As is both usual and regrettable in The Raspberry Patch, last week’s post was pocked with a few typos, misspellings, clarity fuzzings, and other assorted stylistic infelicities. With help I found and fixed most of these and updated the post in the Substack archive. Flaws notwithstanding, the basic argument and supporting evidence for it were, I think, clear enough. This post, similarly, has me feeling a bit uneasy: It feels not as tightly wrapped as I want it to be. The order of presentation doesn’t yet feel exactly right, but again I think the basic gist will get through….and I’ll keep at it after the fact until I’m satisfied with it.
Otherwise, for those interested in my writing on contemporary American politics, one more item has appeared, just yesterday: “The US Presidential Election: Before and After the Harris-Trump Debate,” RSIS Commentary 133/2024, 12 September 2024. It’s free to all. In my experience the RSIS website can be a little slow, but it does eventually deliver the goods. As with most things, a little patience can pay a nice dividend.
So onward we go, with part 3 of Chapter 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy.
. . . .The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
We have not finished even yet with Plato, but we need to set him down more firmly in the American context. So let’s re-ask our question above with this objective in mind.
What happens, for example, when the organic sinews of community, the source of the trust that allows formal Enlightenment institutions to be build on the natural cooperative habits of familial and communal experience, become weakened not because of overweening government intrusion, but for other reasons? What if the bedrock of the cooperative model, the family, is weakened? What if too much immigration too fast to assimilate weakens bridging social trust? What if for various reasons the evolved trigenerational character of the species can no longer be sustained, older people lose their roles for the third third of life, parents have no help during the “paterntal emergency,” as David Gutmann named it, and children are denied the wisdom of their elders?[1] If organic social sinews break and social anxiety and disorder spreads as a consequence, isn’t it incumbent upon government to step in to fill the voids?
The inclination to see things that way in America in the latter part of the 20th century and now the first quarter of the 21st, to see government as a means of compensation for the erosive impact of what has become corporate/finance capitalism on society, comes easier to some people and some subcultures than it does to others. History bears legacies, even as different people interpret them differently. Looking at the trajectory of American attitudes toward poverty and hardship over time, it seems reasonable to ask if it is in the nature of a governmental system shaped in the womb of the Scottish Enlightenment to become a meliorist enterprise over time. Why the hunch?
Because of the self-image of Protestantism—as we saw in Chapter 2, a main and essential ingredient in what became the Enlightenment—as a new, progressive, and universally valid transcendence over Roman Catholic stolidity, superstition, and general backwardness. Protestantism particularly in its youth, and in its Lutheran/Episcopalian/Anglican dispensations in contrast to its Calvinist ones, tended and still tends to generate a “yes, we can,” cutting-edge of progress presumption.
In a religious age, what seemed to be on the cutting edge of advancing modernity is not what we might recognize as progressive now, in an age when many intellectuals have come to characterize Abrahamic religion as regressive. But the Protestant Reformation, which we might just as reasonably call the Protestant Revolution for the political upheaval it sired, seemed to those loyal to it to be the very quintessence of progressive thought. It was literacy- and individualism-promoting, accommodating of many proto-secular arrangements especially in Britain, and unafraid of worldly material progress. The “poverty of the church,” long since a mere wraith of an old ideal, pretty much vanished altogether both inside and outside houses of prayer.
That youthful and progressive self-image has endured even as time has altered its content and multiplied Protestantism’s heterogeneity both in terms of the number of denominations and their internal diversity (think Baptists, for example). Its stickiness has remained even as religious reformation gave way to a secular denaturing as gospel became social gospel in the early 20th century. This is how one might track the movement from mainline 19th-century Protestant social thought, which considered itself progressive but not avowedly political, to someone like the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, who embraced both churchly and political liberalism, and from him to entirely secular and most often anti-Abrahamic “woke” progressivism. What all the phases have in common is the self-image of being on the side of the angels, on the progressive and heroic edge of moral advance.
