Adam's Ideas

My own love-affair with JRR Tolkien goes back a long way.  In 1963, when I was 10 years old, my 6^th-grade teacher read The Hobbit to us in class.  My mother, an English major with a special interest in medieval literature, knew of Tolkien as a scholar; she had connections who could get their hands on The Lord of the Rings, at that time virtually unavailable in the US.  (It became a US sensation only after the paperback came out in 1965.)

I read it again and again and again.  I loved the Appendices.  I memorized Elvish script.  As more Tolkien writings appeared over the years I read them too.  I know my way around Middle-Earth.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Fan, I don’t haunt Tolkien chat rooms or dress as a Hobbit.  There are volumes of Tolkienish literature I have never cracked.  But I feel more than a little proprietary, even now that the movies have made Tolkien mass entertainment.  (Peter Jackson’s LOTR is pretty good, his Hobbit is an abomination…)

Honestly, I don’t much want to analyze Lord of the Rings; I just want to enjoy it, like a 10-year old.  But there is a dangerous cloud on the horizon so, reluctantly, I am taking up my pen.

Tolkien Appropriation

It is with anger mixed with perplexity that I have seen Tolkien appropriated by some on the far right.  It would be disastrous, and wrong, to associate him and his writings with these people and movements.  What is going on?

• In Italy, the incoming neo-fascist prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has played up her love for Tolkien, the influence of right-wing “Hobbit Camps” for children, and the supposed message of traditional values found in LOTR and other Tolkien writings.  She has gone so far as to say Tolkien is a ‘sacred text.’

• In the US, Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley pseudo-intellectual who has been bankrolling Trumpist political candidates this election cycle, such as his former employee JD Vance in Ohio, is a big fan.  He has given various companies and enterprises Tolkien names, like Palantir Technologies and Valar Ventures.  

Tolkien himself was in my view certainly conservative, but the opposite of a fascist or libertarian.  He did not want people to read politics into his books—they were not ‘allegories’ about Hitler or Stalin—and always resisted talking about his own political views.  He despised Nazi racism and was deeply offended when a German publisher in 1938, thinking of publishing The Hobbit, asked him whether he was an Aryan.  But he was a devout Catholic and equally despised communist attacks on the church. 

Tolkien’s own political or social views, however, are not what matter.  It is the political and social views readers absorb from his writings, or read into them, that I want to discuss.  So while there can be endless discussions about Tolkien’s personal politics drawing on his numerous letters, unpublished papers, marginal jottings, conversations with his children, etc., what matters for our purpose is the major writings, The Hobbit and LOTR and, to some extent, the Silmarillion. 

To determine whether Tolkien gives support, even inadvertently, to Meloni’s neo-fascism or to Thiel’s anti-democratic libertarianism, we must identify what these mean.  The characteristics of fascism are generally understood to include extreme nationalism; strong racial prejudices and belief in racial hierarchy; a love of war and violence for its own sake; and contempt for liberal democracy and preference for a ‘supreme leader’ or ‘Superman’ who acts decisively and embodies the nation.  In many instances this is linked to hostility towards the Biblical tradition based on Nietzsche’s critique of Judaism and Christianity as promoting a ‘slave morality’ that softens the human spirit.  However, I would also include under ‘fascism’ modern theocratic or fundamentalist variations that are based on enforcing adherence to rigid religious doctrines, as in today’s Iran.

Libertarianism advocates an unrestricted individualism, distrust of governments and collective decisionmaking, faith in markets, and rejection of tradition (including religion) in favor of rational self-interest.  It too has a Nietzschean side, seen clearly in the writings of Ayn Rand, another Thiel favorite.  

As we shall see, neither of these are reflected in Tolkien’s writings or his imagined world of Middle Earth.

Despite Tolkien’s deep love and intimate knowledge of Northern Europe’s mythology, the ur-perspective of Tolkien’s created universe owes more to Paradise Lost than to Beowulf or the Icelandic sagas.  The recurring message at every stage of his story, as far as I can tell, is this: every type of being is vulnerable to temptation, and all at some point fall.  The very greatest of the Valar, Morgoth, falls; so does Sméagol, from perhaps the most humble of Middle-Earth’s many peoples.  And everyone in between.  High elves. Kings of Men. Dwarves.  Wizards.  Hobbits.  (Ents? Well, they become preoccupied with their labors and lose touch with their Ent-wives.  Tom Bombadil?  He seems to belong to a race of which he is the only member.)   

To fall seems to mean, above all, to give in to pride.  The desire for rule, for power, for immortality, is the downfall of the Numenoreans and of men generally.  Frequently, especially for dwarves and certain elves, it is the love of one’s own products and genius—jewels, rings—that is their undoing.

In Lord of the Rings of course it is the One Ring that exemplifies temptation and puts almost all of its main characters to the test.  Some pass with flying colors, like Galadriel or Faramir or Bilbo.  Some fail badly, like Saruman; or like poor Gollum fail but retain flickers of goodness.  Some are battered and bend, but don’t quite break, like Boromir or Frodo himself.  

The Ring works on weaknesses present in all of us. In some better natures it is our desire to do good.  Galadriel’s love of this world, of Middle Earth itself, is a kind of temptation; her rejection of the Ring is bound up with her final willingness to leave Middle Earth—which she sought in her youth as a place to exercise her powers—and diminish and go into the West.  Boromir wants the Ring to save Minas Tirith, and please his father.  Sam, in a brief moment when the Ring is within his grasp, is seized by a vision of creating a great garden in the midst of Mordor.

Is he fascistic?

What is it that enables some to resist?  Tolkien presents us with a variety of personal and cultural strengths that come into play.  A key indicator of inner strength, perhaps the greatest of them, is the ability to transcend barriers of race.  The estrangement between elves, men, dwarves, hobbits (and Ents) has been the bane of the forces arrayed against evil since the beginning.  LOTR frequently displays the habitual suspicion and fear that members of each race (and often for different tribes or clans within the same race) typically have for the other, often based on long-ago betrayals and misunderstandings. The Fellowship is remarkable for representing all the main races of Middle-Earth; the friendship of Gimli and Legolas (and Gimli’s adoration of Galadriel) is especially notable.

Orcs are frequently shown as unable to cooperate and liable to turn on one another over internal differences, to the great benefit of hobbits and others.  The orcs of Orthanc and Mordor fall out violently on the edge of Fangorn, allowing Merry and Pippin to escape. Inside Mordor, two rival groups kill each other off over Frodo’s mithril shirt, saving Sam and Frodo.  

It is Gandalf’s life work to unite the peoples of Middle Earth against Sauron. Tolkien carefully starts the Appendices at the end of LOTR by pointing to the three historic unions of men and high elves; he ends LOTR with the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, perhaps to show that even in today’s “Age of Men,” something of this past is still with us.  At the same time, the union of Faramir and Eowyn shows that traditional barriers between the ‘higher’ people of Gondor, proud of their Numenorean heritage, and the ‘lower’ people of Rohan, need to fall.    

Another quality Tolkien praises is compassion.  Frodo’s ultimately unsuccessful outreach to Gollum (in whom he sees his own reflection) is in some ways the heart of LOTR.  Gollum betrays Frodo’s trust, but Gollum proves necessary for success.  It is Gollum who sparks one of Tolkien’s most striking moral statements, from Gandalf to Frodo: “Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.”

We see the same hope when Treebeard lets Saruman out of Orthanc, and when Gandalf tries to offer Saruman help when he meets him on the road.  So just as everyone may fall, everyone equally may be saved—or at least it is right to assume so. 

There is a lot of violence and warfare in LOTR and in Tolkien’s larger history.  And great warriors are certainly honored.  Gimli and Legolas compete on the battlefield, like little boys, to see who can kill the most of the enemy (killing orcs lacks the moral ambivalence that might be connected with killing men or elves).   Hobbits are presented as possibly too peaceable and in need of toughening, something Strider tries to provide on the road to Rivendell.   But no major figure, as far as I can tell, loves fighting and killing for its own sake.  None seek warfare primarily for their own glory or for dominion over others.  There are no ‘supermen,’ no infallible leaders requiring worship and blind obedience—other than the Sarumans and Saurons. 

Hobbits seem to be a special case in their resistance to the Ring and what it offers.  There are many references to the inner strength of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam and hobbits generally.  Bilbo is unique in his willingness to voluntarily give up the Ring (though with much prodding from Gandalf).  This may be because Hobbits are little attracted to power, conquest, glory, war, and riches, the main temptations the Ring offers its possessors.  Hobbits are ‘simple’ folk, given to farming and gardening (like Sam, the prototypical Hobbit), family life, and the honest pleasures of a good glass of ale and a pipe of fine weed.  Tolkien greatly admires these traits.  It is Sam and Frodo’s memory and love of ordinary life in the Shire that sustains them in the darkest times of their quest.  

However, Tolkien makes it clear in his ending of LOTR that hobbits are not immune to a desire to boss people around and act like bigshots; there are Sackville-Bagginses everywhere.  Saruman is able to mislead and corrupt the Shire, which is only saved by hobbits who have acquired some un-hobbit-like skills and habits.  

Tolkien is partial to those strong souls who dedicate themselves to protecting ordinary people, without thought of reward or recognition.  Happiness for most may depend in part on not being fully aware of how precarious their safety is.  Strider is compelled to enlighten his Hobbit companions, after rescuing them in Bree, that he and his fellow Rangers have long protected them from enemies who would “freeze their blood.”  

To sum up then, there is no support in Tolkien for the core tenets of fascism and the right.  Racism is clearly and categorically rejected.  There is no worship of a great leader, and no excessive praise of war or violence.  Weakness is to be pitied and helped, when possible, not scorned.  The qualities Tolkien most admires seem to be quiet tenacity, friendship and loyalty, and a love of poetry and song.  

Is he ‘anti-modern’? 

Where Tolkien and some neo-fascist sensibilities do intersect is in ‘traditionalism’, a respect and love for past (and lost) ways of life that can surface in an intense hatred for modernity.  In Italy LOTR was published in 1970 with an influential introduction by the writer Elemire Zolla.  Zolla connects Tolkien with a hodge-podge of modern thinkers and writers who look back nostalgically to pre-modern thought, to fairy stories, Celtic mythology, etc. 

Another point of reference for Italian fascism is Julius Evola, an extreme thinker immersed in mysticism and Naziism who is beloved by contemporary neo-fascists like Alexander Dugin in Russia and Steve Bannon in the US.  Evola’s traditionalism “viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth…Evola’s ideal order was based on hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

The underlying proposition for reactionary traditionalists is that in the past we lived harmonious, organic lives nested in an accepted hierarchy of classes and peoples, usually organized around a common religion endorsed by the state.  If your touchstone for this way of life is Medieval Europe, you tend to be a conservative Catholic, or Orthodox.  If it is pagan Europe, you may be a neo-Nazi.  In either case you are deeply unhappy with modernity and in particular trends towards class, racial and gender equality and separation of church and state.  (Evola was, unsurprisingly, strongly influenced by Nietzsche).  If you believe in taking action to restore some version of this past, it is easy for traditionalism to morph into a reactionary movement, no longer conservative but radical and open to violence and extremism.  

Tolkien certainly presents a vivid picture of a pre-modern world that has been attractive both on the left and the right.  In the US, unlike Italy, Tolkien is usually associated with ‘the 60s’, environmentalism, and a rejection of materialism and capitalism.  Like other fantasies, because it is not set in our real past it is easy to avoid controversial issues of equity and oppression. 

Tolkien’s appeal is, I think, strongly linked to his dislike of today’s industrialization and its handmaiden, capitalism.  The hellish works in which Saruman burns the forest and creates the Uruk-Hai and their weapons, and their small-scale imitation in the Shire, earn Tolkien’s unmitigated scorn.  He hates the  destruction of the natural world and the support for war that accompanies this sort of industry.

Tolkien’s dislike of industrialization goes beyond its ugliness and greed; there is a suspicion of human creativity itself.  Even the ingenuity of the dwarves in Moria, and Elves such as Celeborn who make the great rings of power, is viewed with ambivalence.  Tolkien loves to describe beautiful works of art and craft and tell us about their creators, but there is a risk.  In Moria the dwarves “delved too deep” and roused a Balrog.  Elves aim higher but their efforts are also suspect.  Celeborn, and Feanor before him, love their creations more than they should.  By taking advantage of their excessive pride, Sauron was able to influence Celeborn, and Morgoth fatally corrupted Feanor. 

Nevertheless, while Tolkien is no believer in progress, neither is he a believer in decline.  I don’t think his work supports the view that we should look to restore some past ‘golden age.’  Unlike many other fantasy writers, Tolkien carefully fleshed out his pre-history.  There is no resting place, no perfect harmonious organic society—not for any of Middle-Earth’s peoples, nor for the whole.  Each of the Three Ages has its heights, but these do not last.  Each Age is characterized by terrible wars and civilization-ending failures, necessitating the gradual and permanent sundering between this world and the more perfect (but still imperfect) world of the Valar.  One learns from the past not to learn too much from the past.   

Living in the past or basing present worth on these connections is a sign of decadence.  The line of kings of Gondor, for instance, fails when, as Faramir says:  “Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons”.

A central theme of LOTR is, in fact, that great deeds are just as possible now as in any earlier time.  Those alive today are in no way inferior to those who came before.   Sam, who loves the old Elvish stories, weeps with joy when, waking up after his rescue from Mt. Doom, he hears a minstrel recite his new lay of “Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom.”

Moreover, great deeds are not done only by the Great.  Tolkien in a 1964 interview says that the wisest words in LOTR are Elrond’s at the Council where it is decided that Frodo will carry the ring to Mt. Doom: “This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

Tolkien’s traditionalism is not the reactionary version that says everything was better in the ‘old days’ and seeks simply to go backwards.  It might better be described as a love of the particular.  He values a world with a variety of races, places, languages, and traditions.  Like some nationalists on the right, this would place him firmly against globalization and the erasing of national and cultural boundaries.  But he values tolerance and peaceful relations between the peoples of the earth.  And opportunities for greatness are just as abundant now as in the past. 

Is he anti-democracy? 

Tolkien in his writings is studiously uninterested in politics, in the sense of examining different political systems.  Most well-ordered peoples have kings, and the frequent failures of kings do not lead to consideration of democracy or some other type of rule.  This should not, in my view, be interpreted as a rejection of democracy or an endorsement of monarchy or aristocracy.  I do not think the books are meant to urge us to work towards recreating the political structures of the early Ages.  There is a clear line drawn between the New Age of men and the Three Ages that preceded it.  This is a different world.  

