To See a World in a Grain of Sand

On Universalism, Particularism, & the war on empathy: Christian Nationalism, ordo amoris & National Conservatism

May 14, 2025

1 For a long while, I’ve been thinking about Universalism and Particularism.

You know, as one does.

After having written last time about “All men are created equal,” it seems time to stir this long-simmering pot.

What would be a fair, ballparky way to describe these concepts? If you look up Universalism, you’ll get a lot—and I mean a lot—of material on religion (which will be relevant in a way), and a smidgeon on philosophy and ethics, but I’m mainly thinking of the latter.

Let me describe Universalism as the tendency to believe in or work toward a world where at least some key moral principles are upheld consistently pretty much everywhere, a world where violations of those moral principles are deemed wrong pretty much everywhere, by pretty much everyone.

Oh, for example: “Genocide is bad.” “All people have inherent dignity that must be respected.” “Torture is forbidden.”

You know, the kind of stuff you might find in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

By contrast, moral Particularism kinda says that we can’t take some universal precept like “Murder is wrong” and apply it to each and every situation regardless of the particulars of the context and situation.

If that notion bugs you, imagine walking in on someone who just brutally killed or assaulted the person dearest to you. Enraged, you attack them, causing their death. At trial, you are not charged with “murder” at all, but perhaps “manslaughter,” because the law recognizes context, mental state, and situational factors that give us different legal labels and consequences for taking the life of another. A lot of us would find the law’s special considerations here appropriate. We can say you did not “murder” someone, that you “took a life” or “killed,” but those semantics reflect the Particularistic outlook we are employing: Not all killing is equally wrong; not all killers are equally culpable for life-taking.

So I think all of us have Particularist and Universalist tendencies.

Particularism, as I described it above, is pretty anodyne. But it has a dark side. One difference, a key difference, lies in whether or not we accept the fine distinctions of, say, the murder-manslaughter example above—for people who are not us, people we do not know and have no necessary connection to. Or do we acknowledge these situational factors and their “exceptions” to the general rules only when we personally relate to the accused? When we identify with him? When he is “one of us” in some way? We tend to be Particularists just when it’s our bacon in the fire, or when someone we sympathize with gets in trouble, so we contextualize, put ourselves in his shoes and demand others do the same to carve out exceptions to what would otherwise be a Universally condemnable behavior.

In this way, Particularism is a strong indicator of tribalistic thinking.2 Universalism leans a little more toward Immanuel Kant and asks whether the considerations and contexts a selfish, tribal Particularist might offer as excuses for someone they identify with are actually valid reasons for making distinctions for, well, anyone. And because identification is a significant factor in our politics—perhaps the main factor these days—the question of whether you’re a Universalist or a Particularist has huge implications on everything that’s going on.

Empathy’s Bridges

Empathy is a crucial factor in both Universalism and Particularism. You can plumb the question of Universalism vs. Particularism by asking With whom do you identify? or With whom do you empathize?

If you are a white, childless, non-Muslim anglo-American, and you see footage of Palestinian children dismembered by US-made bombs launched by Israel at Gaza, and see, well, children, then yours is an empathetic, Universalist instinct and response. It doesn’t matter what color these children are, what language they speak (if they can speak yet), what religion they’re raised in, what their parents’ politics may be. It’s absurd and obscene on its face to try to categorize them as “pro-” or “anti-” Hamas.

They are children.

Human beings are supposed to protect, care for, and lay down their lives to defend and shield and spare from the horrors of the world … children. Period. Full stop.

But if your empathy is stunted, or trained to pull back somehow at imaginary borders—like a dog collar that shocks when close to the buried wires at the furthest reaches of a property line—then you come up with excuses for US complicity and enabling, for Israel’s war crimes and ethnic cleansing, because your empathy is reserved for those you deem to be of your kind, not those Others, however you designate them.

Here we tend to find the political Right in America.

If you can only feel empathy for those who resemble you in significant aspects—they share your sex, gender, religion, racial category, political views, etc.—you’ll tend toward Particularism. Your empathetic bridges are short, extending only over small local creeks, and you’ll be extremely skeptical that any bridge could possibly be built to span entire oceans. That distance is just too great. Such connections can only exist in the imagination, never the real world. They’re “abstract,” while the ties that really bind folks are “concrete,” like, well, sex, gender, religion, racial category, political views, etc.

Trouble is, all those things are abstract, constructed by human beings living in societies and trying to make it through their days.

What isn’t abstract? The bodies of children torn apart by bombs. It’s hard to get more concrete than that.

