The long-term integrity of democratic institutions is threatened by “deteriorating norms of truthfulness and authority”, says Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy.
The answer to the West’s 21st-century drift into cultural incoherence, political sclerosis, and fecklessness in the face of new aggressors is not going to be found in a mythologized past or xenophobic forms of nationalism, writes George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center. Nor is it going to be found along the path of a new authoritarianism.
The answer can only be found in rebuilding the political culture of the West on the basis of the moral truths that, over time, created the unique form of public life known as western democracy. Those truths come to us from both revelation and reason, from biblical religion and from the ancient Greek conviction that human intelligence can get at the truth of things, adds Weigel, also a NED board member:
The claims of some political scientists and sociologists notwithstanding, democracy is not a machine that can run by itself. No matter how well-designed the machinery, democracy will become brittle, and may ultimately crack and fail, if it is not sustained by a citizenry steeped in certain virtues: men and women committed to the dignity of the human person as the first principle of just governance and dedicated to the pursuit of the common good.
This hard truth is denied by the post-modern high culture of the West; indeed, the truth that there are truths about the human person and human community essential to democracy is regarded by many post-modern thinkers as an undemocratic sentiment, behind which lurks a creeping authoritarianism. Yet the opposite is true across the West: it is the radical moral relativists for whom there is no “truth,” but only expressions of personal preference and will, who are busily enforcing their judgments on society in the name of “tolerance”. You may find them wherever the western democratic project is understood primarily as a machine for the satisfaction of individual willfulness – wherever the imperial autonomous Self is understood to be the idea of the human person that best suits the democratic project.
