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The Church and l ib e ra l Democracy
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Ihe preservat ion o f order through the management o f conflict between
such individuals .23
The irony is that our founders thought that the system of competing
factions would work only if you could continue to assume that people were
virtuous. John Adams in his first year as vice-president under the new con
stitution said: “We have no government armed with power capable of con
tending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitu
tion was made only for a moral and a religious people. It is wholly inadequate
for the government of any other.” Yet the very theory that has formed our
public rhetoric and institutions gives no sufficient public basis for the de
velopment of such people. It was assumed that in making “morality” a matter
of the “private sphere”—that is, what we do with our freedom—it could still
be sustained and have an indirect public impact. But we know this has not
been the case; our “private” morality has increasingly followed the form of
our public life. People feel their only public duty is to follow their own
interests as far as possible, limited only by the rule that we do not unfairly
limit others’ freedom. As a result we have found it increasingly necessary to
substitute procedures and competition for the absence of public virtues. The
bureaucracies in our lives are not simply the result of the complexities of an
industrialized society, but a requirement of a social order individualistically
organized.24
Many of our current political problems and the way we understand and
try to solve them are a direct outgrowth of our liberal presuppositions. For
example, the American government is often condemned for its inability to
develop an economic or energy policy, but such policies must necessarily be
public policies. Just as it has been the genius of the American political system
to turn every issue of principle into an issue of interest, so it has been the
intention of our polity to make impossible the very idea of public policy or
public interest. Public policy cannot exist because society is nothing more
than an aggregate of self-interested individuals. The policy which is formu
lated therefore must be the result of a coalescence of self-interests that is then
justified in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number (but too often
turns out to be the greatest good for the most powerful). Liberalism thus
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; a social order that is designed to work on
the presumption that people are self-interested tends to produce that kind of
people.
It is often pointed out that there is a deep puzzle about the American
people, for in spite of being the best off people in the world, their almost
frantic pursuit of abundance seems to mask a deep despair and loss of pur
pose. I suspect that our despair is the result of living in a social order that asks