Obviously, not all of what has happened in more than two centuries of American history is problematic. We in the West, and in America, now lack a common religious and literary canon to the extent we once did, but we substitute popular films with often noble messages. We don’t read poetry much anymore, but we substitute heartfelt song lyrics.[2] We don’t read naturalistic fiction as much as we used to, so we substitute documentaries of creative people designing and building “tiny houses” and gardens to enlarge our theory of mind. Far more important, we still have a working definition of ourselves as “we” as opposed to everyone else—“them.” It may be that as the inclusiveness of “we” has expanded over time its emotional intensity has waned for many, and these days we see some extreme expressions of that sentiment in the nativism and xenophobia of much MAGA and related Christian Nationalist rhetoric. We recently beheld J.D. Vance insist that what he called “Southern Bourbons” were a foundational American people, and that America is less an idea than a bloodline ethnic nationalism based partly at least on this very group. But these substitutions and developments have democratized the culture and enriched it. With very few exceptions, only minorities of the privileged were ever deeply literate as groups before about a century or so ago; only they could enter the palaces of the elite. Now America can draw on a wider reservoir of talent, and that is much to the good.
But not all of it is good, as the uber-progressive latter-day Protestant narrative insists, leading some to cite a process called the Protestant Deformation, not least as regards its impact on U.S. foreign policy thinking.[3] With the idea of a “progressive” state comes the specter of doomed efforts at democracy promotion where it does not fit the culture—as in Afghanistan—and at home it encourages mainly left-of-center politicians to look down their noses and lecture people they consider their moral inferiors. Both aspects of the Protestant Deformation have caused trouble lately. The Bush 43 Administration’s “Forward Strategy for Freedom” in the wake of 9/11 counterproductively persuaded vast stretches of the Muslim world that the new U.S. foreign policy to fight the so-called War on Terror was a new crusade aimed at their faith. In its wake that policy arguably evoked more anti-Americanism and more terror, notably on account of the counterproductive March 2003 insertion of an American army into the heart of the Arab world. At home, had that preachy tendency been kept in check during the 2016 election season we would likely have been spared the many misanthropies of the Trump presidency, and its still incomplete aftermath.
Worse, as already limned, the tech-abetted diffusion of the culture beneath the lingering impulses of Protestant progressivism has diluted, if not melted altogether, a coherent canon of stories common to nearly everyone and substituted instead a cacophony of alternatives. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings and cousins may still sometimes read or tell what are either literally sacred or once-removed hallowed stories of credit and blame, of origins and destinies. But how can they compete with glitz-tech industrial folklore, with Disney, Star Wars, or Marvel comics come, as it were, to two-dimensional life virtually in the flesh?
It takes no long stride of reasoning to add, how can they compete with the more explicit political storylines of adversary-culture fiction fare that began with “Three Days of the Condor” and has endlessly escalated ever since in television and Hollywood manufactures? Civics is no longer much taught in American schools, partly a casualty largely of the “no child left behind” debacle coupled with the still-rolling jeremiadic wave of high-cultural self-flagellation that followed Vietnam and Watergate. Instead, civics “lessons” of a negative valance are pumped ceaselessly into young and not so young minds alike minds in fictional garb, where the government (especially the CIA) is always the bad guy secretly plotting some dastardly deed.
This stuff in its great abundance constitutes a three-lane express onramp to the “deep state” conspiracy theories now even more popular on the Right than on the Left. A hop, skip, and jump down the line, too, this is how someone like Edward Snowden, who violated his oath by giving away the plumbing diagram of U.S. counterespionage art, gets spun with barely a peep of dissent—and along with wildly exaggerated and flat-out mistaken depictions of what the National Security Agency is and does—into a noble “whistleblower” instead of the traitor he is.
