The Raspberry Patch is posting earlier in the day than usual, because we’re soon off for the weekend to Franklin, Pa. for the annual Rock ‘N River state stone-skipping competitions.
Otherwise, just one note before we get back to The Age of Spectacle: I erred in describing the manuscript’s reorganization in a way that spilled over into the identification of the previous post. It wasn’t part 2 of Chapter 5; it was part 2 of new Chapter 4. Why? Because old Chapter 1 was eliminated, old Chapter 2 became new Chapter 1, old Chapter 3 became new Chapter 2, and—hold on now—old Chapter 4 became new Chapter 3 and 4 because, remember, I split it in half. I fixed the error post hoc in the substack archive. At least nothing happened to the continuity of the text from one week to the next. Sheesh; sorry again.
On we go:
. . . We will return later to the all-too-common error, pointed out some time ago by both Plato and Aristotle, of presuming that because people are considered equal in some things—such as equal dignity and standing before the law—they are therefore equal in all things—say talent and virtue. Of course they are not, and this is a childish conflation. But it was and remains egregiously common.
The effects of deep literacy erosion on education also pour into the mix. The much-lamented influence of screen addiction on student capacity to read fluently and write competently obviously includes reading and writing competently about politics. College professor after professor has bemoaned the refusal of even graduate students to study in the only way they know how to study as members of the academy: to read books and discuss them with peers and teachers. Students’ refusal to read books has persuaded many teachers to stop assigning them in college as well as high school, and syllabi reflect vividly the dumbing down process.[1] After all, it takes many hours a day to sustain a screen addiction which, as already noted, overwhelmingly features hybrid pseudo-written forms of social media orality when it is not near-totally imagery-dominated, as on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. There just isn’t much time left over to read anything serious, or often anything at all. As far as study habits go, this is decadence with a difference: It is specifically digital decadence.
The result of non-reading is that students lose—or never gain in the first place—the ability not only to write well at first blush, but to form internal standards of excellence that guide them from first drafts to finished products. Loose writing breeds or abets loose thinking, and that makes it harder for students to grasp and critique arguments from the past. Not only can today’s American students of English not write like Shakespeare—but then who ever could?—they cannot read Shakespeare with rudimentary understanding let alone catch the nuances of his prose. More to the point of education in politics, they also cannot read and understand Hobbes, Locke, or Mill—or The Federalist Papers.
Or even the Bill of Rights. Most contemporary Americans, it seems, either cannot or at any rate have not understood what the Second Amendment actually says. It is only 27 words long and it has, until recently, always been understood as being about the right of the states to form militias in balance against Federal constitutional duties regarding national security and defense. In 1787, as the nature of the Federal system was being defined, this right vouchsafed to the states is easily understood, since given the nature of the expanding frontier no state government could depend on a quick dispatch of the very small number of Federal troops in a sudden fight. Also clearly, George Mason wrote the language to guard against any creep toward an overweening central power, as he always did. Pace the Roberts Court’s conservative majority, he and the great majority of the Founders and Framers most certainly did not favor “an energetic executive.”[2]
The historical context thus shows clearly that Mason’s language had nothing to do with an individual citizen’s right to own a gun, and it would have been passing strange for anyone at the time to read it that way. At the end of the 18th century nearly all American homesteads owned guns, even in cities and certainly in small towns, villages, and on farms; from that stock of weapons and their owners militias could be formed--period and full stop. Had the Second Amendment really been about individual gun ownership, the Third Amendment might have been about a citizen’s right to breathe oxygen.
American jurisprudence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries reflected this manifestly obvious understanding, as did the many gun control regimes, state and Federal, that have existed over time. This is why it is so spectacularly bizarre for a supposedly “originalist” Supreme Court conservative majority, in Heller v. District of Columbia (2008), to have claimed the opposite, and to have ratified its error about two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Finding an absolute right to individual gun ownership in the Second Amendment is no different from the Warren Court’s finding a right to an abortion in the privacy clause of the Constitution: Neither is even remotely there.
No one can reasonably claim that Supreme Court Justices lack facility with conceptual language. Their errors are born of willfulness, not ignorance. But it is reasonable to claim that, if the agora comes to lack nearly all facility with conceptual language and its members knows virtually no history or civics, those willful errors are far more likely to go undetected, and even to be reinforced, by We the People.
