Generational Political Theologies: Why Constitutional Meaning Is Fragmenting in Western Europe

The New Digest is delighted to present a guest essay by Mishael van Luipen, who is a student in law and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

We are misdescribing constitutional conflict in Western Europe. What presents itself as disagreement over law, over the rule of law, democratic mandate, institutional restraint, is better understood as a conflict over the conditions that make those things intelligible in the first place. Appeals to constitutional principle increasingly fail to persuade, not because they are weak arguments, but because they presuppose a shared world that no longer exists.

To understand this failure, we need a different concept: generational political theologies. By this I mean the historically situated structures through which authority is justified, crisis interpreted, and political order rendered meaningful. They are “theological” not in a confessional sense but in a functional one: they supply ultimate criteria of legitimacy that are not themselves open to procedural adjudication. They answer foundational questions, what constitutes authority, what forms of crisis justify exceptional action, what kind of order is worth preserving, questions that precede legal reasoning and cannot be resolved by appealing to the very procedures whose authority they simultaneously contest.

In postwar Western Europe, these structures are increasingly shaped not by a shared historical consciousness but by generational experience. Constitutional disagreement has accordingly ceased to be a disagreement within a common framework. It is a contest between rival interpretive sovereignties.

What a Constitution Is

Constitutional theory tends to oscillate between two positions. The first treats the constitution as a formal framework: a system of rules allocating power, protecting rights, and structuring decision-making. The second treats it as inseparable from politics, a product of ongoing contestation rather than a constraint upon it. Both positions assume that the meaning of constitutional order is stable enough to sustain disagreement at the level of rules or institutions. Neither can account for the condition in which that meaning itself becomes contested.

A constitution, properly understood, is a symbolic order: the medium through which a political community represents its authority to itself. It connects past experience, present structure, and future expectation into a coherent framework of meaning. It renders power intelligible and justifies legal norms through historical memory, collective identity, and obligation across time. Constitutional disagreement, thus, is disagreement over this framework, over what kind of order the constitution expresses, why it deserves obedience, and whether it still speaks to the historical experience of those it governs.

A constitution is therefore, at its core, a temporal structure. It holds together what Koselleck called the space of experience and the horizon of expectation — the community’s inherited past and its anticipated future — in a present that can be inhabited as meaningful. Constitutional legitimacy depends on this temporal continuity being felt, not merely asserted. When it is felt, citizens experience themselves as participants in an ongoing story, bound by obligations that precede them and extending toward a future they share. When it is not, the constitution persists as form while its capacity to command genuine allegiance quietly drains away. The crisis of constitutional meaning in Western Europe is, at its root, a crisis of this kind: not a crisis of rules, but of time.

The postwar constitutional settlement in Western Europe depended on just such a shared horizon. It was anchored in the memory of civilizational rupture, fascism, war, genocide, which functioned as a negative foundation for political order. Constitutionalism was experienced as restraint: a structure designed to prevent the return of existential politics. Rights and rule of law were not abstractions but civilizational achievements.

That horizon is now weakening. In highly institutionalised contexts, this produces a revealing symptom: political disagreement is displaced into technocratic management, reframed as optimisation rather than judgment. What presents itself as consensus often conceals the absence of a shared framework within which genuine disagreement could occur. Constitutionalism persists, but as form without substance, procedure without a common world.

Liberalism as Anticulture

To understand how this fragmentation arises, one must confront a deeper transformation in Western political life. Patrick Deneen’s central claim, that liberalism succeeds precisely by dissolving the cultural conditions that sustain it, provides the explanatory framework. Culture is understood as the medium through which human beings experience continuity across time: inherited practices, shared memory, and intergenerational obligation connecting past, present, and future. Constitutional orders depend on such continuity, deriving their legitimacy from embedding within a narrative that renders their principles meaningful.

Postwar Western Europe possessed such a narrative. Constitutionalism was understood as a response to catastrophe: a moral and political settlement grounded in the memory of totalitarian collapse. Liberalism undermines this continuity by replacing embedded forms of life with abstract rights and market relations, privileging autonomy over inheritance, present choice over historical obligation. The protoliberal Hobbes had already identified the anthropological baseline: in the absence of a shared teleological horizon, there is “no common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.” What Hobbes presented as an anthropological condition becomes, under liberal anticulture, a civilizational one.

What remains is a system that is procedurally durable yet symbolically thin. Law continues to function, but it no longer carries a unified account of why it ought to be obeyed. The constitution ceases to mediate a shared historical experience and becomes available for reinterpretation by actors situated within divergent temporal frameworks. It is precisely within this vacuum that generational experience becomes politically decisive. When a shared constitutional memory weakens, cohorts increasingly interpret authority, emergency, and legitimacy through the crises that marked their own formation.

