Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 105

Autonomy on the Road to Tyranny

fortably atop creaking foundations. Is there a coherent American
citizenship that emerges from a collective memory? Is the lack
of any unifying tradition at the heart of our inability to sustain a
constitutional consensus that would guide disagreement about
political means and ends? Maybe that's just it: a constitutional
tradition isn't something you have to articulate-you feel it in
your hips, as Willmoore Kendall once said. But when it goes, can
you get it back?
Even our Constitution itself would seem to be a document
wholly formed and agreed to by consenting citizens concerned
only with the all-consuming present. We come to realize that its
deeper truths-its political traditions-unfold over time into a
political and social order of autonomous adults who leave behind
the premodern authority of relational institutions that grew out of
a thick web of largely unchosen obligations. So on one powerful
reading, our tradition, to the extent Americans have such a thing,
would be made up of self-chosen entities and their practices, all
equipped with easy exit ramps should the need to leave any commitment arise.

The politics of identities
Progressives have carpet-bombed our politics with the proposition that personal identities are the source and summit of our
citizenship. And these identities are, most prominently, caught up
with sexuality and race, such that American citizens are not particular individuals participating in republican self-government.
They are rather the products of autonomously willed assertions
(call me Caitlyn), or else members of a race that provides a set of
ready-made beliefs, attitudes, and opinions to adopt.
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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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