Facility with conceptual language can come only from reading. Without it students as would-be scholars forfeit the ability to converse with generations past, thereby to unlock both the wisdom and the foibles of the ages, both what we should wish to know and what we should wish to avoid. That forfeiture in turn truncates the girth of their theory of mind to encompass any form but the immediate, so the past will thus always remain a foreign country to them, as L.P. Hartley famously put it, and the present will encompass but a narrow intellectual sliver of what it might be.
Additively at least, we are who we read and whom we read about. Poverty in a theory of mind in turn will diminish our capacity for empathy and handicap our ability to imagine a concrete future, political and otherwise.[3] Absent real facility with conceptual language students also learn little to no etymology, so that even their own stunted vocabulary lacks roots, making it easy prey for a vocabulary zombification process to thrive—of which more just below. This is critical, for as Terrance W. Deacon pointed out, “Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.”[4] That goes for conceptual vocabulary as well as for institutions and machines.
In this regard too, the claim, or common assumption, that reading on a screen is the same as reading on a printed page for all practical purposes needs rebuttal. It is not the same. Reading on a screen conduces for technical reasons to skimming. Do it enough and for many people that bad habit transfers to reading ink on paper. Ongoing research on comprehension distinctions between screen/digital and print-delivered writing paints a clear picture: Except for beginning readers who can benefit from the dancing graphics that screen reading can do better than print, comprehension tests uniformly and significantly lower in screen than in paper page reading.[5] That has clear implications for the grasp of conceptual language.
Screen-reading also has several predictable knock-on effects: rapid attention shifts as one’s eyes “eat down” the screen page; a decrease in reflective self-awareness as one focuses on speeding through a text; and consequent decreased memory retention thanks to hypertext and multimedia interference with the reading process. Some have concluded that the massive and rapid substitution of screen reading for print reading has collectively moved us “to a mode of shallow learning.” [6] If true, that would help to explain at a granular level the rash of relative incompetence that has overtaken the United States in recent years. The gang that can no longer shoot straight, it may well turn out, is the gang that no longer reads much, even any, narrative print.
So what then happens when members of our political class, to the extent they read anything serious at all anymore, read overwhelmingly on screens? When what used to be serious journals become exclusively e-zines? A possibility: Our leaders become at least marginally less able to focus quality attention on what they are reading. They skim like most everyone else who, strange as it sounds, thinks they are too busy to slow down sufficiently to really read, which means to really think. Those who think they are too busy to think are not thinking at all.
A final example worth bringing here of the return of orality-dominance in the culture concerns neither the art of prose not the arts of politics but the art of music. And it shows even in a form of writing—musical notation.
Rap is now considered music because it features artists, mostly Afro-American but some imitator others, who make recordings and sell them, exactly like in the commercial music industry. But much of it isn’t strictly music and, with some notable exceptions, its artists cannot read music or proficiently play a musical instrument.
Every genre of actual music is capable of producing instrumental forms because every genre of actual music depends mainly on melody; but there can be no instrumental form of rap, for there are often no chord changes in an entire “song.” Rap has little melody, sometimes no discernable melody at all. Any attempt at rendering a one-chord song into sheet music would produce a vivid lyric line with notes strung out horizontally on more or less the same level straight across the staff all the way through.
This does not mean rap is not art. Some of it qualifies as fine art. But as an art form that for centuries has had a written analog it is purely oral. It is improvisational, or slam, poetry with percussion and bass lines added, to be more precise. It is music only for those who place their own subjective perception of it above all else, including any awareness of or need for an explicit definition. Remember: Orality is emotion heavy compared to print, emotion conflates, and that importantly includes conflating definitions: It expands them toward incoherence.
Zombified Vocabulary
Combine the sharp decline in teaching standard English beyond that minimally required to “teach to the test”—inadvertently exacerbated by the Obama Administration’s Core Curriculum attempt to redeem “No Child Left Behind”[7]—with the substitution of orality in its many forms for engagement with written language, and you see that, as Clive James put it in his 2007 masterpiece Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, as the pretense of egalitarianism spreads language use gets lazier.[8] People become reluctant to correct others’ misuse of language, oral and written, for fear of being labeled an elitist—the worst of all sins in the radical undifferentiated egalitarian orb. And so general standards fall.
