The third question is, will Democrats realize that both moral traditions need each other? As usual, politics is a competition between partial truths. The moral freedom ethos, like liberalism generally, is wonderful in many respects, but liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive.
America needs institutions built on the “you are not your own” ethos to create social bonds that are more permanent than individual choice. It needs that ethos to counter the me-centric, narcissistic tendencies in our culture. It needs that ethos to preserve a sense of the sacred, the idea that there are some truths so transcendentally right that they are absolutely true in all circumstances. It needs that ethos in order to pass along the sort of moral sensibilities that one finds in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — that people and nations have to pay for the wages of sin, that charity toward all is the right posture, that firmness in keeping with the right always has to be accompanied by humility about how much we can ever see of the right.
Finally, we need this ethos, because morality is not only an individual thing; it’s something between people that binds us together. Even individualistic progressives say it takes a village to raise a child, but the village needs to have a shared moral sense of how to raise it.
David Brooks, "How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars"
I largely agree with what Brooks is trying to do, and I want to give him credit for trying. But as usual, I have some quibbles: "...liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive" sounds like an endorsement of illiberalism, which I don't think he means. Why not just say 'conservative'. The idea of obtaining liberal education has become a conservative idea precisely because the meaning of the word Liberal has become attenuated in ways that most cosmopolitan Liberals don't recognize.
Essentially I think he's arguing for a metaxis, or a coincidentia oppositorum of Liberal and Conservative moral traditions. Mill represents the first and McIntyre the second. I think that Brooks goes wrong, though, when he lumps Taylor in with the second, 'you are not your own' tradition. For Taylor that simply is not true, but his goal is to establish how we can be our own in a non-trivial way.
Elsewhere in his essay, Brooks uses the phrase 'horizons of significance' in reference to Taylor without explaining it. In doing so seems inadvertently to lump Taylor into the conservative camp, but Taylor is man of the Left. He's also a Catholic, but that's what makes him interesting, imo. He's not easily categorizable. He in fact embodies exactly what Brooks is calling for, which is an integration of Right and Left moral traditions. He achieves this metaxis in his 1992 Massey lectures entitled "The Malaises of Modernity". I wish these five 45-minute-long lectures were more widely recognized, and I encourage the reader here to listen to them or to read them.
Taylor's offers what he calls the 'ethic of authenticity", which requires a deeply developed sense of mature individual freedom combined with a deeply felt sense of there being existential horizons of significance. It's his attempt to integrate the second with the first that prevents the first from devolving into a groundless, anything-goes narcissism.
And it raises the essential question: what does it mean to be authentically human? Any morally serious consideration of that question must draw upon what the great post-Axial religious and philosophical traditions have to say about it. This is precisely what the 'moral freedom ethos' that dominates cosmopolitan Liberalism fails to do. Or rather, the moral freedom ethos presupposes this tradition without understanding its broader horizons of significance, which leads to its trivialization.
Maybe more on this later.
BTW, here are the links to the subsequent Taylor lectures: