As some of you Raspberry Patchers—that’s what I call you when I’m talking about you behind your backs—know, on February 1 I posted a short Premature Epilogue for paid subscribers only. All of you would know that by now had I brought down a teaser paywall, but I did not do that. Why? Those who pony up dollars when they do not have to are not zero-sum, law-of-the-jungle types, and I am not a dollar-squeezing, advertising-loving performative type. Because we fit so well temperamentally, I gave paid subscribers to The Raspberry Patch my email address and invited helpful questions and comments from them. I have heard from a few.
I tell all of you this because once we complete The Age of Spectacle rollout at the end of this month, I intend to do more of this: keep basic weekly posts free, but intersperse somewhat shorter, intensely analytical, comments for paid subscribers only. If free subscribers want to get those pieces, and get my email to use to comment directly on them, then free subscribers will need to shift status from free to paid.
Three other brief comments before we plunge forth into part 2 of Chapter 10, which is Age of Spectacle post number 42, being therefore the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (If you do not get the allusion I am sorry for you.)
First: Sorry for the typos in that February 1 post; all is now fixed in TRP (“The Raspberry Patch”) archive. I should have slept on it and proofed it again next morning before posting, but, given what was happening at the Treasury Dept. and OMB at the time, I did not want to wait.
Second, just yesterday morning I received from Claire Berlinski at Cosmopolitan Globalist (where, full disclosure, I am an editorial board member) her essay “Impeach Him.” This is a MUST read, long but well worth it. Indeed, if you’ve not yet read it I’d advise you to go directly to it now at Cosmopolitan Globalist and save this post of The Raspberry Patch for afterwards. Claire will of course be accused of being a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and she does wax lucidly kinetic at points. (Who has time to go through ten drafts on these matters right now, or calm all the way down to normal?) But it’s the accusers, in the main, who are deranged.
Third: Not enough of you, regrettably, have visited www.Hannahinblue.com. Valentine’s Day is approaching, as it always does once Imbolc/St. Brigid’s Day/Candlemas/Groundhogs Day has passed. A masterful cyanotype artwork is not a bad choice of gift for a loved one……
Chapter 10: Spectacle and the American Future, part 2 of 4
. . . . One contradiction deserves another. The postmodernist depiction of the human being, if we assemble it from various fragments of postmodern and related writings, consists essentially of three parts.
First, as already limned above, no unitary individual personality exists; our “narrator” is a stealthy composite of many parts that wants to trick us into thinking we are captain of our own selves.
Second, individual humans have no free will or agency. Rather, individuals (who are anyway not, remember, unitary mental beings) think and act as they do because they are part of a larger group whose nature is determined by bioessential characteristics that nevertheless only manifest in our subjective perception.
And third, our subjective selves, being basically epiphenomenal of structural factors beyond our control and usually our understanding, leave individuals without means to grow morally or to contribute effort to building a better society.
Yet, above all, postmodernists often insist that the ultimate value is the dignity of the individual. What possible dignity can an individual human being of that description deserve? Thus postmodernism as it exists now at least, though set up in opposition to latter-day bourgeois incarnations of Abrahamic religion, looks like a mash up of Pauline “broken” human, irrevocably tainted by sin, doxy and the pre-Abrahamic worship of primal magical forces.
Ironies, as opposed to contradictions, are usually less annoying than instructive. When E.M. Cioran wrote that history is irony in motion he was not just whistling Dixie (being a Romanian he probably could not whistle Dixie in any case). The ur-irony of the moment is that the salon Left’s secularized theology of radical undifferentiated egalitarianism (RUE) has backfired in truly spectacular fashion, and in at least two ways.
First, that crypto-theology rules out a well-functioning liberal democratic order that cares about liberty as well as basic equality under the law—just another example of Isaiah Berlin’s good but incommensurate values that abundantly populate the real and messy world. Why? Because a healthy society needs room for iconoclasts, experimenters, and creative minorities of many sorts to thrive, and that thriving is going to create two kinds of manifest social (not moral) inequality: the craftiest and hardest working are going to get richer than the mean (Michel’s “iron law of oligarchy” at work), and the more intelligent are going to acquire disproportionate status and authority (Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy of talent and virtue” at work).