In practice Tolkien holds up reasoned deliberation among the wise, not top-down kingly dictates, as the best kind of political decision making.  This is how the Council operates in Rivendell when considering what to do with the Ring.  It is apparently how the Ents decide to fight Saruman at the Entmoot (the exact method of deciding is not explained, other than to say it takes a very long time).  

The Shire is a partial exception to the monarchical model.  There is no ‘king of the hobbits’ and though the Hobbits have a ‘thain’ responsible for defense, he has little day to day power.  The most important Shire official is an elected mayor, so hobbits appear to be one of the few communities of Middle Earth where some form of democracy prevails (in The Hobbit, Laketown is said to be ruled by an elected Master, though the electors appear to be limited to the town’s wealthy merchants).  Given the centrality Tolkien gives to ordinary people and the life of the Shire, he might arguably be partial to a democratic or at least pluralistic political order.   

Nevertheless, there is a deep dislike of democracy in many parts of today’s right-wing ecosystem, and LOTR’s world where all will seemingly be made well by restoring the rightful king is an attractive symbol of the alternative.  The Italian right’s nostalgia for Mussolini is matched in the US by libertarians who reject liberal democracy as inefficient and long for an American ruler able to ‘get things done.’  Peter Thiel is foremost in their ranks.  I suspect Thiel’s Tolkien enthusiasm is connected with this project, which involves the violent sweeping away of most of America’s current institutions and traditions.  This is, in my view, a terrible perversion of what Tolkien’s writings envision or call for. 

Is he simplistic?  

A characteristic of Tolkien’s that is often said to appeal to conservatives is that his world is black and white, good vs. evil.  The evil actors are painted in particularly stark terms:  Sauron is not a complicated character with a good side and a bad side.  He engages in no internal struggles about his goals or the means to achieve them (though Elrond says at one point that nothing was evil in the beginning, even Sauron; and some of Tolkien’s writings suggest Sauron at one or more past moments might have wavered in his commitment to evil).  No orc is ever tempted to change sides.  

Conservatives sometimes scorn what they see as the reluctance of liberals to take a clear moral stand.  Certainly fascist ideology and messaging tends to paint the world in absolute terms:  superior and inferior races, strong peoples who do as they please vs. weak ones who suffer what they must. LOTR is admired as a straightforward story of Good triumphing over Evil.

We have seen already that Tolkien does not accept this world view.  No race, people, or individual is always strong and right; they are always flawed and always liable to failure and collapse.  LOTR is triumphant but also melancholy, because there is no way to save Middle-Earth without in some sense destroying it.  The destruction of the One Ring takes with it the power of the others, and signals the final retreat of the elves and the beginning of a world dominated by men.  (A melancholy, I suspect, produced by Tolkien’s awareness that Christianity has led to the ‘disenchantment’ of the world and the loss of the old powers and gods and beliefs that Tolkien himself loves).  

 Tolkien himself was categorical about this, in his own statements and interviews.  LOTR is in his eyes a type of tragedy.  His central figure, Frodo, in some sense fails in his task; and in carrying it out, he is  hollowed out (by a kind of PTSD) and is unable to be happy in this world.  And there is no assurance whatever that the defeat of Sauron will usher in a permanent Golden Age; it is certain that the Fourth Age and all further Ages will see their share of terrors and failures (as Tolkien said in one speech, Sauron is no more but plenty of Sarumans are still with us).

Does he support libertarianism? 

Amassing great wealth is nowhere seen as praiseworthy, though a well-run kingdom will naturally accumulate riches.  The dangers of greed are shown more vividly in The Hobbit than in LOTR.  Dwarves are particularly susceptible, with the Arkenstone as a kind of symbol.  Dragons are however at the top of the food chain when it comes to accumulating wealth, which they have no use for other than to lie on mountains of stolen gold and riches.  This shows clearly how Tolkien views a life devoted to getting rich.                                                            

We can see from this that Tolkien in no way celebrates the kind of ferocious, unchecked combination of greed, self-promotion, and invention we see in today’s libertarian capitalism.  Individual effort and ingenuity are valuable, but have to be checked by wisdom and humility.  The inventions of Peter Thiel and today’s Silicon Valley titans would be, for Tolkien, ugly in themselves and frightening in their implications for ordinary life.  

IN SUM

We might therefore sum up Tolkien’s ‘teaching’ thus:  the good life for most men would be something like life in the Shire.  It would be peaceful, close to the natural world, where people enjoy simple pleasures in the close company of family and community.  Poetry and song would be plentiful.  Squabbles and disagreements would not disappear but would be dealt with via input and participation from everyone, leavened by abundant tolerance for quirks and eccentricities.  Social and economic differences would be relatively small, no one would be impoverished and no one would be so rich as to lord it over others.  

However, the world is not constituted to allow such a life for most.  There are great threats and dangers, both external and internal.  Most peoples must be organized to defend themselves from outside aggression, and from the ambition and greed in their own souls.  They must structure their political and ruling institutions around these necessities.  Kings and nobles and knights and rangers are needed, creating a clear social hierarchy.  This world of danger and strife calls forth great deeds and achievements which in some ways enrich all of us.  But it also frequently calls forth the worst in all the peoples of Middle Earth.  

Under some circumstances, Shires flourish under the protection of powerful but benevolent rulers.  Those in positions of authority have a duty to nurture and protect the Shire.  But it is hard to see this as a permanent or stable state of affairs.  Enlightened rule by great kings is the exception, not the rule. 

Just as the Shire requires the help of the great powers of the world, the success of the kings and powers requires the help of the Shire.  Hobbits have a quiet strength that turns out to be necessary to destroy the Ring.  The Great of the world, by their natures and upbringings, are proud and liable to temptation.  The wise among them know that creating and protecting the Shire-life is not a useless endeavour but is essential to their own long term success and the success of the whole.    

The Shire for its part needs to avoid the danger of becoming too parochial and self-satisfied.  The Shire-life is attractive but some within it chafe at its limitations; whether through curiosity or love of adventure or the intrusion of threats that cannot be wholly held at bay, they will be dissatisfied and seek the wider world.  The Shire has to tolerate if not encourage some engagement with the world outside, and not come down too hard on its own more adventurous and curious children.

 Some of them need to leave the nest, in hopes they will return with a wider perspective and become leaders—like Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin—who are aware of the frailty and limitations, as well as the strengths, of the Shire-life.  But maintaining a successful balance is difficult; too many ambitious and adventurous souls will destroy the Shire’s essential characteristics.  Too few leave it vulnerable to decay or attack. 

Different peoples and communities should be free to develop their distinctive ways of life, expressed in language, poetry, and song.  They should be proud of their achievements and celebrate their traditions.  But they should also be open to the achievements of other peoples, welcome outsiders, and work together against common enemies.  

The great risk facing modern man is perhaps the love of his own works, a danger that runs through Tolkien’s writings.  The success of our technology and industry leads to an unfounded confidence that perennial dangers and temptations no longer threaten.  It alienates us from the natural world, which we come to see as nothing but a resource to be consumed.  When we can seemingly satisfy all our desires with ease, the Shire-life seems too modest and dull to be attractive.          

CODA: Tolkien and Plato 

Many readers and commentators have noticed the similarities between Tolkien’s One Ring, and a story told in Plato’s Republic about the Ring of Gyges.  The Gyges story is used in the Republic by one of the characters, Glaucon, to try and show that morality is based only on fear of punishment.  The Ring of Gyges makes its wearer invisible, and Glaucon describes how a shepherd, finding the ring, uses his new-found immunity to kill a king, marry his widow, and become king himself.  The ring’s power allows ‘real’ human nature to reveal itself.  

Tolkien, a well-educated Englishman who studied classics at Oxford, certainly was familiar with the Republic, one of the most famous philosophical texts in the Western tradition.  His One Ring is also a ‘revealer’ that highlights existing weaknesses.  (While I think it likely that the Ring of LOTR was influenced by the Gyges story, there were also rings of power in the Norse tradition).  

In any case, I want to pursue a different possible connection.  The Shire bears a resemblance to another well-known story in the Republic, Socrates’ description of the “City of Pigs.” The City of Pigs is Socrates’ attempt to describe the most natural or primitive life for man.  It is a life without wars, without riches, without jealousy, where everyone enjoys a sufficiency of food and shelter.  All are equal and satisfied with simple pleasures: singing, dancing, story-telling, the charms of their wives and husbands.  

In the Republic, this way of life is criticized as being not entirely human; in particular, it is attacked as a life without ‘relishes,’ meaning what goes beyond the bare necessities.  When Socrates spells out the implications, it turns out that life that incorporates luxuries and satisfies a range of human desires leads inevitably to a city that goes to war and has sharp divides between rich and poor, powerful and weak.

The key human characteristic that is absent in the City of Pigs is thumos or spiritedness, which manifests itself in a desire for honors, rule, power, and recognition.  Some people are not satisfied with equality, but want to be distinguished.  The desire to be distinguished brings forth tremendous human energies and accomplishments in the arts and sciences, but is also at the root of competition, envy, violence, and war. (Socrates’ suggested solution, later in the Republic, is the institution of the Guardians—citizens with an abundance of thumos who are carefully educated to protect the city and never seek to dominate it.  How realistic this is is open to question.)

The City of Pigs, like the Shire, is made possible by the weakness of thumos.  Tolkien makes clear that it is not entirely absent and Hobbits too can become proud and envious.  But it is held in check for the most part by some combination of nature and nurture.  

I have no idea whether the Republic influenced Tolkien’s thinking or his conception of hobbits and the Shire-life.  It is more likely that he had in mind the centrality of pride in the Biblical tradition; perhaps both lines of thought converged.  What does seem clear to me is that in inventing Hobbits (a race which he created from scratch, without drawing on well-established sagas and stories), Tolkien was seeking to include in his imagined universe a people less susceptible to thumos, to pride, and show how such people contribute to a good world.     

I have always thought of myself as a Constitution lover.  When the country seemed to veer off-track, when difficult hurdles seemed too high to overcome, when blatant injustices blocked my sight, it never occurred to me to abandon the Constitution.  This was our rock, our North Star.  Work within it, I thought.  Understand it rightly, dig deep, attend closely to what the Founders thought and said and wanted.  

I’m not there anymore.  The Constitutional structure has a number of terrible flaws.

• It imposes a Presidential system with a powerful executive separate from the legislature, a structure that experience around the world shows is prone to gridlock and tyranny.  Parliamentary systems are better. 

• It has two co-equal legislative branches, one of which—the Senate—is ridiculously un-democratic, complicating and slowing government action.  The lopsided influence of small rural states exercised via the Senate is a great cause of our polarization. One dominant branch close to the people is better.

• It has a Supreme Court with lifetime appointments and a monopoly on Constitutional interpretation, an invitation to arrogance and politicization.  Judges with limited tenures and powers are better. 

• It has the Electoral College, a relic of slavery and an open invitation to gaining political power without majority approval.  Direct election of the executive is better.

• It has an ambiguous and poorly constructed Bill of Rights that has hardened into a jackhammer used to thwart the will of the people and, in the case of the 2^nd Amendment, to undermine the government’s most fundamental obligation, providing for peace and security.  A more flexible understanding of rights would be better.

Further, it has become almost impossible to fix . Clever, power-hungry people have learned to exploit the flaws.  They don’t want changes, so they have built barriers to prevent amendments or interpretations that might make this old document workable.  To make their schemes palatable, they have fostered a cult—originalism and its brethren—around this document that would amaze and terrify its authors.  

I am tired of debating vital issues like abortion, or gerrymandering, or guns, not on their merits, but on whether some direction can be deciphered from ambiguous old words designed to fit a world that no longer exists.  Supreme Court originalists make vital decisions affecting millions of people’s lives and the health of American democracy based on their interpretation of 18^th century dictionaries.  Enough. 

The Constitution as we all know was designed to create a strong central government and rectify the fatal weakness of the Articles of Confederation.  Partly for this reason it was skeptical of simple majoritarianism.  State governments under the Articles had often come under the sway of populists advancing the interests of the poor.  Too much popular power seemed dangerous, it had (sometimes) historically been a source of radicalism or anarchy, and there were few good examples of success.  Federalist #9, written by Alexander Hamilton, is scathing about the shortcomings of past republics: “It is impossible to read the history of the petty Republics of Greece and Italy, without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions, by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration, between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.” This is the dystopia Hamilton and his colleagues wanted to avoid.  Better to err on the side of caution.   

The innovation that allowed America to have popular input, without the risks of too much say by the people, was representation via election.  The framers of the Constitution famously argued that the right rules governing elections would lead to choosing the right kind of people, with more education and good sense and public-spiritedness.  

The best argument in favor of the current system is that it has worked well enough for 240 years.  We have had a long lasting country with some great successes.  We have become very rich and very strong.  We have moved to include many more as citizens and tried, if with only partial success, to rectify terrible historic wrongs.  

A second argument is that whatever flaws the Constitution has, it provides an agreed framework for all Americans of whatever political or ideological stripe.  Better to have something that unites us, even if imperfect.  Americans are not one people because of common blood, soil, and religion, but because of commitment to a set of ideas and institutions, the Constitution first and foremost.   

But turning the Constitution into a secular version of the Bible, an inerrant document that cannot be questioned, only genuflected before, gives excessive power to conservatives and those who oppose change.  The Constitutional processes designed to elect the “best and brightest” have brought us Civil War, inequality, monopoly, Jim Crow, the military-industrial complex, a ravaged environment, Vietnam, Iraq, financial crises and Donald Trump.  We have managed to work around the flaws, but our luck is running out.

Americans are understandably tired of their elected officials.  We are tired of the clever ways they come up with to do the bidding of special interests, tired of mindless partisanship, tired of insulting appeals to our worst passions and fears, and tired of listening to explanations of why the things the majority clearly wants can’t be done, or will take years to accomplish, or can only be implemented in some watered down version.  A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 50% of Americans think the country’s system of government should have “major reforms.”   

There are two ways we might think about improving our system. One is to keep elections but make them better.  The other, more radical, is to scrap elections as our main method of choosing decisionmakers, and instead use groups of citizens chosen by lot.  

Better Elections.  We could certainly make improvements to the way we elect people. Some of them can be done without amending or scrapping the Constitution.  The most immediately valuable would probably be to implement ranked-choice-voting and open top 4 primaries, like Alaska did in 2020.  Other steps would be to make voting mandatory, adopt the National Popular Vote proposal to sidestep the Electoral College, expand the size of the House of Representatives, require non-partisan commissions for redistricting, and create multi-member districts for the US House and state legislatures.  Restrictions on political donations and funding, reversing Citizen’s United and related decisions, would also make a huge difference. 

