Last week I expressed some apprehension that a lack of time might impinge on my properly completing The Age of Spectacle’s introductory chapter. That apprehension proved justified: I over-dieted my overgrown original, and had to put some flesh back on the bones. I even buried my own lede, as journalists oddly spell it. Shame on me.
I have since repaired my manuscript—not necessarily for the last time, alas—so this week’s Raspberry Patch post will deploy that repair to complete the book’s introduction, paving the way for Chapter 1 to begin next Friday. It comes to you here divided into three subheads, each with discursive notes and references—which will be important to some readers but not to others—deposited outside of the main text.
Metaphors for Our Shock
The subject to hand, it cannot be doubted or ducked, bears a powerful emotional resonance. It is an aspect of the subject that threatens the distortion of reason and so must be handled carefully. But we need to get it out on the table for collective inspection.
Many of us old enough to remember reality as it existed a few decades back, and fortunately educated enough to be able to share thinking about it, have struggled to express just how qualitatively different the present para-mythic moment feels from the former norm. For some it is as though the culture, hauling the nation’s politics along with it, has done a Rip van Winkle on itself—rising from a long slumber to find itself in a waking dream, or nightmare, that does not much resemble normality back when we laid head on pillow. For other it feels like the nation has gone through a 21st-century looking glass in a futile search for Alice (or Alice’s restaurant, as the case may be). For me, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1952 short story “The Tunnel” best expresses my discomfiting sense of shock. If you don’t know it, it is very much worth finding and reading in a single sitting. If you do know it, you’re nodding in agreement, no doubt.
What all these and other metaphors have in common is the strong sense that something unusual and ominous has been happening, that recognition of it has rushed upon us unawares and even on reflection but partially formed, and that too many of our fellow Americans either don’t seem to have noticed, have normalized or are resigned to it, or in not a few cases seem even to relish it.
Reacting to the galloping weirdness many observers have called attention in recent years to pieces of the puzzle. Critics have studied the impact of mass-media entertainment, including “news” broadcasts that are at best commercial infotainment venues bereft of objective information or analysis, and noted its influence on the coherence of American political discourse. Our agora, argue some, has become as flat as the screens delivering the “news.” Others have drawn attention to rise of performative gestures substituting for substance in discourse, personality having come to be more important to political advance than policymaking competence.1 Some have called attention to a deeper “epistemic crisis” in the culture consisting of a multipartite assault on the autonomy of facticity itself.2 Several have placed the origin of leftwing “woke” identity politics amid these and other developments.3 A few others have focused on the politically deranging impact of entertainment modes so invasive and immersive as to constitute a means of metaversal entrapment of its consumers.4
But most have ignored the specific role played by spectacle, or have done so only in passing.5 No one, to my knowledge, has heretofore connected observations of emergent spectacle to how dramatically our origins stories have changed, in other words to the tectonic mindset shift among We the People away from the attitudes and assumptions underlying the Enlightenment-born basis of American political culture. Few if any have noted how closely much of the new spectacle mentality tracks with the cognitive psychology of magic as cultural anthropologists and a few philosophers have described it, and hence of magic’s origin in mythic thought from the time of humanity’s pre-literate collective adolescence. And no one, again to my knowledge, has defined spectacle as a neuroscience-based phenomenon linking changed attitudes and behaviors to rewired and rewiring brains, and then linked it to what us happening in our wider society and politics before our very eyes. That is a lot to have gone missing, it seems to me.
Not much of what follows this introduction is wholly new, but some of it is. And what is new combined with what is not suggests a unified field theory of the problem that forces a reconsideration of how the various parts of the puzzle fit together. That, in a nutshell, is what is different about this book: Not any original social science research despite its use of close observation and thick description, to use the late Clifford Geertz’s term, but rather the originality of its synoptic perspective.
The basic thesis is simple enough, through it can be shocking to many when first encountered and so is worth repeating in slightly different words: Cybertech developments have rewired our brains and rejiggered our endocrinal norms to a point so far beyond our evolutionary inheritance that we are now experiencing unprecedented trouble keeping track of what is real and what is surreal. Human consciousness, it turns out, tracks on certain environmental stabilities, and when those stabilities are thrown into doubt, even if the means are our own hands, consciousness may shuffle its own ontological hierarchy, leaving a good many of us disoriented.