Liberal democracies as truly open societies (thanks again Karl Popper) by nature generate these twin forms of elitism, which is why more or less deep-illiterate people jealous of their own impugned egos occasionally, at least, feel an urge to overthrow democracies in favor of a tyrant claiming to be a leveler, the kind of tyrant (again, ironic as it may seem) who endorses John Rawls’s “original position” argument in A Theory of Justice (1971) that people born with natural advantages—for example, the height, speed, and strength necessary for superior athletic prowess; a natural intelligence suited for math and physics; out-of-the-ordinary sexual allure; and so on—should not be allowed by overriding social norms to profit from those advantages since they are not “deserved.”
Normal people may envy both oligarchs and political leadership, potentially at least though not always equally, and so the game of democracy often consists of efforts by oligarchs to blame politicians and politicians to blame oligarchs for the cloying inequality perceived by the hoi polloi who may insist, just as Plato described in Book VIII of The Republic, on equal status regardless of merit or effort. But the game comes with the turf, and cannot end without destroying the entire set-up, cashiering the very principle of vox populi in the descent to tyranny. In that sense the actual functioning liberal democracies are good examples of Wallace Stevens’s remark that, “Our paradise is the imperfect.”
RUE thinking, trickled down to corporations and even elementary schools, rules out the legitimacy of a public-spirited aristocracy or guardianship as Plato understood it, rules out any acknowledged creative minority as Toynbee understood it, and rules out political leadership and politics as an avocation as Weber understood it. The irony here is that many of the best educated among us in the liberal arts appear to be insisting that their erudition in the social and human sciences means nothing in terms of social status or authority deference. The postmodern insistence that there is no objective reality and hence no basis for rational expertise, only subjective feeling, has led anti-elitist populists on the Right in effect to answer: We agree, and here are our feelings about you.
The American hoi polloi are neither stupid nor deaf to the identity politics mantra of the RUE woke. Granted that the term woke is by nature broad-brushed, and clearly not everyone said to fit the description buys into all of its parts or buys into them in the same way. As with all such labels, more or less serious and more or less unserious people will cohabit within the fold. That said, the optic of wokeness as it appears to virtually everyone else, from MAGAt surrealists to those of left-liberal but not woke views, is one of scowling and utterly humorless judgmental arrogance, tinged with self-righteousness, condescension, and disdain for any and everyone of other views. It thus hauls along its path unwittingly, as always in such cases, a huge negative follower effect that tends to make its consequences counterproductive according to its own lights.[1]
That is certainly true, and obvious, in political terms: Wokeness generally and identity politics in particular generated a huge backlash in the November 2024 election. It was not alone responsible for the outcome, since such a major shift in the electorate clearly had multiple sources. The result was, as social scientists say, over-determined. But it was not a trivial factor by a long shot, and its counterproductivity showed up in a particular form.
As many have remarked, we have now witnessed the coalescence of a narrative among some self-described white Christian guys without college degrees that says, in effect: “Right you are, it’s all about groups defined bioessentially, and we are an identity group, too, and a harassed and victimized one at that. Nevertheless, we are two-thirds of the population while you college grads are at most one-third, and you luxury-thinking woke types are at most an over-entitled one-tenth. So if you insist that only conflict can exist among bioessentialist-defined groups, fine, we accept your premise, the label, and the challenge of the struggle. You say no one is better than anyone else, and so everyone gets a trophy, fine: We agree that you are not better than us, we reject your pretensions to expertise, and our trophy of late is the Oval Office. You have proven your point; congratulations.”
If the Democratic Party in shocked defeat decides, as left-of-center parties often do after an electoral trouncing, to double down on its radical tendencies, it will become essentially feckless in most state politics and in national politics until it comes to its senses—if it ever does. If it doesn’t, the history of such decisions suggests that some new social force will eventually rise up and capture the party. The name may stay the same, as happened in 1896 when Populists led by William Jennings Bryan overtook the brain-weak party of an elderly Grover Cleveland, but the party will be different nonetheless.
Now, last on this excursion into the practical implications of bad philosophy, consider a further note about idol worship. An insistence on a supposed trans-empirical essence located within the subjective experience of the individual resembles a highly individualistic form of idolatry: Every person is his or her own little godhead, at least when not busy worshipping someone else’s genitalia. That may help explain why ambient postmodernism contributes to the hyper-individualism, often called “expressive individualism,” we observe in the salon provinces of the cultural West. If so, it contributes in turn to the demobilizing anti-political consequences of hyper-individualism, where all politics does come down to the personal, and the idea of a commonweal or of an organic civic community disappears like a cheap suit once its lint is brushed off.