The reason is deceptively simple: Written language fixes meaning much more firmly than oral language. With written language comes dictionaries filled with precise definitions; the notion of a comparable reference resource for oral language is an oxymoron for any practical purpose. With meanings written down, anyone can consult them; before recording technology was invented, no one could revisit oral exchanges past. The written word can be shared in libraries; oral lore has no library besides the decaying memories of mere mortals. Oral-only cultures can have no history as the term is commonly understood, only a very loose-fitting and highly malleable oral simulacrum of it. In an oral-only culture no systems for anything—tool-making, cooking, music, government—can be fixed and shared except by mimetic means, and one can only learn anything directly from someone else. With literacy, one can learn from those far away and long gone. One can compare views, ideas, aspirations, histories. This is why the great ancient libraries like those of Alexandria, Fez, Córdoba, and Antioch were revered by the wise of old.
Also note: Most important and what should be most obvious, but somehow surprisingly isn’t, the rule of law must be written down; the rule of men need not be and typically hasn’t been except except as post hoc legitimation. That is the difference between rule of law and rule by law, which epitomizes Chinese history, but not ours since at least 1776. Law and the administration of law are also what bind political units together. Preliterate political units had to be small enough for charismatic authority to apply; only with literacy could political units grow and the earliest ancient empires arise. The idea of a continental size liberal democracy like the United States is unthinkable in an orality-only cultural context.
Obviously, written language does evolve, but it may do so in such a way as to expand the reservoir of linguistic distinctions at our service. Orality is also capable of producing finer distinctions, but it tends to conflate meanings rather than to distinguish among them. The same is true for usage conventions—grammar, in particular. It is massively easier to emotionalize any subject with images than can be achieved with words on a page. Oral narratives are capable of complexity; many ancient sagas and stories attest to the fact. But memory limits most of them to simple plotlines, the scale of plotline, so to speak, one finds in tall tales, conspiracy theories, and similarly simple fare.
Above all, oral language is less stable so much easier to deploy to manipulate listeners. Indeed, it is massively easier to manipulate non-readers than readers. The manipulation of people by the greedy and power hungry actually depends to a considerable degree on the willful corruption of language. It is as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.”
One manifestation of the definitional looseness of orality compared to literacy is that vocabulary is vulnerable to getting zombified. Key words do not change in many cases, but their meanings are prone to be gutted of substance and replaced with caricature. At scale, language zombification can have major effects. This is not a new observation: Everyone more or less knows this Confucius quote, but that does not make it wrong:
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.[9]
Thus when MAGAts assert that Democrats are Socialists, or even Communists and Marxists, they do not mean, cannot possibly mean, that Joe Biden and other Democrats want to nationalize the main sinews of the American economy, substitute command-economy diktats from commissar bureaucrats for markets, and build gulags and re-education camps for those who object. Not even woke Democrats, at most only 10-12 percent of the party, want to do any of that. That is what those words mean, or at least what they meant until about decade or two ago. Now MAGAts have zombified that vocabulary to “mean” anyone who supports any meliorist Federal social policy whatsoever, or any policy seeking to rectify market failures to produce social goods, of which there are a great many in a plutocratized political economy.
How has that happened? Simple: Those who do not read usually cannot define abstract terms of any kind, not just Communism and Marxism but “civic virtue” and “liberal democracy” either. Similarly, sort of, when leftwinger and also many others feared for the safety of democracy during the onset of the Trump Administration in 2017 they turned out in due course to be not so wrong, but they were nevertheless mistaken about what the initial and immediate threat was: It was not a threat to democracy but to liberalism.
Democracy worked fine in November 2016: Trump was elected fair and square, assuming that Russian disinformation bots did not in fact throw the election.[10] That happened because the usual “implied consent” in a mass-electoral democracy, which really means mass rational apathy or assumed obliviousness in normal times, did not work because times were not normal. Many Trump voters in 2016 had never before voted or had not voted in many years, but populist passions sent them to the polls mobilized by some combination of anger, fear, and spectacular media-borne lies. We went from rational apathy to a form of para-rational mobilization in a trice, as these things go.
To reality-tethered “normies”—most Democrats and independents, and at the time many Republicans—the result was scary, to be sure. But it had nothing to do with a threat to diminish or overturn democracy; it rather manifested too much democracy, too much populist froth beyond the norm, in all the wrong places. The point is that those making the claim really did not understand what the word meant. Democracy is just the way leaders are elected in a popular sovereignty politico-legal framework. It is not some shiny political object we are supposed to revere but cannot define. Liberalism and democracy have separate histories and ontologies, illustrated by the fact that some electoral democracies are illiberal (today that includes Hungary and Turkey) and some non- or marquee-democratic party-state arrangements are liberal (Singapore is perhaps the best example).
