About City on a Hill

City on a Hill is a project I have had in my mind since I was a child. But it is only now that I have the perspectives, the skills, and the tools to bring it to life.

The final impetus was the 2024 presidential election, which proved to me beyond any doubt that the thin conception of liberalism that is the philosophical foundation of the contemporary United States does not have the ethical and spiritual (in the broad sense of the word) resources to resist a religious and political attack like the one we are now experiencing from the MAGA movement.

The most common explanations for the 2024 result are economic and political. The Democratic party’s enthusiastic support of neoliberal economics alienated its working class base. Post-pandemic inflation, which was exacerbated by an unnecessary stimulus, caused real hardship. And the party’s obsession with gender identities, driven by a narrow but vocal group of elites and academics, alienated socially conservative members of society.

My own view is that it goes deeper than that, and that the reason Americans voted for an immature, misogynistic, neo-fascist demagogue, who in his last term in office incited a mob to hang his own vice-president, has as much to do with the positive appeal of such a figure as it does with the negative impressions Americans had of the recent Democratic administration.

I think we neglect this positive appeal at our own peril. America now has a thin majority who would prefer to risk the destruction a two-hundred year old democracy rather than continue as we are. That cannot be merely economic grievance. If we listen to what people are saying — over and over again —we will hear a perception that something is seriously wrong with what this country has become.

This brings us to the other explanations that have been offered. Some of this is the resentment of a previously privileged white male working class, which is no longer uniquely privileged. Some of it is anger at uncontrolled immigration. Some of it is racist. Some of it is sexist. But, again, I ask the same question. Does this add up to a reason to elect a criminal to the highest office in the land, with the announced intention of ending democracy as we have known it?

There’s no question people are angry. But the explanations offered do not, to my mind, add up to kind of anger we saw in this election. Nor do they account for the embrace of Donald Trump’s dark and apocalyptic vision, less than two generations after Ronald Reagan declared “Morning in America.” In the years from 1984 to 2024, Republicans have gone from sunshine to apocalypse. What happened?

Well, neoliberalism and globalization happened, elevating one class of workers and depressing another. But those weren’t the only things going on during that period. Nor does it account for the fact that the MAGA movement has never explicitly been a class movement. It has attracted some very wealthy people. Donald Trump’s single legislative achievement during his first term was a tax bill widely seen as redistributing wealth upwards to one-percenters and corporations. But this apparent betrayal did not cost him any support in 2024. “Occupy Wall Street” it is not.

My provisional view is that what people are really angry about is not merely economic injustice, but the collapse of a social contract. The projects, stories, and values that bound us to each other, and the institutions — religious and secular — through which we were connected with each other, and in which cared for each other, have all collapsed, more or less simultaneously. And while this may be manageable for a certain highly-educated, culturally sophisticated, well-resourced, highly mobile, and privileged class of Americans, it is highly alienating for the rest of Americans. These two groups of Americans now find themselves with little in common. And it is this division, more than the traditional liberal/conservative division, that now dominates our politics.

Donald Trump has come along and he has offered this disenchanted group something that America itself is not offering them — a sense of identity, purpose, and hope for renewal. His vision is not “Morning in America.” But it’s meaningful to the people who subscribe to it. It captures and explains their resentments. It promises that the old contract can be restored — with or without the social elites who have abandoned them.

Whether any of these promises can be delivered upon is beside the point. The point is that in the contest between meaning and alienation, any meaning — even a dark, apocalyptic meaning — is better than no meaning.

The challenge for liberals then — if we want to keep our democracy — is not merely to restore economic dignity to the middle class. It is, rather, to make America meaningful again. To rebuild the social contract, to restore to America a sense of shared purpose, and establish a renewed commitment to each other.

This is going to take liberals out of their comfort zones. And it’s a big reason why I was hesitant, until now, to begin this project.

It is only now, after Americans have elected Donald Trump for a second time, that Liberals might be willing to confront the possibility that the thin conception of liberalism on which our system is founded lacks the resources to restore the purposes and commitments that are missing.

We have tried to build a society that is neutral with respect to ends. It has led us to where we are now: a nation of angry people, with dehumanized institutions and a failing democracy.

To get past this stage we need a stronger conception of what it is to flourish as human beings. And we need to make this conception central to our identity as as people and our purpose as a nation.

Just as people need personal ends, societies need public ends. And it’s time for us to think about what those might be, over and above our ongoing project of equal recognition. If our politics is now a contest between the thick meanings of MAGA and the thin conceptions of liberalism by which we have been living, then MAGA will win. Indeed, it just did. And spectacularly so.

What people who still believe in liberalism must do now is to tell a better story. And it has got to be a thicker story than merely fighting for the rights of logarithmically multiplying identity groups. That story does not tell me why I should want to give up any of my rights to your new identity group. It may be seen as noble — or even morally obligatory — in highly privileged liberal circles to do so. But at some point people grow weary of this game of dividing the pie into ever thinner slices.

A thicker story would tell us what we owe to each and every individual, rather than to each and every identity group. It would appeal to the fundamental needs and goals that we all have in common, rather than to our differences. And it would entail a shared commitment to giving people the support and resources they require to meet those needs and reach those goals. It requires a thicker story of what it is to be human. And it requires the inclusion of each and every American under this umbrella of humanity.

Philosophically and socially, there is much to be worked out. But I don’t think we have any choice now but to begin that work in earnest. Our current system is too broken for too many people to survive much longer. That much is now clear. Even the economic remedies that have been proposed are going to take a great deal more unity, and greater sense of shared purpose, than our present system enables us to muster.

To complicate matters even further, artificial intelligence will soon start separating even the highly educated classes into those with high paying jobs and social recognition, and those without. And what binds us together after that?

My answer that it’s going to have to be something stronger than economic self-interest, or even a shared commitment to human rights. It’s going to have to be a narrative (broadly conceived) that reflects back to us our deepest intuitions about what it is to be human, and that binds us together in a shared commitment to each other in our development along that path.

None of this is to argue against the economic and political fixes that are proposed. Short term political and economic fixes, to the extent we can implement them, can buy us some time. But I don’t think we will ever make the thin modern liberal model work again. It’s every bit as broken as the pre-modern religious model the MAGA crowd wants to go back to.

The MAGA crowd may think that they can go back to a time before modern liberalism. And modern liberals may think they can go back to a pre-MAGA style of liberalism. But there is no going back — for any of us. We’re all going forward now. And what that future will look like will depend on how much imagination, wisdom, and compassion we can bring to what comes next.