There are indeed uncanny resemblances between the simplified plots of mass-entertainment fare and the garden-variety syntax of conspiracy theories.[4] The shadow effect on political thinking shows in the performative simplemindedness of contemporary political ideas, or what passes for them. What “sells” to an audience, and what gets hits on social media must be simple to get across, showing again that, as Charles Frankel put it years ago, “Simplemindedness is not a handicap in the competition of social ideas.”
But Frankel, author of the 1955 meditation on modernity The Case for Modern Man, could not have imagined the meteoric current career of simplemindedness at work and at play in American politics in an era when unfiltered social media, the collapse of media professionalism, and plummeting educational standards concerning government set the context for the dissemination of “news.” A harmless but telling sign of social media-induced performative simplemindedness is the wide proliferation of a certain colorful “In this house” yard sign in recent years. The most common variation reads like this:
IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE
BLACK LIVES MATTER
WOMEN’S RIGHTS = HUMAN RIGHTS
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL
SCIENCE IS REAL
LOVE IS LOVE
Diversity Makes Us Stronger
INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE
This projectile virtue-signaling has so irritated some people that they devised and offered for sale a rebuttal in the same rainbowish color scheme, reading instead:
IN THIS HOUSE WE BELEVE THAT
SIMPLISTIC PLATITUDES
TRITE TAUTOLOGIES
AND SEMANTICALLY OVERLOADED APHORISMS
ARE POOR SUBSTITUTES
FOR RESPECTFUL AND RATIONAL DISCUSSIONS
ABOUT COMPLEX ISSUES
Along with the pro-police/pro-military blue-striped American flags widely on display in some quarters, probably tens of thousands of the former sign are out there; I’ve seen exactly two of the latter one.
In place of seriousness when seriousness is called for we have instead the continuous impulse toward easy entertainment. Following on Dr. Crichton’s observations, Americans have come to believe that they have an inalienable right to live not only unseriously but in vivid fantasy. The shadow effect is everywhere around us. The industrial folklore of corporate advertising has abetted the cognitive reification of fictional structures created by “Hollywood, Disneyland and Vegas,” as Bruno Maçães has put it.[5] Extended media spectacles like “Russia collusion” and “impeachment” and FBI raids on Mar-a-Lago become more real than the events, enabling actors within them, Mitch McConnell, say, to pretend if they choose that what is happening is not particularly serious, just part of the show. In short, the spectocracy has spread from its electorate audience to many of the actors, creating a form of pseudo-government that not even Plato could have imagined as a variety of circus.
We see not only the show but the shameless justification for it as well. Didn’t Donald Trump tell us outright that The Art of the Deal privileges “truthful hyperbole, an innocent form of exaggeration”—which are of course snake-oil showmen lies? Hasn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose Green New Deal was a quest staged in a dreamland far beyond practical politics, admitted that, “We have to become master storytellers”?
It has been so easy for the anti-foundationalism of postmodernism in practice to conquer American culture, from Left now to Right, because the proliferation of fantasy has diminished respect for the occasional harsh reality that once lingered beyond the relative purity of the New World imagination. Now that “flat” mediated images predominate cognitively over direct imagery input, certainly for urbanites engaged in symbol-manipulation jobs, reality is no longer the common lodestone of reference for evaluating statements and assertions about social and political reality. It is no coincidence that the abbreviation IRL (in real life) has popped into being on social media; its denizens actually need a reminder that there is such a place after all.
Note, moreover, another way that our fantasy scripting of surreality interweaves with reality itself to confound our sense of clarity between the spheres. Three or four decades ago most sci-fi fantasy entertainment pictured aliens as coming from outer space, and some still does, like the television serial “Resident Alien.” But “zombie apocalypse” themes in which the enemy comes from inside have been dominant for a while now. Coincidence? No shadow effect here from the hemorrhaging of social trust, really? Is it any wonder that so many Americans actually believed that the September 11, 2001 attacks were “an inside job,” and that about a quarter to a third of Americans believed as of mid-2021 that COVID-19 was some sort of U.S. government plot? Just another example in a different context of William James’s insight from 1896 that human beings, as meaning-making because meaning-needing symbol users, tend to “believe all we can and would believe everything if only we could.”[6]
Though it was not what James was talking about, the broader implication, alas, is that slack-jawed credulity is indeed a fraternal twin of slack-jawed skepticism, and of course also the other way around. Again, this is nothing entirely new: 19th-century Americans fell for all sorts of snake oil, too, and absent a national security crisis most distrusted central authority. But the technology powering contemporary industrial folklore did not exist back then. It’s the difference between being kidnapped on a bicycle and being hijacked in a Lear jet.
