A lot has happened since January 20, no? The Raspberry Patch will not address any of it just yet, but I have addressed some of it in a couplet of two recent publications released eight days apart: “A New America?: The Setting,” RSIS Commentary 013/2025, 23 January 2025; and “A New America?: Global Security Implications,” RSIS Commentary 018/2025, 31 January 2025. Each of these comments is about 1,200 words long and, as before, are available to all on the RSIS/NTU website.
You should be aware that the title chosen for these pieces is the doing of the editors in Singapore. My suggestion was not “A New America?” but “America Deranged.” Alas, in some cultures and sub-cultures the public airing of strong emotion is considered unseemly, so I defer to the local sensibility. When in Singapore, even virtually, I am content to do as the Singaporeans do, lah?
Not here, however. Part 1 of Chapter 10 of The Age of Spectacle will come right at you, aiming for the space a few inches in from right between your eyes. Don’t turn away; it won’t hurt, much.
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 1 of 4
The future ain’t what it used to be.
—Yogi Berra
So, where are we, and where are we going? As a prelude to future gazing let us briefly sum up the essential answer to the “what the hell” question we began with. This may be particularly useful for an argument that is necessarily multipartite, polymorphous, complex, and assembled from many kinds of knowledge.
The spectacle mentality, enabled by the three culture-based underturtles we have described, is all about the astounding complexes—the more technical social science way of saying spectacle—that we deliver to each other and ourselves for the sake of virtually non-stop entertainment. We can do that because we are affluent, yet detached from the virtues that helped make us affluent: investment over consumption; savings over spending; provenance over dissipation; patience over impulse; cooperation over selfishness; future orientation and intergenerational responsibility over selfish fixation on the moment; humility over arrogance. That detachment is the currency of our decadence. Lacking sufficient experience of these virtues at work in our lives, most of us can no longer fathom how they accumulate into benign social outcomes.
The upshot is that We the People are now mostly drifting in clouds of aspirational amnesia so to be free to enjoy ourselves without the slowing, deadening weight of pesky, full-reality consciousness. Projecting the current miasma forward as of January 20, 2025, we likely stand at the portal of an extinction event for American liberal democracy and rule of law. The end will likely come with neither a whimper nor a bang—but closer to a whimper—when we, with our magic rectangle portable rabbit holes always at the ready, self-anesthetize the culture at scale and so descend into a collective brain fog consisting of dazed days and numbed nights until one lonely moment when the heart of the great American Experiment stops beating.
For the time being, our bespoke form of ambient funhouse-mirror adolescent-level ideological thinking continues apace to infect everything in the culture, and affects politics as a downstream extrusion of the culture. By a thumbnail conservative estimate, about 35-40 percent of the chronologically adult population to the right of center, and about 10-15 percent of the chronologically adult population to the left of center, cannot summon a remotely accurate, even at a bare-bones level, description of any public policy issue because their analytical imaginations are limited to narratives no more complex than a typical fictive television or movie script.
Here is evidence of the pace of ongoing derangement. In the weeks after the November 3, 2020 election most Republicans, but only a fraction of the electorate as a whole, swallowed Trump’s Big Lie, which he ordered made up on the spot when he learned that he has lost the election. “Just say we won,” he ordered. As I wrote just after January 6, 2021, the facts were
. . . that: his heretofore loyal Attorney General William Barr pronounced Trump’s claim “bullshit” to his face and resigned; even Mitch McConnell admitted the evidence-free lie once the Georgia Senate runoff elections concluded; many dozens of Republican election officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and other states pronounced the President’s claims baseless; and dozens of judges at every level, including Republicans and even those appointed by Trump himself, told the President’s lawyers the same.[1]
But the Trump script did not adjust; instead it doubled down on its own lie and persisted in that doubling down over time. Now fast-forward to December 2024: Trump had won reelection and commenced vetting personnel for the new administration via a loyalty test the core of which is fealty to the Big Lie. He has turned a refusal to accept the truth into a new truth, or truthiness: More Americans believe the Big Lie now, or are agnostic about its veracity, than was the case in January 2021. How can that be? It can be because, to quote myself again, “facts do not matter in the mentality of spectacle, and everything about Donald Trump, even his hair and ‘tan,’ reeked and still reeks of spectacle. Cults, religious and political alike, inhabit the fertile symbolic soil between fact and metaphor, between disciplined reasoning and associational roaming.”[2]
Trump’s scripts, ironically enough, are variously filled with politically correct stereotypical simplifications of mostly a leftward lean, and “deep state” and other conspiracy theories of mostly a rightward lean. Together they sire apocalyptical projections of insecurity and fear that blot out the political conception of linear time critical to the stability of liberal democratic orders; they replace linear time with revenant magic characteristic of preliterate, orality-dominated societies in which everything political happens now, in the media-churned wow. Everything is attuned or vulnerable to one shiny object or another, say, environmental catastrophism to the Left or “replacement” theory to the Right. Everything is imagined to be both limitless and fraught, producing dopamine flows by the mega-gallon and, upon attempted and temporarily successful hedonistic escapes from reality—drugs, in other words, from the psychedelics of Silicon Valley to the booze of small-town America coast to coast—buckets of oxytocin, as well.
