The Age of Spectacle, No. 20
Chapter 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy, Part 1
I’ve not much to say by way of introduction to this week’s Raspberry Patch offering—just three brief notes.
First, my friend Laurence Kotlikoff invited me to submit a short guest essay on his Substack, Economics Matters. I pondered the invitation briefly, then decided to give it a shot, not least because of my gratitude to him for sending a fair number of folks to the Raspberry Patch. It appeared two days ago with Larry’s title: “Ten Novel Policy ‘Commandments’ from Adam Garfinkle.” Why ten? Not because that’s all I have; rather because it follows one of Larry’s posts that also bore ten ideas. Symmetry, you know.
Given the generous bio he attached, unbidden by me, I feared dreams in which I would find myself channeling Charlton Heston. Gratefully, I have so far escaped that experience. Let me then suggest that Raspberry Patch readers with an interest in practical economics take a look at Economics Matters, if you have not already done so. In my experience at least, Larry is a lot less predictable and a lot more creative than most standard-issue economists.
Second, the Age of Spectacle manuscript has continued to evolve, but not so much that I feel it necessary to consume space below by again reposting the master outline. Next time maybe.
Third, my father was for many years a proud member of the Teamsters Union. So when I wish all my readers a Happy Labor Day on Monday, I really mean it—and I hope that at least some of you appreciate the spirit in which my wish abides. “There was once a union maid….”—remember? Thanks again, Woodie; and bless you Samuel Gompers, Jimmy Hoffa, and Lane Kirkland, wherever you may be.
Chapter 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
“Nothing fails like success.”
— Arnold Toynbee[1]
This chapter’s title is an obvious play on the title of Daniel Bell’s 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, mentioned in passing in Chapter 1. It explicitly broadens the dialectical observation at the core of that book from economics to politics. But we might as well broaden it further, as useful heuristics go, from politics to the social order writ large, and so speak again as we did in Chapter 2 of the cultural contradictions of modernity—or what’s left of it in the West. Why do this now, in the final chapter of Part I?
We have made use of the old philosophical chestnut that refers to turtles “all the way down,” meaning that every chunk of knowledge seems based on something prior such that ultimate wisdom assumes the character of an asymptote that one forever approaches but never quite reaches. Having employed three underturtles thus naturally begs the question of what turtles lies beneath them, and of what ur-turtle lies at the very bottom of the pile for purposes of explaining American cultural and political dysfunction?
It’s a tease question, unanswerable in the absence of omniscience about the nature of social orders and, indeed, of creation itself. But that doesn’t matter for practical purposes: Having covered our three underturtles above, we now descend just one more level to an ancient insight from the Greek founders of Western philosophy. We do this for two reasons: first, to lay out a broader historical context without which the shape of current American political dysfunction cannot come into full focus; and second so that the three underturtles can be further woven together to form the basis for the spectacle mentality that has arisen from them. We need our focus to be full and sharp looking to Part II, for without it we are necessarily at sixes and sevens in trying to figure out what the problem set we face really is and what, if anything, we can do about it.
To foreshadow the essence, the success of liberal democracy seems to have roused the conditions for its own decrepitude, if not failure. “Nothing fails like success” applies to political culture as well as to the affluence-decadence dialectic. It is a common enough phrase, but one based on an uncommon insight: Human institutions typically lay the groundwork for their own obsolescence because, while the human spirit and intellect can be and at least occasionally are revolutionary, institutions are by nature conservative.
Innovations both mechanical and ideational can be sudden, unexpected, unpredictable in their downstream impact, and they can change human interactions by dint of changing much of what those interactions depend on: reciprocal expectations of conduct, a common language and wider symbol system, and a more or less common calculus of moral reasoning. Innovation can also change social structures over time, how markets operate, and hence culture itself, which is where social structure and markets collide. Institutions depend on standard operating procedures attuned to a purpose baked into them at their inception. Organizations are notoriously poor at doing things well that they were not designed to do. They can adapt to new energies, values, and aspirations if they are well designed for flexibility and resiliency, and if ever shifting attitudes in a democratic setting are friendly enough to change for the trust they repose in the good will of leaders. But this is relatively rare and anyway there are limits to how fast and how much an organization can adapt, especially when beset by time pressures. The availability of talented and disinterested leaders is not assured. And perhaps for that reason more than most others, no political order so far has proved immortal.
