The Triumph of Anti-Politics. by David A. Bell

The Triumph of Anti-Politics. by David A. Bell

First Appeared in: Liberties Journal, Winter 2023

Volume 3 - Number 2

Nearly all observers today agree that politics in the United States is in a dire, poisoned state. For this they generally blame “polarization” — and the other political camp. In fact, the reasons are both more complicated and more distressing, and cannot be blamed on any single political grouping.

In his pre-pandemic best-seller Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker hailed the worldwide spread of democracy, but not in the glowing terms one might have expected from such a zealous celebrant of modernity. Democracy, he allowed, was preferable to tyranny, and offered people “the freedom to complain.” But Pinker cautioned against what he called “a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.” And he continued: “By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future.”

         The statement was obviously true on one level, as even a glance at the “deliberation” in our media will show; but it is appallingly superficial on others. Of course, ideal democracy has never existed on the planet, and probably never will. If a key element of democracy is a universal adult right to vote, then the United States has approached democratic status only since the 1960’s. But recognizing the fact that reality always falls grievously short of the ideal hardly invalidates the ideal. Pinker, having dismissed the ideal as impossible to realize, and having taken a condescending swipe at “the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs,” argued instead for a “minimalist conception of democracy” that leaves public policy, as much as possible, in the hands of trained experts. “To make public discourse more rational,” he insisted, “issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible…” In other words, circumscribe democracy through technocracy.

         The problem with this vision is that the most important problems in public life cannot be depoliticized, because most of them do not have a single correct solution that “rational” analysis alone can determine. Men and women see different solutions, depending on their political principles and moral values, which they hold in good faith. The fact that many of them do not approach the subject in the way an Ivy League professor such as Pinker (or I) would do hardly invalidates those principles and values. Would the creation of a national healthcare system in the United States represent a step towards improving the public good or an intrusion upon individual freedoms? Should we tolerate enormous inequalities of wealth so long as the poorest among us see their incomes rise? How do we balance the right to defend our homes against the dangers posed by the easy availability of deadly weapons? I have strong opinions on all these issues, and will vote for politicians who share my opinions and promise to act on them. But I recognize that others have different opinions, not because they are mistaken or ignorant or evil, but because they bring different principles and values to bear on the problems. I recognize that however strongly I feel about these issues, they do not belong beyond the bounds of political debate, with only one point of view about them permissible. 

         Throughout modern history, the greatest threat to democracy has come precisely from the rejection of these assumptions — indeed, of politics itself — and the consequent denial of political legitimacy to those who fail to share one’s own views on key issues. Historians have devoted intensive study to the long and painful process by which the notion of a “legitimate opposition” gained acceptance in the United States and other democratic societies and the way in which it has frequently threatened to erode. Democratic politics, tending as it so often does towards hyperbole and demagoguery, all too easily generates claims about the wanton stupidity, immorality, or just plain evil of one’s political opponents.

         But it is not casual hyperbole, insincerely employed and quickly forgotten, that most seriously threatens democratic societies. It is when the denial of legitimate difference congeals into a system of thought, into an ideology which admits only one permissible point of view on key issues, and judges all who fail to share this point of view as ipso facto beyond the pale. Such systems of thought, reinforced through constant repetition in media and by political party organizations, have led again and again not only to the erosion of democratic societies, but to their destruction.

         If politics has reached such a dire state in America today, the reason is not simply “polarization,” but the toxic growth of several distinct and distinctly contemporary patterns of thought that all tend to undermine the idea that citizens with different political principles and moral values can collectively deliberate on the public good. They span the political spectrum, and can be labeled, in turn, technocracy, market fundamentalism, Trumpian populism, and wokeness. Each seeks to place key issues in American life beyond the bounds of political debate, subject to only one permissible point of view, and they can, for this reason, be called antipolitical. They represent not so much a contribution to politics as a contribution to its destruction. They all have historical roots but have all evolved into new and powerful forms in recent years. Partly this is because the contemporary media environment groups like-minded people into hermetic “silos” with such dreadful efficiency, making it far more difficult to submit extreme and insistently repeated claims to even the most elementary forms of objective verification. Partly it is because these different patterns of thought have shown a surprising capacity to influence and interact with each other. 

