The Age of Spectacle, No. 37
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: The Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism
On we go to the penultimate chapter of The Age of Spectacle, which, as has been the case with the foregoing chapters of Part II, will take four posts/parts to roll out. To mark the first anniversary of The Raspberry Patch tomorrow (January 4) and to help new subscribers—welcome, welcome!—get a better feel for the whole project as it stands at the moment, I will as I have done several times before paste the extended working table of contents of the manuscript at the end of this post. I’ll do the same when we get to the beginning of the final chapter, Chapter 10.
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: The Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism, part 1
As already rehearsed in Part I, America as both an idea and as polity was born in the womb of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the single most defining idea of the Enlightenment that ever pierced the minds of the common citizen is that relationships between and among both individuals and groups need not be zero-sum. Win-win situations can be constructed by use of reason applied carefully to institutional design.
For example, as Adam Smith showed (as it happened in 1776), economic growth can be generated not at another’s expense through roving pillage and looting, or through stationary coerced domination, but prosperity is better achieved cooperatively through trade and investment partnerships encouraged by contract law, and by adjuration from bully pulpits both religious and civil for education and tolerance.
Even more important for political life as such, as John Locke and Montesquieu showed, political/legal structures can be devised that tame power by dividing it, and so render what might otherwise be zero-sum conflicts subject into consensual, process-driven resolution. The forebears of the people who live in Franklin, Pennsylvania today may never have understood or consciously embraced any of that. But the educated forebears of those on the illiberal Left did, which brings us to the next critical observation.
Different Birds, Same Feathers
What is remarkable but, alas, mostly unremarked, is that the Randian Right represented so well by Donald Trump and the “critical theory” of the woke Left both embrace views of human nature that reject that of the Enlightenment. Both are zero-sum views insisting that the world works only by dint of conflict.[1] There are only mutually exclusive winners and losers. The engagement of diverse ideas is not important or even desirable; only hegemonic narratives and dominant power, personal commitment, and raw determination matter.
Both forms of American illiberality come to this premise in different but also sometimes in the same ways, and without question their exaggerated and often spectacalized means of expressing it reinforce the determination of the other extreme to stymie what is from their perspective the yonder end of the ideological horseshoe. Over time, too, the combination of this near continuous attention-arresting display with the hollowing out of a more nuanced, refined, and morally infused center—for reasons already rehearsed—is sucking every greater numbers of confused and anxious Americans into the whirlpool of extremist contentiousness. It makes a sound a little like effluent sewage circling down a drain, and that sound is of course the audio of cable news broadcasts.
Examples of the phenomenon let loose into the world are abundant. We saw this form of intellectual dementia on display during the pro-Palestinian campus protests in the spring of 2024, notably at Columbia University. Mona Charen wrote the obvious at the time, but wrote it well: “Something has gone very wrong when [protestors] think in absolutist categories--oppressor/oppressed, victim/victimizer, white/people of color--instead of the equal worth of every person. They are more like the MAGA crowd than they know.”[2] But of course, as anyone who has read this far already well understands.
The main difference between the extremes is that the Randian right focuses on the individual and is a faux-philosophy for those who think for one reason or another that they are winners, all little or would-be John Galts who know and revere their own supposed intrinsic, innate, merit; whereas the neo-Marxoid woke think in terms of groups defined by biological essences who assert, also for a variety of reasons, that they are agentless losers because they are victims of some oppressive “system.” (Never mind, yet again, that the woke Left also claims the postmodern premise, when it suits its felt biases, that all identities are constructed, unaware of the glaring contradiction involved in invoking determinist biology.)
To note this polar dichotomy within the unity of the zero-sum mindset is nothing new. Indeed, it is so old that few contemporaries are aware of it. Not the earliest but arguably the richest of expressions belongs, not surprisingly if you have beforehand acquired a clue about him, to Friedrich Nietzsche.
In paragraph 21 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), where Nietzsche is burying the foolishness of claiming that anything can be sui causus, he digresses into political thought of a sort. More important than the politics, however, Nietzsche identifies a range of conceptual ontologies involved between mythology and religion, both of which he associates with “non-free will” (or necessity or determinism, all the same thing but the vocabulary varies according to period and school). It is not a simple statement--little of Beyond Good and Evil is simple—but what Nietzsche had to say is worth our attention if only for the remarkable contemporary frisson its conclusion trips off:
The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker . . . manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself.