Is Woke Really Broke?
Maybe none of this matters, or will for long. We of all people must take care not to exaggerate, not to let our analysis become spectacalized. Maybe with any luck it will be a long time before any American dystopian finale comes about, and with a little more luck it never will. Then we may congratulate ourselves on having defended the future by warning against and hence averting its worst-case scenario.
But not yet. For now, we still have the contending para-adolescent irrationalities of Right and Left to parse, puncture, and present for what they really are: mere performative spectacles devoid of plots complex enough to compete with reality, but redolent with mostly make-it-up-as-you-go para-religious energies speckled with revenant magical themes that appeal particularly well to phombies and other cyber-addicted minds. Surely, we like to tell ourselves, it is nothing serious or likely to become culturally embedded; we could therefore act smug in the confidence that irrationality at such a scale has to collapse on itself before long. We could take the fever metaphor to heart and project its burning itself out, as fevers often do. After all, they always have burned out eventually in the American experience thus far; all the more explicitly religious Great Awakenings of the past have exhausted themselves and paved the way for a more conservative, less morally panicked restoration in which some positive essence of the moral panic at its core actually got carried forward into the future.
Ah, but that was because the majority of people back then were never wealthy enough as a group to afford protracted, narcissism-fueled radical misalignments with reality. We can afford it. We are as a society that wealthy. Nevertheless, some already argued before the November 2024 election, so before the negative follower effect of wokeness became too obvious to deny, that evidence existed for the fading of wokeism.[2] Perhaps; amid standard-issue reactionary backlash some adult pushback has been discernible in some quarters for a while now.[3]
Wokeism may indeed be petering out faster than before thanks to the after-action understanding of what happened on November 5, 2024. It certainly lacks the political power that MAGAt entrepreneurs and many frightened others attribute to it. As David Leonhardt observed in late May 2024, while the woke Left was obsessed with climate change, student debt, DEI, and the Gaza War, smart Democrats campaigning for the Senate were talking instead about housing and medical costs, and inflation.[4]
That was good to know, albeit in a left-handed sort of way: These candidates were more likely to win by talking this way, since they were talking to people a large percentage of whom were deeply pessimistic about the overall state of the economy, even though they put faith in the rosy macroeconomic story coming out of the Biden Administration. So many Democratic candidates found themselves having to pander to what they thought was delusion to be successful, and that is precisely how most of the successful ones in November 2024 won.[5] Except that their electorates were for the most part not deluded; their microeconomic reality was about as bleak in most cases as they supposed it was. It was the candidates’ senior party elders who were deluded—self-deluded. As convolutions go, that one was stellar.
I doubt that wokeness is tumbling headlong toward the dustbin of history, just as I doubt that the surreality of voter perceptions will soon revert to reason. The magic-suffused spectacle mentality is for way too many Americans already the new normal, and as always the opposite poles of crazy bolster one another. There is no evidence at all that the craziness on the Right is ebbing. On the contrary: It seems all too stable and even growing, which helps explain why Donald Trump’s becoming a convicted felon as of late May 2024 had no appreciable effect on the November 2024 election. Judging from earlier August 2023 polls, some 40 percent of the nation was living in a world of fact-free make-believe, or multi-indicted Donald Trump would not have been clobbering his nearest GOP primary opponent 54-17, or have soon pulled even with Joe Biden in an “if the election were held today” poll. On the eve of the November 2024 election nothing much had changed aside from Biden stepping aside for his Vice-President. Had he not stepped aside he would have lost at least as badly, possibly more so.
Since January 20, 2025, of course, MAGAt insanity has reached new heights since it lacks the constraints of the first Trump term and has been launched into mental outer space by its mandate. We have blatant illegalities by the trunk-load, amounting to an incipient coup, and new ex nihilo conspiracy theories sprouting everywhere, like the very wild one about USAID. This spectacular display of performative excess may or may not institutionalize itself—hard to say as of this writing in early February—but not despite but because of the Administration’s ball-peen hammer-style attack on DEI and wokeness generally, the loony Left is likely to dig in harder. Hark, another negative follower effect manifestation, but this one in the opposite direction.