The Greeks knew this, and some of them thought they understood why that was. Just as our early modern forbears often did, we can make do with just one of them: Plato.[2]
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
Beneath our three intermingling underturtle causal steams is a big, fat, very old Greek idea. It is from Plato’s Republic, specifically from Book VIII, and it concerns obsession with a too-narrow definition of ideal values. Specifically, Plato shows how types of political regimes decay and fall not because people are unmindful of or disloyal to the highest value of the particular regime type. It is rather because they pursue that highest value with excessive zeal, distort it into dogma by so doing, and leave it unbalanced by considerations of other values that are also good and important, but are incommensurate with it. He describes how this happens to an oligarchy, but soon includes democracy in the general rule: “Plutocracy thought the good was wealth, didn’t it? And the fact that it had no respect for anything else was its destruction. Democracy, too, comes to its end through its idea of the good.” “And what is that?” conveniently asks Adeimantus, classic literature’s greatest straight man. “Freedom,” answers Plato’s frontman Socrates.
In democracies, argued Plato, such narrowness tends to produce a misplaced zealotry in which reasonable concern for a particular form of equality—equality before the law and equality of dignity—morphs into radical undifferentiated egalitarianism which, in turn, sires blowback in the face of an ever-stubborn reality. It produces near ceaseless cases of Tocqueville’s Paradox[3], and the ensuing tension between ever redoubling zealotry and the blowback it unerringly generates leads to social division and disorder, eventually siring demands for an authoritarian “correction”—tyranny, in Plato’s words. Aristotle made the same point even more succinctly: “Republics decline into democracies and democracies disintegrate into tyrannies.” Doubtless these once-famous formulations are what led John Adams to write: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”[4]
It is very likely that the widespread triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the “end of history” notion first banalized and then taken too far, is partly responsible for We the People neglecting myriad warnings about democracy’s rarity and fragility. With no gargantuan ideological enemy to keep us honest and attentive to our own brief, many of us rather quickly forgot why we cared who won the Cold War. Less than a year after the end of the Soviet Union, Richard Betts laid down what looks today very much like a prophecy:
Who would not have been derided and dismissed in 1988 for predicting that within a mere three years Eastern Europe would be liberated, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union deposed, and the Union itself on the ash heap of history? Yet it is hard to believe that the probability of equally revolutionary negative developments, of economic crisis and ideological disillusionment with democracy, of scapegoating and instability leading to miscalculation, escalation, and war several years from now, is lower than the probability of the current peace seemed several years ago.[5]
So in 1988 most people thought the world was more fraught than it was; by 1998 most thought it less fraught than it was. By 2008 most had come full circle even as the definitions of danger shifted, and by 2018 they had shifted again. Such is life, such are the wages of constant change, such are the limitations of predicting the health of socio-political orders.
Betts wrote as a realist, not a pessimist and certainly not as a fatalist. Plato, on the other hand, saw democracy’s doom as fated, a natural part of the eternal tragic flow of fall following rise. Alas, an awareness of the autogenic nature of the social world and, within it, the prospect that a hybrid liberal democratic order with a self-correction mechanism within would arise millennia in the future is too much to expect even of a genius in the circumstances of 4th-century BCE Greece. Plato’s insight about the republic-democracy-tyranny cascade nevertheless stands as a warning still very relevant today, not least to Americans in the combined throes of fragilized affluence, the end of modernity, and the transition from a culture of deep literacy to one of myth-friendly orality.
