Does America have too much liberty, and too little democracy?

Religions in America should be repoliticized. People should stop saying, "This is what we believe," and start saying, "This is the truth of the matter, and you ought to agree."

In a second step, we should admit that all religious opinions are also political ones, and that politics in a democracy is a field that includes any statement anyone makes bearing on how things ought to be and what things should be done in the shared social space.

In a third step, positions are contested in a democratic space by way of the space of reasons, in which people play what Wilfrid Sellars called "the game of giving and asking for reasons."

In short, we need to become less liberal and more democratic. In a democratic space, ideas are contested; in a liberal space, individuals have private rights of withholding assent from the consensus. A society that wants to be both liberal and democratic is thus faced with a contradiction that must yield some compromise.

America is a society that chokes on liberty. We have so much of it, we are the land of violent liberty. People are murdered over small disagreements and the fact of being annoyed by them.

That a belief is legislated "as true" (or rather, morally obligatory, which is what is really meant) by anyone's religion (which means, by authority) is nonsense, and the refuge of tyrants and scoundrels. It leads to tyranny.

This is one reason why authoritarianism and libertarianism are not opposites but may well go together. The Confederacy was motivated by certain ideas of liberty, and so are Trump's and de Santis's supporters, but they are wrong. The liberty many people want is for themselves, and is entirely consistent with their being masters who deny the liberty they enjoy to those they rule over, exclude, or who are less fortunate. There is the liberty of masters and the equal liberty of citizens in a democratic republic. That liberty is not absolute, but the master's can be. A master who has absolute liberty because someone else who is subject to his power, freely exercised with little external restraint from the "government," is absolutely subjected and has zero liberty: this was the figure of the slave holder in America. It is also the figure of the American "libertarian" who wants to be free from "the government" and its "administrative state" and to find that freedom residing in and secured by his own property and power. These are fundamentally similar. Libertarians root freedom in property, and so demand total freedom for capitalists, and none for workers, except to go somewhere else if they don't like "the way things are here."

It would be a different matter if the power of the administrative state were limited by being counterbalanced by the ability of anyone to defend against the rulings and judgments of its officials by way of a broader extension of the partisan processes of democracy and the adversarial ones of legal controversy. That would be very different from limiting it only by falling back on the authority conferred by ownership of property or position in a family. The former is a liberal alternative that has been insufficiently tried or practiced, while the latter is the conservative position. The concept of liberty itself may be too weak to allow contesting it fully.

(Footnote: That a speaker who asserts any proposition always also means "(It is my opinion that) this is the truth of the matter..." is obvious; the point of that caveat is to reassure the interlocutor that although I believe I am right, I know I might be wrong. This is a courtesy in our liberal democracy with its famous right of opinion, which many people require, lest they write you off as arrogant for believing you are right about what you believe to be true (everyone who practices the 'game of giving and asking for reasons believes that), and not also recognizing that you know that you could be wrong about what you believe to be true, and are not so certain that you would not allow someone else to gainsay you and show that you were mistaken if it is possible for anyone to do so. I have heard American liberals call me a "fascist" because I insisted that something I believed was true in fact. What they should say is not that I was wrong for thinking I could be right, and thus supposedly endowed with a will to enforce my opinion by constraining their own liberty to exercise their own will to act as they please; they should instead just say, I disagree, because....