January 14, 2025
By John G. Grove
What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative conference, I recently heard a panelist make the flip side of the same argument: that if the state is not actively enforcing certain values, those values are being “relegated to the private sphere.” This view on what is “public” and what is “private,” increasingly common to hear on the right today, brings to mind a famous quote by former Democratic Representative Barney Frank: These conservatives seem to believe that politics is “the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” There is no room, it seems, for something to be public, and yet not political.
Sometimes that association holds. The language of publicity is often pegged to government. Consider the way we talk about law and policy. We all understand a “public official” as an officer of government, while references to “the private sector,” or “private schools” indicate the government is not directly involved. And our legal tradition has developed a “public-private” divide along these lines, too.
But that is not the sense in which the terms are being used when conservatives talk of something being consigned to the “private realm.” They clearly mean “private” to have a negative connotation—as essentially irrelevant for common, shared life, and applicable only to personal belief with no effect on the wider world. On the other hand, they do not distinguish this general sense of “public matters” from “public policy or law”. The choice seems to be between official coercion and merely individual preference.
Consider how this applies to a religious community. To use Pearcey’s example, the members of a church may leave their homes and gather in a shared place; they may worship together; they may commune together; they may have fellowship with one another. But unless they do so withan explicitly political purpose, all of these things done together are supposed to be essentially private because they are presumed to have little perceivable impact on the wider society.
Those on the right who encourage a more political role for religious and conservative ways of life intend to challenge the parameters of modern, progressive liberalism—and they are right to do so. But they are actually operating within its model of political and social life, which identifies just two meaningful social categories: individual and state. In other words, they want to exert a public, cultural influence, yet believe that such influence can be had only through political clout. What is at stake is whether there exists something we would reasonably call “public” life that does not wield directly coercive power guided by political values and objectives.
This is not merely a question of semantics. How one answers it reveals fundamental assumptions about what political action should be trying to accomplish and about how social order emerges. It is also suggestive of the relative value we place on the social activities we undertake. Is politics an overriding, “architectonic” activity that orders subordinate social activities according to an overarching plan? Or is politics primarily about protecting the freedom of persons and associations to pursue goods that we value for their own sakes?
From Is to Ought
There is an “is” and an “ought” side of the issue. Historically, conservatives have been nearly unanimous that there oughtto be such a sphere of public life—that in the modern world, it is precisely the things we do in common but outside of government that allows for both freedom and order. Even today, aside perhaps from a few Catholic integralists, most conservatives would probably agree that they want to defend civic association and moral authority from the parallel threats of centralized power and individual whim.
The more contentious issue is how one should approach the “is” part of the question. Even if we want such a realm of civil society, is it anything more than a Tocquevillian fantasy?
There’s no doubt that the social-but-not-political realm has been under almost constant assault for at least the last century. It has been eroded both by the expansion of government and by the politicization of institutions from churches to businesses to universities. This has not been exclusively the left’s doing. But progressives have certainly blazed the trail, attempting to coerce and cajole all elements of society to play their part in a broader plan for justice and equity.
Some conservatives say that the left has been so successful that the game has changed. Whatever might have been possible in the 19th or early 20th centuries, they argue, we now live in a different world, and must either pursue all-encompassing politics or unconditionally surrender. When it comes to the rise of corporatism, erosion of constitutionalism, or the politicization of society, we must “accept the reality” and “live in the world into which we are thrown.” In other words, the is of our present situation trumps the idealistic ought.
There might be something to this logic if the conservative objection to totalizing politics really were exclusively concerned with the ought—a matter of moral restraint. One might say that it is not ideal to politicize all of society, but once others are doing it against you, then the ideal must give way to hard-nosed reality. The calculus changes, however, if the conservative objection itself springs from hard-nosed reality—an observation about the limits inherent in any attempt to mold and shape society according to a plan. What if the conservative concludes that attempts to pull all of society into correct political orbit should be avoided not simply because of a moral objection to social engineering, but because such attempts will always fail, and will actually prevent the emergence of a stable and healthy social order?
It is on this question that the politics of the right can be distinguished from the conservative disposition. The right-wing case for more assertive politics assumes that we could transform society in their favored direction but refuse to do so out of weakness of will or crippling scruples. The conservative responds that such measures do not work, even and maybe especially when they are pursued with the best intentions. In some cases, they are even counter-productive—leading to the opposite of the intended results.