Those in the throes of the spectacle mentality are rendered subjectively bored with little difficulty and, at least by traditional standards, are rarely altogether sane when it comes to apprehending any collective form of facticity. They have the same cognitive plumbing as the rest of us, about 86 billion neurons, roughly16 billion of them in the frontal cortex; but even in the softest pinch their addiction to distraction renders them unable to use their neural plumbing to reliably locate the Lebenswelt.
How does this affect American politics? It’s pretty simple but, alas, the theories on offer on the “what the hell question” do not get the answer right even taken together, and perhaps more telling, do not capture the critically important tone of the moment. About half the population is worried that the other half is delusional—on that nearly everyone agrees. The problem is that each half thinks the other side is the delusional side. The tone of the times is one of fear bordering on panic for those of us not prisoners to what has become the political version of the attention economy. The still sane portion of the adult population, seeing the craziness close in from both illiberal horseshoe flanks, are forced to assess which flavor of political insanity is the most dangerous soonest, and so choose one kind of damage limitation over another.
Some not unreasonably fear the anti-Constitutional zero-sum-inspired authoritarian, xenophobic madness on the Right, and so look to the Democrats to save the republic from de facto extinction. That would include me, however reluctantly. Some not unreasonably fear the utopian para-religious madness of the woke children’s crusade, and so look to the Right, biting their lips all the way, to save the nation from that form of madness. Given the inherent bias of the Electoral College favoring the more conservative and rural small-population states, those who fear the Right more than the Left need to do a better job of getting out the vote to save the day their way than would be the case if the institutional political playing field were perfectly level.[3] They failed massively to do that on November 5, 2024. Clearly, too, institutional imperfections, and institutional aging as well, that creates additional poor fits between our secularized civic scriptures and postmodern realities, do help constitute the dysfunctional funhouse whole.
Others refuse to lean and so pronounce a plague on both mirror-bedecked funhouses. Some seek a third-party alternative in hopes that, as before in American history, a new party undergirded by a social movement can displace one of the two presently idea-free major parties. (I tried my hand at helping one such effort, the ill-fated Alliance Party.) Others seek retreat to out an off-mainstream-political-grid monastical alternative, like the Intentional Communities movement on the Left or the aforementioned Claremont out-of-California migrants on the Right. Still others favor a fuggedaboutit-inducing exile, either internally or abroad. That’s a problem, because these include many of the people best suited to save the nation as it teeters on the precipice of recovery or chasm.
You Are the Tube and the Tube Is You
Escapism need not be literal, as in leaving the country, also for those in thrall to the spectacle mentality. As we discussed in Part I, Americans increasingly chose frameworks in which they see themselves as though they are embedded in some sort of made-for-television drama, and many generally prefer that state of surreality to their actual lives. Their “narrators” are simultaneously in their heads and on an inner-screen only they can see. Our culture generally, nearly all commercial broadcast media, and hence our politics as well, are now avidly imitating presentational frameworks that lean to the performative and away from the substantive. How things look take pride of place over how things actually are, as if we see only the shadows and not what is casting them. This confronts us with an obvious practical political debility, for, as C.A.W. Manning once wrote, “One does not affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow.”