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Even more than that, the ancient Greek paradigm for failed plutocracies, and particularly for republics decaying into democracies and democracies inviting tyranny in unwitting contradiction to liberal democracy, arguably fits the present American moment with uncanny aptness. To see why, we need to take a step back before taking two steps forward.
As noted in Chapter 2, liberalism and democracy have separate histories and ontologies, illustrated by the fact that even today some electoral democracies are illiberal (Hungary and Turkey, for examples) and some non- or marquee-democratic party-state arrangements are liberal (Singapore is perhaps the best example). As noted in passing above, the two parts to the hybrid we properly call liberal democracy merged under Enlightenment conditions in parts of western Europe the 17th century and came to intellectual fruition there and in America in the 18th century. So it is no surprise really that hybridization did not occur or last in places that either never experienced the Enlightenment or were barely brushed by it. Before that hybridization happened, first in Britain and then elsewhere in some parts of western Europe and America, classical Western understanding thought democracy—meaning majoritarian and usually plebiscitary democracy—was incompatible with individual liberty. Liberalism joined to majoritarian methods of choosing leaders created something new: a balance between the common-sense legitimacy of majority rule and the legally protected rights of individual conscience to voice dissent.[6]
A necessary intermediate step in this process goes all the way back to 1215, to the Magna Carta. Before majoritarian rule and individual liberty could abide together in benign balance, a prior balance had to be struck: between a king’s right to expect loyalty, taxes, and a rightful monopoly of force from the barons and lords under his territorial purview in return for his promise to respect their local authority and, more important, their rights to property against attempts at confiscation both from the king above and the from the rabble below. This is an intermediate step that should not be taken for granted. Indeed, in some major civilizational zones no such thing has ever occurred, with the result that in a place like Russia the political culture leans to absolutism, the protection of property is weak, and the right to dissent on the basis of conscience is so evanescent that doing it well is liable to get a person murdered. Ask Boris Nemtsov and Viktor Navalny…. if you could.
Contemporary genuine democracies thus constitute a triangular balance, so to speak, between recognition of legitimate authority, of the right to property, and of the exercise of conscience. The hybrid balance also offers three kinds of protection: against mob fevers, against absolutism, and against the illusion of benign anarchy. Government is necessary because the triangular balance is not static and can never be perfect; it presumes the occasional emergence of conflict. A dynamic balance, mimicking the heavens themselves as the hero scientists of early modernity revealed their secrets, is nevertheless assumed capable of peaceful adjustments through compromise conducted by the hand of man himself.
As already noted, this arrangement is not intuitive. Had it been intuitive it would not have taken thousands of years of brutalist governance to see its shape and merit. It marks a refinement many centuries in the making, in a narrow chunk of geography and under usually propitious circumstances. It is not only not intuitive, but requires study and a written-word culture to pass from generation to generation. The gossamer thread of transmission is easily disrupted, however, and, as we have seen, the new orality, layered on top of the decadence of affluence and the end of modernity, are proving excellent disrupters.
Plato would have understood, at least in a limited way, what happened in both 2016 and 2020: The guardians screwed up and the rabble rose, fully empowered to make its own mistakes as, in his tragic, cyclical Hellenic view, all energetically mobilized democracies eventually do because they sacrifice other values that are also good to an excessively exuberant and imbalanced pursuit of just one. In a sense, the flaw that makes the tragic wheel turn is the same as the zero-sum mentality: an inability to count past two.
But we can be more precise than that. MAGA “New Right” intellectuals, few though they may be, think that the American republic is deteriorating into a kind of plebiscitary democracy that crowdsources what passes for truth through the subjectivism of postmodernism. That subjectivism, utterly ignorant of or deprecatory toward the limited and self-limiting government described by the Constitution, has debauched our stories and our morale, and turned too many Americans into anti-patriotic and anti-national utopianesque believers in a global form of radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, brimming over with Tocquevillian Paradoxes. That, in turn, has birthed an ever expanding meliorist state characterized by a huge and unaccountable administrative state that sucks up the taxes of the “makers” to give them to undeserving “takers,” man of whom are not even American citizens. So when polls tell us that 64 percent of Americans think major changes need to be made in political and economic policy, or else that the whole system needs to be torn down, some of those people, at least, hold a view very close to how Plato might have described, had he written in more detail about what he meant, how a republic degenerates into a democracy, and how en extremis a tyrant is preferable to a mob that would expropriate others’ property if it could.