We can find examples of this blowback in the 20th century history of religion and politics. Attempts to enforce conservative, religious values in countries such as Ireland and Spain encouraged the rapid and thorough secularization of those countries as people revolted against what they regarded as burdensome and partisan interference with their lives. Much same has been true in Iran. Rather than promoting a more pious society, the Islamic republic has discredited religion—thus calling on increasingly brutal repression to sustain the mullah’s regime.
A recent study on DEI at the University of Michigan is a more recent example from closer to home that would support this thesis. DEI programs in education aim to use the university as the agent of social transformation. Yet despite a quarter of a billion dollars spent, the report concluded, racial tensions on campus were higher than ever, black enrollment had not changed, and black students felt less included. Once one factors in the backlash that DEI programs have prompted off campus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, on their own terms, such programs have utterly failed to achieve their goals. Like clerical establishments abroad, their main result was to provide lucrative if unpopular sinecures to supporters. Movements that begin with grand visions of social change tend to end as jobs programs for activists.
Living With Frustration
The inability of political movements to redirect society toward their desired end is one reason why people on the left and the right today both seem so adamantly convinced that the other side is on the brink of absolute domination. Despite the left’s advances in culture and the right’s successes in electoral politics, neither side has been able to subdue or eliminate the other. To the contrary, their most ambitious efforts have tended to produce frustrating backlash. Think of the way the DEI mania of the last few years helped Trump’s political comeback.
Enthusiasts of the right and left alike assume that the reason they haven’t succeeded is that they just didn’t try hard enough—or that they were sabotaged by moderates, squishes, cucks, and so on. The conservative, by contrast, might conclude that we should be skeptical of the approach to political and social life that gave rise to such totalizing ambitions to begin with.
The left is a cautionary tale, not a model. It has enjoyed a kind of success in destroying old things. But it has not been terribly successful at building up their hoped-for alternative. That’s partly because they ignored conservatives’ recurring questions. What if a stable social order and shared way of life actually require independent, overlapping sources of authority? What if they require institutions focused on learning together, or worshiping together, or creating together—for their own sake, not for a conscious political end? What if a stable society cannot emerge from a centrally-directed mass society, but requires a million small voices each exerting an imperceptible influence? What if T.S. Eliot was right that “culture is the one thing we cannot deliberately aim at”?
If that’s the case, the conservative cannot simply say that the world has changed, that everything is political, and the we must play by the new rules. Even if the public realm outside politics is in a sorry state, and even if the “other side” attempts to reduce it to a pawn, the conservative could never accede to its loss if he believes the alternative is disorder and intractable conflict. Rebuilding and renewing the freedom and sense of independent purpose on the part of our associations would be not simply the moral way, or the ideal way, but the only way to renew society more broadly.
A thriving public life is not one correctly guided by the right political movement, but one in which social institutions are free to operate according to the animating principles appropriate to them—and to form individuals accordingly. A conservative political program, then, would aim to promote such freedom. On the policy side, this means conservatives shouldn’t try to arrange the “correct” outcomes across social institutions, but seek out the ways political influence has distorted and misdirected these institutions and try to reverse that effect.
This enterprise could take several approaches. First, to use Philip Hamburger’s phrase, conservatives ought to work to reduce the ways the federal government “purchases submission” from both state and local governments and institutions of civil society by placing conditions on its funding. Second, they should try to drastically reduce the amount of federal aid, subsidies, and grants that flow into social life (especially universities) in an attempt to make them serve political aims. Third, they ought to continue to cut away the misguided 1980s-90s evolution of civil rights law, especially the “disparate impact” concept, which—intentionally or not—played a huge role in the spread toxic theories of race and gender throughout social institutions. Fourth, they should lean into policies like school choice that put as much distance between politics and education as possible, given the existence of government-operated schools. Finally, they should reinforce the legal framework for freedom of association, protecting the associations that allow us to engage in public life outside of politics.
Finding the Middle Ground
Politics is important: there will always be important legislative, legal, regulatory, and electoral battles that must be won to protect civic life. But the notions that anyone who does not engage in politics is retreating into “private life,” or that, in order to have public influence, ideas and values must attain political clout, would be some of the most pernicious beliefs a conservative could propagate if he aims at cultivating a stable and healthy social order. Ostensibly seeking to take the fight more aggressively to the left, these ideas casually capitulate on fundamental questions about the nature of common life and the aims of political activity. In doing so, they may be setting up fruitless or even counterproductive political fights, all the while channeling talented young people of a conservative disposition exclusively into political activism, leaving behind the real institutions of cultural formation which they treat as empty vessels.
This brand of activist tells us that politics demands everyone’s full attention, but the long-term prospects for social and cultural renewal may require that we refuse that demand.
John G. Grove is associate editor of Law & Liberty.