Four Generational Horizons

These categories are analytical ideal-types; they identify dominant symbolic horizons rather than uniform political orientations. Individual variation within each generation is substantial, but what they aim to capture is the modal structure of political imagination as shaped by formative historical experience.

Boomers: Chastened Constitutionalism. For those shaped by the memory of totalitarian collapse and democratic reconstruction, constitutional order appears as a moral achievement grounded in restraint. The rule of law functions as a bulwark against the return of existential politics. Authority is legitimate insofar as it is constrained; proceduralism and moderation are the hard-won lessons of catastrophe. From this horizon, the erosion of institutional norms appears as a failure of political will, recoverable through recommitment to established procedures.

Generation X: The Politics of Containment. This cohort inherits the postwar framework but experiences it through the lens of geopolitical fragility. Constitutional institutions are valued less as moral correctives than as stabilising mechanisms within a dangerous world. The political-theological form is one of containment: legitimacy lies in preventing escalation rather than realising any substantive vision of the good. Where the Boomer horizon is shaped by memory of collapse, Generation X is shaped by fear of rupture, and by a corresponding suspicion of political ambition that presents itself as transformative.

Millennials: Hollow Constitutionalism. Socialised in the last period of apparent normality, the 1990s, and then disrupted by financial crisis and declining institutional trust, this cohort experiences constitutionalism as formally intact but substantively empty. Arendt’s account of the disappearance of the public realm is precise here: when politics becomes administration, citizens no longer experience themselves as actors within a shared world but as objects of governance. What she describes as “rule by nobody,” authority without an author, captures this condition of depoliticised legitimacy. The deficit, for this generation, is not fear of collapse but the suspicion that the order no longer stands for anything worth preserving. It is then no surprise that this is the first generation gravitating toward more radical political preferences. Peter Thiel in his famous email identified the structural cause: the generational compact has been badly broken, the Boomer generation has maintained an iron grip on institutions long past the point of legitimate tenure, and when the handover finally comes it will be more sudden and dramatic than anyone expects precisely because it has been so long delayed. When one has no stake in the system, Thiel observes, one may well turn against it. The Millennial drift toward radicalism is not just ingratitude but a rational response to dispossession and unworldliness.

Generation Z: Permanent Emergency. For the youngest, and my own, cohort, the formative horizon is defined by overlapping crises, climate, migration, pandemic, geopolitical rupture, in which the distinction between rule and exception has blurred. Having grown up in a world with no recognisable normal, the 1990s are understood by this cohort primarily as cultural reference points absorbed from older generations, most concretely the apparently mythological era in which one could carry more than 100ml of liquid onto an aircraft without arriving at the airport two hours early to prove it. More analytically, following Agamben, modern governance increasingly reduces political life to the management of bare life, destabilising the traditional unity of state, nation, and territory. Authority is evaluated primarily in terms of its capacity to respond to crisis, even at the cost of normative stability. What earlier generations experienced as exception, this cohort experiences as the normal environment of politics.

But the deeper consequence of permanent exception is temporal. Schmitt’s concept of the exception presupposed a distinction between normal constitutional time and the moment of decision that suspends it. The exception was an interruption; its purpose was, at least notionally, the restoration of order (Schmitt’s commissarial dictatorship). What Agamben identified, and what the Gen Z horizon makes viscerally legible, is that the exception has ceased to be an interruption and become a standing condition. Constitutional time — the fragile continuity of past, present, and future within which judgment and deliberation can occur — has not been suspended but eroded from within. The result is a generation that evaluates authority not by its fidelity to an inherited order but by its capacity to manage the crisis of the present moment. When the temporal horizon collapses into the perpetual now of emergency, constitutional memory becomes irrelevant.

Fragmentation Without Resolution

These frameworks explain why constitutional arguments increasingly fail to persuade across audiences. Appeals to the rule of law resonate within the Boomer horizon, where restraint is the highest political virtue. Appeals to democratic mandate carry weight where legitimacy is understood in majoritarian terms. Appeals to emergency powers gain traction where crisis is perceived as permanent. Each argument presupposes a framework of legitimacy that is no longer universally shared.

The consequence is fragmentation at the level of meaning. Constitutional politics is no longer best understood as disagreement within a shared normative universe but as a competition between rival frameworks of ultimate justification: distinct loci of interpretive authority within a formally unified constitutional order. This has a crucial institutional implication. The erosion of a shared constitutional horizon entails the erosion of adjudicative authority. When no common framework of legitimacy exists, no institution, court, legislature, or executive, can resolve disagreement in a manner recognised as authoritative across the political community. Constitutional systems may persist formally while their capacity to sustain democratic legitimacy quietly diminishes.