One is tempted to quip that this shift within the American cultural mentality amounts to life imitating art, but bad art. But that is not quite right. Entertainment and art, while both engage the abstract, the emotional, and the representative—hence in a way the fictive or literally not real—are not the same. Art is created to be directed at an individual person, to evoke an emotion that, once articulated, can serve as a thought bridge to a broader perspective. Entertainment produces not emotion refined into thought but wordless sensation, and it is created for direction not at individuals but at an undifferentiated human mass. It triggers the opposite of a broadening perspective, tending instead to pull spectators further into themselves.[4] That tends to slow the development of their theory of mind, to relatively infantilize them through isolation and hence the unpracticed social skills that go with it.
This helps to explain why, as we have argued above, in an entertainment-addled culture even the most serious political issues get packaged and delivered to the public in show business styles and with language suitable, at best, for adolescent fiction. A shift toward a more over-the-top show business template for politics seems to have occurred between around 2008 and 2011, at least according to one inside-the-GOP observer. When I spoke with Jon Huntsman in October 2015, after his return from being U.S. Ambassador to China, he remarked:
I’d have to say that what struck me about this time four years ago is how show business has infiltrated politics. And I don’t totally say that tongue-in-cheek. It’s very real. It’s the politics of entertainment as opposed to substance.
Huntsman clearly had in mind the way professional politicians reacted tactically to the post-Great Recession populist surge of anger, bewilderment, status humiliation for many, and the growing pains of political mobilization. They essentially did a follow-the-crowd song and dance act, muttering all the while “ignore that man behind the curtain,” and it didn’t work. Said Huntsman: The reaction, at least on the Republican side, belied
. . . the ultimate attention-getter by the voters. Politicians are generally pretty good at trying to stay ahead of the sentiments of the voters, because when they subsume you, you’re in deep trouble. But I think it was the ultimate attention-getter that turned into something more than mere political tactics. . . . The Great Recession ignited something that was very real. I was in China watching all this from 10,000 miles away. Among those who would filter through the embassy were those who were involved in partisan politics, and some of those people said to me, “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening to the party.” It had dramatically changed.[5]
The rise of the show business meme qua tactic is of course what opened the door for Donald Trump. Neither Huntsman nor I saw that coming in the autumn of 2015.
Producers of entertainment have become aware that this is the modal level of understanding in the culture, and to be successful in business terms producers have to meet and match those levels. These business models therefore prefer stories over analyses, the personal over the general, the concrete over the abstract, and above all the emotionally evocative over the coldly reasoned. Financial success in the media business, which has become a form of passive entertainment like so much else, thus depends above all on knowing one’s audience well enough to tell it what it already believes, but in a new and entertaining way. Those who can do that get clicks and clicks mean advertising revenue; those who cannot get canned.
The cumulative distortion this produces in the minds of non-readers, in particular, is mammoth. A good example may be seen from a 2022 YouGov study on Americans’ perceptions of the country’s ethno-cultural demography. The study asked a series of questions in the form of “What percentage of Americans do you think are……?”, and the blank was filled in with numerous categories. Some of the data matched reality fairly closely, as for example with “What percentage of Americans do you think own pets?” But most of the answers displayed wide and sometimes wild deviations from reality.
When it came to the human identity category in an age of identity politics having saturated social consciousness, the disparities were particularly pronounced. The answer for “transgender” was 21 percent; the real number is about 0.4 percent. The answer for “Muslim” was 27 percent; the real number is about 1 percent. The answer for “Jewish” was 30 percent; the real number is about 1.7 percent. The answer for “Black” was 41 percent; the real number, excluding Hispanics of various skin hues, is about 12 percent. The answer for “live in New York City” was 30 percent; the real number is about 2 percent. The answer for “gay or lesbian” was 30 percent; the real number is 3-4 percent. People also think that about 20 percent of Americans make a million dollars in a year when less than 1 percent do. They think 54 percent of Americans own guns, but only 32 percent do. They think 40 percent of the nation has served in the military when only about 6 percent has, and they think 30 percent of the nation eats vegetarian when the real number is about 5 percent.[6]
Some observers back in 2022 and more recently, as well, have strained to understand how such huge divergences can exist. But many of the efforts violate Occam’s Razor in spades. Most of the distortion is easily explained, and the explanation is not that so many Americans are just stupid any more than that so many are “deplorable.” The explanation is that people who watch a lot of commercial television, including cable news infotainment as well as obvious fictions, will surmise these numbers in an intuitive form of statistical impressionism from the wildly distorted picture of America they see on their screens—and that now amounts to by far the majority of Americans.