These changes might well lead to electing better representatives and greater trust in those elected.   But it is hard to see how many of these could be implemented in our current condition, even short of changing the Constitution.  They would require action in many states that have no interest in making elections more open and fair, a large Democratic majority in both houses of Congress to either abolish or overcome the filibuster, and a radically different Supreme Court.

Lottocracy.  Representation via election is, for most of us, synonymous with democracy and good government.  It is pretty much the only way we think modern mass societies, in large countries with millions or hundreds of millions of citizens, can be democratic.  We assume only very small polities, like ancient Athens or New England towns, can try to have direct democracy where every citizen rules and is ruled in turn. 

But elections are not the the only way for all citizens to be represented.  In fact, it is clear that elections do a rather poor job of reflecting the views of all citizens.  The people we end up electing via our systems of primaries and campaigns and elections are not very representative.  They don’t mirror the population in terms of gender or race—they are much more white and male.  They don’t mirror it in terms of class—they are much richer.  There are far more lawyers and millionaires and children of politicians, and far fewer small businessmen and laborers and schoolteachers and baristas than in the actual population.  

Now, some would say this is the point, that we don’t want average people, we want above-average ones, people with exceptional talents and virtues.  This was a key Madisonian argument for the Constitution.  Elections, with the appropriate filters—the Electoral College and property requirements— would attract the wiser, more sober, more educated class rather than the lower-class types that Madison and other founders thought were having their way in the new independent states after the Revolution.

But it is hard to look at today’s political class and agree that we are getting wise and public-spirited people.  We are instead getting people with exceptional ambition and wealth and hunger for publicity.  In fact, it seems to me that for the most part the people most likely to seek high office are exactly the sort of people who should be kept as far away from power as possible.  

Most of us have the intuition that if, somehow, we could get citizens to interact without the intervention of elections, however reformed, we might be better off.  What we need are ways to hear directly from the people. 

The possible solution is to pick representatives randomly, by lot.  This has been tried with Citizen Assemblies.  A Citizen’s Assembly is a representative group of citizens tasked with considering an issue of public policy and making recommendations.  It is chosen to reflect the composition of the city, state, or country in question—the same ethnic, religious, regional, economic, gender balance as the whole.  The members are picked via lot, a process called sortition, similarly to the way we pick juries.

Assemblies can be constituted from above, by legislatures or executives; or from below, by citizen’s groups or referenda.  Assemblies in current conditions work with and alongside elected bodies, which have the final say on legislation.  

An Assembly is not a group of ‘volunteers,’ because the people who volunteer for these kinds of commissions are not your average citizen; they are always older and better-educated and often strongly opinionated. Instead, a Citizen’s Assembly includes minorities and youth and all those quiet, I-don’t-care-about-politics people who need to be heard from.  

Successful Assemblies are supported by moderators and facilitators with experience at running open discussions, and by a team that helps the Assembly get expert advice from a variety of sources on their chosen topic.  Say the Assembly is tasked with considering “What should our state do to deal with a warming climate?”  It might have a number of sessions with experts on different issues related to the task: scientists, economists, businesspeople, sociologists, political scientists.  It might hear from people and communities impacted by climate change:  farmers, sportsmen, tribes, immigrants, minorities, investors.  Once the Assembly gathers and discusses information, it deliberates about what to do and makes recommendations by a voting process designed to make sure only the proposals with strong support get approved. 

So what, you might be thinking.  There are endless commissions and study groups that don’t make any difference.  Of course that might happen.  But a Citizen’s Assembly has legitimacy because it mirrors the actual population.  It turns passive citizens into informed, active citizens and makes them listen to one another.  It gives cover to cautious political leaders to take action.  Where this has been done, in the US and around the world, the results can be dramatic.  A Citizen’s Assembly in Ireland in 2017 met for over a year and was key to liberalizing laws on abortion.  One in Washington State in 2020 helped push new legislation on climate change.  

Even where the recommendations don’t make it into law, they galvanize public discussion and push change that reflects what the people want.  Participants and observers inevitably discover that people with very different backgrounds and opinions are able to work together constructively, and come up with sensible proposals, given the right conditions.  

Other, similar efforts can move us in the same direction. The “America in One Room” project in 2019/20 brought a group of representative Americans together for four days to deliberate on big issues facing the country.  It didn’t make policy recommendations, but before and after surveys showed major shifts in opinion, mostly towards more moderation and realism.  

The United States is suffering from extreme lack of trust in its government and elected officials.  We won’t turn this around with business-as-usual politics.  Serious reforms to make elections fairer and more likely to reflect the will of the majority would help.  But these will be stopped and slowed by the forces that already are gnawing at our body politic.  Citizen’s Assemblies have the potential to catalyze action and give citizens a sense that what they think matters, by offering examples of serious, thoughtful participation in democratic decision making.

Lottocracy can be instituted in many organizations and at any level of government—from your church board or high school student government, right up to cities and states.  The next time you have a chance to suggest it, at whatever level, try it.  Most will find the idea odd or scary.  But some will be intrigued.  (As an introduction, you can recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about sortition, The Powerball Revolution.) Let’s start in our towns and cities and states.  Once Americans get used to the idea of getting useful and meaningful input outside the election system, once hundreds of examples are available, it will be time to scale up to the national level.

Citizen’s Assemblies can for now only complement, not replace, elected bodies.  That would indeed take a new Constitution and a radical rethinking of what we mean by ‘democracy.’  Helene Landemore raises the question in her book, Open Democracy:  Rethinking Popular Rule for the 21^st Century:  “It is puzzling to consider why, in the eighteenth century, the original non-electoral model of Classical Athens was not taken up again when democracy was reinvented in the eighteenth century in the West, especially given the concerns over “factions” held by theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France or the American Founding Fathers…” One reason was perhaps that the necessary tools had not yet been discovered: “In particular, the idea of a “random sample” was not available just yet (it would become available only in the late nineteenth century, with the rise of statistics as a science) and, as a result, the polling techniques that would have rendered selection based on sortition feasible were also unavailable.”

But more widespread use could widen the aperture for citizen participation and put helpful pressure on elected officials.  Perhaps the realization that there is an alternative would force them to shape up.

When I was a college freshman in 1970 I took an introductory class in American government at Claremont Men’s College.  The textbook we used was The Democratic Republic, written by a trio of fairly conservative, somewhat Straussian professors:  Martin Diamond, Winston Fisk, and Herbert Garfinkle.  The title sums up their view of the American system, which is a republic—a type of government where some important part of those ruled chooses representatives to govern—with democratic characteristics.  When the US was founded, ‘republic’ in most people’s minds meant first and foremost Rome in its early days  (‘republic’ is the Latin for ‘the public thing’) in which Senators were appointed by magistrates (Consuls or Censors) elected from a narrow group of aristocrats, and Tribunes with important but limited powers were elected by the plebs or ordinary citizens.  

What makes us democratic is that in America ‘those ruled’ means a majority of the citizens, or as Madison puts it in Federalist 39:  “It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.”  How we have defined ‘the great body of citizens’ has of course changed and expanded since the US began, but the essential principle hasn’t changed.

That the US was both democracy and republic was not seen as something particularly controversial at the time, as far as I can recall.  Neither the US (or any other modern country) is a pure or direct democracy, where every citizen takes part in voting on legislation or deciding court cases, as in some  periods in ancient Athens, or in some small New England towns.  The constitution lays out a process of electing representatives who make decisions in the name of the voters.  There are important checks on what those representatives can do to avoid the infamous ‘tyranny of the majority’ feared by Madison.  Representation, separation of powers, constitutional protection of certain rights, and a large and diverse population: these were the key improvements in ‘the science of politics’ that Hamilton praised in Federalist 9.  It was hoped—no one at the beginning was entirely sure it would work—that together these would make democracy for the first time in history a stable, energetic, longlasting form of government. 

If this all sounds like pretty basic stuff that you learn in high school and no American could question, you haven’t been paying attention.  Conservatives for a number of years now, with increasing vehemence, have been declaring that the US is ‘A republic, not a democracy!”  They shouted this slogan at the capitol on January 6.  Perhaps the most extreme, Trumpist political figure in the US, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, is prone to screaming it regularly at rallies, to get the conservative faithful worked up. 

The operational reason for this is quite clear; it is an attempt to seem like a true-blue American while denigrating democracy and rule of the majority.  This would have seemed insane to Americans of almost any earlier time.  The only exceptions of course would have been southern separatists and racists, who denied human equality and hence the principle at the heart of our democratic experiment.  

Suspicion and dislike of democracy is now embedded in American conservatism and in the Republican Party, mostly because the majority of Americans don’t want what conservatism is selling:  economic inequality, privileges for the wealthy, government gridlock, religious zealotry, white supremacy, guns for everyone, and rule by a carefully engineered majority of black-robed unelected justices.  Conservatives, rather than adjusting their policies to appeal to the majority, are instead trying to keep the policies and rule as a minority by taking over key state offices that control voting results, and (they hope) soon reinterpreting the Constitution to allow state legislators to decide the composition of the electoral college. 

This effort is directed and powered by moneyed interests who want a weak state that doesn’t interfere in the accumulation and passing on of wealth—people who in effect want to become the ‘tyrannical nobles’ Madison warned us against.  It is producing a cascade of demagoguery, deception, intimidation, and manipulation of the American political system the likes of which we have never seen.

The ‘republic not a democracy’ slogan is part of an ideological campaign to give conservative voters an excuse for rejecting what a majority of fellow citizens prefer, as expressed by their vote.  It is the underpinning for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and supporting the January 6 insurrection.  It gives a false sense of gravitas to “Great Replacement” and other conspiracy theories according to which today’s American majority, the diverse and increasingly non-white population living in big cities, shouldn’t be allowed to pick our country’s leaders because they are not ‘real Americans.’ 

I cannot improve on this explanation by Ryan McMaken some years ago:  

“The claim that the United States political system is “a republic, not a democracy” is often heard in libertarian and conservative circles, and is typically invoked whenever the term “democracy” is used in any favorable context. This claim is generally invoked when the user believes one of the following:

1. ‘I don’t like your idea, and since it involves aspects that are democratic or majoritarian, I’ll invoke the republic-not-a-democracy claim to discredit your idea.’
2. ‘A majority of the population appears to support this idea, so I will invoke the republic-not-a-democracy claim to illustrate that the majority should be ignored.’” 

It is a piece of demagoguery, not a serious argument.  The next time you hear someone say the US is “a republic, not a democracy,” please let whoever is spouting it know, in no uncertain terms, that it is bunk.

Not long ago I took part in a week-long seminar on Thoreau’s Walden, put on by my alma mater, St John’s College, and headed by two excellent tutors.  We met every day for a week.  As is the St. John’s way, we read no other texts, consulted no biographies or interpretations—just Walden.  

(One of my personal surprises was that I had never read Walden before.  It took me about 40 pages of reading to become convinced that this was really new.  I guess I thought I knew Thoreau.  I could quote parts of Walden, I once visited Walden Pond; it was so ‘familiar’ that I assumed at some point, when I was young, I had read it. Not so.) 

‘Going to Walden’ is almost a meme for many Americans (and others—Yeats loved Walden).  It means turning your back on society, going into the wilderness (with one or two favorite books), communing with nature.  Walden had only modest success when published, but over the years has become discovered and re-discovered to become an American classic.  Young people especially often go through a Waldenesque phase.  The popularity of camping and backpacking is due in part to Thoreau (an attraction lost on many, like my mother, who grew up on a farm and thought deliberately going out into the woods for days on end was nuts).    

Going all the way to Walden means not just leaving society but turning a baleful gaze on it. Thoreau’s view of his fellow humans is a mix of bemusement and annoyance—at one point he talks about Concordians as objects of his study, like prairie dogs. He is not exactly a misanthrope, he enjoys engaging with people, but at an emotional distance.  Walden is replete with criticism of the way most people live, in particular their preoccupation with making a living and adding to their possessions.  

So what was Thoreau doing, and why?  As our group quickly learned, Thoreau didn’t go very far.  Walden Pond is only a few miles from Concord, within sight of a railroad line, and frequented regularly by swimmers and fishermen and ice-cutters and other visitors.  The land around the lake had been farmed and timbered for generations.  It was hardly a howling wilderness.  

Our seminar discussed frequently the question of whether Thoreau had some larger social or political object in mind in going to Walden, or in writing Walden.  He is strongly opposed to slavery and to the war with Mexico, which is ongoing during his sojourn.  He relates very briefly his overnight stay in jail for refusing to pay his taxes in protest at these government sins.  But I was hard-pressed to find a motive for his stay other than a personal desire to live like a ‘hermit,’ (the description he uses several times for himself during his Walden period) and to see life from a different perspective.

What I think happens is that Thoreau finds, to his surprise, and ultimately the surprise of others, that there is a great deal of interest in his ‘hermiting.’  He tells us at the beginning of his book that he is writing it largely in response to numerous questions he was asked, and still gets asked, about his experience: “Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid, and the like.  Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.”  It seems clear that Thoreau becomes famous as ‘that Walden hermit,’ and that this is an identity he carries with him for the rest of his life, an identity that solidified when he published a whole book about his ‘experiment.’

And it turns out lots of people find his experiment intriguing and attractive.  More people than might have been expected shared some of Thoreau’s unhappiness with society, with the hectic pace of modern living (Thoreau goes on at some length about the pernicious influence of railroads), with the burdens of ownership and farming and debt and emerging industrialization.  As the world has gone further and faster down these paths, Thoreau’s attraction has grown.

A recurring seminar question was, is Thoreau a true American or a kind of anti-American, an American gadfly like Socrates?  Thoreau never claims to be modeling his life on anyone else, but his message to his contemporaries is almost completely captured by Socrates’s charge in the Apology:  “are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?”  Like Socrates (or Confucius) Thoreau sees philosophy as a way of life, not a collection of doctrines.  

Much of what seems most characteristically American to, say, contemporary observers like Tocqueville—our restlessness, our intense focus on success and acquisition, our proclivity to join together in associations, our casual violence (towards Native Americans and African slaves, but not only them) and drunkenness, our faith in progress and constant betterment—is anathema to Thoreau.  He abjures even tea and coffee, and has no interest in philanthropy or teaching or any sort of project to improve his fellow citizens.

An important way that Thoreau sees himself as un-American is that his idea of a good life is inseparable from books and reading.  His Walden experiment is motivated in large part by a simple desire to read more:  “My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading than a university…”  He strongly prefers old books, the classics, especially Homer and various Latin authors.  He is equally partial to old eastern texts, quoting the Vedas and Confucius as much or more than Western writers.  

