Reclaiming Civil Society: From Voluntary Servitude To ‘Parallel Polis’

In an important article in the October issue of The Atlantic titled “The New Puritans,” Anne Applebaum takes eloquent aim at a growing illiberalism that has colonized large parts of civil society. It is dominated, Applebaum argues, by an arbitrary censoriousness, “ritualized apologies,” and “public sacrifices.” The ugly scenes it gives rise to are not recognizably American and do not belong in a truly free state or society. As Applebaum demonstrates, more and more cultural and civic institutions are succumbing to self-enslavement, paying obeisance to the angry mob and to an ideological mindset that repudiates independent thought and any sense that our civilized inheritance is worth preserving and sustaining. Applebaum insists that authentic liberals have suffered the worst from the ideological mob, and she has a point – but this has much to do with the reality that bona fide conservatives have long been marginalized within, or simply driven out of, higher education and major elite cultural and social institutions. With some exceptions, they largely operate within ghettoes, however vigorous or effective, over which the woke have little control.

Beyond these conservative ghettoes, an ascendant wokeness angrily jettisons free speech and the legitimacy of free intellectual debate and disputation. In these circles, diversity never means viewpoint diversity. To be sure, this not-so-soft totalitarianism coexists with a system of electoral and political contestation – with democracy, as we more commonly call it. But for how long? The center clearly is not holding.

Formally, America remains a “free country” by the standards, let’s say, used by Freedom House to classify such things, but with large and growing pockets of censoriousness and “cancel culture” – the mad Orwellian desire to erase from historical memory any person who resists the tyrannical ideological nostrums of the present. A dictatorial “presentism,” as George F. Will has called it, dominates nearly all judgments about the historical past. It is strictly verboten to put one’s self empathetically in the shoes of historical figures facing choices and circumstances significantly different from our own. Abraham Lincoln, for example, should not have been fighting the grave evil of chattel slavery and doing everything within his power to preserve the Union. Instead, he should have spent all his time denouncing white racism and white supremacy in some anachronistic display of woke purity.

Such is the surreal logic that leads woke ideologues to cancel and repudiate men and women who used to be civic heroes. In