Plato would have understood 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 (more on this in Chapter 5). In due course Trump and his supporters did move on from anti-liberal to anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior, but that was mostly after Trump lost the November 2020 election, also fair and square. That is when the plotting to overturn the will of the majority for the sake of an artificial minoritarian regime really got going, and as of this writing it is going still.
Plato can be shockingly prescient 2,400 years after the fact, but he’s not always so. He could not have imagined a democratic order with constitutional guardrails, or a liberal democratic order that could survive and become even more stable through episodes of testing and self-correction. The genius of the American Federal system, however imperfect its representational formulae have been and still are, is that the key democratic part of it works 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. 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 to a socio-religious Great Awakening. Until now, anyway, bumps against the guardrails this way and that have eventually arced back to the mean. Likely the current bump will do so, as well—so, anyway, one may hope.
This dynamic these days, in an Age of Spectacle, often shows up in contentious language, and we have recently seen some telltale competitions over the ownership of hallowed vocabulary. For example, MAGAts now claim that January 6, 2021 was a peaceful protest and hence represented not an insurrection, as any normal person could plainly see it was, but the constitutionally protected right to peaceful assembly and dissent. If any doubt existed at the time as to motive, Trump’s subsequent call to suspend the Constitution so that he could again take power, presumably via mob intimidation of lawful due political process, should have made it very clear. And if even that did not work on the thicker of the thick, his call for more insurrectionary violence in mid-March 2023, when he thought he was about to be not only indicted but arrested, should have done the trick. But it didn’t.
So by mid-summer 2024 the Republican Party had become a “new Right” post-constitutional authoritarian party, and in some respects even a neo-fascist one. But the typical MAGAt fan did not care, partly because he did not grasp the distance between the new language being used orally and the older language in writing at the plinth of American political institutions. Indeed, the post-conservative GOP has started to use language the way Franz Neumann described in 1942 the origins of Nazideutsch. And it works because those whom MAGA entrepreneurs seek to enchant do not deep read, and so do not really know the meanings of the words being zombified for propaganda purposes. As non-readers they are defenseless against this manipulation. Listen to how Neumann described the Nazi approach:
Magic becomes the main concern of National Socialist culture. The world can be manipulated by techniques and formulas; in fact, if properly used these techniques and words automatically change things. . . . The emphasis on magic has even changed the language. The noun tends to supersede the verb. Things happen--they are not done.[11]
Lord help us if re-empowered MAGAts ever start talking like that, using English distortions comparable to those in German Neumann was describing. Er, wait: Could J.D. Vance’s post-RNC rhetorical vault into faux-heroic transhistorical “civilizational” balderdash perhaps qualify as an English-language equivalent of infant Nazideutsch?
Democracy as Drama
Vast implications out of culture for politics exist beyond the fairly straightforward ones already noted: Politics becomes a form of fiction, or at least a lamination of the lebenswelt closer to fiction than to anything wide-awake and hence causally serious. We say typically that MAGAt entrepreneurs are liars, and that is often true exactly as meant. But often enough it may be more accurate to call them fantasists, fictionalists, and purveyors of spectacle for a fawning audience that is addicted to the stuff. Indeed, unreal is a better adjective for what it is than merely false, and that leads to the sum of what is happening to our politics: If indeed, as Erving Goffman is quoted above, “social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it,” it follows that our political frame has become polluted with assumptions and attitudes wildly misaligned with the serious stuff of public policy discourse and management. To the extent that our conceptions are now drawn increasingly from magic-infused mythical-fictional storylines, even among significant numbers of our supposed leaders, our politics will strain even to define, let alone effectively address, actual challenges.[12]
It is hardy any wonder, then, than one of several reasons Congress has lost the knack for legislating—this one less widely recognized than some others—is that it seems so boring, so dull, so plodding as an activity compared to the spectacular fare so many of us have become used to and expect as a matter of course. Because the money now flows more often from the periphery to the center—from the telegenic candidates and congressmen to the party coffers—politicians have per force become performer-fundraisers in ways very different from the pre-digital norm when resources flowed from the party center outward to promising candidates. This has changed the modal personality of politicians in the United States from people interested in and at least from time to time capable of studying and understanding complex public policy issues to people whose typical skill set points in very different directions.
It also follows that if large numbers of not particularly well-educated Americans get their supposed news from partisan propaganda operations like Fox News they will believe in large numbers, as an October 2022 Chapman University poll indicated, that the pre-eminent political fear of our times comes from corrupt politicians and deep state plots—62.1 percent of respondents. Directly in line with this induced “mean world syndrome” fantasy, the Chapman poll noted that, “seasonal phobias of ghosts (8.1% and zombies 10.6%) continue to make the list.”[13]
These are at best B-movie and made-for-television level storylines; where else nowadays can widespread belief in ghosts or zombies come from, after all? But in a techno-cultural environment that has been Necker Cube-flipped on its head, where reality is too complex and nuanced to be contained in the only causal templates many people can handle, this is what happens.
