The Oasis of Principle

Nearly a quarter-century ago, Stanley Fish's book The Trouble with Principle made a stir in literate America. That and his other writings have led academic peers to attack him as a cynically relativist gadfly, but the book in question reads pretty much as if Principle were a fair maiden languishing in partisan captivity. It's her fate to be used, Fish protests, as an unassailable surrogate for people's assailable motives. Joseph Conrad, who had known a politicized home life as the child and eventual orphan of elite young activists, seems to have held a kindred view: that the true motivators of political action are personal interests and impulses, not impersonal ideas.

Observers of political life in America today routinely cite the intensification of partisanship but less often dwell on its correlative: open indifference to principles and, in some cases, scorn for Lady Principle herself.

An extreme example of indifference to principles is the case of evangelical Christians who swear by Donald Trump, an impudently unrepentant sinner oblivious of any higher will than his own. (Seek forgiveness? “I don't bring God into that picture.”) Devoutly religious people ought to have principles, to say the least. Religious faith is, after all, surrender to an elemental principle. Religious practice consists in the observance of attendant principles. Religiosity loses its character when untrammeled by principles. And that's what has happened. The most bumptious of Christian zealots, seeing a political advantage, have turned themselves into pagan idolaters.

Idolatry seems an apt term for any partisan alternative to the work of conserving common reservoirs of good. Idolatry — the worship of an artificial god that's there to dispense favors to the favored. The difference between thoroughgoing partisanship and even faltering service to impartial principles is the difference between the prayer "Make me successful" and the prayer "Make me good."

An idol may take the form of a construct named like a principle but set up for the antithetical purpose of granting its priesthood unspecified latitude. This is the case with equity (the sociopolitical term of art) versus equality. A commitment to equality hems you in with standards and definite tasks. A commitment to equity turns you loose in a political toyshop. Adherents of equality may admit a need for certain pragmatic steps to offset disadvantages, but adherents of equity will admit nothing. Why should they, if they've got one of the gods of social justice on their side? To the principled question, At what point will equity have been attained?, the partisan reply is always going to be, "We’ll let you know."

Two words commonly conjoined with equity — diversity and inclusivity (or inclusion) — take partisan wordplay further. Whereas equity is a usefully vague replacement for another word, diversity and inclusivity are cases of redefinition. Partisan usage narrows the definition of diversity by reducing its referents to mostly biological identity groups and treating any demand for diversity of worldview or political inclination as counter-revolutionary mischief. The redefinition of inclusivity is a bold inversion of the straightforward meaning, openness to all as on a commons where people of every description can mingle on equal terms. Here, inclusivity means partisan displacement; a game of musical chairs managed so as to shunt some participants to the sidelines while seating others in politically secure positions. As to the inversion of anti-racism, plenty has already been written.

The Republican Party once seemed to be all head and no heart. Now it's nothing but viscera. However, to say that Republicans have changed would miss the mark. They haven't changed so much as they’ve undergone a great replacement. The patrician skinflints who long employed the powers of social darkness as electoral muscle are now reduced to dining elbow-to-elbow with those powers, glumly staring into their soup while the rafters ring with indecent banter. By and by they creep away, taking their principles with them. Obstreperous upstarts, bringing only partisan energy, move in. This is how the party changes.

Worst, at the bar of history, is the fate of those old-school politicians who've acquired more power than they can walk away from. Consider the case of Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader during the presidency of Donald Trump, who nearly distinguished himself at the end of that sordid chapter by orating against Trump’s insurrectionist offenses from the Senate floor, first on January 18, 2021, and again, even more forcefully, on February 13. In the meantime, however, he had found a rationale for saying "not guilty" in the selfsame voice and leading his Republican majority to acquit Trump of those offenses in an impeachment trial. If there's anything more ignominious than to surrender your principles outright, it's to make a stirring show of them while surrendering them as an aside.

Such is the open indifference to principles in American political life today. It exists on both sides of the left-right divide, much to the disgust of the middle. However, scorn for the very principle of bowing to principle is especially an ace in the hole of activists on the cultural left.

People who wish to re-order society (or who wish to sweep away the competition in their own careers) have an interest in overthrowing impersonal principles; not only common standards, blindfold assessments, and impartial procedures, but also those principles of individual conduct that regulate esteem.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture recently [as of July, 2020] unveiled guidelines for talking about race. A graphic displayed in the guidelines, entitled "Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States," declares that rational thinking and hard work, among others, are white values.

