Politics is downstream of Anthropology
When the Moral Language is Untranslatable
Monday Memo, March 9 AD2026
What is man, that you are mindful of him, and the son of man, that you care for him? —Psalm 8:4
Thomas Sowell in his 1996 book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy made the case that many political disagreements stem from a fundamental clash in anthropology: the constrained versus the unconstrained view. A “constrained” view sees human nature as inherently flawed and fixed, leading to a politics of checks, balances, and tradition. An “unconstrained” view sees human nature as malleable and perfectible, leading to a politics of social engineering and radical reform.
I would add that it matters what it is that you believe constrains people in a society or what makes them unconstrained. If man is a political animal to use the often quoted Aristotelian language, then the nature and ecosystem of that beast matters. Hobbes, Locke, and especially Smith have perspectives, which are often thought of in terms of worldviews and systems, but I argue we should focus more on the idea of what humans are and therefore all politics really begins with anthropology.
The handbook Christian Democracy: Principles and Policy Making, produced by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung a German think-tank, explains that Christian democracy—the ideology that built democratic Germany after World War Two—approaches politics from a unique perspective:
The spiritual and political foundations of Christian Democracy are rooted in the troika of the social ethics of Christian churches, the liberal tradition of the enlightenment, and the nurturing of civic values where the smallest social unit is understood to be the family. Christian Democracy’s founding belief is the Christian view of humanity. Thus, in such a belief, every individual is considered unique and must be treated with dignity.
This was the right ideology to repudiate Nazism and build a future for the free Germans. And it matters that the East Germans missed out and went from 12 years of Nazism to 45 years of Soviet Communism, which accounts for their linger dysfunction: three generations of broken anthropology.
And if 21st century America has broken anthropology then we will have a politics that cannot resolve its contradictions. America has always had disagreements, and we should not look at our past as some fantasy period without conflict. Rather, the Americans had a good-enough, and commonly-understood-enough anthropology that matched their political system so that when Americans had problems, most of the time they could reach a resolution, and then move on to the next problem.
So if you have a situation when you are led by an elite with bad appetites, who lack humility, and so driven by bad anthropology that they cannot distinguish between themselves and the common good, you will have a system that is not only unresponsive to public needs, it will not even understand how or why it should respond.
People glorify the marches and sit-ins and learn the wrong lessons about how America solved the problem of legal government-mandated racial segregation and exclusion.
Stop for a moment and imagine the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s-1960s in an America that lacked a common moral language and anthropology.
Would it have worked?