This affects political life, alas. Collectively and at-scale, therefore, we now see the MAGA world and the “woke” world—which, again, share far more in common than either side realizes or would admit—putting the squeeze on America’s Enlightenment-born and based political order. They are doing so with the eager, all-the-way-to-the-bank assistance of both our conscience-free clickbait commercial broadcast media, and our de facto oligopoly of high-tech digital corporate behemoths. But as attention-arresting as that may be, it is relatively incidental.
More important as far as our political circumstances are concerned, a predisposition to cognitive simplicity and concreteness inherent in oral language forms has now gained pride of place not only among non-college educated Americans—which has always been the case to one extent or another—but also increasingly within all key U.S. elite sectors: political, business, cultural, media, and education. It is a disposition well fitting the description of an uncluttered zero-sum, two-valued orientation that calls to mind childlike or at best adolescent reasoning patterns. Ideological as opposed to analytical thinking, in other words. But reality is messy, which is presumably why both neoteny and then adulthood came to be necessary for species survival and genuinely human flourishing in the first place. In our entertainment-besotted era the zero-sum mindset privileges snap judgments, transient amusement, and surface appearances over deliberation, avocation, and substance.
More consequential, the zero-sum mentality also aligns with a fundamentally mistaken view of human nature, one that sees all relationships as inherently conflictual rather than a complex, shifting mix of competitive and cooperative aspects. It thus credits and advances leadership styles that are brusque, combative, and not infrequently proudly selfish, indeed, Randian in tone. This is exactly what some mean when they credit Donald Trump with “telling it like it is.” They see his win-by-any-means-necessary predilection as an inspiring reification in a high place of their own subjective experience of living in a supposedly dog-eat-dog world. Similarly on the Marxoid if not self-consciously Marxian Left, there is only conflict, so that all expressions of altruism and bourgeois morality is mere eyewash, clever masks, designed to enslave the credulous. In both cases what is imagined to be most real is actually merely most cynical.
The zero-sum mentality, which we will return to below, has advanced lately to a degree that is both new in our nearly two-and-a-half century history as an independent state, and alarming because it seems to mark a cultural tipping point standing athwart the attitudinal basis of every institution that classical liberalism holds dear. Indeed, the malignant zero-sum mentality is the energy source within every Enlightenment termite in our midst. The great numbers of these termites, seemingly multiplying all the time, wielding the zero-sum default attitude toward civic life and moral reasoning with it, have transformed American politics in recent decades.
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
All the main sources of the return of the zero-sum (and lesser others, as well) matter, and they have over time magnified their strengths as they have interlaced with one another to confront us with a dizzying array of temptation to jettison what has been best and most noble in our culture and politics. Some of these sources have a definite material basis in the trenches of economy and technology; others are further removed but not necessarily less impactful. When we concentrate all of this into a formula to proceed, three categories—translated into three separate chapters below—make for the most parsimonious ensemble:
(1) rapidly expanded but essentially unearned affluence for the age cohorts now experiencing it that, shockingly, suddenly seems stalled for many and may even be reversible in an age of financialized and globalized plutocratic/rentier capitalism;
(2) the end of modernity which, in the American case at least, is characterized by an elite reluctance to inculcate Enlightenment-informed civics and moral reasoning into youthful hearts and minds, so to allow the civilization’s sustaining origins stories to fall silent, replaced both by shallow “industrial folklore” and inverted adversary culture stories of credit and blame; and, above all,
(3) a stunning and still accelerating atrophy of deep literacy among even supposedly well-educated people, twinned with the still-underappreciated downsides of the cyberlution (my shorthand hereafter for the cybernetic revolution).6
The first two of these causes are necessary precursors of the third, for it is the displacement of deep literacy by the cyberscreen-propelled return of orality that tracks most closely with the burgeoning of the spectacle mentality. How so?
To put it simply, first with regard to affluence, there could have been no cyberlution without great affluence; neither the science and technology base could have existed without it, and without an eager market that could bear the costs of purchase and ownership of cyber-gadgets no commercial entity could have made a profit. With the spectacle mentality ensconced, elite attempts to respond to the apparent end of ever-expanding affluence has degenerated into an elite-vs.-populist demolition derby.
