A century ago, Michael Oakeshott, Britain’s great skeptic of politics, a grand project, diagnosed a sickness that now afflicts every Western democracy: the confusion between government as referee and government as a crusading force. This sickness has infected the political realignment that is happening around the developed world. Some reach for the Nolan chart in an attempt to diagnose the affliction. Yet the axes of big vs. small government, or social conservatism vs. liberalism, no longer suffice. Many observers, including me, have noted that identity now appears to be the main political aligning issue. However, the picture was incomplete; Oakeshott finishes the painting — and answers one of the most puzzling political questions of the day.
The global realignment around identity was apparent a decade ago, as Britain voted for Brexit, identity-focused political parties wiped out old Christian Democrat parties around Europe, and Donald Trump made America First the focus of his first Presidency. While some political commentators, most notably the New York Times, struggled to fit this phenomenon into the old model that pitted big government versus small government alongside social conservatism and social liberalism, it was clear that didn’t work any longer. Instead, what divided politics was the role of identity and the nation.
To the new conservative, the nation and national identity were paramount. To the new leftist, what was important was either sub-national identity groups (in the US) or supra-national organizations like the EU or international human rights conventions (in Europe and the UK). This explained why new conservatives were suddenly quite friendly to collectivist economic policy or why climate activists started talking the language of the market.
Yet there was something missing. This didn’t quite explain the utter hostility of national conservatives to what they derided as “Conservatism, Inc.” or worse — the network of think tanks and organizations that had achieved things like the conservative remaking of the courts and more. After all, both factions believe strongly in America as a nation. Nor did it explain a similar civil war brewing on the left between progressives and old-style Democrats, including the donor class. In Europe, thanks to the ease of creating new parties, the warfare was open and saw the rise of national identity-focused parties on the right and Green parties on the left that largely swept away the old parties on both sides. The UK, as per usual, was somewhere in between, but recent polling suggests both the Labour and Conservative parties are under existential threat.
The missing element may be provided by Oakeshott. In his account, the rise of the concept of the individual in the late Middle Ages led to a rethinking of the role of the state. Two separate visions developed — one of the state as what Oakeshott calls a “civil association” or societas, the other of the state as an “enterprise association” or universitas. What differentiated them was a radically different way of conceiving political order. The societas was a nomocracy, from the Greek nomos (custom or law), that was governed by general rules of conduct rather than the pursuit of substantive goals. The universitas was a teleocracy, from the Greek telos (end or purpose), that organized society around substantive collective goals, a national purpose, if you will.
So, in the nomocracy, the state’s function is to provide a framework of law in which individuals and associations can pursue their own diverse ends. While in the teleocracy, the state’s function is to advance specific ends, which could be economic regulation to redistribute wealth, industrial policy to promote preferred industries, or moral and cultural policies aimed at instilling virtue.
Oakeshott’s theory was that England had almost uniquely developed a nomocratic structure. As Oakeshott scholar Max Skjonsberg puts it,
English freedom did not spring from any single principle, whether private property, parliamentary government, or even the rule of law, but rather what all the characteristics of English society seemed to point to: “the absence from our society of overwhelming concentrations of power.” In English politics, authority was diffused between past, present and future—in other words, it had a strong traditional component, but not one that dominated all political considerations.
This differed considerably from continental European concepts of the state. For instance, the German concept of Cameralism focused on management of the state as an enterprise, involving all sorts of boards and agencies that would put into practice what the rulers decided.
What appears to have happened is that this historical philosophical divide has become a major factor in world politics. The divide between national conservative and freedom conservative isn’t between nationalist and non-nationalists — as already mentioned, both camps believe strongly in the nation — but between teleocratic and nomocratic visions of the state.
The national conservative generally believes that the state has a unifying purpose, whether it be to promote the interests of the American worker above all else, to preserve American communities by restricting immigration, or to promote the “common good” in morals and the economy. All these are teleocratic ends.