The Great Morphing
A secret hiding in plain sight accounts for what may be the denouement of the cultural contradictions of liberal democracy. American government stands transformed from a procedural apparatus designed to adjudicate between Madison’s “factions” to one that has taken on not just a bully pulpit but what amounts to an actual pulpit disguised in secular form. Making the citizenry “better people” was not an accepted function of American Federal government in the Founders’ era and well beyond; that was, as already noted, understood to be the job of family, faith community, and wider community. Secular-inclined Americans in particular, however, have come increasingly to look to their leaders, especially to the President, as a key source of moral guidance for lack of many or any other places to look.
That role makes the President a source of unity, at least when the role is taken seriously and properly performed. But it also makes it seem natural, even obligatory, for the Federal government to have and hold principled positions on culture war struggles such as abortion, homosexual marriage, gender definitions, and all the rest—even though there is no remit in the Constitution for any of this in the Federal government’s delineated powers. At least as far as the founding template is concerned, these are, again, matters for families, faith communities, localities, and states to determine. The real reason this all seems so natural as matters for Federal determination is that Federal civil rights law, an extension of the Civil War amendments—the 14th Amendment in particular—and, a century later, the civil rights movement, forces Federal decisions on all matters pertaining to the legal rights of citizens. Federal law has thus been rendered over the years so as to touch nearly every aspect of individual citizens’ lives. Chunks of money are often involved—concerning inheritance laws, for example—but sometimes have to do with matters like who can visit whom in a hospital sick bed. The Founders would be aghast to behold this Federal legal-meliorist creep over the years.
This raises a neuralgic issue that those left of center often have trouble crediting. To those genuine conservatives seized by the brilliant good sense of the Founders, whose sense of patriotism includes an intellectual admiration of limited and self-limiting government, the Constitution has already been thoroughly debauched from its origins. MAGA schemes to steal lost elections—2020 and prospectively 2024, as well—naturally raise accusations of transactional attitudes, and a total instrumentalist attitude toward the Constitution: Use it when it helps, ignore or subvert it when it doesn’t. And that is accurate; MAGAt entrepreneurs are but very rarely intellectuals of any insight or stature. Certainly that description applies to Donald Trump. But Claremont Institute purists who are leaving California for more conservative social digs sincerely believe that their ability to live a religious Christian life in a socio-political environment imagined by the Founders is fast wasting away. What they are really doing, if they are honest with themselves, is retreating into monastical enclaves. But when they point to a legal and social order today in the United States that rubs hard against the grain of original American republican sensibilities, like it or not they have a point.
Truth to tell, too—and pace J.D. Vance’s revisionism—the American nation has always been more like a church community than a typical ethno-linguistically based nationalism, at least in the sense that we feel we have something transcendent in common as Americans to offer the world by example. This is why Richard Hofstadter wrote of America back in 1989: “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.” That is correct because, as we have seen, a socially embedded religious culture is where the idea of a progressive meliorist state comes from, and that fact is what has led some observers to sense the gravitational pull on the American liberal democratic ethos of secularism back toward a form of monadic political theology.[7]
This is hardly just an American affair, by the way. Gustave Flaubert was getting at precisely the same thing in 1869 when he had a character complain in A Sentimental Education about “legislators who set themselves up as a Lycurgus to mould society,” insisting that “all modern reformers believe in Revelation.”[8] Reform beyond a certain timidity requires an authoritative godhead, in other words, that speaks to humankind about earthly as well as celestial issues. This is a natural product of an increasingly literate society: Once people reach the stage of self-consciousness through the interiority-generating effects of deep reading, most sense and many seek some deeper meaning to existence than just being, buying, and consuming. Once a critical mass of society feels that way, its creative minority, at least, its leaders and elites, wants their social and political institutions to correspond to and support that feeling.