Woke leftists also fit a pattern Plato would have recognized, only starting from a different definition of the situation. Even as they engage in what staid liberals would see as democratic excess, they mostly reject the premise that the United States is a liberal democracy anymore. They see instead an oligarchical clot of corporate financial power buying its way to political influence via factotums in both major parties. Bereft of much historical imagination, they do not see much difference between a tyranny and a plutocracy ever tightening its grip thanks to a technology-abetted surge of gigantism that dwarfs individual agency, makes a mockery of promises of equality of opportunity, abets widening class divisions, and leaves the demands of conscience pauperized by industrial folklore and other devices. In their view, radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, expressed in identity-group terms, is a mobilizing tactic to confront the oligarchy and demand the return of basic fairness. They prefer the mob to the tyrant if those are the only choices.
These descriptions of the views of the illiberal Right and the illiberal Left are not manifestly crazy. They each proffer a narrative close enough to the experiences of many people to seem plausible. Both accounts of the problem see law as having been instrumentalized and the Constitution debauched, or about to be debauched, by other side. But both are usually expressed in emotionalized ideological language that fits the memes of a culture bathed in ratified anger expression, exaggeration, cognitive gluttony, and impatience, thus appealing to the parts of our brains further from the frontal cortex than they are to the brainstem. Our market-share seeking broadcast media encourages use of these bath oils, setting extreme against extreme and so magnifying the perceived salience of each, and thus continually hollowing out what is left of the liberal democratic middle.
Footnotes to Plato
Samuel Huntington aptly put the first part of Plato’s Book XIII insight in the language of 20th-century social science: “A value that is normally good is not necessarily optimized when it is maximized.” A few decades earlier Mae West put it in simpler form: “Too much of a good thing can be taxing.” So did, earlier still, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand: “Surtout pas trop de zèle.” And even earlier Goethe in a splash of typically cryptic late 18th-century German: “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.” In other words, the original Socratic notion never went entirely out of style, notwithstanding most contemporary Americans’ fulsome incomprehension of it.
Isaiah Berlin is justly famous for emphasizing the second part of Socrates’ insight, that, as he put it, the human condition is “a complex sum of contradictory truths.” Those things we deem good, alas, do not all align, so we must make tradeoffs and be satisfied with compromises. This is what most adults eventually learn to do in their personal lives; so with public life writ large, which is why the personal integrity of leaders and the experiences that have shaped them matter in the context of a liberal democratic order. Leaders in a liberal democracy are not engineers running equations, formulas, and machines. They are practicing moral philosophers, whether they realize it or not, operating in an ocean of turbulent contingency.
The point? All values are prone to being corrupted and turned counterproductive when they jump their tracks and go spinning off at the expense of too many other values. Socrates identifies the enemy of successful political management as immoderation, overdoing it in such a way as to fail to apply common sense and prudential judgment to the pursuit of abstract principles. The enemy can thus be identified as ideological thinking and its several aliases: utopian thinking; hyper-partisan thinking; too much deductive thinking at the expense of too little inductive thinking; impatient, sped-up thinking at the expense of more deliberative, slower thinking; and, perhaps above all, conflated thinking at the expense of thinking that seeks useful distinctions.
Alas, the cyberlution encourages every single one of these forms of cognitive excess. But it did not create them in the American soul. The impulse to immoderation is to some extent a collective character trait of some civilizations more than others. Older ones having managed to learn from experience tend to be less immoderate; younger ones usually not so much. And since we are talking about America, we must face the fact that American civilization, if that is actually what progeny will decide to call it, has a reputation in this regard.