         Over the past few years, this shriveling of politics has principally spurred attention among left intellectuals broadly associated with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. It has been a leitmotif in the work of the influential legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn, who has done much to popularize the concept of “antipolitics,” which he drew from a constellation of thinkers including the French intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon. Early in his career, Moyn used the term to characterize the human rights crusades that took shape in the 1970’s, charging them with circumscribing the field of action of progressive social movements and siphoning off their energy. More recently he has emerged as a strong critic of the authority now held by the American Supreme Court. This year, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy picked up on the idea of “antipolitics” in a forceful book-length essay entitled Two Cheers for Politics. Purdy claims that “our institutional and intellectual life, our culture and common sense, are made up substantially of warnings against politics and appeals to alternative sources of order: enduring constitutions, sober norms, the wisdom of markets.”

         Valuable as they are, these works suffer from two problems. First, they tend to conflate the antipolitical and the antidemocratic. Purdy, for instance, holds up James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville as “antipolitical” figures because of their strong and well-known beliefs about the dangers of untrammeled democracy. But if we think of politics as a society’s collective deliberation about the common good, Madison and Tocqueville were in no sense antipolitical. They both believed passionately in what they called political liberty, and ferociously opposed systems in which a central authority decides all public matters. They both advocated what they considered a healthy, lively political life — but with safeguards against the sort of democratic excesses that they believed led to despotism, political collapse, and civil war. This makes them conservative and anti-egalitarian in certain senses, and perhaps “antidemocratic” as well — but hardly antipolitical.

         Secondly, the “antipolitical” intellectuals tend to see the threat coming almost entirely from phenomena that they associate with the political right and center. They are not wrong in what they see happening there, but they err in characterizing the rise of antipolitics as a simple question of right versus left, with the left as the heroic opposition. The left, too, is culpable for a form of antipolitics — associated with the overly broad but unavoidable term wokeness — which has become increasingly influential in American society, and whose anti-liberal excesses figures such as Moyn and Purdy have been reluctant to criticize. The existence of this left antipolitics undercuts the comforting idea that what we are living through in the United States today is essentially another chapter in the long conflict between “the people” and “the elites,” and that a more successful version of Occupy or the Sanders campaign might bring about the people’s triumph.

         In fact, the existence of the left version of antipolitics suggests strongly that something different, and more dire is at work in America today. It suggests that the antipolitical impulses at work in America do not principally derive from a fear of politics, from a terror among elites of a powerful and unruly demos. To the contrary, they derive from a more generalized fear of the weakness and failure of politics, in what very quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

         The different versions of antipolitics circulating in the United States today have this in common: they all share the conviction that the political system has failed in its most important task. For technocrats, this task is to manage the fearsomely complex challenges of postindustrial society. For the market fundamentalists, it is to safeguard the sacrosanct market system from interference by disruptive interest groups. For the Trumpian populists, it is to protect real Americans, genuine Americans, from being ruined by elites and overrun by strangers who share neither their heritage nor their values. And for the “woke,” it is to protect historically oppressed groups from further oppression and to repair the damage done to them.

         All these groups, of course, have their agendas and their material interests. But all have managed to craft enormously resonant messages, which our deranged media and social media systems, as they distill outrage into profit with such dreadful efficiency, amplify all too powerfully. Worse, the endless, strident competition between these groups, their demonization of each other, and the resulting political paralysis only reinforces the fundamental perception, common to all of them and grounded all too firmly in reality, that our political system is indeed failing, in what amounts to a truly mephitic positive feedback loop. In the resulting political universe, even crises on the scale of the financial collapse of 2008 and the pandemic have failed to bring about genuine change, or the popular movement that figures such as Purdy hoped might crystallize. 

         This is, then, the paradox of our politics today: while nearly everyone believes that our political system has failed, there also seems to be a broad consensus that the only possible response is to restrict the space of the political yet further, to place ever-larger swathes of American life beyond the reach of collective deliberation and decision-making, to further reduce the space of toleration and patience without which no responsible politics can flourish. What one group sees as the protection of sacrosanct rights, others perceive as a tyrannical imposition. In the process, all sense of a common political community and a “legitimate opposition” evaporates, and, as Foucault once put it, riffing on Clausewitz, politics becomes the continuation of war by other means.