So this is ironic: The Founder fathers saw secularism, as defined in late-18th century terms, as protection against tyranny and a goad not just to a formal separation of powers between branches of government, but also to a separation of passions between faith-based and political ones. If the latter separation for whatever reasons breaks down, the former separation may become endangered, as well.
Both Adams and Jefferson certainly understood this, but their options in the moment were limited. What they could not have foreseen is the manner of transformation of what was always latent in America’s origin as a covenantal society. They could not have known how what were, at their core, actually religious values would be serially re-seeded and grown in American political history with Abolitionism, female suffrage, workers rights, civil rights, and more. They could not have foreseen how all this would double back to magnify the Federal government’s roll in the social order precisely in ways they strove to design against. Would Plato have been as surprised? Probably not, he the master of political irony; but we will never know.
What we all do know is the list of American reform movements over the years, and most of us are justifiably proud of their role in reinventing America at least three times, when reinvention became necessary to obviate dissolution or self-defamation. The idea that the Founders’ design could be fully weatherproof against change over more than two centuries is simply unrealistic, which is why the uber-conservative charge of constitutional debauchery raised to justify its instrumental attitude toward the rule of law cannot pass practical muster. W can argue overt the wisdom of specific reforms over the years, but not over the need for them. Moreover, it is disingenuous to suggest that American reforms were imposed by “Yankee elites,” as Vance and others have claimed. In fact, all significant American reform impulses began outside government as social movements that infiltrated and redirected government—and then ultimately captured and all but possessed it.
Opposition to reform, operating as a kind of drag against its nature and pace, also arose outside of government. Until about a century ago the more conservative elites among us abjured the kinds of government-driven moral missions that characterized, say, earlier French republics (A Sentimental Education was published in 1869 but is set twenty years earlier amid the chaos and fall of the short-lived Second Republic). Political leaders had important roles as models of propriety, but that is where the self-limiting sway of 18th- and 19th-century liberalism generally punctuated it and that is where the punctuation should remain, they argued. Here is how William F. Buckley, Jr. put the case in 1965—as though one administration was to blame for a tectonic mentality shift already many decades in the making:
[T]he government of the United States, under Lyndon Johnson, proposes to concern itself over the quality of American life. And this is something very new in the political theory of free nations. The quality of life has heretofore depended on the quality of human beings who gave tone to that life, and they were its priests and its poets, not its bureaucrats.[9]
Buckley felt the tailwind of the zeitgeist, but there was ultimately nothing much he could do about it. As the status and authority of the cleric, the writer, and the male family elder declined—priests, poets, and parents, in other words—the shift to a public pulpit from private ones crept forward. Many have argued that the New Deal marked the key tipping point in this process, but perhaps the most vivid tipping occurred about a quarter century later, during a Republican administration, in 1957. That is the year “In God We Trust” first appeared on U.S. paper money, three years after the Pledge of Allegiance had been edited to include the phrase “under God,” and our President sent the National Guard into Little Rock, Arkansas to forcibly desegregate public schools there.[10] That was a gist Flaubert’s complaining character could have really gotten arms around.