These Americans still also wildly exaggerate how much crime, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and kidnapping there is—questions the YouGov study failed to raise in 2022—for the same reasons George Gerbner found decades ago in his aforementioned Mean World Syndrome studies. Some of the newer distortions clearly follow from the dramatic over-representation of homosexuals (and more recently transexuals) on screens of all sorts because of deliberate efforts by mass-entertainment producers to norm these traits, largely for ideological reasons. The same goes for blacks, particularly middle-class looking Afro-Americans. It is uncanny, as most of us have noticed by now, that commercials depicting African-Americans nearly always show them in atypically tony middle or upper-middle-class households, the subliminal but still obvious suggestion being “buy this product and you, too, can have that lifestyle.”
The exaggeration of the number of Jews probably owes something to the longstanding disproportional role of Jews in the media and entertainment industries. It probably has to do, as well, with very longstanding exaggerations about everything Jewish, not just in America but perhaps particularly in America.[7]
The wild overestimation of the number of Muslims in the United States is curious, since Muslims do not occupy a huge share of characters portrayed in sitcoms, romcoms, and so on, and most Muslims depicted in infotainment news are living outside the country. Possibly, many respondents thought that Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Sikhs, Punjabis, and other ethnic minorities living in the United States are Muslims when of course they mostly are not.[8] In many uneducated minds naturally tending to conflation it is possible that Muslim and foreigner have become virtual synonyms.
No doubt the YouGov study would have produced even wilder results had the interviewers managed to speak only to the 54 percent of the nation the Department of Education estimates cannot understand standard newspaper copy, or even just to the roughly 57 percent of the adult population that has not read a book in the past year. Why? Because as we have seen, oral forms—from talking screen heads to podcasts—have rapidly taken pride of place over written narratives, rendering serious discourse on public policy issues nearly obsolete.[9] No democratic political order can have civility without discourse, but discourse requires that at least some part of We the People care and know about key public policy issues in order to deliberate and debate them. How can very many of us know about such issues when the main institutions responsible for informing us—the press, our educational systems, our leaders at local, state, and national levels—are busy doing something else, even as America’s wild-West form of capitalism has for years been inadvertently smothering humanities’ education in slow motion[10]: trying to entertain us, coddle us, or snooker us with smoke-and-mirror banter?
The internet has sharply exacerbated all these trends by disaggregating, or “unbundling” as some call it, what used to be efforts to present balanced and curated content to audiences, and by shortening the presentational forms of just about everything. Years ago a show like “Sixty Minutes” could over the course of an hour curate a half dozen segments that balanced liberal and conservative sensibilities, letting viewers decide which they preferred. Chopped up shorts projected onto YouTube or Instagram destroy that curational value-added. Surrendering to ever shorter attention spans and to the appetite for images over words means that grabbing attention depends on a tacit promise that the grabber will demand attention only for a short time, too short to allow any kind of critical assessment or thought to be brought to bear.
The effects of this multiple abdication have been cumulative. That is why when we think, after the most recent unthinkably bad event, that things cannot get worse, they get worse anyway. We have experienced in recent years what Thomas Hardy warned of in a previous century: “To every bad, there is a worse.”[11] A brief review of precisely that won’t hurt.
The Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue
Think back to where the American body politic has been lately in order to get some purchase on where it is likely headed. It reads like a horror story because it occurred in a story-like mesmerization of the real political world. Thus, the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021 was spectacularly alarming enough, but who thought in the immediate aftermath of that collective trauma that Republicans either supporting that insurrection in fancifully reinterpreted form, or Republicans who preferred merely to ignore it, would only 22 months later be voted into control of the House of Representatives, and miss taking the Senate by a whisker? Were sanity rightly enthroned, the American electorate should have punished the Republicans for shoving the country to brink of civil violence; instead, on the eve of the November 2022 midterms most polls predicted a great red wave. Had it happened to the extent predicted, that development would have been even more alarming than the sonic punctuation point of January 6 itself.