What we’re really talking about isn’t a difference in abstraction versus concretion. It’s a difference in perceived proximity. Yes, a child in Gaza is far away from me in physical space, but no less blazingly real than a child playing across my street. The proximity—the closeness—that matters here is the closeness in relationship, in humanity, in bond to me as a person. How real is the Gazan child to me? I know that child only through images on a screen or as a number in a report, hardly anything in comparison to how I know my own children or those of friends and relatives. But I know Gazan children are real, that they are children, that children are much the same the world over.

I may not have the thick, rich, personal, lived experience with the Gazan child that I do with my own children. I have raised my own children, from their births and baths and diapers through school and scraped knees and ER visits and a million more moments. These make the emotional bond stronger, more textured and granular, with my own, now-grown kids, but empathy (and simple category-recognition) tell me that the children over there are in no meaningful way different from the ones I helped teach to walk and talk and now take such pride in seeing live their adult lives.

As James Baldwin said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

Empathy As Enemy

If extending empathy is a key factor in Universalism vs. Particularism, and if the political Left trends toward affirming Universalism, then empathy will be coded Leftist or at least Lefty.

And if you view the political Left as your enemy, then it makes a world of sense to take aim at the human capacity to have compassion for others who are seemingly very different from you. Enter The Sin of Empathy.

The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits is a February 2025 book by Joe Rigney, a “Fellow of Theology”3 at the small, private, “classical” New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. In 2023, Rigney left his last post as president of the independent Baptist Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in part for his increasing advocacy of Christian Nationalism.

His new perch at New Saint Andrews College is a better fit for him. It’s home and home-base to Doug Wilson, the prolific writer who’s probably best known among progressive watchers of the Christian Right for his weird theocratic contortions to revise history on how benign slavery was in the US.4 Wilson is senior minister at Christ Church in Moscow, the congregation that started New Saint Andrews. He/it/they also founded Canon Press (which published Rigney’s Sin of Empathy book), and later sold it to his Wilson’s son, a graduate of Christ Church’s “classical” Logos School and New Saint Andrews, who later became a “Fellow of Literature” at the college. Canon Press also published Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (2022).

(“Incestuous” is a word that comes to mind for the whole nest of these vipers,5 but hey, that’s low-hanging fruit, so we’ll return to the main narrative.)

The Sin of Empathy is based on some of Rigney’s 2019 musings, so it was just happy timing that it hit bookstands the month after the Right Rev. Mariann Budde spoke truth to power to Donald Trump in Washington National Cathedral. Rigney’s argument in the book is … well, how shall I describe it? Hot garbage? Evil trash? Lying, faux pedantry? Essentialized misogyny cosplaying as theology? To give to a taste of what his view is like, here’s what he wrote about the Mariann Budde episode:

Budde’s attempt to “speak truth to power” is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness. Bishop Budde’s exhortation was a clear example of the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy.6

Rigney tries to distinguish between the terms “empathy,” “sympathy,” and “compassion,” but they’re differences that don’t make a difference. He insists that “sympathy” and “compassion” are proper, Christian, manly virtues and traits, while “empathy” is secular, feminized, and suspect. Like a legalistic nitpicker or, well, a right-winger obsessed with pronouns, he dwells on how sympathy and compassion mean “to suffer with someone,” while empathy means “to join someone in their suffering.”

If you join someone in their suffering, Rigney insists, you get swallowed up along with them. You lose yourself and all your bearings, your identity, and most importantly, your righteous, bigoted, Christian line-drawing about what God says is the divine Order of Things.

His favorite anecdote to illustrate this is the image of a sympathizer who throws a rope or extends a branch to a person sinking in quicksand, the rescuer thus remaining secure on firm ground while helping the sufferer.

The empathizer, by contrast, is so overwhelmed by the spectacle that she (it’s archetypally a she), leaps right off the solid ground of Scriptural right-and-wrong into the blob of quicksand to sink along with the sufferer. Such is the peril of “empathy,” as opposed to the prudent and stable Christian virtue of sympathy/compassion. You lose your head and get swallowed up by emotional dysregulation.

Cool story bro.

But nobody parses the terms that way in normal usage. We use the terms interchangeably, and what we mean by them is far simpler: Don’t be a dick; mean people suck. Conditioning your “help” on whether sufferers pass a Bible study test or check the right boxes for conformity to a repressed Christo-fascist New Model Army ideal is dick behavior, mean, and sucky. Decent humans don’t demand resumes before helping people. That’s the whole Good Samaritan story, my dude. I may not be a “Fellow of Theology” at Doug Wilson’s metastasizing Idaho homeschool, but I remember that much of the point.