And in general . . . the “non-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their “responsibility,” their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get out of the business, no matter how. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favorite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as “la religion de la souffrance humaine”; that is its “good taste.”
Nietzsche died in August 1900, without being able to observe how his observation crystalized into its current Western form. He did observe the genius of Jacobinism in making envy and the smothering of the individual in the group into virtues. But he did not live long enough to witness the genius of Ayn Rand, who reified radical selfishness, greed, and transactionalism into something noble for anti-Enlightenment sensibilities to strive for. But having distinguished between Randian Galtists (vain races) and woke victimologists (not answerable to or blamed for anything), Nietzsche’s mention of mythology and a certain victim-celebratory kind of religion does provide us an irresistible window through which to see how critical theory cum ideology, as it exists today as the principal form of unchurched woke theology, and Marxism are alike in some ways and different in others.
They are particularly alike in that both, in their respective times, enable the post-Abrahamic mind, tortured by the moral self-doubt inherent in lacking, or denying, any foundational basis for moral reasoning, to indulge its moral passion in terms that also satisfy its passion for ruthless empirical/materialist objectivity. Both ridicule conventional morality and its terms of reference as mere covers for the exertion of raw, exploitative power. Thus Isaiah Berlin noted in his 1939 biography that Marx
. . . sought to obliterate all references to eternal justice, the equality of man, the rights of individuals or nations, the liberty of conscience, the fight for civilization, and other phrases that were the stock in trade . . . of the democratic movements of his time; he looked upon these as so much worthless cant. . .[3]
For Marx the moral charlatans were the bourgeoisie; for critical theorists today they are the shock troops of white patriarchy defending their privileges.
The Marxian analysis in the past created an internal contradiction: The moral passion of socialism has no ontological or epistemological basis if morality itself is merely an instrumental cover for class interests--just the distracted false-consciousness fluff of superstructure carved out of the real stuff of substructure by those advantaged by the oppressive status quo. The “magic” of Marxism, as Michael Polanyi shrewdly described it, was to hide the barely varnished moral basis of the ideology by claiming that it was actually a science. That meant in the 19th century that it was determinist and lawful in the sense that science, when it gets it right, is lawful in fidelity to truth structures inherent and invariant in nature. Without the magic, Marxism is pure moral angst with no logical moral basis. It was the 19th-century quintessence of having one’s philosophical cake and eating it too: “The more inordinate our moral aspirations and the more completely amoral our objectivist outlook, the more powerful the combination in which contradictory principles manage to reinforce one another.”[4] To pull something like that off is indisputably magic of a sort.
Having jettisoned in its entirety the moral system associated with religion, Marxism’s claim to be empirical, “ruthlessly objective,” could still possibly make sense if the premises concerning the objective quality of the subject matter had been accurate. But they were not accurate. Not only was the economics wrong (the sociology of knowledge less so), but Marx’s insistence on the inevitable domination of conflict over cooperation in human nature was an objective error, at least by the light of recent sociology and even primatology, turning what he believed to be a inverted and true domestic political version of Realpolitik into what amounted to cynicism on stilts. Like so many others at the time, it seems, Marx was influenced by Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” bastardization of Darwin. Whatever the source of his error, when Marxism became armed after November 1917, the cynicism ultimately emerged as the central characteristic of communist systems, first in Russia and then elsewhere; but it was there all along, embedded in a single erroneous premise.
Woke critical theory relies on an identical zero-sum premise about the domination of conflict in human nature, and suffers a very similar problem with contradictions, only it reverses the relevant premises as it, like Marxism, tries to evade them. It claims, thanks to its very sticky if not always entirely smothering postmodernist premise, that there is no objective reality and so no basis for independent moral claims. All such claims mask interests, as with the Marxist premise—so here critical theory follows directly from the emotivist position first devised, in modern times at least, by the aforementioned A.J. Ayer.
