Age of Spectacle No. 24
Chapter 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy, final part 5
Today’s Raspberry Patch post completes Part I, “Puzzle Pieces,” of the Age of Spectacle manuscript. To those readers who have stuck it out from the start, back on April 5, and struggled along with me all these months, my praise and my gratitude. Just knowing that true stalwarts are among my readers gives me strength and sharpens my determination to work harder still to bring the manuscript up to my standards of excellence. I have a ways to go, but I think I am headed in the right direction. And just fyi: I have again put the book’s extended outline at the end of the post, particularly for those who have not been with us for a while, so it’ll be easier for them to get a feel for the whole project.
Just to note: We are back to our Friday afternoon posting time. Last week’s Thursday morning slot, as mentioned, became necessary because early Friday morning we were off to a campground just north of Bennington, Vermont to meet two of our children, one in-law tag-along spouse, and five of our grandchildren for the Vermont stone-skipping championship at Lake Paran. I can report that not only was a wonderful time had by all, but my son Gabriel won the professional bracket of competitors with a ginormous and hugely beautiful skip of 38! As some may know, the winner of stone-skipping competitions typically gets fudge as a prize. Hey, shut up: There’s nothing wrong with a prize you can eat.
Scilla and I detoured to Schenectady, New York to visit old friends—old meant in both senses of the word—on the way back to Wheaton. The Hudson River is still beautiful, in case anyone may be in doubt. Near Tarrytown we saw a highway ad sign for “Headless Horseman Hayrides.” In his day Washington Irving was both a gifted writer and self-promoter. I like to think he’d be proud of that sign all these years later.
Finally by way of introduction to this week’s post, I still have not decided about raising a paywall and opening the comments section. I have decided that between the end of Part I: Puzzle Pieces here and Part II: Emerging Picture to come, I will post an essay in two parts entitled “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?: Recent American Pro-Palestinian Campus Activism in Historical and Personal Perspective.” I will post it in two parts since its length exceeds the Substack limit for individual posts; but I intend to post both parts within the same week. Why do this at all? Truth to tell, I’d prefer that the essay appear in a non-Substack venue, but it is so atypically personal that the prospect of placing it seems to me dim to vanishing. But I like it, and the points it makes are important. So Substack to the rescue as venue of last but not least resort.
OK, metaphorical seat belts fastened, off we go to Part I’s finish line:
. . . . It seems self-evident that the first television generation, the one that grew up with animated Mighty Mouse and Tom Terrific, and with Snow White and Cinderella, all in vivid color, and with never an unhappy ending in sight, developed a different attitude toward the possibility of tragedy and seriousness in general than earlier generations who came of age looking straight and unvarnished into the maw of the Great Depression and the Second World War. And the happy endings came so fast; one rarely had to wait more than an hour, two at the most. If that did not qualify as instant psychic gratification, it came teasingly close.
Now today, with the technology hooking young people by the nose and dragging them forward faster than they can rationally go, so that even when they do read they usually only skim, if anything the lack of patience has redoubled. Why were we as Americans demonstrably so much less patient in dealing with COVID-19 than most other societies, and as earlier generations of Americans were in dealing with a host of quarantine-worthy pandemics? Frankly, we freaked, and we looked absurdly incompetent to most of the rest of the world in so doing. And this had little or nothing to do with the cynical, inept Federal administration that so royally botched the response to the crisis.
We Baby Boomers were invincible, immortal, and most of us were wildly rich by any reasonable comparison with earlier times, or compared to most of the rest of the world at that time. It was as if we were collective heirs to a great fortune that we ourselves had not created and knew not how to create; so with heirs who inherit dollars without sense, for there is a marked though not inevitable tendency to take the largesse for granted and so to squander it. Most Baby Boomers will remember a black-and-white television show that aired from 1955-60, every episode of which was a variation on this theme: “The Millionaire.”
There is also a sharply attenuated tendency in such circumstances to accept the messiness of the world, and to acknowledge its capacity for moral regress. As our hero Tomo says to the earnest young female archeologist in the very low-production value (by Western standards) Indonesian sci-fi adventure film “Firegate”: “It’s easy to be an idealist, if you have money.” (There is no telling where genuine wisdom may be found.) The parents and the youth of that generation had money, so most young folk became idealists just in time to respond to John F. Kennedy’s call to head out into a “New Frontier.” The relatively few realists amid the generation growing into maturity mostly shook their heads and shut their mouths.