The nation’s bedrock Protestant religious foundation, the core ideas of which, entangled irrefragably with the efflorescence of the Scottish Enlightenment, have shaped how we think about important matters. That way is burdened with a remarkable internal paradox. On the one hand, it is on account of this foundation that positive-sum concepts adorned our politics, and, as already shown, all American Enlightenment-wombed institutions are based on such positive-sum concepts. On the other hand, this same Protestant religious foundation bespeaks the most abstract, theo-ideological and Manichean language imaginable. That language tends to support winner-take-all conceptions more than it does positive-sum ones. Only the sociological pluralism of first the European, then the British, and then the American experience—pluralist denominationally from the get-go as well as regionally and ethnically more diverse than any west European country—explains the firm embrace of positive-sum conceptions in the American version of classical liberalism.
For a long time this paradox managed its own balance. The fact that we commonly, and uniquely as a civilization, use the locution “That’s history” to mean “that’s irrelevant” shows how little stock we put in learning from our own or anyone else’s experience. This is what David Brooks was getting at when he took a Navy Seal motto probably coined by Admiral Dennis Blair—“We’re Americans: Everything worth doing is worth overdoing”—and messed with it to get, “It is an essential element of the American creed that anything worth doing stupidly is worth doing at great expense.”[7]
Americans tend to be enthusiasts by nature, not least with regard to the aforementioned obsession with limitless material progress. We form what some have called an “adolescent nation” on that account. Alas, too, credulity, broadly defined, has played a part in the story. Partly as a result of our untutored egalitarian enthusiasm large numbers of Americans have believed fairly wacky things throughout our history.[8] Those para-normal beliefs, paranormal defined broadly, is probably what made American culture so skilled and prolific at inventing entertainment forms that have since spread across much of the globe. Some of the outcomes are credulous in the creepy sense; many years ago David Letterman put the point well: “America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.” Other outcomes have been less embarrassing. The American penchant for “the blurring of fact and reality isn’t merely fascinating,” wrote Kurt Andersen in his aforementioned analysis of “Succession.” “Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition—what made America the global center of show business. . .”[9]
The Republic endured nonetheless because the positive-sum design of our institutions, and the fact that actual adults were in charge of them most of the time, supplied the necessary balance. But something has lately removed the constraints holding back our imaginative animal spirits and, worse, fused them with our politics in new and ominous ways. Andersen recently restated the essence well: When the adults abandoned their posts, “America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metathesizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems. . .”[10]
Another way, a way with more historical and sociological depth, to sum up this “something” is contained in a single sentence: “The worst thing that has happened to American society in the 20th century has been the migration of religious energies into politics, to the detriment of both.” So E. Digby Baltzell, the Penn sociologist who coined the acronym WASP, wisely instructed me in May 1970. Americans used to mainly reserve their enthusiasms for imaginative abstractions and zero-sum convictions to the domains and dogmas of religion, ironically as noted—because these enthusiasms were pluralism-generating and reinforcing, hatching more exotic forms of Protestant Christianity per capita than any other place in history.
Now, the latter certainly affected politics from time to time, but by in large American politics remained an elite affair throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.[11] Most Americans respected the status of the better educated to dominate the political provinces of social life even as the modal source of authority in religious life moved inexorably over time from pulpits to pews to camp meetings to, in our own day, mega-churches. Nevertheless, the democratizing impulses in American religion did dive headlong into political life from time to time in the form of three Great Awakenings, the first one before and during the war for American independence, the second before and during the Civil War, and the third in the Social Gospel/Progressive era. Now some espy a fourth Great Awakening, energized by a moral panic and organized around a single radioactive idea, as all the earlier ones had been: equality, defined about as vaguely and conflationally as possible. This fourth Great Awakening emerged about a decade and a half after the end of World War II, and continues still. Like the earlier three Awakenings, the fourth has a common source but diverse manifestations.
