Adam's Ideas

Over the last few months I have conducted a low-key experiment, using the comment section of our local newspaper, The New Mexican.  I have been reading comments posted whenever an article appears on hot-button topics like climate change and political reform, and inserting myself to counter and critique what I think are bad arguments or poor use of facts.  My goals are, first, not to cede the public square to the loudest voices; second, to see if reasonable comments, citing sources and data, have any effect on the discussion; three, to test my own views and see if I can learn from people I disagree with.

One of the most frequent topics has been guns.  The New Mexico legislature just ended its annual short session, and the Governor introduced a number of gun-control bills that received extensive press coverage.  Any article about gun legislation is sure to produce an avalanche of angry responses, mostly from the libertarian right but also from some progressives.  Engaging in this over the last few months has made me think more about our gun problem and what needs to be done.  

One of the most frequent, and most emotional, issues is anything having to do with the AR-15 and similar assault rifles (I will use ‘AR-15’ here as shorthand for all assault rifles).  A huge amount of discussion—probably more than it deserves— is devoted to back and forth on these weapons.  Here in New Mexico, Governor Lujan Grisham has at various times proposed regulations to raise the age for purchasing AR-15s to 21, or to ban them altogether.  New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich has backed a federal law to limit the size of magazines on assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons.  All of these received extensive comments both pro and con—mostly con.  

I want to offer some of the conclusions I have come to from engaging in these debates, as well as from an excellent recent book, American Gun:  The True Story of the AR-15, by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Ellinson.  I have included page references to American Gun in the text. 

Threat of Political Violence

My first and most important conclusion is that the AR-15 is central to the political threat posed by Donald Trump.  As will be explained in more detail, this is because of the huge number of AR-15s now in circulation, and their close association with right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-government perspectives.  

The United States has for decades had to deal with militia groups, mostly on the right, that have stockpiled AR-15s and other firearms and trained members for defensive and offensive scenarios.  Contemporary groups such as the Boogaloo Boys, 3-Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and many others plan to counter supposed government oppression, or initiate a race war, or confront progressive demonstrators, or prep for the collapse of the country, or defend traditional Christian values, or stop the flow of immigrants, among a range of goals.  Many of these groups target former members of the military or law enforcement for recruitment because of their training and access to weapons.

Until recently these armed groups, though concerning, did not present a serious threat to the country’s stability and political order.  They lacked a common strategy, had no single leader, and often disagreed and fought among themselves.   

But Trump’s rise has changed the nature of the threat.  Now these disparate groups have for the first time a leader who unites them and gives them marching orders.  The January 6 attack on the Capital followed Trump’s call to the Proud Boys to “stand by” and enlisted multiple anti-government militias, conspiracy-theorists, ideologues, racists, anti-Semites, Christian fundamentalists, and other parts of the extreme right under one banner.  According to the ACLED (The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project) “There has been a major realignment of militia movements in the US from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate, thereby generally positioning the militia movement alongside a political party.” The FBI has recently said that white nationalist extremists constitute our most dangerous domestic terrorist threat.  

While the majority of AR-15 owners are law-abiding and responsible citizens, the sheer number of weapons ensures that a significant number are in the hands of dangerous actors.  The AR-15 has been marketed for decades to appeal to people suspicious of government who often identify with the military and are primed to resort to violence.  Many hold extreme anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and racist views.  AR-15 owners are often hardline supporters of gun rights who demonize any politician or activist who supports even the smallest restrictions on firearms as enemies who are conspiring to take their guns away (328).  These are the type of people most likely to join right-wing militias.

Of particular concern is that this demographic overlaps with the approximately 30% of the American population that believes Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, and would likely favor the use of intimidation or force if directed by Trump.  We have already seen the violent results of Trump’s refusal to accept the results in 2020, and there is every reason to think he and his supporters are planning a much wider and more aggressive response in 2024.  In this response the AR-15 has the potential to play a central and very dangerous role.  

Misleading Arguments 

My second point is that most of the arguments invoked by gun rights supporters against AR-15 restrictions are false or misleading.  Three of these arguments came up frequently in the comments posted in the New Mexican. 

AR-15s Not Significant in Killings.  Probably the most common claim is that AR-15s are used in only a small fraction of murders.  Therefore restrictions that focus on this weapon are not really designed to stop shootings but are pretexts to take away gun rights by liberals who just have an irrational bias against assault rifles.

It is certainly true that the vast majority of the approximately 19,000 firearms murders in the US in 2023 were committed with handguns.  In 2022 only 541 murders were categorized as committed by ‘rifles,’ which includes the AR-15 but also other long-guns.  Almost 8000 were from handguns, with thousands more not categorized, but mostly handguns.  

However, one reason it’s a good talking point to say the AR-15 is only responsible for a small fraction of murders is not that AR-15 related deaths are so few, it’s that the number of murders in the US is so large.  When 19000 people are being killed each year, 500 or so deaths doesn’t look like much.  But in most countries comparable to the US—high income, industrialized democracies—500 deaths isn’t so small.  For instance, in 2021, the total number of firearm related murders in the UK was 28.  Total.  The United States is a huge global outlier in the number of people murdered with firearms. 

AR-15s are not generally used in the run of the mill street shootings, robberies-gone-wrong, domestic quarrels, and gang violence that account for most gun-related murders.  You can’t easily conceal an AR-15 or tuck it in the back of your pants.  But it is the weapon of choice for many mass murderers, for fairly straightforward reasons.  The Buffalo shooter, who killed 8 African-Americans in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, (to avoid giving them any publicity, I will not use the names of mass murderers) tells us the two main reasons:  “ [He] believed that using an AR-15 would enable him to kill more people—and get more attention. ‘The AR-15 and its variants are very deadly when used properly. Which is the reason why I picked one,’ he wrote. ‘Plus, the media loves to hate on the AR-15, which may increase media coverage and public outlash.’ (395)  

As a military weapon designed to rapidly engage multiple targets at close range, with maximum lethality, the AR-15 is perfectly designed for mass murder.   Perpetrators are not trying to conceal the weapon—they want it seen, to instill fear.  And many mass killers are wrapped up in living up to a certain image:  “ [the Aurora, Colorado shooter who killed 12 and injured 70 at a movie theater in 2012] was drawn to the AR-15 in part because it looked scary, said Craig Appel, an Aurora homicide detective who interviewed [him]. “That warrior mentality, that was his big issue,” Appel recalled. “He wanted to look like a badass.” (297)

In addition, the AR-15 intimidates law enforcement.  In the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, where first responders waited almost an hour before directly engaging the shooter, the main reason was fear of the AR-15s firepower.  Officers had their own AR-15s but this did not make them willing to engage. According to the Texas Tribune:  “Once they saw a torrent of bullets tear through a classroom wall and metal door, the first police officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary School concluded they were outgunned. And that they could die.  The gunman had an AR-15, a rifle design used by U.S. soldiers in every conflict since Vietnam. Its bullets flew toward the officers at three times the speed of sound and could have pierced their body armor like a hole punch through paper. They grazed two officers in the head, and the group retreated.”

Many mass murderers are copycats, trying to live up to the example of previous killers.  The more those killers use AR-15s, the more new killers are likely to do the same (362).  In recent years the percentage of mass killings (with four or more people killed) that involve AR-15s has risen sharply.  Over the past ten years almost half of mass shooters have used an AR-15, according to the Violence Project.  (400)

The effect of mass shootings on public life and the lives of those affected is far greater than the numbers would suggest by themselves.  These are acts of terrorism, designed by their perpetrators to inflict not just physical damage, but to damage and shock entire communities and the nation as a whole.  Hate-based attacks such as those targeting the LGBTQ community (Pulse Nightclub 2016, Colorado Springs 2022), African-Americans (Buffalo 2022, Jacksonville 2023), immigrants (El Paso Walmart 2019), or Jews (Pittsburgh 2018) reverberate nationally and even globally, as evidenced by the copycat shooting in New Zealand in 2019 that targeted two mosques. Schoolchildren in every part of the US can now expect to take part in drills to deal with an active shooter.  Schools, churches, nightclubs, concert venues, parades—virtually any public place—must now plan for, and devote resources to try and prevent, a violent assault by someone armed with an AR-15.  

Nothing special about the AR-15.  A second common argument is that the AR-15 is no different than other guns, and people choose to own an AR-15 for the same reasons people own guns in general, for hunting or sport shooting or home defense.  Therefore singling it out for special restrictions is unfair and unlikely to be effective. 

This claim is disingenuous.  Americans now own somewhere between 20 and 30 million AR-15s, so certainly some people have them for these reasons.  But it is obvious that the huge rise in AR-15 sales in the past 20 years is because of its symbolic properties.   As summarized in American Gun, in the period after Sandy Hook, “The image of the AR-15 had become a political and cultural symbol infused with meaning far beyond the gun debate. People put its image on T-shirts, banners, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. To scorn it meant you were a Democrat and a liberal who backed stricter gun-control laws. To embrace it meant you were pro-gun, conservative, likely pro-Trump. It became a tribal emblem, immediately signaling where you stood on the American political spectrum.”  (373)

The AR-15 is not designed for hunting or self-defense or target practice, though of course it can be used for all these things.  It was designed from the beginning for military use, for short to medium range rapid fire against multiple human targets.  It uses high muzzle velocity, two to three times the velocity of a typical handgun, with light-weight, low-calibre ammunition to minimize recoil—important for rapid aiming and shooting.  

The AR-15 was carefully built to produce tremendous damage to human tissue, much greater than from a normal rifle or handgun.  The inventor of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner, experimented to find the combination of velocity and bullet size that caused the most destruction.  American Gun describes the conclusions of Beat Kneubuehl, a Swiss ballistics scientist who authored the definitive work on the subject: “By increasing the velocity of the tiny bullet, Stoner gave it more injury potential. When the bullet hit the human body it slowed down and released its energy. ‘The energy that the projectile loses through deceleration (loss of velocity) is converted into work, i.e., into damage to the tissue,’ Kneubuehl said. The bullets of the AR-15 maximized this effect because they went unstable so quickly. They had less energy than larger rifle rounds but they transferred more of their energy to the human body. A bullet fired from an AR-15 flew nose first through the air. But when it hit the human body it became unstable. Once unstable, the bullet tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones.” (78)

This is why, when trying to describe what had happened to the bodies of the children at Sandy Hook, a policeman involved told a grieving parent “They were in a fucking blender.”

This sort of destruction is not what you want for hunting.  It’s not what you need for self-defense in your home.  It’s what you want on the battlefield when you need to kill with as few shots as possible.  