The craziness of the 1968-70 period let it all hang out, so to speak. As many observers have pointed out, for those who lived through that none of what is going on today should be any great revelation, or seem entirely new. “We have all been here before,” once sang the late David Crosby: right. So Baby Boomers now have, or by rights ought to have, a sharper idea of what Bob Dylan meant in 1966 when he wrote, “You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.”[1]
For example, the Black Lives Matter movement has lately become the vanguard of the current left-social revolution; in 1968 at Palmer House, during a Students for a Democratic Society conclave attended by several celebrity Black Panthers, white radicals could be heard pleading to be “just a rider on the tail of a great black panther.”[2] BLM was explicitly based on the Black Panther experience and program; one of its founders was tutored in Marxist praxis by a former Weather Underground member—not that penumbral sympathizers who affirm the Black Lives Matter slogan have a clue about the animating ideology at the movement’s core.[3] That’s good in a way, and not so good in other ways.
So it has all happened before, but the context has changed thanks to the rapid growth of affluence, failed myth maintenance, and the erosion of deep literacy. Finding our way back, using genuine liberalism to counter the Marxoid illiberalism that is the wayward bastard child of the Enlightenment, may be much harder this time around. Those in the nation’s still sober and sane center, who spent the years between 2017 and 2020 mainly fighting irrationality in the White House on the Right, found themselves spending at least part of the next four fighting irrationality on the Left. We now see ever more distended oscillations between extremisms that threaten to reduce the glint of a remaining sane center to a suffocating spark in a cloud of radioactive ideological dust.
What we are seeing now with Black Lives Matter and DEI fever, with Baby Boomers having been ensconced now for a quarter century in the highest positions of social and political authority, is the latest surge of moral panic associated with race that always adopts the syntax of religious thinking. Over time that thinking becomes increasingly unmoored from any intellectual damper or array of accepted institutional constraints. Just as back then the center of gravity moved fast from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Stokely Carmichael to Bobby Seale, we’ve seen movement from a largely moderate, reasonable, and above all pragmatic middle to harebrained Manichean views like those of Ibram X. Kendi.[4]
But there are differences as well, and, again and as always, context is critical. One difference is that no matter what one believed about the policy wisdom of the Johnson and Nixon Administrations either in Vietnam or at home, no serious person really thought of them as flatly irrational and certifiably irresponsible, no matter some of the heated adversary-culture rhetoric of that day. The same could not be said either of the rhetoric or the rationality of Trump Administration. The country is far below and beyond that now; not even the reasonable, sober, and surprisingly successful Biden-Harris Administration has been able to wash away the weirdness stain of the Trump years.
More important, today we must add to the mix the unfiltered electronic sewer of the internet bringing us the simplified and hence warped collected tidings of the intervening economic stuttering, terror attacks, lost or inconclusive wars, serial leadership failures, and the plutocratic ravaging of the middle class. The typical fare is neither happy-ending nor heroic as it was, say, forty years ago so much as paranoid, violent, chest-bumping, coldblooded, pornographic, and rude.
Note, too, that the newer industrial folklore offerings come courtesy of devices deliberately designed to addict their users, devices unquestionably responsible for sharply dumbing literacy down—as we saw in Chapter 4. The reversal of the ambient technological optimism of a dozen years ago is unmistakable, and for good reasons: Just one of several is that market saturation of iPhones is just past a mere dozen years old. A coincidence? Some argue that social media is not just a problem but the problem when it comes to the mania that today afflicts the nation.[5] This cannot be true, some have claimed, because the afflicted addicted are mainly younger people, not the entire population or even most of it. That argument may have been persuasive as recently as half a dozen years ago. It is persuasive no longer; all the recent data we have on screen-time dwelling attests to it (of which more below).
