Farewell, Richard John Neuhaus

From Ross's obituary:

Neuhaus was an archetypal post-Vatican II figure, whose deepest intellectual interests lay in finding compatibilities and building bridges - between Jews and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, faith and the free market, and above all between Christianity and liberalism . . . . [H]is magazine's most apocalyptic moment - the famous "End of Democracy" symposium, a few years after Planned Parenthood v. Casey was handed down - doubled as a passionate brief for constitutionalism and democratic self-government, and a defense, however excessive, of a particular interpretation of American liberalism against the usurpations of meritocracy. No modern intellectual did so much to make the case for the compatibility between Christian belief and liberal democratic politics - and in the future, when the two have parted ways (as I suspect they will) more completely than at present, both Christians and liberals will look back on the synthesis he argued for with nostalgia, and regret.

I was introduced to Neuhaus in the pages of National Review in college, back when he was still a Lutheran, and I promptly devoured The Naked Public Square. His work stood out for exactly the reason Ross cites: he articulated a synthesis of Christian faith and morals on the one hand and an 18th century understanding of liberalism on the other.

As time went by, I drifted away from Neuhaus. Not self-consciously really; indeed, I haven't really thought about him much at all lately. But I realize on reflection that by the time First Things appeared on the 'net, his work no longer arrested my attention in the way in once did. For one thing, it became apparent that there were no modern liberals left on the other end of the conversation that Neuhaus wished to have. For another, I was becoming less classically liberal, more Burkean in my own political philosophy.

But the main reason I drifted away is: 9/11 happened. That terrorist attack illuminated the most unpleasant realities of the world in which we live. And liberalism, of whatever variety or era, was simply inadequate to the challenges before us. Goodness knows, President Bush tried: he and the neo-conservatives surrounding him dusted off the intellectual paradigms of Cold War liberalism and reapplied them to the war against The Threat We Dare Not Name. They told us that the biggest problem of the Middle East was its despotism. They insisted all that the peoples of the region wanted was Jeffersonian democracy. And they asserted, in the teeth of the evidence, that the world's hatred for America would melt away in the bright light of mutual understanding.

In the ashes of that project, I have bid farewell to consistency and embraced a fully bifurcated objective: Christian ends, sought with Darwinian means. I cannot, and do not try, to reconcile this fundamental contradiction. But may God bless Fr. Neuhaus for having fought the good fight to the end. RIP.