The real reason for the immense popularity of the AR-15 was captured succinctly by a gun company executive:  “All of a sudden, people are buying guns because they want to own the libs and because people are telling them they can’t have them and because they want to give the world the middle finger,” recalled Ryan Busse, a sales executive at the gunmaker Kimber. “Rationality of the market left the building and this sort of weird emotional, political drive took over.”  (329)

Unsurprisingly, this loss of rationality did not happen spontaneously; it was deliberately fostered by American gun manufacturers and by gun rights organizations heavily funded by industry.  In the mid-90s the firearms industry was facing a declining market.  Hunting was becoming less popular and fewer Americans lived in the rural and small town settings that allowed for regular gun use.  A federal ban on the AR-15 that began in 1994, coupled with general disdain for the weapon in traditional firearms circles—AR-15 enthusiasts were nicknamed “couch commandos”—a drop in crime, and successful lawsuits against gun companies and gunstores, all led to a drop in gun sales.  

This turned around, however, in the 2000s: “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sunset of the federal assault-weapons ban, and the passage of legislation to protect gunmakers from litigation all combined to create a perfect environment for mainstream gunmakers to make, market, and sell large quantities of AR-15s. Sales executives realized that the gun’s appeal was widening beyond military veterans. Bill Silver, head of commercial sales at Sig Sauer, recalled that the tough-looking military-style weapon had what he called the “wannabe factor.” “People want to be a special forces guy,” he explained.  (268)

Politicians during this period became more and more intimidated by the political clout of the well-funded gun lobby.  In 1994 Congress was sufficiently motivated to pass a bipartisan ban on semi-automatic assault rifles, but the NRA and other opponents helped to defeat many of its supporters in the 1994 election cycle.  The ban was poorly written and counterproductive, doing little to actually take guns off the market and providing gun rights supporters with an issue to mobilize around.  AR-15 sales increased.  Instead of strengthening the bill to make it more effective, Congress, frightened by the pro-gun lobby’s ability to turn out single-issue voters, refused to renew it in 2004.  

In 2005 the Bush Administration gave the gun industry a tremendous victory with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms act, which protected firearms manufacturers and gunstores from most legal liability for the use of their product.  In 2004, for instance, Bushmaster and the guilty gunstore had paid a $2.5 million settlement to the families of people killed by the “DC sniper”, using a Bushmaster AR-15.  Now the gun industry no longer faced the threat of lawsuits that had forced the tobacco industry and other producers of dangerous products to pay billions in damages and modify their sales practices. (264)

In 2008 gun rights advocates received another major boost from the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which interpreted the Second Amendment as granting an absolute right to individual gun ownership.  This decision was the culmination of a lengthy legal campaign, funded by the NRA, to shift the understanding of the Second Amendment.  While Heller did not entirely prevent governments from restricting certain types of weapons, it put gun-control advocates on the defensive and was a tremendous symbolic victory for the forces already vested in promoting the AR-15.  

The marketing campaigns for unrestricted gun rights became more strident and more explicitly militaristic, often deploying the confrontational slogan “Come and Take It” (Molon Labe, a Greek saying attributed to King Leonidas at Thermopylae).  This was designed to appeal to buyers but also to intimidate politicians, who had to worry for their personal safety and the safety of their families from  the reaction of angry and well-armed citizens.

Gun manufacturers loved the AR-15 because the profit margins were much higher than for most other firearms.  The gun was designed to be cheap and easily mass manufactured.  It was made from pre-stamped metal parts with a plastic stock.  And it was highly customizable, which added to profits as customers bought stocks, grips, flashlights and other attachments. 

AR-15 sales went into high gear once big money arrived from Wall Street.  The rising potential in the 2000s attracted Cerberus Capital, which consolidated several manufacturers into the Freedom Group.    By 2007 the Freedom Group was selling half the AR-15s in the country.  With the protection afforded by the 2005 Act, it adopted aggressive marketing practices designed to appeal to new types of consumers. Bushmaster, one of the Freedom Group’s companies, launched an advertising campaign that linked the AR-15 to masculinity, with copy that said “In a world of rapidly depleting testosterone, The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded.” (285)

The Freedom Group cut prices and began selling AR-15s in Walmarts and other mass market outlets.  It also placed AR-15s prominently into video games, trying to develop brand allegiance among young men who spent more time on their screens than at real shooting ranges.

The combination of financial and marketing muscle, coupled with the cultural and political identity fostered by the NRA and other gun rights organizations, caused AR-15 sales to skyrocket.  In the mid 2000s the compounded annual growth rate for traditional rifles and long-guns was 5%; for the AR-15, it was 36%.  As of 2022 at least 20 million AR-15s, and probably many more, were in the hands of private citizens in the United States.

The AR-15 is needed to defend individual rights.   A third argument often used in favor of the AR-15 in fact confirms that it is different from other guns.  This is that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable private citizens to protect themselves from government oppression, or perhaps to overthrow an oppressive state.  Individuals need to own weapons that are on par with those in the hands of the military and law enforcement.  

This purpose is seen as so compelling that it justifies whatever harm comes to society from having these weapons widely available.  It is the “price of freedom”, as Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly opined after hundreds of people were gunned down by AR-15s in Las Vegas in 2017.  

This argument is more honest and closer to the real reasons for AR-15 ownership than the others.  But it is also deeply misguided.  It distorts the Second Amendment, which aimed at strengthening state militias, not individual vigilantes.  It is wildly unrealistic in an era when the United States has a powerful permanent military armed with tanks, heavy artillery, fighter aircraft and cruise missiles.  

Most importantly, it ignores the risk that a heavily armed citizenry imbued with a belief in its own righteousness can just as easily be mobilized by demagogues and cranks as by genuine patriots.  The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened in part because of Shay’s Rebellion, an anti-tax uprising in Western Massachusetts that the weak central government of the time was unable to put down.  Americans concluded that a stronger government was needed to prevent similar threats.

In an American psyche whose DNA is often constructed around suspicion of central authority, small grievances easily morph into conspiracy theories.  In one back and forth in the New Mexican, one angry writer’s frustration with a state agency led quickly to charges of dictatorship, and a call to citizens to keep their guns and buy more.  Instead of relying on the peaceful processes of organizing and persuading and voting, the temptation is always there to short-circuit democracy and reach for your holster instead.

A picture worth a thousand words from January 6 shows insurrectionists waving a Confederate flag with an AR-15 in the middle and Trump signs in the foreground.  Nothing more needs to be said.

“The survival instinct is at the heart of the Stockholm syndrome. Victims live in enforced dependence and interpret rare or small acts of kindness in the midst of horrible conditions as good treatment. They often become hypervigilant to the needs and demands of their captors, making psychological links between the captors’ happiness and their own. Indeed, the syndrome is marked not only by a positive bond between captive and captor but also by a negative attitude on behalf of the captive toward authorities who threaten the captor-captive relationship.”  (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The US Congress has just rejected a bipartisan compromise that would have strengthened border security, and sent vital funding to Ukraine.  This is foolishness of such magnitude that I cannot find adequate words.  Frank Fukuyama says it straight:  “The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities [my emphasis] makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations.”

Of course the first sentence above is not quite right.  It is not the US Congress as such that is rejecting this deal, it is a partisan MAGA minority in thrall to Donald Trump.  

America has for a long time now been a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.  The majority is held hostage at every turn by a relentless, mobilized minority uninterested in policy, only in the power and notoriety that comes from saying ‘no’ and showing up the enemy.  

But there is method in the madness: these political terrorists calculate that not allowing government to function will anger people to the point that they welcome a strongman who promises to ‘get things done.’  Making the trains run on time is a classic authoritarian move.   Meanwhile the victims hang on the terrorists every word, imagining that the occasional sane remark shows they are coming around, and cowering when threatened with blows and abuse.

When Stockholm Syndrome strikes, we are torn between who to blame.  Of course the terrorists are at fault.  They make no secret of their evil intentions, in fact they revel in them and publicize them.  MAGA supporters say openly that they will not address the border or help Ukraine, only because they calculate it might help Joe Biden.  They count on Americans demanding action and turning to Trump to deliver.

But at some point the captives cannot escape responsibility.  They whisper to one another that, well, the terrorists have some good points, maybe we should see their side.  They argue about whether fighting back might make their captors even angrier.  They consider carefully what might happen if the roles were someday reversed; maybe their enemies would try to do the same to them.  And of course the crazy threats the terrorists make are just for show, they would never actually carry them out.  So Senator Marco Rubio can say “I have zero concern” when Trump says he would allow Russia to attack members of NATO. 

In short, they find reasons why being held prisoner is not so bad.  So even when they actually have the power, the filibuster rules in the Senate stay the same.  The Supreme Court goes unreformed, and Clarence Thomas is not forced to recuse himself despite his wife’s immersion in the MAGA agenda.  Like clockwork a few extremists weaponize the debt ceiling and shut down the government to gain headlines and concessions.  Every four years the ridiculous Electoral College is dusted off to embarrass us one more time.  The country subjects itself to another round of dangerous, polarizing single-party primaries.  Oceans of unconstrained billionaire money surge over the electorate. Then Americans go to the polls under rules that make most votes meaningless unless you happen to live in one of the handful of ‘swing states.’  

Stockholm syndrome is widespread among Democrats, but is even stronger among traditional Republicans.  These shell-shocked troglodytes paved the way for today’s hostile takeover by regularly blocking compromise, painting apocalyptic pictures of the enemy, and strengthening every rule that allows the minority to have its way. Now, surprised that these efforts have had their predictable effect, they are surrendering in droves.  With their electoral survival, and often their physical survival, threatened by the MAGA wave, they have fallen over themselves to invent reasons to give in. 

What needs to be understood is that when it comes to exercising power, the MAGA movement has nothing in common with conservatism.  Trump is not in favor of limited government, constrained by tradition and Constitutional checks and balances.  He and his followers make no secret of their plans, once in control, to ignore all those fuddy-duddy obstacles and aggressively use the state to trample on their enemies and consolidate power.  These plans include remaking the civil service, politicizing the Justice Department, and likely invoking the Insurrection Act to in effect declare martial law.  And we already know that election results mean nothing to Trump.  

No wonder Americans feel sour.  Once we took stock of our problems and did something about them.  We amended the Constitution to give women the vote and create an income tax.  We cut the robber barons down to size.  We gave rights to African-Americans.  We out-spent and out-maneuvered the USSR.  Now we can’t pass a budget and are on the brink of unilaterally surrendering to Putin.  Not because we lack money or military power or smart and capable citizens, but because responsible leaders have lost their way and are allowing the loudest and most unreasonable voices to prevail.

Americans need to shake off Stockholm Syndrome.  Continuing to let the minority block action plays into Trump’s hands.  Most Americans don’t buy what MAGA is selling, but the rules of the game have been rigged to hamstring the majority.  This has to change.  