The result of what isn’t new combined with what is? The combination has yielded a form of public life in which spectacle—again, thanks in large part to a fawning, market-share chasing broadcast media—has replaced the realest world brought to us by direct images based on direct experience and hollow performative displays that have replaced actual serious work for members of our political class.[6] No better formula for producing immoderation and cognitive gluttony exists.
Down the historical road a few centuries from Plato the Roman elite understood the uses of “bread and circus”—panem et circenses, as Juvenal put it—but they never could have imagined anything like the present spectacalization of American life, its politics ineluctably with it. The head of the Portland, Oregon chapter of the NAACP, E.D. Mondainé, got it right when he identified spectacle as the counterproductive cultural style of the day, showing how the BLM/antifa/Marxoid left, with its Naked Athena antics, played right into the hands of the Trump Administration.[7] If the Yippies and their idiot-of-the-moment at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the runaway Maoist Mark Rudd, helped at least a little via the negative follower effect to elect Richard Nixon in November 1968—and they did—might the post-George Floyd excesses of the BLM/antifa Left have done the same to re-elect an incumbent in 2020? The answer is that it nearly did. It helped make the election close enough to inspire an attempt to steal it through the courts and, when that failed, to steal it via a lame duck presidential-led insurrection against the Capitol as it counted Electoral College votes.[8]
Pull It Up By the Roots
There remains the question, one Plato cannot much help us with, of how important the latest pulse of the cyberlution is to what is happening in the country. The short answer is that it is a mighty accelerant, but it cannot accelerate what does not exist from other causes.
Twenty-first-century high-tech spectacle as a mode of cognitive para-normality is now producing mythic, magic-infused madness in the West and the United States because the basis for it has very long been latent in the culture. It has lurched into center stage thanks in part to the erosion of the status of scientific rationality and the surge of technologically enabled fantasy entertainment. It is also a case of the promiscuously associational human mind doing what it does best with a multi-strata cultural reservoir filled up over time: recursivity. It sets life to imitate its own art, even entertainment as a lower form of art, and nowadays also to imitate artifice, including its own advertising images. Affluence-seated spectacle sucks the seriousness out politics and hence out of government, turning both into polarized and polarizing spectacle for the pleasure of a demobilized audience of the aforementioned Eloi, but now, as farce follows tragedy, Eloi with debit cards.
Nothing escapes. Take the Democratic Party as an example of a group of would-be leaders who for a good while came to believe too much in their own self-preening advertisements. For the four years prior to the November 2020 election, while party leaders should have been trying to understand how they went wrong in 2016, and trying to re-engage with and appeal to the great middle of the electorate, they sat around debating a lowest-common-denominator form of meliorist socialism and scaling the heights of culture-war absurdities. They did so apparently assured in the view that Donald Trump would self-destruct politically while in office. He didn’t, only nearly did: It took a pandemic to expel him from Pennsylvania Avenue, and even then he didn’t leave without a demeaning fight.
This was a grade-B movie plot stuff, not reality. It was not serious introspection befitting a serious problem. It was as though the Democrats were trapped in a poorly scripted melodrama of their own making—and of course TV and movie plots need to be “clearer than the truth,” to borrow a phrase from Dean Acheson, uttered admittedly in a different context. They can’t stand too much nuance if they are to appeal to mass audiences, but genuine leaders are not supposed to be their own audience and they’re not supposed to believe their own advertisements.
The woke particularly do, however, and their reaction to the MAGA descent into the violent and the berserk just egged them on to new depths of surrealism. Theirs was not just any grade-B movie plot; it was a romance, more specifically a tragicomic romance. These folks perhaps read a line of early Emily Dickinson fare and it lodged in their brains without them recalling how it got there:
But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and rising sun to wake her; or else we’ll pull society up by the roots, and plant it in a different place.[9]
Alas it is true, as the saying goes: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line—and lately some of them seem willing to fall in line with pretty much anything. Aspirational promiscuity, let’s call it. Walter Lippmann put it beautifully about a century ago, and what he wrote remains the best warning to woke Democrats today: “It is a disease of the soul to fall in love with impossible things.” Such diseases are wages of fantasy.