Thoreau in Walden never engages with any modern thinkers.  He must be aware that in Europe Hegel and his followers are dominant, that Marx and his fellow socialists are feverishly attacking capitalism, that doctrines of progress and historical necessity are all the rage.  Thoreau is however no believer in progress.  Where Marx attacks capitalism with the aim of going beyond it and distributing the fruits of modern science and industry to all, Thoreau wants to convince us we are better off giving up these fruits altogether.  His studied avoidance of his contemporaries helps give Walden its aura of timelessness, of being an ‘instant classic,’ that is part of its charm.  

What is American (or at least what fits the American self-image) is Thoreau’s insistence on questioning other people’s opinions and accepting only his own direct experience; as he famously says marching to his ‘own drummer.’ He is not a scientist, but if there is anything Walden demonstrates and tries to teach, it is the value of close and careful observation, without preconceptions.  Science ratifies what men learn on their own; he praises hunters and fishermen by saying “We are most interested when science reports what those men know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.”  

Thoreau stays at Walden a bit over two years, then leaves for reasons he doesn’t explain.  My own view is that Thoreau concludes that hermiting is not the best way to live an entire life, though it may be an important part or phase of a good life; something worth experiencing for a time, and possibly re-experiencing periodically.  This could be related to his avoidance, in Walden, of any reflection on love or or what we might call the erotic side of his own nature. Desire, procreation, family—these are mostly absent, and when mentioned it is not positively.  In his ascetic moments he preaches a sharp dualism between our ‘animal’ and higher natures, and recommends abstinence: “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like are but various fruits which succeed it.”  Throttling our erotic impulses is an inseparable part of the Walden experience, necessary for Thoreau’s proud self-sufficiency.  Giving in to love needs to happen somewhere else, if at all.  

This dualism raises the question of the purpose of Thoreau’s experiment.  He tells us that he goes into the woods to ‘live deliberately,’ and ‘to front only the essential facts of life.’  It is in his relation to Nature that this experiment will succeed or fail:  “Let us live one day as deliberately as Nature…” But what is the relation he seeks?  A sharp distinction between spirit and animal would seem to lead to a distant relationship, a dispassionate observer who stands apart from the natural world:  “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers..”

When people today call Thoreau our first environmentalist, what I think they mean is that Thoreau sees all living things and the world they live in as interconnected and interdependent, including man.  Man has no unique or special status, as his contemporary Darwin will soon be revealing.  Connecting to Nature means losing any sense of separation and superiority.  Thoreau does not always speak like this.                 

But sometimes he does.  Towards the start of the chapter titled “Higher Laws” he says: “Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me.  I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both.  I love the wild not less than the good [emphasis mine].”

For a more modern take on the attractions of the wild I recently read Feral:  Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by a British author, George Monbiot.  Monbiot is obsessed with trying to re-introduce animals and plants back into the European landscape from which they were driven, often thousands of years ago.  He wants to see forests where today there is sheep-blasted barren heath; beavers and lynx and eagles anchoring a rich tapestry to replace agricultural monocultures; even someday aurochs, bison, rhinoceros and elephants.  

Monbiot carefully informs us of the environmental and practical benefits that could accrue from these efforts.  But his underlying interest is more spiritual and closer to Thoreau.  He thinks human beings have lost touch with the wild and therefore with their greatest happiness.  After spending time in Africa with members of the Maasai, hunting lions and raiding their neighbors for cattle, he has an epiphany:

 As I watched the warriors sitting hand in hand on the pallet, and the young woman looking tenderly at her husband, I was struck by a thought so clear and resonant that it was as if a bell had been rung beside my ear. Had I, as an embryo, been given a choice between my life and his–knowing that, whichever I accepted, I would adapt to it and make myself comfortable within it–I would have taken his.

Monbiot walks away, in part because he knows he is too soft, but also because the Maasai way of life is ending as government restrictions curtail traditional patterns.

Rewilding is Monbiot’s partial solution; not a return to tribal life, but an attempt to give modern humans regular access to a natural world that is more wondrous, more strange, more unpredictable and uncontrolled, than we have now.  He wants us to set aside large areas in which we take our hands off the wheel and let nature take its course.  Maybe in such a world some people would go wild and turn their backs on civilization; most would not, but he thinks people would benefit immensely from an occasional immersion, even from just knowing that this world existed and thrived.  

Monbiot cites Benjamin Franklin’s famous observation about Native Americans and civilization, likely familiar to Thoreau:   

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

(The same experience continued on the frontier as long as Indian tribes existed beyond the reach of Europeans, as chronicled in an excellent book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel.)

Why doesn’t Thoreau, like Monbiot, at least consider joining the Indians?  He knows them well and regularly praises much in their way of life.  The New England tribes have perhaps been too thoroughly tamed, but further West they are still wild and free.  However, Thoreau wants the wild and the good, and the good includes the life of the mind, poetry, reading the classics, and other pursuits not possible If you completely turn your back on civilization.  It means sometimes standing apart from the wild.

And maybe, like Monbiot, Thoreau knows the freedom of Native Americans is about to come to an end.  He goes to Walden when he can see the handwriting on the wall.  Soon all of America will be full of railroads, every forest will be felled, every body of water tamed and measured.  Every tribe will be ‘civilized.’ Thoreau sees the opposite of the good, the drive for gain and growth, leading to the destruction of the wild.  Life doesn’t have to be this way, as he often points out; but just as often he relates how his teachings about frugality fall on deaf ears.  His time at Walden is rejuvenating but also melancholy. The wild is in retreat, a retreat that is turning into a rout.  

The Monbiot solution, rewilding, has gained some traction as human beings take stock of the terrible consequences—material and spiritual—of our wholesale assault on the natural world.  But it requires investments over a long period of time, in the face of tremendous resistance from vested interests and a population that is afraid, with some reason, of losing control over nature.  Monbiot, more than Thoreau, is clear about the dangers and tradeoffs.  Nature is not just playful loons and beautiful spring flowers.  It includes floods and droughts, trampling elephants and pandemics.  

The same questions can be asked about human nature.  Thoreau has a rather benign view of his fellow man, boasting that he never needs to lock his Walden cottage.  He has a malign view of government, developed in his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” where he states at the start “That government is best which governs not at all,” and goes on to say:  “Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free.  It does not settle the West.  It does not educate.”  What governments do is countenance slavery and start unjust wars.  Thoreau is in short violently opposed to the Hobbesian tradeoff, obedience for security.  He exhorts Americans to disobey unjust acts of their sovereign.  He is not impressed by America’s constitution or democracy. All governments are immoral and meddling, differing only in degree.       

Monbiot is more willing to acknowledge that human beings can be dangerous and unpredictable.  The Maasai enjoy raiding and harassing their neighbors, have no respect for private property, and are partial to bouts of feasting, drinking, and carrying on that would make Thoreau’s hair stand on end.  We have laws and police forces and government institutions for some good reasons.  If rewilding includes human beings, there will be costs.     

Thoreau’s solution, temporarily retreating to our own versions of Walden, is more realistic if less far-reaching.  Each of us has the ability, at least for awhile, to simplify our lives and free time and energy for the things that matter.  Communing with the natural world, however, is harder now.  It can’t be done a few miles from Concord.  Fewer and fewer Americans retain even a slender connection to living practically ‘in nature,’ via the childhood hunting and fishing that Thoreau praises; Thoreau’s contemporaries, the ones who ignore his advice, are far more at home in the wild than most Americans today.  Without rewilding, access to nature will become harder and rarer.  

And going to Walden is not just a matter of finding the right place, but finding the strength to think on our own once we get there.  If Thoreau came back today, he would probably say that we have wiped clean not only the natural landscape but our intellectual and spiritual landscape as well.  We have replaced the solid foundation of the Iliad and the Vedas, “the noblest recorded thoughts of man,” with a hodge-podge of disconnected learning.  The din of news and the expectation of constant social connection have greatly expanded.  Slowing down, disconnecting, and unlearning, central to Thoreau’s experiment, are harder now than ever.  

Walden still resonates, in some ways even more than when it was written.  But it is in danger of becoming not a call to follow Thoreau along a difficult but recognizable path, but a description of something, like joining the Indians, that has vanished beyond recovery.  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on March 16 fired a shot across the bow of the Democratic Party.  If Democrats get rid of the filibuster, Mitch blustered, it would be ‘scorched-earth’ politics.  Republicans would go to the mattresses and stop at nothing to bring the business of the Senate to a halt.

What this tells us, of course, is that nothing frightens Mitch more than losing the filibuster.  Without it, Republicans would be unable to stop a tidal wave of progressive legislation that would threaten to reshape electoral politics for a generation.  “Government bad, private sector good” has been the Republican mantra for decades.  What if government starting giving Americans the things they want?  For Republicans, this is an existential threat.  

Today’s politics are dominated by the fierce populist and anti-liberal reaction now unfolding in the US, Europe, Israel, Brazil and elsewhere.  Popular anger is a result of the many insults and indignities inflicted at the hands of an unchecked private sector, which has been lionized and coddled by conservatives since the Reagan era.  The economic and technological forces let loose have, in America, devastated thousands of communities and destroyed millions of jobs.  Deaths of despair are ravaging the working class.  Inequality grows in good times and bad.  Monstrous media empires shape our public discourse in ways that no one wants but no one can control.

Despite agreement on the problems, little has been done in response.  Underneath the anger at political elites is a terrible fear that democracy has been corrupted and is not up to the task of managing the market.

Mitch’s conservatives remain wedded to weak government and an unchained private sector.  Every problem is solved with the same all purpose patent medicine of lower taxes and less government.  This nostrum long ago lost its efficacy, but the liberals in the Democratic Party have allowed themselves to be stymied by rules and processes that favor a determined minority.  When one side favors weak government, structural features that make it hard to act automatically favor conservatism.

Over the years I have spent a good amount of time studying how democracies fail.  One clear lesson is that impotence is fatal.  Key groups become dissatisfied and demand change.  Often this change is in the direction of a strongman who promises to cut through roadblocks and get things done.  Democracies in Latin America, for instance, have regularly disintegrated when the executive and legislative branches gridlock, leading to military coups or auto-golpes by elected leaders.  

The classic analysis by Juan Linz thirty years ago argued that presidential systems, popular in Latin America (often because they copied the North Americans), are especially prone to breakdown.^[1] Parliamentary democracies are less likely to fall apart because they have built-in mechanisms to overcome deadlocks and get rid of toxic leaders.

Linz cited the United States as the most prominent exception to this process.  The US was the most stable democratic system in existence.  Linz pointed out, however, that this was due to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political Parties—which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties.”  

Today, however, no one is exasperated by the diffusiveness of our two parties.  They have become more and more distinct to the point that studies show the most liberal Republican barely overlaps in voting behavior with the most conservative Democrat.

As another distinguished political scientist, Scott Mainwaring, observed about two party systems, they are preferable to multi-party systems largely because “ideological polarization is unlikely.”^[2]  For much of our post Civil War history our two parties did indeed tack to the center and avoid sharp ideological differences.  But now that polarization has taken hold, having only two parties is a source of instability.

The American presidential system is dangerously brittle if the two major parties are in rigid opposition.  Under these conditions the executive and legislative branches are often at odds.  Control of one of the two legislative branches is enough to prevent most major legislative initiatives.  Gridlock becomes the norm.  We have moved into Latin American territory.

There have been two inevitable results.  One is greater executive authority, and neglect or weakening of legislative prerogatives, in order to carry out normal government functions and implement a coherent program.  This dangerously concentrates power in the executive and leads to populism as voters and powerful elites look to the President to bypass the legislature to get things done.  The 2020 Republican Party platform famously had no goals or legislative initiatives; it was just “whatever Trump wants.” 

The other is a move towards performative and symbolic politics.  The harder it gets to actually pass legislation and take action, the greater the temptation to posture and turn every issue into a zero-sum war of identities and cultures.  This is where we now find ourselves.

Today’s fight over the filibuster brings these systemic problems to the fore.  Even when one party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress, the minority can thwart it.  Procedural shenanigans like “reconciliation” have limited scope and throw the law-making process into disrepute.

The good news is that the filibuster is a Senate rule that can be changed by a simple majority.  This would unleash a wave of potentially transformative legislation: political reforms to restore trust in democracy, infrastructure programs that build the working class and incorporate serious measures against global warming, a tax system that works against inequality, healthcare for all, and more.  

If Democrats blink and refuse to use their power while they have it, it will reinforce the view that gridlock is the system default.  Since one of our two parties is averse to government action, it benefits more from this perception.  It is wrong to argue that the filibuster serves both parties equally.  The party that prefers an active government has much more to gain by ending it.  This is why Republicans did not move against it when they controlled the government in 2017-18 (except to ram through Supreme Court appointments). 

In the short run the best hope for reducing polarization is that Democrats will use their temporary power to quickly implement large-scale government action that benefits the American people.  A party that simply says ‘no’ to every initiative will be punished at the polls if voters see that its opponent will use its power to help them.  As long as the ‘party of No’ can be prevented from controlling the Presidency and both houses, the many other checks in the system will limit the damage it can do.  

The most urgent step is to prevent the ‘party of No’ from tilting the political playing field even more in its favor.  Republicans already have systemic advantages built into the Senate and the electoral college.  They control the Supreme Court and much of the federal judiciary. They are now moving against democracy in the states via voter suppression, redistricting, and control of the courts.

HR 1, the “For the People Act,” is therefore the most important first step.  It will stop Republicans from implementing their anti-democratic agenda at the state level—which since it is states who control election law, even for national office, means an advantage at every level of politics.  HR1 has no chance of passage under the current filibuster.

Passing HR 1 would give American democracy a breathing spell and the time to consider further necessary changes.  Our presidential system in its current form almost guarantees further dysfunction and the erosion of liberal democracy.  We need to contemplate systemic political reforms; if not a switch to a parliamentary system, then major fixes such as ending the electoral college, expanding the size of the House, multi-district elections, ranked-choice voting, public-financing for campaigns, and more.  All these would help move parties towards the middle while widening voter participation.

From the 1930s to the 1970s the United States moved, fitfully but surely, in the direction of social democracy.  Our anti-government tendencies were moderated by programs that helped the middle class, provided a universal safety net, and laid the basis for broad prosperity.  But a determined effort by corporate interests—who discredited government programs largely by inciting a backlash against racial equality—ended this trend.  The Reagan Revolution led to deepening distrust of government and a systematic effort to counter any popular new social programs, like universal healthcare.  Republicans went all-out against Obamacare not because it wouldn’t work, but because they feared it would.

