David Hume has something to teach us about party politics. We flatter ourselves that we live in unprecedented times. But the eighteenth-century Scot tells us otherwise. He too lived in an era of “party rage.”

For more than a year, Americans have said the country is on the wrong track. Even more striking, a majority claims the “other party’s agenda will destroy America.” Voters are using apocalyptic language. They commonly lament that if the other party wins the presidency, along with majorities in Congress, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.”

Presidential candidates have been talking for months about how they might save the soul of the country. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, describes the “woke” ideology dominating elite sectors of our society as an “existential threat.” Woke ideology, he says, teaches “kids to hate our country or to hate each other.” President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has vowed to save the country from Republican “extremism” that restricts rights and threatens “the very foundations of our republic.”

Predictably, there have been calls to lower the temperature of our political discourse. This is part of our liberal political inheritance. Forged by the fires of the religious wars, liberal political thought removed government from the business of saving souls. It promised to turn down the heat by making politics less existential.

The philosopher David Hume (1711–76) exemplified this endeavor to promote a more moderate, polite civil discourse. Stylistically, he imitated Addison’s and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12), a daily newspaper read by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and James Madison. “The Spectator” brought philosophy into the homes of what we would now call the middle class.

Hume wrote to this growing middle class. These men and women of “middling ranks” were less concerned with party squabbles than with the mundane tasks of daily life. They did not care about party purity. They wanted to better their condition. They wanted to earn more money. They wanted to climb the social ladder.

Hume released his first set of essays in 1741. Parties were still rather new to British politics. Tories were loyal to the Crown. Whigs were loyal to Parliament. But Hume was loyal to neither. He thought it was far better to be loyal to the Constitution than to a single party.

In Hume’s day, court and country parties had split in part along the lines of economic interest. This did not bother Hume. He found parties of economic interest “the most reasonable, and the most excusable” of all possible parties.

James Madison, a close reader of Hume, wrote in “The Federalist” No. 10 that free economic activity begets various interests: landed, manufacturing, mercantile, and monied. Madison believed that “the regulation of these various and interfering interests, forms the principal task of modern legislation.”

Madison learned this from Hume. But Hume noticed a major wrinkle in this understanding of politics. And this wrinkle worried him. Parties defended something greater than economic interest. They defended ways of life, whether rural or urban. They defended belief systems, whether traditional or progressive, that is, expressing faith in an ancient constitution or modern liberty.

If each party thinks it is fighting for first principles, for God and Country, then compromise becomes nearly impossible. Hume wanted to avoid this. He sought to “persuade men not to contend, as if they were fighting pro aris & focis [for altars and hearths], and change a good constitution into a bad one, by the violence of their factions.”

Hume suggested in the essay, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” that a republic might thrive in an “extensive country.” Even though a multitude of factions might arise, no single one would be able to dominate the others. This inspired Madison’s treatment of factions in the Federalist Papers. Hume supposed that in a large territory, “the parts are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.”

Parties now, however, seem to contest each other passionately while accomplishing little. Congress, for example, rarely even passes a budget resolution. The parties are balanced but impotent.

Last year, Yuval Levin argued that partisan gridlock derives from each party’s tendency to see “the other as the country’s biggest problem.” As a result, parties do not seek broader coalitions. They do not seek durable majorities. They seek ideological purity.

Levin has encouraged parties to respond to practical “contemporary concerns” and to avoid “heedless cultural radicalism.” Similarly, William Galston has called for parties to speak to “the country’s moral center” which is “charactered by moderation, decency, and respect for others.” Like Levin, he suggests that moderation will make our parties more politically viable, if less ideologically coherent.

This is good liberal language coming from public intellectuals on the Right and Left. It recalls Hume’s plea to his readers “to encourage moderate opinions, to find the proper medium in all disputes.”

Hume too was a good liberal. He thought that if individuals could free themselves from “party-rage, and party-prejudices,” they would devote themselves to “public utility.” He thought they would appear more like the “many honest gentlemen” in England. These “honest gentlemen,” “being always employed in their domestic affairs, or amusing themselves in common recreations, have carried their thoughts very little beyond those objects, which are every day exposed to their senses.” These “honest gentlemen” were practical people with practical concerns.

But—and Hume knew this—it was shared beliefs and practices that produced the “honest gentlemen” of England. A complicated mix of causes—including Protestant enthusiasm, the decline of baronial power, and the rise of the middling ranks—gave rise to what Blackstone called “a polite and commercial people.”

Leading Protestant thinkers in England largely sanctioned the polite, moderate pursuit of gain. They portrayed the active, commercial life as one part of a virtuous and godly life, a life oriented ultimately toward supreme blessedness rather than temporal gain. Hume, though, sought to despiritualize the polite and commercial ethos of England. He tried to make a commercial life stand independently without a connection to the traditional Christian virtues. He tried to base the commercial life on the principles of sound philosophy alone, without the inconveniences of “fanaticism” or “enthusiasm.”