“…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  (Ivan Karamazov)

“Western society is more pragmatic.  Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”  (Vladimir Putin)

My essay is occasioned by a fine St John’s seminar which allowed me to re-read Brothers Karamazov for the first time in decades.  I have been a long-time watcher of Russia in its various modern guises and was grateful for the in-depth discussions.

This is quite a long book and has occasioned its share of equally long commentaries.  This will be short.

Dostoevsky shows us characters who live on the edge, emotionally and psychologically.  The ones he admires are those who suffer, who go through a dark night of the soul, and as a result are able to have  ecstatic experiences of love, God’s presence, and repentance.  The best of the three brothers, Alyosha, has his moment when his faith in his elder, Father Zosima, is shaken after his death by the smell of corruption; Alyosha sulks about, has a dramatic encounter with the town’s loose woman, and ends up face down on the earth overcome by God’s creation.  Zosima himself tells us of his turn to God when, during his military service, he accepts a duel but recoils at killing, throws away his pistol and becomes a monk.  

Dmitry, Alyosha’s often boorish and violent half-brother, turns to the light only after deciding to kill himself when his amour, Grushenka, appears to have left him forever but then unexpectedly accepts his love.  At the end of the novel, Alyosha creates a life-changing moment for a group of young boys who experience the death of a beloved schoolmate.  

A question is, what is the lasting effect of these moments of darkness followed by ecstasy and redemption?  Do they bring about a ‘new man’ who treats his fellows with kindness, who works for justice, who seeks to alleviate human suffering?  That is not clear.  Dmitry in particular continues to lose his temper and fight jealously with Grushenka, and vice versa.  

Dostoevsky’s foil throughout Brothers is modern, European, Enlightenment thinking and mores.  The advances of science and the dream of making the human condition better through planning and reforms and, God help us, socialism are roundly scorned and made fun of.  This way of thinking leads to atheism, the collapse of all morals (“everything is permitted”!), and alienation from our fellow man.

Wanting to better mankind in this way is a fatal temptation.  The famous tale of the “Grand Inquisitor,” where the Inquisitor faces down Christ himself in the name of making ordinary humans happy, shows that this is the work (literally) of the Devil, leading to spiritual death and brutal oppression.  

Dostoyevsky has a penetrating portrayal of Kolya, a promising boy who is at risk of being taken over by these ugly modern forces but is fortunately turned to the light by Alyosha.  Kolya is prone to trying to impress those around him by repeating half-digested bits of modernity, gleaned from journals, overheard conversations, and Rakitin, the town’s village atheist.  During one of these discourses he asserts “Everything is habit with people, everything, even state and political relations.  Habit is the chief motive force.”  This would seem to be a central tenet of our modern, Enlightenment view of human nature; we are bundles of habits, who can be changed for the better by inculcating new, better habits.

Whether Dostoyevsky means us to think of Aristotle or not, this statement brought me up short.  Aristotle famously told us in the Ethics that moral virtue is a matter of habits.  We acquire the moral virtues—courage, prudence, temperance, justice, magnanimity—because we have nurtured and practiced them until they have become a second nature.  The virtues are means between extremes, and a virtuous person would generally display a calm strength and predictability in behavior. 

This is not how Dostoyevsky seems to see a good life.  We need to be open to wild swings of mood and activity by remaining emotionally honest (like children, who Dostoyevsky sees as innocents who can be models to us as we grow up, retaining the memory of our younger selves).  No pain, no gain.  The sign of a good soul does not seem to be the equanimity that comes from well-established habits.  No one in Brothers is an example of such a life.  We are not in it for the long haul, but for the experiences of love and ecstasy that illuminate life like lightning flashes.  

Brothers might be said to have a ‘missing middle’.  There is penetrating attention to individual struggles and psychology, and also to the highest spiritual and religious experiences.  There is little said or portrayed that might be called ordinary life, including public life.  No one gets married and settles down and has a job and raises a family.  No one works hard in the town council to pave the streets and start a fire department.   The main characters are members of Russia’s newly emerging, educated, well-to-do, Western-oriented middle class.  But the Karamazovs at least remain the kind of Russians that Ivan describes to Alyosha when they settle in for a brotherly heart-to-heart:  “…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  And Alyosha agrees:  “Yes, for real Russians the questions of the existence of God and immortality, or, as you just said, the same questions from the other end, are of course first and foremost, and they should be.”  

It goes without saying that this Russian orientation to the ‘eternal questions’ is in contrast to the self-absorbed pragmatism of non-Russians, in the West.  Dostoyevsky is aware that this Russian trait is already by now something of a caricature, but he defends it nevertheless.  When Alyosha is bantering with young Kolya, he tells a German joke about Russians:  “Show a Russian schoolboy a map of the heavens, of which hitherto he had no idea at all, and the next day he will return it to you with corrections!”  To which Kolya retorts “Bravo, German!  However the Kraut didn’t look at the good side, what do you think?  Conceit—so be it, it comes from youth, it will correct itself…but on the other hand, an independent spirit, almost from childhood, a boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of those sausage-makers groveling before the authorities…”  

Bold-thinking Russians who go straight to the eternal questions, who embrace suffering as the price for a meaningful life, these are Dostoyevsky’s heroes.  By now this image of the ‘real Russian’ has been deeply implanted, both in Russians and non-Russians—in no small part by Dostoyevsky himself.  However much Russians may see themselves outdone in the mundane world by the West, they see themselves as superior in their souls.  Dostoyevsky’s own prescient warnings about where too much ‘socialism’ might lead were on the mark for Russia itself, where Lenin and Stalin took Marx and melded him with Dostoyevskian excess to create a real-world version of the “Grand Inquisitor.”  Russian floundering and brutality have brought untold suffering down on their own heads, and the heads of those around them, but this is waved off as a necessary part of the national character.  

Today unfortunately Russia has again missed the chance to become a normal nation; again there is a ‘missing middle’.  Instead Putin and his minions have appropriated a distorted Dostoyevsky to teach a new generation that Russia has a special mission in the world, a spiritual mission that requires sacrifice,  submission, war, and the conquering of neighbors.  In his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin channels Dostoyevsky:  “Western society is more pragmatic,” he said. “Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”

Shortly after reading Brothers I watched a recent Ken Burns documentary on Benjamin Franklin.  If Dostoyevsky provides a lasting model for Russia, so Franklin has done for America.  The differences, of course, could not be greater.  Franklin is among other things the greatest proponent among our Founders for the middle class, for the artisans, small businessmen, immigrant strivers, self-made thinkers and doers who the new nation is made for.  Self-discipline and concern for one’s community are Franklin’s touchstones for a good life.  Franklin creates institutions the way Johnny Appleseed plants trees:  libraries, postal services, schools, fire-departments spring up in his wake wherever he goes.  He was a relentless tinkerer, an improver, a reluctant Revolutionary.  Not for him the Eternal Questions.

American success has come from this focus on the middle.  Creating and nurturing this segment of society has been the true American achievement and our true radicalism.   We have gone astray when we tilt towards the greatly rich, the greatly charismatic, the greatly ambitious, the greatly religious.

Dostoyevskian characters are not missing in America, far from it, but their suffering and spiritual striving has for the most part remained private.  They have been kept far away from the levers of power.  May it remain so.  

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.  They will struggle for the sake of struggle.  They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.  And if a greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.  Frank Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society… So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.  James Madison, Federalist 10

So many right-wing crazies, so little time.  This must be why I had not heard of “Bronze Age Pervert” until recently, courtesy of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right.”  Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, is a slightly mysterious Yale-educated political science Ph.D who masquerades online as an unhinged, foul-mouthed purveyor of racism and misogyny, coupled with a love of bodybuilding and ancient Greece.  Yet he seems to have attracted a large and loyal following among young right-wingers.  Unraveling his attraction for today’s new-Right was the thread I tried to follow, leading through the labyrinth of modern right-wing thought.

Old and New Rights

In the United States, to be ‘on the right’ until recently meant that you were a firm supporter of a capitalist, free-enterprise system; limited government with low taxes and regulation; strong protections for individual rights with respect to property, speech, guns, etc.; and a believer in the rule of law.  You were almost always a proud defender of the Constitution, the military and law enforcement, America’s leading role in the world, and the American business community. You endorsed a level playing field because you believed that liberty allowed natural differences in talent, drive, and intelligence to manifest themselves and rise to the top.    

Today however almost none of this is true.  

What we call the right today in America still has some of its classic features.  But that is not where the grassroots energy is, not where the MAGA movement is, not where the intellectual fervor is.  Increasingly it is found in support of formerly fringe positions:  not limited government, but strong government empowered to enforce minority views on religion and morals; not the Constitution but the will of a demagogue; not universal individual rights but the rights of particular voices and groups; not a leader of the ‘free world’ but a selfish defender of national interests; not the military or law enforcement (see Senator Tommy Tuberville’s willingness to block military promotions); not even private businesses who insist on their right to hire and fire and appeal to customers as they see fit (see Governor De Santis’s fight with Disney). 

Donald Trump, and not only him, makes no secret of his admiration for authoritarian tough guys like Putin, Xi, Erdogan and their ilk.  This is largely because politics for Trump has nothing to do with policy, it is entirely about winning and losing—are you for me or against me.  It is struggle for its own sake.  

One way to sum up these changes is to say that the American Right now looks more like the old European Right.  In Europe, the Right, since the terms Right and Left came into general political use with the French Revolution, has stood for hierarchy and the rule of the strong and privileged.  It advocated for the close cooperation of church, state and business.  It promoted a blood and soil nationalism based on affinities of language, race, and faith, and against dangerous mixing with inferior races and peoples.  It fought virulently against advances for women, equal rights for gays, and other challenges to ‘traditional morality.’  It culminated in fascist regimes that glorified violence, struggle and war as ends in themselves.

That version of the Right seemed, after World War II, to be extinguished, never to rise again from the ashes of utter defeat and ignominy.  But it has returned, in almost every European state.  In Russia, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy it has taken power.  In other states it is growing, including here at home.

Hungary in particular has become the model for America’s new right-wingers, who are envious of Victor Orban.  It is nominally democratic but has been rigged by Orban to be a democracy in name only:    The courts, the press, the universities, the legislature are all cowed or bought off.  Xenophobia over a hyped immigration threat, and faux-indignation at having to abide by European human rights standards, help fuel Orban’s continued popularity. Freedom House now considers Hungary to be a ‘partial’ or ‘semi-consolidated’ democracy.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an epicenter of today’s Right, in 2022 and 2023 held its annual conference in Budapest.  One of its leading lights, Rod Dreher, has said “Right now, the political leader of the conservative resistance in the West is the prime minister of a small central European [country] that most Americans never even think about.”   