Some evidence? As Washington witnessed a blitzkrieg attack on the Constitution and the rule of law by the new Trump 2.0 Administration, a meeting of the Democratic National Committee on February 1-2 in Baltimore witnessed a fervent plea by its outgoing chairman to reserve a place for a “non-binary” person on its seven-member steering committee, this just after the delegates affirmed a resolution acknowledging that America is build on indigenous land.[6] It is hard to resist—so I am not resisting—referring again to Michael Kelly’s perfect description of the type: “self-styled saints” propounding “a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then to enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible: if it were a person, it would pierce its tongue.” At last count the Democratic Party has a favorability rating of 31 percent; unfavorable, 57 percent. That means, mark carefully, that Kamala Harris actually significantly outperformed her party’s base appeal by quite a lot, not that it mattered in the end.
Alas, fevers sometimes abate only after the victim has died. Fads sometimes fail to abate, or to abate as quickly and harmlessly as anticipated. The fact, already rehearsed above, that the main prestige print media have already canonized identity politics in the culture by use of capital letters to adorn the words “Black” and (increasingly) “White,” something that seems to have happened rapidly yet somewhat mysteriously in the wake of the “George Floyd” moral panic, just hints at the harmful residue that even a passing fad can cause. Maybe worse, the trans obsession, also redolent with moral panic, quickly penetrated the corporate world, with Nike, Adidas, and Budweiser jumping on it with Ripley-like spectacle advertising.[7] Budweiser put a photo of “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney (who also appeared in a Nike bra advertisement…..two-headed carnival calves were everywhere…..) on cans of Bud Light. That would have bothered me more, admittedly, were the product not such terrible beer.
Meanwhile, it has hardly been harmless that the illiberal American Right, partly teeing off woke magic, made clear that it cares more about a racial and religious re-identification of America more than it cares about democratic norms, the Constitution, truth-telling, and basic civility. A good bit of that, while not created by wokeness, has been seeded and spread by dint of anti-woke backlash. That by now has summed to more than a fad; it’s an Overton Window express train that has just rambled down the street before our eyes. Highly distended views like these are now normalized in American political discourse, each feeding off the other. That is or should be breathtaking, but not in a good way.[8]
As usual, too, media models being the way they are, crashing through the guardrails on the Left seems to justify doing the same on the Right, and vice versa in a mad dialectic of one-upsmanship rational decay—as in, I can be more bizarre and selfishly entitled than you; I can retreat from reality into a better theta and do it faster and longer than you, now watch this….., and so on and on until the madness is so pervasive that it seems sane. Neither side seems capable of throwing a decisive punch, yet; so the surreality never ceases except behind our closed doors with an actual book in our hands, which is what makes it so hard for most of us to look away from, and that of course enables it to multiply further in the culture.[9] That process, exactly, is what describes a culturally embedded chunk of a mentality.
Note that in designer perfect pure magic fantasy worlds it is possible to be both limitless and controlling of the unlimited at the same time. This is why pure fantasies never disappoint, and it is why fantasies downkeyed into collisions with reality nearly always do disappoint. It is why utopias bathed in theta invariably beget tragedies once consciousness of reality, however accomplished, drags the fantasy back into beta and so causes it to evanesce. Here is how the inimitable Robert S. Vansittart once put it: “When the air is full of castles bricks soon drop.”[10]
As we await those bricks, each form of fantasy-inflected illiberalism is still busy honing its deployment of spectacle to master the political version of the “attention economy.” The clickbait press as always acts as megaphone and accelerant. A bedazzled populace that in stunning proportions no longer reads and thinks much, but instead seeks the next “wow” on its array of cybergadgets, is a willing if mostly passive audience for it all. So the madness is real, it has mass appeal to the narcissistically affluent, and the audience serves the recursive function of norming the madness so that it is no longer so perceived.
Erving Goffman famously pointed out in Asylums that the clinical definition of madness at any given time or place is not strictly clinical, but rather follows the ruts of the core cultural memes of the moment.[11] Few thought Cotton Mather mad in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony just because he believed in spectral evidence and the existence of witches; if someone tried that in 1961 when Asylums was published he or she would, probably, have ended up in a psycho ward. But—and here is the point—if someone arrives on the scene who is suited to and can channel a berserk cultural meme already rooted in the social soil, affluence-based narcissistic surreality, for example, no matter how insane it seems to some others, he or she might get elected President of the United States.