That leaves any and all moral claims the woke make about the moral rightfulness of radical undifferentiated egalitarianism with no ontological basis whatsoever. Whereas Marxism posits an objective reality and sees itself as a science that understands that reality—and can affect reality in pursuit of class interests that would ultimately wither away the bourgeois (or Lockean) state and usher in the secular messianic era—critical theory asserts that there is no objectivity, and one cannot affect that which does not exist! In place of empirical-based science critical theory asserts the domination of subjective perception. It thus relativizes not only morality but also rationality. Marxism’s magic consisted in declaring itself a science in harmony with objectivity; critical theory’s magic consists in its denying the very basis for science in harmony with pure subjectivity. That truly is powerful magic, for subjectivity is the perfect on-ramp for all forms of psycho-metamorphosis—of thinking and believing whatever one likes.
Marxism and critical theory also share one other similarity and difference. They are similar in that moral unction, and being on the side of justice and equality, is the engine of the ideology—never mind, as noted, that neither locates any plinth in moral reasoning itself. But Marxism’s martyrs and victims to be saved are defined in terms of class, while critical theory’s martyrs and victims to be redeemed are defined in terms of group biological essentialism—so back we go for a necessary moment to the identity politics of race.
The concept of social class has a firm basis in sociological reality and, looking at the long skein of change from pre- to post-industrial revolution social structures and political economies, a trajectory can be identified and at least generally and fairly referred to as progressive. Over about three centuries the movement first in the West and then elsewhere from Ferdinand Tonnies’ gemeinschaft to gesellschaft has involved a huge tradeoff in terms of the definition and nature of human thriving. But that said, it is a fair statement that the world as a whole is today generally less nasty than it was, say, three centuries ago, and progressive political energies, when they did not jump the rails into totalitarian hellfires, are part of the reason for that. Whether it is less nasty also thanks to the collective efforts of the inventors, investors, and builders who fabricated the infrastructure of a widespread prosperity is a question we can no more firmly answer than could Job or any number of disappointed Whigs.
But the concept of group biological essentialism, whether defined by ethnicity or gender or some mash-up of the two and more besides, is about as regressive as one can imagine. The modern precursor of the supposedly “progressive” idea of the definitive biological essences of groups was the Nazi Party, following Josef de Gobineau and other “scientific” racists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, to ground the premise of critical theory identity politics in anything solid would require a granular analysis of the distribution of allele clusters among human groups worldwide and their behavioral manifestations, a project that would be subject to massive misunderstandings and cause no end of trouble, and that in any event would not ratify the wildly simplistic categories of identity politics than animate woke social justice warriors.[5]
But simplistic, superficial thought is as necessary to ideology as it is anathema to science, and we see this distinction by looking more closely at the terms “race” and “racism.” When ideologues or merely the simpleminded invoke “race” they may mean a genetic endowment, and they may insinuate that a genetic endowment explains better than anything else how groups of people, and sometimes even individuals within that group, behave. But whatever genetic endowment may lie within the human body—and it would be churlish to deny any such endowment—it generally pales before cultural-historical factors in explaining behavior, especially collective social-institutional behavior. The polygenic and environmentalist accounts of group behavior are not mutually exclusive but complementary; insofar as argument exists among those seeking reliable data on the matter it has to do with balances and interactions, not exclusive provenance.
When social analysts and ideologues alike invoke “racism,” on the other hand, they mean that one group of people organizes their thinking and behavior toward other groups with different allele clusters in ways that stigmatize them as biologically inferior. That indeed happened and still does to some extent—and not only in America and the West.[6] The term fits aptly to describe a mistaken behavior.
But invoking the term “racism” today can and often does mean something additional in the lexicon of identity politics ideology: It mean that “White” people are racists not because of historical and cultural factors but because of biological or bio-essentialist factors: “Racism” inheres in Whiteness, in other words, and no amount of penance, education, and support for reparations can expunge it. This is, of course, the identical logic of white racism only flipped on its head. As already argued above, it is just as much in error as was the original version, and it may or may not be a coincidence in the American historical context that both the original error and the new, flipped one have found homes mainly in the Democratic Party. That party seems well nigh obsessed by the specter of racial hierarchy, first one way and now, partly at least, the other, passing through the colorblind interregnum of Martin Luther King, Jr. as though it were a fuzzed blink in the night. It is one of the errors woke identity politics makes that Marxism, based on a distinctly different epistemology, never did.