        The first pattern of antipolitical thought at work in the United States today is the one that Steven Pinker exemplifies, namely technocracy. Today technocracy is often seen, mistakenly, as a cause whose time is past. When the sociologist Daniel Bell (my father) analyzed it in 1973 in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, the term summoned up images of white-coated experts working for government bureaucracies, think tanks, and large corporations such as IBM. These experts would provide direction to elected officials as they proceeded with large-scale social and economic planning. The Communist bloc, with its massive, petrified bureaucracies and its “new class” of officials and experts, seemed to offer a hypertrophied version of this sort of technocracy, while Western European institutions such as France’s ultra-powerful École Nationale d’Administration and Commissariat Général du Plan offered a more compelling example. Today, the appeal of central planning has ebbed almost entirely away across most of the planet. In the sector of the economy which Bell and others saw as the principal arena for the triumph of the technocrats — information technology — the future did not belong to armies of white-coated company men from IBM and MIT. Instead, it was seized by swaggering upstart capitalists possessed, in many cases, of a distinctly counter-cultural vibe. 

         But as the success of Pinker’s work suggests, technocracy still has powerful resonance for many Americans. One relatively benign version has found a home in the more cautious and wonky precincts of the Democratic party, among officeholders who aim to achieve their goals as much as possible through technical and regulatory changes, thereby avoiding risky political conflict. Barack Obama, for all the soaring rhetoric of his campaigns, gravitated towards these in-the-weeds policies, for instance by preferring the technical fixes of the Dodd-Frank Act to any serious attempt to restructure the financial sector in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and by failing to include a public option in Obamacare. His influential advisor Cass Sunstein, an authority on the theory and practice of regulation, has advocated the pursuit of reform through the careful and expertly designed “nudging” of public behavior in a wide variety of arenas. He has called this “libertarian paternalism.” As Moyn has put it, “When it comes to government helping people achieve fulfillment, Sunstein insists that technocrats must rule. With a palpable sense of relief, he has confessed that he finds politics mostly a distraction and not so much about contending collective visions of the good life or about calling out the oppression that claims to expertise can mask.” To be sure, technocrats are not valueless or amoral people, and Sunstein’s regulatory work has been motivated by a concern for the good life, and the safe life, and the fair life. 

         A far more threatening form of technocracy has found advocates among American oligarchs, notably the former business partners Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Few things do more to breed arrogant over-confidence than the acquisition of a multi-billion-dollar fortune, and these men believe they know far better than any career politician — not to mention the American public — how to solve the country’s problems. To be sure, while they share the older technocrats’ conviction that governance can be approached like an engineering problem, they utterly reject the idea that doing so requires a large bureaucracy. They generally have a strong libertarian streak (Thiel backed Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns and has a weakness for Ayn Rand) and they take the tech startup as their organizational model: lean, fast-moving, and totally in thrall to a dominant, charismatic leader. As Sam Adler-Bell wrote in a recent profile of Thiel’s protégé, Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters: “the Thielites want to see the government hollowed out… They wish to unseat the liberal technocratic elite only so they can install their own: a more competent, compliant and unfettered one.”

         It is hard to know what actual political program these technocratic oligarchs envision, beyond wrecking the federal government and freeing companies like theirs from regulation and taxes. In their hunger for domination and their scorn for competition, in their sense of themselves as a priesthood that exclusively understands the esoteric needs of the hour, in their economic power and their political unaccountability, they are dangerous. Whatever is wrong with OSHA, it is not an apparatus of conquest and control. Unlike the technocrats of the 1960’s, and the Democratic wonks of our day, the new technocratic vision of the future comes in considerable part from science fiction, meaning that it depends on technologies that do not yet exist and may never do so, such as Elon Musk’s comic-book “hyperloop” that would solve traffic congestion problems by whisking passengers in capsules through depressurized underground tubes at seven hundred miles per hour. Most significantly, these would-be technologist-kings have a visceral contempt for democracy. Curtis Yarvin, an addled blogger admired by both Thiel and Masters, has openly suggested that a Big Tech CEO should become an American Caesar, ruling dictatorially. 

        Free market fundamentalism also has a very long pedigree. Nineteenth-century classical liberals promoted the notion that unfettered markets provided the most efficient way to distribute goods and services for maximum overall social benefit. Markets, they argued, were naturally self-organizing and self-regulating, and could therefore safely be left to operate in their own natural state of equilibrium, without interference from the state. This vision, just as much as the technocratic one, was of a society free from politics — a society where ordinary people had little or no recourse to political action. Pierre Rosanvallon has argued that when taken to an extreme, it can leave ordinary people almost as vulnerable to forces beyond their control as totalitarianism does. The historian Jacob Soll has demonstrated in his important book Free Market: The History of an Idea that the vision also broke with the long tradition of market thought that prevailed from antiquity through the eighteenth century, up to and including the work of Adam Smith. For all his paeans to the operations of the free market, Smith firmly believed that it could only operate within structures and limits devised and maintained by powerful states.