Many of Orban’s most committed supporters are Catholic ‘integralist’ thinkers who want the state to explicitly privilege their faith, as is the case in Hungary.  The integralists reject liberal pluralism as dangerous to conservative practice (on abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc.) and contrary to Catholic doctrine, and want to seize control of the state to impose the truth.   Kevin Vallier, author of a recent book critiquing integralism, characterizes it this way:  “’We’re going to take the institutions established by liberalism and socialism and we’re going to turn them to our own ends.’ This is the great danger of the American integralists because they’re bringing the ideas of Viktor Orbán into the Republican Party. They’re one of the ones who are most responsible for it.”

Integralists are not the only ones who dream of capturing state institutions for their own purposes.  Trump has promised that if re-elected he will purge the government bureaucracy and change civil service rules to allow him to put his followers into every federal position.  Trump seeks not the standard conservative goal of less government, but the new-right goal of my government.

In the 1930s during the Great Depression small groups of Americans looked to foreign dictatorships on Right and Left—Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s USSR—as models for a troubled United States.  But there is no precedent for the leader of a major American political party, millions of his followers, and its intellectual spokesmen, to openly prefer explicitly illiberal, foreign, political systems.  

A number of different strands make up today’s right. (I have not found a satisfactory term to characterize today’s right-wing movements and thinkers:  New Right is an old term, ‘alt-right’ refers more narrowly to white nationalists.  The one term that does not fit is ‘conservative’—there is nothing conservative about today’s right, which is both radical and reactionary).  But they increasingly overlap.   

We have people of great wealth who, like the Trumps and Musks, cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  They are convinced that they got rich because they are superior beings, and that this superiority is transferable to other domains.  Many are openly hostile to democracy and see no reason for their inferiors to have an equal say in politics:  billionaire tech-entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, wants to limit voting to those who can pass a civics test.  Today many of the most brazen of these Gilded Age throwbacks live in Silicon Valley and are prey to anti-establishment conspiracy theories: as Paul Krugman wrote recently,  “Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets.”  

We have conservative nationalists like Steve Bannon, part of the Orban admiration society.  These are people who agree with Putin and Xi and Modi that the world is characterized by a ‘clash of civilizations’; we are divided into distinct religio-cultural spheres, each of which should be allowed to develop its own distinctive way of life.  Liberalism is despised because of its claims to universalism and attempts to criticize and reform non-liberal regimes.  Our sphere (the best of all) is Christian, white, and European.  We should proudly uphold it and keep out people and ideas from all those ‘shithole countries’.  

We have disaffected young men who rightly feel put upon by globalized capitalism, which has ravaged America’s industries and turned the once-proud working class into the precariat.  Their place in the world is unclear, and it is easy to blame feminism and affirmative action for their problems. They yearn for some greater cause to provide meaning and belonging, and often find it in right-wing organizations and leaders like Trump, who tell them liberalism is the arch-enemy, a world-view that looks down on people like them.  Embracing racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny and prepping for violence is exciting and fills the void that has opened up in their lives and communities. 

And we have a small but influential group of intellectuals and ‘thought-leaders’ who find liberalism unsatisfying and yearn for alternatives, sometimes in a resurgence of traditional religion, sometimes in  an anti- or post-liberal political order.  These are people who want a great cause to support, who want a world painted in clear black and white, with enemies to defeat and battles to wage.  Some see themselves as defenders of ‘true’ American values, but many are fascinated with theocracy and fascism.  

The Common Thread:  Hatred of Equality

What do these different strands have in common? The fundamental divide today, as for the last three centuries, is between those who accept and defend the fundamental equality of human beings, and those who do not.  The United States has until now been the nation that most clearly falls in the first camp, at least in its creed and publicly accepted principles.  The (many) deviations from this creed have come to be understood as mistakes that need to be acknowledged and overcome.  But as liberalism has moved more forcefully to identify and rectify these mistakes—racism and sexism, the destruction of indigenous peoples, the piling up of massive fortunes—it has produced a fierce backlash.  This backlash has now morphed from a defense of ‘classic’ American values, to a growing embrace of values that cannot by any stretch be called American. 

The dividing lines between these groups are increasingly blurred as what they have in common, their hatred of modern liberalism and egalitarianism, pulls them together.  This is aided by a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, institutes, and media outlets built up over decades and funded by wealthy patrons and businesses.  These wealthy interests want above all to reverse the modern liberal project, understood as empowering government to use some of the wealth generated by the private sector to provide welfare and opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged.  Even small steps to reduce inequality and check the power of the rich are characterized as socialism or communism.  

(While wealthy liberals tend to fund foundations that do ‘good works’ and create detailed policy proposals, conservatives tend to fund politically-oriented organizations that aim directly at influencing elected officials.  In Washington, the moderately-liberal Brookings Institution is a storehouse of broad-ranging policy expertise; its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation, creates talking points for the House Freedom Caucus.)    

Claremont’s Turn to BAPism

One notable part of this right-wing network has been the Claremont Institute.  Claremont began as a vigorous defender of the Constitution, understood as embodying natural rights, that is, rights ascertainable by reason and hence true for all time.  Its teachings reached influential conservatives, notably Justice Clarence Thomas, a convert to the natural rights doctrine.  In this vein Claremont has long opposed critiques from the left that question America’s principles, as well as most forms of affirmative action.  It grounded itself in the ideas of Leo Strauss and his followers and often published interesting political and cultural analysis.  

But Claremont’s mainstreaming of “Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)” reveals how this supposedly patriotic and intellectually sophisticated effort has lost its way.  BAP has gained a cult following among some of today’s reactionary youth, reportedly including young staffers in the Trump White House.  His writings, including a 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, are a melange of (often crude) meanderings that glorify eugenics, manliness, classical Greece, bodybuilding, and violence, while tearing into feminism, Christianity, the bureaucratic state, democracy, non-white peoples, etc. 

In short, BAP is a Nietzschean.  The essential Nietzschean assertion is that human equality is a myth, foisted on modern man by Christianity, abetted by Greek philosophy.  This myth is destructive of all human excellence, a soul-sucking mistake that produces a world of joyless “Last Men.”  Just as BAP is romantically attached to Bronze Age Greece, the time of the Iliad, when men were men who kidnapped women and then fought to the death over them, Nietzsche admired ancient Rome for its unabashed love of violence, conquest, and the right of the strong to do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.  BAP vilifies his contemporaries as ‘bugmen’ and dreams, vividly, of their violent demise.

Now there have always been American adolescents sitting palely in libraries, enamored of Nietzsche and his modern epigones, like the capitalism-worshipping Ayn Rand.  Via Rand, Nietzsche has had considerable influence in promoting a hard-edged libertarianism.  But his ideas have otherwise had little broader support in the United States.  Until now.

In 2019 Claremont published a review of BAP’s book by Michael Anton (the author of a hysterical Claremont piece in 2016, “The Flight 93 Election,” explaining why voting for Donald Trump was the equivalent of the hijacked passengers on Flight 93 fighting back against their al-Qaida hijackers.  Anton leveraged his article into a position on the Trump National Security Council.)  Anton acknowledged BAP’s outrageous views but basically defended him, saying BAP “speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence…”.

Anton implies—more than implies—that BAP’s exhortation to his followers to infiltrate the military and security institutions and await instructions is an understandable move; it is certainly consistent with the message of “Flight 93.” It is also consistent with Claremont Board President and main donor Thomas Klingenstein’s claim that America is in the midst of a ‘cold civil war’ and that America is a de facto ‘totalitarian regime’ under the thumb of liberals and ‘woke communists.’  Anton purports to be concerned that young right-wingers are being drawn to BAP rather than Claremont’s Americanism, but this is gaslighting.  Like many half-baked Straussians, Anton inserts numerous winks and nods to show that his surface reasonableness is just a facade, and what is really needed is an all-out war to overthrow liberal dominance.

Anton’s and Klingenstein’s dislike of liberalism is so great that anything is preferable, whether Trump, or an unhinged fascist like BAP.  This mirrors the overall corruption of Claremont, as outlined in detail in Katherine Stewart’s September New Republic article, “The Anti-Democracy Think Tank.”  

In Graeme Wood’s  “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right,” he tells us that according to the political philosopher Bryan Garsten, BAPism is increasingly the choice of many of his top graduate students:  “Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to enlightenment liberalism.”  

The key point is that to these young thinkers, liberalism is no longer seen as a viable choice.  It is felt to be exhausted, done in by a wearisome and gridlocked politics, pointless overseas adventures, and the triumph of special interests.  Contemporary ‘wokism,’ which tries to shame infractions against progressive orthodoxy, is intolerable, on a par with the Gulag and concentration camps.  Reform is not possible.  The whole thing needs to be blown up.

This is perhaps the essence of the fascist mentality.  A violent cleansing is needed, via war or revolution, to clear away the dreck of the existing order and create the intense national, spiritual, and racial unity that gives meaning to life.  Various alien and subhuman enemies—the ‘bugmen’—must be identified and done away with.  Accomplishing this requires a Leader before whom one can kneel.  

Liberalism and its Discontents

This is not the first moment in modern times in which dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, and life under advanced capitalism, has been used to justify violence or tyranny.  It in fact appears to be a regular and inevitable accompaniment to life in a liberal democracy.  It has often been pointed out that liberalism is thin gruel, prioritizing as it does compromise, toleration, negotiation, and peaceful conflict resolution.  Liberalism teaches that no one has a monopoly on truth and we must live with ambiguity.  Those who yearn for moral intensity, great deeds, the triumph of good over evil, find this deeply unsatisfying.  

In Europe the period at the end of the 19^th century and up to WWI was a time of such dissatisfaction.  Europe had largely been at peace for 100 years.  The bourgeoisie—smug, narrow-minded, and materialistic—were triumphant.  The great critics of the bourgeoisie, Nietzsche and Marx, disagreed on everything except their disgust at complacent modern European man. 

Partly as a result, a generation welcomed war as a catharsis, a romantic escape from boredom and pettiness.  What they got, however, was a catastrophe that (for a time) discredited all such romantic notions.  While all existing regimes were damaged by the Great War, the biggest losers were the most reactionary and un-democratic.  Great oppressive Empires collapsed:  Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans.  America rose. 

The interwar period saw another surge in anti-liberal sentiments.  Liberal democracy in the 1930s seemed to be on the ropes.  The Depression caused many to question whether it was up to the task of creating prosperity and national unity.  Fascism, communism, and militarism seemed to be the wave of the future, offering meaning and purpose.  

Once again, however, the supposedly decadent and divided democracies rose to the challenge.  In WWII they reduced the cities of Germany and Japan to smoking ruins, then occupied them and, in a final twist of the knife, transformed them into liberal democracies.  Then in a burst of creativity they birthed  modern welfare states, built powerful militaries, and held on doggedly to outlast communism too.

After the collapse of the USSR it seemed that the last word had been written on the seeming flabbiness of liberal democracy and the superiority of various forms of authoritarianism.  In the contest to see which regime could best mobilize and harness the energies of its people to produce prosperity and national power, the democracies with their combination of individual freedoms, competitive politics, and private enterprise had clearly triumphed.  