Meanwhile, deep literacy erosion doubles back on affluence. Those who don’t read don’t do well at connecting dots, or at any task that requires flexibly creative abstract thought, and so come to take their lives of material abundance for granted. They know not how we got from a vague “there” before they were born to where we are now. Hence the affluence is not only unearned but the process of having earned it is neither understood nor respected. So when doubts arise about affluence’s future, the reaction tends to be one of confused, projectile anger.
Moreover, people who displace the patience that deep reading nurtures with cognitive gluttony need affluence to feed their insatiable desire for entertaining, if not escapist, leisure. There must be an ample buffer of material abundance between the bon vivant of the cyber age and the pantry falling empty, or else someone might actually have to do some gainful work to restock it. That prospect is much too sobering for some, and nothing but bad news for many more. A result: The sense of nobility in all honest labor is not what it once was. Pride in workmanship itself seems to be a wasting asset as patiently acquired and bequeathed touch skills decay in the face of digitalized automation. That will likely get worse: Who will need a carpenter to craft wood when a 3-D printer will be able to make what you need out of plastic or some composite synthetic material faster and cheaper?
The end of modernity invariably expresses itself as failed myth maintenance. The decay and displacement of core cultural attitudes, beliefs, and institutions cannot happen so rapidly unless a guardian elite or a creative minority loses first the will and then the practiced ability to defend the virtues of its own civilization. Only into a near void can the unreality haze wrought by the spectacle mentality—whose magical and zero-sum predicates mimic the return of the mythic consciousness in a postmodern era—take firm enough root to shatter the fundaments of a political order as venerable and worthy, warts and all, as that delineated by the U.S. Constitution. From these bases the mother-of-all dysfunction agents has found an open door to push against: the evil twins of deep-literacy erosion and cyberaddiction.
But note that the evil twins also double back to exacerbate the problem of failed myth maintenance. The spectacle mentality is thrilling; it is all about the wow. Understanding classical liberalism and its centrality to democratic culture is the opposite of thrilling. It is stolid, and as such begs lessons in humility, mutual toleration, and respect, and the patience needed to comprehend the workings of positive-sum institutional designs. Is asks for quiet and calm, not cacophony and excitement.
It is not just the content that differs between a spectacle mentality and its forebear, but also the tone. Whatever else they are, elites are teachers to and models for the body politic. When they lose patience, when they abet and model profligacy and short-term flip-it behavior in their professional and business conduct, when they indulge the modalities of Herbert A. Simon’s “attention economy,” and when they themselves don’t read much or deeply, they forfeit the respect owed to genuine leaders. They become unable to engage in myth maintenance—or in positive political socialization, if we want to prettify it a bit—even if they would attempt it, for most have come to lack the ability to teach with passion and sincerity. They can only perform. They know how to grab attention, but having grabbed it they are mostly clueless as to what truly useful tasks they might do with it.
Let us now see why deep literacy erosion, twinned with the cyber-addiction wave washing over us, takes pride of place in the causal pantheon of sources for American dysfunction. Consider just the barest description now in the form of a loose but suggestive chronology; more detail awaits below.
A Timeline to Contemplate
The iPhone first hit the market in June 2007, just in time for the Great Recession, a key inflection point relevant to the mass affluence aspect of the argument, because that’s when expectations of ever-expanding affluence hit a wall, and that turned out to matter a lot politically. That’s where the most recent populist surge came from, its precursors being Occupy Wall Street to the “woke” and the Tea Party to the MAGA phenomenon. It was a surge that Democrats refused to understand and that Republicans gave their party’s soul to capture. The iPhone hit market saturation sometime in late 2013. In that same year Twitter entered the top ten internet sites from its humble origin in March 2006.
From late 2013 to the start of the Republican presidential primacy season was less than two years. 2016 brought us Pizzagate and Frazzledrip, and coincident with the November 2016 election Alex Jones’s InfoWars eclipsed both The Economist and Newsweek in weekly internet hits. In October 2017, QAnon burst forth on the MAGA Right through the semi-“dark” website 4Chan. Three years and a month later, propelled in part by the rapid rise of TikTok—the quintessence of deliberately designed dopamine masturbation, being essentially electronic cocaine dispensed in fifteen-second intermittent reward sequencing—the “Big Lie” was born in the context of hundreds of prior lesser lies from the same source, and it was widely, indeed shockingly, believed. About six weeks later, prepared largely through social media channels, came January 6, 2021.
