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.
Yet fraternity is necessary; it offers the promise of something more than a lonely life, left alone with my rights. Man is not made to be solitary, but to be in solidarity with others. If sibling rivalry is written into the human story from the beginning — Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac — then fraternity is the needful correction.
Perhaps that explains something of what we saw this past week at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Paul Wells writes about both American and Canadian versions of a “working-class conservatism,” sometimes also called “national conservatism” or “common good conservatism.” Whatever the name and variations, it speaks to a desire for solidarity, for something like what was said during the pandemic, “we’re all in this together.” The “together” was a powerful appeal.
It’s a challenge to ensure that the “together” includes “all.” During the pandemic some were not included among the “all,” and the RNC boasted that “all” most definitely does not include those targeted for mass expulsions.
Despite missteps, there is certainly a nascent conservative effort to build what that early Republican, Abraham Lincoln, called the “bonds of affection.”
It bears careful watching, this potential rise of fraternity, despite suspicions on left and right. It may take time. The French Revolution was 235 years ago.
P.S. Long-time readers may well have tired of my nearly 10 years of pointing out that the phenomenon of Donald Trump cannot be understood apart from professional wrestling, made culturally and commercially potent by Muhammad Ali, who freely acknowledged that he formed his public persona on the wrestling model. Thus I will only note, without further comment, that Trump chose to be introduced at the Republican National Convention by Hulk Hogan and Dana White, the principal impresario of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
National Post