Nothing so extra-constitutional has happened in our politics since. But the story of the African-American relationship to liberalism after the Civil War is also a little more complicated than Serwer’s paragraph suggests. As an undercurrent, at least, the black political tradition in America has included many “post-liberal” forays and flirtations, sharpest in periods of apparent political breakdown, that encompass everything from the Communist affiliations of many black intellectuals in the 1930s to the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist movements in the civil rights era. (Elements of these traditions are visible around the edges of contemporary African-American intellects as different as Clarence Thomas and Ta-Nehisi Coates.)

For a cleareyed take on the appeal of these tendencies, I recommend Serwer’s own 2018 essay on the sympathy that even the odious Louis Farrakhan can still inspire. But really anyone with an imagination should be able understand the past attraction of Communism or racial separatism or back-to-Africanism to black Americans. If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people’s flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities. And defenders of the system should accept that openness, at least in certain cases, because serious discontents with the liberal order can also spur the changes necessary to keep it.

Which takes us from race to religion, from Serwer’s defense of America’s promise to his attack on today’s religious conservatives. There is plenty in today’s religious right to criticize, especially on issues of race. But the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy. Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power. Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons, who were harried westward by a brutal persecution and then forced to rewrite their doctrines by state power; and conservative Roman Catholics, about whose difficult relationship to liberalism I will say more in a moment. And all of these groups are embedded in global religious communities in which persecution is as common as privilege — which if anything probably leads them to worry too much about what a hostile government might do to them, not to fail to imagine such oppression.

All of these groups have their own sins to answer for (my own Catholic Church’s scandal being particularly salient these days), and some of the stances religious conservatives take in their struggle with secular liberalism are clearly influenced for the worse by the racism that has pervaded every white religious tradition in America.

But while that secular liberalism, in its meritocratic-elite form, may present itself as a vehicle for long-suffering minorities to finally grasp power, in many ways it is also a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy — shorn of that ascendancy’s piety and sense of duty, but still at war with fundamentalists on one flank and Catholics on the other, still determined (to borrow an image from National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty) to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists.

And for serious Papists, especially, the longer arc of liberalism has to look a bit dubious at the moment. Whether it descends through John Locke or Voltaire, the liberal order has often tended to define itself against the Catholic Church, and in the European context to answer ancien-régime cruelties with anti-Catholic persecutions, expropriations and terrors all its own.