Vice and the Crisis of Liberalism

The triumph of vice in American life — the haze of marijuana in our cities, the gambling apps pulsing in so many young male pockets, the success of OnlyFans layered atop the ubiquity of online porn — happened gradually and suddenly. Gradually in the sense that there was no one Supreme Court decision that made all the difference, no single presidential election that turned on legal pot or legal porn. Suddenly in the sense that a convergence of forces, legal and cultural and technological, had a turbocharging effect over just the past 10 years.

This combination, a drastic transformation that feels organic rather than politically imposed, makes the rise of vice a useful point of entry into the debate about liberalism’s crisis. It’s a vivid illustration of why the critique of liberalism has power nowadays, even as it highlights the problems that beset its post-liberal challengers as well.

In a recent series justifying liberalism against its critics, Matt Yglesias devoted an essay to a defense of the liberal order as a thin canopy beneath which people can pursue their own thicker conceptions of the good life. The fact that liberal governments are obliged to “treat citizens as if they are atomized individuals,” he wrote, doesn’t mean “that people should, in fact, be atomized individuals.” The liberal order allows for myriad social cures for hyperindividualism, all kinds of private sources of morality and meaning. It just doesn’t impose a single one-size-fits-all model, because that way lies tyranny.

I think that vice clarifies some ways in which this theory is naïve. In any society, politics is an arena for debates about the good life. The way the government taxes and spends and bans and regulates has a powerful effect on the behavior of its citizens, and what the law allows or forbids has some effect — not decisive, but inevitably influential — on what ordinary people think and do. So if the law and the political theory underneath it treat people like atomized individuals, well, then people will inevitably behave more like atomized individuals, conceive of themselves more like atomized individuals and experience the ills of atomization more acutely.

This is clearly part of what has happened with gambling and drugs and pornography. As our laws have become less moralistic and more libertarian, addictive behaviors have increased. An amoral understanding of liberalism has yielded, in a pretty direct way, to a more immoral society.

Yglesias nods in his essay to concerns about addiction and suggests that we could use more regulation, more sin taxes and the like. But, he insists, “fanaticism about Rawlsian liberal neutrality” is not the main impediment to such regulation; it’s just that “neither partisan coalition agrees that these issues belong at the forefront of public life.”

But why? Well, in part because both partisan coalitions have adopted an increasingly libertarian presumption about what personal liberty entails — one that tracks with Yglesias’s own views about liberal neutrality! Maybe Americans are not fanatical about “Rawlsian neutrality” as a specific theoretical concept, but clearly more people than ever just don’t think it’s the government’s business what they smoke or stream or bet on, and that shift is a working out of exactly the “treat citizens as if they are atomized individuals” premise that Yglesias defends.

Now, is it a necessary working out within any imaginable form of liberalism? Maybe not, since after all, America has always been a society with a strong liberal-individualist bent, and yet we also had all kinds of regulations on vices until the day before yesterday.

From this perspective, what gets called “post-liberalism” might enter into debates as a corrective to current-era liberalism rather than as a full political alternative. For an example of what this looks like, I recommend Charles Fain Lehman’s essay in the most recent issue of National Affairs, “The Case for Prohibiting Vice,” which argues for a recovery of political concepts that imply that “something about vice, and addiction per se, threatens our capacity to act as fully capable humans and citizens.”

This framework takes a big step away from current tendencies in liberalism. But it presents itself as an internal corrective, not a revolution but a way back from a mistaken path.

And I wholeheartedly endorse the steps that Lehman wants to take. But I also have doubts that the procession of arguments he puts forward, aimed primarily at secular-minded elites, is sufficient to change our trajectory.

That’s because at the deepest level, vice’s triumph in America is not just about an impoverishment of legal thinking or a cultural over-indexing for individualism. As Aaron Renn notes in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal, it’s also fundamentally about the decline of Protestant Christianity as the core worldview in American life — the death of what Renn calls the “softly institutionalized generic Protestantism” that worked within and through liberal institutions before collapsing from the 1960s onward.

And it’s here that the stronger forms of religiously minded post-liberalism make their case. Whether in their Catholic integralist or Protestant “Christian nationalist” forms, they argue that American liberalism was able to restrain vice only because of its religious inheritance, the secularizing aspects of the liberal order have destroyed that inheritance, and so only an explicitly Christian politics that repudiates liberalism can restore the moral order.

I’ve written elsewhere, at some length, about the problems with this vision. Among other things, it lacks a persuasive account of why integralism lost to liberalism in the first place, a compelling theory of how to get the diverse and divided American public to vote for a politics of faith and virtue and an adequate engagement with why post-liberal experiments in the 20th century defaulted so often to authoritarianisms that corrupted Christianity rather than restoring it.

But the alternative vision can also feel inadequate. If you think the liberal order needs some version of what we once enjoyed with American Protestantism, some kind of “softly institutionalized” moral and religious vision that prevents us from devolving into addiction and despair, but you don’t think that politics can do much more than gently create preconditions for that vision, then aren’t you still stuck inside the Yglesian framework, hand-waving vaguely at the social problems that are eating your order from within?

If I had the answer, I wouldn’t write so many open-ended newsletters on this subject (while urging my fellow Americans toward religion every chance I get). But it’s important to be clear about the dilemma: The absence of a credible replacement for liberalism doesn’t mean that there’s an obvious cure within the system for its vices.