In the section, Smithsonian declares that "objective, rational, linear thinking," "quantitative emphasis," "hard work before play," and various other values are aspects and assumptions of whiteness.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture had no comment for Newsweek. They referred to the website's page titled "Whiteness" when asked for additional comment. The graphic was later removed from the page.

—Marina Watts in Newsweek (July 17, 2020)

It's often impossible to know when the anarchic impetus is actually coming from a member of the minority that's supposed to profit by it and when it's coming from a majority-group ally, but it's telling that the rationale may spill over into "the soft bigotry of low expectations" without being caught until complaints lead to a retraction and apology. Profoundly telling. The image of the white savior reaching down to join hands with children of nature could hardly find a more appropriate application. It makes no difference whether the authors of patronizing declarations like the Smithsonian's are themselves white or not. The mentality is of privileged-white origin.

This is one of the pitfalls in the anti-principle path. It's the summer of 2020. Some politically acute person encounters the new whipping-boy of "whiteness" and wishes to take part in the whipping. The word suggests Northern European colonizers and their culture, so — Puritanism, Protestant work ethic, Age of Reason, etc. Yes, that’s the ticket. Deprecate hard work and analytical thought, and you strike a blow against whiteness. It's just that with this narrow focus on discrediting a particular political object, you fail to notice ramifications and contradictions. After all, the world is home to work ethics that owe nothing to Protestantism, and analytical thought that owes nothing to a certain phase of European history. Throughout American society and elsewhere, such wellheads of principle are valuable resources. People whose acuteness is of the non-political kind understand that this is so. If they know they belong in the company of capable people, they won't take kindly to being cast as outsiders.

Before that summer, a certain principle held a prominent place among black commentators: the principle of black agency. Racial justice, to be genuine and honorable, must be won by black people and not dispensed by white ones. Then came the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the racial reckoning that ensued, and suddenly the good offices of whites were available in superabundance. When such a host of well-connected white allies had mustered for the fight against racism, it was hardly possible to deny them leading roles even if that wouldn't have been terribly self-defeating in practical terms. Thus black activists found themselves employing the powers of whiteness as muscle and more. At the same time, it was to be understood that black people — that is, some incorporeal black authority with the power of speaking through individuals — would preside as arbiter of racial truth. This was the way forward: black agency brought to you by white agents.

We'll never know, or won't till times have changed again, what results the uncompromised principle of black agency would have achieved. It was hard but not impossible to foresee the jumble of good intentions and wanton impulses, of productive work and destructive play, that resulted from the compromise. At a minimum, a worthy cause might have been spared association with schoolteachers' fevered takeaways from critical race theory and minor bureaucrats' inability to do a number on whiteness without insulting blacks.

The path of principle is not magical in the sense that it necessarily leads to the success of any project. However, it is magical in that it starts from every point on the compass and leads to a common reservoir of good. It's like the path of unbiased reporting in journalism. Freedom from bias may be unattainable, but it makes a world of difference whether journalists strive toward it or not. Their striving leads to the place of best conditions for accurate understanding. Principled effort by people engaged in politics, or at least by their audience, would lead to the place of best conditions for wise political behavior. Principles may be mirages, but the principle of Principle is a true oasis.

Card Game

At the point where youth catches sight of adulthood, you feel that your own time in history is destined to be a watershed. You retain the vanity of the child who says, "When I grow up, I'll (be everything good and get everything right)," while gaining an adult's knowledge of the world. You and your cohort will set the world straight. You, with your fresh eyes, see clearly what past generations have seen dimly if at all: that war is folly, that love is the answer, that we're all brothers and sisters.

Until now, that is; until this phase of American history that has more of the maelstrom than the watershed about it. War is folly? Many Baby Boomers thought so in their youth, before some wave of feminism came along and diverted them to the cause of getting women involved in the bombing and strafing. Today, the hill of equal opportunity having been taken, war itself is in vogue with the youthful Left. One factor is that Ukraine, with the West at its back, is now fighting a war for national survival against a rapacious Vladimir V. Putin. Another is that Putin shares a space in many American minds with Donald Trump. Yet another is that the working-class segment of Trump’s base, grievously versed in the concept of a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, has already made the anti-war position its own. To adopt a sanguine view of war, then, is to join in the great struggle against a Trumpist-Putinist Axis. The justice of Ukraine's particular struggle provides moral cover for doing what one wants to do anyway. Support for that struggle and for America's part in it, which ought to be arrived at after a journey of sorrow, becomes a snap. Look at the reader comments in The New York Times during 2022 and see all the heroes jumping aboard polemical trains to the front.