What is the firm ground that Rigney worries the empathizers are stepping off of in their fits of emotional enmeshment to they dive into the quicksand of other people’s suffering? It’s the same old Biblical hierarchies of human worth: men over women; parents over children; queer people are abominations; you help the down-and-out only with words of holy admonishment of how badly they’ve strayed as you hand them a bowl of soup; and it’s a sin of women in particular to get so … hysterical … that they lose their scriptural moorings and succumb to the whirlpool of that supernatural, supersaturated colloid.

Evangelicals love the idea of “complementarianism” between the sexes. Men are to be spiritual leaders in churches and families, bringing home the bacon and setting policy, speaking for the clan, making decisions. Women are in charge of home and hearth in a home ec way, raising up the tots to be obedient and quiet and god-fearing, with daddy and other male figures as avatars of God. There’s all this hokum about servant-leadership and stuff, and how husband-fathers are to respect and love their wives, but still be in charge when the rubber hits the road, yet conflicts are never supposed to arise because proper wives aren’t supposed to contradict the benevolent headship of their men. It’s all incoherent, but in theory, supposedly, for some, it might, kinda-sorta “work,” for a while, depending on how much Kool-Aid has been intravenously pumped into the participants via their upbringing.

Rigney actually goes farther than complementarianism when he demonizes empathy and attributes it almost exclusively to women (or, when found in men and “properly” male-dominated spaces, to the pernicious, feminized infection of girl-cooties). Back and forth, he depicts empathy as an okay woman’s trait, in moderation, but still dangerous, worth watching … then as a counterfeit of Our Savior’s righteous “compassion,” a sin, a vice, the evil, Mirror Universe version of the correct attitude of “suffering with as opposed to in”, that it is uniquely found in the hearts of those wicked daughters of Eve.

It’s hardly worth the ink I’ve spent here, but Rigney wants to fight wokeness and the Left. He regards anything that’s slightly milder than the Inquisition as fitting those categories. To do so, he senses he has to target the sympathy - compassion - empathy that starts with mirror neurons in infant brains, so he peels off one of those synonyms, attributes it solely to his unmanly enemies, then labels it as Evil by building an obscure and theologically and etymologically twisted, incel-welcoming box around it.

From what little I can tell by reading the tea leaves of Amazon’s bestseller stats, Rigney’s book is doing well enough. Rigney himself is a self-promoter. And lest you imagine he speaks only for Doug Wilson’s version of the God-Hates-Fags cult in Topeka, he has a congenial and mutually-agreeing conversation you can read or listen to with Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention on the latter’s podcast. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in America, so this fringey, woman-hating club isn’t just for the extreme nutbags.

This is religio-political Particularism: care only about those who resemble you in doctrine, in living the “right” way, in attending the right churches, in upholding misogynistic and patriarchal and dominating family structures based on strict binaries and hierarchies of how people must be in the world, and condition your care accordingly. Any slippage toward Universalism, the notion that what matters underneath everything is that people are, well, people, that you can find common ground with them as human frickin’ beings with the capacity to suffer? That stuff’s for chicks. And chicks are weak ninnies who lose themselves in their emotions. They need strong-willed, theologically strong-minded menfolk to yank their leashes away from occasions to sin because it’s in their very nature to go all weepy over lost kittens and stray dogs, when they should be more like Kristi Noem and shoot the wicked curs.

That’s the theme, the music, that Joe Rigney, Albert Mohler, Doug Wilson, and whole swaths of the Administration are playing: sympathy and rights for people like us, disdain and the rod of correction for Others. We see it in Supreme Court jurisprudence, in the double-standards or abandonment of due process, in disappearing “the homegrowns,” in every form of not just American exceptionalism, but what’s now a walls-closing-in chamber focusing on the exceptionalism of an ever-narrowing slice of just the right kinds of Americans, to be defined and refined more tightly as we go along.

Disorder Amoris

The World’s Most Odious Catholic Convert JD Vance told Sean Hannity the following on January 30:

[A]s an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. But there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.

