Recovering Christian Democracy
How shall we think about these changes? According to the Confucian view, as long as man fulfills his role in the world through appropriate rites and virtuous behavior, society enjoys harmony, peace, health, and prosperity. But if man neglects these rites and this virtue, chaos is substituted for harmony, war for peace, illness for health, and destitution for prosperity.
Therefore, the upkeep of proper rites and true virtue is the main purpose of the state. “Dynasties” and ruling elites attain legitimacy insofar as they achieve that end. To use the well-known Chinese expression, the “Mandate of Heaven” is bestowed upon them. If they fail, the mandate is withdrawn and given to a different dynasty or elite. Breaches in harmony, abnormal circumstances, and ominous incidents are warnings to the ruling class. They signal the rulers’ need to mend their policies and “rectify” their societies. If the rulers don’t heed the warnings, they will be unceremoniously swept away.
Can we say that the Mandate of Heaven is being removed from the Christian Democratic–Social Democratic “dynasty” that ruled Europe for more than seventy years? I venture the answer “yes.” The reason is simple. This ruling class has lost touch with the essential values it was empowered to defend and sustain. The Social Democratic movement abandoned its working-class base, becoming a postmodern “progressive” party, preoccupied with utopian multicultural dreams. The Christian Democrats have followed suit, less out of conviction than from a lack of conviction. As the Social Democrats moved left, the way was open for politicians like Angela Merkel to redefine the center-right as center-left, a moderate version of the increasingly radical left.
For the last two decades, this tactic has been sustained by a social consensus according to which anything to the “right” of Christian Democratic positions is “far right,” and thus to be condemned by all responsible people. This social consensus, understandable three generations ago in the aftermath of fascism, is now perverse. It writes a blank check to supposedly center-right establishment parties, allowing them to move as far left as necessary to co-opt old-fashioned Social Democrats and stay in power. The consensus is breaking down, not because there are not dark forces in European politics, but because Christian Democratic leaders have so thoroughly abused the “far right” label that it has lost currency.
What, then, should be done?
The Enlightenment nurtures in its devotees a totalitarian drive toward social engineering. It stimulates fantasies of wiping the slate clean, of refounding society—even humanity—on an entirely new (and supposedly pure) basis. In a moderate form, this impulse expresses itself as a spirit of reform and incremental improvement. But the Enlightenment is not by nature moderate. It is radical, and modern European history shows that the Enlightenment and its twentieth-century political epigones, communism and fascism, can be moderated only if counterbalanced by a Christian Democratic movement.
If Europe is to have a future—and that future would include the Enlightenment’s contribution—then Christian Democracy must become Christian again. This is not an anachronistic hope. There are substantial remnants keeping the Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox faith unadulterated. They can serve as the anchor of renewed Christian politics.
And there is a much larger constituency of lost and perplexed Christians. They tend to describe themselves as nonreligious, but in fact they desperately seek their roots. This constituency may constitute a majority. The “far right” parties now on the rise draw votes from the lost and perplexed Europeans who half-know that Christianity is at the foundation of what they fear will be lost. This is why Matteo Salvini makes a show of his rosary beads. These perplexed voters—whose numbers are growing—need an elite worthy of their confidence. That “new dynasty” can, perhaps, be populated by the substantial remnant of serious Christians.
Let us not meet the utopianism of the Enlightenment with our own dystopic pessimism. There is the striking example of Christianity’s fathers and teachers in spiritual matters, the Jews, who underwent all manner of terrible trials in the past century, but were nonetheless able to resurrect their corporate identity, not just as a secular nation, but as a religious, indeed biblical nation. Such feats are not accomplished by the sorts of men who desire sinecures in establishment institutions or who swim easily in the current of accepted opinion. They require the courage and determination of a few who understand the duty of a leader, which is to secure the Mandate of Heaven.
Christian Democracy must become assertive again, and that means Christians must become assertive again. Their modern record is impressive. They were for two hundred years the perennial Resistance party against totalitarian utopias. They were the prime agents of peace and reconciliation among the warring empires. They built the House of Europe. They should reclaim it from its travesty, the E.U.’s Tower of Babel.
Michel Gurfinkiel is the former Editor-in-chief of Valeurs actuelles.