For the most part, the students where I teach—in the Ashbrook Scholar program at Ashland University—tend to be patriotic and decent. They also tend to be more religious than students I have taught elsewhere. One goal of the program is to encourage students to be more thoughtfully patriotic by the time they graduate, to be better citizens. To this end, the final book that students in our program read is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which speaks of our peculiarly American “reflective patriotism.” To be sure, we have students from all over the political spectrum in our program, but the majority, it’s safe to say, are conservative. Most of our students, even our conservatives, are liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the word, that is, they’re committed to freedom. We like to say at Ashbrook, after all, that “we’re in the Freedom Business.”

　　While the program in which I teach is not a typical one in higher education, a problem I have recently encountered appears to be: post-liberalism.

　　Often, and with increasing frequency, I encounter young people (males typically but by no means exclusively) whom I would generally describe as hostile to liberalism and modernity writ large. For the purposes of this article, I don’t mean to distinguish between the various strands of post-liberalism. Others have already split these hairs. As a supporter of modern liberalism, I instead want to understand students who generally fall under this umbrella and to think about how best to teach them.

　　It seems to me that these students reject modernity not because radicalism is chic: Ashland is no Columbia. Rather, these students reject modernity on the basis of genuine moral and often religious impulses—impulses they believe are not satisfied in our current regime. If we are to succeed in educating them, we need to take their criticisms of modern liberalism seriously and recognize when their critiques have merit; we must point to examples of human excellence within liberal regimes; and we should try to model moral and intellectual virtue ourselves.

　　Students

　　Any good teacher begins by meeting students where they are and understanding their concerns. What, then, are the problems post-liberal students see in liberalism, and what is the core of their rejection, however complete or incomplete, of liberal democracy? What do they find so objectionable about modernity? What, at bottom, is the root of their problem with modern liberalism?

　　Among the students I teach, the most common illiberal or anti-modern sentiment seems to occur among religious students of a particular stripe. Some others are drawn to the thought of Nietzsche or his current popularizers, to Internet Frog Men and to the self-styled “Bronze Age Pervert,” who idolizes the ancient warrior type. These include students of friends of mine, students who’ve gone off to graduate school, students I meet at conferences, and students I interact with online in social media and through the political philosophy podcast I work on, The New Thinkery. I’m aware of just how popular many of these folks are.

　　Many of them have come to see, not unreasonably, that the chief architects of modernity—Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, among others—were hostile to religion, that they aimed low, and that they intended to unleash acquisitiveness in order to produce bourgeois consumers who believed in nothing higher than satisfying their desires, mainly of the bodily sort, and whose lack of commitment to higher ideals would make them more docile and pacific. By extension, some have concluded that America was flawed from its beginning.

　　Students are repulsed by the ever-present hypocrisy, immorality, and ugliness they see in liberalism. Here again, it’s hard not to sympathize.

　　What seems to unite these students in rejecting modernity, then, is a concern with morality. In some cases, this moral impetus may be hard to detect, but I believe it is there and is the root of their rejection. These are decent kids, for the most part, young people who have moral longings and who still believe in virtue and excellence, the noble and the good. And liberalism does not seem to offer anything to such young people. Today, the young look at liberalism and too often find it morally repulsive—and even the decent liberals they see look weak, pathetic, and morally hamstrung, incapable of defending even the most basic of moral principles. On some matters, it’s hard not to be sympathetic to their revulsion.

　　And it’s not just liberalism in action, it’s the goals and aspirations of liberalism that they object to, and, here again, their objection is principally a moral one. Many on the left, for example, speak of a “world community,” some speak of themselves as “cosmopolitans,” and others even decry the notion of borders at all. They hope for a world where there aren’t citizens in any ordinary sense. “Globalist” is the term most use to describe people who are essentially non-citizens and who call London home just as easily as they might San Francisco, Dubai, or Bombay. Many decent young Americans find this kind of talk morally repulsive. They see globalists as people without ties of hearth and home, cosmopolitans who lack patriotism and roots, elites untethered to communities who therefore have no responsibility to those around them but who speak incessantly about their devotion to a nebulous, so-called “world community.” Many of the young find the prospect of a “pacified planet, without rulers and ruled … devoted to consumption only, to the production and consumption of spiritual as well as material merchandise … positively horrifying.” The goals are dystopian.

　　We need not limit ourselves to the future; many don’t like what they see from liberalism in the here and now. Students are repulsed by the ever-present hypocrisy, immorality, and ugliness they see in liberalism. Here again, it’s hard not to sympathize.

　　As for hypocrisy, the young see certain basic facts about human nature, which were nearly universally recognized by earlier generations, “are at the present time verbally denied,” and “superficially covered over.” Worse, there is enormous public pressure to join the chorus, to parrot obvious falsities and absurdities, often with real human costs for refusing to do so. Humiliatingly, “liberalism” censors moral speech and judgments.

　　Speaking up on campus on behalf of America, or the traditional family, or religion, or Western Civilization has led to people like me to being called “fascist,” “sexist,” “racist,” “homophobic,” and “transphobic.” If it’s happened to me, I’m sure it’s happening to many young people today. It can be exhausting always to have to defend yourself at most universities, and it is difficult to remain composed in the face of such insults. We have undoubtedly lost our former pride, “a quiet and becoming pride,” in Western Civilization and in the principles of our country, and some young have accordingly become attracted to a loud and unbecoming pride that can manifest as nativism, nationalism, and even racism. Many of the young take pride in calling themselves, perhaps with a touch of irony, “based”—which a friend of mine calls “right-wing ‘woke.’”

　　With respect to immorality, let us just say that modern liberalism encourages people to live whatever lifestyle they would like, but in the face of such permissiveness, few will aim high and use the freedom to pursue nobler goals. It’s much easier to pursue a life of gratification of pleasures, and no pleasures are said to be off the table. You’re a bigot if you think otherwise.

　　Last but not least, liberalism looks ugly. If one judges by online memes, an unfair indicator perhaps, opponents of modern liberalism find our music vulgar, our movies violent and overly sexualized, and our buildings ugly. We’ve become somewhat androgynous, with sex differences receding into the background.We’re obese, and we seem to have lost any sense that there’s anything wrong with it. In response to the foolish embrace of “body positivity,” we have begun to see reactionary advocates of smoking cigarettes, which, while undeniably unhealthy, strikes its proponents as at least being more elegant than being fat. One cannot help but grin at the success, now a generation ago, of the television series Mad Men, which initially aimed to show how terrible the 1960s were (they were all racist, sexist, homophobic, chain-smoking alcoholics). But the show couldn’t help but present the style, drinking, and smoking as glamorous. They were just so much cooler than we are.

　　Teachers and Role Models

　　In response, young critics of liberalism need teachers who can explain to them in articulate language the positive, and not merely destructive, meaning of their aspirations. Above all, we educators of the youth must point students to models of moral excellence, especially courage and toughness, but also integrity. And we ourselves need to model, in our own way and as best we can, these same virtues.

　　We need to start by showing students what’s excellent about America. We must remind them of how lucky they are to live in a free society. We must show students what is noble about the United States by focusing on the founding and its principles—instead of using textbooks, Game Theory, or the 1619 Project. We must turn to the words and deeds of America’s actual statesmen who put their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the line for their ideas, men of courage and integrity. Of course, the founders were far from perfect, but they were still noble, decent, excellent men—men who, in many cases, were models of courage and practical wisdom. The ideas in the Declaration of Independence are laudable, and the Constitution is a work of extraordinary genius.

　　Unfortunately, reverence for the founders seems to be insufficient to convince the kinds of students I’m talking about. Because many post-liberals see the founders as men who were naïve about liberalism’s nastier consequences, returning to their thought is insufficient. What is needed are examples of virtue to demonstrate that liberal regimes are perfectly capable of sustaining excellence. Perhaps these examples can begin in the classroom.

　　The memory of Peter Schramm looms large for students in the Ashbrook Center. He was a Hungarian refugee who fled the two most horrible totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, and he would always say he was “born American but in the wrong place.” His love for this country still animates the program, and many of the professors and staff are his former students.He was tough: a cigar-chomping, Harley-riding, boot-wearing, foul-mouthed professor. For many students looking for manly, principled men who loved liberty, Schramm is a good role model.