Interestingly, in this they share something in common with a former prominent conservative faction that they despise, the neoconservatives, who believed that America had a national purpose in policing the world. For instance, Irving Kristol, the grandfather of neoconservatism, believed that America should have an “imperial role,” saying, “I think it would be natural for the United States … to play a far more dominant role in world affairs … to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that.”
While the neocons bombed foreign countries, the national conservatives have blown up left-liberal institutions like USAID. Note that this whole distinction says little about economic policy, which helps to explain how the current administration can be very free market and deregulatory in some areas and collectivist in others.
Freedom conservatives, however, generally believe that the state should set the rules of the game and allow civil society, enterprises, and associations to pursue their own ends. For this, of course, they are castigated by their erstwhile friends for believing in “neutrality” and not using the levers of the state for their own power. That would be anathema to the nomocrat, but it is seen as an essential weakness by the teleocrats. So, while nomocrats insist that the power to tax is one reserved to Congress and cannot be delegated away, the teleocratic right insists that Congress hid the elephant of tariff power in the mousehole of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and to say otherwise would “destroy” the country.
On the left, teleocracy has always been in ascendance, but today it manifests in social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, gender justice and many other forms of justice, all of which are seen as important ends at each and every level of government — municipal, state, national, supranational, and all the various Cameralist bodies that infest these forms of government. This is clearly on display in the phrase “the moral equivalent of war,” the title of a 1910 essay by philosopher William James that posited that war provided a sense of common purpose and unity that needed to be replicated in non-martial areas. The idea has been applied to things like the space race, environmentalism, and the COVID crisis. Indeed, the nomocrat Freedom Conservative Jonah Goldberg has pointed out that the American left is fixated on the idea.
That leaves little room for a nomocratic left, but I think one does exist. Old-style ACLU types believe in the overwhelming importance of freedom of speech as a rule, although their teleocratic comrades have all but exterminated those voices. Many still believe in the rules-based international order, and they may have been strengthened by the President’s trade policy. There are also traces of the idea in the “supply-side progressives” of the abundance movement, who believe that rules need to be set to allow for innovation, especially in the energy space, although many of them have teleocratic ends in sight.
This division also helps to supply an explanation for a question that has vexed many of a nomocratic mind — why do politicians of both parties double down on rules and powers that will surely be used against them? The simple answer is that to the teleocrat, the executive must have these powers to achieve their ends. The ends may vary — immigration restrictions one day, emissions suppression the next — but the executive needs the power to impose these measures to achieve the desired ends.
This brings up the glaring contradiction in American teleocracy. The constitutional system is a nomocratic one, built on the foundations of the English system described above, designed to secure “the blessings of liberty” for Americans. Rules need to be debated, scrutinized, and voted on by Congress. The executive then administers these rules, and the judiciary decides any questions that arise about them. The system allows for differences between states and is designed to allow civil associations to thrive free from the demands of government, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously described. As Oakeshott stressed, this is the best system for the pluralist society the Founders viewed America to be. E pluribus, unum.
Since the Progressive Era, however, which was inspired by the German teleocratic system Oakeshott portrays, teleocratic elements have crept into the system, most notably the administrative state. If that “fourth branch of government” seems at odds with the rest of the system, that’s because it is fundamentally a different animal, a creature of the universitas rather than the societas.
We can therefore expect the teleocratic branches of the parties, when they are in power, to further empower branches of the state that they need for their ends — border protections and customs on the one hand, environmental agencies on the other. We can also expect them to bristle when the nomocratic design of the Constitution gets in their way, which helps explain anger from both parties directed at the judiciary (it was not all that long ago that Democrats were talking about court packing to achieve their ends).
This leads to a feedback loop. The national conservatives can and do say that leftists will just use the power of government against conservatives, so it makes no sense not to use that power against them. Yet in the end that line of thinking is and should be alien to American conservative sentiment. Conservatives who embrace the teleocratic temptation may win a battle or two in their crusade, but they will have abandoned the very liberty their Constitution was built to protect.