Later, on Xitter, Vance “clarified” he was speaking of ordo amoris, the Augustinian/Thomistic notion that Christian virtue entails the right ordering of love and charity guided by circumstance and proximity and need. Thus was sparked a theological debate of sorts that the late Pope Francis waded into via a letter to US Bishops on February 10, papally bitch-slapping the vice president. Newly-minted Pope Leo XIV, back when he was just Chicago’s Cardinal Bob Prevost, simply tweeted “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

This is, to an extent, a dumb thing for anyone not a Catholic theologian to care about. Why would the vice-president vent to a right-wing TV propagandist about obscure Latinate doctrine primarily of concern only to Catholics, and then only to the deeply Scholastic variety? Only 20 percent of US adults describe themselves as Catholics, and you can bet those numbers are not stacked to the spire with anxious scribblers desperately needing to know just where the vice president stands on … checks notes … the ordo amoris.

But Vance’s was yet another effort to tarnish the notion of Universal empathy and compassion, lifting up Particularist, tribal, self-interested exceptionalism over and above any notion of solidarity among humans qua humans. He tried to pitch the narrative that it’s OK—nay, it’s the obscure heart of Catholic / Christian orthodoxy—to care first and foremost for your tribe, your nation, your people, relegating others to a second-class status in the “order” of caring and Christian love. He offered a permission-slip to redefine Christianity’s aspirational universal solidarity as conditional on family ties, ethnic ties, national ties—basically, blood and soil.7

Muddy the waters of empathy, insist that empathy is for our kind of people, and depict “the Left” as perverting Christian doctrine just because they affirm the sort of Universalism seen in the parable of the good Samaritan as opposed to the systemic hair-splitting of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

Blaming the Left is absolutely essential in this strategy, as described by David Roberts and Michael Hobbes:

“The Left hates their own country and loves foreigners instead—and it’s anti-Christian!”

This is what Vance is trying to sell—as an answer, a talking point, a defense against empathy and compassion, all wrapped up in a War on Christianity narrative.

Like Rigney and Wilson and Albert Mohler, he’s pitching it in Christian Nationalist terms: as a counterfeit, an inversion of “real” Christian compassion, because the real thing prioritizes your own tribe first and gets to strangers, migrants, refugees, the poor, unhoused, foreigners, and bombed-to-pieces children sometime down the road, you know, after a long day, when you bother to think about them, probably as you’re ready for bed and only have time for thoughts and prayers.

It’s Christian Nationalism that’s the inversion, or perversion, and to get to this Upside-Down realm, it helps if you can lead people on a path of arcane, medieval etymologies, Scholasticism, angels-on-pins, and detailed debates that concern only the in-crowd who already buy 90 percent of the racket. These are the QAnon-adjacent lovers of signs and conspiracies after all. They like to do their own research and selectively cite the authorities they like (Vance yes; Pope, no). They miss the forest (Universal love and dignity) for the trees (were those knuckle tatts photoshopped?).

It’s peddling excuses and exceptions, talking points and rejoinders so deep in the weeds of medieval monks that the real goal is to make critics of Particularistic rejection of empathy simply shut up. The theological version of “Oh, you support gun control? Well, name all the component parts of an AR-15, then. If you can’t, you’re not serious about this subject.” Here, it’s Vance offering selfish people a Latin phrase that makes them sound Godly and learned while they reject everything the empathetic offer to suggest it’s bad to disappear student visa holders off the street.

Nat-Cs

Lost for now in the memory hole while Trump 2 sledgehammers the US, are the National Conservatives—the Nat-Cs.

They’re Particularists who, ironically, seek to spread Particularism everywhere. That is, they seek to create a global phenomenon of nations in which each individual country is composed of a homogenous “people” united by a common religion, language and culture, seeking to serve its own parochial national interests. To hell with “international norms,” “global human rights,” and the notion that people elsewhere are more or less the same as people within their borders. Also to the depths of Gehenna go the notions of multiculturalism and diversity within a country. The best they can offer is separate nations for each culture or people, then carte blanche for those nations for how they run their affairs.

To the devil go any multilateral alliances premised on shared values. The only thing that makes sense in a Nat-C world are transactional bilateral deals like Trump loves: two nationalist authoritarians cutting a bargains to benefit their kinds of people (cough—cronies—cough), and who gives a shit if there’s poison gas used against helpless peasant in some shithole country somewhere else?

Nat-Cs claim to be economic populists or levellers in certain ways. They claim to want to preserve a social safety net and popular support programs like Medicaid that benefit MAGA voters (Josh Hawley just criticized proposed Medicaid cuts in the name of Missouri MAGA folks, for instance), but it’s Particularism that drives them. A safety net for me, not thee: privilege white people, people with large families (the pro-natalist camp, which intersects nicely with white genocide believers, Christian Nationalist quiverful loons, and tech-bro eugenicist weirdos like Elon Musk and that ubiquitous weird couple profiled everywhere).

