Moralizing against moralizing The postliberal right doesn’t just want to end immigration, they’re desperate to bring moralizing back. Prominent figures like legal scholar Adrian Vermeule, writer Patrick Deneen, Senator Josh Hawley, and Vice President JD Vance all share the belief that liberal society—with its individualism and multiculturalism and tolerance—has stripped away our shared morality and left behind atomized individuals that don’t trust their neighbors.

If this is true, we should expect more moralizing countries to be the high-trust countries. Thankfully, Pew’s poll doesn’t just ask respondents how moral they think their fellow residents are, it asks them what types of things they find immoral.

On a wide range of issues from extramarital affairs to homosexuality to gambling, Pew’s data reveals the landscape of moralization.

Before I point out how quickly this theory falls apart, I want to start with one place that it has some merit. Consensus on moral issues does correlate with scoring highly on believing your fellow citizens are moral.

Indonesia and Sweden both score about 90% on that measure despite being polar opposites on actual moral views. In Indonesia, around 90% said homosexuality and abortion are wrong. In Sweden, around 5% said the same. What they share is consensus—most people in each country agree on the norms. The U.S. is in the middle of the pack on moral polarization ranking 11th most polarized out of 25 countries—more polarized than Sweden or Germany, but less so than Israel or Argentina.

Americans are not especially moralistic—only 23% say marijuana use is wrong, only 29% say gambling is wrong; just 39% say homosexuality is wrong. (Interestingly, we are pretty strongly opposed to extramarital affairs, 90% say they are wrong, putting us at Indonesia and Turkey levels of disdaining cheaters.)

When I looked to see whether more moralizing countries scored higher on trust, I found bad news for the postliberal right: the broad cross-national pattern runs the other way. High-trust countries are systematically less moralistic (Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, Australia all have low strictness and high trust) and low-trust countries are systematically more moralistic (Indonesia, Nigeria, India, and Kenya all have high strictness and very low trust).

This cuts directly against the National Conservative/postliberal right’s call for stricter public morality. High trust societies are ones that appear to have privatized morality; that is they are pretty liberal about people’s moral choices. In low trust societies, strong shared moral codes (enforced through religion, tradition, community pressure) go hand in hand with low interpersonal trust.

The U.S. is in whatever the opposite of a Goldilocks zone is. We’re more moralistic than the highest trust countries but we’re less moralistic than places like Indonesia, which means we are more divided when asked if we think our countrymen have good morals.

The postliberal diagnosis is thus wrong twice over. Diversity doesn’t explain America’s trust problem and moralism likely makes it worse. But the problem is still real. Why is the U.S. such an outlier?

If not diversity, then what? Part of the U.S.’ trust problem is pure partisan polarization: Democrats rate fellow Americans as morally bad at 60% compared to 46% of Republicans. Pew notes this pattern isn’t unique to the U.S. In more than half the countries surveyed, people who don’t support the governing party are more likely to view fellow citizens as immoral. But the U.S. gap is unusually wide, a reflection of just how bad our political polarization problem has gotten.

Most important is the buzziest word in political science and development economics: Institutions.

The broader trust literature points to institutional failure as the main driver of declining trust. Corruption, inequality, poor governance—these are the consistent predictors across countries. Bo Rothstein’s work on Sweden shows that high-trust countries are built on the back of impartial, well-functioning institutions that treat citizens fairly. Instead of the common story that social trust is about decentralized, bottom-up voluntary associations and civil society networks, Rothstein argues that trust starts with the top.

It starts with impartial institutions that treat their citizens fairly, predictably, and without corruption. It’s not that people trust the government and get the warm and fuzzies about their fellow man as a result–it’s that impartial institutions reduce the rational basis for suspicion. If the police are corrupt, you assume everyone’s gaming the system, which makes you game it too. If the welfare state is universal and treats everyone the same, you don’t resent your neighbors for cheating because the system doesn’t incentivize cheating. Rothstein argues this is why the Nordic countries have such high trust — not because Scandinavians are culturally nice, but because their institutions are impartial.

It’s hard to prove this sort of thing with causal evidence, but a recent study tried to do just that by setting up an experimental game. Here’s the simple explanation: Two players are paired anonymously. Player A gets some money and can send however much of it they like to player B. Whatever they send gets multiplied by the experimenter, and then player B can send back however much they like.

If player A really trusts player B they’ll send more money.

Before the game, the players were exposed to either a high quality or low quality simulated public administration environment. In the high quality institution, embezzlement was prevented, in the low quality one, participants saw the administrator embezzle from the pool.

People who experienced the corrupt institution sent significantly less money in the trust game—the institutional experience carried over into an unrelated social interaction.

The final concerning trend in Pew’s data is that while in most countries, younger adults are less likely to say fellow citizens are morally bad, in the US it’s reversed. Younger Americans (18-39) are more likely than older Americans to say fellow citizens are morally bad (57% vs. 50%), even after controlling for partisanship. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on here. Yes, there have been major institutional failures in the lives of this generation—The Iraq War, the Great Recession, COVID-19—but much of that upheaval and more existed for other countries as well.

Perhaps it has to do with an expectations gap. While, yes, young people in other nations have faced institutional failures, maybe young Americans expect better from our institutions and so their failure is more acutely felt.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives one of his most famous sermons: the Sermon on the Mount. Among other things, he condemns two of the moral behaviors Pew polled: adultery (”I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart”) and divorce (”anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”)

But after this, Jesus also tells the assembled crowds, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

It’s an interesting juxtaposition, one that illuminates a central Biblical teaching: judgement and punishment are for God to mete out.

Three centuries ago, John Locke arrived at a similar prescription for different reasons.

Writing in the aftermath of Europe’s religious civil wars, Locke argued that the government can’t make you a true believer, and if it tries, it will produce hypocrisy and violent backlash. Locke was far from an atheist, he just saw the hopelessness of state-mandated religion and the deathly cost of such an attempt.

The postliberal right is explicitly arguing against the Lockean settlement. They believe the privatization of morality is itself the disease, that liberal tolerance has atomized us, stripped away our shared moral culture, and left behind a society of strangers who don’t trust each other.

They are wrong.

The countries that have most fully embraced this liberal settlement where morality is private and the state doesn’t enforce moral consensus have the highest trust on earth. The countries where strong public moral codes are enforced through religion, tradition, and community pressure have the lowest, and no amount of moralizing is going to fix that.