To pose a chicken-and-egg dichotomy as to which must come first—the fertile soil of madness or the farmer who plants and the mutant seed and would harvest its crop—is to spite the dialectic always operative in such circumstances. Our underturtles prepared the soil for the present madness, Donald Trump found sustenance in it, and once and now twice has fertilized that soil afresh. That is how narcissism comes to be contagious, how whole societies can episodically go mad. It has happened before, to others; now it is happening again, to us.[12]
And the future? There will not be a future in the sense of a coherent and stable timeline of the sort we are used to if this keeps up much longer.
Myth as Model
What does it all mean? Philip Rieff argued that our desacralized secular “third” world (in his locution) recycles storylines and images from mythic times (his “first world”) as fictions.[13] These fictions include mass-entertainment commercial spectacles from Avatar to your favorite zombie apocalypse episode, as well as tall tales featuring the mythic era’s laws of both consanguinity and metamorphosis: what matters is only what is felt, and anything can turn into anything else along a timeline so loose that entire centuries can fall off of it and reappear as if at random somewhere else.
But as Rieff sensed, these recycled fictions do not necessarily come across as fictions for those with tenuous connections to the Lebenswelt in a post-deep literate culture. In a world where the foundational stories of Abrahamic religion (Rieff’s “second world”) have been pluralized, bowdlerized, demoted to the status of mere fairy tales, or simply ignored—and in which the attempted substitute of cold rationality failed to fill the mythical space—what mentality reigns? The new gods resemble the same old and bloodthirsty gods from whom enlightened humanity once sought to escape; they are incarnate, capricious, and chimerical. It is no wonder that the post-“second world” yearning for spirituality among younger age cohorts embraces both a constant impermanence in the forms of spirituality taken and the invariable spectacle that attends their expression.[14] We see it often if we know how to look, and we have been seeing it for many years now.
Consider the Star Wars phenomenon in this light. In John D. Caputo’s On Religion he mentions his daughter’s college roommate who hung a poster reading, “All I need to know about life, I learned from Star Wars.”[15] Sure; why not? Anakin Skywalker is clearly a Christlike figure miraculously born and brimming with afterlife appearances; Luke is Christlike, too, saving his father from the dark side. Even the name Skywalker, as the University of Michigan’s Ali Hussein points out, pays homage to Jesus’ ascension.
Then there is the enduring popularity of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, whose protagonist Paul Atreides is a Sufi-like messianic figure. Even Taylor Swift’s early March 2024 Singapore concerts belied an aura of a religious experience, if one doesn’t ask too much from one.[16] All these examples of secular fantasy approaches to religious sensibility reek with spectacle, whether contrived in fiction or acted out on a stage with heartbeats and brainwaves moving into synchronization, just as happens in a communal prayer service. One wonders how many new-age spiritualists realize that the origins of ancient Greek theater, the highest form of spectacle in its time, lay in its function as a religious rite.
The return of mythic memes in neo-fictionalized form—think Thor and Loki for the Norse-inflected, and the Percy Jackson series whose dramatis persona is drawn straight from Bulfinches’s Mythology—may presage the end of a multi-millenia life cycle of humanity as we regress into a collective childlike second mythic consciousness of the species. If humanity is now, in the West anyway, deep into Rieff’s post-Abrahamic Third World, what characteristics of that mentality should we expect to see? Following Cassirer and others, we should expect to find many putting a high premium on ecstatic, dreamlike experiences. We should expect to find not just a religious attitude taken toward social and political life—an attitude marked by the possibility of moral communion and partnership with a transcendent, unitary creator God—but also and more so a prior mythic attitude in which propitiating immanent gods and spirits is the order of the day.
Observing those in thrall to a mythic mindset we do not expect to see silent and subdued congregational prayer but theatrically acted sacrificial rites. We do not expect to see moral reasoning but superstition and word magic. We do not expect to read or hear language in which facts exist or matter, and anyway the story is not now the point—for listeners no longer have the patience and focus to follow complex plotlines, only bumper-sticker length one. It is rather about the storyteller, for only he or she, acting as shaman, can seize pulses and hold onto them. And we do not expect to see teleological aspirations projected out along a set and sturdy linear timeline, but a consciousness ever rotating in place in the moment. Religion hopes for redemption of one sort or another and through deeds its adepts seek worthiness for it; myth of 21st-century mien seeks the mystical reverie of the “party that never ends.”[17]
Still don’t see it? Let me help you just a bit. Recall Portland, Oregon’s Naked Athena on the woke Left, and consider this description of a nihilistic form of mythic magic relevant to the world of dark-web Trumpism:
In the months preceding the election, Trump supporters on 4chan’s /pol/ noticed something strange about posts concerning Trump. There were all numbered in a special way known as “gets.” On 4chan, which is otherwise anonymous, all posts are sequentially numbered. Given the high volume of posts on the site, the final few digits of this number are essentially randomized. Posts with distinctive final numbers--such as ending in 1111--are often celebrated as “gets.”