Then, between January 6, 2021 and January 6, 2024 the ensemble of MAGA lies, knotted together as they fell upon the intended audience aided by a collective skepticism of reality and the credulous embrace of spectacalized fantasy, set deep roots thanks to rampant social media. Recall that the late Ashli Babbitt came to the Capitol on that former date actually believing that she was going to “save the children” from having their faces eaten off by Satanists in the basements of pizza parlors. As of that latter date, just about three and a half months ago, fully a quarter of American adults—and 34 percent of self-identified Republicans—still believed that the January 6 insurrection was a staged deep-state deception carried out by the FBI.7
Even weirder in some ways, a November 2023 poll recorded Republicans claiming that Donald Trump was more a “man of faith” than Joe Biden by a margin of 64 percent to 16 percent. As Dave Barry summed it up—sometimes it takes a humorist to get at the gist of the truly serious—“if the polls are right, we, as a nation, are insane.” Well, maybe not the entire nation; neither Democrats nor most independents agreed, suggesting that someone needs to come up with a serviceable socio-cultural sanity index (SCSI).8 Still, anyone see a picture coming into focus here?
Meanwhile, undreamed of affluence in late 20th and early 21st-century America, most of it inherited rather than earned so more taken for granted than appreciated, has conduced—as it always has everywhere—to decadence.9 It has sired intellectual laziness, notably in the form of a preference for empirically unmoored spontaneous abstractions over patiently examined facts. It has called forth a general decay of standards. It has helped sire the reduced status of truth relative to vague notions of subjective experience. It has diminished the status of work relative to that of creative leisure, or far more often, one suspects, just passive numbing leisure.
It has also diminished the basis of the virtue of provenance. Why save, why be frugal, why be provident when fear of scarcity has lost its age-old grip? A few generations ago, in a less urbanized nation, nearly every household had a kitchen or cottage garden of one kind or another. It cut the costs of putting healthy food on the table, it reduced the frequency of needing to spend time to go somewhere to grocery shop, and it typically provider fresher and healthier fare.
But affluence created what for lack of a better term might be called rational improvidence. Why grow your own when for pennies you can buy it in a glass jar or a plastic bag? Gardening takes physical effort as well as planning, and it takes time that most affluent people seem to prefer to spend on doing nothing in particular. Rational improvidence when it comes to food forfeits the many physical, psychological, and social benefits of gardening—not least its formidable educational virtues for children—so it isn’t rational at all viewed from a whole-human point of view. It only seems rational in the distracted moment.
Affluence has also begotten alienation from politics as an avocation, since if one’s material well-being seems guaranteed it takes the immediacy out of the significance of politics for most people. At least in modern, more materialist times, political orders are like trees known best by their materialist fruits, and if the expectation of abundant fruit is inured in most minds politics as a vocation will seem either a luxury or a bother. Some social scientists have called that attitude rational apathy.
A vacuum of seriousness about political life allows for the development of politics as just another form of entertainment. It helps to norm fictive-like drama as a form of reality—especially when delivered as moving mediated images on two-dimensional screens—and as this form of reality becomes more salient it captures new domains of social life, including political life. Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or family member who seemed unable to distinguish the plotline of an episode of “West Wing” from a fact-based newspaper account of something that actually happened in the Oval Office? It is an increasingly common experience now that at least a third of the world’s population spends the better part of a day fixated on a television screen, a computer screen, or a smartphone screen.
Over time decades of affluence, and in the past thirty years the absence of perception of an existential national security threat, has debased politicians as reality managers and turned them into a collection of superficial and mostly feckless performative gesturers. They know where the audience’s head—the electorate’s head, that is—is these days, even if most individual members of the electorate are too busy wallowing in the wow-now to give the source of their own predilections much thought.
All that, in turn, has helped to produce an overweening sense of effortless entitlement among elites, and with it a relentless drive to lock in near-aristocratic privileges for the next generation. That drive has been mightily aided over the years by the much-discussed phenomenon of assortative mating, itself a consequence of young women attending and graduating from college in numbers that would have astounded any of the nation’s 18th and 19th-century elites. That drive matches up against a keen corresponding sense of unfairness and envy among less well-situated classes, who have mostly grievances, real as well as exaggerated or imagined ones, to pass down.10 Widening status inequality is at least as important a factor in American political life these days as income and wealth inequality, probably more so though it is well nigh impossible to prove. The former is underappreciated; the latter is often misunderstood and exaggerated.