         In more recent decades, free market fundamentalism has radicalized. Acolytes of Milton Friedman press for keeping government entirely out of economic life, and indeed for limiting government as much as possible to military and police functions. They insist that the need for maximum possible economic growth justifies high levels of economic inequality, coupled with powerful restraints upon taxation, regulation, economic planning, nationalization, and labor organization. So-called neoliberals put particular emphasis on freeing the financial sector of the economy from regulation, on allowing “creative destruction” and “disruption,” and on insisting that free trade needs to operate on a global level, with goods and services freely circulating at maximum possible speed and volume across the world.

         Unlike technocracy, free market fundamentalism no longer has high-profile gurus like Thiel, Musk, or Pinker. The days of Friedman and Hayek — or, on a comically lower intellectual level, Ayn Rand and Arthur Laffer — are past. As Soll notes, Friedman himself had maximum visibility and overt political influence in the 1980’s, the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Yet the doctrine retains enormous strength through such institutions as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the corporations and hedge funds who ensure through their donations that the congressional Republican party — and much of the Democratic delegation as well — remain committed to the gospel of tax cuts. Just this past August, congressional Republicans without a single exception voted against President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with its 15% minimum tax for large corporations, while once-Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema engineered the preservation of the low tax provision most cherished by hedge fund managers (the “carried interest” provision). As noted, advocates of the new, stripped down, oligarchic version of technocracy, who often have libertarian backgrounds, can sound surprisingly like free market fundamentalists. Steven Pinker cheers on globalization and rails against what he calls “collectivization, centralized control, government monopolies and suffocating permit bureaucracies.” He does so despite the fact that allowing markets to operate without political oversight blatantly contradicts the idea of allocating goods and services according to technocratic expertise.

        With Trumpian populists, the shriveling of politics takes a very different form. In their rhetoric, at least, Donald Trump and his many acolytes have no sympathy either for technocrats or free market fundamentalists. They excoriate and ridicule both as foolish, greedy, unpatriotic, and out-of-touch elites. They rage against “globalists” and globalization, lax immigration policies, and free market agreements such as NAFTA that allowed American corporations to move jobs beyond our borders. They scorn government experts as corrupt members of the “administrative state” or the “deep state” or the “swamp.” They call for returning political power to “the people” in terms sometimes quite close to those of the Sanders left and the Occupy movement.

         The catch, of course, is in how they define “the people.” Few of them go as far as the tiresome reactionary Ann Coulter, who in 2016 proposed limiting the vote to people with four U.S.-born grandparents (a measure that would exclude Donald Trump, among others). But Trump himself often speaks of “real” Americans (or, in a recent fundraising letter, “REAL Americans.”) He takes care not to define them in ethnic terms, but his rhetoric leaves little doubt as to whom he takes them to be. Real Americans are proudly patriotic, overtly religious, and live outside large cities (“Democrat cities,” otherwise known as hellholes). They believe in the Second Amendment but not in climate change, they eat meat but not tofu, they own pickup trucks rather than Priuses. They are white. They are convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, and that Joe Biden and the Democrats are consciously plotting to “destroy” the country. Some even believe that Biden and Nancy Pelosi are kidnapping children to drink their blood. Only these Americans, in the Trumpian populist view, really deserve to have a voice in deliberations about the common good.

         This idea would be noxious enough if it remained mainly a rhetorical cudgel. But in recent years, figures across the American right have drawn on it to forge what amounts to a coherent and powerful anti-democratic ideology. They increasingly insist, buoyed by the work of intellectuals from quasi-authoritarian places such as the Claremont Institute, and drawing on James Madison’s famous distinction, that America is a republic and not a democracy. They therefore justify (as somehow “republican”) the gerrymandering of congressional seats, the hugely disproportionate power granted small rural states in the Senate, and the way the Electoral College gives presidential candidates the ability to win elections while losing the popular vote. They also tout the “great replacement theory” according to which elites are consciously trying to replace “real Americans” with immigrants who do not share their values, thereby casting doubt on the legitimacy of naturalized citizenship for millions. They shower praise on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and the thuggish tactics he has used to muzzle a free judiciary and a free press. Most dangerously, they press the notion that Republican-controlled state legislatures have the right to override the popular vote. In short, the Trumpian populists believe in politics, but only for themselves, only when it produces the outcome they prefer.