"Love is the answer" and "We're all brothers and sisters" have gone the same way in related handbaskets. Maniacal partisanship has put agape out of mortal reach for those concerned, while the biological essentialism of current leftist thought (barely matched by right-wing bigotry) has made the notion of "all brothers and sisters" downright heretical.

Biological essentialism, in turn, is teetering on the brink of its own sub-maelstrom. Only a few years ago, "toxic masculinity" was a veritable Homeric epithet in progressive discourse, so well was it understood that the human race consisted of good, wise, cooperative females and bad, doltish, self-seeking males. But even as hard-core feminist writers were busily turning the adjectives into money, someone was making off with the nouns. It seems in retrospect as if there had been one morning when they awoke to find their cash cows and bulls gone, but of course it didn't really happen overnight. It happened just slowly enough for some feminists to remark that a transsexual (hereinafter transgender) person who had changed from male to female was not a real woman; but those feminists were already on the wrong side of history. Before much longer, room will have to be found on the wrong side of history for those who assert that a transgender woman is, too, a real woman. Though their time has not yet passed, it has entered a state of incoherence as radical progressives call upon each other to deny that binary sexuality has any basis in fact. It's impossible to be a real woman if womanhood is make-believe.

That's where matters stand, in a snapshot taken at this moment. The vanishing of nouns has of course sparked a riot among the pronouns, but it's really the noun situation that's leading people and organizations into madness. We can skip over most of the contrivances by which men and, especially, women have been banished from the public lexicon out of regard for incomparably smaller portions of the human race. However, there is one example among the latest that demands attention.

Sometime in the first half of last month (apparently), the Johns Hopkins University Office of Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) updated its online LGBTQ Glossary to amend the definition of lesbian from "a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women" to "a non-man attracted to non-men." As one can infer from that amendment, the term "gay man" remained unmolested: "a man who is ... attracted to other men." Yes, really. In one stroke, Johns Hopkins justified the darkest paranoia of the fiercest feminist. The vision of "erasing women" became literal truth. Men could appear as themselves. Women must appear as Adam's phantom ribs: non-men.

The reaction was intense. The glossary was taken down for review. But consider: the author of the amendment was some person with a conscious care for representation; they must have discussed it with some other such person, if not a committee (though Johns Hopkins had the brass to assert -- defensively assert, not apologetically admit -- that the misogynistic content was "not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership"); and yet it went out to the world. What this is an example of, surely, is not a positive wish to erase women, but the lunatic confusion in store for minds that get drawn into the game of improvising fundamental change. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive a new reality instead of improving the one we've got. The glossary people could have solved their representation problem with a footnote, but no. They had to dabble in creative decentering.

This essay began with a remark on the sense that one's own time in history is destined to be a watershed. It then drew some specific contrasts between earlier times and the present while straying from the metaphor of a watershed to those of a maelstrom and a trip to somewhere in a handbasket. However, there's a more fundamental difference between today's movements to change the world and past ones. The very word today's in that last sentence is "dead when it is said" for many of the activists who are now active. Their twentieth-century counterparts identified certain great wrongs, such as racial discrimination or the denial of women's rights or wars of choice, and worked to interest others in righting them. Their social vision was genuinely inclusive, not displacive. Their procedures weren't always realistic or free of hypocrisy, but the faults and the virtues converged on some constant idea. True, political engagement could bring social cachet. It could be an end in itself for some. But it was not then chiefly a pursuit of sociopolitical points carried on for the thrill of scoring or the comfort of garnering credit or the distinction of rule-changing. Now it is. It's that game of improvising fundamental change.

The game-playing character of political engagement shows itself both in the details and in a single unifying pattern. In the politics of race, there's the detail of standing the term anti-racism on its head. There's the detail of commanding attention for a while with a proposal to abolish police departments. (It was a predictably short while, now declared past by The New York Times.) In the politics of sex and gender, there's the cascade of details that leaves women's rights behind, returns sexual orientation to the midst of controversy, and subjects society to an endless bed of coals as new articles of faith are brought to white heat and thrown on: trans women are real women; wait, there are no "real" women; wait, sex is not even binary; wait, sex is nothing more than a construct; wait, we shouldn't be talking about sex when gender is the thing -- well, not the thing, but a limitless variety of things defined by individuals. As to the initial surge of transgender politics and the onset of partisan contention on this head, the freelance journalist Meghan Murphy offers a shrewd insight:

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, "the culmination of decades of litigation and activism." This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d'etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.