Indeed, the relative lack of amazement about how the new GOP could possibly have won control of the House just made things seem all the more surreal to many, in a sense ratifying the new abnormal normal. Poll after poll showed that most Americans were more concerned about inflation and street crime than about the prospect that the very sinews of the nation’s democratic norms were under persistent and deliberate assault. Most knew those sinews of democracy were under serious assault; they just seemed not to care. How could that possibly be?
It is not just possible, but it plainly is, because normal American politics are no longer normal, which is why what seemed incomprehensible in November 2022 became even more incomprehensible in November 2024. The obvious conclusion is hard to ignore; American politics are no longer normal because American culture has become deranged in ways that challenge coherent comprehension. When something seemingly inexplicable happens politically, wise intuition should by rights direct us to seek out antecedent causes below the level of common sight. But that rarely happens, the result being the normalization of mystification about why our politics have become so screwy. Eventually most people stop asking why things are so odd, and in due course begin to assume that what is odd isn’t, as if in a dream we credit its apparent wide-awake reality more insistently than we do when we are actually awake.
That requires a special kind of logic, a logic in which normality can disappear, be summarily forgotten, and abnormality displace—as if anything at social scale could metamorphose into something else and nevertheless go more or less unmentioned. That logic has a name that should by now be obvious: magic. It also, obviously, has the deepest of sources within us: childhood.
We were all once children, and causal efficacy in the mind of a child is magical, not empirical, efficacy. The language window that starts developing at around 8-10 months of age is the portal to symbolic consciousness in humans, but when it begins to develop its nature is not self-aware. To the child what is happening is naturally magical, so much so that the child has no name for it, for to have a name would be to contrast magic with something else—but there is as of yet nothing else. Listen to how Jean Piaget describes the essence of what he took to be a two-step process:
Thanks to language, the child has become capable of evoking absent situations and of liberating himself from the frontiers of immediate space and time, i.e., from the limits of the perceptual field, whereas sensorimotor intelligence is almost completely confined within these frontiers. . . . But besides language the small child needs . . . another system of signifiers . . . . [T]hese are the symbols which are commonly found in the symbolic or imaginative play of the young child.[12]
That childhood process corresponds, remember from Chapter 7, to theta brainwave imaginative play in children. So when adults are attracted or lured into waking theta, let’s call it, by our magic-diffusing screens, we become childlike again in a perceptual world seemingly wholly real “whilst attended to.” When that happens, we do believe in magic. We live within the magic as much as the magic lives within us, as adults reverted to adolescence and childhood.
Again, that is why consciousness of the character and virtues of liberal democracy being at risk gets so little traction in the minds of vast percentages of contemporary American adults. Democracy is an abstract concept, and as a concept it requires facility with abstract thought to grasp. To learn about it and understand it depends at some level on having mastered the written word. To care about it requires a timeline awareness of what a future without it might portend. It takes no such refined skills to grasp the shrinking balances in one’s bank account and the ballooning interest charges on one’s credit card debt. In relative terms, therefore, democracy simply disappears as something to worry about because it is not concrete. Michael Chabon probably said it best a quarter century ago in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: “The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”[13]
Of course magic is great fun, just as childhood imaginative play was great fun for all of us. There is no harm in it and potentially much good as long as adults don’t overdo it to the point of losing track of the brackets that identify fantasy and magic for what they are and are not—they are fictive and they are not real. “Beetlejuice,” from 1988, is one of my favorite films, and I loved the 2020 first season of “Locke & Key” on television, before a new set of writers turned the story toward the violent and vulgar. Neither of those and many other fictive magic fantasies I have enjoyed led me to misplace the Lebenswelt, but that is because I am fortunate to have received an education, nurtured a reading habit as a result, and avoided wasting time staring at screens. I took Groucho seriously when he said: “I find television very educating. Whenever someone turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”
But alas, we as a culture are overdoing it, hence the trouble, hence the shock, hence the fear that strikes those of us who do not daily drink whole bowls full of magic Kool-Aid. That said, spectacle cannot swamp a reality-based political culture unless that political culture has already undermined its own vitality. Spectacle invades a vacuum of seriousness as “the Nothing” from The Neverending Story—another of my favorites—invades an impoverished imagination. Affluence, because it has become fragilized, makes us simultaneously decadent and nervous, tempting us to seek escapist solutions for the headaches we might get from an actual process of thought. The end of modernity and the pluralization of our mythopoetical core courtesy of industrial folklore has taken our stories, and hence our intellectual breath, away. Deep literacy erosion and cyberaddiction has addled our brains to the point that we as a coherent political community cannot reason our way back to solid ground.