Nat-Cs—chock full of Ivy League degrees—decry “elites” but what they mean by the term are those who engage in wrong-think, not folks with actual power, money or influence. So you can be a high school teacher, a postal carrier, or even a lowly janitor with a Substack and be one of these “elites” simply because you subscribe to the “rootless cosmopolitan” (i.e., Bad Jewish) Universalist notions like “all people are equal” instead of the Particularist concept that “my nation’s culture, religion and race are better than others.” (Seriously: it’s like the whole theme of Josh Hawley’s keynote at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference.) As the walls close in and the easy-to-clock enemies of the regime are disappeared, we can turn to the internal foes, the “homegrowns,” the folks who aren’t real Americans after all, based on how they’ve wandered from True American Culture and Folkways and Values. The enemy isn’t the billionaire who stole everyone’s data to make Skynet and crashed Medicaid and Medicare and the VA and libraries and museums and everything else in the process, no—it’s the poor schmuck next door who insufficiently hates trans folks or attends a mainstream church.

For professional politicians, a lot of this Nat-C stuff is just rope-a-dope. Insofar as the 2024 election was decided by the absolutely politically unplugged8 who caught a vague wind of some headline regurgitating an empty talking-point promise that Trump would save the world while Harris would doom it, the wider GOP knows that it has to throw sops to various folks in its clueless coalitions. So people like Josh Hawley can toothlessly criticize cuts to Medicaid and call for economic populism, knowing that the fraction of the MAGA base that likes that sort of thing will stay engaged and attached to the GOP brand (or at least to him) as long as he gives them … something.

But for the intellectuals and true believers, National Conservatism is about trying to pour the same old supremacist wine into newly labeled barrels. They want Americanism, whatever that means for a country that’s welcomed (or dragged in chains) people of every origin to its shores since before it was even independent. They want cultural unanimity. They want cohesion and uniformity. And they insist it be on their Christian Nationalist, tribal, white, European, “Western civilizational,” terms. They blame “the Left” for everything that works against this enforced sameness and theocratic ethnostatism, alternately slandering “liberalism” then co-opting Lefty criticisms of socioeconomic stratification, money in politics, unrestrained capitalism—even racism and discrimination—to try to make what is ultimately an impossible case for their evil vision.9

Maybe this would work for, say the Sentinelese, the voluntarily isolated tribe on Sentinel Island who killed Christian missionary John Allen Chau in 2018 for trying to convert them. But for countries with millions or hundreds of millions of people who’ve not only seen the wider world in media, but visited that world and often come from elsewhere, there are a few problems. The only way to get a homogenous “people” after all sorts of cultural and demographic mixing for centuries is, well, pretty ugly and authoritarian. It requires either expulsion of those who don’t fit or forcing all square pegs into round holes. At a minimum, you have to appeal to some selected version of “true” culture and nationhood that typifies the “correct” people and promote this ugly cartoon while disadvantaging all alternatives. At a maximum, you turn into Procrustes, the Greek villain who lopped off ill-fitting parts of people to make them fit snugly in his torture bed.

If that starts to smell faintly like eugenics and ethnonationalism, you’re getting it. National Conservatives have to choose a culture to conserve, and in the US, they choose a made-up, Particularist, amputated Christianity (flashback to Doug Wilson’s apologetics for not-so-bad-after-all slavery), the patriarchal nuclear family (with many, many children), the Trumpist authoritarian Republican Party, and whiteness.

What’s interesting is that the international Nat-C movement is driven in large part by a “Judeo-nationalist” named Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) and Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022). A former speechwriter for Benjamin Netanyahu, Hazony bases his theories of nation-states explicitly on the idea of tribes, and now seeks to use Israel’s ethno-state as a positive model for building more like it, as Suzanne Schneider has well argued.10 JD Vance, of course, is a fan of the movement, as are others on the list of Worst People in the World.

It’s couched in the language of anti- or post-liberalism, basically like this:

Liberalism abandoned whatever it was that made each discrete homogenous people unique inside each hermetically-sealed nation state—their language, culture, religion, traditions, history—and embraced silly ideas like “all people are equal.” But this is all an error. Communities cannot cohere without ties that bind, and people [all people, equally—ahem] clot together only via families and cultures and traditions and languages and religions, so we must embrace this [Universal] social reality and impose it on our respective deluded and misguided nations going forward.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that Hazony dates the fall from nationalistic grace in America from the end of World War II, you know, after the Nazis were defeated and the global death toll was so horrific that the consensus around the “liberal order” taught (or as I have argued, overtaught) us the wisdom of neutrality and rights. I suspect Hazony would be fine with a Nazi Germany today, so long as it had no expansionist agenda and Jews had an Israel to flee to. He cannot explicitly admit this, but such is where his logic seems to lead, and I think we can see that the Nat-C contingent in America is hip to this logic in their flirtations with Nazi gestures, apologetics, and policy parallels.