This gradual but seemingly ineluctable shift, from a limited and self-limited Federal government explicitly agnostic about social policy as such to one up to its nostrils in it, is much more important in accounting for the current dysfunction of the political culture than may be first appreciated. When a limited and self-limiting government works well enough, everyone knows it simply by the absence of public crises. That kind of government doesn’t claim it will deliver the moon, the stars, or the romance associated with both, so not delivering such emoluments does not register in the popular imagination as failure. But when for whatever reasons, good, bad or indifferent, a government commits itself to use public policy to solve what amount to moral challenges, some nearly as old as civilization itself, that are open-ended and often mutually incommensurate, it can only disappoint—at least some people. Promise the moon to those ensnared in Tocquevillian Paradoxes but fail to deliver it and trust in all government promises will suffer, and with it the institutions believed pledged to deliver the goods. It is therefore characteristic of a meliorist-inclined government and its associated institutions to eventually leak trust as social norms, following the rhetoric of political and cultural elites, bend in meliorist-friendly directions. This can be akin to spraying ideological napalm on a smoldering liberal democratic order insofar as that order may lose altitude for other reasons. But the ultimate irony is that, looking back, it all seems so inevitable. The seeds of evolution toward the meliorist dispensation were there all along.
This dynamic is also relevant to the malaise of liberalism noted above. Some believe that liberal attitudes imported into political culture from religious beliefs and other sources inform and sustain liberalism in politics, and that is the view which sees politics as an epiphenomenal extrusion of culture and social structure. Others believe that political liberalism spreads downward, as it were, into private lives and attitudes and should do so, such that living in a liberal democracy sires liberal attitudes in our private lives.
Of course, both views can be true if we accept a normal dialectical relationship between institutions and attitudes, but even so we intuit that the bottom-up causal arrow is stronger than the top-down one. That said, the relationship is not a constant because historical contexts differ. Thus, classical liberalism in its origin, in that twinning of the Reformation and the Age of Reason, arose at a time when tyranny from the center of a state was a vivid danger to conscience and integral community. Under such conditions historical memory embedded in culture drove political attitudes and disposed them to construct a limited and self-limiting state. But when despite that initial design the same state over time has become the presumed center of social and moral life, carried there on the back of a meliorist sensibility with roots both in the Great Awakenings of American history and in what resembles a spun-off version of secularized political theology, then of course some philosopher will come along in due course to claim that liberal democracy (vaguely or misdefined) “has made us all liberals.”[11]
It is a logical argument but one still on the whole mistaken as applied to current circumstances. If it were true that we Americans, and we in the West, are now all liberals in our hearts and minds because we have lived long in liberal democracies, then how to explain the burgeoning appeal of illiberal authoritarian memes coming from Left as well as Right nowadays? Far more likely than liberalism having trickled down to become a way of life, it is—just as Plato described it—democracy that has instead trickled down to create a wide-open franchise that has become a means for more or less indiscriminate—because it is now decisively driven by political advertising resources and skills—crowdsourcing decisions about who should wield political power.
That development has sired some questionable consequences lately. Indeed, the current egalitarian pretense is the environment in which liberalism has suffered so much. Both leftwing utopian-friendly and rightwing populist-friendly egalitarian impulses are authoritarian-majoritarian in spirit; neither has much time or sympathy for toleration of principled dissent or genuine open-minded debate. Both are shaped by the return of the zero-sum in the culture and the entertainment-driven obsession with spectacle.
Alas, spectacalized surreality is not friendly to the subdued moral aesthetics of liberalism; it glaringly magnifies the non-heroic metabolism of the liberal spirit, which is one of its indelible disadvantages, especially in tempest-tossed times, in the face of ideologically bloated transhistorical claims of all kinds. But spectacalized surreality is the circus flavor that the American demos, such as it is, apparently wants, and it wants it so badly that the very process that birthed it—democracy—now lacks much salience as it comes under sustained attack from authoritarian impulses Right and Left.
Possibly even worse than promising and failing to deliver the moon, a government that for whatever reasons usurps the function of tending to the moral ballast of a society can further vitiate that society’s underlying organic social coherence—what’s left of it in the rush of pluralizing and destabilizing postmodernity—and cause it to further hemorrhage trust. James C. Scott, in his “anarchist’s squint,” explains:
Most villages and neighborhoods function precisely because of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it. . . . [T]he formal order of the liberal state depends fundamentally on a social capital of habits of mutuality and cooperation that antedate it, which it cannot create, and which in fact it undermines.
