The Era Of Presuming Liberal Moral Superiority Is Over

There’s a popular debate series on YouTube called “Surrounded,” where they take a pundit of some stripe — usually an older person with some degree of renown and experience — and put them in a room full of social media savvy youngsters who all disagree with that person. One by one, they all take turns arguing with the guest. As you might imagine, a round robin debate with a bunch of peacocking college-age students is frequently the Dante-esque assault on reason you imagine it is, but it produces plenty of viral moments that can be clipped and shared on social media.

In any event, the most recent guest was comedian-turned-liberal talk radio guy Sam Seder. In fairness to Seder, he seems like a genuinely intelligent guy — if we could steer clear of politics, I’m sure I would enjoy spending time with him. I also didn’t watch the full 90-minute debate because I’m not a masochist, so I’m sure he had some good moments along the way.

But in the clip from the debate that was most widely shared, a young Hispanic guy asks Seder about his objections to supposed religious fundamentalists and then, as the kids say, he proceeds to absolutely own Seder. Essentially, the question put before Seder is this: If he objects to traditional religious values as a foundation for guiding America’s collective political and legal decisions, what does he think should be the basis for morality?

The Pundit Test

It’s a bit inconsequential, but still notable that Seder’s first failure was hearing an ostensible comedian utter the words, “I’m a Reform Jew, I don’t have a strong belief in the existence of God” without so much as a wink. Even proud liberal Jon Stewart has an entire comedic essay, “The New Judaism,” on the differences between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism that repeatedly makes a joke out of the fact that Reform Jews don’t actually believe anything is a sin.

But Seder’s full answer is so much worse than that. First, Seder suggests some vague “humanist vision” of what’s best for the most is what’s moral, and then when he balks at being labeled a utilitarian or consequentialist, he shifts to saying that some also vague version of collectivism is the basis of morality. When his interlocutor then asks what he would think if the small-d democratic collective came together and undermined trans rights, he says that wouldn’t be moral. Then he argues that biological distinctions, such as being born gay, could be determinative of morality. Then when the young guy points out that some people think pedophilia is an innate biological orientation, we see more backpedaling, and Seder then argues that there also has to be consent for relationships to be moral. So then he’s asked whether it’s moral if a father and a daughter have a sexual relationship if they’re both consenting adults, and he says “I think society has determined …” and we’re back to secular collectivism as a moral foundation. It’s just a mess.

Presumably, Seder knew this debate would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked a kid would cut right to matters of first principles and question the assumptions of moral authority underpinning bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. When it comes to political punditry, there’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously: How does that person justify the use of political power to implement the policies they favor?

What Seder was asked was far from a trick question; rather, it’s basic American civics. This is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses, as the founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their present government would start with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. So our founding document is a fairly succinct and compelling natural law argument for a government that recognizes all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that cannot be abrogated, let alone by a king who claims the “divine right” to tax people on a whim.

Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. So our system hinges on allowing an element of democracy, while putting enough checks in the system to ensure the tyranny of the majority doesn’t overwhelm the God-given rights of individuals. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there’s no getting around the fact that having objective notions of morality, traditionally represented by a belief in God, is foundational to our whole system. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.

As Chris Rufo observes, “The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s ‘debate champ’ doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he’s ignorant of basic Christian theology, the natural rights theory of the American founders, and the criticism from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault. Just doesn’t know any of it.” There’s also an element of blatant hypocrisy here as well. “Seder objects to religion because it ‘imposes’ values on everyone,” notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. “It is, however, a dream to think that imposition of values is NOT a precondition of every social order. (Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such.)”

As a liberal born in 1966, as Seder was, he’s spent his entire life watching American liberals basically achieve complete ideological capture of every major institution — the federal and state bureaucracies, academia, the media, Hollywood, even Wall Street and Silicon Valley have been predominantly liberal the last couple of decades. Heck, for a guy so worried about Christian Nationalism, he can take heart in the fact that Christianity is far less of a threat to our current liberal order because liberals took over almost all of the mainline Protestant churches and proceeded gut these denominations of their traditional biblical beliefs to the point they’re all more or less indistinguishable from … Reform Jews.

In other words, it’s safe to assume Seder is defending the dominant liberal order imposing its values on everyone because it’s what he knows and what he prefers, not because he can articulate why it’s justifiably “moral.” Nor is our current liberal order necessarily a matter of consent or democracy. This is pretty evident in the left’s approach to social issues. Gay marriage flailed in nearly every referendum it faced, and only became legal after the Supreme Court made it legal by decree, using a decision that has all the defensible legal and moral rubric one would expect to find on the back of a cereal box. And when a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the left screamed in unison they actually preferred it when nine unelected judges conjured up a new right to murder children in the womb that half the country found morally abhorrent, rather than letting such a controversial issue be decided by be democratic means.