To say nothing of the cruelty push, the dehumanization propaganda, the eugenicist themes, laws, cuts and executive orders emanating from state legislators and governors, the White House, the cabinet, the right-wing media, both professional and crowd-sourced.11

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Centrists Will Not Save Us

Though he calls himself a liberal—in the post-WW II sense of the term—political scientist and columnist Damon Linker has weighed in on Universalism vs. Particularism, and no one should be surprised that his thumb is on the dead-center of the scale, despite all the encroaching horrors from the Right.

Linker’s approach is similar to the both-sidesism of the media and the academe: select an outlying position, a fringe view without any kind of powerful constituency, and attribute it to the Left with nary a mention of the fact that “the Left” is not only not in the driver’s seat in America, it’s standing on the side of a dirt road somewhere in the California desert, with no sunscreen, no water, maybe half a bar on its phone, and the only vehicles that pass have Trump 2028 flags flapping from their truck beds, the occupants hurling empty beer bottles rather than give them a lift to the next town.

In this case, Linker selects an essay by Freddie DeBoer, a Marxist internationalist cultural critic, which, two months after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, explains that DeBoer doesn’t agree with the widely stipulated caveat that Israel [or any other nation] has a right to exist.

DeBoer more or less says that no country has a right to exist independent of how it is organized with respect to its people. Do they enjoy individual freedoms and rights? Does their government represent them? Does their government eschew unjust war and atrocities against their neighbors?

If so, then sure, maybe their government is legitimate and can claim some kind of presumptive reason to continue. (Whether he would call that reason a “right” is wooly and not the point.)

But if not, then that government—that nation as it is constituted—is illegitimate in some way, and an illegitimate nation and/or state can’t claim any moral or ethical right to exist. To crib from the deep-seated nations-are-like-families metaphor, does a father who abuses and tortures his wife and children have a “right” to remain a father and husband? If you say yes, WTF is wrong with you?

I really have no conceptual problem with DeBoer’s argument here. What he seems to be saying is that, at a moral-ethical level, simply being a government in control of a piece of land where a bunch of people live doesn’t give you a right to carry on forever. Think back to Saddam Hussein’s rule in Iraq. Back then, it sure seemed like a whole lot of legitimacy and a regime’s “right to exist” depended on what kind of government you ran, what kind of treatment you doled out to the people living on the piece of land you controlled, how you behaved toward your neighbors. Sure seemed like a lot of Americans were pretty hot to just go in and yank a country right out from under Saddam and his pals because they were baddies who didn’t deserve (had no right to) it. Suddenly, though, the notion that a nation’s right to exist is conditional on how it acts is a ridiculous Leftist utopian fever dream?12

Still, Freddie DeBoer’s vision is pretty far out there. Nobody with any clout is seriously advocating the dissolution of nations to form the glorious, global Marxist utopia, no matter what OAN might claim. Nations are pretty established and can be trusted to defend themselves and their prerogatives.

Until MAGA, that is. Before Putin and Trump decided to join sides, even weaker nations like Ukraine, Greenland, and Canada could still rely on stronger ones to stick up for the principle that if you have made it into the club of nations, the rules of that club said the big boys needed to respect your sovereignty.

This means, ironically, that the threat to the existence of nations isn’t coming from the Left’s internationalist Marxist imagininings, but from resurgent Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism like we see from JD Vance, Yoram Hazony, Trumpist policies, the MAGA movement (including its tech broligarchy’s desire to transcend the regulatory constraints of nation-states on their longed-for fiefdoms and global empires), and Nat-C embrace of authoritarian regimes like right-wing model states Hungary, Turkey, Israel, and Russia.

Does any of this make a dent on center-left liberal Damon Linker’s both-sidesism? Of course not. He treats Freddie DeBoer as a typical member of “the Left” and uses him as an avatar of political Universalism, that longing to affirm a world where at least some key moral principles are upheld consistently pretty much everywhere, a world where violations of those moral principles are deemed wrong pretty much everywhere, by pretty much everyone.

