James Davison Hunter's Democracy and Solidarity

The Frayed Sources of Cultural Cohesion

I’ve written often in this newsletter on the challenges of our polarized political environment. In fact, the first things I wrote on this SubStack were on the topic.

One of the big questions confronting early society involved what it meant to be a part of a group. Durkheim argued that society was possible because individualism was supplanted by group cohesion. In The Division of Labor in Society, he argued that tribal society was held together by what he called Mechanical Solidarity. The idea was that all members were the same and could be interchanged (like widgets). In modern (for him) society, that sameness was supplanted by diversity and diffusion. A new form of solidarity, Organic Solidarity, took its place. The basis for Organic Solidarity is interdependence where component parts need each other and must work in concert (consider the body’s interdependent systems).

James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis is something of a Durkheimian analysis of the cultural bonds that overlay the supposed interdependence.¹ He suggests that this book is a bookend to his 1992 Culture Wars. Where that book was more empirical, this one is based on the Big Ideas of Culture, which he calls Cultural Logics.

He writes:

The assumption of the enduring vitality of liberal democracy an America is challenged not only by the unraveling of the deep structrues of the hybrid-Enlightenment, but also by what appear to be filling the void.

Underneath the polarizaiton a different common culture has emerged, but tragically not one that fosters unity. Rather, it is one that, by its nature, turns in on itself and destroys. (17-18)

The hybrid-Enlightenment of the founding drew from Calvinist frameworks and secular views of Locke and others. They were something more than civil religion but less that Christianized America. Still, it set in place a number of bold ideas (all men are created equal, representative government) for a new nation.

However, those common understandings didn’t work for all. Blacks, Women, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and others all struggled to get those ideas to have meaning for them (which Hunter calls “the working through” of the hybrid-Enlightenment.

In early twentieth century America, a more secular view was taking hold. In part, it seems to me, this was a response to urbanization and immigration.² At this point in his argument, Hunter begins a pattern that runs through the middle of the book: contrasting views of major intellectual figures.

He begins with a contrast between the progressivism of John Dewey and the realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. In the middle of the century, he contrasts the views of Arthur Schlesinger and Walter Lippman.³ As he enters the Culture war fights of the 1960s and 1970s, he explores the thinking of Catholic natural law scholar John Neuhaus with the legal framework of Laurence Tribe. The next contrast is between Richard Rorty and the positions of the Claremont Institute.⁴ He then explores the policy orientations of Cass Sunstein and its opposite in Adrian Vermeule⁵

The result of these evolving cultural shifts is a loss of telos, the question of the end-goal of our solidarity.⁶ In its absence, we are left with nihilism and ressentiment, a feeling of permanent grievance toward others.

Hunter writes this toward the end of the book:

In sum, what we need is a paradigm shift within liberal democracy rooted in an ethical vision for the re-formation of public life, a courageous and visionary leadership capable of enacting it as practices within the entire range of major institutions, a well-formed citizenry that would support it and participate in it, a healthy civic ecosystem within which the nonpolitical elements of politics would develop and thicken, all drawing on the affirmations of a renewed humanism that would affirm the humanity of all human beings in their particularity and repudiate any and all political violence toward them. It would define a new, vital, principled, capacious, and defiant center, the conditions of which would encourage the insight to see the nihilists that undermine human flourishing, would arouse the resolve to renounce them, but then would inspire the wisdom and ingenuity to imagine ways of seeing and ways of living that move beyond them. It would recognize that the most serious culture war we face at present is not against the “other side,” but against the nihilism that insinuates itself in the symbolic, institutional, and practical concerns of the late modern world, not least in its politics. (382)⁷

While I like the aspirations present in this quote, it’s not clear how we get there from here. These are certainly not the themes being discussed at the RNC in Milwaukee nor in the current conversation about the Democratic campaign. I wish we had been given a little more in terms of what levers we might use to move toward this idealized outcome.

I do wonder about Hunter’s focus on large scale intellectual leaders like Dewey or Neuhaus or Lippman or Niebuhr. I dare say that people who are in American Studies or US History departments might be familiar, but not most people — including me.

It begs the question about these ideas filter into the culture of everyday people. In reading, I found myself thinking of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Stranger in Their Own Land, which explored the “deep story” of Tea Party members in Louisiana. Beyond the ressentiment that Hunter describes which has echoes in Hochschild, I wanted to know how the Hunter’s big ideas inform those feelings.

I also had question about the figures he focused on in his intellectual contrasts. Why these figures? Are they the primary shapers of culture in their period? Who else might have been considered? How might different pairings shift the argument?

Finally, I found a subtle preference for the more conservative voices in each time period. Clearly, that’s Hunter’s prerogative as an author but it could have been more clearly stated. As it was, I was caught off guard by references to disapproval of Vietnam war protests without mentioning the parallel moral problem of the war itself or by a passing reference to “Fauci’s lies” during COVID.

All in all, I appreciated Hunter’s attempt to explore the Durheimian problem of solidarity in late modern capitalist democracy. We have much work to do for which our current political, media, religious, and educational institutions are not currently prepared.

1. Hunter’s work on evangelicalism plays a key theoretical role in my book.

2. Precisely the Durkheimian problem above.

3. Unfortunately, he doesn’t cite the Walter Lippman book by my friend Mark Edwards

4. Of John Eastman fame.

5. You’ll find Vermeule as one of the authors of Project 2025.

6. In my first book, I used Neal Postman’s The End of Education, which raised similar questions about the telos of public education.

7. Hunter likes LONG sentences!