Drag Queen Story Hour and Liberalism: Politics As A Way Of Life
In his 2019 First Things article, “Against David Frenchism,” Sohrab Ahmari complains that David French’s approach to politics is inadequate to deal with the cultural and political forces of progressivism. As an example, he cites Drag Queen Story Hour, something practiced in a few dozen public libraries across the United States, where a drag queen leads a story hour for anyone who wants to listen (children included). Ahmari contends that French’s classical liberal commitment to individual autonomy is insufficient to combat such developments and calls for a thicker philosophical and political commitment to the common good.
While the Ahmari-French “debate” has continued on the internet and in conferences over the last couple of years and has raised all sorts of interesting questions, I want to focus on one, fundamental question: what, exactly, is Ahmari’s problem? Is it Drag Queen Story Hour? Is it David French?
No. Fundamentally, Ahmari doesn’t want to be a liberal democrat.
In Book 8 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that states are not “made of ‘oak and rock’,” but “out of the human natures which are in them,” to which his interlocutor replies, “Yes…the States are as the men are; they grow out of human characters.” What Plato scholars call the “anthropological principle,” this way of analyzing politics means we’ll need to do more than study legal documents and constitutions if we want to truly understand politics. Indeed, both Plato and Aristotle thought of constitutions and regimes as ways of life, including not just documents and systems but also the habits and customs of a people.
On this view, we don’t just live in a liberal democracy; we are liberal democrats. We don’t just have a written constitution that’s democratic; our souls — our constitutions — are democratic. Further on in Book 8 of the Republic, Socrates describes the democratic soul as one who loves freedom and — in his freedom — loves all things equally. The democrat’s way of life — his constitution — is that he has no single way of life. In one moment, the democrat writes poetry; in the next, he gets drunk with wine. One day she debates the good life’s meaning in the public square; the next day she abuses her children in the privacy of her home. Unlike the philosophic soul whose sole commitment is to the Good, the democrat’s commitments are diverse and without focus.
If Socrates is right about all this, that liberal democracy defines our souls as much as it does our politics, those of us who claim to have our primary identity in something other than politics — religion, family, club — should be troubled. It should at the very least move us to ask hard questions of ourselves and our communities.
For example, in our churches and mosques and synagogues, in our schools and universities, in our families and friend groups — where do our commitments to freedom and equality invade in inappropriate ways? Do our religious communities embrace individual freedom in ways at odds with the stated commitments of those communities? Have our schools and universities wrongly committed themselves to untrammeled free expression, such that every utterance is of equal worth, no matter the content? Do our churches and schools and non-profits embrace a consumer ethic, where students and parishioners are customers while teachers and pastors are service providers? As Michael Sandel argues, do we live not just in a “market economy” but a “market society,” where everything and everyone seems to be for sale? In short, are all of our communities made in the image of liberal democracy?
If our answers to any of these questions are even a partial “yes,” we really should not be surprised. Whether we like it or not, we are liberal democrats. You are a liberal democrat. You may think you’re a Christian or mother or student or economic development humanitarian. You can recite the creed and provide the right answers on the what-it-means-to-be-a-fill in the blank test. But if your soul is always already liberal democratic, you will subconsciously carry the loves and commitments of liberal democracy with you wherever you go, whether you like it or not, and in ways you don’t even realize.
I can’t remember who said it, but there is an adage that a liberal society will decline if the nonpolitical communities within it are also liberal. While I think this is true — that we need strong families, religious communities, and schools to resist the liberalism of the wider community — it’s naive to think these “little platoons” are impervious to the larger forces around them. Moreover, this is especially naive when the members of these nonpolitical communities are also liberal democrats.
In the end, the answer to the problem of liberal democratic soulcraft is not necessarily to abandon liberal democracy. At the very least, however, it should help us appreciate the fundamental motivation of Ahmari and anyone who would dare criticize the liberal democratic project. At the beginning of this little essay, I noted that Ahmari’s problem is that he does not want to be a liberal democrat. For him, the matter is not confinable to an academic seminar. It is, instead, a matter having to do with existence itself, a question concerning the kinds of people we want to be.
It’s not, then, really about Drag Queen Story Hour. It’s about what Drag Queen Story Hour represents. In his highly discussed book, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen (one of Ahmari’s postliberal compatriots) argues that liberalism is not just a political doctrine. It is instead a comprehensive way of life that dominates our entire society. It is — you might say — a way of life that both forms and is formed by the souls of the people who are within it. The souls of people like you and me. And that, if true, should give us all pause.