To me, such a longing is the animating value that backstops the horror at Trumpism and MAGA and National Conservatism. It’s the felt empathy most Americans who reject this administration (and the ongoing Palestinian extermination, and so many less-publicized atrocities) both express and long for more of. The empathy that figures like Joe Rigney, JD Vance, and the Nat- Cs seek to denigrate and discredit as either counterfeit or upside down in its priorities or doomed to fail as some kind of universal social fact—the Hazony-like argument Damon Linker stumbles into.

Empathy is also, it seems to me, at the core of what binds families together when they are not poisoned by cruelty and abuse. It’s what makes communities cherished and liveable when they aren’t exclusionary and unsustainable. It’s what makes nations loveable while also being vibrant and evocative and fertile and innovative and always renewing.

You cannot “expand the concentric circles of care” in JD Vance’s vision of ordo amoris if you have nothing to build on, which is why an idea of caring for distant strangers is not an alien imposition upon an otherwise natural arrangement of affection. It’s an an organic or spiritual maturation, as Pope Francis suggested (which I now secularize): because you learned to care about others in smaller communities, you mature to care about wider and wider groups, and those who cannot, well, “see the face of God” in those from far away who otherwise seem so different have missed out on something vital in their upbringing as humans.

Is it any wonder MAGA and its affiliated strands of empathy-stranglers and -slanderers appeal so much to, and reflect, such an immature, petulant, stunted, childish rejection of adult complexity, nuance, depth, and patience? If Universalism and the empathy it requires is spiritual maturation, then the clenched retraction of the MAGA coalition of nationalistic Particularism is … arrested development raised up as a goal for all humanity.

But Linker is having none of that. To him, the only way to have solidarity is to have ties that bind us to smaller communities, and he says DeBoer is wrong because DeBoer’s central premise is that “moral and political decency is incompatible with sub-universal forms of communal solidarity.”

So for Linker, Universalists—people who long for a better world where decency and rights and moral principles are more universally respected—contradict themselves. They want to do away with every tie that binds us at every level below the global “We Are The World” slop of soupy feelies, yet it is precisely our kinship and cultural and religious and community ties that matter most to us. Soldiers fight and re-up their enlistments and lay down their lives for their band of brothers, not for abstract principles of the global working class, says Linker. And he’s kinda right about that.

But soldiers also declare Christmas truces because they sense or know that some things transcend national differences. That’s a sign of human solidarity, even though in that case it was premised on a particular, shared religion. If humans can engage in such acts of nationalistic transcendence, even limited by religious ties, even unofficially, in the midst of 1914’s battlefront horrors, surely that speaks to our capacity to expand our definitions of Us and shrink the exclusion zones of Them.

To Linker, Universalism wants to demonize and ban the very sources of (Particularistic) solidarity it draws from to achieve its Universalistic goals. To me, Universalism looks at those wellsprings—family, community, church and religion, culture, language, the whole lot of traits that tie people together—and asks them to do more, to do better.13 If these primordial sources of greatness are so strong, as the Nat-Cs insist, why can’t they bear the weight of trust and risk-taking? Why can’t they be used as rock on which build a universal “church” of greater decency and humanity despite differences in culture, language, etc?

Why can’t we see past brown faces and Arabic language and Muslim religion and simply recognize … children?

No, it’s the Nat-Cs in their Particularism who wish to have it both ways. They insist that each culture-nation is an island, entire of itself—or will be again once each one rids itself of the corrupting influence of the lesser races and inferior cultures and poisonous ideologies that sap its true communal strength. Once each becomes uniform in size and shape like, say … a bundle of sticks bound together into an unbreakable ax handle.

Likewise, it’s the Christian Nationalists who claim their Particularism is Universal: it’s their interpretation of what God wants for all families (nuclear structure; patriarchal head; cowed, obedient, isolated and brainwashed progeny by the truckload to outnumber the Muslims and Jews and miscellaneous Brown and Black kids) that must be writ large upon the nation. It’s their Mandate that must reign across the Seven Mountains of culture, law, government, et cetera ad theocracy.

These are Universal claims. Claims about all human societies, and thus, about all human beings. Yet Linker chooses to focus on the alleged internal contradictions of the Universalist Left dreaming of a world where all people are free of oppression and exploitation, instead of the internal contradictions of Particularist Yoram Hazony (who is much more influential than Freddie DeBoer) trying to convert the entire globe into 193 individual sovereign Reichs free of LGBTQIA+ folks, feminists, atheists, agnostics, modernists, free-thinkers, dissidents, and other inconvenient populations.14 The Nat-Cs are certainly making damn good progress in very short order toward their goal, with folks like Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, columnist Josh Hammer, Viktor Orban, British MPs, and so many more attending their conferences — as opposed to Freddie DeBoer, who seems to have precisely zero power whatsoever.

