From Noema:
Nathan Gardels: It is remarkable in today’s context to remember that 40 years ago, you and I sat here in Cambridge at the dining room table of the famous sociologist Daniel Bell to discuss what we called “the American Cultural Civil War.” The discussion was about the loss of authority of the liberal establishment with the rise of Ronald Reagan, both politically and culturally. Much of what was said then can be said now.
You said then that Reagan appealed to the “symbols and resonances” of traditional order and that Democrats had become the party of the national welfare state that had lost touch with the “local intermediating institutions” like bowling leagues and churches, which they “looked down on as parochial and prejudiced.”
Then you presciently pointed out the “vulnerability of a neutral state as a framework of rights equally impartial among competing conceptions of the good life.” It was vulnerable, you said, because “the problem of tolerance is that it is not self-interpreting or self-implementing as an ideal. Tolerance is not a substitute for a vision of the common good. It presupposes one.” The way to address this vulnerability, you said at the time, is to “infuse politics with moral and spiritual meaning.”
So, one has to ask, in 2026, isn’t that just what MAGA has done? They’ve assigned a moral substance to the state, not in terms of liberal values, but in terms of what they call the “strong gods” of family, faith and nation.
Michael Sandel: Yes. MAGA has been very effective at speaking to the sense that the moral fabric of community was unraveling around us, invoking a kind of hyper-nationalism that asserts sovereignty and belonging with a vengeance.
More here.
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