At stake, ultimately, is the disappearance of a shared orientation toward the common good. As Aristotle argues, political community presupposes a shared understanding of justice directed toward others as a common end. Where that horizon dissolves, constitutional disagreement can no longer be resolved through appeal to shared standards, because those standards are themselves contested at the level of generational experience rather than merely at the level of legal interpretation. Constitutional politics becomes a contest among rival mythic horizons rather than deliberation within a shared world.

After the Anticulture

If this diagnosis is correct, the challenge in reconstituting the common good is first temporal before it is institutional or cultural. The fragmentation described is, beyond a disagreement about values, a collapse of the shared time within which values could be deliberated and transmitted. Each generational horizon inhabits a different relationship to constitutional past and future: the Boomer preserves a memory others no longer share; the Millennial inherits an empty form; the Gen Z cohort has abandoned the temporal horizon altogether, substituting crisis-response for deliberation.

The temptation is restoration; to reconstitute the postwar horizon by recovering its memory, reinvesting its symbols, and recommitting to its procedures. But the tranquillitas ordinis that held the postwar settlement together was never a positive achievement but an act of holding on, restraining collapse long enough for judgment to remain possible. That holding is now failing, and no recommitment to procedures will regenerate what sustained it.

This failure has a political consequence: the generational fragmentation described in this essay produces a legitimacy vacuum, and vacuums get filled. Schmitt’s distinction between commissarial and sovereign dictatorship is illuminating here, where, as the commissarial dictatorship suspends the existing order temporarily — as Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, a deviation framed as restorative, directed toward preserving a constitutional world that remained substantively alive — the sovereign dictatorship does something categorically different: it does not restore but refounds, replacing one legal order with another. The danger of the permanent emergency horizon that Gen Z already inhabits is not merely that it normalises exception. It is that the same formal gesture — emergency power framed as temporary and restorative — becomes sovereign in effect when there is no longer a shared constitutional world for it to restore toward. The commissarial can only hold if there is something to uphold.

What the collapse of constitutional time therefore requires is not restoration but reconstitution, and reconstitution begins at the level of institutions; at the level of formation. The postwar constitutional settlement already presupposed a moral vocabulary it had inherited but could no longer regenerate: the Tradition from which liberalism borrowed its account of human dignity, natural right, and the common good, and which it then systematically dismantled. To reconstitute shared frameworks of meaning now means going behind the liberal settlement to the sources it drew on, reading those texts as interlocutors with something valuable to teach rather than specimens of difference to be studied. This is what postmodern means directed toward premodern ends looks like in practice: institutions that must now consciously choose to hand on what was once unconsciously inherited.

That such institutions are beginning to appear is itself significant. The Huygens Master’s Programme in Liberal Arts — launching in Leiden in — is one example of the institutional form this requires: small, residential, text-centred, consciously positioned within a lineage rather than against one. That Europe’s first Great Books master’s programme had to be invented from scratch in is not an encouraging sign; it confirms the diagnosis. But that it exists at all suggests the retrieval is beginning to be instantiated. What makes this form adequate to the transmission problem is scale: formation requires proximity close enough that the text can find you as it was intended, contributing to your formation in libertas, not merely that you can extract from it in your licentia. A small seminar, an argument that begins over a text and finishes hours later, are conditions for the kind of handing-on the diagnosis requires. To treat them as optional is the gesture of Saul at Endor: reaching for the Tradition through sheer will, after the living connection has already been severed, and expecting the dead to speak on demand. What is required instead is formation that precedes the need: apprenticeship within a lineage while it can still be inhabited, not conjured.

Two paths then present themselves. The Benedictine option: withdrawal into enclaves that preserve the tradition while the broader culture continues its dissolution. Or the long march: the conscious reoccupation of the universities, courts, and legislative chambers that the anticulture has hollowed out, by people formed within a lineage rather than against one. The disembeddedness this essay has described is three generations deep, recent enough on a civilisational scale to be reversible. The Tradition was not destroyed but abandoned, and what was abandoned can be retrieved. Until that work is further along, we remain in the interval: hoping the emergency gestures of our politics remain commissarial, aware that without a tradition robust enough to constitute an order worth restoring, there is nothing to prevent them from becoming sovereign. That is the political-theological wager of the present moment. It will be resolved, or not, by whether the coming generations find their way back to the Source.