Not to suggest that this process is wholly nefarious—not at all. This, it seems, is by temperament if not settled tradition how Americans make social progress. No movement to create an independent republic, to abolish slavery, to achieve female suffrage, to enable trade unionism and collective bargaining, or to banish legal segregation would otherwise have been possible in the institutionally conservative American context. As a rule, the dynamism of American society, and economy with it, has saved many a day by outrunning government and challenging it to catch up. The fact that American government by design does not smother social energies, and trusts them on balance, is what makes this possible. Yes, Hamilton reportedly referred to We the People as “this beast,” and at times that description has been apt; but Hamilton’s view did not end the discussion. This, it may be argued, amounted to another, if accidental, well-balanced paradox.
But ideologically grounded American reform movements are noisy, discomfiting, always generate nasty rearguard resistance, tend to violence and sometimes even cause wars. Seen in proper historical perspective, these inconveniences are forgivable, and they are anyway irrepressible except at the margin. In the moment, however, they can be cause for morbid anxiety and even existential alarm. One sees this is the hysteria of some observers who proclaimed during the summer of 2020 that nutcase Marxists and anarchists had seized control of many American cities and its urban culture en toto.[12] One sees it still in the ravings of the once sane Claremont Institute, which labels all non-Trump supporters socialists, “citizen-aliens,” and “non-American Americans.”[13]
The point for our purposes, since rehearsing two centuries of American history is not our burden here, is that what are at base theological modes of imagination lack natural limits or balances. They are utopian-leaning, end-of-times Protestant eschatological eruptions in secular garb, and are thus inherently unfalsifiable. When they invade political thinking so far as to drive out the hard-earned pragmatism that a system predicated on procedural norms needs, they undermine those norms which are, in turn, the guardians of a limited and self-limiting form of governance. They cause Socrates, Samuel Huntington, and Isaiah Berlin (don’t know about Ms. West) no end of worry. Although it sounds odd to say it, we actually need more muddled, pragmatic, case-based, even theoretically inconsistent (recall Emerson’s hobgoblins) thinking at a time like this.
Some For Instances
Want specific examples of Book VIII-type “irrational exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan once put it with regard to markets (since he apparently could not bring himself to use Keynes’s perfectly suitable phrase “animal spirits”), when it comes to what are normally positive American liberal democratic values? It’s almost too easy to accommodate.
Democracy is good; it’s the operating manual for popular sovereignty. We often hear nowadays, however, that the way to fix flaws with democracy is always to have more democracy. Most of the Founders, who in their own minds created not a democracy but a republic with several bumper guards against mob rule, would be appalled by such lazily intemperate remarks. They would probably agree that more democracy is sometimes what is needed; but always? Not a chance.
Both humility and patriotic pride are good, but only when balanced against one another. Humility is essential to any individual’s and any society’s ability to be self-critical and to improve its moral quality, but too much self-abasement—individually or collectively—is demobilizing and destructive of the socialization process. No society that wallows in its own presumed guilt can be healthy or constructive in the sense of building forward. Patriotic pride helps to create a sense of collective responsibility and contributes to a sense of intergenerational continuity, but too much of it destroys the capacity to be humble and self-critical. Jingoism spites pluralism in all but very homogeneous societies, and so is ultimately divisive and prone to generating xenophobia.
Free speech is good; it expresses the sine qua non of the sovereignty of individual conscience, the very bedrock of the American concept of liberty. We are now told, however, that we need ever more free speech, even for corporations—which are actually partnerships, not individuals, as anyone can see. And so we have drenched our politics in corporate money that produces ever burgeoning plutocratic distortions in our political economy, which creates the tinder for populist resentment of elites of every description.
Due process is good; it animates and democratizes the rule of law. We are now told, however, that we need more due process and more standing to sue, even though it has created endless NIMBY problems that have made it impossible to invest wisely in infrastructure, public health preparation, or much of anything else.