But while Linker fails to reckon with—even really mention—where Particularism will lead us, is leading us, he’s all about exploding the implications of where Freddie DeBoer’s out-there musings could maybe-someday go.

He writes that affirming greater Universalism must mean erasing, denying, or threatening “love of one’s own.” He insists that the Left’s Universalist project is doomed because it treats Particularism, the love of one’s own place, people, customs, nation, whatever … that “ineradicable aspect of the human condition as something that must be driven out or at the very least denied moral legitimacy.”

But this is nuts. It’s the same tired and deliberately misinformed argument we hear lobbed at communism as regards property:

Communism says we abolish private property, and I really love my stuff, so I reject communism.
Your stuff? You mean your Funko Pop figures?
Yeah, man. I spent a lot of money building my collection.
Dude, that’s your personal property. Private property is, like, the means of production, not your toothbrush and your toys, dude.
Huh?
You know, like on The Last of Us, the folks in Jackson Hole? They admit the way they live is communism, right? Totally makes Tommy uncomfortable, but it’s true. All the stuff essential to life for the community is shared in common. But they still have personal property. Like, how Ellie trades a pair boots for a cool rifle scabbard in Season 2? And she still carries her switchblade? You think anybody’s gonna lay claim to Ellie’s switchblade, dude? Or, Joel’s watch?

We can reach for greater Universalism, greater solidarity with others, without utterly rejecting love of one’s own.

Just because I care and am outraged about what has been done to Kilmar Abrego Garcia doesn’t mean I must put my daughter up for adoption or sale to the highest bidder because I love her the less. The two are not in conflict.

In some nightmarish scenario that is astronomically unlikely to occur, I might have to run into a burning building and choose to save either my own daughter or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and yes, if that should occur, I would probably save my own daughter. I’d proffer a lot of excuses and rationalizations for that choice, but a part of me would know they are, in some way, excuses and rationalizations. A part of me would know that I chose Particularism over Universalism, failed to live up to certain ideals, but the larger part of me won’t care about that in that moment or probably even all that much afterward.

But those kinds of hypotheticals are not how we actually live our lives, even if they can provoke uncomplimentary self-reflection. (I’m also betting Kilmar would hold nothing against my decision, nor demand an explanation.) For the most part, the vast, vast majority of us are not heroes rushing into burning buildings, nor are we even choosing between paying the light bill or sending the money to starving Gazan children. We’re just choosing whether to vote for the folks who want to slightly increase the USAID budget or expand the social safety net versus people who want to set it all on fire.

That’s not “driving out” or “denying moral legitimacy” to the instinct to love one’s own. We can love our own and expand on that natural instinct to see reflections of our own in the faces of others.

So yes, when forced, most of us choose Particularism. When “our own” are under threat, we choose them over strangers. But very few of us are ever forced, and the only threat “our own” face is a product of propaganda and up-ratcheting Us-versus-Them hallucinations peddled by right-wing media, the Christian Nationalists, and the Nat-Cs.

Seems to me there’s more than enough room to try a little more empathetic Universalism before we ever need to worry our pretty heads over the dissolution of beloved nation-states and public stoning for, you know, liking your own home town football team.

But then, unlike Damon Linker, I don’t teach political theory at Penn.

Look at the world around you. Is the big problem right now a massive cultural force marshalling law and politics to push you to forswear your love of your own family and kin, reject your roots and hometown and favorite church hymns from when you were a tot?

Or is the overwhelming emphasis bent on telling us that we need to look out for our own? That everyone’s out to get us, that “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” That some poor hairdresser is a high ranking Tren de Aragua terrorist “invading” America? That the new head of the global Catholic Church is a “woke Marxist” because he speaks for the poor and the refugee?

Which “ineradicable aspect of the human condition” is really under assault by powerful forces? That Particularist and traditionalist part of you that loves your family or likes Christmas?

Or the part of you that feels horror and pain seeing perfectly normal people who maybe dress differently, have an accent or darker skin, or go to a different house or worship getting snatched up off the street and shuffled to detention centers to avoid courts with jurisdictions?

Empathy is the enemy of these people, and rightly so, because it’s the real “ineradicable” part of us they need to try to smother and shame in order for them to do what they want.

But because it is ineradicable, they will lose.

If not today, then eventually.

Know Your Place

To See a World in a Grain of Sand

On Universalism, Particularism, & the war on empathy: Christian Nationalism, ordo amoris & National Conservatism

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