Happily, though it took time and some uncanny luck, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden did sober up enough to move back toward a sane center, and Kamala Harris’s campaign has so far moved it further in the right direction despite the shadows of her own more leftist public past. If she loses, however—this is written on September 27, 2024—the pattern is for losing parties in a mass democracy to move toward their bespoke extreme. So the wheel is still in spin, to quote yet another prime-decade song lyric.
When forms of impossible thinking sets the standard for reasoning about politics—delusional nostalgia on the Right, delusional utopia on much of the further Left—it’s fair to say that we are now in a very different place than we were four or five decades ago. But different how? Where once, in the Founders’ United States, the people had common little pictures, common narratives built from simple stories of origins and destiny, credit and blame, We the People now have a swirling melange of uncountable, contradictory, and reality-challenged images that more resemble something one encounters under the influence of psilocybin. (My vocabulary choice here is not entirely incidental.)
Thanks to our infantilizing affluence, our carelessness or even for some shame in inculcating and modeling the the Founders’ conception of civic virtue, and our obliviousness to the impact of technology on our habits of heart and soul, nearly all the buffers and boundaries that have held natural American exuberance, enthusiasm, and moral ambition in check-and-balance are in tatters. The result is that our deliberately checked-and-balanced political order cannot function as designed. Listen again to John Adams, perhaps still the most underrated intellectually of the American Founders:
. . . we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.[10]
Here Adams is probably again channeling Aristotle: “When he is without virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of the animals.” But not only Aristotle. “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,” wrote Edmund Burke:
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Nor can they be happy. When Jefferson as an older and wiser man wrote in 1816 that “without virtue, happiness cannot be,”[11] it may well have been—I wish to say must have been but it cannot be proven—that it was Burke who supplied the connective tissue between Jefferson’s free-standing 1776 happiness of the Declaration and his more maturely defined version forty years later.
Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness are key raw materials, ever abiding in human nature, for current screen-beamed digital entertainment spectacle. It’s been years since Bedford Falls fell by the wayside, along with what seems now like strangely normal entertainment: for examples, “Father Knows Best,” “Dobie Gillis,” and “The Ozzie and Harriet Show.” Those of intemperate minds now dominate in polarized and polarizing fashion in one major American political party, and similarly intemperate but ideologically different men and women may arguably still gain influence in the other. Intemperate illiberalism on the Left is clearly influencing mainstream commercial and social media, and certainly elite universities. None of this is new news. It’s been developing for many years, particularly so, for some reason, since around 2015. Democratic Party leaders did little to nothing to stop it; many even applauded and encouraged it because they found it useful for raising campaign loot from self-avowed progressive institutions and wealthy individuals. What did they think would happen, or were they actually thinking at all except in very short-term “flip-it” modes, from indulging such behaviors?
It’s simple when you get right down to it: When people are for practical purposes living in an array of streaming designer never-neverlands, they don’t care what the Constitution says or why it says it. They don’t care about history because they “don’t know much about history,” and they don’t know much in part, at least, because it’s not a fraction as much fun for an undeveloped mind as playing “Red Dead Redemption II,” shopping on line, or watching porn.
COVID made things even worse for a few years: As Ruchir Sharma pointed out in a sign of the times, people were not so much reading or even watching movies during lockdowns, but gaming.[12] Ever deeper into their own private fantasies, they also did not care if the President knew what the Constitution says (he didn’t) as long as the “show” of the politicians’ arguing over it and related matters was at least as entertaining as, say, the “Jerry Springer Show” used to be.[13] They just want to be entertained and safely shocked into undulating, mind-grabbing uncertainty, just like the little kids we all once were at our imaginative play. We were, and many still are—especially so-called Digital Natives born after 1980—having so much fun that we don’t even realize some of the big new things that have strayed wildly from predictions once made on their behalf. For example, as Giles Slade put it shrewdly back in 2010 with regard to what he called social prostheses: “Devices once used to relieve loneliness have become, in effect, generators of loneliness. . . . [S]o have we fabricated means to no longer be psychologically alone, but only at the cost of being actually alone. What would Faustus say about a bargain of that sort?”[14]
Just as we adults can shift cognitive frames so effortlessly that we don’t even know we’re doing it, such as when we leave the street to enter a theater for a stage play and the cognitive syntax we use for the latter differs meaningfully from that which we use for the former, so now many people leave the real “street” when they enter into a state of thinking about politics. They deploy a different cognitive syntax, one utterly addled by spectacle, without realizing they are doing it. The shift is both aided and occluded from conscious recognition by the prevalence of spectacle as a mentality in the culture writ large. To use an gaming metaphor, the angry birds have eaten all the bread crumbs; too many people don’t know their way back to the street anymore. They’re like Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show,” or worse, they’re imprisoned forever in an episode of the aforementioned Jerry Spinger Show. If there is a better description of what a contemporary hell is like, please be sure to let me know.