Since Reagan we have been at best treading water.  It is time to resume forward progress.  Call Mitch’s bluff and change the country for the better.          

---

^[1] “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Juan Linz, Journal of Democracy, 1990; https://scholar.harvard.edu/levitsky/files/1.1linz.pdf.  

^[2] “Presidentialism, Multipartism, and Democracy: The Difficult Combination,” Scott Mainwaring, Comparative Political Studies, 1993.   

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.  And for this trouble there is no remedy.”  (Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 1967). 

The energy behind Trumpism comes largely from anger at experts and educated elites, especially in the government ‘deep state.’  The intellectual argument rests on questionable claims that our founding principles are incompatible with modern science, and that progressivism and liberalism, which are based in part on that science, are threats to American values.  If these views are not understood and countered we will be unable to regain the shared reality needed to sustain a free society.     

Now that the Trump presidency is over, we must try to sort through the rubble.  One of its most dangerous and frequently noted legacies is the damage to our shared understanding of reality.  Even before Trump we were having bitter fights about science and the role of experts in politics and policy.  Populists and conservatives had lined up against scientific findings like global warming, the need for childhood vaccinations, and other similar exercises in truth denial.  Right-wing media had built up an alternative reality that boosted not only science skepticism but a general skepticism towards any common account of the world.

Trump doubled down on these trends.  His budget drastically cut government funding for scientific research.  He appointed unqualified people to positions requiring real expertise, often people who were openly opposed to science and scientifically-based policy. He favored—and was often directed by—Fox News and other supportive media outlets, while telling frequent lies.  For those who disagreed, whether scientists or journalists, Trumpists openly aimed not just at refutation but at delegitimization and destruction.  

The Supposed Progressive Threat

Trump and his supporters justified this as a push to end the supposed capture of government by “experts” and professionals.  Steve Bannon (pardoned by Trump on his way out the door) early on said the goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”^[1] Regulations promulgated by “unelected bureaucrats” were a major target (never mind that most of these have been mandated by Congress), but the disagreement went deeper.  

• Many of the conservative thinkers who have banded together behind Trump, led by the Straussians writing for the Claremont Review, demonize Woodrow Wilson as the progressive arch-enemy who symbolizes what has gone wrong with America.^[2]  Wilson was an academic and a political scientist—a former President of the American Political Science Association—who thought good decisions should be informed by professional experts drawing on the latest scientific research.

• In Trump’s last days his administration released a report from the 1776 Commission, an analysis of American history by a group that didn’t include any actual historians, but did include Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review, along with the President of Hillsdale College and similar ideologues. In it the Progressive era, generally thought of as a period of good government reforms and much-needed limitations on big business, is astonishingly singled out as a threat to democracy on a par with slavery and fascism.^[3]  

According to Kesler and his ilk, “The Progressives sought to overthrow the Constitution in all but name.”  The essence of their criticism is that Progressives, under the influence of modern science, thought human beings were shaped in important ways by outside forces and ‘society.’ This, according to the 1776 Commission, is incompatible with believing in the ‘true and eternal’ principles of the Declaration, especially that all men are endowed with natural rights. The Commission argues strongly for the individualist view of human nature supposedly embodied in the Declaration and Constitution, that people are independent actors and the sole task of government is to protect individual rights. ^[4]

The Progressive view indeed draws on science in ways that underscore human weaknesses and the limits of ‘rugged individualism.’  Over time the biological and social sciences have shown the many ways individuals are shaped by complex internal drives, by how we are raised and educated, by prejudices and biases associated with race and gender, by poverty and inequality, and a myriad of other factors outside our individual control.  

This understanding suggests that if we want autonomous, self-directed, free human beings, the kind of people who will make good democratic citizens, we must work to create them.  We must not leave this to chance but must do our best to bring about the right social conditions.  

Among other things, we need a government that makes sure certain essential goods are widely available, beyond the minimal goods—national defense and law and order—of the ‘watchman state’ endorsed by the 1776 Commission.  Government must address poverty, discrimination, and ignorance.  In particular it must protect citizens from oppression by unscrupulous private interests.  The Progressive movement arose largely in response to the immense wealth and power of modern industry and the threat it posed to democratic government, via its ability to corrupt the political process, and its exploitation of individual workers. 

This view of an active government, drawing on experts and research to create the conditions for freedom and buffer individuals from dominating institutions, is anathema to conservatives who hold to the individualist myth supposedly enshrined in our founding documents.  Hence their view that there can be no compromise, no splitting the difference, with progressives (or liberals, since they are the same thing).  It is war to the death.

There can in fact be tension between democracy and science, or democracy and reason.  We are not aware of this in large part because our own democracy was viewed by its creators as based in reason and the Enlightenment. They supported not only the natural sciences but also what they saw as new, scientific discoveries in politics, as Hamilton tells us in Federalist #9: “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.”  Hamilton is thinking of ideas like separation of powers, bicameralism, and judicial review. 

The difficulty, however, is that the conclusions of science or of reason are not democratic.  They don’t depend on popular support or whether a majority agrees or disagrees; Galileo concluded that the earth circled the sun, and was properly indifferent to what everyone else thought at the time. Many thinkers both before and after the American Revolution believed that a genuine science of politics based on irrefutable conclusions about individual and group behavior would allow us eventually to create the best human society, and it would not be a democracy. 

Nineteenth-century positivists, scientific materialists like Marx, and Social Darwinists in the early 20^th century all held to this belief. It is this danger that the critics of Woodrow Wilson believe modern liberalism is guilty of propagating.  Are they right?

Arguments for Democracy

The argument for democracy largely rests on judgments about our intellectual capacities.  Critics of democracy have generally argued that some people are more intelligent, and more able to make good decisions about public affairs, than others.  From Plato to Marx, this has been the position of thinkers convinced there is a rational, scientific understanding of politics available only to a few.  These people should rule.  

Democrats can counter with two arguments.  First, they can question whether this sort of scientific understanding is possible.  Human affairs are a realm of irreducible uncertainty and unpredictability; a conclusive science of human affairs is not achievable.  If things are so complicated and so full of complex interactions that no human being can fully unravel the lines of causality, or predict the outcomes of what we do and don’t do, then in some fundamental sense we are all equal.  We are all equally limited. There is no definitive science of mankind that can substitute for our flawed, partial, human judgments.

Second, there is good reason to think that joint judgments that get the benefit of many individuals contributing their experiences and views, and that guarantee the decision will be made with an eye to the well-being of the many, will be better and fairer than the judgments of one Great Man, no matter how smart. Aristotle—certainly no believer in human equality—in the Politics makes this argument to explain why democracy is superior to oligarchy.  Democracy’s superiority rests on the reality that human beings are cooperative ‘political animals’ and not isolated individuals. (Aristotle, Politics, Book III). 

Freedom as Unconstrained Will

Does this mean the populist argument wins? To be constrained by science and the judgments of experts is an unacceptable restriction on our freedom. This is, in essence, the Bannon argument: If freedom and reason are opposed, the hell with reason. 

In this construct freedom is essentially an act of will, and the will is at its purest if it rejects any bounds, including reason.  Bannon as we can read is a great admirer of “The Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic paean to Hitler.^[5] He also calls himself a Leninist, and Leninism is basically Marxism that denies the scientific side of Marx; Lenin claimed the Revolution could happen without waiting for History to work its magic, without the necessary growth of an industrial proletariat—all it needs are people who will it to happen.  Leninism, like Naziism, is closer to Nietzsche than to Marx. 

Bannon’s instincts here are closely linked to some major trends in modern thought, originally intended to counter entrenched social power but over time expanded to call into question all claims to objectivity.  So-called “critical theory” originated on the Left with European thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, who argued that modern science and other Enlightenment ideas were essentially tools for ruling elites to exercise power and oppress the lower classes.  Their ideas have migrated to the right as angry partisans have found them a convenient way to call into question the validity of their opponents, who can easily be labeled as ‘fake news.’’  

• Alt-right white supremacists and woke social justice warriors disagree on almost everything, but agree in dismissing factual or logical claims they don’t like as ‘motivated speech’ that rests on prior biases or hidden agendas, not on verifiable truth. 

• One of Trump’s most influential internet-troll supporters, Mike Cernovich, said in a New Yorker interview in 2016: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”

Ultimately, in this worldview, there are no truths. There is only power, the power to insist that your version of reality is correct.  It turns out that throwing science and reason over the side to save freedom leads to tyranny rather than any kind of freedom that most of us would recognize. 

In this light we can see that freedom requires some constraint on the will.  Something has to buffer human beings from assaults on their autonomy, from a Big Brother who wants you to agree that 2+2=5, or a President who wants you to believe that the election he lost was rigged.  One might say that freedom requires a ‘ground’ that is not free, that just is.

As Hannah Arendt concludes in her essay “Truth and Politics”:  “What I meant to show here is that this whole sphere [the political] its greatness notwithstanding, is limited—that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence.  It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will.  And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises.  Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”  The preservation of a functioning political sphere requires non-political work by philosophers, scientists, historians,  journalists and others dedicated to facts and truth.  

We are forced to conclude that freedom, like science, may be threatened by radical individualism, because the egalitarian principle, unchecked, leads to truth itself becoming subject to the flux of popular opinion.  As Susan Jacoby says in her 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason, “The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”  This is, in my view, the inevitable outcome of the individualist ideology promoted by the 1776 Commission.  It has become the populist air now breathed by millions of Americans who think Alex Jones is more reliable than the New York Times.

Why Americans Have Been Complacent

It is vital therefore that defenders of democracy find ways to constrain this “credo of tolerance.”  Unfortunately, many Americans accept common arguments that make them complacent about the dangers of today’s information environment and lead them to mistakenly believe that each of us can on our own sort through competing claims to truth.   

Lies Don’t Last.  One is that untruths are self-refuting. A conviction or theory at odds with reality will eventually collapse in the face of new evidence. Therefore we don’t need to get too worked up about lies having the last say—kill them all, and let God sort them out.

This is, however, not always a good guide to action.  Sometimes mistakes and lies have to be refuted quickly, without waiting for the roof to collapse. 

• It’s true that climate denial will eventually be untenable.  The planet will be warmer, the ice will melt, the seas will rise, the forests will burn. But by the time the last denier has been converted, it may be some satisfaction to say “I told you so!”, but it will be too late for mankind.

• After the 2008 financial collapse even Alan Greenspan admitted that his faith in unregulated markets had been misplaced.  Better to have heeded the many refutations of market fundamentalism before millions lost their homes.       

Today is Different.  A second bad argument is that our problems today with technology and social media are brand new.  If you think Facebook and Twitter are radically different from anything before in human experience, then once we wrestle them to the ground we solve the problem.

But powerful people and interests have been successfully distorting reality, on a grand scale, since…forever.  To take just some recent examples: King Leopold of Belgium convinced much of the world in the late 19^th century he was helping the Congolese people, when actually he was enslaving and massacring them.  William Randolph Hearst and the yellow press seized on the sinking of the Maine—almost certainly the result of an accident, not Spanish attack—to drive the US into war with Spain.  The “Lost Cause” fantasy of kindly masters and happy slaves was invented by Southerners but then spread to much of the country, meaning for a hundred years many Americans lived (and many still live) with a fundamentally false understanding of their history.  Communists and fascists perfected Big Lies, including infamous manipulations of film and photos, that fooled millions, not just in their own countries but beyond. McCarthyism.  Big Tobacco and cancer. Big Oil and climate.  

Each of these used new media and technology—mass circulation newspapers, radio, television—that were hailed at their birth as certain to promote truth and freedom. They found ways to use these tools in the service of the same old underlying goals: money, power, fame.  Today, old wine is again being poured into new bottles. We most certainly need to rein in modern social media.  But new communication tools will inevitably arise that face us with the same problems.  

Competition Solves Everything.  A third argument is that truth will emerge from the most intense possible competition. Americans have great faith that competition produces the best results. This is the basis for our democratic politics, our scientific advances, and our free for all journalism. The foundation is equal access to every opinion and truth claim.  As Jefferson wrote, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”^[6]  Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1919, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” 

Competition is central to our view of science; for a claim about the world to be ‘scientific,’ we expect that it will have been subject to rigorous criticism by its ‘competitors,’ i.e. by proponents of alternative or rival claims. It will have been published in elite peer-reviewed journals where experts will go over every aspect with a fine-toothed comb.  For the most part we can’t evaluate scientific claims ourselves, but we can evaluate whether the competitive process has been adhered to.

However, ensuring genuine competition is extremely difficult.  Free market advocates tend to assume the conditions for competition, including “perfect information,” in explaining how competition ensures the optimal allocation of resources. But imperfect, partial, and misleading information is the rule, not the exception, in most spheres of life.  The benefits of competition do not naturally arise in the absence of carefully constructed rules and institutions; they require thoughtful and active interventions to prevent monopolies and other distortions. 

Institutional Failures

In this paradigm, it is essential for these gatekeepers to operate properly and without bias or manipulation.  When doubt arises that this is true, or even possible, it can devastate faith in outcomes.  Today we have a double-barreled problem.  Many of the key institutions we look to for objectivity have shortcomings that need urgent addressing.  These shortcomings give ammunition to those who want to cast doubt on judgments they believe are not in their interests.

• Elections, for instance, are primarily a cognitive exercise, a carefully constructed mechanism for counting preferences.  Unfortunately there is ample reason to think that in the US this process is corrupted by money, special interests, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. This gives credence to arguments that election results, and laws passed by those elected, do not reflect popular opinion. 

• Careful studies of the scientific process show some fields are riddled with shoddiness and personal biases.  Experimental results often cannot be replicated.^[7]  Scientists are human and can try to cut corners or manipulate evidence to get published and enhance their own reputations.  This gives credence to those who want to cast doubt on specific scientific findings, such as human-caused global warming, or hawk unfounded theories about vaccines or the benefits of trickle-down economics.  

• Mainstream reporters and news organizations have often failed to recognize the ways their prejudices, educational backgrounds, and the economic needs of their platforms shape what stories they cover and how they cover them.  Powerful interests, mostly on the right, have seized on these shortcomings to justify explicitly one-sided ‘news’ coverage and to discredit the very idea of an impartial press.        

If we refuse to set limits on media on the grounds that we are better off giving everyone an equal right to express themselves, we may believe we are strengthening individual and minority views, but what we are often doing is leaving people prey to the loudest, most authoritative voice. Some voices are inevitably more equal than others, often due to having the money or power to influence—or own—major media.  And the platforms themselves, like talk radio and Facebook, are far from neutral; as we are now all too aware, they are designed to arouse strong emotions and reinforce prejudices to keep users engaged and sell more advertising. 