On June 16, 2016, one poster received the ultimate “get,” ending in 77777777, with a post that read simple, “Trump will win.”
A meme was born.
Or rather, “meme magic” was born.
Meme magic--the half-joking idea that Donald Trump could be “memed” into victory through judicious 4chan shitposting--became part of the site’s rhetorical landscape. . . .
This meme magic was represented visually by a cartoon frog named Pepe. . . . It just so happened, 4chan soon discovered, that there was, in fact, an ancient Egyptian chaos god with a frog’s head that resembled the newly ubiquitous Pepe. His name was Kek.[18]
We see the same fascination with magic in the trajectory of American science fiction writing. Before and up to Isaac Asimov’s time the deadly mysterious danger posed in the 20th century was mainly externalized in the form of alien space invaders. Then the genre began to hint at internalized dangers, moving in mass culture from the shocking tale of Rosemary’s Baby to the obsession with zombies. Remnants of the earlier alien theme tended to turn into comic parodies, like the 1996 film Mars Attacks! Now it has moved toward tales of explicit magical efficacy, dramatically so for young adult readers with J.K. Rowlings’s “Harry Potter” books and films and, less well known because not (yet) made into a film, for fully adult readers the wonderful 2017 novel The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neil Stephenson and Nicole Galland.[19] This trajectory, I suspect, is not random.
The implications of an Age of Spectacle point to the engagement of myth and magic at an even deeper level. In humanity’s pre-literate past, the lines dividing religion, theater and art, and politics were not nearly as finely drawn as they much later became. But the mélange never really separated entirely. Remember: Because political life is suffused with emotion and metaphor it is never very far from the mythic consciousness. Unusually fraught times, the times between eras as Hesse hauntingly described them in Steppenwolf, tend to evoke its return. There are more examples from history than any normal person can count, let alone recount. But let’s just mention one still familiar to most of us.
In Chapter 4 we made passing mention of Franz Neumann’s 1941 analysis of magic in German National Socialism, and of the origins of Nazideutsch as a element in catalyzing that magic. Neumann has more to tell us from 1941. In Nazi Germany, he wrote, “magical ceremonies are practiced on many occasions, reminiscent of the practices of primitive tribes. The annual induction of the Hitler youth into the party is the equivalent of primitive initiation rites.” Neumann then returns to word magic: “The words used at mass meetings carry in themselves means for changing nature and society. The touching of the blood flag of Munich and being touched by the Leader are thaumaturgical practices.”[20]
In 1944, another German-Jewish exile in America elaborated Neumann’s observation in a far richer anthropological-philosophical framework:
The mythical organization of society seems to be superseded by a rational organization. In quiet and peaceful times, in periods of relative stability and security, this rational organization is easily maintained. It seems safe against all attacks. But in politics the equipoise is never completely established. What we find here is a labile rather than a static equilibrium. In politics we are always living on volcanic soil. We must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions.
In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. . . . The description of the role of magic and mythology in primitive society applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life. In desperate situations men will always have recourse to desperate means—and our present day political myths have been such desperate means. . . . If modern man no longer believes in natural magic, he has by no means given up the belief in a sort of “social magic.” If a collective wish is felt in its whole strength and intensity, people can easily be persuaded that it only needs the right man to satisfy it.
That is Ernst Cassirer writing in The Myth of the State, composed in 1944 and published after his death on April 13, 1945.
Cassirer understood that under the right (or wrong, perhaps is a better word) circumstances, people and nations can and do flow in and out of rational and less-than-fully rational modes of cognitive attention. When that happens, the latent persistence of strong impulses toward immoderation suggests atypical levels of rage and a will to violence, but also romanticism and even mysticism applied to the wrong subject: politics. Cassirer also well understood the background: Moving from the 19th to the 20th century in Germany we see that an ample base of schwartzwaldian romanticism, left to marinate for a few decades on top of a lost war and a Great Depression, when then shaken vigorously in the presence of an infant democracy, produces murderous reactionary mystical politics, another even more destructive war, and a Holocaust to boot.
