A universalist politics must consist in a transformation of who "We" are and how "we" understand our values, not in relation to our past identities, values, and histories, but in relation to a commitment to the truth that transcends our interests, intuitions, and comforts – and will determine who we will be in the future. That was the meaning of Lincoln's gesture at Gettysburg, by which he helped the nation achieve a "rebirth" by changing its identity, namely, aligning it with truth. And this is precisely the move that the identitarian left and liberal center reject as metaphysical.
Lilla seems at least half aware of this problem, adding the adjective "universal" repeatedly to the words "we" and "citizen." And in brief, testy footnotes, he tries to brush aside the question of who counts as a citizen as a "sign of how poisoned our political discourse has become."
Poisoned or not, however, that is the question on which his "universalist" critique of identity itself turns out to be based. The word "we" is never universal; a patriotic politics is not a cosmopolitan politics. For the same reason, "universal citizenship" is also a contradiction in terms. In short, liberalism is not humanism: those who speak today of a universal "we" are privileged enough – that seems to be the right phrase – to forget that their emphasis on "we" was conceived in the first place in order to dispense with their obligation to humanity.
The liberalism of a John Rawls also gets entangled in the same betrayal of universalism. He boasts of an idea of justice that is "political, not metaphysical," and therefore provides a framework for a unionist democracy that begins with an "us" and is authoritative for "us." "Philosophy, understood as the search for the truth of an independent metaphysical and moral order," Rawls writes, "cannot provide a useful common ground for a political conception of justice in a democratic society." A metaphysical "moral order" is thus replaced by consensus: Now, because [...] justice as fairness is conceived as a political [i.e., not metaphysical, OB] conception of justice for a democratic society, it seeks to draw exclusively on basic intuitive thoughts [my emphasis, OB] rooted in the political institutions of a democratic constitutional state and the public traditions of their interpretation. Justice as fairness is a political conception in part because it proceeds from a particular political tradition. We hope that it is at least supported by what I will call an overarching consensus, that is, a consensus that includes all conflicting philosophical and religious doctrines, [...].
If Rawls is understood in our day by friend and foe alike as a Kantian universalist, it is because we have moved far from the genuine understanding of the term. His replacement of truth with consensus by means of the "intuitions" of those who speak out of "a certain political tradition" is the most robust replacement of Kant's abstract commitment to humanity with Dewey's naturalized, group-shared experience.
Our intuitions are nothing more than facts about us, and to that extent incapable of imposing duties on us that are not grounded in our "lore" – that is, our identity. [⇒Obligations]
Rawls's idea of overlapping consensus is nothing more than the most common way in which democracy is given primacy over philosophy, while "place-based and ethnotric" beliefs that determine the meaning of the word "we" are given primacy over the universal idea of justice. Probably nothing expresses the triumph of Unionism over abolitionism, over Gettysburg and the Declaration of Independence like its slogan "political and not metaphysical."
In the years before the Civil War, Emerson and Thoreau had argued that such Unionism was inseparable from conformism of the sort Tocqueville warned against in On Democracy in America. In his view, a tyranny of the majority threatens as soon as the "doctrine of equality" is applied to "the mind." Where all thoughts have equal value, false ones are as good as true ones. But since an independent standard of truth contradicts this equality, it is abolished and replaced by something to which all can agree – consensus. The result is the belief that "there is more insight and wisdom in many people than in one alone," or rather, those few who may follow the truth and contradict the general opinion – they are weeded out as fanatics by this logic.
The danger of such conformism, which Tocqueville points out, is that it allows the desires of the majority to be enforced not only by means of physical threats or state power – in the style of earlier tyrants – but as legitimate authority. Once the higher metaphysical authority of truth is denied, the only standard that can confer legitimacy is that which all can agree upon – or at least all who are included. Such internalized moral authority can determine not only what people say or do, but also what they think and want – a degree of control of the masses that the ancient tyrants would not have dreamed possible. In a passage that Adorno and Horkheimer were to take up as a central pillar of their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Tocqueville remarks: […]
~
BOEHM, Omri, 2022. Radikaler Universalismus: jenseits von Identität. Berlin: Propyläen. ISBN 978-3-549-10041-7, p. 111.