The threat that populist demagogues and opinion echo-chambers pose is that only the strongest souls can cling to something true if it is regularly denied by their neighbors, their leaders, and  key media. If the majority are taught and bullied to affirm out loud that Jews are subhuman, or the socialist motherland is a worker’s paradise, or illegal immigrants are all murderers and rapists, most will eventually succumb.  

What We Can Do

Are there remedies?  Yes, if we accept the Progressive insight that a healthy democracy requires active interventions, backed by science and research, to create the conditions for individuals and communities to flourish.  Many, though not all of these, must come from government.

A vital check is placing a high value on sources of truth or accepted knowledge that everyone can agree on—Hannah Arendt’s “ground” and “sky.”  Wide acceptance that the work of scientists and expert professionals is valid is necessary to prevent democracy from dissolving every judgment in Susan Jacoby’s acid bath of “junk thought.” 

• Our schools and curriculum designers have a central role to play here. Unfortunately many Americans have only the vaguest notion how science works, or the methods that experts in different fields use to sift fact from fiction, or assign probabilities to their judgments.^[8]  Modern science does not teach a sterile determinism but incorporates at its heart uncertainty and unpredictability. These must be essential elements of classroom education beginning in the early years.  Perhaps a post-DeVos Education Secretary could take this on.

• Higher education is also key.  A dangerous line of thinking on the left asserts that all judgments are nothing but expressions of power relations determined by class or race or gender.  While there is plenty of room for debate about how ‘truth’ is determined, a simplistic version of this argument has become an unexamined article of faith in many parts of academia. From there it has migrated into the larger culture.  It needs to be vigorously challenged in our colleges and universities

We must do more to fix the shortcomings of our gatekeeper institutions.  Major political reforms are needed to ensure elections reflect more accurately the real preferences of the majority rather than those with the largest checkbooks.  Scientists must redouble their adherence to high standards for publication and replication of results, and need to do a better job of inserting their voices into public debates.  

Perhaps the most urgent task is to make sure the media are not monopolized by a few owners, that a variety of views are heard, and that major platforms meet minimum standards of accuracy.

• This could mean reinstating a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, abandoned in 1987 under the Reagan Administration in the name of free speech.  This is needed because American audiences today do not regularly encounter a range of opinions that engage with one another. Instead, they self-select—and are powerfully manipulated to select—only one set of views.  Competition has no chance to take effect.  

• Another option would be supporting public media, not only at the national but the state and local levels, where journalism has been fading for decades.  We should make PBS the equivalent of Great Britain’s BBC, a trusted powerhouse with global reach. ^[9]

Journalism is one of many areas of our complex modern life where hidden manipulation can lead people to act against their own interests.  Mortgage bankers selling loans to unqualified buyers, politicians advocating tax cuts that benefit the rich, drug companies pushing addictive pain pills:  all these require government intervention by publicly accountable institutions to prevent lies and deception.  These interventions, the legacy of the Progressive movement, focus on protecting citizens from outside powers.

Cultivating Democratic Humility

We must also avoid unrealistic expectations.  If we put our institutions on pedestals, they are destined to fall.  Citizens who are taught that democratic elections are pure and unstained expressions of the popular will can be devastated when they discover “it ain’t so.”  If you believe science exists in a hallowed universe separate from other pedestrian human activities, you will be baffled by its uncertainties and mistakes.  (We saw this play out recently in arguments about wearing masks to fight the spread of COVID-19, where the initial, and erroneous, message from the CDC that masks were not effective was used to justify rejecting all subsequent advice).  Journalists aren’t perfect and even the most scrupulous reporters will get things wrong in the heat of the moment. In every case an ideal struggles with a messy, imperfect reality. 

Jefferson hoped that a future democracy with the freest possible access to every opinion would be able to agree on “reason and truth.”  But one of the things ‘reason and truth’ teach is that there are limits to reason and truth.  All of our methods and institutions are imperfect; chance, uncertainty, unpredictability, and irrationality are part of the human condition.  

This is frustrating but also liberating.  Though we crave certainty, it is uncertainty that leaves room for freedom and makes democracy valuable. If a perfect science of human affairs was achievable, freedom would vanish and we could hand governance over to a small class of experts, or a bank of computers.  Instead we are forced to take into account various perspectives, reflecting differences in experience, natural endowments, class, gender, race, the whole caboodle—there is no rational basis for dismissing any of them. 

Paradoxically, the science and expertise that frightens the 1776 Commission teaches us that no rigid science of humanity is in sight.  Modern biology, the social sciences, complexity theory:  all show human behavior is the result of astonishing combinations of multiple interacting systems.   

Today we are rightly fearful that advances in computers and access to Big Data will allow for reliable prediction, and manipulation, of individuals and groups.  But while with one hand science seems to squeeze free will and individuality out of the picture, with its other hand it seems to guarantee that a complete understanding of complex social systems, along with the power to predict and control, is impossible.  

• According to a recent description from an expert in complexity studies:  “Complexity Theory has established the limits of Classic Science…showing the limits of our capacity to predict and control events. Dissipative structures have shown the creative role of time. Instability, emergence, surprise, unpredictability are the rule rather than the exception …”^[10]  

• A recent study by computer scientists of a simple social system finds that “even with unlimited data predictive performance would be bounded well below deterministic accuracy” and concludes that “realistic bounds on predictive accuracy are not dissimilar from those we have obtained empirically, and that such bounds for other complex social systems for which data is more difficult to obtain are likely even lower.”^[11]

This means that ultimately decisions about what to do should not be delegated to experts but are best made through a democratic process.  Our task is to invent ways to bring multiple perspectives together and have them interact constructively.^[12]  

• Expanding on Aristotle’s insight, modern advocates of “deliberative democracy” argue for processes where citizens engage in reasonable discussion, exchanging “reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future.”^[13]

• Citizen’s assemblies have been used successfully in Ireland and Scotland to deal with sensitive topics like abortion. ^[14]

On the other hand, the fact we cannot vanquish uncertainty cannot be an excuse for throwing learning and expertise over the side.  Lack of perfection doesn’t mean that every claim about reality is as good as any other.  No one thinks their random next door neighbor is as good as anyone else at removing their gall bladder.  Expertise is needed to advise citizens and their representatives, with agreed procedures that require it be taken into account. 

Uncertainty cannot be eliminated but can be bounded: as statisticians admonish us, “update your priors!”^[15]  Well-constructed methods for determining and combining a wide range of knowledge and opinion are available and do, for the most part, produce better—not perfect, but better—judgments.

Acknowledging this is to recognize that we live in an ambiguous world, where we know some things but not everything.  Perhaps the central democratic virtue is humility.  We are neither beasts nor gods.

Building on the Progressive Legacy

The Progressive movement, like all complex movements, was imperfect. Some of its advocates were indeed paternalistic believers in the ‘rule of experts.’  But at its heart it aimed at protecting individual citizens against domination by undemocratic forces, especially Big Business but also corrupt political machines.  In its New Deal and Great Society manifestations, Progressivism took aim at poverty, hunger, racism, unemployment, and lack of education, in order to keep citizens from being diminished and manipulated.  These efforts relied on research and expertise, in and out of government, to demonstrate the existence of inequities and guide pragmatic responses.

The 1776 Report deplores the growth of government, supposedly at the expense of the Founders’ understanding of individual liberty.  But it is Madison who tells us, in Federalist 10, that human beings, equal in political rights, are not equal in their ability to acquire property, that this gives rise to competing interests, above all the rich and the poor, and that “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.”  It is government that must ensure inequalities in property and wealth—so often the result of differential treatment according to race or ethnicity or gender–do not mean inequality in rights and in the ability to participate in public life as citizens on an equal footing.  

Reactionary interests in the US look nostalgically back on a pre-Progressive past when legislators and courts reliably deferred to business, often basing their arguments, as in the infamous 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision, on a narrow understanding of property rights without regard for discrepancies in power between individuals and employers.^[16]  Despite the  hand-wringing of the 1776 Report, Progressivism has by no means vanquished the power of wealthy elites, who continue to wrap themselves in self-serving appeals to Constitutional principles, like the ‘free speech’ argument used in Citizen’s United to give corporations the right to ‘speak’—meaning, to give money to politicians, used largely to shape public opinion.

Madisonian conflict between haves and have-nots rages in today’s America, as armies of business lobbyists in Washington and the states propagate their versions of truth, and a tiny fraction of the electorate is allowed to amass great wealth and use it to offset the will of the people.  A large and sophisticated bureaucracy, supported by informed citizens, is needed to stand up to these forces. 

The foundations of democratic politics and a pluralistic society are epistemological as well as moral and pragmatic.  We must be conscious of them and protect them, or we will disintegrate into warring tribes with no hope of recovery. 

---

^[1]   “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,” Washington Post, February 23 2017;   https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html

^[2] “The Progressive Revolt Against the Founding,” Claremont Institute;  https://www.claremont.org/featured/the-progressive-revolt-against-the-founding/?act=page&id=the-progressive-revolt-against-the-founding&pagetype=f

^[3] The 1776 Report, President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, January 2021, 

fCohttps://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/397762/The%20President%E2%80%99s%20Advisory%201776%20Commission%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf

^[4] It is worth noting that the 1776 Report makes no claim that this view of human nature is true.  Instead it argues that it is a necessary belief for accepting the American system.  It is also worth noting that the word ‘democracy’ is never used. The United States is repeatedly described as a republic, never as a democracy.  This common conservative meme is designed to emphasize that government is limited while downplaying the role of citizens in creating and using government for a variety of purposes.     

^[5]  https://www.npr.org/2017/10/20/558906151/how-steve-bannon-s-time-in-hollywood-changed-him

^[6] Letter to John Tyler, 28 June 1804;  https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0557#:~:text=no%20experiment%20can%20be%20more,the%20freedom%20of%20the%20press.

^[7] “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” John Ioannidis, PLOS Medicine, August 2005;     https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.  See also The Knowledge Machine:  How Irrationality Created Modern Science, Michael Strevens, ch. 2-3, W.W. Norton, 2020. 

^[8] At its core science proceeds in ways that are similar to democratic deliberation and decisionmaking: a variety of interpretations are put forth and vigorously debated; the best of these is adopted, but always subject to further debate and potential revision in light of new evidence.

^[9] “The United States Needs a BBC,” Foreign Policy, January 2021;  https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/bbc-partisan-news-united-states-polarization/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29810&utm_term=Morning%20Brief%20OC&?tpcc=29810

^[10] “Complex Systems Theory:  Some Considerations for Sociology,” Rosalia Condorelli, Open Journal of Applied Sciences, 2015 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305690970_Complex_Systems_Theory_Some_Considerations_for_Sociology

^[11] “Exploring Limits to Prediction in Complex Social Systems,” WWW ’16: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web,April 2016;  https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2872427.2883001  

^[12] A useful perspective from the modern Aristotelian philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre can be found in his 1981 book After Virtue, ch. 8 “The Character of Generalizations in Social Science.” After noting the inability of social scientists to come up with the type of ‘’law-like generalizations’’ characteristic of modern natural science, he points to four underlying and permanent causes of systematic unpredictability: 1) radical conceptual innovations; 2) inability of each individual to anticipate their actions; 3) the game-theoretic character of social life; 4) pure contingency.  MacIntyre points to Machiavelli and his concept of Fortuna as the most useful way to think about human action.  His conclusion is that sweeping claims by scientists or managers are misleading, while modest expert claims within limited fields are respectable. 

^[13] Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, “What is Deliberative Democracy,” in Why Deliberative Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2004).

^[14] “Are Citizens Assemblies the Future of Participation?”, Evy Beekers, CitizenLab, Sept. 2020;   https://www.citizenlab.co/blog/civic-engagement/are-citizens-assemblies-the-future-of-participation/

^[15] “How to think like an epidemiologist,” New York Times, August 4 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/science/coronavirus-bayes-statistics-math.html

^[16]   “Lochner vs. New York:  Fundamental Rights and Economic Liberty,” National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/lochner-v-new-york-fundamental-rights-and-economic-liberty/

For a while now we have been bombarded with claims that the US is more divided “than at any time since the Civil War.”  Here is just one recent utterance, from Ronald Brownstein on CNN:  “Donald Trump ends his tumultuous presidency with the nation confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.”

I beg to differ. I’m a baby-boomer, born in 1953, graduated high school in 1970, went to college in the early 1970s.  We boomers always think the world revolves around us; we were the first, the best, the baddest, the mostest.  In that spirit, I submit the boomer-driven 60s were more divisive than today  (and, just to be clear, closer in time than the Civil War).  They were certainly more violent, more openly confrontational.  And the divisions were about big things, real things, like civil rights, and Vietnam; not about whatever it is we’re fighting about these days.  We’re divided now mostly because a lot of people seem to have found a way to make money off Americans disagreeing with each other.  Man, give me the 60s any day!

However, I submit that today’s divisions largely go back to the 60s and how they were experienced, and interpreted, especially on the right.  We are still fighting many of the same battles.  Let’s review.

There is lots of disagreement about what “the 60s” really was.  No period fits neatly into 10 year increments.  But we can probably say without too much contradiction that it was the time when the post-war generation came of age and became a demographic force, especially in schools.  The number of college students exploded due to the boomer birth rate, the successful postwar economy that gave more people money and leisure for education, and the GI Bill and other government support for higher education.  The heyday of “the 60s” can be seen as starting around 1963 and extending through 1975, the end of US involvement in Vietnam.  

This concentration of kids on campuses coincided with the civil rights movement and Vietnam, which became the two most visible sources of mobilization and grievance.  But there were many others, including the environment, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and more.  

(And this was just in the US. It is critical to see that the 60s weren’t just an American phenomenon, it was worldwide.  Hundreds of thousands of students and supporters marched in 1968 in London, Paris, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo, and around the world.  The baby boom and growing prosperity fueled rising expectations and demands everywhere.  The specific sources of discontent differed, but discontent of some kind was universal among the young.  One reason is that globalization, the connectivity across borders made possible by television and jet travel, allowed models of protest and countercultural memes to travel rapidly from the US to Europe to Asia and back again.) 