The same explanation seems to apply to the weird commonplace, noted by several observers in the autumn of 2023, that huge numbers of Americans without college degrees believe that the economy is in terrible shape, if not terminal crisis, under President Biden when, according to all available macroeconomic data, it is really doing pretty well.[14] The same goes for perceptions of crime: Huge numbers of people extrapolate from social media reports of telegenic crime incidents to conclude that violent crime is rapidly rising when, in fact, it has declined significantly in most urban areas since 2021.
One example, or set of examples, at scale of this modal personality transformation is so obvious that it is easy to overlook it. The politics of not just the United States, but of several democratic polities, have lately been dramatized all the way to dysfunction. The belief in the United States that existential stakes inhere in which major party wins the next set of elections, such that the very heart and soul of the nation would be irremediably damaged if the wrong people took power, is the example we see most often and most clearly. But the spring 2023 strikes in France over the Macron government’s proposal to raise the retirement age let loose torrents of similar rhetoric, as did follow-on riots over the death of a Muslim immigrant at the hands of police--a sort of French “George Floyd” moment. And it is hard to beat recent Israeli politics, even before October 7, 2023, for over-the-top drama in the struggle over the role of the judiciary initiated by the most recently installed and by far the most radical rightwing coalition in the history of the state. All these contentions, certainly real enough, have nonetheless been “fictionalized” in form as though they were entertainment fare: emotionalized, simplified, linguistically dumbed-down, and above all perhaps, sped up.
Ivan Krastev was moved by these and other examples to plead for a little less drama in democratic politics.[15] He was right to do so; Krastev has an uncanny knack for turning common sense into more rarified wisdom. But the truth is that, as I told him, “with the clickbait media spectacalyzing everything in a dramatic, zero-sum mode, we will not see less drama in democratic politics anytime soon. This is what happens when entertainment becomes the ultimate goal of daily life, even outside the core West.” If emails could nod, his return email did.
Plenty of other political manifestations of the scripted-drama shadow effect can be cited. It could be, for example, that one reason for the rise of the popularity of conspiracy theories—although not the only or probably the most important reason—is the habituated assumption that what we are seeing unfold before us has already been “done,” which is to say in this case fixed, prearranged, decided for our consumption without any chance for our own individual or collective political agency to participate in the making of any consequence. Another way to put this using basic philosophical language is that, perceptually, what is actually contingent and open-ended has been rendered in many minds of our spectocracy necessary and closed-ended. The result, if true, would encourage self-induced passivity and, not infrequently be a goad to victimization thinking as in “they”—it is always the anonymous they—have done it to me again.
The “Stop the Steal” phenomenon has tracked, and still tracks, directly on this observation. For starters, note that the absence of evidence for the contention in the real world becomes meaningless in the “necessary” and not “contingent” mode. After all, the viewer of fictive fare never gets to sit with the screenwriters, directors, and actors as they are deciding how the storyline and its portrayal should go. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the appearance of agency in democratic politics may be just that—an appearance. Some people, evidently, find freedom cloying and agency annoying, so when highly oversimplified but emotionally resonant explanations of political reality are put to them, as though it could have been part of a fictive streaming TV series, they embrace them for the release from difficulty they offer.[16] Many cannot seem to get beyond the shimmer of being entertained, no matter what the stake may be. That is something new, created by a nexus among affluence, aspirational amnesia, willful intellectual demobilization, and dopamine-flushed cyberaddiction.
Technology has long affected culture, of course—and culture in turn has always affected politics. Cybernetic technology is different, however. As already noted, it is a generative technology, like steam was to the Industrial Revolution, but unlike steam and other earlier generative technologies it substitutes not for human labor but for some aspects of human brain functions. Some, but not all: Machines can calculate wonderfully given the right directions and data and, given proper parameters, they can calculate with problem-solving results that involve extrapolation and planning. But they cannot generate their own purposes, which requires organic needs to define and a sense of time as a cost. They also cannot have fun. All that requires mind, not mere brain. Cybernetic technology is therefore a bit like the invention of the codex beyond the scroll in that it affects the way we learn and communicate. But it cannot define for us what we should learn or why we should or should not communicate it.