Gluing the "T" to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of "born this way" and "accepting people as they are," as well as a need to fight for "equal rights" on this basis.

Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.

Such are the details. The single unifying pattern by which the game-playing character of political engagement manifests itself is the competitive spirit of individual players. Imagine being the first to notice that the term pro-choice can be construed as an affront to those women who are economically compelled to seek an abortion and boldly putting forth pro-abortion as the best term after all. This may be a sucker punch to other progressives, but it makes a splendid breakout for oneself. The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.

Technology is the mother of degeneration. The comparatively sluggish world-changers of the twentieth century were different in themselves, but it probably matters more that they differed in their opportunities. Who, being constantly in touch with a multitude of other people, would not fall prey to an exaggerated sense of collective destiny and a concomitant dread of personal irrelevance? The feeling that a day mustn't go by without some new proof of revolutionary vigor belongs to an age of constant communication.

Andrew Sullivan, an early advocate of legalizing same-sex marriage, maintained a steady, influential focus on that goal. The outcome he helped attain reached beyond a judicial ruling to broad social acceptance of homosexuality. Now he sees that acceptance under threat -- actually declining in a recent Gallup poll -- by association with manic sex-and-gender activism and its more appalling consequences. Manic activism across the spectrum of progressive interests is like a compulsive card game. It undermines lives and corrodes society as the players throw in stakes that don't even belong to them, looking to win the next trick; or the next; or the next.

But history, though stingy with watersheds, is generous with tides. As the night the day, an ebb tide must follow the flood. This is most definitely true of latter-day American manias. The players in the game of improvising fundamental change will lose interest, their passion spent and the surrounding disarray having grown too uncomfortable. When they turn away from the table, it will transpire that all they've really done with their cards is to build a house of them. The first breeze of the morning after will take care of that.

This Much Is Certain

It is now three weeks since the thing first came tapping at our chamber window. To be precise (for strange reports must be set down with precision), the sound was not so much a tapping as a fitful going-bump in the night. In the morning twilight, to be precise.

On that first occasion, I lay starkly awake trying to reconcile the evidence of my senses with some rational explanation. One that soon occurred to me was that my wife was kicking the furniture in her sleep. In a place the size of ours, furniture is seldom out of leg's reach. However, I found that she wasn't moving. I would presently learn that she wasn't asleep, either, but was simply keeping her head when all about her were losing theirs.

No, this was something outside the house hitting the window beyond the foot of our bed. Something or someone. But surely no burglar would adopt such a modus operandi: coming at dawn and intermittently messing with the window till we woke up. How about a wayfarer lost in the snow who had spied a light in our window? But there was no snow and no light. For that matter, the curtains were drawn.

Now, birds occasionally dash themselves against windowpanes by mistake, but they either break their necks or repair to the woods thoroughly chastened. When a crow came a cropper against one of our windows last year, it dropped all of a heap and lay there awed by its encounter with the supernatural till it was strong enough to totter off. It didn't try, try again. Birds are no gluttons for punishment.

What, then, was it? Far from hopping up to investigate like some impetuous youth, I continued to take the thinking man's approach. I may have placed my fingertips together under the covers. Wisps of rational explanation swirled around and yet failed to coalesce. When that sort of thing goes on for a while, bafflement begets a sense of the uncanny. If the thinking man's approach yields no rational explanation, mightn't it be time to venture beyond reason? In short, might not this thing that comes bumping at our chamber window be — I know this will seem abrupt — the ghost of some miner doomed to wander the old trolley tunnels that are said to honeycomb this area? To put the case on a sounder footing scientifically, might not this phenomenon be due to the venting of subterranean ectoplasm? That would be fun. Our little cottage would go viral.

I didn't really entertain such a thought at the time. I made it up just now for the sake of argument, though some will say that the scope of admissible arguments ought to be narrower. Anyway, we know for a fact what it is that makes our bumping sound. When we finally peeked between the curtains on that first morning, we found that it was a bird after all. We haven't identified the species. This bird perches on the nearest branch of a peach tree and suddenly flutters up against the window just long enough to make a single light bump. Then it returns to the branch. It does this off and on every day, weather permitting, not only at daybreak but at various times during the daylight hours.