Beyond the capacious impact of affluence, and its recent discontents, failed myth maintenance has created a vacuum into which simpleminded conceptions of both government and economy have flowed. As already noted, classical liberalism represents an achievement of the political arts that emerged from the highly improbable conjunction of a rare moment’s twinned secular and religious innovation: the Age of Reason entwining with the pro-modernist parts of the Protestant Reformation. The result was something new and fine compared to the misanthropies of most pre-modern governance, but something also delicate and so requiring generation-to-generation transmission to appreciate and master. Without study, an enterprise founded on certain minimal levels of at least semi-mass literacy will decay, and regressive pre-Enlightenment modes of thought will re-emerge. They are now doing so with alacrity. It’s rather like a garden: Fail to plant and nurture what is beautiful and useful, and the weeds will return in a trice.
The decay of symbolic capacity that flows from the drop-off in serious reading is both serious and ironic, for it is happening after a decades-long tectonic shift in technology and political economy that has made symbol manipulation vastly more important relative to the manipulation of he physical world. As far as politics, and more specifically civics, is concerned, this decay is directly related to the difficulty we are experiencing in teaching Americans how to understand the related parts of the innovated twinning noted just above: the arts of moral reasoning—mostly the Reformation’s legacy—and the workings of their own government—more the legacy of the Age of Reason.
Not that other sources for the difficulty are lacking, as in education elites not bothering even to try to truly educate in the face of the “no child left behind”/Common Core testing tyranny. Most younger Americans these days think that government gives the people rights just as it gives them material benefits of various kinds (welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment and disability insurance, stimulus payments in hard times), when of course it is We the People who give the government rights, those enumerated in the Constitution and since-accumulated lesser tasks derived therefrom.11 (That most Americans are probably more familiar with the Bill of Rights than with the body of the Constitution no doubt contributes to the confusion.)
The idea that the Federal government is deliberately limited and self-limiting, its power divided into three branches, to protect the people from mobs and avaricious majorities so that the real business of life can proceed has become nearly incomprehensible in a world where power is understood primitively as a zero-sum struggle, and the state is understood to be the vital center of the society, including a moral center, from which all benign initiative flows. Additionally, the separation of powers to protect against autocracy and tyranny renders liberal democratic politics deliberative and slow, sometimes downright plodding, compared to autocracies and dictatorships that can turn on a dime. Built into such political institutions is a need for patience, which is a precious quality we seem to have less and less of as digital devices drive us to speed everything up.12
Liberal democratic politics is also long on procedure and short on instant heroism, enabling compromise and relegating matters of strong conviction to private and community life insofar as possible. This procedural emphasis led Samuel Huntington to shrewdly characterize American politics as Tudor-like, organized around “courts and parties.” With popular entertainment of all types emphasizing superheroes, fantasy wish fulfillment, and non-stop exhilarating action on a grand scale, politics can only seem tedious by comparison. Hence, no doubt, the impulse to remake politics in the image of the entertainment culture within which it dwells as, yet again, life tends to imitate (bad) art.
Clearly, more nuanced and enlightened understandings, which when practiced over time become embedded in attitudes and hence expectations and behaviors, require effort to grasp and to transmit. Again: They require the written word, both the writing and the reading of it. The burgeoning forms of orality all around us, old and new, seem incapable of teaching large enough numbers of people the importance of patience and compromise in a democratic order. So that order is eroding. Put another way, what we think about such subjects is influenced by the ways we think about it. The medium may not exactly be the message, but there’s little doubt that it can shape it profoundly.
The Path Forward
Do the words of this introductory chapter really encapsulate what has gone so very wrong? I believe so, yes. We behold a perfect storm of several trends with separate histories and ontologies. No single silver bullet explanation for the present waves of ambient madness exists; we have instead been hit with potentially deadly pellet spray from one or several sawed-off shotguns.
If we unpack these words, carefully define, expand, and illustrate them, we may then see more clearly the problem set before us. Seeing the problem set for what it really is must precede any plan for fixing it, if indeed it can be fixed. On that question hope must precede effort, for no other way exists to summon the energy for the tasks ahead.
For those trying or wanting to knit last week’s post together with this week’s, the book’s introduction, in its current form, ends with the chapter descriptions just as provided last week.