This more than anything else probably explains the aforementioned weird polling data showing the self-referential approval ratings of Trump supporters for President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. If the over-65 crowd sees only One America News, Fox News, and other celebritized malarkey on television, being less plugged in to the internet, they didn’t know that Trump ignored multiple early warnings about the virus. They didn’t know that he politicized the Department of Health and Human Services and through it the CDC, accounting at least in part for the disastrous early testing screw-ups. They forgot or never knew that he demanded that schools open in the fall of 2020 come hell or high levels of viral infections. They didn’t know that he flat out said that keeping the numbers down for political reasons was his first priority, a particularly callous selfishness he later repeated several times in public apparently without any hint of shame. They didn’t remember that Trump switched from denying any Federal responsibility for managing the crisis to, just a few days later, claiming “total” control over all related decisions, because their news sources never mentioned it and were adept at designing distractions from any negative judgments.
They also didn’t remember that he publicly hunched out quack cures and treatments that got some gullible people killed, and that he tried to shut up and hide away the government’s genuine experts on infectious disease. They didn’t know that he entrusted his son-in-law, a person with no experience in government management, to coordinate a response to the pandemic. They didn’t know that this same son-in-law was then asked to head up a shadow committee to the Pence Committee, its main task being to funnel Federal money to supporters, friends, and cronies with zero oversight.
They didn’t know any of these things because the infotainment media they watch sheltered the lies, hid the facts, and massaged the subject from what it was to what it was engineered to feel like whenever the facts threatened to intrude. They did know that Trump was always in their field of electronic vision, pugnacious, direct, unsentimental, and using a sparse vocabulary assembled into short staccato sentences similar to their own. That’s all it takes to survive and prosper in American Spectacleland. So by way of distraction from a burgeoning pandemic Trump sent Federal DHS and Treasury/ICE agents to American cities without the approval of local authorities, and created……a telegenic spectacle. He knew how not to just be on the news but to be the news in a reality-television presidency that was all about…..managed, staged spectacle. However encyclopedically ignorant Trump was and still is, he is a genius when it comes to a narrow set of circus-master skills.
Most kids in this country used to grow up to be adults. Adults can usually grasp what Trump is really about; frozen adolescents in aging bodies often cannot. Now, thanks to the systematic debasement of reality by dint of affluence-enabled mediated fantasy envelopment, a great many don’t as a lot of people, thanks to their own chosen dumbed-down, pre-literacy-shaped media infospheres, have regressed back into their 11-year old selves. We are witness to a mass-based technology-propelled Benjamin Button experience, only it’s not the least entertaining to those not immersed in it. The digital dilemma is thus piled on top of its Republic of Entertainment predecessors, which were troublesome enough on their own. Not even Aldous Huxley limned how seductive and intellectually demobilizing fantasy amusements could be, nor could the sagacious Neil Postman half a century after him, armed only with the evidence from television.[15]
But we can see it. It is right in front of us, day in and day out. Don’t kid yourself; we’re in deep trouble, and we’ve done it to ourselves. Pogo redux, with a vengeance. We have ensconced ourselves in such a mesmerizing, confusing, and disorienting interplay of reality and fantasy that if and when AI becomes as threatening as many believe it one day will, too many of will no longer retain a serious capacity for sorting what is AI-infused and what isn’t. In short, we have constructed the scaffolding of our own gullibility. But gullibility in an AI-saturated world may be not just varyingly dangerous, but could well become the kind of scaffolding that becomes not a support for construction, but a device used for executions.
[1] For those who may not remember or know, the line comes from the final verse of the song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.”