Its motive remains a mystery. In February there's no fermenting fruit (which can actually intoxicate birds) anywhere to be found. I've examined the outside of the window and the surrounding wall but can find no trace of anything edible or otherwise attractive. If this bird is excited by its own reflection, it's unique among all those that have ever stopped by our garden. That and its being a glutton for punishment suggest nothing so much as a reincarnated human being, but I'm setting any such thesis aside in obedience to the voice of reason. It's good to have an inner voice telling you that everything must be due to some natural cause, since -- this much is certain -- there's no such thing as the supernatural.

However, peremptory inner voices abound in today's world. Some people are immured against epistemic inconvenience by the precept that everything is due to God's will, since there's no such thing as a world beyond God's control. Does geological evidence confute a literal reading of Genesis? Well, God made it look that way to test our faith, or else Satan made it look that way to trick us; and Satan's ability to do so is willed by God. Some people who believe themselves free of religious faith argue in the same way, though perhaps not with quite the same absence of guile. Given the cookie cutter of Marxist critique, they spend their intellectual lives cutting Marxist cookies from every kind of material. Leninist critique takes care of international affairs (imperialism not being part of the Marxist lexicon). Does human history show us a world already beset with decadence and exploitation when Europeans were living in huts? Well, European colonialism severed the historical thread two or three hundred years ago, so never mind the ancient part. All the evils of our time are due to colonialism and capitalism: the very things that Marxists and Leninists want them to be due to. More recently, some people have adopted the precept that all violence and social injustice in America are due to white racism. Do the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021 defy analysis as a white-racist hate crime? Does the fatal beating of a black man by black police officers in Memphis last month tend to complicate the race-based view of police brutality? Not for a moment. All social evils in America rest ultimately on white racism, since — since white racism underlies everything in America.

That list of examples brings us a long way from the mentality that attributes a strange noise to a ghost. However, it doesn't leap any great divides. It just traces, in a hopscotch manner, the development of confirmation bias from a blunt instrument to a scalpel. In modern society, a priori precepts are constantly slicing up the collective brain, and the scope of admissible ones is no more governed by reason than by religion. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, in his "Up for Debate" newsletter of February 22, 2023, calls attention to a valuable commentary on this state of affairs. It comes from Brink Lindsey, author of The Permanent Problem on Substack, who perceives the negative consequences of abandoning organized religions although he has never subscribed to one himself. After noting how religious observance is declining across the Western world, Lindsey writes,

Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.

So the sunny view of organized religion's retreat as humanity's intellectual advance really can't be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one's personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the "sacred canopy" has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.

Lindsey's focus is on patent superstition, but the procrustean beds of ideology serve the same purpose for intellectuals. Though dogmatically anti-religious people hate hearing their organized materialism referred to as a form of religion, let alone "the superstition of the 20th century," as Octavio Paz felt compelled to describe what Marxism had become, the characteristics are present there and in political orthodoxies more generally: revealed truth, unimpeachable authority, doctrine and heresy, insiders who have seen the light and outsiders who have not. Whether one tends to adhere to a traditional religion or to a modern substitute, there's a certain level at which one must either reserve the right to do some free thinking or settle down to a life of docile credulity.

Our bird continues to puzzle us. It sometimes moves around the corner of the house to a rose bush in front, from which it can watch us eat while it makes its ascents against the nearest window. Strange. When we're in the bedroom, it comes to the peach tree and jumps up and down. When we're in the living-dining-kitchen space, it comes to the rose bush and jumps up and down. You'd almost think it was trying to tell us something. Mind you, if I could find a rational alternative to the reincarnation thesis, I'd prefer it.

Never Draws Near

I am a Gentile born and bred. A product of the American South and of two long lines of relentlessly Anglo-Saxon agrarian or petty bourgeois Protestants. I mention this because I wish to treat a certain subject the way it was introduced to me: as a moral crystal with facets of human feeling and self-respect besides those of principle, but no facet of personal injury or anxiety.

When I was about 15, my father said he wanted to take me to the movies. It would be just the two of us. This was not unusual in itself. Neither was the venue: a suburban movie theater where I had enjoyed a number of Hollywood trifles and would later work part-time as an usher. What was unusual was the nature of the film. It was a documentary. It was long, and it felt endless. Not that it was boring; on the contrary, it was gripping. At its heart -- its relatively brief dive into the utmost darkness of its subject -- it was searing and eye-opening for a lifetime. Here was a rite of passage.

Afterwards I’d confuse the title of the film with the phrase I retained from it, the idea my father wanted to impress on me at the time: “Never again.” What I had just experienced was in fact the film that established those words in the discussion of the Holocaust. I had been taken to see Mein Kampf, the landmark documentary by the German-born Swedish filmmaker Erwin Leiser.