Both Marxism and critical theory are at base creedal systems; both, as Eric Voegelin would be quick to note were he still among us, bear the syntax of religious thought. But Marxism is merely scientistic; critical theory is downright mystical. Marxism has been, whatever else it has been, a project for actual adults. Critical theory, as already suggested, looks more like a postmodern children’s crusade. In that regard both have been signs of their times.
Marxism arose during science’s ascendency as the focus of a new faith, but the stories it could tell were familiar ones about progress, fairness, and human dignity derived from older sacred narratives. Marxism denied all of that high-sounding language, as Berlin pointed out in 1939, but it could not possibly have banished it as a reference point. Critical theory, on the other hand, has arisen at a time of science’s reputational nadir among a population largely unable to figure out what, if anything, it believes in or what stories it has to tell. Marxism took emotional refuge in the inevitability of its triumph; its meaningfulness was nested in expectations of real change that could be seen and measured. Critical theory and postmodernism generally takes emotional refuge in mere virtue-signaling, in performative posturing. There is no telling or compelling point, after all, in trying to change a construed or constructed reality that by definition does not exist except, somehow ex nihilo, in some people’s heads.
Perhaps worse in the sense of more dangerous, any sense of meaning in the ambit of critical theory, or of any kind of thought that dwells entirely in the subjective, is ephemeral and evanescent. It is fleeting since when the emotion decays, as emotion must, so with it does any meaning. Matt Crawford put a related point about the arc of experience this way:
For the subjectivist, value judgments don’t apprehend anything. There is no feature of the world that would make them true or false, since they merely express private feeling. It follows that your moral and aesthetic outlook can’t become more discerning. It can’t deepen or mature, it can only change. . . . Moral and aesthetic judgment has the same status as mere sensations, such as an itch--they are entirely one’s own. As such, they are basically incommunicable. The dogmatic inarticulacy of subjectivism--perhaps we should call it moral autism--leaves people bereft of any public language with which to express their intuitions about the better and worse, the noble and shameful, the beautiful and ugly, and assert them as valid.[7]
Since a completely personal and relativistic sense of value or meaning is by definition not intersubjectively sharable, except temporarily and often only by accident, no stable hierarchy of values can form a ground for any purposeful social or political project. Any meaningfulness that matters in social and political terms requires institutional structures, discipline, and standards. The meaningfulness of postmodernism tries, as one observer put it, “to replace moral systems with the emotional corona that surrounds acts of charity. It’s a paltry substitute.”[8]
The Touching of the Extremes
The similarities between the extremes of illiberal Right and illiberal Left, the cynics and the saints, are generally more interesting than the differences. In summary, their thinking is ideological as opposed to analytic, so highly simplified and thus unfalsifiable since all discrepant evidence is ascribed to lurid and often lewd conspiracies. In that sense the thinking usually evinces the syntax of religious or creedal language, so is typically zero-sum in nature and hence definitionally intolerant. They both know little actual and hence messy history (or keep quiet about it if they do), only snatches of what I have called bullshistory.[9]
The highly improbable logic of the respective ideologies also works to bind groups together, as improbable religious origin stories have always done.[10] Above all, both are very deep into spectacle as a mode of demonstration and communication, actively searching for any reason to be outraged (think Alex Jones on the Right, almost any victimhood entrepreneur on the Left) so to release their hatred in histrionic waves of attention-grabbing spectacle.[11] This kind of mentality has been around for a long time, of course, but the internet is the perfect medium for taking it to heights—or depths—heretofore undreamed of.
President Obama commented on the phenomenon back in 2015 when he noted in his airplane conversation with Marilynne Robinson, mentioned above, that internet exchanges incentivize “the sensational and the most outrageous or a conflict as a way of getting attention and breaking through the noise,” the result of which, he added, is the generation of “pessimism about the country.”[12] As Renée DiResta has observed, too, cultic crowds assembled through common belief in a conspiracy theory do not easily disassemble, just as crowds-cum-affinity groups rarely assemble over the anodyne and normal.[13] Obama added that, in the current media environment, “It’s not interesting to hear a story about some good people in some quiet place that [sic] did something sensible and figured out how to get along.”