Common to the 60s’ demands was questioning of authority, of established leaders and institutions and rules.  A lot of it was puerile, as you might expect from a youthful, college-based movement.  More alcohol and drugs and commingling with the opposite sex, or any sex.  “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”

Colleges themselves became a prime focus of anger and demands, and the 60s saw an endless series of student ‘takeovers,’ sit-ins, strikes and other actions.  Often these were aimed at loosening campus rules; in other cases deans and presidents were convenient stand-ins for remoter, less tangible targets.  We can’t get rid of Lyndon Johnson, but we can make life hell for the provost!    

However, energy flowed back and forth between the personal and the political, to adopt a 60s slogan.  Protesting the war, supporting (or joining) the Black Panthers, ousting Nixon, bombing Dow Chemical, ending capitalism—for many these all merged seamlessly with taking drugs and free love and long hair and escaping from the other constrictions of suburbia.  And in the 60s America had some seriously radical dudes calling for real change: Weathermen, SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society, Timothy Leary.  Thousands burned draft cards.  Millions—millions!—protested against the Vietnam War on campuses and then in huge demonstrations in major cities.  African-Americans, angry over police violence and lack of opportunity, rioted violently and frequently.   

This cultural and social ferment coincided, in the US, with ambitious changes in law and policy, many of which moved broadly in the directions demanded on campuses.  The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; Medicare and Medicaid; the Immigration and Nationalities Act of 1965 (greatly expanding the number and diversity of immigrants); a panoply of Great Society, War on Poverty initiatives; federal aid to education at all levels, including the Higher Education Act of 1965.  And much more.   

The question is, how did all this ‘net out,’ so to speak.  What kind of country did we have as a result?  

Here’s how I think it shaped up to one large part of the population.  By the mid-70s, a lot of things seemed to be headed in the wrong direction.  Crime was rising, rapidly.  The economy was stalling in the wake of growing global competition, the 1973 oil embargo, and inflation from the Vietnam War debt and the costs of other new government problems.  The US position in the world was weaker, partly because we had visibly lost the war and communist opponents on the other side—the USSR, China, Cuba—were emboldened.  The first Cuban troops in Africa started showing up in 1975.

If you were less than enthusiastic about the cultural side of the 60s, the sex and drugs and rock n’roll, and more generally the push for equal rights for blacks and women, it was easy to link these developments with American decline.  Correlation is not causation, but it’s often hard to resist.

 And plenty of powerful interests were eager to make the linkages seem obvious.  The Republican Party swooped in quickly in 1968 to use fear of crime as a tool to pick up the alienated white vote, in the South but also elsewhere.  Business interests, embodied in the infamous Powell letter of 1973, mobilized via the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups to fight back against taxes and regulations by building the narrative that government programs always make things worse, not better.  Conservative churches began to see political engagement as necessary to fight the erosion of traditional values, first and foremost new roles for women.  Anti-communists on the right joined forces with the emerging neo-conservatives to raise the alarm about the Soviet threat and against appeasers here at home. 

This reaction to the 60s was key to creating the modern conservative movement.  It gave those motivated by race, business, religion, and anti-communism a clear story about what had gone wrong
in America, and allowed them to cooperate across previously strong barriers.  By 1980 these groups had coalesced around Ronald Reagan.  

So is it useful to point to the 60s as the relevant Time of Troubles to compare with today?  I think what we have today is not a replay of the 60s, but rather a kind of 60s unraveling.  Our polarization, and the attacks on a common reality, come from the toxic decay of this anti-60s coalition on the right.  As it disintegrates, it has been forced to move further and further from reality to try and stay in business.  

• It no longer has a counterculture to fight against (America’s non-judgmental capitalist/entertainment industry having long ago absorbed and monetized the heck out of it)  but pretends it does, inventing ever less convincing cultural enemies determined to seize everyone’s guns or force Americans to take anti-racism training.  

• There is no serious anti-capitalist, pro-socialist movement in the US (please, you can’t compare Bernie Sanders to the SDS), but that hasn’t stopped conservatives from trying to win elections by leveling shrill charges of ‘radical socialism’ against liberals and progressives and claiming they want to turn the US into another Cuba.  

• The Christian Right’s political partisanship and opposition to gender equality has contributed to the alienation of many Americans, especially young Americans, from Christianity and from organized religion more generally; nevertheless, conservative Christians doubled-down on Trump and are retreating further and further into fantastical—and dangerous—apocalyptic visions.    

• International communism is long gone, and crusades against Islamic extremism have badly misfired and no longer unite most Americans against a clearly second-tier threat.  China is now being plumped up as a new focus, even though the US business sector has spent the last three decades swooning over China and its billion-plus market.  

This backwards looking movement, no longer conservative but deeply reactionary, has no interest in finding solutions for the actual problems now facing the country.  Its instincts are only to block and undermine government action, while engaging in performative dramas to retain supporters with anger and nostalgia. Income inequality, global warming, healthcare,  (“You’ll have healthcare the likes of which you’ve never seen!”), racial injustice, deaths of despair—all these could benefit from smart, conservative policy proposals.  None have been forthcoming.  

Sorry folks, the 60s have come and gone!  They were both a more playful and a more serious time.  Some of the conservative critique was justified, but it has long outlived its sell-by date.  The anti-60s core of today’s radical reactionary movement is rotting and stinking to high heaven.  Please, put some Beatles records on the stereo (EVERYONE likes the Beatles, they’re, they’re…traditional), smoke some recently legalized weed, and let the 60s go. 

By now it’s clear that while we may have gotten rid of Trump, we didn’t get rid of Trumpism.  It was always there, of course, but it was like the piles of kindling that have built up in our poorly managed forests.  Over the last four years it has roared into the open, turning into one of the huge fires we have become used to each year.  It has darkened the skies and thrown a pall of smoke and ash across the entire country.  

I and many others had hoped this election would, if not put out the fire, at least squelch it.  The Blue Wave would crash over the flames, empowering more reasonable Republicans.  Trumpism would go back into the shadows.

But the fire was not dampened.  In some ways it blazed up with greater strength.  Despite 25000 lies, rampant corruption, impeachment, mishandling COVID-19 to the tune of millions infected and over 230,000 dead, shamefully ramming through a last-second Supreme Court appointment, a boorish and incoherent debate performance, and openly trying to disrupt the election and democracy itself—despite a thousand things that should have ended his career and lost him the support of all but a tiny minority—Trump almost won.  He got more votes than in 2016, and actually increased his share of the white vote.  By pledging fealty to him, his party kept control of the Senate (probably), almost won back the House, and held onto its strong position in state legislatures, ensuring that redistricting will, as in 2010, lock in place Republican advantages.  

Clearly most of what I call ‘despites’ were, in the eyes of almost half the voting population of the United States, not mistakes, not negatives.  They were pluses.  President Biden, and the remaining pockets of anti-Trumpers in the Republican Party, face a daunting task.  It is vital that we understand what Trumpism is, and why many Americans love it so.

The answer, in my view, has little to do with policy, and much more with human psychology.  As many have noted, Trumpism is a type of cult masquerading as a political movement.  Its appeal stems especially from a cult characteristic that is especially prominent in Trumpism:  it absolves its believers of all guilt and responsibility.  Trumpism makes it OK to be selfish, OK to be angry and vindictive, OK to blame others for your problems.

• According to the book  Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, one common cult identifier is:  “The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (e.g., lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).”

• Genuine religions (sometimes) try to rein in our demons and encourage concern for others.  Trumpism instead lets the demons run rampant, under the guise of doing what is needed to stop some terrible threat:  Clinton, or immigrants, or socialists, or Black Lives Matter protestors.  

This syndrome, of encouraging our bad angels because they’re needed to cope with an existential danger, of casting politics as a drama of good vs. evil, is not unique to Trump.  Far from it.  It is characteristic of fascism and Leninism, not to mention countless episodes of religious fanaticism and personality-driven authoritarianism.  Terrible words and deeds become acceptable, indeed praiseworthy.

Let’s look at the key characteristics of Trumpism.  I count eight, though one could add others.  Together they amount to a complete reversal of our ordinary moral and practical judgements.  Here’s how Trump himself might summarize them.

Nothing is your fault.  The buck never stops here.  If something gets screwed up, find the culprit and explain how stupid they are, and how they did it on purpose because they hate you.  Like coronavirus:  China allowed it to spread to infect the United States and hurt my re-election chances. 

White guilt is bull***t.  Liberals invented political correctness so you won’t fight back when black people and immigrants invade your suburbs.  White people made this country—it’s ours.

Sacrifice is for suckers.  There is zero reason you should give up anything you want to help other people.  People who do this are dummies.  People who try to convince you to sacrifice something are trying to take advantage of you.  They’re probably socialists. (Or…hint, hint… Jews, or both.) 

There are no experts.  You are just as smart as anyone else.  Smarter, in fact!  So-called experts are mostly just pretending to know things so they can act important and manipulate you.  They think their education and degrees make them better than you.  Don’t fall for it.  Climate change, wearing masks, trickle-down economics—believe what works for you.

Truth and consistency are over-rated.  What is ‘truth’?  No one can answer that.  If you say something over and over, with enough conviction, and get it on TV, other people will agree with you, and that’s all the truth you need.   (NB — the bigger the lie, the better!  Most people can’t believe anyone would be brazen enough to tell such whoppers, so they think “there must really be something wrong with voting by mail.”)

And please, never worry that what you say today contradicts what you said yesterday.  Ignore it, and say something new to distract everyone (by ‘everyone,’ I mean the press).  Flood the zone, it doesn’t matter with what. They’ll move on.

Being rich is everything.  How do you know someone is really smart and talented?  They have lots of money.  They’re good at business.  Anything else is hogwash.  Don’t trust anyone who isn’t rich.  My job as President is to make sure rich people aren’t hindered by taxes and regulations and prissy concerns about ethics.  Being against rich people is socialism. 

Always lawyer-up.  Anytime someone does something you don’t like, attack, attack, attack.  Never admit you might be wrong or might compromise.  This shows weakness.  Look strong, talk strong, tell everyone how great and strong you are.  You’ll be adored.  Like I adore Putin.

Nobody is neutral.  People are either with you, or against you.  There are no disinterested public servants.  If they disagree with you it’s because they belong to the Deep State and are out to get you.  Get them first. 

For millions of Americans, these upside-down values are not disturbing but liberating and invigorating.  They come across as a (perverted) form of Christian teachings that the last shall be first, of American teachings that one person is just as good as another and anyone can be a millionaire.  If you are struggling and poor, a whole movement encourages you to point fingers and find scapegoats.  If you are successful and rich, it encourages self-congratulation.  You can be selfish, you can lie, you can indulge your anger and frustration and prejudices, all without guilt.  This is what will make America great again!  

This is not to say Trumpists have no real problems.  They have plenty.  But Trumpism is the antithesis of serious analysis and policy work.  It channels dissatisfaction away from fixing things to expressing anger.    

Not all Trump voters are Trumpists, of course.  Many are uncomfortable with Trumpism but like particular results, like low taxes or anti-abortion judges.  But in doing so they give Trumpism and its principles a pass.  They look the other way because it is in their self-interest.  As fallible human beings all of us sometimes avoid facing the full implications of our actions, or inactions. But after four years of Trump there can be no excuse any more.  We know what we are doing. 

Now that Trumpism has been unleashed, others will take it up with or without Trump himself in the saddle.  The basics of Trumpism overlap with the core message of modern conservatism, which exalts individual self-interest, denigrates the idea of a public good, despises government, and puts rich businessmen on a pedestal.  Conservative leaders and thinkers will continue to see it useful to fan the flames.  

The best hope for deflating Trumpism was, in my view, a combination of clear defeat at the polls, followed by an effective progressive government that quickly accomplished big concrete things that made the lives of Trump voters better—affordable healthcare, jobs from a big green infrastructure program, free childcare and college.  We didn’t get the clear defeat, and without control of the House and Senate, an effective agenda appears unlikely.  The odds of winning two Georgia Senate races are not good.  Maybe the Biden team can work some policy magic.  But it goes without saying that it will be Mitch McConnell’s mission to make sure none of this happens.  

I remain convinced that eventually Trumpism will burn itself out.  Without Trump himself in the White House and the platform this gave him to shape the national psyche, there is room to recover.  A few Republican Senators may feel liberated to act cooperatively.  But huge swaths of our country are already charred and blackened.  The fire is not contained.  It is not clear how much will be left standing.                    

Sometimes small incidents lay bare the truth of things.  Two recent episodes reveal how modern conservatism has gone morally awry, and the limitations of the liberal response. 

Bitches

Back in July, Representative Ocasio-Cortez was reportedly called a “fucking bitch” by a colleague on the steps of the Capitol.   As the Washington Post explained, “In a confrontation overheard by a reporter Monday outside the Capitol, Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “disgusting” and told her “you are out of your freaking mind” for describing poverty as a root cause of crime…”.

Subsequent commentary, including Ocasio-Cortez’s speech on the House floor, focused on Yoho’s sexism and disrespect.  But largely lost was any discussion of what it was that caused Mr. Yoho to come undone in the first place.  Apparently it was the notion that poverty might cause crime.  Not a position that most of us would think all that controversial, much less ‘disgusting.’  But this is the conservative worldview, distilled into a 10-second encounter on the Capitol steps.  

Every good conservative knows that crime is caused by Bad People, who need—for their own good, of course—to be dealt with forcefully by heroic men in blue.  Saying it might have something to do with poverty challenges a whole set of moral assumptions.  Maybe people are not just autonomous individuals, but members of society who can be shaped by circumstance.  Maybe they would respond better to assistance and support, than the threat of punishment. Maybe fellow citizens have a duty to offer help, even—gasp—through the government.  Maybe arresting millions of people for petty crimes and locking them up in jail and ruining their lives isn’t “doing them a favor” by building their character. 

Having this pointed out by a young, progressive woman of color was apparently too much for Mr. Yoho.  No, no, my head hurts—make it stop, b**ch!  

That is what spun up the good Congressman.  And that is what Democrats need to point out, over and over: the narrow and flawed moral universe inhabited by today’s conservatives.  A universe that sees even the suggestion of compassion as “disgusting” and worthy only of obscenities.  A universe that rejects any positive role for government in addressing the underlying causes of crime.  A universe divided, as Mitt Romney told us in an earlier offhand reveal, between virtuous “makers” and parasitical “takers.”  A universe willing to spend unlimited amounts on policing, but eager to cut programs to help the poor. 

Suckers

According to reports that surfaced in August, Donald Trump reportedly called American soldiers buried at Normandy “suckers” and wondered why they would sacrifice themselves.  Biden correctly and emotionally responded on behalf of his own son, who volunteered to go to Iraq.   What he and Democrats more generally also need to do is show what this comment reveals about today’s conservatism.  

