As Republicans kindle a sense of national fraternity, beware the risks
National Post, 21 July 2024
The French Revolution is a painful reminder that brotherly solidarity, though necessary, can be taken too far
Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Bastille Day came and went last Sunday, overlooked due to the shooting of Donald Trump the previous evening. But the motto of the French Republic is useful in thinking about our present political moment. We are searching, still, for fraternité.
Fraternity is elusive. The first article of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen begins, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.”
While the slogan on the streets included “fraternity,” the Declaration itself spoke explicitly about liberty and equality, while only indirectly about fraternity in acknowledging the common good. Liberty and equality were given further definitions later in the text, but fraternity is harder to define as a political reality.
At the grand bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, world leaders gathered in celebration, but Margaret Thatcher, then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, offered a slightly off-key reflection on that occasion, noting that “of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.”
Instead of the fraternity came the Terror, which cast liberty and equality aside, too.
It’s possible to read the past century of political debate across a wide variety of democracies as a contest between liberty and equality. The conservative side tends to emphasize the freedom of the individual, exercising his creativity and taking responsibility for his actions. The progressive side emphasizes equality, rooting out official and practical discrimination and working for a more equitable distribution of wealth, with particular attention to the plight of the poor.
Conservatives, when considering equality, often cast it as part of liberty — equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Progressives, when considering liberty, may well cast it as part of equality — think of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “four freedoms,” which included “freedom from want.”
What then of fraternity? Fraternity is about social relations and common bonds, about man’s obvious and indispensable social nature. Fraternity is more fundamental than liberty and equality. An infant is not free in any meaningful sense. What is most obvious about a newborn is that he is inferior — even before the law — to his parents. But all are born into a family, broadly understood, and into a set of relationships.
When do brothers begin to be brothers? At birth. Indeed, the existence of the child itself makes a father and mother, brother and sister.
Nevertheless, both conservatives and progressives can be suspicious of fraternity.
For the conservative, the sociability of man can degrade into socialism as a political program, and the ties of common life into communism. It’s happened.
The progressive knows that fraternity extends out to the family, the tribe, to the community and nation. That too can degrade into discrimination against others who are not considered part of the family, so to speak. It’s happened, whether by a sort of comfortable elitism or brutal racism, or even violent nationalism leading to war.
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