But apparently not forever.  As we have seen before, liberal success contains seeds of discontent.  For guidance we can look to the ur-text of modern liberal triumphalism.  Frank Fukuyama became famous in the early 1990s for describing the “end of history,” where major conflicts would cease, drowned in a wave of success as democracy and capitalism joined hands and the world’s great powers converged in agreement on the path to prosperity and stability.  Major conflicts between and within states would diminish as all people gained ‘recognition’, the equal rights as citizens that would satisfy them and do away with the primary cause of war and rebellion.

The Perennial Right-Wing Challenge

But the millions who read and praised (and and have since largely turned on) Fukuyama’s thesis, failed to read his text to the end.  Remember, the title of the book was:  The End of History and the Last Man [emphasis mine].  The Last Man was Nietzsche’s sarcastic term for the bourgeois, pleasure-loving, pain-avoiding human being spreading rapidly over modern Europe.  

Fukuyama saw, at the moment of its apparent victory, that the combination of liberal democracy, capitalism, and scientific/technological progress could still be challenged.  From the Left it was vulnerable to ever-increasing demands for equality.  These would bump up against natural human differences—we are not equal in looks, in talents, in basketball-enabling height, in emotional stability, in mathematical intuition, and all manner of other characteristics.  The most important of these differences, as Madison understood, relate to the acquisition of wealth or ‘property’:  “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”

Ameliorating the resulting inequalities via the modern welfare state is one thing. But eradicating them requires a monstrous tyranny, as we saw in the Soviet Union.  Short of tyranny, constantly harping on every instance of inequality quickly arouses irritation and anger and becomes counter-productive.  Fukuyama correctly foresaw the dangers from the always-woke, finger-pointing, micro-aggression-cataloguing vigilantism that is damaging life on college campuses, and beyond.  

But Fukuyama also correctly foresaw that the greater danger would come from the Right.  “Liberal democracy could, in the long run, be subverted either by an excess of megalothymia, or by an excess of isothymia—that is, the fanatical desire for equal recognition.  It is my intuition that it is the former that will constitute the greater danger to democracy in the end.”   (Last Man, p. 314).  Megalothymia is the desire to be better than others, to gain not equal but greater recognition—status, fame, glory, wealth, power.  It is impossible and undesirable to eliminate this desire, which exists to some degree in everyone, and to a very large degree in some.  Wanting to excel and be recognized for excellence is the great motor of progress and innovation. 

However, any stable society, and especially a liberal one, must check megalothymia.  Modern liberal democracies can divert this drive towards productive or harmless activities, like business or science or sports or Tik-Tok influencer, or even democratic politics, properly constrained.  But if they are to survive they must put limits on certain kinds of ambition, in politics or military affairs, and must insist on equality in ways certain to rankle those who want more than equality.

Especially important are limits on the acquisition of wealth and how wealth can be used politically—limits that America today has failed to enforce.  As we see every day, the Trumps and Musks and Klingensteins cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  Above all they want to consolidate their positions by shaping public policy to protect and grow their riches, thereby entrenching inequality.  (Hence actions like the recent $1.5 billion bequest to Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo—the largest ‘charitable’ transfer in US history—from an Islamophobic, climate-denying Chicago businessman who was able to engineer a $400 million tax break from his blatantly political donation.)    

Once these ‘malefactors of great wealth’ (to quote Theodore Roosevelt) have unleashed their resources to defend their interests, the cat is very much out of the bag.  The money spreads into unforeseen nooks and corners, activating more and more extreme views, drawing in equality-hating ideologues,  conspiracy-theorists, opportunists, and madmen.

It is difficult to put limits on the ambitions of people in the grip of the Nietzschean, BAP mindset.  They are motivated largely by resentment at what they see as the failure of society to give them the rewards and recognition that their moral or intellectual or racial superiority deserves.  No one who feels the clouds have parted after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Atlas Shrugged, or listening to a Steve Bannon podcast, ever feels that they are not one of the elect (this is the real meaning of the right-wing meme ‘to be red-pilled’).  If they haven’t gotten their due, it can’t be their fault—someone else must be to blame. Today a young white man with limited education (or with an advanced degree but no job; see historian Peter Turchin’s increasingly fashionable theory of elite overproduction), will quickly find all manner of tempters—talk radio, FOX News, the Claremont Institute—eager to persuade him that his problems are all due to feminism, anti-racism, immigrants and progressive ideology.  

This resentment rarely issues in any productive or serious policy proposals. The energy, the focus, is entirely negative.

To some extent we must tolerate youthful exuberance and try to tame it for better ends.  But liberalism became intellectually complacent after the Cold War.  It is now on the defensive.  It doesn’t matter that what makes the modern right apocalyptic is, in the scheme of things, trivial and overblown.  We aren’t at each other’s throats in America over real issues like slavery or Vietnam, but over same-sex restrooms and elementary-school textbooks.  But this reveals the actual challenge, which is not policy differences but the drive for respect and recognition, for a life of meaning and challenge—or for raw power. 

Liberals are frustrated when Americans vote ‘against their self-interest,’ meaning against all manner of benefits they could get from good liberal policies.  But they underestimate how much people see their life in terms of values and identity.  Backing Trump is exciting, it makes your enemies furious, it gives you a reason to get up in the morning.  You feel seen.  If you are an intellectual you see opportunity to be one of the shapers of a new order after MAGA victory sweeps away the flabby elites in academia and government.  (Hint to intellectuals: No, you won’t.  You’ll end up in the gulag.)

Whether liberalism can get its mojo back is one of the key questions of our time.  Joe Biden has done excellent things in terms of policy:  inflation is down, job growth is strong, support for Ukraine has been solid and effective, long-term investment in manufacturing and sustainable energy is through the roof.  But his popularity remains low.  Enthusiasm is lacking, and not just because he is old.  Donations to progressive groups have fallen sharply.  Perhaps this will change as the reality of good times sinks in.  But man does not live by bread alone.  

The best case is that the brazenness of the attack on liberal values will rouse its defenders.  Openly embracing racism, violence, Christian nationalism, and obeisance to the superior man, is astonishing.  The task of defending liberal democracy and the Constitution in the face of January 6 and the Trump takeover of the Republican Party should bring excitement and unity back to American liberals who have become mired in minutiae and infighting.

Abroad, foreign leaders like Putin and Xi are openly contemptuous of liberalism and democracy and expect to ride a wave of tyranny that ousts the US and its allies from global leadership.  They claim their versions of efficient one-man rule are superior to liberal democracy’s messy collective decisionmaking.  

We have seen this movie; Hitler and Stalin made identical claims.  Supporters of democracy have rallied before and can do so again.  Already Putin and Xi have committed the predictable error of authoritarian over-reach, Putin in Ukraine, Xi in fighting Covid.  But it seems every generation has to learn these lessons anew.                               

Imagine that, after the Civil War, an American poet had written a great work purporting to embrace the history of the world—not a history exactly but a compilation of the myths and stories that have shaped the American soul—culminating with the triumphant Presidency of the great General Grant, who has ushered in a period of peace and prosperity after decades of strife and war.  Then suppose that in reading the poem, you discovered that most of it was a recounting of the legends about King Arthur and his knights, with a few stanzas dealing perhaps with Richard the Lionhearted or Robin Hood.  Then some chapters about the American founding, focused on the Mayflower, a long digression about Isaac Newton, a bit of concluding praise for Lincoln and Grant, and voila.

If this sounds a bit odd, then you can share my disorientation after spending several weeks with the Latin poet Ovid’s (Publius Ovidius Naso) masterpiece, the Metamorphoses.  This involved reading the whole work (which is very long, over 600 pages in the Penguin translation by David Raeburn^[1]) then re-reading it in stages for a week-long seminar at St John’s College, where students and tutors (none of us experts on Ovid) met every day for 5 days and discussed the text. 

Ovid flourished, and wrote Metamorphoses, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  Rome was recovering from a century of civil strife and Augustus was creating what would become an imperial system of one-man rule, while pretending to preserve Rome’s republican institutions.  Ovid had achieved fame with earlier poems, in particular the Ars Amatoria, a sequence of lyric poems about love and more particularly about seduction, including rather detailed instructions for seducing married women (he also discussed how women might seduce men, a sign of his flexibility with regard to Roman norms).  You can get a taste of his approach from these lines in Ars Amatoria Book I:

But hunt for them, especially, at the tiered theatre:

that place is the most fruitful for your needs.

There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with,

one to be with just once, or one you might wish to keep.^[2]

Just as he was finishing his poem, Ovid was exiled in AD 8 by Augustus to a remote village on the Black Sea in what is today Romania; he spent the last 10 years of his life there.  Despite desperate pleas for clemency, neither Augustus or his successor Tiberius allowed Ovid to return to Rome.  Scholars are not sure exactly why Augustus had it in for Ovid, with some speculating he was involved in anti-Augustan plotting and others arguing that Augustus disliked Ovid’s morality, or lack of it, especially with regard to sex.  (A fine modern novel about Ovid’s exile is An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf, which I highly recommend.  We’ll come back to it later).  

Metamorphoses is written in epic verse, like Homer and Virgil, signaling a different and presumably loftier intent. But it is unlike these other epics; it lacks a central hero or a recognizable story. Instead, Ovid tells us he intends to explore a particular theme, metamorphosis or transformation.  

The stories in Metamorphoses are loosely (very loosely) linked by this theme of ‘change’ or transformation.  ‘Transformation’ is not a metaphor or some internal psychological realignment, it is literal transforming, with people turning regularly into trees or birds or streams.  This happens commonly in the myths that compose much of Metamorphoses.  Typically a god, maybe Jupiter or Apollo, lusts after a pretty nymph or human girl, seduces and rapes her, then he (or some other deity) turns her into an oak tree or a seagull or a lion—sometimes as a kind of redemption, sometimes as punishment.  There are poignant descriptions of people losing their ability to speak and move as the transformation occurs, while remaining human on the inside.  These transformations are at first surprising but, repeated in hundreds of short vignettes, also repetitive.   

The stories of Metamorphoses (a Greek, not a Latin word) are almost entirely, for the first 80-90 percent of the book, Greek stories.  Ovid has sources lost to us but for the most part they are familiar from Homer, Hesiod, the Greek playwrights and other writings.  The settings are Greek, the cities where they occur are Greek, the gods and kings and queens and heroes are familiar Greeks though sometimes with Latin names:  Jupiter and Hera, Apollo and Bacchus, Jason, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Medea, etc.  Ovid to be sure puts his own spin on them, carefully describing some particularly outlandish changes, drawing out aspects of character, occasionally dwelling on the internal struggle a character faces when trying to decide what to do.  But the stories are part of the tradition, not invented by Ovid.

It is difficult to convey the often bewildering experience of reading Metamorphoses, especially for a modern reader not steeped in these old tales.  Many of the stories are short, while some go on for 10-15 pages; sometimes different stories are linked together by their narrator (Orpheus has a long string of tales), or nested confusingly (a primary story, then a character digresses with another story, which reminds someone of yet another, and so on).  Ovid is a master of many moods and styles. He can be lyrical, terse, playful, earthy, or grand; he can imitate the goriest battle scenes of the Iliad; he can appear pious or irreverent.

There is a sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying stream of consciousness as you read, enjoying the variety but then asking yourself ‘what is the point here; why am I reading about Venus seducing Adonis one minute, and the flaying of Marsyas the next?’  The book is a kind of labryinth in which it is almost impossible not to get lost.

Two Key Themes: Sex and Honor

However, some themes do reoccur.  One of them is sex.  We are not for the most part talking about love here: when a guy—often a god (sometimes a goddess)—sees a girl he is often inflamed with desire which can’t be resisted, pursues/seduces/rapes her, then for the most part takes off while the lady lives with the consequences:  maybe a baby, maybe disgrace, maybe revenge from the guys wife (Hera is a particularly nasty revenge-seeker) or an outraged parent.  In any case, for the most part eros causes people/gods to damage one another, with the excuse being that they couldn’t help themselves.  

Ovid’s landscape is littered with the offspring of these liaisons, to the point that most characters have some deity or other as a parent or grandparent or uncle.  There is a quite literal intermingling of human and divine.

Another theme is lack of respect—the gods are endlessly upset when humans don’t acknowledge them properly or forget to offer sacrifices or trespass on their domains.  This leads to horrible payback, like when Actaeon accidentally spies Diana bathing and the outraged goddess turns him into a stag who is torn apart by his own dogs.  Ovid blithely notes afterwards that “Comments varied: some felt the goddess had overdone her violent revenge; while others commended it—worthy they said of her strict virginity.”  ^[3]But outside judgment seems beside the point.  Gods are gonna do what gods are gonna do.    

The transformations that Ovid delights in are often enjoyable for their own sake, but also can be seen as attempts to repair or restore cracks in the order of things.  When terrible rapes or violent vengeance occurs, the perpetrators are not usually punished—there is no moral reckoning—but there is recognition that the fabric of the world has been torn and should somehow be set right.  When the gods change victims into trees or flowers or birds or springs, some kind of harmony has been restored.

Jupiter in particular is both a constant source of disorder, and the one who keeps the world within certain bounds.  It’s Jupiter who has to take down Phaeton with a thunderbolt when he carries the sun too close to the world and threatens to burn it to ashes, and who periodically drowns mankind, like a basket of unwanted kittens, when we get overly nasty and disrespectful—taking care however to preserve a select few to carry on the race.

Poetic Troublemakers

Within this dizzying merry-go-round, Ovid draws our attention to a few characters who stand out for their independence and creative powers; people who rival the gods and who we can arguably identify with Ovid himself.  One is the woman-weaver Arachne, who claims to be the equal of Minerva and is challenged by the goddess to prove it.  People who challenge the gods do not generally come out well in Ovid, and Arachne is no exception, but she claims our respect.  Unlike most of Ovid’s protagonists, Arachne is not high-born:  “Arachne’s distinction lay not in her birth or the place that she hailed from, but solely her art.”^[4]  She doesn’t back down when Minerva warns her, and her work is fully the equal of the goddess’s: “Not Pallas, not even the goddess of Envy could criticize weaving like that.”^[5]   But while Minerva weaves pictures showing the gods and goddesses at their most majestic and benevolent, Arachne details all the crimes against women of Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo and the rest, all the rapes and deceptions and abandonments.  

Typically, the goddess when thwarted decides to overturn the board:  “The fair-haired warrior goddess resented Arachne’s success and ripped up the picture portraying the god’s misdemeanours.”^[6]  Then she turns Arachne into a spider. But Arachne/Ovid is the real winner.  The tapestry is destroyed but Ovid preserves for us the image of this strong young woman using her artistic talent to tell truth to power.   Ovid—who himself came from a well-off but not particularly prominent family—is in the midst of raining down on us thousands of carefully-crafted words showing in detail the lusts, jealousies, and multiple shortcomings of the gods.  It doesn’t take a great deal of extrapolation to see the gods as stand-ins for the rich and powerful of Rome (and elsewhere), who do as they please and punish anyone who takes exception.  

Another independent craftsman is Daedalus, the famous inventor responsible for the Labryinth that imprisons the Minotaur; the wings that allow him to escape from Crete; and other marvels.  When Daedalus begins to work on his wings, Ovid says he “put his mind to techniques unexplored before and altered the laws of nature.”^[7]  He has no help from the gods.  Of course his marvelous work proves fatal to his son, Icarus, who flies too high.  Challenging established ways is risky and possibly impious; the observers of the flying Daedalus and Icarus say “They certainly must be gods to fly through the air!”^[8]  Ovid is perhaps another Daedalus, using his fabulous technique to create a new kind of epic poetry but with the risk of coming too close to the sun, endangering those he loves and affronting the powerful.

A third heroic artist is Orpheus, the extraordinary musician who famously travels to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, succeeds in charming even grim Pluto with his song, then loses Eurydice again when he looks around on their way back to the upper world. Orpheus’s power extends to nature as much as the gods; he is described as able to charm even the rocks and trees and animals to come to him when he plays.  

After losing Eurydice, Ovid says that Orpheus would “have nothing to do with the love of women” and instead turns to young boys: “Orpheus even started the practice among the Thracian tribes of turning for love to immature males.”^[9]  Ovid’s Orpheus becomes in fact a celebrator of strange and unnatural loves; after praising Jupiter, he says “Now there is call for a lighter note.  Let my song be of boys whom the gods have loved and of girls who have been inspired to a frenzy of lawless passion and paid the price for their lustful desires.”^[10]  This is followed by a series of stories, told by Orpheus, that include Jupiter’s infatuation with the beautiful boy Ganymede; Apollo’s similar love for the young Hyacinthus; the origin of prostitution; Pygmalion’s twisted desire for his own statue; a long and detailed account of the young girl Myrrha who pursues her own father; and the doomed love of Venus for Adonis.   

Orpheus ends up being torn to pieces by wild Thracian ‘bacchanals’, who resent his disdain for women.  Orpheus’s music deflects their attacks for a while, but finally Ovid says “cacophony won.  The hideous screech of the Phrygian pipe…the clapping of hands and the bacchanals shrieking drowned the sound of the lyre…”.^[11]  All of nature mourns his passing, the birds and beasts, rocks and rivers and trees.

Although the ‘bacchanals’ seem to act along typical Bacchic lines, Ovid tells us that the god Bacchus takes revenge on them because Orpheus has been a ‘priest of his mysteries’.  Bacchus is prominent throughout the Metamorphoses—he is a ‘new god,’ a celebrator of disorder and female empowerment, who has to win his place against the opposition of the Olympians.  Ovid likewise loves to tell stories about the breakdown of good order, with a number of them highlighting strong women who succeed in enacting vengeance or getting their man:  Medea the powerful witch who revenges herself on Jason; Arachne; Salmacis the abnormal nymph (“The only naiad not to belong to the train of Diana”) who desires, attacks, and is joined permanently with young Hermaphroditus; Procne, wife of the evil Tereus, who plots successfully to have him torn apart in Bacchic ritual after he brutally rapes her sister and cuts out her tongue.   

Ovid as a great poet I think identifies with Orpheus, and with Bacchus, who reverses the rules and turns the world topsy-turvy.  Augustus is busy building a conservative movement to “Make Rome Great Again,” restoring religious practices, building temples, and, controversially, trying to clamp down on adultery.  He makes an example of his own daughter Julia, who he sends into exile for playing around.   These efforts to restore ‘traditional’ morality are controversial.  The Roman historian Suetonius writes in The Twelve Caesars that the new laws Augustus introduced “dealt, among other matters, with extravagance, adultery, unchastity, bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders.  His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses.”^[12]

The Ovid who in earlier works described at length how to commit adultery, and in Metamorphoses is often preoccupied with sexual misconduct and out-of-control desires, is not likely to have found Augustus’s reforms congenial.  At the end of the poem, after comparing Augustus explicitly to Jupiter, Ovid throws down his own challenge to the gods: “Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy—not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire or sword, nor devouring time…My name shall never be forgotten.”^[13]

Bringing Greece and Rome Together

Those are some themes I think one can make out in the often bewildering labryinth of Metamorphoses.  But what about the work as a whole?  Can one stand back and make out an overarching theme or story?

Here is where the question of Metamorphoses’s “Greekness” is worth pursuing.  We take it for granted that the Greek and Roman worlds are one, that Zeus equals Jupiter, that Rome is the natural extension and follow-on to Greece.  When Ovid calls on the gods at the beginning to “spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own lifetime,” and at once launches on an account of creation borrowed from Homer and Hesiod, it takes an effort to ask whether this is just how it has to be, or whether the interweaving of these two cultures is something problematic.  

Ovid like many generations of educated Romans before him was steeped in Greek poetry and philosophy.  He studied in Athens for a year.  Rome had interacted with Greek colonies in southern Italy for centuries, conquered Greece in the 2^nd century BC, and then gone on by Ovid’s time to rule all of the Eastern Mediterranean, a world that had previously been conquered and Hellenized by Alexander the Great.  The Greek language, Greek literature and philosophy, and Greek institutions were the norm from Egypt (where Alexander was buried, in the great Greek city of Alexandria) through the Levant and Asia Minor.  This had a profound effect on many Romans, who were putting together an Empire on the back of an invincible military, but had little to offer of what we today call ‘soft power.’ They were awed by Greek accomplishments and quickly adopted them for themselves.    

Many, but not all.  Plenty of Romans thought of the Greeks as effete chatterboxes, and sources of decadence and decline.  Tough, virtuous Romans are sent off to rule Egypt and Syria and Macedon, and end up like Marc Antony; corrupted by the riches and temptations of the East, they lose themselves and forget their duty to Rome.  (There are parallels here to the way Thucydides tells us Spartans, similar to Romans in their single-minded focus on martial virtues, are prone to fall prey to greed when they leave Sparta to rule other parts of Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars).

Cato the Elder in the early 2^nd century is strongly opposed to growing Greek influence, as is the later Augustan-era historian Livy.  Livy is particularly critical of the cult of Bacchus, which he describes as a Greek import, for encouraging the unregulated mixing of sexes and classes.  (The Roman analogue to Bacchus is Liber Pater, identified with freedom and the rights of the plebeian class, according to modern scholars^[14]; Ovid often refers to Bacchus as Liber).   Livy, a conservative who sees Rome as threatened by moral decline, was close to Augustus.  He is suspicious of all so-called ‘mystery religions,’ such as the worship of Bacchus, and describes approvingly how in the early 2^nd century the authorities violently suppressed the growing Bacchus cult.  Rome’s expansion has allowed all manner of foreign customs and gods to infiltrate Rome itself, weakening the state.  