Lest some Americans become too full of their own virtue, recall that we have done similar if much less murderous things in the past. We mentioned Cotton Mather just above: So how is what is happening today really so different from believing, as late-17th century American Calvinists did, in ghosts, witches, and spectral evidence to detect them? How different is it really from any number of 18th- and 19th-century romantic effusions and reactionary movements against what seemed at the time a rash of confusing hyper-rationality? Americans have invented more heterodox forms of Protestantism per capita than any Christological society in history, many of them classically cult-like. The Know Nothing and Anti-Masonic parties of the antebellum period were conspiracy riddled and fact free. But these irruptions of madness never encompassed more than a small fraction of the citizenry, and the political parties aforenamed never got anywhere near the White House. But had those Americans in the 1840s been as affluent and as decadent and as severed from stable faith communities and as self-marinated in two-dimensional screen fantasy spectacalized entertainment as most Americans are today, well, things might have turned out differently.
[1] Since November 5, 2024 more attention has been paid to this argument, which I drafted more than a year earlier. For one example see Andres Velasco, “How Liberals Lost America,” Project Syndicate, January 30, 2025.
[2] Musa al-Gharbi, “Woke-ism is Winding Down,” Compact, February 8, 2023, and see his 2024 book We Were Never Woke. Richard Dawkins is of a similar opinion concerning sexual wokeism: “I suspect it is a temporary fashion, like McCarthyism.” See Josephine Bartosch, “Richard Dawkins: In defence of scientific truth,” The Spectator, April 21, 2024. But then again, Dawkins, like Kurzweil, thinks that rationality is the only human-defining quality, which is why he once likened raising a child within a religious tradition to “child abuse.”
[3] An example of reactionary backlash even before January 20, 2025 is “Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names,” New York Times, May 10, 2024.
[4] Leonhardt, “Patriotism and diversity,” New York Times, May 30, 2024.
[5] Note the short but to the point analysis by David Leonhardt, “Democrats Who Won,” New York Times, November 11, 2024.
[6] See Edward Luce, “While Democrats Sleep,” Financial Times, February 4, 2025, who reported words like “string quartet” and “Titanic” rushing into his mind.
[7] The same tendency is visible on the other side of the Pond; see Catherine Lough, “Adidas under fire as biological male models female-style swimming suit,” Telegraph, May 18, 2023.
[8] A post-election argument made by Matt Johnson, “`Identity Politics’ Isn’t Why Harris Lost,” The Bulwark, November 13, 2024. My text, above, was drafted long before the November 2024 election.
[9] Germane here is Taylor Goyette’s “Show Goes On” song lyrics. The music isn’t bad either.
[10] Vansittart, The Mist Procession (Hutchinson, 1958), p. 258.
[11] Not that it matters, but George Bernard Shaw made the identical point in 1924 in the long historio-psychological introduction to his play Saint Joan.
[12] Again, note my “The Present Madness,” The American Interest, June 15, 2020 (linked to by Real Clear World, June 18, 2020), but see especially Claire Berlinski, “Impeach Him,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, February 6, 2025. In her essay Berlinski reminds us of Erich Fromm’s discussion, long since mislaid in my memory, of the codependence of individual madness and what Fromm called folie à millions in his 1964 book The Heart of Man.
[13] Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks, Part One.
[14] See the examples in Burton, Strange Rites. The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, emphasizing that information is neither knowledge nor in itself story, but only a de-narrativized form of communication, urged the re-enchantment of the world by means of new stories in his 2017 book The Scent of Time. He might now want to read Rieff and Burton, for new enchantment narratives crafted in present circumstances may not be the portal to the contemplative balm he seeks.
[15] Caputo, On Religion (Routledge, 2001).
[16] See Ali Hussein, “From Taylor Swift to Dune: The Religio-Political and Spiritual Agency of Popular Culture,” RSIS Commentary 034/2024, 11 March 2024.
[17] The scare quotes mark a reference to a 1989 James Earl Keen’s song, “The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends,” on the album “West Textures.”
[18] Burton, Strange Rites, pp. 229-30. Burton further describes the evolution of “Kekism” on pages 231-34. Did Kekism turn out votes for Donald Trump in 2016? Clearly, it did.
[19] Galland by herself wrote a sequel, The Master of the Revels, published in 2021, the ending of which leaves the door open for still more.
[20] Neumann, p. 439.