Why? Hatred works because it is the most powerful emotion. Aptly wrote William Hazlitt in his 1826 book On the Pleasure of Hating: “Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.” Even better, perhaps for our purposes is Eric Hoffer writing in 1951: “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensible of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can arise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.”[14] Best of all on this point—for it describes to a tee the MAGAt tack of nurturing and when possible creating hatred in order to harvest it—are the words Umberto Eco put in the mouth of his archetypal 19th-century Okhrana agent Rachkovsky. Divine Providence gave the Jews to Russia, Rachkovsky tells our narrator Simonini, because:
We need an enemy to give people hope. . . . National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. . . . You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. . . . You don’t love someone for your whole life—that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends…. But you can hate someone for your whole life, provided he’s always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.[15]
These traits of collective personality that adorn both positive and negative aspects of peer dynamics show up in both expected and unexpected places and cases. The inability or unwillingness of the illiberal, identity-politics Left to condemn Hamas’s grotesque slaughter of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, including elderly people, children, and at least forty beheaded infants, is a case in point. In a zero-sum mental world where there are only oppressors and oppressed, college students who know virtually no relevant history assume that “White” Israelis, allied with the imperialist United States, are the oppressors and Palestinians—terrorists and not terrorists glibly conflated together in an act of clueless anti-Arab bigotry—are the oppressed.[16] That premise excuses all forms of moral obloquy apparently and, initially at least, the leaders of many elite colleges were either so frightened by the illiberality of their students that they did not dare stir their ire by calling evil by its name, or else they shared their simplistic identity-politics views. It is unclear which possibility is worse.
Jake Auchincloss, a 35-year old Congressman representing a district near Boston, got it right:
Colleges are increasingly illiberal, and there is a rise of illiberal progressivism that is hostile to the concept of individual rights, free expression, free enterprise, free inquiry. Too many young activists view the conflict through the academic lens of colonialism [which] collapses all of the context and history of the Middle East into the binary of oppressor vs. oppressed. There is no patience or understanding of the long history and context of the region. The Jews are just the oppressors, and the Palestinians the oppressed.[17]
That zero-sum ideological framework, Auchincloss continued, obviates any possibility that that Hamas might be bad, that Israeli hostages deserved rescue, or that Joe Biden might be right over all on the U.S. policy response.
It is also the basis for spectacle-based protests where slogans like “Gas the Jews” have been popular. This is no different in performative inspiration, aligned generally with the mythic mentality, than MAGA slogans and signs reading “F_ck Biden.” In the case of the illiberal Left’s anti-Semitism a thick crossover to the neo-Nazi shard of the MAGA Right is easy to discern, linking illiberal Left protestors with those who wore “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.
The favorite choice of spectacle instrumentation on the Right these days usually involves blatant, shameless lying, but also guns, mobs, and threats to do violence with both. Certainly this was increasingly Donald Trump’s default mode after losing the November 2020 election. Whether he will be able as President a second time to take the nation’s entire legal system hostage as a result remains to be seen. It is Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason,” given only a very light sheen of a rationale, brought to mob life in living color. Gun control is ultimately a mental problem in this sense, or may soon become one.
Meanwhile, on the Left the favorite choice of spectacle instrumentation is, as we saw above in Chapters 2 and 8, genitalia—mostly assertions about it rather than genitalia proper, thank heaven. Both sides of the circus act evince spectacle gluttony. Another similarity often goes unnoticed, though it is the most important of all: Both illiberal woke Left and illiberal populist Right fail to discern where the actual source of the problems that irk them come from.
The populist MAGA Right is the most obviously and profoundly confused about this. These fools (I use the word in its specifically Swiftian meaning) have been gulled by MAGAt conflict entrepreneurs into thinking that the state is their enemy. That is the “deep state” for the particularly conspiratorial minded but more broadly it is the meliorist/administrative state whose main function, they think, is to give their tax dollars away to the undeserving. But who is funding the Right big time? Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are the most obvious ones, but others are not that far behind them in reputations and financial contributions. All of them are anti-union, anti-regulatory, pro-offshoring, and all the other things that harm non-college educated white men and their families. The Republican ticket even included a Vice-Presidential candidate who managed as a junior Senator from Ohio to get a zero percent approval rating from the AFL-CIO. Some champions of the working class….
It is so very ironic: Donald Trump, the supposed “winner” ever punching down on and bad-mouthing “losers” is adored by those who in the current oligarchical vice grip of the Net Effect are objectively the left behind….the losers. Perhaps the pertinent question is, how many oblivious masochists does it take to fill the orange head of a sadistic pin?
Our gluttony is obvious and wildly harmful in its effects in everything from the national plague of obesity, which involves literal gluttony, to binge-watching Netflix, which taken together is very bad for Americans’ health. Speaking of health, it is obvious too in the social reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, where such mundane matters as wearing a mask and abiding by social distancing precautions were politically instrumentalized far beyond reason and almost beyond imagination. But nowhere was this curious form of democratic masochism plainer than in the surrealist MAGAt reaction to Trump’s management of the COVID crisis.
Those who identified as Trump supporters gave Donald Trump an over 80 percent positive approval ratings for handling the pandemic (as of the end of June 2020), and the older the cohorts the higher the approval rating—93 percent for those over 65 compared to a mere 80 percent for those 18-35.[18] In other words, those most likely to die as a result of Trump’s multiple and often willful callous errors were the ones who approved most. How can that have been?
The Age of Spectacle: How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Has Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: Hypothesis Unfurled 5
The Cyberlution
The Republic of Spectacle: A Pocket Chronology
The Spectocracy Is Risen
Why This Argument Is Different from All Other Arguments
Opening Acts and the Main Attraction
Obdurate Notes on Style and Tone
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. Fragilized Affluence and Postmodern Decadence: Underturtle I 39
Government as Entertainment
The Accidental Aristocracy
Deafness to Classical Liberalism
The Culture of Dematerialization
Affluence and Leadership
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Wealth and Individualism
Hard Times Ain’t What They Used to Be
Affluence Fragilized
Real and Unreal Inequality
The Net Effect
Dysfunctional Wealth
Searching for the Next Capitalism
2. Our Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity: Underturtle II 81
What Is a Mythopoetical Core?
Aristotle’s Picture Album
Faith, Fiction, Metaphor, and Politics
The American Story, a First Telling
How Secularism Was Birthed in a Religious Age
Regression to the Zero-Sum
Industrial Folklore
Bye, Bye Modernity, Hello the New Mythos
Mythic Consciousness and Revenant Magic
Sex Magic
Word Magic
Business Magic
Progress as Sarcasm, History as Nightmare
Attitudes and Institutions Misaligned
3. Deep Literacy Erosion: Underturtle III 143
Trending Toward Oblivion
The Reading-Writing Dialectic
The Birth of Interiority
A Rabbinic Interlude
You Must Remember This
Dissent
The Catechized Literacy of the Woke Left
Reading Out Tyranny
Chat Crap
4. Cyber-Orality Rising: Underturtle III, Continued 178
The Second Twin
Structural Mimicry and Fantasized Time
Losing the Lebenswelt
Podcast Mania
The Political Fallout of Digital Decadence
Zombified Vocabulary
Democracy as Drama
Where Did the News Go?
Optimists No More
Foreshadowing a Shadow Effect
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy: An Under-Underturtle 228
A Big, Fat, Ancient Greek Idea
The American Story Again, This Time with Feeling
Footnotes to Plato
Some For Instances
Jefferson à la Carte
Revering the Irreverent
The Deep Source of the American Meliorist State
The Great Morphing
Myth, Magi, and Immaturity
The Wages of Fantasy
Pull It Up By the Roots
The Crux
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated 289
Astounding Complexes and Technical Events from TV to Smartphones
Tricks, Illusions, and Cons
Fakers, Frauds With Halos, and Magnificos
Projectionist Fraud as a Way of Life
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
Fake News
Trump as Master of Contrafiction
Conspiracy Soup
Cognitive Illusions
Facticity Termites
Conditioning for Spectacle
To the Neuroscience
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Research and Implications 346
Brain Power
Seeing the Light
Surfing Your Brainwaves
Suffer the Children
The Screen!
Easy Rider
The Graphic Revolution, Memory, and the Triumph of Appearances
McLuhan Was Wrong, and Right
Brain Shadows
No Need to Exaggerate
8. Cognitive Gluttony: Race and Gender 383
Cognitive Gluttony Racialized
Ripleys on the Left
More Sex
Abortion: Serious Issues, Specious Arguments, Sunken Roots
Beyond Feminism
I’m a Man, I Spell M-A-N
9. Saints and Cynics: The Common Roots of Contemporary America Illiberalism 425
Different Birds, Same Feathers
The Touching of the Extremes
From Left to Right and Back Again
Spectacle in Stereo
The Right’s Crazy SOB Competition
The Irony of Leveling
Human Nature
What November 4, 2024 Means
10. Spectacle and the American Future 459
You Are the Tube and the Tube Is You
The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Is Woke Broke?
Myth as Model
The AI Spectre
The Futility of Conventional Politics
A Few National Security Implications
Meanwhile…
Who Will Create the Garden?
Acknowledgments 488
[1] See the herald by two senior officials who left the first Trump Administration earliest: H.R. McMaster and Gary D. Cohn, “America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2017. See also “Ayn Rand Acolyte Donald Trump Stacks His Cabinet with Fellow Objectivists,” Washington Post, December 13, 2016. A fine if incomplete description of the woke Left’s Hobbsean-to-Marxist premises is Andrew Sullivan, “The Roots of Wokeness,” The Dish, July 31, 2020.
[2] Mona Charen, “The Gaza Protests Are a Mirror-Image of MAGA,“ The Bulwark, May 2, 2024.
[3] Berlin, Karl Marx (Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 10.
[4] Polanyi, “The Magic of Marxism,” p. 228.
[5] Massive misunderstanding is likely despite best efforts to allay it, as with the reaction to Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History (Penguin Press, 2014). Wade, the long-time science editor of the New York Times, bent over every way possible to protect his analysis from misuse, but some still rued his search for truth. An earlier example of something similar, from a time before the mapping of the human genome in April 2003, is F. J. Ebbing, ed., Racial Variations in Man (John Wiley & Sons, 1975). The book contained an essay by the then-controversial Arthur Jensen.
[6] Anyone with the stomach for it should watch the last half hour of the first “Baahubali” film released in 2015. Only in India can unvarnished racism of this kind pass the muster of public and popular opinion.
[7] Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in An Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), p. 184.
[8] David Brooks, “The Problem with Meaning.” See also Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. Hunter was Philip Rieff’s series editor in the latter’s aforementioned Deathworks trilogy.
[9] See my “Bullshistory and Philosoupy,” The American Interest, November 25, 2020.
[10] See my “The Origin and Uses of Improbable Beliefs,” Al-Mesbar (UAE, Arabic and English), December 27, 2018.
[11] See Richard Thompson Ford, “The Outrage-Industrial Complex,” The American Interest, December 18, 2019, for example from the Left.
[12] New York Review of Books, November 19, 2015.
[13] Watch Renée DiResta’s Commonwealth Club conversation with Quentin Hardy, June 20, 2024.
[14] Hoffer, The True Believer, p. 11.
[15] Eco, The Prague Cemetery, p. 342.
[16] This, too, is not an entirely new phenomenon. When Black Panther founder Eldridge Cleaver arrived in Algeria in the summer of 1969, he expected to find that Arabs were dark-skinned, basically black, like he was. After all, he knew that Algeria was in Africa. What he found instead, of course, were people who mostly looked like sun-tanned white people, and he saw some Algerians who were blonde—the result of many generations of Mediterranean-borne trade between North Africa and parts of Europe. Alas, ideology and ignorance had preceded him to Algiers.
[17] Auchincloss quoted in Charlie Sykes, “Morning Shots,” The Bulwark, October 24, 2023.
[18] “How Americans Feel About the Country Night Now. Anxious. Hopeful,” New York Times, June 27, 2020.