In this back and forth one can say that ultimately, Greece wins.  Under Constantine the Empire is divided, with the center of gravity moving to the new Eastern Capital at Byzantium.  Its language is Greek, not Latin.  The Empire in the West eventually collapses and Rome itself falls to barbarians, but the Greek, Christian version of Rome in the East carries on for another thousand years.  (Whether the Greek East, in the form of another new cult, Christianity, was the cause of Rome’s downfall has been debated for 2000 years).  

This is far in the future for Ovid.  What he sees in his time is a challenge to this more sophisticated, more open-minded Greek-Roman future.  Augustus is trying to restore the old Roman morality, arguably to make his radical usurpation of power look like a return to tradition.  Ovid’s poem asserts the oneness of the two cultures.  In this he follows Virgil, who in the Aeneid ties Rome’s founding directly to the fall of Troy.  Rome’s story comes straight out of the Iliad.  It doesn’t get any more Greek than that.

Ovid’s view of what is at stake may perhaps be hinted at towards the end of Metamorphoses, where he describes at length the views of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.  Pythagoras comes to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, fleeing from political oppression on his home island of Samos.  Ovid’s Pythagoras, (who seems to be a composite of Greek thinkers rather than the real Pythagoras) teaches that all things are permanently changing and in flux, always metamorphosing, coming and going—including great kings and cities.  Recognizing and embracing this is the key to wisdom.  

Ovid tells us that at one point Numa, one of Rome’s first kings who takes the throne after Romulus, travels to Croton to meet Pythagoras.  Ovid singles out Numa as “a capable thinker…His restless, ambitious mind led him on to explore the mysteries of nature itself.”^[15] After being taught by Pythagoras, Numa returns to Rome, where he “converted a nation practiced in brutal war to follow the arts of peace.”^[16] Ovid may be suggesting that Augustus, who promises Romans peace after over a century of civil war, should also learn from the Greeks; he should embrace a changing world rather than resist it.  Here is Ovid’s own point of view, from Part III of Ars Amatoria:

Others may delight in ancient times: I congratulate myself

on having been born just now: this age suits my nature.

Not because stubborn gold’s mined now from the earth,

or choice shells come to us from farthest shores…

but because civilisation’s here, and no crudity remains,

in our age, that survives from our ancient ancestors.^[17]

Whatever Ovid’s intent, Augustus does not appreciate it.  Just as Ovid was finishing Metamorphoses, Augustus banishes him.  

Ovid In Exile

David Malouf’s 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life, invents a trajectory for Ovid in his exile.^[18]  It is told as though written by Ovid himself (though Malouf acknowledges his story is based on almost no evidence).  After an initial period of extreme disorientation, Ovid comes to terms with his fate; he learns the local language, and starts to appreciate the beauty of the bleak landscape.  He plants a garden of flowers, something that surprises and confuses the locals, who do nothing that is not entirely practical:  “My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome.” 

He has an epiphany about the meaning of metamorphosis:  “I have stopped trying to find fault with creation and have learned to accept it.  We have some power in us that knows its own ends…This is the true meaning of transformation.  This is the real metamorphosis.  Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree…”   

Malouf’s Ovid becomes fascinated with a local ‘wild child’, a young boy who roams the woods with the wolves and is eventually caught.  Ovid takes it on himself to teach him to speak.  The boy for his part shows Ovid what it means to genuinely transform into another being:  “In imitating the birds…He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man.”  Through speech, especially perhaps poetic speech, we enable ourselves to become another person, perhaps the person we imagine ourselves to be.  Exercising this power, which is a kind of love, cracks us open, softens us.  Ovid dies happily in communion with the natural world.  

America and Rome

I started by imagining an American version of Ovid.  The Romans cultivated an image as a practical and pious people.  Many Americans too think of themselves as especially pragmatic and God-fearing; a people who should beware an ‘Old World’ seen as a den of corruption and godlessness.  But others have thought our character needed deepening and widening via engagement with the arts and traditions of Europe and the West. Waves of American poets and thinkers made pilgrimages abroad in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, exiling themselves from what they saw as American narrow-mindedness.  Many are among the first rank of American writers: Henry James, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin.  It would be hard to imagine today’s America without them. 

In 2017 the City Council of Rome officially revoked Ovid’s banishment.^[19]

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^[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. David Raeburn, Penguin Books, 2004.

^[2] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkI.php#anchor_Toc521049262, Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[3] Metamorphoses, Book III, lines 253-255.

^[4] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 7-8.

^[5] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 128-129.

^[6] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 130-132.  

^[7] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 186-187.

^[8] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 218-219.

^[9] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 79-85.

^[10] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 152-155.

^[11] Metamorphoses, Book XI, lines 15-17.

^[12] Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, pp. 73-74.

^[13] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 871-876.

^[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber

^[15] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 3-6.

^[16] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 483-484.  

^[17] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkIII.php, The Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[18] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, Vintage Books, 1978.  

^[19] The Guardian, “Ovid’s Exile to the Remotest Margins of the Roman Empire Revoked,” Dec. 16 2017  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/16/ovids-exile-to-the-remotest-margins-of-the-roman-empire-revoked

Make America Great Again—what is that all about?  What time in the past are the people in the red hats  looking to?  Great in what way?

There’s no one answer, of course.  It’s a useful phrase because it means many things to different people.  But I think there are two basic meanings.  One is quite awful and dangerous, but the other is actually something progressive politicians and activists should support.  And they are connected.  If we articulate clearly what we mean, maybe we can make inroads into the heads of MAGA supporters.

The awful and dangerous meaning has been frequently pointed out and is clearly front and center for the reactionary side of the MAGA movement.  This is a desire to restore or impose ‘traditional’ norms regarding the role of women, homosexuality, non-white minorities, Jews, and atheists and non-believers.  In the not so distant past, the post-war period up to roughly the early 1970s, these norms all favored white, male, Christian power.  Then, in the eyes of traditionalists, it all fell apart in a cascade of youthful protest, black empowerment, women’s movements, gay movements, Native American movements, surging immigration, and on and on.  

MAGA enthusiasts want most of this rolled back.  They may not be against any and every aspect, but the overall trend is personally uncomfortable and frightening; white Christians are now becoming a minority with attendant threats to power and status.  Women are asserting themselves in work, politics, education, everything.  What used to be seen as ‘normal’ American life based in rural areas and small towns and manufacturing (or living in the suburbs and working for big corporations), has been replaced by urban lifestyles dominated by minorities and immigrants and educated professionals.  

This discomfort is comprehensible, but unacceptable.  It amounts to a reactionary desire to reject basic premises of American life:  the equal worth and dignity of all Americans, the right of all to participate in choosing our rulers, equal respect before the law, the ability of everyone to pursue the ‘American Dream’ of economic success and advancement. 

But I think there is another side to MAGA nostalgia, one that has real weight.  During the same postwar period that traditionalists praise as a time of solid, family-oriented, Christian values held up by white men, the American economy was (for those same white men) a juggernaut of success.  It was during the roughly 30 years after WWII that the United States saw its longest period of sustained growth, growth that benefited all classes more or less equally—a rising tide that really lifted all boats.  Growth was steady and strong and similar for blue collar workers, white collar professionals, and executives.  As productivity climbed, wages and compensation climbed for everyone.  Work was characterized by job security, pensions, and benefits, fought for and protected by strong unions.  

Pay for corporate executives was of course higher than for regular employees, but not so much higher that they lived in different economic universes.  In 1962 the CEO of the average company made about 25 times as much as the average employee, unlike today where it is often 400 or 500 times as much.  Marginal tax rates as high as 90% discouraged very high salaries.  

The good times were made possible in large part by an expanded role for government.  Social security, the GI bill, financial regulations, and government infrastructure programs like the national highway program boosted growth and gave Americans economic security.  A broad consensus, that seemed permanent at the time, took hold that government had a central role in making sure the economy avoided major recessions and worked for everyone.  As Richard Nixon famously said, “We are all Keynesians now.”    

The postwar economic (and demographic) boom was the necessary condition for the challenge to traditional cultural norms and hierarchies that took hold in the 1960s. Rising incomes, greater economic security, and a huge increase in access to higher education made it easier to argue for radical social change that would make the fruits of prosperity available to all.  Extending rights, opportunity, and government assistance to everyone was now seen as both just and affordable.  

But then, in an ironic turn, changing norms about race and gender and patriarchy contributed to the eventual collapse of support for the postwar egalitarian economic system.  Economic stress in the 1970s—caused by the unfunded war in Vietnam, growing international competition, and the sharp rise in oil prices from OPEC—led to embracing Reagan’s neoliberal model which championed unbridled competition, small government, lower taxes, weak unions, and free trade.  This caused skyrocketing economic inequality and, eventually, the hollowing out and destruction of much of the unionized manufacturing that had been the underpinning of America’s shared prosperity.  The trajectories of corporate managers, investors, and educated professionals began to diverge sharply from those of America’s blue collar and lower middle class, where incomes stagnated and jobs disappeared.

Economic stress is almost guaranteed to exacerbate racial and social tensions; it is much easier to get broad support to share a growing economic pie, than a shrinking one.  As economic prospects began to contract, more and more Americans were easily persuaded that liberal social and economic policies were to blame.  Minorities and immigrants and women were taking the jobs and privileges that rightfully belonged to regular white guys.  Conservative politicians and culture warriors were happy to connect the dots, redirecting anger and frustration away from corporate and political decisionmakers towards undeserving ‘others’ who were being given unfair advantages.  Business interests who had never accepted the postwar consensus about the role of government in managing the economy pushed a new Friedmanite, anti-Keynesian ideology that said all good things come from the private sector.  They grew in power and took over the Republican Party. 

So the two sides of the MAGA worldview—anger at efforts to include all Americans, and anger at the loss of economic security and opportunity—are in fact closely connected.  They are linked by a zero-sum view that sees any gains for others as a loss for ‘us’.  In the MAGA mind, the decline of jobs and prosperity and status for white men is because everyone else has been rising.  And though there is plenty of disdain for women and people of color, the real hatred is reserved for the white liberals who brought this about and are seen as traitors.

If liberals want to defuse this anger, we must push policies that separate these goals, and find a better language for talking about them.  We should start by agreeing that we need to re-create a version of the more egalitarian economic and social system we once had.  There are genuine traitors who have sold out working class Americans, but they live mostly on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, not college campuses.  They have hoodwinked working Americans with neoliberal claptrap about ‘trickle down’ economics and ‘move fast and break things.’ 

