Over thirty years ago, I introduced the concept of culture wars in my book, Culture Wars: The Struggle toDefine America. At the time, I observed a shift that was unfolding in the political life of the nation. Throughout most of the 20th century, the left-right divide—and the political conflicts stemming from it—were largely rooted in the cultural logics of political economy: conflicts between the wealthy and the poor, between working-class labor and corporate interests.
By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, however, it became clear that political economy alone could not account for the deepest divisions emerging in American public and political life. This realization led to my borrowing a term from Bismarck and calling it Culture Wars. Now, three decades later, I have returned to this theme with a new book, Democracy and Solidarity, which I hope bookends the project and explores a different facet from many writing on democracy’s current crisis.
If we take politicians, activists, journalists, or the most impassioned citizens as our guides, the problems of contemporary political life are often attributed to corruption, bad decisions, or flawed ideologies of a particular leader or party. Across the political spectrum, leaders and parties are portrayed as beyond the pale, as existential threats to decency, fairness, justice, and, indeed, the nation itself. This polarization is further amplified by the media, which focuses on the daily battles of political fortunes—“this candidate versus that,” or “this issue versus that”—reinforcing the perception that democracy’s crisis is caused by the other side.
The question of how to restore democracy often comes down to mobilizing political will: a new election, a new referendum, voting the wrong party out and the right party in. It seems as simple as that. Even when assessments go deeper, observers tend to locate democracy’s problems within politics itself—whether in the weakening of America’s voting system through voter suppression, flaws in the primary process, or the distortions of the Electoral College. The underlying belief is that these problems are, in the end, fixable. What the proposed remedies share is a faith that solutions lie in political will and smart public policy. The prevailing sense is that if we are just a bit more clever, or try a bit harder—if we mobilize our individual and collective resolve—we can rebuild the social fabric that sustains democracy.
The story I tell focuses on the cultural resources that have sustained liberal democracy and how, through conflict, these sources have evolved over the past two and a half centuries. I argue that the particular configuration of cultural foundations that underpinned American democracy—what I call America’s hybrid Enlightenment—offered an ethical vision for reconstituting public life. This framework not only made certain ideas and ideals intelligible but also provided the basis for solidarity and cohesion. Crucially, the opacity of these shared resources allowed for the containment of many internal disagreements. The critical question, however, is: solidarity on what terms? This is significant because even solidarity that relies on opacity has its limits.
Solidarity, by its nature, is always defined by boundaries that establish lines between inclusion and exclusion. What makes this story both historically and ethically compelling is how these boundaries—and the cultural sources that shape them—have been continually contested over generations. This contestation is a radical and defining feature of liberal democracy in America, driven by the fundamental contradictions inherent in the hybrid Enlightenment. From the very start, there was the promise of freedom, equality, and universal justice—yet these ideals were denied to large portions of the population. The hope for a vibrant political solidarity, embedded in America’s hybrid Enlightenment, was always set against these internal contradictions—contradictions that have ensured ongoing tension, conflict, and, at times, violence.
The story I tell is one of how the contradictions within America’s hybrid Enlightenment have been repeatedly worked through. This process has, over time, dramatically altered the character of the hybrid Enlightenment, yet it has remained recognizable to successive generations—until now. Today, those efforts are being abandoned by leading factions on both the right and the left.
But that is not the whole story. Solidarity is not simply about the will to come together and engage in the work of democratic politics; it also depends on the cultural preconditions and normative sources that make such unity possible in the first place. These sources, however, appear to have largely unraveled. The story ends in a complex and troubling place: the cultural foundations of solidarity, once drawn from America’s hybrid Enlightenment, have partly disappeared from shared memory and practice. Worse still, they have devolved into distortions of their highest and best ideals.
More troubling, these have been replaced by a nihilistic cultural logic—ironically shared across partisan divides—that not only makes democratic solidarity impossible but also creates conditions in which the authoritarian impulse cannot be restrained. Put simply, the authoritarian impulse becomes manifest in the attempt to address the absence of solidarity: when solidarity cannot arise organically, it will be imposed coercively.
Two brief points before I conclude. The first concerns culture itself. There is a tendency to focus on the visible, observable aspects of culture—values, beliefs, folklore, traditions, and cultural institutions. Yet of even greater significance, I believe, are the deep structures of culture: the tacit, often unspoken frameworks of meaning embedded within the structures of social life. These deeper layers shape how we interpret the world and provide the foundation upon which political and social life is built.
These deep structures are the cultural antecedents of political life. It is from these tacit assumptions and latent frameworks of meaning that liberal democracy has been able to adapt over time while maintaining a thread of continuity. This is why I use the word solidarity rather than consensus or unity. The term consensus suggests rational agreement, placing undue emphasis on reason and rationality while overlooking the affective and sociological dimensions of human experience.