Trump’s views ring true not only to his own character (a person who has never done anything in his life that was not self-serving) but also to the core principles of the Republican Party.  The most important of those principles is selfishness.  This is disguised as love of ‘freedom’ and ‘individual liberty,’ but what it comes down to is doing everything to empower individual acquisitiveness while ridiculing the slightest sacrifice for the common good, like wearing masks.  It is 100% about ‘rights’ and 0% about duties.  

Trump’s views on military service, or any public service, are the logical conclusion of a worldview that sees any choice that subordinates self-interest to some broader concern as stupid and incomprehensible.  This encompasses not just soldiers but teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters—these are chumps in Republican eyes.  Trump without doubt privately scorns them all, in accord with the teaching of his favorite thinker, Ayn Rand, for whom altruism was the greatest of all sins (Rand is Steve Mnuchin’s favorite as well, and Mike Pompeo’s, and Clarence Thomas’s, and Alan Greenspan’s, and on and on). 

Democrats must make central to their messaging the underlying selfishness and scorn for the public interest, and therefore for government that reflects that interest, of the modern Republican Party.  This is a Party that for four years has neglected and undermined the Federal Government it is supposed to lead.  It has not bothered to undertake any of the hard work needed to pass legislation, even on issues, like fixing America’s infrastructure, that Trump promised to prioritize during his campaign.  There is no Republican healthcare plan.  No Republican climate plan.  No Republican plan to deal with policing and the racism that continues to plague our institutions.  There have only been tax cuts, which of course have further weakened government capacity, and various grifter schemes to privatize education and other government functions.  This is a kind of political nihilism.      

There is a dangerous tendency with Biden to see Trump as a ‘bad apple,’ who can be defeated, after which we heave a sigh of relief and return to normal and make deals with decent Republican Senators.  But President Trump is no more a bad apple with respect to the Republican Party than Officer Derek Chauvin is with respect to the Minneapolis police.  He is the stripped-bare essence of a broken institution. 

Continued American Decline

Trump has continued America’s decline, but he didn’t start it.  When I say ‘decline’ I do not mean primarily our international standing, though that too is in free-fall.  I mean the quality of life, of day to day experience, for fellow American citizens. 

• In their recent book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, the Nobel Prize winning economist Angus Deaton and his wife, Anne Case, explain that life expectancy for working class white Americans, people with high school educations, has been dropping under the weight of “deaths of despair”:  suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses.  This is unprecedented for the United States and for any modern advanced nation.  It is due largely to a dysfunctional healthcare system, run for profit at the expense of actual health; and to the callous disregard shown over decades by America’s One Percent for the impact of de-industrialization on working Americans. 

• The most recent iteration of the Social Progress Index, which takes into account 50 measures of well-being that go well beyond the standard metric of “GNP/capita,” shows the US in 28^th place globally, down from #19 in 2011.  We are #100 when it comes to discrimination and violence against minorities.  We are #97 for access to quality healthcare, and #119 for environmental quality.  

• According to the annual Economist Democracy Index, since 2016 the United States has been categorized as a “Flawed Democracy,” instead of a “Full Democracy.”

At the root of our decline is not simple selfishness, it is an ideology and moral framework that exalts selfishness and rejects the very possibility of collective action for the public good.  This is the conservative equivalent of Orwell’s “boot stamping on a human face—forever,” the oligarchic vision that conservative strategists hope to make permanent through Constitutional amendments and control of the Supreme Court.  Democrats must connect the dots to point out the underpinnings of seemingly offhand remarks about ‘bitches’ and ‘suckers.’  

The other day I watched a recent PBS “American Masters” on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas seems to be emerging from his shell a bit—he is actually asking questions during Court arguments, something he hasn’t done for decades, and now this biography, which consists largely of Thomas sitting alone and describing his life and thoughts.  

Thomas has long been a spokesman and model for black conservatives. As I write this the US is in the grip of racial unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. I have no idea of Thomas’s thoughts on the current protests, but judging by his general views it is safe to say he doesn’t approve.  Unlike most African-American leaders, Thomas sees black progress as almost entirely a matter of individual effort.  Neither government programs or mass action are useful; in fact they harm African-Americans by diverting them from acquiring self-discipline and self-responsibility.  Complaining about the ‘system’ is a sign of weakness. How did he reach conclusions so at odds with the mainstream views in the African-American community?    

Thomas has a compelling life story.  He grew up poor and isolated in rural Georgia and Jim Crow Savannah.  His single mother basically gave up trying to raise him and his brother and turned them over to her parents.  It was his maternal grandfather who, according to Thomas, stamped him permanently and for the good.  He was a tough, unsentimental disciplinarian who taught that the world owes you nothing and you have to fight for everything you get.  He broached no compromises.  In 2007 Thomas wrote a biography with the revealing title My Grandfather’s Son; a review summarizes Thomas’s own description of his grandfather like this:

• “ He never praised us, just as he never hugged us.” Beatings with belt or switch were frequent. Eventually, Thomas writes, Anderson [the grandfather] bought a new truck for his business, but he took out the heater. “The warmth, he said, would only make us lazy.”

• His grandfather was Catholic, and in high school Thomas embarked on a program aiming for the priesthood, then quit because of the insufferable racism of his classmates and teachers (Thomas was the only black student).  His grandfather unceremoniously turned him out of the house for violating one of his key rules, always finish what you start. 

Thomas in college and law school was something of a radical, though more in his politics than his daily life.  He supported civil rights and black empowerment.  But over time his views shifted.  According to his story, when he graduated from Yale the only job offer he could get was for a position in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, offered by its Republican Attorney General, John Danforth.  In Thomas’s view,  this was because prospective employers all believed he had gotten his degree not because of individual merit, but on account of affirmative action.  (I personally find it very hard to believe that in the 1970s a talented black graduate of Yale couldn’t have more options, but it certainly rings true that Thomas would have detected skepticism about his qualifications.)

When Danforth was elected to the Senate, Thomas followed him to Washington and a series of Reagan era appointments culminating in his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Bush.  

• Along the way he fell under the spell of natural rights purists from the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in the Straussian orbit; it is unclear what sort of views Thomas had about Constitutional interpretation before this.  

• With help from the conservative black economist Thomas Sowell and reading Ayn Rand—Thomas used to require his staff to watch the movie version of “The Fountainhead”—he began to tilt ever more firmly towards the hard-core originalist views he is known for today. 

In the PBS show you can see how much Thomas revels in the certainty and clarity of his newfound opinions.  When he describes how a natural rights interpretation of the law makes everything clear and simple, his eyes light up, his voice lifts, the clouds roll away.  Ambiguity and uncertainty, even about such difficult matters, clearly fills him with scorn.   

What struck me in watching is that his professional evolution in a conservative direction coincided with his embrace of his grandfather’s worldview.  After being kicked out of the house, there is no evidence Thomas had all that much contact with his grandfather.  His death seems to have come as a surprise; Thomas didn’t know his health was failing.  In the film he says this is one of his great regrets.  But as a mature adult it is the voice of his grandfather—who Thomas says is “the greatest man he ever knew”—that he begins to channel.  

The Lakoff Model. I have been thinking of this as I read a book by the linguist George Lakoff, Moral Politics.  Lakoff is a liberal Berkeley professor who is famous for a theory about the difference between conservatives and liberals that centers around different views of the family.  Conservatives, he writes, are shaped by “Strict Father Morality,” which starts with a dark view of the world and of human nature.  Life is a struggle, most people are weak and sinful, and you only succeed by developing self-discipline and a strict moral code.  Trust in others, especially people who are different in race or religion or background, is risky and naïve.  Children have to be raised with lots of “tough love,” and shaped to go against their natural inclinations to sloth and indulgence.

This underlying worldview, according to Lakoff, carries over into views of politics and public policy.   Government should be limited to a few essential tasks.  Government coddling is immoral and destructive, because it encourages weakness and dependence.  People (and businesses) need to be left to sink or swim without government interference, whether in the form of social programs or taxes and regulations.  Success, especially in business, is the truest indicator of moral virtue.  Blaming failure on a bad environment or poverty or racism is a sign of weakness.  

In conservative eyes, liberals who embrace a different model, “Nurturant Parent Morality,” are guilty of corrupting the youth by offering social programs that short-circuit the development of self-restraint.  Liberal values that emphasize tolerance and concern for the poor and disadvantaged actually hurt their intended beneficiaries.

For Thomas, affirmative action and everything associated with preferences for minorities are prime examples of liberal immorality.  Liberals deny individuality by assuming there is only one ‘correct’ way to be black. Thomas sees his conservatism as proof that he is not defined by his race or by membership in some larger group. (It is hard not to see the self-doubt here, since Thomas’s own career largely depended on special treatment.  He knows his professional rise and his Court appointment have everything to do with his race.  He has constructed a story that denies the obvious, and wrapped it in a worldview that he uses to justify claims of persecution and reverse-racism). 

Thomas seems a textbook example of the Lakoff thesis.  A boy molded by an extreme version of the “strict father” grows up to hold extreme conservative views, and to worship the man who, as he sees it, deserves praise for living according to his beliefs.  Never mind that his grandfather offered no warmth, no encouragement, nothing but criticism, punishment, and, ultimately, rejection.  This was, for Thomas, the right way to bring up a child, the only way to harden him against the slings and arrows sure to come his way.  

When they do come, in the form of Anita Hill and his confirmation hearings, Thomas is ready.  Despite ample evidence supporting her accusations (Thomas admits that during the time they interacted, he was drinking heavily and his personal life was in tatters), Thomas is adamant that it is all fabricated.  He blames not Hill so much as liberal elites who see him as not entitled to his own opinions, as not “genuinely black.” 

The Lakoff model is powerful but limited.  In real life few people are as clearcut as Thomas; most liberals have an inner “strict parent” they can draw on, and most conservatives have a nurturing side.  This is a strength, not a weakness, especially when mapped onto the larger community or the nation.  We need both worldviews, the one correcting for the other, and each available to meet the needs and crises of a changing world.

I would go further and argue that a good dose of Strict Father Morality is probably a helpful framework for the poor, the disadvantaged, the persecuted.  For most African-Americans the world is indeed a dangerous place, and success is going to require more than ordinary discipline, effort, and perseverance.  A nurturing and liberal view is more appropriate for people who live in greater comfort and security.  

This is the overall finding of the World Values Survey, a major cross-national set of opinion polls that tries to track views across cultures.  In poorer and more fragile societies, where prospects are uncertain and the ability to get an education and a job is often limited, people typically hew closer to some version of a Strict Father model, reflected in Traditional values.  As incomes and education rise, Self-Expression values come to the fore.  Over the three decades of the survey one can track clear shifts in Western Europe and North America, with support for issues like gay marriage gaining strength in synch with rising GDP, higher education levels, and greater urbanization.  

Conservatism and Reaction. What the WVS does not quite capture, however, is the interaction between these worldviews.  The transition from one to the other is not placid and seamless.  As conservative values decline, their adherents become angrier and more afraid.  What were once largely unquestioned judgments, viewed as simply natural or obvious, are attacked as partial and conventional.   Here in the US every year the number of “others”—minorities, educated urbanites, coastal elites, the unchurched—seems to grow, while the number of white rural Protestants declines.  The adherents of the new “nurturing morality” can be contemptuous of the old ways.   A reaction often sets in that champions more uncompromising versions of traditional or religious values.  

We saw this dynamic consume Islam and produce spasms of incredible violence.  Here in the US it has not come to that.  Yet. 

Thomas is clearly a product not of some original “Strict Father” unreflective conservatism, as practiced by his grandfather.  He is a champion of a new, harder-edged, self-conscious and ideologically-informed conservatism.  He is, I would argue, no longer a conservative but a reactionary.

The deliberate, conscious choice of a reactionary path may explain one of Lakoff’s most telling observations, that conservatives are much more effective in messaging and articulating their values than liberals.  They are more aware of how views of family and morality relate to politics.  Liberals seem to think people vote, or should vote, in accord with reasoned appeals to their self-interest.  This is largely wrong.  People vote on the basis of their identities and perceived values.

Liberals are continually surprised when voters act against their “self-interest,” usually understood as the immediate economic benefits of picking one party over the other.  Conservatives understand that prejudices and strongly-held worldviews can often overcome self-interest.  Republicans have directed their appeals to self-interest narrowly at the rich and powerful few, while making emotional appeals to the identities and perceived moral values of the lower-class many.

I think this self-awareness is a product of the transition described above.  Conservatives, on the defensive from massive social and economic changes, have been forced to figure out how to defend themselves.  Liberals, who generally see their cause as inevitable and historically-determined (on the “right side of history”), have been complacent.  

Policing. The divide between conservative/reactionary and liberal views is now at the center of our debate over police violence and the best response.  For decades Americans have largely chosen to beef up the police and the rest of the criminal justice system on the assumption that more law enforcement, more “strict fatherhood,” will eventually teach criminals their lesson. 

The video of George Floyd being slowly and calmly killed has temporarily cracked this worldview.  It has forced its defenders to acknowledge that something is badly wrong.  All this toughness has inevitably fallen most heavily on African Americans and other minorities. Arresting and incarcerating African American men at shocking rates (African Americans are incarcerated at over five times the rate of whites) has eviscerated whole communities and furthered not just distrust of the police but alienation from the entire American system.  

Will this lead a majority to rethink a reliance on force and intimidation as the correct, moral, rational way to reduce crime?  Maybe. Thomas himself recently argued that the Supreme Court should re-consider the legal doctrine of immunity for police actions.  But advocates of de-funding the police want to shift resources from policing to community services: less punishment, more support.  This goes against the core values of most conservatives, and not a few middle-class liberals, who have a deep fear of disorder and see the poor (and minorities) as threatening forces who must—for their own good—be taught discipline and respect for the law.

What Thomas is Up To. I noted at the start that it is surprising to see the normally reticent Thomas speak up.  I do not think for one second that this is without some strategic intent. My best guess is that he is trying to tear down Joe Biden and influence the coming election.  During the documentary we see frequent clips of the confirmation hearings, with then-Senator Biden leading the interrogation and allowing Anita Hill to make her case.  

Thomas clearly despises the entire process, and the film is his opportunity to give Biden a beating.  Biden for instance asks Thomas a question about natural law, and Thomas in the movie says:   “I have no idea what he was talking about. One of the things you do in hearings, is you have to sit there and look attentively at people you know have no idea what they’re talking about.”  

The Thomas hearings were not Biden’s best moment, though maybe not for the reasons Thomas thinks.  Thomas may judge it useful to remind voters of this episode in Biden’s career.