And when liberals couldn’t exercise raw power to get their way in courtrooms and legislative chambers, they leveraged the economic might of corporate America to enforce their agenda. Despite the fact BLM was a scam literally run by communists who explicitly stated the nuclear family was an obstacle to “social justice,” corporations were alternately bullied and praised into giving BLM and related causes $83 billion even as the movement burned cities to the ground.

The problem is that you can only arbitrarily impose values on people from the top down for so long before there’s political and cultural backlash. Interestingly, in an interview with Seder, he said that he did the debate because his 19-year-old daughter told him “Surrounded” was popular with kids her age. Seder is almost certainly aware that there’s increasing amounts of data showing Gen Z shifting rightward, and this is especially true of young men — between the presidential elections in 2020 and 2024, there was a shocking 29 percent move right in men aged 18-29.

Youth In Revolt

This is a full-blown crisis for the future of liberalism, and in that respect, Seder deserves props from his fellow liberals for entering the octagon here with a bunch of conservative kids. However, I’m not sure liberals are drawing the right lessons from Seder’s appearance. In a column for The Daily Beast, Michael Ian Black — yet another comedian who has spent the last couple of decades dabbling in liberal politics — unintentionally amuses us with the thought that the growing ranks of right-leaning kids are “not anchored by a cogent philosophy.” As a fan of Black, it gives me no pleasure to report that a minor Gen X icon, with such credits as The State and Wet Hot American Summer, has some very boomer politics:

Time and again in the video, the young conservatives platformed in the video expressed a lack of faith in that pluralistic society. They have no faith in our institutions. They have no faith in science. They have no faith in Americans who do share their religious beliefs to determine the best course of action for their own lives.

There’s no point in combing through the conservatives’ claims; they were almost all incorrect, as fact-checked by Jubilee during the video. But, contrary to the t-shirts, the MAGA worldview is not informed by facts but by feelings. They feel that Social Security is a disaster despite the fact that, as Sam pointed out, it keeps 2/3 of our senior citizens out of poverty. They feel that gender-affirming care for minors is, as one said, “a huge problem” despite the fact that, as Sam correctly stated, a miniscule number of children actually receive such care.

Hmmmm. Can you think of any reason why kids who were in high school during COVID might not have any faith in institutions or “science?” Or why kids who won’t collect social security for 40 years are looking at a program such as Social Security, which has somewhere north of $25 trillion in unfunded liabilities even as their grandparents continue to extract far more money from the program than they put in, and have doubts about whether it will still be around to keep them out of poverty? I’m not even going to exert myself to explain the myriad ways that making Gender Affirming Care Is Good Actually part of every blue state curriculum might be ill-advised. By all means, keep telling people it’s not a big deal and it only affects a few confused and regretful adolescents you’ve permanently sterilized and cut the breasts off of.

After all, these kids are ultimately beyond hope because, as Black reminds us, “what we’re dealing with, instead, is a wholesale dismissal of data because, as Stephen Colbert once famously said, ‘Reality has a liberal bias.’” Ah yes, noted political sage Stephen Colbert. I would strongly encourage the American left to really consider shutting down this whole comedians-doing-liberal-commentary business until they can figure out what the hell is going on.

Of course, it’s normal for up-and-coming generations to question societal foundations, and at least since the sixties, we’ve seen the American left weaponize this tendency. They have explicitly, repeatedly argued that the political energy and preference of the youth has a unique moral force that must be heeded, regardless of how incoherent those youth politics are. It was not that long ago we were supposed to stop driving or whatever because a teenage Swedish autist with grossly irresponsible parents let her gallivant around the world yelling “HOW DARE YOU” at various climate conferences.

From a conservative perspective then, it’s pretty amusing to whipsaw from that to the left suddenly taking the default conservative get-off-my-lawn position of arguing kids don’t know what they’re talking about, and especially since nobody’s doing much of any self-reflection about why the left has abruptly lost its lock on the youth vote. (Though they’re still a bit schizo about all this; even as they lament Gen Z getting more conservative, we’re also being told with a straight face that the pockets of lefty students defending Hamas terrorists and harassing Jewish kids on campus are somehow the conscience of American foreign policy.)

Regardless, it’s pretty clear that after decades of failing liberal institutions and identity politics that actively discriminated against whole classes of people, kids are not wrong to intuit they are, uh, surrounded by a cultural and political order that they don’t like and can’t be justified. Maybe they can’t always articulate their perceived problems as well as they should — and to the extent they’re not as articulate as they should be, you can chalk up the state of public education as another massive L for progressives who overwhelmingly control our schools — but the sooner Seder and his fellow travelers take the failures of liberalism seriously, the better off they’ll be. Generational discontent is not a MAGA mind virus; it’s an understandable reaction to an arrogant presumption of liberal moral superiority that was always difficult to prove and is presently, transparently nonexistent.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator