The Age of Spectacle, No. 40
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism
The Raspberry Patch is on today with the final part of Chapter 9; so one chapter, in four or maybe five parts, to go.
By now those of you who have been along for the rollout ride more or less from the beginning have probably decided whether the argument being made here helps you see more clearly and understand better what is happened outside your windows, out there in the world—or not, or perhaps some. It does help me. The more I see the more I am persuaded that the analytical template is basically correct, and certainly I have used it to good effect, I think, in the recent days of accelerated experience that have been bursting out pretty much non-stop since the afternoon of January 20—that date being, as already announced, The Age of Spectacle’s closing date for new data (with only a smidgen of exceptions).
But then my assessment of my own handiwork could just be the motivational bias of cognitive dissonance throwing its pesky self onto the road before me, teasing me onward even as it leads me astray. I am aware of the temptation of smugness and the danger of egoism because I’ve seen them at work in others. But at this point I see no alternative to sprinting toward the finish line. As my old friend Walter Russell Mead once said—I’m paraphrasing from memory here—“nay-sayers to the left of me, calumnies to my right, onward I pundit.” So buckle up (or down, your call), here we go:
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism, final part 4
The Irony of Leveling
The urge to radical leveling—whether it comes from Left or Right by current locution—is very old, and was old long before deviant sexuality saints got their hands on it. The English Civil War included a group actually called the Levellers, for example. In more modern times leveling has taken two forms: radical mass-murderous revolution (cf. the Jacobins and the guillotine, the Cheka and the Kulaks; the CCP and the Great Leap Forward; the Khmer Rouge and the class-genocide…); and a politically more palatable gradualist form of egalitarianism fostered by institutional means rather that by revolt, riot, and revolution.
That latter form has been the growing norm and the increasing reality in much of the globe since the middle of the 19th century. But by mid-20th century a twist arrived that torqued the trend: Just as the egalitarian norm was spreading widely and beyond the cultural West, the infrastructure of the economies of most advanced states was becoming more hierarchical as average economic unit size grew with increased labor specialization and technical innovation—a sort of early or apprentice Net Effect compared to that of our own day.
The pre-industrial age norm was that a man worked for himself for sustenance first and profit second if he could, often within a family unit. The industrial age norm in cities and towns was that a man worked for someone else for wages, with every company featuring a hierarchy with the owner or owners on top, the managers just below and the workers of various skills and ranks below that. By the time we get to mid-20th century corporate America, gigantism in economic units produced massive and ornate hierarchies that brought with them a large dollop of impersonalism—the “gray suits” that culture critics and the novelist Sloan Wilson, with his The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, wrote about in the mid-1950s. From a psychological perspective, work life became more inhibiting, less free, less egalitarian even as the now extended second- and third-generation Industrial Revolution ultimately increased living standards, literacy rates, and health outlooks for nearly all people.
This observation is more important to illuminating the problem before us than it first may appear. The status of work itself has eroded in an age of massive and mostly unearned affluence.[1] Why work when there is already enough, and more than enough, for everyone? What’s wrong with a guaranteed national income regardless of any work requirements to get it; it will stimulate consumption, so-called aggregate demand, which is good for the economy, right? Why struggle to leave the world a better place materially for the next generation when things are already amazingly flush—so better to solve the distribution problem than to emphasize working and building further at likely harm to the environment. Besides, it is clear that machines already do and will do still more of the required menial work, and not just menial work—and it takes only a tiny fraction of the labor supply to build and maintenance those machines.
The point is that we now live in a culture that for the first time in history that is capable of thinking that work, whether enjoyable or not, is mostly unnecessary. No wonder the an increasing percentage of the service workers who come to repair your air-conditioning or plumbing, or to paint your house or fix your electrical sockets, take so little pride in their work that they routinely screw up simple tasks. Other, usually older craftspeople typically remonstrate about this even more than do disappointed consumers.
Nor do we take much pride anymore in large “works”—canals, bridges, super-highways, skyscrapers, jet aircraft, putting a man on the moon, and so on—as we once did. As with affluence in general we mostly take all this for granted. This is one of the several reasons we do not do infrastructure well anymore; it’s lost its sex appeal.
Same goes for service-oriented bureaucrats at all levels of government who interface with the public: the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and so on at the Federal level. Employees follow the rules but increasingly lack pride in public service; they care about salaries, benefits, and protections against being disciplined or fired for malfeasance. That is partly because when individuals are dwarfed by massive hierarchies that anonymize whatever skills they may have it becomes difficult to pinpoint positive outcomes that are their clear doing. It is as bad, probably worse, than working on a conveyor belt manufacturing assembly team. At least in the latter instance one sees physical, assembled things produced that someone might actually use.
More on the government point: We have lots of policymakers with terrific ideas of about doing this or that, but we have many fewer policy implementors, those who care about and know how to work the details that make anything actually work. Coming up with ideas is simple; getting any one of them to work right in context is complex, but the slow and patient work of implementation is not well rewarded—it is rather the kind of work government agencies typically hire nameless contractor factota to take care of.[2]
This problem works as a microcosmic proof of the Age of Spectacle thesis itself: Ideas provide eureka moments, and when shared they arrest attention. They are pulse-raising, entertaining, even spectacular; but implementation details are boring even to hear about let alone to do. So a story as illustration.
My former dean at SAIS/Johns Hopkins, Paul Wolfowitz, once told me once he wanted to be Secretary of State. Instead, for reasons we may leave off relating here, he became Deputy Secretary of Defense.[3] The Deputy job at DOD is a management job, or long had been since the 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense. But Wolfowitz fancied himself a policy ideas man, and, like Ronald Reagan before him, believed that the details (and the money to pay for implementing ideas) would take care of themselves if the basic concepts were gotten right. The management and details-oriented leadership obligations of the Defense Department then might have fallen to others, probably an Assistant Secretary; but personalities matters in such things. The Assistant Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith—whom I met in the summer of 1972 in Philadelphia and whose father I also knew—was also an ideas man more than a details man, and he was preferred to others of his rank in Donald Rumsfeld’s order of bureaucratic battle. The result: “Shock and Awe,” the decision to attempt a knock-out punch of the Iraqi military by decapitating its leadership in March 2003, more or less on the model of the Israeli preemptive strike of June 6, 1967. It failed, and when engaged military and civilian personnel looked around for Plan B they discovered to their anxious embarrassment that there wasn’t much of a Plan B to be found. The rest is tragi-history.
First time tragedy, second time farce? You bet: When “shock and awe” became the pre-Inaugural for-press-consumption by-word of the second Trump Administration it would have been funny had it not been so bizarre. True enough, it was eerily accurate: Beyond the campaign and post-campaign rhetoric about tariffs, deporting illegal immigrants, ending the Ukraine-Russia War in a day, grabbing Greenland and the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state, transforming Hollywood, and so on, the Gang That Couldn’t Hammer a Nail Straight had not much of an idea of what to do, no actual detailed plans for implementation, just mostly noisy fake-it-‘til-you-make-it instincts propelled by a rash of angry-defiant Executive Orders. It simply skipped over what became of “shock and awe” 1.0 back in the spring of 2003; did they think no one would notice?
Why use the phrase at all, then? Because the MAGAt brain trust thought it would sound attention-arresting, manly, entertaining, spectacular—appearances are what these people have always cared most about, and they probably assumed that few would remember what happened nearly 22 years ago in the age of present-oriented wow-now, assuming that some of them, at least, did recall what happened. They were probably right in that assumption: After all, no more than a wisp of facility with before and after, no solid timelines backward or forward, remain in the extant mass mythic American consciousness, especially in the mostly post-literate MAGA constituency.
Besides, should the substance of a policy be found wanting or gone awry, the MAGAt brain trust knows how to distract the audience with new shiny objects while they recalculate what to do next—and, to be fair, it has worked pretty well for them so far. Indeed, Trump’s second Inaugural, reportedly written by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, was its own shiny object, reifying the grit-and-grimy developmentalist—and imperialist—glories of the American 19th century, deifying, of all Presidents, William McKinley, and failing to mention any downside to that era whatsoever.[4] The speech resembled—what else?—an old-time movie in prose, and recalled the late P.J.O’Rourke’s memorable line: “It’s one thing to burn down the shithouse, another to install plumbing.” Populists, then and now, know how to rabble-raise and dream big, but institution building and reforming is not their forte, to put it mildly. Who would have thought that farce could be so efficacious politically?
Everyone with eyes to see knows all this about the nadir of work and the rise of boring bureaucratic anonymity—and on its coattail the rising appetite for diversion, entertainment, spectacle, and faux-history based fantasies like Trump’s second Inaugural; one needn’t have read Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, or even Richard Sennett to identify the trend-line. What has gone largely unremarked, however, is the possibility, noted in passing just above, that the contemporary expression of radical undifferentiated egalitarianism has erupted as a form of overcompensation, an unselfaware cri de coeur stemming from the cloying contradiction between growing normative egalitarianism and the reality of growing hierarchy and reduced labor agency in workplaces. Corporate capitalism has long been busy creating more literal labor inequality and associated pay scales just as cultural norms demanded more equality and greater concern for the dignity of all persons.
Something had to give; but it took time for the consequences to come out in the wash. Labor unions and their supporters tried to fight the contradiction on its own terms, and in the Iron Triangle age of the 1950s and 1960s—as John Kenneth Galbraith famously named it in The New Industrial State—succeeded pretty well. But as trade and manufacturing unions lost clout for both internal and external reasons—including corporate strategies explicitly designed to press government policy into harming them—the once pro-union political Left abandoned the field and its own original raison d’être in favor of a softer, better to say squishier, cultural egalitarianism focused increasingly on, yes, gender and genitalia. Instead of fighting in the union trenches the Sixties and post-Sixties Left has been fighting the bedroom cultural wars. And since November 5, 2024, we all know where that led.
The culture-war Left has been moderately successful in fighting those bedroom wars—too successful its own good politically—but that has been little to no help for what used to be called the proletariat, which the Left still professes, occasionally and theoretically at least, to care about. No surprise, then, that the proletariat has turned rightward in its politics as harder times bore down upon them—as manufacturing jobs were exported to cheaper production platforms so that men, mainly, could no longer be the main household breadwinners they were raised to believe they should be. Again, to reprise from earlier chapters, we know the data on men without college degrees opting out of the workforce, becoming depressed, using alcohol and drugs to excess, messing up their marriages if they had one, and ending up too often as a “deaths of despair” statistic.[5]
The political implications are or ought to be clear: It is no surprise that a déclassé and disabused male proletariat has turned rightward with a vengeance, because the same thing happened in 1930s’ Europe. Remind yourself of how German laborers voted socialist in the 1929 general election and then voted National Socialist in the 1932 election; in the face of a sharp economic downturn it need not take long for worried workers to switch allegiance to vote for “change,” since the airy abstractions many politicians spout never really seize their attention in the first place. While the downturn in the United States after 2007-08 was mild and only relative compared to Germany at the onset of the Great Depression, it was psychologically as powerful for the optimism and growing affluence that preceded it. Meanwhile, the woke Left took to referring to these folks en masse as “deplorables” and thus became, and remains, an objective but clueless political ally of the MAGA world. Here the fact of polarization creates a powerful synapse: when the poles meet, some very destructive energies threaten to break loose.
Bringing the Left into the discussion is no accident, as they say. Leveling is of course also the animating core of Marxist class war, and when empowered predictably leads to mass murder. Marxists armed certainly leveled a lot of innocent people, murdering many millions into permanently horizontal postures. And the basic urges of leftwing populism, even when not armed, have not disappeared. The irony of it is positively shocking: Though posited as progressive, much of the current variety rather resembles medieval feudalism.
Saints are the anointed; they have grace. They see their life’s work as selflessly serving others, and the idol of radical undifferentiated egalitarianism bids them destroy all hierarchy and privilege. But woke saints themselves stand at the apex of a moral hierarchy—that is what a saint does, of course—and they themselves are the ultimate elite in an utopian scenario—that is what it means to have grace, also of course. They thus resemble more than a little the lords and barons of old in league with the Church, protecting the innocent and clueless from both predators without and from their own benighted spiritual shortcomings within. This could be funny even to woke social justice warriors if they had a sense of humor; they don’t, however.
That said, the contemporary woke Left’s virtue-signaling essence has yet to transcend theatrical spectacle; its ideological excesses have not yet killed many or even any innocent people. Circus of the Portland Naked Athena type and unselfconscious silliness are preferable to civil war, after all.
Nevertheless, woke radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, now in its prominent sexualized form, has made deep inroads into American elite culture, and within that culture elite universities are the vanguard of the process. Most elite universities have already turned from Enlightenment-infused institutions dedicated to freedom of inquiry and critical thinking—sapere aude, remember?—back into their prior medieval form: theological institutions, where belief shapes what passes for facts and truth rather than the other way around.
The new catechism then passes downward from the heights these days through all forms of big-money mass-entertainment, which necessarily subsumes most advertising venues as well; the corporations that buy the advertising do it because they know that the woke come mostly from the middle and upper-middle classes, where purchasing power is thickest. That is why it matters that advertising language, along with the attitudinal premises mostly inadvertently smuggled within, dig the deepest ruts in American culture given the nature of the delivery technology—and mass-broadcast advertising language today in America is very woke…at least it has been before November 5, 2024. There are now signs of change; several large companies have dumped their DEI programs, for example. But the wheel is still in spin as of Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025.
So leftist illiberalism is not mere, and one day might yet become as dangerous to what remains of the American classical liberal order as the nuttiness on the Right, perhaps even more so. Alas, it is not easy to project the trajectory of cultural memes that have taken leave of their own senses. But as far as polarization is concerned, the point is that wokeism is truly lodged deep in the culture, its explicit political expression being only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Recent rightwing populism is certainly as deranged or more so at the margins—QAnon, the size of the “Big Lie”-affirming rightwing Oathkeepers constituency, the pedophile-persuaded Comet Pizza gang—but has it been as deadly as earlier leftwing or rightwing leveling in other countries at other times? Not yet; but wait and watch.
Start, perhaps, by traveling outside the last ring of middle-class suburbs, out into the rural wilds where the university graduation rate for adults drops below ten percent, and just hang around and talk to people for a while. Most of these people voted for Trump and other Republicans in November 2024, and they only moved less to the Right than a lot of “blue” zones did because they were already there in 2020 and in 2016.
Voting behavior does not capture the essence, however. The sense of humiliation, anger, frustration with liberal elite condescension, and what may best be called spiritual violation—meaning perceived systematic insults to deeply held religious views, in what we earlier referred to a perforated moral communities—is palpable. At this point, as of Inauguration Day 2025, it would not take much encouragement from above to turn it both pro-authoritarian and violent, and to direct it against ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, if MAGA conflict entrepreneurs saw value in it. They have for the purpose, if they choose to deploy it, a new core of a para-military/domestic terrorism force: the roughly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump on January 21.
Human Nature
Is it somehow “nice” that our American ideological extremes have so much in common in their agreement on a foundational philosophical-anthropological premise? Does that convergence portend something positive, perhaps? No, it’s not nice because the premise is wrong, and because the premise is wrong it promises only a regress of self-fulfilling nightmares.
Hobbes thought that human nature was fundamentally conflictual and competitive. Rousseau thought that human nature was fundamentally cooperative, mangled only by social-institutional malefaction. This silly “tastes great”-“less filling” argument, believed to be so profound by Western (invariably christological and usually actually Christian) thinkers, but actually put aside hundreds of years earlier by thinkers in other faith/philosophical traditions, has yielded in our time a form of polarization buttressed by two forms of adolescent ideology—one nostalgic and the other utopian. When one person or group or political side does that, it leads to embarrassment. When two empowered opposing sides believe in incompatibly impossible things it is a prologue to mayhem. We now have competing versions or stories about what is true that qualify as mass hallucinations: One hallucination holds that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was actually a patriotic uprising against the “deep state” on one side, and the other holds that the nation is ruled by a “deep culture” white male patriarchy that hates and wants to oppress and kill people of color, gays, and transsexuals, and reduce women to sex slaves. Neither is much different really from the pre-Age of Reason mass hallucination about witches and spectral evidence from the 16th and 17th centuries, which just serves as evidence for how the new orality has propelled our regression back into cultural time. In an Age of Spectacle this competition is driving facticity, reason, sanity, and the defenders of classical liberalism with them into the rough functional equivalent of monasteries.
Obviously, as any reasonable person can see and as we have been at pains to point out above, human nature bears both competitive and cooperative aspects. Obviously, too, human differences will sire different outcomes on both individual and group levels, but radical undifferentiated egalitarianism is not the way to abolish hierarchy. Hierarchy cannot be abolished except at a price unacceptable to human liberty and creativity. But the dignity of difference and the appreciation that talent and virtue come in a great many forms is not beyond us. Obviously too, what is humane and what is utopian in politics are not mutual aides but eternal adversaries, for utopianism armed invariably leads to counterproductive consequences. Any stable, educated, calm, adult mind knows these things, which regrettably excludes those in the throes of the para-adolescent mentalities of both illiberal Left and illiberal Right.[6]
We need to account for why such obviously wrong ideas have become so popular, even if the clinging majority of Americans have never heard of them and would disagree with them if they could be made to understand them. As already discussed in Part 1, two reasons stand forth most clearly. One is that the competition for jobs, status, and security within an increasingly plutocratized, warped political economy makes primitive social Darwinist tropes seem true for many. Segmented economies, as described above, just make it all worse.
And two is that critical theory is usually pushing against an open door. The failure of liberal elites, in particular, at myth maintenance, their manifest sense of shame in taking any pride in American history such that civics is taught only in a perfunctory manner, with no heart in the undertaking, in public schools, has created a vacuum. Into that vacuum over the past forty or so years critical theory has flowed.
Of course it is asinine to claim, as some on the Right do, that critical theory is widely taught in high schools, and even in elementary schools, but that’s beside the point: Those are not places where culture is made; those are places where it ultimately trickles down whether anyone intends to teach it as such or not. And it has trickled down: Critical race theory, or some watered down and unnamed version of what is anyway a simpleminded theory, is becoming the default assumptions of the dumbed-down American agora, and it starts in schools where teachers are too insecure or cowardly to buck the meme d’jour.
The weight of the adolescent, spectacle-addled and illiberal Right and the weight of the adolescent, spectacle-addled and illiberal Left, taken together and exaggerated by the clickbait media, has besieged what remains of the liberal center. In a civil war no one cares what moderates think, and we are getting closer daily to a virtual if not also a real shooting civil breakdown. The November 5 election, even before it happened, was clearly going to make matters worse no matter who won. That defines a Zugswang, and that is an unhappy place to be.
How could that be? Because what has been happening, so hard for some to digest, is that a deep and accelerating derangement in the culture is reflecting itself in our politics. And that derangement has a name: an obsession with spectacle that has caused a non-reading, excessively self-regarding and decadent population disposed to discounting rational plotlines into magical fantasy story arcs to regard the American experiment in classical liberal democracy a piñata perhaps to be admired, and then smashed.
What November 5, 2024 Means
This, all of this foregoing, is the deeper and proper context with which to view the outcome of the November 2024 election. Donald Trump’s electoral romp can be explained at one level by a confluence of superficial and happenstantial factors, but that way of thinking about it misses the real future-inclined point. Tim Miller sideswiped that point poignantly, albeit without getting down to the real nub, in the way he defined a species of Republicans back in 2016 as LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. Having to defend the indefensible on a day by day basis during the 2016 campaign turned these people, he argued, into “morally bankrupt and childish” political after-thoughts because they could not brush away the fact that, as Miller put words in their heads, “if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone else does in politics is meaningless. So they became nihilists.” Nihilism became appealing because it was liberating, in a Root Beer Syndrome way: “If a manifestly unfit Barnum & Bailey confidence man like Trump could become president, then why are the rest of us out here minding our p’s and q’s? Fuck it. Get the bag.” [7]
After November 5, Miller argued, the appeal of nihilism has spread to liberal Democrats. He describes many anti-Trump friends “coming to the conclusion that nothing matters. That our new cold world is Hobbesian, with everyone out to get theirs.” Some saw President Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter, in December 2024 as piling on to the new dominant meme: “The notion that the Democrats need to stop caring about niceties and traditions and laws and respect was quickly catching on. The old world where that stuff mattered is gone, they said.”
Hence, President Biden and Vice-President Harris’s determination to save gracious tradition and proper protocol in the transition of power leading up to the Inauguration struck many as the stoicism of the condemned walking to their own execution. They knew, even as they performed this role, that Donald Trump had humiliated them by stating after a ritualistic pre-Inaugural White House meeting with President Biden, in an obvious taunt, that “we” are engaged after November 5, 2024 in a peaceful transfer of power—this after having refused repeatedly to promise a peaceful transfer of power if he lost, and after falsely claiming that after November 2020 there was a peaceful transfer of power. Everyone except the most deeply dense among us knew that if Trump had lost in November 2024 there would again have been no peaceful transfer of power, so his statement, while true as stated, was a malicious example of punching down as intended. It is a rare poison indeed whose mere pronounced name can sicken a listener.
So is this just another example of the zero-sum redux, belief in the “law of the jungle,” the cynics ridiculing the fey fantasy of morality existing as a real category (sayeth the Marxists and the postmodernists alike)? Well yes, but, as Miller concluded: “This mindset doesn’t just corrupt people. It destroys their souls.” The nihilist path, having been nourished so richly from the hedonism of easy affluence, “sounds so good in our lizard brain.” But if still decent people in large numbers come to believe that “Donald Trump was right about rules and norms and values being for suckers,” then it is a “dark and scary path” we choose to walk down. Don’t do it, Miller pleaded, don’t give Donald Trump your soul, because if you do then the real American dream—the great experiment in covenantal self-government nested in the trust of God—is forfeit by your own hand.[8]
Right; but this has become a much harder sell. One of the reasons pushing this new nihilism forward in time is the obvious truth that if Trump could win twice, the second time after a four-year interregnum of near public-moral non-Randian normalcy, it meant that the first time was not so much a fluke as Democrats had persuaded themselves it was. It also meant that for a very substantial portion of non-college educated Americans of all skin hues, and among younger age cohorts particularly according to the exit polling data, the example of an encyclopedically ignorant narcissistic bully getting freely and fairly elected President of the United States by “flooding the zone with shit” could not be expunged from the national consciousness and memory. Not ever.
Trump has shoved much, maybe most, of the nation back to “knaves and fools” alone, and no one would want to be a fool if he or she had any choice in the matter. If “human nature is what we are taught to rise above” qualifies phenomenologically as a self-fulfilling collective benignity, then realizing that Trump’s second victory, if not his first, negated that benignity at full American social scale has to constitute a soul-searing recognition. Trump did not win on November 5, 2024 just a second presidential election; as or more important, he won a philosophical point that had been dangling in the American cultural air for some time. He has ratified a social fact of political life being “nasty, brutish, and short” in the absence of a tyrant, and he is that tyrant-in-waiting.
Miller did not say so explicitly, but he also pointed to the truth that other-directed performance and inner-directed authenticity—that key watchword of the Sixties—are ever at odds with one another. The former is an image subject to manipulation through spectacalization, the latter is the reality behind the image that is skeptical of and so resists both. Postmodernism celebrates the inwardly subjective as more the authentic “in here” than the materially objective “out there,” but at the same time it fetishizes outward appearances, as with virtue-signaling, as a votive substitute for doing anything practical or constructive. The truth is that postmodernism’s subjectivity is not really “inner” at all, but far more about outward conformity with its saints. That is the secret of how its faux authenticity can be so fecklessly flexible, via the law of metamorphosis.