Hume theorized, that is, that the public could pursue utility for utility’s sake. Hume based the politics of utility on utility alone. But England’s identity as “a polite and commercial people,” developed out of historical circumstances combined with a shared moral and religious consciousness.

In the contemporary United States, we do not have a shared moral and religious consciousness. We are divided. The Pew Research Center reports that “the ideological gap between left and right in the United States … is significantly wider than the ideological gaps” in European countries. We have lost sight of our meaning and purpose as a country. We use the language of identity politics. But our identity as a nation eludes us.

Without shared meaning, purpose, or identity, the polite politics that Hume recommended is impossible. Hume promoted a politics of utility. But a politics of utility cannot stand alone. It presumes shared beliefs and practices. It presumes that more basic moral and spiritual matters are settled.

Without shared beliefs and practices tying the populace together, pleas for moderation fall on deaf ears. As the philosopher David McPherson claims, the human person is a “meaning-seeking animal.” It does not take long for people to accumulate all of the tools, toys, and conveniences made available to them in our globalized economy before realizing that meaning does not come from consumption alone. When people no longer find meaning in private life, they seek it in public life. In that case, a politics of “cultural radicalism” becomes the only option.

Hume is a prime representative of the modern experiment to privilege a politics of utility over a politics of truth.

Our political problems, our polarization, and party rage have cultural roots. They derive from a lost moral and religious consciousness. The liberal, Humean approach to politics is feckless in our circumstances. His liberal politics of utility, in fact, constituted a direct attack on the classical Christian tradition that once limited trade and consumption in light of greater concern for truth and virtue.

Hume is a prime representative of the modern experiment to privilege a politics of utility over a politics of truth. This bargain has produced many benefits through the creation of wealth, improvements in quality of life, and declines in poverty. However, the politics of utility depends on the social capital derived from a politics of truth and the shared beliefs and practices that result from it.

That social capital is spent. As a result, the politics of utility is spent. The politics of truth has come back with a vengeance. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. As I argue in The Political Thought of David Hume, it is a characteristic mistake of liberal political thought to suppose the politics of truth was ever gone in the first place.

It was Hume’s social scientific theory of economic and moral progress, for example, that led him to criticize popular Christianity and Stoic discipline. This theory of economic and moral progress remains central to the liberal mindset. It was evident in the nineteenth century, when Bentham, like Hume, rejected the “religious party” and the “philosophical party” for championing “the honourable …, the honestum, the decorum” above the pleasant and useful. It was evident in the twentieth century when Rawls argued that political liberalism could not, and should not, be grounded in the classical Christian politics of truth and virtue.

As one of Hume’s critics, James Balfour, noticed, however, the Humean approach undermines the very virtues that are capable of sustaining—and softening—a politics of truth. Hume, for example, lambasted the “monkish” virtues. He regarded self-denial and humility as vices. But as Balfour pointed out, with reference to great Greeks and Romans, self-denial promotes not only mastery of the passions but also sacrifice for the public good.

Humility, moreover, like piety, tempers the lust to dominate. It leads us to prioritize social and religious duties over the pursuit of pleasure. Cicero wrote that “it is by piety that we do our duty towards our kindred and well-wishers of our country and render them faithful service.” Hume excluded piety from his catalog of virtues.

The return of the politics of truth provides us with an opportunity to season our speech with the classical Christian virtues of humility, self-denial, and piety—not to mention grace and forgiveness—for which the Humean worldview leaves no room. The politics of truth, in this case, possesses resources to mitigate party rage that the middling politics of utility simply does not.

American conservatives once were reliable defenders of the politics of truth. Russell Kirk, for example, professed that “at heart, political problems are moral and religious problems.” He contended that conservatives “believe … in the existence of certain abiding truths which govern the conduct of human society.” The Sharon Statement, moreover, a landmark declaration of conservative principles published by the Young Americans for Freedom, led by William F. Buckley, posited that in a “time of moral and political crisis,” it is necessary “to affirm certain eternal truths” and “transcendent values.”

The statement of “Freedom Conservatism,” released this past summer, which presents itself as a successor to the Sharon Statement, declines to mention God, transcendence, truth, or any moral or spiritual grounding for its political claims. This is an example of the liberal mindset, the politics of utility at work. And it is further evidence that the liberal mindset corrodes the moral and spiritual foundations of political society, thereby making party rage inevitable.

If the politics of first principles has returned and is here to stay, then we must come to grips with this fact and think—and act—accordingly. Returning unabashedly to the politics of truth and virtue that built the West—and that the politics of utility effaced—is a good starting point.