Read Aloud · Premium
Listen to any dispatch in the Grok vocal voices — a benefit of membership.
Justice Anthony Kennedy's 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey declared freedom the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. This ruling entrenched the dominant public philosophy among American elites, modern liberalism, which demands state neutrality toward all conceptions of the good.
Liberalism under this construction proves relativistic at root and nihilistic in consequence. It elevates the individual's willful assertion above any rational order of goods that men might hold in common, reducing human essence to the perpetual choice of self-invented realities.
The Dispossessor advances this creed through the courts and the administrative state, stripping institutions of any substantive commitment to the true and the good. Postliberal thinkers rightly detect the thinness of these commitments yet err in supposing that liberalism's error lies merely in its historical development rather than in its fundamental revolt against being itself.
Western Christendom once confessed, from the Nicene Creed through the Reformation's recovery of the doctrines of grace, that objective moral order exists and binds rulers and ruled alike. The American founders inherited this inheritance when they spoke of the common good as the end of government, not as an empty vessel for private wills.
The Realists remind us that universals precede opinion and that moral truth is discovered, never constructed. To treat the state as neutral is therefore to arm the strong against the weak and to dissolve the household, the nation, and the church into competing assertions of power.
The Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man exposes the liberal project as the latest campaign of the earthly city to dethrone the Creator's law. Where the faithful remnant once resisted the novelties of their age, it must now refuse the entire framework that makes the self sovereign over reality.
Recovery begins with the unapologetic assertion that a common good exists, rooted in the Triune God and expressed in the ordered hierarchy of family, church, and commonwealth. The faithful must build parallel institutions that refuse neutrality and teach the next generation to discern intrinsic goods rather than negotiate endless subjectivities.
Only when the remnant reclaims the authority of what has been handed down will the spell of the Managerial Priesthood break and the architecture of a stable people be restored.