To be clear, a certain degree of consensus is necessary—particularly among those responsible for creating, interpreting, and enforcing the law, such as policymakers, judges, and law enforcement. Without it, the very concept of the rule of law would be meaningless. However, the reach of this kind of consensus tends to be narrow and limited, primarily applying to those with technical and administrative expertise in the law.
Consensus, in this sense, may extend outward from those technical spaces into opaque ideals shared by large portions of the public. However, applying the concept of rational consensus to the general citizenry, while reasonable in theory, sets unrealistically high expectations. In this context, solidarity proves to be a more useful concept. It signals that there are bonds holding us together that go beyond our capacity to rationally agree, debate, or deliberate.
Solidarity suggests a tendency toward cohesion or concord—one that can transcend, or even incorporate, particular disagreements. Its strength lies in the unspoken, often vague and imprecise resonances of shared identity, common affections, mutual challenges, and a sense of shared destiny.
If Americans are divided politically, it is because they are divided culturally at this level. Today, there is little to no common political ground because we lack shared assumptions about what constitutes a good society—assumptions that once underpinned a shared political life. Our inability to move beyond political stalemates stems from our failure to identify the cultural sources of common hopes or to develop a shared vocabulary for expressing those hopes in ways that transcend impasses and chart a path forward.
The same can be said for the crises of democracy beyond America’s borders. Authoritarian tendencies have long existed in the shadows of modern nations, but they have now reemerged publicly, even in democracies long thought to be immune to them. While globalization and interconnectedness inevitably produce common themes across these crises, there are also significant differences rooted in the particularities of history, geography, and circumstance that shape each nation’s experience.
Now to my second point: the historical dimension. The heart of my argument is historical, beginning with a sketch of the contours of what I call the hybrid Enlightenment. This intellectual framework drew as much from Calvinism as it did from classical republicanism and Lockean individualism. It was a complex and robust cosmology—one that gave rise to a powerful and generative mythos. Yet it was also deeply contradictory. While it fueled a century of nation-building, it simultaneously reinforced and deepened exclusionary boundaries, most egregiously against the continent’s Indigenous tribes and African-born slaves, but also against Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Jews.
There are clear signs, however, that we are now in a period of exhaustion. The once-endlessly examined sources of the hybrid Enlightenment are depleted and no longer hold relevance. For some, these resources have been forgotten; for others, they have been distorted beyond recognition to serve partisan interests. And for yet others, they are seen as the fundamental problem with America. In any case, they have unraveled as sources of solidarity.
That doesn’t mean all solidarity has disappeared or that everything has fallen apart—far from it. However, it is clear that the hybrid Enlightenment, once a central source of much of America’s solidarity, has unraveled at its deepest levels. We have yet to fully understand the consequences of this shift. This raises fundamental questions about the very possibility of liberal democracy in our time.
If the frameworks of meaning, interpretation, and cultural logics that defined the hybrid Enlightenment created the conditions for the birth of liberal democracy in America and, to some extent, have sustained it over time, what happens now? What occurs when these frameworks lose their authority? Can an Enlightenment-era political institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment culture? Is there anything from the hybrid Enlightenment project that is still salvageable or renewable? And if, for some, restoring the hybrid Enlightenment project is neither possible sociologically nor desirable politically or ethically, then what cultural resources will sustain liberal democracy moving forward?
The answers to these questions are far from clear, and it is not even certain that there are answers at all. For a long time, we have wanted to believe not only in the durability and stability of American democratic institutions, but also in their long-term vitality. Democracy in America has endured for over two and a half centuries, weathering severe disruptions to the social order along the way. Why shouldn’t it continue into the future? Perhaps it will. But that is by no means guaranteed, and we should not take its endurance for granted. The assumption of the enduring vitality of liberal democracy in America is now challenged, not only by the unraveling of the deep structures of the hybrid Enlightenment but also by what seems to be filling the void left in its wake.
The polarization of different common culture is emerging, but tragically, it is not one that fosters unity. Instead, it is a culture of nihilism, driven by a logic of ressentiment—a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power. This culture’s negations, as Rieff once put it, lead to a nothingness that can be both radical and reactionary at the same time. The challenge of meaningful and effective governance under such conditions is immense, if not impossible. All of this is true in its own right. Add to it the multiple crises of global poverty, rogue states with nuclear weapons, climate change, mass immigration, and an increasingly unstable international order, and the stakes become even higher. My argument is that we are at a moment when the answers to these fundamental questions about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be taken for granted—not because of our polarization, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to navigate what divides us.
Cover photo: Donald Trump arrives for a live interview with US commentator Tucker Carlson in the finale of the Tucker Carlson Live Tour at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, on October 31, 2024. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP)
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