　　We must also expose students to examples of excellence over the course of our country’s history: Abraham Lincoln was a singularly impressive human being, as was George Washington, and Frederick Douglass. When I teach “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” I stress the enormous courage King and his followers exhibited in submitting themselves to the most brutal violence and even the threat of death.

　　At the same time, I introduce many students to non-American, and even ancient examples of political excellence.All freshmen read Winston Churchill’s My Early Life.They come to see the political wisdom of Shakespeare, Plato, and Aristotle—thinkers who were models of excellence with modest political hopes who aimed to moderate their students. After all, modest political hopes are not arrived at exclusively through the study of modern political thought.

　　They need to see that liberalism can produce courageous men and women and not just self-absorbed individuals.

　　In a similar spirit, I hang pictures of excellent statesmen in my office: King and Madison are there, accompanied by busts and statues of Leonidas, Lincoln, and Reagan. I chose these pictures and statues to be silent reminders to students who come to my office of excellence and virtue, to encourage them to see that statesmanship is possible in times ancient as well as modern.

　　Also, I try to moderate students’ political hopes by showing them brilliant political failures, such as Alcibiades and Cyrus the Great. The Republic, of course, is a fantastic exercise in an education in moderation. So, too, is Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, a text I have taught perennially in my career. Cyrus may ultimately fail, but I then point students to the alternative of the book’s author. Xenophon was no pasty-faced wastrel like so many other thinkers, but was a successful general in addition to having been a philosopher. 

　　While the examples of good teachers and historical examples are salutary, they’re not enough. The young need to see contemporary, or near contemporary, examples of excellence at the highest levels. They need to see that liberalism can produce courageous men and women and not just self-absorbed individuals. Above all, they need to see politicians who have exhibited great courage—in an earlier time, we would have called such models of prudence and courage statesmen. A few generations ago, Churchill could serve as a powerful example of courage, prudence, and justice. When I was young, Reagan served as an impressive model. And while I still admire Reagan, he lacked the opportunity to exhibit courage in the face of imminent physical danger in the way Churchill did both as a soldier and as Prime Minister in Britain’s Darkest Hour.

　　Given that many of the students I encounter who reject liberalism do so on religious grounds, perhaps John Paul II could serve as a model; he defended the natural rights teaching of modern liberalism while remaining a fairly conservative Catholic (for further remarks about John Paul II, see Tim Burns’s remarks about him in Perspectives on Political Science). But all of these men were at least a generation ago. Who can students turn to now? Are there adults in the room? The Ashbrook Center brings our students face to face with members of Congress, state Supreme Court Justices, Senators, and department secretaries. The impressiveness of many of these figures is immediately obvious.

　　Perhaps some students who are critical of modern liberalism can come to see that the United States, at least, has preserved much of what is good from pre-modern times. Tocqueville suggests we are unique among moderns in that regard. Religion has served as a salutary check on liberalism in America, as did the family, the self-governing character of New England Townships, and the fact that so much of the United States was wilderness. Tocqueville was surprised to see the ubiquity of Shakespeare in people’s homes, for example. He seems to suggest the US was relatively insulated from European intellectual fads and that we, among the world’s democracies, were distinctly poised to make the best use of what modernity has to offer.

　　There are reasons to believe that this is still the case.While Americans may not be as devout as we were in Tocqueville’s time, we still attend church at a much higher rate than our European counterparts.Moreover, we have all kinds of programs devoted to keeping civic education and the study of the great works of Western Civilization alive—from the Ashbrook Center where I teach to Core Text programs at liberal arts colleges to the wave of new legislatively created Civics Institutes at state institutions like the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, the Civitas Institute at UT Austin, and five new such centers in Ohio alone, including the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University.There are grounds for hope.

　　Alas, I cannot help but think that I, too, am failing students who are critical of modern liberalism.I know of individual cases where I know I have not succeeded. I sometimes console myself by reminding myself of what Aristotle says about the young in the Nicomachean Ethics: “It makes no small difference, then, whether one is habituated in this or that way straight from childhood but a very great difference—or rather the whole difference” (II.2.1103b23-25, my emphasis). Perhaps we professors exert far less influence than we might otherwise hope.