[2] See my Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Consequences of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (St. Martin’s, 1995).
[3] For another account of BLM’s origin, not incompatible with my text ut additive to it, see Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Movement (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Lasch-Quinn, a history professor at Syracuse University, is Christopher Lasch’s daughter.
[4] How to Be an Antiracist. Note these two among many critiques: Thomas Chatterton Williams, “Forget White Fragility: here are 10 books Americans should be reading about race,” Spectator USA, June 27, 2020; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2020.
[5] See Yevgeny Simkin, “Social Media Is The Problem,” The Bulwark, July 21, 2020; Frank Fukuyama’s review essay, ”It’s the Internet, Dummy,” American Purpose, July 1, 2024; and DiResta, Invisible Rulers, which is the subject of Fukuyama’s review.
[6] See Yuval Levin, A Time to Build (Basic Books, 2019). Note also Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge University Press, 2008) for a broader analysis of how political performances shape political movements in context.
[7] See Mondainé, “Portland’s protests were supposed to be about black lives. Now, they’re white spectacle,” Washington Post, July 23, 2020.
[8] For a more detailed argument on this point, see my “Ricochet Spitefulness,” American Purpose, April 16, 2021.
[9] Excerpt from Dickinson’s “Magnum bonum, ‘harum scarum’.”
[10] Letter, October 11, 1798, to the officers of the Massachusetts militia.
[11] From a January 21, 1816 letter to Amos J. Cook.
[12] Sharma, “People Aren’t Reading or Watching Movies. They’re Gaming,” New York Times, August 15, 2020.
[13] Jerry Springer died of pancreatic cancer on April 27, 2023 at age 79. Born in London in 1944 of Jewish parents who had fled Germany, he became Mayor of Cincinnati in 1977 and, after failing to win the governor’s seat decided that his liberal views were a dead end in Ohio politics—so he went into television show business. The “Jerry Springer Show” ran for 27 years and was a pioneer of its type. Springer continues to be an enigma as a person and as a Jew. He was by all accounts kind, generous, understanding, loyal, and considerate. Yet he created a form of entertainment based on his “guests” continuously embarrassing and humiliating themselves and each other publicly, something that is exactly opposite all rabbinic teaching. Nor did he seem to care that his show normed bad language, bad behavior, and vulgarity of nearly every sort that seems to have permanent debased American culture. How could such a “nice” person do such harmful things? Does the need to make a living forgive all sins?
[14] Giles Slade, “Electric Company: Machines As Social Prostheses,” The American Interest VI:1 (September/October 2010), p. 82.
[15] The references are to Huxley’s famous 1931 book Brave New World and Postman’s prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. See, too, my use of both in “Dystopia vs. Dystopia: The Cultural Roots of the Sino-American Rivalry,” The American Interest, July 24, 2020.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
A Spectocracy, If We Can Keep It
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
The Path Forward
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
The Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and the Changing Image of Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story, a First Telling
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Word Magic Redux
Progress as Dirty Word, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Fakery Cubed: Chat Crap
4. The Rise of Cyber-Orality: Underturtle III, Continued
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Democracy as Drama
Where Did the News Go?
Optimists No More
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy: An Under-Underturtle
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Immaturity, Myth, and Magic
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers and Frauds With Halos
The Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud and Contrafiction as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Trump: Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle
Glancing
Seeing the Light
Eye-to-Eye
Surfing Your Brainwaves
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
Structural Shadows
Surfing a New Wave
Toward Some Informed Speculations
Suffer the Children
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
Ripleys on the Left
From Left to Right and Back Again
The Root Commonalities of Illiberalism
Gratuitous Harm in Black and White
The Touching of the Extremes
Spectacle Gluttony
The Wrongness of the Right
The Root Beer Syndrome
And Now More Sex
Beyond Feminism
The Irony of Leveling
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
The Imperfect Perfect
Vive la Difference?
Human Nature
9. Spectacle and the American Future
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Astounding Complexes from TV to Smartphones
Up from the Television Age
The Crux
Cognitive Illusions
Another Shadow Effect
Myth as Model
The AI Spectre
A Sobering Coda
10: Epilogue: What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?
Acknowledgments