This technology, however, is revolutionary in the way it creates and handles data. It creates a multivalent “net effect” that shimmers and shatters its way though institutional life, in some cases disintermediating and in others re-intermediating it.[17] It is not like anything previously experienced, so it follows that it will affect culture—and politics in turn—in ways heretofore not known. That tends to make at least some of those effects genuinely unpredictable. Take just one recent, April 2023, disintermediative example as illustration: The moronic but nevertheless dramatic perfidy of Jack Teixeira.
[1] A good example is William Deresiewicz, “American education’s new dark age,” UnHerd, March 21, 2022. Deresiewicz is the author of the much praised and criticized Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2015).
[2] The greatest hypocrisy of the current SCOTUS majority, however, lies in its July 1, 2024 decision on Presidential immunity. How that SCOTUS majority can claim originalism despite a decision that runs 180 degree against the Founders’ clear aim to limit the power of the Federal Executive is a wonder to behold.
[3] As already noted, Douglass Rushkoff cleverly called the press of the immediate Present Shock, nicely going one up on the Tofflers.
[4] Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 23.
[5] There are dozens of examples. For just one attuned to a K-12 readership, see Avery Elizabeth Hurt, “Will you learn better from reading on screen or on paper?” Science News Explores, October 18, 2021. A more rigorous study has proven the point beyond doubt; see Karen Froud, Lisa Levinson, Chaille Maddox, and Paul Smith, “Middle-schoolers’ reading and processing depth in response to digital and print media: An N400 Study,” Neurocognition of Language Lab, Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, Teachers College, Columbia University, January 2024.
[6] K.K. Loh and R. Kanai, “How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition?” Neuroscientist, July 13, 2015, followed and cited in Cytowic, pp. TK
[7] Noted in Pamela Paul, drawing on Diane Ravitch’s 2018 analysis, “How to Get Kids to Hate English,” New York Times, March 9, 2023. See also Ravitch’s earlier criticism and predictions—all since come true—concerning the “No Child Left Behind” policy in “No Bad Idea Left Behind,” The American Interest 5:5 (May-June 2010).
[8] James, Cultural Amnesia, p. 798.
[9] The Analects, Book XIII.
[10] Some still assert this, but it is probably impossible to prove. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former head of DIA and the DNI from 2010 to 2017, looked into the possibilities and the data more assiduously, and from a basis of his own then-contemporary experience, than anyone. He concluded that it was possible, but could not say dispositively that it was so. See his book written with Trey Brown, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence (Viking, 2018).
[11] Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944 (Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 439.
[12] Tim Miller and his colleagues at The Bulwark get it. See for example, Miller, “There Are Two GOP Primaries Happening and Only One is Real,” The Bulwark, July 24, 2023. The blurb that heads up the article is perfect: “The fantasy may dominate the headlines. Don’t buy into it.” Right; but look what happened anyway?
[13] Cerise Valenzuela Metzger, “Political Corruption, Illness, and Threat of Nuclear Attack from Russia Top Chapman University’s Annual Survey of American Fears,” Chapman University, October 18, 2022. Chapman University is in Orange, California, a fact that does not necessarily suggest that the bizarre nature of its polling findings owes anything to geography.
[14] This is not, however, just another populist delusion d’jour as many have supposed. The macro-data on the U.S. economy is buoyant only if one doesn’t look too closely at it. Vibrant job creation, low unemployment, much reduced inflation, good GNP growth, yes: But what kind of jobs? How many able-bodied men have removed themselves from the work force to produce that low unemployment statistic? Growth in what sectors, benefitting what income and wealth quintiles, and based on capital investment from where exactly? Even more important for electoral assessment purposes, happy macro-data doesn’t square with the perceptions—and often the realities, too—of most less well-off Americans. Inflation lag is still traumatic for family budgets that have yet to catch up with the cumulatively high inflation of the past few years, and the tightened credit used to treat it has added woeful knock-on effects, as well, is boosted credit card debt interest rates. When whoever handles the family finances opens a bill for homeowners’ insurance and sees a whopping 25-40% hike in the new premium charge, he or she—momentarily at least—doesn’t give a damn about macroeconomic data. Obviously, too, huge increases in property owners’ insurance bills trickle down to affect rental costs, which are presently skyrocketing in many places.
[15] Ivan Krastev, “Democracies can’t take too much drama,” Financial Times, April 10, 2023.
[16] This is not remotely a new observation. See Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941).
[17] Detailed in Chapter 5 below.