Bad Philosophy, Bad Consequences
Alas, something else has happened, too, something surprising to most Americans and challenging even to many well-educated Americans: We are stunned to realize that philosophy matters, and that bad philosophy can actually produce bad consequences. This strikes most of us as highly improbable, for we Americans are proud pragmatists, and do not easily credit the idea that the abstruse abstractions of which most philosophers are so fond could make an impact on a society that overwhelmingly pays no attention to such things. Don’t people have to expose themselves to philosophy and understand at least something about it to be influenced by it?
Well, no. Philosophy trickles down, so to speak, a little like Adam Smithian capital investment. As it trickles from ivory tower to lunch stand it gets denatured as a matter of course. It gets distorted, and can even get altogether inverted. Here is how Tom Robbins put the phenomenon in Still Life with Woodpecker (1980):
The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted to it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.
And here is how Saul Bellow summed up more or less the same point even earlier: “. . . we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals.”[14]
Bad ideas do not come from nowhere; like everything else except the First Cause they must come from somewhere. And where they come from is not inconsequential. The foremost postmodern philosophers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida—Ayer and Heidegger warrant inclusion, too, as antecedents—were not altogether lightweights or fools. It is easy to caricature their views when they are expressed by lesser lights, and by altogether dim ones once they are sufficiently trickled down from philosophy to ideology. But that does not make the philosophy sound to start with. Let us now start again with the philosophy, albeit briefly, and then show, also briefly, how that trickled-down philosophy has resulted in self-contradictory ironies that uncannily define the madness of contemporary American politics.
We have invested some effort above to describe the nature of postmodernism, and what it has to do with the loss of our stories, the scrambling of our sense of moral reasoning, and our definitions of virtue. We have described its influence on the downstream meanderings of the cultural contradictions of democracy. We have also alluded to similarities and differences between Platonic Forms and the anti-foundationalism of postmodernism. But now with more background since put under our belts, let us expand that thought a little more.
The basic similarity between Platonic Forms and the anti-foundationalism of postmodernism is that both approaches to epistemology reject pure empiricism, contending that something is, indeed must be, prior to and constitutive of knowledge such that we do not discover reality passively but build it through our capacity for intersubjective symbology. Fine so far; that is just Phenomenology 101, just Kant and Cassirer, Schütz and Goffman, and others we have mentioned.
As described in Phaedrus, Plato found his “something” in an atemporal and aspatial zone above heaven. Were it reformulated as a monad, Plato’s something would be compatible with both the Jewish idea of God and the Brahmin idea of cosmic unity. Postmodernism, on the other hand, since it is radically anti-foundational, rejects all metaphysics and, in its re-mythicized current form, instead finds the trans-empirical solely in the subjective experience of the individual.
Ironically, Foucault was right to criticize Jean-Paul Sartre’s locating the nub of philosophical consciousness in the individual as “transcendental narcissism”; Foucault found it instead, however scantily in his studies of mental hospitals, in historical contexts, which aligned with Ayer’s emotivism. But Foucault also rejected the materialist determinism within those contexts that Ayer-cum-positivist affirmed.