        In practice, over the past several decades, adherents of these three currents of antipolitical American thought have been able to make common cause, united by a shared hatred of liberal elites and government regulation. The Republican party, Newt Gingrich in 1994 through the Tea Party in 2009 to Donald Trump in 2016, proved brilliantly adept at muffling blatant contradictions and gathering oligarchic technocrats, libertarian financiers, and ethnonationalist populists into a coalition that might not command a majority of the citizenry but could nonetheless win national elections. And so, despite the contradictions, it is easy to imagine these three currents as a single malign antipolitical force — “the right” — that a properly energized and powerful left, committed to real democracy, should have the ability to overcome. It is easy to imagine antipolitics as a left-right issue.

         But unfortunately the left has its own version of antipolitics, commonly known as wokeness. It is a system of thought that stems from the best of intentions, namely to protect historically oppressed groups from further oppression and to redress the wrongs done to them. But it, too, ends up placing numerous issues outside the realm of the political, in this case by defining them as moral absolutes and matters of inalienable right.

To be sure, many left-wing intellectuals whom I would call antipolitical insist loudly on the inescapably “political” nature of their work. But their definition of the political is very different from the one I have offered here. Heavily influenced by Foucault, they see modern societies as fundamentally shaped by hegemonic belief systems grounded in exclusion (of women, people of color, sexual minorities). “Political” work consists of exposing and challenging these belief systems and the exclusionary practices that stem from them. From this point of view, collective deliberation about the public good is only authentic and productive when it takes place among those who have done the work of exposing and challenging. The only legitimate political discourse is dissent. In practice, it is a stance that makes the vast arena of legitimate political activity — both in terms of who can participate, and which issues they can debate — vanishingly small.

         It goes without saying that many key issues facing the United States today do indeed involve moral absolutes and inalienable rights. Critics of wokeness often forget that things which they themselves may now place in the “inalienable right” category — the right of gays to marry, for instance — not so long ago struck most Americans as wild progressive overreach. There are many issues which clearly should not be left up to a popular vote. Imagine, for instance, the results of a referendum on interracial marriage held in the United States in 1920. But as figures such as Madison and Tocqueville so keenly argued, political deliberation need not always be, indeed should not always be, democratic, in the sense of reflecting the conscious and immediate desires of the majority. Particularly on issues of great moral import, such deliberation may more properly involve relatively undemocratic institutions such as the courts. But it should still, in some sense, derive from national institutions and express the will, as mediated notably through the constitution, of the nation as a whole.

Wokeness, on the other hand, puts the definition of what qualifies as a moral absolute and a matter of inalienable right solely in the hands of the oppressed group itself, and its members’ claims as to what constitutes harm. They are, in this view, epistemologically privileged: their experiences allow them to see further and understand more. If members of the group declare that even the discussion of an issue causes them pain, or places them in danger, others must defer to them, and set that issue beyond the bounds of deliberation entirely. This notion of deference does not just disquiet thinkers on the right. The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, an eloquent advocate of reparations to African Americans, wisely writes in his book Elite Capture: “For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present.”

         For the moment, wokeness of this sort has the greatest influence in universities and in the elite media. Even publishing, as opposed to writing, an article deemed harmful or dangerous — for instance, Senator Tom Cotton’s New York Times op-ed “Send in the Troops” in response to the protests following the killing of George Floyd — can cost editors their jobs. Despite the hysterical charges emanating from the right, wokeness has not taken control of public primary and secondary education (except perhaps in a handful of schools and districts), or large corporations, or the military. But it has had an undeniable effect in the Democratic party. In heavily blue districts and states — and in presidential primaries — candidates run serious risks if they express heterodox opinions on a variety of issues, including issues that large majorities of Americans consider vexed and difficult, such as abortion, or affirmative action, or hormone therapy for prepubescent children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Invoking the notions of a moral absolute and inalienable rights, as defined by those who have suffered or may suffer harm, activists rule out political deliberation on these issues by the community — a group of people with many life experiences — as a whole. And so politics shrivels.