A pertinent example is Yuval Levin, A Time to Build (Basic Books, 2019). Note also Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge University Press, 2008) for an earlier and broader analysis of how political performances shape social movements in context. In truth, this line of analysis has a deep pedigree. Warren I. Susman, a Rutgers University historian, wrote already in the early 1960s of the rise of the “Culture of Personality” in which likeability, appearances, and entertainment talent was displacing substance and seriousness. Susman was certainly aware of The Lonely Crowd’s typology of inner- and outer-directed personalities and what the relative rise of the latter meant, and of Daniel Boorstin’s well-known aforementioned 1961 book The Image. Aside from books, anyone more or less adult at the time could see how television advantaged John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in November 1960, and how the young Kennedy Administration was contrasted in popular culture with the old Eisenhower image of the taciturn and tattered. “First Family” comedy LPs sold like hotcakes; no one would have thought to make a sympathetic comedy album out of the daily lives of Ike and Mamie.
The best of these is Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press, 2021).
See Joshua Michell, America Awokening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Times (Encounter, 2020), and three years later on the same subject and with roughly the same conclusions—albeit from further left on the horseshoe—Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Times (Penguin, 2023). Mounk is also the author of the 2018 book The People Vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It, on the origin of Western populism or Caesarism. See also Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (HarperCollins, 2023) for a conservative approach to the subject focused on the legal profession.
See Megan Garber, “We’ve Lost the Plot,” The Atlantic, January 30, 2023.
The one partial exception is Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America (Oxford University Press, 2020). For a shorter version of the book’s argument see Maçães, “How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics,” The Intelligencer, September 9, 2020. History Has Begun does put fantasy—not quite the same thing as spectacle as I define it as a neuro-cognitive phenomenon—at the heart of its analysis. It is rich with insight but offers no robust theory of the case as to how fantasy arose to such prominence, ignores entirely the neuro-cognitive dimension of the subject, and asserts a peculiarly optimistic interpretation of a spectacle mentality’s implications. Also, just incidentally, “How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics” was published after I drafted much of this text. Mr. Maçães and I have met briefly, in 2019 in Berlin at a German Marshall Fund program; unfortunately, we did not discuss this subject. We might both have benefitted.
Note that the cyberlution has arrived in phases, and with each the irrepressible sirens of American optimism have deluded us into thinking that no significant downsides were to be imagined or feared. The initial stages of globalization, so-called, which were enabled and propelled by technological change, gave rise to much unbridled optimism—remember Thomas Friedman’s popular 2005 book The World is Flat? It was far more popular, though dramatically less predictive of the future, than Edward Luttwak’s 1998 warning in Turbo-Capitalism. Next came the social media phase of the cyberlution, which most observers pronounced a near-messianic boon for global democracy. That was wrong big time. Similar enthusiasms have lately greeted Artificial Intelligence—anything Ray Kurzweil writes, for example, and fans’ elaborations of Neal Stevenson’s Snow Crash metaverse. Now, at least, cautionary views have been quicker to emerge along side the optimism, so perhaps we are finally learning something. A fine if obscure example of the latter is Prince Floyd, “We Missed Social Media’s Dark Side. Let’s Be Smarter About the Metaverse,” Defense One, February 14, 2023.
See Tom Jackman, Scott Clement, Emily Guskin, and Spencer S. Hsu, “False beliefs on Jan. 6 take root,” Washington Post, January 5, 2024, p. A1.
The poll was a Deseret News/HarrisX poll conducted Nov. 21-23, 2023, but involved only 1,012 registered voters (with no indication given of spatial or demographic/age cohort distribution) with a high margin of error of +/-3.1 percentage points.
Ancient expressions of the insight aside, the ur-text here arose in 14th-century North Africa: Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. The modern classic, focused on the West from the 15th century forward, is Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (Harper, 2000).
On the American meritocracy’s efforts to pass down its privileges to its spawn, see Steven Brill, Tailspin (Knopf, 2018).
A point stressed in Benjamin Sasse, Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal (St. Martin’s, 2018). It is hardly coincidental that Sasse abandoned his Senate seat two years before the end of his term to return to academia.
A point elegantly made by William A. Galston in (the oddly titled essay) “Good Intentions Gone Awry,” American Purpose, September 8, 2023.