Now, if materialist determinism were true, we have no logical problem. But if both metaphysics and materialism are rejected as foundations for approaching the question of empiricism, as with postmodernism, then epistemology with a condom, or else on a Mobius Strip, must be the result; neither gets you anywhere except if run through the mythical-magic funhouse mirror of unlimited metamorphosis. The irascible Walker Percy once defined a postmodern deconstructionist as a guy who sits around all day in his university office postulating the non-existence of empirical referents for language and then, just shy of five o’clock, calls his wife on the phone and asks her to please order a pepperoni pizza for dinner. Quipped Percy, “‘pepperoni pizza for dinner’ is the language and the actual pizza, once delivered, is the empirical referent: So what, for Heaven’s sake, is the problem?”[15] Good question.
Postmodernism is not only epistemologically incoherent, it is disjointed to the point of incomprehensibility thanks to the semi-anarchic plurality of contemporary self-avowed postmodernist voices few of whom, very likely, have ever read Foucault. As one observer put it, the contemporary cacophony of postmodernist claims resembles “circus voyeurism incarnate, like the Rome of Romulus: it’s the setup for the fall,” like the howl of the whirlwind one can hear before the winds really pick up. That is not an exaggeration, and here is why once we descend the ladder from postmodern philosophy to postmodern ideology.
Contradictions are often signals that something is wrong with the premises that produced the contradictions. Consider that postmodernism as an ideology strives to create artificial divisions where they should be none, as with identity politics, but when it comes to gender its anti-foundationalist, anti-empirical non-binary shard of ideology strives to erase a natural division between complementary parts of a whole that is and always will be. How anyone can sign onto both of these strivings may be the greatest mystery of the moment—at least if we set aside the possibility of sheer adolescent foolishness based on an insistence on contrarianism for its own sake. But let us be clear about the practical consequence of that contrarianism: The argument that the November 5, 2024 election turned significantly on a backlash against the woke postmodernist insistence on deranged gender roles does fit the premise of the regression to the mythic consciousness, and most of the electorate—90 percent of all congressional districts registered a shift toward the red zone—seems to have sensed and rejected it, despite its own proto-magical disposition on many other issues.
[1] Garfinkle, “The Collapse of Reality.”
[2] Ibid.
[3] So do I support eliminating the Electoral College? No; that would require a Constitutional amendment so central to the Constitution as a whole that the risks involved would far exceed the likely benefits. It would also worsen the rural-urban divide in the country, perhaps dramatically so. Besides, the United States is a large and still diverse nation, subsidiarity is still a good idea, and the Electoral College aligns well with that prospect. There are also good ways to reform the EC and ways, as well, to rebalance its structural bias without eliminating it—but we will not discuss them here.
[4] See Gabler, pp. 18-19. Gabler interestingly contrasts art as ekstasis in Greek with entertainment as inter tenere in Latin.
[5] Adam Garfinkle, “A Conversation with Jon Huntsman,” The American Interest, December 16, 2015.
[6] These data are re-reported in Jonathan Last, “Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias,” The Bulwark, November 22, 2024.
[7] See my Jewcentricity: Why Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
[8] This would not be surprising. All these years after September 11, 2001 and the protracted wars that ensued from it, most adult Americans still cannot accurately define the words “Arab” or “Muslim.” They overwhelmingly suppose that these words are synonyms, think Iranians and Afghans are Arabs, and think that most Muslims in the world are Arabs.
[9] This is despite the fact that more thoughtful material is probably being written than ever before, albeit in mostly non-curated forms that well-educated seekers must discover on their own. Think Substack, for example.
[10] Much has been written, and for a long time now, on the impact of capitalism and its ethos of novel individualism on tradition, and hence on the appeal and relevance of a humanities education. A recent addition to this literature is David Rieff, “Capitalism has killed the humanities,” UnHerd, January 31, 2025. In it, Rieff cannot resist quoting his mother, and good that he did.
[11] Hardy, The Woodlanders, ch. XXXIV. The Woodlanders was published in 1887.
[12] Piaget, Six Psychological Studies (Vintage, 1968), p. 89.
[13] Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Picador, 2000), p. 339. Chabon probably did not have liberal democracy in mind when he wrote that sentence, but that is now very much beside the point.
[14] Bellow, Herzog, p. 96.
[15] I have regrettably lost track of where I first read this story. A brief reference to it without citing an original is George F. Will, “Smitten with Gibberish,” Washington Post, May 28, 1996.