In the end, therefore, all that postmodernist critical theory can ever muster is a form of anti-politics. It can sow ennui and guilt, disillusionment and demobilization. No more than rightwing populism can it build anything new and useful, and no liberal society can thrive, or even survive, without some moral fundament upon which to base social solidarity.[9] It is precisely the kind of mindset preparation for the budding left-of-center liberal nihilism that Miller described.
It is important to be clear what this means for practical purposes. With the Enlightenment-friendly center of American politics, now vouchsafed almost entirely in the middle-right of the Democratic Party, stunned by the loss not just of an election but of an entire gloss on socio-political reality, it is as certain as anything in political life can be that critical-theory wokeism will prove a paper-thin barrier to the Randian MAGA juggernaut, now that it is in effect armed. There are still some liberals who think that Trump will overreach and founder, create a huge oppositional drag, and so turn the 2026 midterms into a Democratic rout. Anyone who thinks that the midterms will be fully fair and free in many “red” or even “purple” battleground parts of the country, and that a Democratic victory will be seated in a peaceful transfer of majority Legislative Branch power even if it occurs, is delusional. Trump will initiate another bout of “Stop the Steal” mendacity to invoke his version of the Brezhnev Doctrine (not that he has ever heard of it), and call out the mobs if he needs them to cow any court officials brave enough to properly do their jobs according to the law.
Of course, postmodernism’s validation of emotion and subjectivism at the summary expense of reason and empiricism, postmodernism’s epistemological calling card, did not come from nowhere. It can be understood in part as an overreaction, or over-correction, to the earlier prevalence of positivist, materialist bosh about human nature—as if Bertrand Russell’s quest for an “ideal language” ever made any sense as something other than a category error—and in part as a reflection of the triumph of the therapeutic. As such it may be seen as a substitute for the cultural embodiment most adept historically at processing collective emotion: religion. It is when orality displaces literacy that the postmodern substitute regresses from religion back to myth. That is, in the main, what has been happening, and as we now see its implications are dire for politics as well as for culture—must be, since politics are ever downstream from culture.
Hope that once postmodernist critical theory has done its share of damage to the commonweal it will fade from significance may be warranted, or not. But even if not it will always be politically counterproductive: Its only political function will be its throwing of red meat in the general direction of the illiberal Right. If it succeeds in institutionalizing itself it will only reify the negative follower effect that has ever been its calling card, at least from the road to Wigan Pier to where we find ourselves now.
Even if wokeness fades, as many prophesy, there is no guarantee that American culture can retrieve the civic virtues that made it genuinely great during its finest hours. One can of course hope, but as a former boss of mine used to say, “Hope is not a policy.” Nor can hope alone fashion a path of doing. Hope is different from and superior to optimism, for the latter is merely a voyeur’s disposition while the former embodies an active motivation to shape agency. But while necessary, hope is not sufficient to turn this particular trick. Only a major social movement, properly shaped and wisely led, can do that. Where is it? And in our post-literate, entertainment-besotted “addicted to distraction” epoch, what could it possibly consist of?
[1] See Brink Lindsay, “The End of Work,” The American Interest XIII: 3 (January-February 2018).
[2] See Francis Fukuyama, “We Need Policy Implementors, Not Policymakers” Persuasion, January 17, 2025. Of course, we need both, but the point is taken.
[3] Anyone curious about details should consult Dov Zakheim, A Vulcan’s Tale (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).
[4] The best short analysis of the speech in historical context is David Brooks, “How Trump Will Fail,” New York Times, January 24, 2025.
[5] A good summary is Thomas B. Edsall, “’There Are Two Americas Now: One with a B.A. and One Without’,” New York Times, October 5, 2022.
[6] An example of such a stable, educated, adult mind belongs to Alana Newhouse, who used a Dylan song title for a headline to make a point; see her “Everything is Broken,” Tablet, January 21, 2021.
[7] See Miller, “Don’t Let Donald Trump Take Your Soul, Too,” The Bulwark, December 6, 2024. In this essay Miller quotes himself from an earlier text.
[8] Ibid.
[9] See here the introductory paragraphs of Yehuda Mirsky, “Israel and the Trials of Liberal Solidarity,” UnHerd, October 23, 2024.