More important, if that is possible, a classical liberal order that gradually shape-shifts into an overbearing state, even if it continues to think of itself as classically liberal,
. . . destroys the natural initiative and responsibility that arise from voluntary cooperation. Further, the neoliberal celebration of the individual maximizer over society. . . encourage[s] habits of social calculation that smack of social Darwinism. . . . [W]e are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.[12]
In a nutshell, the great morphing expresses the dynamic wherein American liberal democracy contradicted its origins and eventually undermined its own future. But it simply could not be helped, except perhaps in wan theory. This Plato would have understood in a trice; he can be shockingly prescient 2,400 years after the fact.
But he’s not always so. As already suggested, Plato could not have imagined a buffered republican democratic order with constitutional guardrails guaranteeing individual liberty and the lawfully protected right to dissent, or a liberal democratic order with a separation of powers between branches of government that could survive and become even more stable through episodes of testing and self-correction. He also could not have imagined the genius of the American Federal system, however imperfect its representational formulae have been and still are, working in balance like a homeostat. Sometimes the system bespeaks too little democratic input, as when elites manage to manufacture implied consent to excess and so feel safe to self-deal and look down their noses at the hoi polloi. More democratic input resets that imbalance—think Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. Sometimes the system bespeaks too much democratic input, as with populist risings such as have occurred in long waves throughout U.S. political history, usually corresponding, as in the present tense, to a socio-religious Great Awakening. Better elite management, often entailing system reforms, rebalances against that—think both Roosevelts.
Until now anyway, bumps against the guardrails this way and that have eventually loosed dynamics that arced the system back toward the mean. Eventually the well-earned bruises that came with the struggle healed. The current populist bump, coming in major Right and minor Left versions, may do so, as well. American democratic collapse is not inevitable. Or it may not rebalance this time around, leading to the guardrails failing and the nation tumbling into an abyss of irretrievable division. If it does tumble, Plato will come out looking real good after all. All due respect aside, I’m hoping he doesn’t. But if he does, bet your bottom dollar that a child, of sorts, will lead it.
[1] The reference here is to the brilliant and much under-appreciated book by David Gutmann, Reclaimed Powers (Northwestern University Press, 1987).
[2] See my “Bemused: Lyricism as Poetry in 21st-Century America,” The American Interest, November 11, 2017.
[3] James Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation,” The American Interest I:2 (Winter 2005).
[4]Since writing this sentence I discovered the existence of Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2019). I have yet to read it, but I would be surprised if it overlooks the point I am making. Note also Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press, 2014).
[5] Maçães, History Has Begun, p. 3.
[6] James, “The Will to Believe,” The New World, Vol. 5 (1896) pp. 327-47. James was arguing that it is sometimes justified to accept a belief in the absence of confirming evidence because acceptance opens the mind to the possibility of confirming evidence that might otherwise be disattended. He was, in other words, arguing the phenomenological case as a tool of intellectual and moral advance in the same way he did when he earlier wrote that, “if you can change your mind you can change your life.”
[7] The gist of Mark Lilla’s book The Stillborn God.
[8] Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 193. In the novel’s context, the speaker is trying to show that Rousseau and the Papists actually have more in common than either would have liked to admit.
[9] National Review, August 7, 1965.
[10] The legislation to put “In God We Trust” on paper money passed in July 1955, but the first bills with the altered design did not appear until 1957. Herbert Parmet’s 1972 book Eisenhower and the American Crusades: Piety on the Potomac is insightful here.
[11] The reference is to Rothfeld, cited above, and to the book she reviewed in that essay: Alexandre Lefebvre, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton University Press, 2024).
[12] Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism, pp. xxii-xxiii.