他人也如此行事时，这种悲伤就变成了恐惧。正如海耶克等早期反左派作家所坚持的，任何试图将生命的目标与活生生的意愿脱离开来定义的尝试，都是一种集体主义，而集体主义又是不自由和更糟糕的非人道的根源。摒弃这种思维方式就是拒绝了一种传统：从奥克肖特到海耶克，从巴克利到汉娜·阿伦特，从詹姆斯·鲍德温，这一系列政治光谱上产生的思想，将真实的人民——而不是国家、种族或阶级——置于文明社会的中心。

Today, a mobilized segment of American intellectuals, politicians, and the voting public view themselves as part of an international coalition of the aggrieved, people whose core desire is precisely the “regime change” that Deneen advocates. It is commonplace to point out that Trump, Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and other authoritarian leaders are versions of the same political type, perhaps even the same psychological one. But what is even more worrying is that the United States has developed an ecosystem to produce future leaders of this sort: a party, a media space, a financial base, and now even an American school of illiberal thought. In this way the United States is in the odd position of being both the world’s most ardent champion of the liberal order—meaning a rules-based, cooperative system of states that themselves profess liberal values—and one of its potential threats. As never before, which way the country leans will depend entirely on the results of future electoral cycles. 今天，一部分美国知识分子、政治家和选民自认为是国际上一群受委屈的人的一部分，他们的核心愿望恰恰是丹宁所主张的“政权更迭”。众所周知，特朗普、奥尔班、俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京和其他威权领导人都是同一种政治类型的不同版本，甚至可能是同一种心理类型。但更令人担忧的是，美国已经形成了一个生产这类未来领导人的生态系统：一个政党、一个媒体空间、一个财政基础，甚至现在还有一个美国的非自由思潮学派。这样，美国就处于一个奇怪的位置，既是世界上最热衷于自由秩序的捍卫者，也是其潜在威胁之一。前所未有地，国家的倾向将完全取决于未来选举周期的结果。

The point of liberal values—the ones embraced by many progressives, classical liberals, and mainstream conservatives alike—is not that they are timeless or guarantee happiness. It is that they rest on the one thing in social life we can all be sure of: that we will encounter other individuals, different from ourselves, with their own preferences, ambitions, and worldviews. Put aside the complicated metaphysics and speculative theology, and what is left is human beings struggling to patch a ship already at sea: to find ways to live together peacefully—and even prosper—in a changing, plural world. 自由价值观的要点——被许多进步派、古典自由主义者和主流保守派所接受的那些——并不在于它们是永恒的或能够保证幸福。而是它们建立在社会生活中我们都可以确定的一件事情上：我们将会遇到其他与我们不同的个体，他们有着自己的偏好、抱负和世界观。抛开复杂的形而上学和推测性的神学，剩下的就是人们努力修补已经在航行中的船只的人类：在一个多元化的世界中，寻找和平共处的方式，甚至是繁荣。

Traditional American liberalism held that greater equality would enable achievement for all. Traditional American conservatism warned that grand schemes for improvement usually end up as disasters. That is still a debate worth having. But for all their differences, these older camps shared an ability to recognize tyranny when they saw it, whether in the Soviet Union, the Jim Crow South, or philosophies that claim God, History, or Nature as a comrade. On the American right, time may be running out to recover that sense of reality. 传统的美国自由主义认为，更大的平等将使所有人都能取得成就。传统的美国保守主义警告说，大规模的改进计划通常会以灾难告终。这仍然是一个值得讨论的辩论。但是尽管存在差异，这些老派阵营都有能力在看到暴政时予以认识，无论是在苏联、吉姆·克劳南部还是声称上帝、历史或自然是同志的哲学中。在美国右翼，恢复对现实的认识可能时间不多了。