At the same time we can’t back down on the need to include everyone.  White Protestants have no right to keep their historical privileged position.  We are a nation united by a common creed, not a common ethnic or religious heritage.  But we also must avoid ‘flipping the script’ to such an extreme that it panics those who we need to win over.  If America cannot properly be described as an exceptional “city on a hill,” neither should it be described as a version of hell.  This is thoughtless as well as dangerous.

MAGA Republicans have some things deeply wrong, but some things right.  Acknowledging that the past was better in some respects might help reduce and redirect the simmering anger that is dividing Americans.  

I don’t normally watch “Antiques Roadshow,” the popular PBS series that travels around the country and invites people to bring out stuff that’s been sitting in the attic and get it appraised by professionals.  But the show was recently in Santa Fe, our hometown, so we watched several episodes.  We saw the usual range of items, some surprisingly valuable—a mid-19^th century Indian beaded jacket, worth an estimated $150000–others interesting but worth next to nothing.  

When the estimated price was revealed to the owner, you could often see an internal struggle take place.  Maybe the picture had been part of their childhood, or associated with a favorite uncle, or was just beautiful and moving—but now it was ‘worth something.’  What would win out, affection and sweet associations, or money?  Would it be kept or sold?

Sometimes the owner would let you know right away, “Oh, I love this, it’s not going anywhere!”  Sometimes it was clear it would be sold.  But often it was hard to tell; the owner might be flabbergasted that this jewelry piece from her mother was worth thousands of dollars, and she didn’t know what to make of it.  Suddenly this thing had changed its meaning, had become something with two faces: the old, comfortable, well-known face and a new face with a dollar sign on it.  It had become ‘monetized.’

Monetization is at the heart of modern capitalism.  Figuring out how to convert not just things but services and normal human drives and emotions into cash—creating ‘value’—is a process we all know well and have come to take for granted.  Thousands of trained, eager experts leap every year out of business schools, looking for some new way to extract yet more ‘value’ and reap the sometimes astronomical rewards.  Silicon Valley and Wall Street are the epicenters of monetization expertise.  Uber lets us convert our cars into cash machines; AirBnb does the same for our houses.

Yesterday I read a story about how private equity now has its eye on childcare—the ‘childcare industry’ (whenever something gets tagged as an ‘industry’ you can be sure monetization is well-advanced)—with predictable results:  exaggerated promises of new investment, higher pay, and better results, and the reality of exploitation.  People who love children and want to help them are suddenly nothing but inputs and labor costs.  People who have struggled to create a small business around something they value and love become roadkill as distant outsiders with zero stake in actually taking care of children work to suck all the ‘value’ out of their new business and then sell the empty husk.  

These processes often occur step by step, looking innocuous at first until before we know it things and activities we love have been swallowed.  It is well-advanced for sport, which increasingly looks like an adjunct of the sports-betting industry.  Sports like baseball that once fought betting like the plague have totally succumbed, and every broadcast now features pitches from Draft Kings and other multi-billion dollar betting platforms.  No surprise, this has been abetted by our clueless Supreme Court, which in 2018–influenced by a tremendous lobbying campaign—struck down a statute that had restricted sports betting to Nevada.  Colleges and universities are there too, justifying it (of course) as necessary to raise money for education:  “College sports betting may have already become too big to fail. Wagering on sports in the Power 5 conferences is now an $11 billion/year industry, according to sports betting watchdog US Integrity”.  Today’s students are swamped with ‘free bets’ and other introductory offers designed to get them hooked on sports betting, with problems of gambling addiction and ruined lives not far behind.  

All of us have become aware of how social media platforms and search engines have ‘monetized’ our personal data, in order to target us with advertising.  Something we used to happily share, such as our name or what city we live in, has become a revenue source.

The world of art has also been thoroughly appropriated.  Today’s art ‘investors’ typically buy expensive paintings and statues, then store them in Swiss vaults to keep them safe while their value appreciates.  So wonderful pieces (according to one estimate, 1000 Picassos) literally never see the light of day.  

An eye-opening new book, Wild New World:  The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, by Dan Flores, chronicles how North America’s wildlife was monetized during European colonization.  While the Spanish and Portuguese to the south saw the New World as mostly a huge lump of gold and silver, the English and French saw it as an endless source of fur and hides and feathers.  Native tribes, despite their reverence for the animal world, were quickly and successfully enlisted to get as much as possible as fast as possible, trading enormous quantities of beaver, deer, bison, fox and otter pelts for knives, iron pots, firearms and liquor.

It was essential to act quickly, before someone more ruthless could beat you to it.  The Hudson’s Bay Company and John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company pioneered many of capitalism’s most predatory practices.  “Move fast and break things” was not invented by Facebook.  The result was the extinction and near-extinction of many of the continent’s most iconic species:  beaver, passenger pigeons, grizzlies, bison…the list goes on and on.  Flores summarizes the result:  “Buffalo and passenger pigeons stand today as the premier case study of a core economic principle.  Without regulation, free-market forces inevitably drive the species they target to extinction.”    

Though Flores is appropriately scathing about the modern European mindset of appropriation and monetization, with its roots in Judaeo-Christian convictions about man’s privileged place in the natural order, he does not spare our earlier ancestors.  The first humans to arrive in force in North America, some 13000 years ago, ransacked the place at least as thoroughly as more recent arrivals.  Most of the continent’s large animals—horses, mammoths, camels, giant sloths, great bison—were exterminated in what seems to have been a frenzy of slaughter as highly-skilled human hunters found themselves in a cornucopia of tasty beasts with no innate fear of man.  Predators like the saber-toothed tiger and dire wolf went too, as their food sources dried up.  This is a permanent human dynamic, not something peculiarly modern or Western.  Only afterwards, as humans began to realize what they had done, did a new ethos of care and identification with our fellow animals take hold among Native Americans, as it is now taking hold, fitfully, in our own time.   

Let’s turn now to another field that has become a lucrative site of monetization—politics.  Yes Virginia, there is now a multi-billion dollar ‘politics industry.’  Of course politicians are part of it, but they are the tip of a gigantic iceberg that includes pollsters, consultants, fund-raisers, pundits, and every type of media that benefits from political advertising.  (Media includes not just egregious cases like Rush Limbaugh, who got $85 million a year for his politico-cultural rubbish, but the full range of newspapers, TV, radio, and online platforms).  All of these actors are interested first and foremost, not in actual policy, but in keeping the politics industry lucrative and growing.  What this means in practice is nurturing features that ensure more elections with more fund-raising, more advertising, more polarization, more, more, more.  

The United States already has the longest election season in the developed world. Presidential campaigns in the US often begin with candidates declaring years ahead of time, while in Canada campaigns are limited by law to 78 days, and Mexico 147 days.  In Japan it’s 11 days.  These constraints mean that political advertising, for instance, can only be conducted during limited periods.  Such restrictions here in the US are considered out of bounds, a violation of unimpeded free speech.  The longer the campaign, the more opportunities for the politics industry to fatten its bank account.  

Of course the US is the unchallenged kingpin when it comes to political donations, otherwise known as political corruption.  Our Supreme Court has again helped out by a series of decisions, most recently Citizen’s United, that make it almost impossible to regulate and limit the amount of money that can be given, or to make this giving open and transparent.  Money is speech, and speech is subject to First Amendment freedoms.  This helps make fund-raising the central feature of American politics.  Members of Congress spend more time fund-raising than any other activity, paying for many things but above all advertising, which flows to TV and radio and newspapers and makes American media complicit in keeping the politics industry going.  

Our primary system is another feather in the politics industry cap.  It means that all the money-making opportunities afforded by elections can be duplicated, if not triplicated or quadrupled, in the run-up to the election.  The more candidates, the more money that needs to be raised and spent, and the industry grows.   

With America’s federal system and its 50 separate states, there are always elections somewhere.  And nowadays there are always consultants and direct-mail companies and radio personalities ready to argue that every election, everywhere, is Very Important and must be invested in with money and polls and the full paraphernalia of industrialized politics.  While in the dim past all politics was local, now all politics has been nationalized, that is, become part of the national politics industry.

I think I speak for most Americans who are confused, exhausted, frustrated and, if they have any energy left, outraged at this system.  They know that it no longer exists to make actual policy or to serve the interests of voters.  They know it battens on anger and outrage, the better to obscure the ways it serves the interests of the rich and powerful.  It has become a self-licking ice cream cone, dominated by wealthy interests and professionals who can afford the time and money to master the machinery, and who live directly and indirectly by the process itself, not the results.    

We could of course fix some important elements.  Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, authors of the 2020 book  The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, recognize the nature of the problem:  

The problem is not specifically a politician problem, a policy problem, or a polarization problem: It is a systems problem. Far from being “broken,” our political system is doing precisely what it’s designed to do. It wasn’t built to deliver results in the public interest or to foster policy innovation, nor does it demand accountability for failure to do so. Instead, most of the rules that shape day-to-day behavior and outcomes have been perversely optimized—or even expressly created—by and for the benefit of the entrenched duopoly at the center of our political system: the Democrats and the Republicans (and the actors surrounding them), what collectively we call the political-industrial complex.

They recommend some excellent fixes, especially two:  ranked-choice voting, and top-5 primaries.  These reforms would produce better results, more reflective of what voters actually want, while reducing some of the wasted effort generated by the politics industry (ranked-choice voting would, for instance, make it unnecessary for Georgia to hold the enormously expensive follow-on Senate elections it has been required by law to conduct in 2020 and 2022).  Alaska recently adopted both reforms via referendum and in its 2022 elections voted in more moderate candidates, sending Sarah Palin to the dustbin of history where she belongs.  

But I don’t think this is radical enough.  We need to stop looking to elections as the best or only way to run a democracy.  I know, I know—we have been taught to think of elections and democracy as one and the same.  But they aren’t.  An alternative model is to use sortition and pick our legislatures by lot, as we pick juries, rather than by voting.  This method would create Citizen’s Assemblies and at one stroke eliminate the advertising, the polling, the primaries, all the fund-raising and professional jockeying.  And it would, if done well, give us decision-making bodies that are far more representative and closer to the people than we have now.  The politics industry would deflate like a pin-pricked balloon.

Sounds crazy and utopian.  But it isn’t.  It’s been done and is being done, here, in Europe, around the world.  Disillusionment with the present functioning of democracy is so strong that we must address it now, before the tidal wave of populism and authoritarianism becomes irresistible.  If you aren’t familiar with how Citizen’s Assemblies work, please start here.  

Monetization should always be viewed skeptically.  Sometimes it is trivial, sometimes  annoying, sometimes even useful.  But when it takes hold of critical areas of human life, it needs to be exposed and resisted.  The monetization of democratic politics is clearly one of those areas.  It is weakening and delegitimizing the core institutions of our country.  Let’s not go down without a fight.