Regulation is good when it prevents market failures; without it economic relations would be anarchic. All markets have political frameworks to enable them, otherwise neither markets nor even money could exist. We are now told by some, however, that we need more state intervention to remedy market failures, but unwise (and sometimes cravenly motivated) interventions can cause new market failures by incentivizing oligarchical industry consolidations that shield rentier-strewn behaviors—say in healthcare domains, and not limited to insurance or pharmaceuticals; for-profit hospitals fit the list, as well.
Deregulation is good when it prevents artificial market failures such as those just noted, and plenty more. We are now told by some, however, that we endlessly need more deregulation, which will predictably enable both different market failures and greater inequality under preconditions of tilted, rentier-strewn playing fields.
At an even deeper level, perhaps, markets can be too free for a society’s own good because market fundamentalism can imbalance the relationship between moral probity and economic efficiency. Some argue that market models have invaded provinces of Western culture where they do not belong, leading to the spread of transactional reasoning at the expense of moral reasoning. This may be a core source of the zero-sum mentality, and as such may constitute an inadvertent source of damage to the very social order free markets are supposed to sustain. As John Gray put it, “unfettered market forces demean the common good” when they bowl over the functioning conservative stabilities they are meant to support.
I concur. . . .
[1] Attributed to Toynbee. Whoever actually said or wrote this first was no doubt playing off Alexander Dumas’s famous aphorism “Nothing succeeds like success.”
[2] For an edifying account of how important Plato was to the development of classical liberalism, before and throughout the 19th century, see Adrian Wooldridge “Leadership in crisis—why the West needs Plato more than ever,” Engelsberg Ideas, September 2020. More recently Timothy Snyder usefully, if somewhat idiosyncratically, took up the same parable, right out of Book VIII of The Republic: Snyder, “The Republican blueprint for power contains the seeds of its own demise,” Financial Times, July 20, 2024.
[3] Tocqueville’s Paradox comes from Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Ch. 13, p. 538 (J.P. Mayer edition). Not by accident does this occur on the last page in a chapter entitled “Restlessness in the Midst of Prosperity.”
[4] Letter, December 17, 1814.
[5] Richard Betts, "Systems for Peace or Causes of War? Collective Security, Arms Control, and the New Europe," International Security (Summer 1992), p. 14. Emphasis added.
[6] See the argument to this effect in Michael Mandelbaum, Democracy’s Good Name (Public Affairs, 2007). Mandelbaum contrasts “popular sovereignty” with “liberty.” Those are just other terms for “democracy” and “liberalism.”
[7] Brooks, “Inspired Immaturity,” The Atlantic, March 2002, p. 22.
[8] See Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland (Random House, 2017), a useful book for its rich descriptive narrative albeit one a bit thin on theory. Andersen was not writing for the academy, however, so that outcome says nothing definite about his own gravity as a thinker. Same goes for Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (Macmillan, 2019) and Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (Viking, 2023). All these books, and others, are skin-deep in theory, descriptive rather than analytical. The latter two are avid users of historical analogy but idiosyncratically so. Merlan, who is Jewish, sees fantasy anti-Semitic narratives behind many contemporary conspiracy theories; Dickey favors antebellum racist conspiracy delusions as key precursors of contemporary cultist conspiracy groups. Without a theoretical grasp of the larger phenomenon, how can one parse one preference from another? A more recent book attempting to explain the same basic phenomenon is Marcel Danisi, Politics, Lies, and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective (Routledge, 2023). I have not yet read the book, but from the looks of the précis published in Politico on July 30, 2023 the basic argument bears nothing new, discusses no original research, and does not even mention the possibility that heavy exposure to mediated as opposed to natural images may affect someone’s sense of credulity.
[9] Andersen, “Succession.”
[10] Ibid.
[11] See Frank DiStefano’s The Coming Realignment (Prometheus, 2019) for a rare historical analysis that skillfully merges American religious and political history as few accounts do.
[12] For example, Abe Greenwald, “Yes, This is a Revolution,” Commentary (September 2020).
[13] For specifics see Laura K Field, “What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?” The Bulwark, July 13, 2021.