        All of these corrosive systems of thought have long pedigrees. Antipolitics is nothing new. But in recent years it has become far more powerful, and far more of a threat to American democracy, for several reasons. First and foremost is the current media environment, in which populism and wokeness in particular thrive. Today a handful of huge corporations derive enormous profits from keeping their users in a state of permanent outrage, driving them to click on link after link, to take in hour after hour of cable news and radio talk, and to see and hear endless advertisements carefully tailored to their demographic profile and their previous spending. Read about the Democratic “regime” and its latest dictatorial power grab! (and click here to learn about a miraculous new performance enhancer). Hear about the latest racist outrage from a right-wing professor! (and let us tell you about our new line of electric cars). And so on and so forth. Algorithms are carefully defined and refined to keep audiences exposed to the same sites and programs, depriving them of other sources of information and constantly reinforcing the same one-sided narratives. Twitter especially was designed for outbursts and invective and slogans and conformity; in a political order that depends on thoughtfulness, Twitter is most often the technology of thoughtlessness. Moreover, Trumpian populism and wokeness have long served as each other’s favorite targets. Trumpistas like nothing more than to warn against woke bogeymen such as “Critical Race Theory” and transgender bathrooms. The woke, with more reason, see Trumpian populism as a thin veil draped over the cause of white supremacy.

         Free market fundamentalists and technocrats do not participate in the new media environment in the same way, and as already noted, in both cases the heyday of their overt political influence is long past. But globalization, and the dynamics of what much of the left continues to call, with a rather touchingly naïve hope, “late-stage capitalism,” ensures that market forces themselves remain as powerful as ever, generating money that floods the political system to protect against profit-reducing regulation. And Wall Street plutocrats have found few better investments than political campaigns. A few million directed to the right senators can save billions in tax breaks. Meanwhile, the new breed of technocrats has proven all too skillful in forging alliances with the Trumpian populists and harnessing the populist resentments that breed so furiously online.

         In fact, the different streams of thought feed off each other in often unexpected ways. As already noted, free market fundamentalists, Trumpian populists, and the new technocrats share a hostility towards most of the federal government as it currently exists, and eagerly collaborate in attacking it. The woke and the Trumpian populists, meanwhile, both direct much of their ire towards an allegedly oppressive elite establishment, even if the first sees it as embodying white supremacy, and the second, a cosmopolitan liberal contempt for ordinary people. And while the Trumpian populists fixate on border security and traditional sexual values, libertarian market fundamentalists and the woke are both more likely to celebrate sexual difference and to support increased migration. More generally, as Jedediah Purdy comments, many progressives agree with market fundamentalists that personal freedom and autonomy, albeit defined by the two groups in hugely different ways, are “too essential to be left to democracy.”

         Above all, though, all these streams of thought thrive on the conviction that politics itself has failed in the United States, leading to the conclusion that key elements of the public good can only be preserved and advanced by extra-political means. And, of course, the ever more bitter political strife that they generate in pursuing these extra-political means turns the conviction into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as endless outrage and controversy chokes the political system and drives it ever further into paralysis. By teaching the failure of politics they bring about the failure of politics. The Biden administration has managed, against great odds, to pass significant legislation despite this nefarious dynamic, and for the moment has partially overcome the paralysis. But if 2025 brings us a Republican president and Congress, they will undoubtedly take as their first order of business the reversal of these achievements.

         At the end of this dark road, if we continue down it, stand the new technocrats. It is they who most clearly and explicitly reject politics itself as corrupt and inefficient, and it is they who, in the long run, will benefit if the American public becomes entirely despairing about political life. It is all too easy for me, as a historian, to see how the public could, in its despair and disgust, ultimately embrace a charismatic technocratic figure promising to stand above the corrupt political fray, to manage social problems in a unifying and rational, if dictatorial, manner. The promise worked for Napoleon Bonaparte, whose version of enlightened despotism was the technocracy of his day. It worked for many others who followed in his wake. This outcome may still seem unlikely, but if the political conflict in this country turns violent (or rather more violent: it is already violent) then people will not simply despair about politics; they will start to fear it. At that point, the appeal of a Caesar could become overwhelming.

         Can we save politics, real politics, a common deliberation about the common good, from this fate? Is it possible to imagine a new sort of movement arising that could bring together enough citizens to produce real achievements, and restore a faith in political life? I see no possibility of such a movement arising today out of the American right. The rot there, the rejection of politics in the name of “real Americans” and even of dictatorship, is far too strong, reinforced as it is by a conservative media machine of unprecedented power. Nor is there any evidence of a significant internecine clash within the Republican Party about its future. There is more of a possibility of a pro-politics politics arising on the left, and it is worth remembering the genuine appeal that the Sanders campaign had for at least some Trump voters. But for the American left to generate such a movement successfully it has to reject its own version of antipolitics and the Puritanical moral absolutism that accompanies it. Only by turning away from this moral absolutism and focusing on causes that genuine majorities of the country can unite behind, does such a movement stand even a slim chance of success. Otherwise, genuine political life in America will continue to shrivel, until nothing at all is left of it. A society without a belief in politics is a kind of hell.