By that time and for years to come, it seemed natural (to a Gentile innocent) to assume two things about the Holocaust: that it could never happen again, and that everyone would always know it had happened once. The most damning evidence, recorded for posterity by the perpetrators themselves, surely settled both of those questions. The world had changed accordingly, hadn’t it? Enlightenment reigned supreme. And yet my father took care that I should see that evidence and hear those words, “Never again.” What was he worried about?

It turns out there are people who profess not to know that the Holocaust ever happened, but at least it seems impossible for such a thing to happen again. Ironically, the sense of impossibility may be exaggerated now by having seen what did happen once upon a time. Those images belong to a nightmare, and a nightmare is not a thing one projects into broad daylight. However that may be, broad daylight holds its own awful possibilities.

The emergence of Donald Trump as president-elect of the United States affected haters like an invocation. He had prepared them for the moment during his campaign. By his aspersions on Mexican immigrants, his vicious reaction to a shout of “Black lives matter,” his proposal of a Muslim ban, his mocking of a reporter’s physical disability, his encouragement of violence against protesters – and so on – he promised the onset of a Walpurgis Night when bigots and bullies would be free to ride the wind. His election was followed by what The New Yorker, only nine days later, called “a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country.” Surly transgression was in. After taking office, Trump continued to signal sympathy with elements that had kept to the shadows of our merrily enlightened world. A torchlight parade by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, gave him an opportunity to abhor the worst effects of his demagoguery without necessarily owning them, but even after intense pressure brought him to say, in a prepared declaration, “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” he proved unwilling to let those words stand for more than a day before effectively unsaying them. Instead, he went on winning the approbation of a man he’d had to disavow (airily, when possible) several times in the course of his public life: David Duke, a former but unreformed leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Antisemitism is one of the pillars of the KKK’s worldview. After all, the kind of self-loathing that breeds a wish to dominate blacks typically breeds a sense of domination by Jews as well. Personalities drawn to the KKK or other white-supremacist formations will generally want both vices catered to. Donald Trump did not explicitly cater to antisemitism. He could say with more than the usual accuracy that some of his best friends (and family) were Jews, even as he betrayed a garden-variety prejudice in his remarks about Jews generally and perhaps a bit more in his browsing of Adolf Hitler’s speeches. He adopted pro-Israel policies in keeping with the Christian Zionism common among his evangelical Christian supporters. No doubt his own white nationalism was literal -- circumscribed by a mental color barrier -- and did not imply placing Jews beyond the pale. He could take them or leave them. When they faced a threat from emboldened neo-Nazis, he left them. It’s unsurprising that the permissive Walpurgis Night of his ascendancy saw antisemitic violence, such as the massacre of congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, that seemed to burst out of history books long closed.

However, the elective affinity between Donald Trump and reptilian antisemites is not the whole story. Antisemitism in America today finds relief and nourishment in two widely separated quarters that have been influenced by Trump in different but fatefully complementary ways.

First there is Main Street America. School districts here and there about the country have become obtrusions of frayed nerves. Educators overreached in applying progressive dogma to the subject of race; parents objected; and Trump-inspired Republicans exploited the friction by starting to roll back even the commonsense teaching of racial history that had been going on for years. Then the progressive-educator class poured oil on troubled embers by setting out to embed the most speculative contentions of the day regarding sex and gender in primary education; the parents became more exasperated; and the Republicans became more exploitative. These school-centered controversies made news and soon came to exemplify a more general struggle between Americans dedicated to cultural renovation projects and Americans who feel that the demands on their moral purses have become too frequent and heavy. None of this involves the question of antisemitism, but the upshot is a state of sociopolitical overload that makes people want nothing so much as to get away from the din. Getting away is bad for vigilance. In that quarter where people who should revolt against antisemitism are occupied in nursing their nerves, antisemitism finds relief.

The quarter in which it finds nourishment today is, shamefully, the one that produced its most stalwart adversaries not long ago: the combined seats of liberal thought and influence. Elite universities, elite news organizations, and even the Democratic Party provide an environment in which antisemitism can thrive and spawn, unstigmatized by the respective communities. This stupendous reversal became not only possible but easy when progressives, with their outward alliances, overtook liberals, with their inward ethics. Now, antisemites who are comfortable working from the left need only two assets: (1) a generic identity that captivates people on the left; and (2) rudimentary skill at gaming the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

After the Islamist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslims suffered prejudice and incidents of violence in the United States. Liberals, including many Jews, took a strong stand against this bigotry. Activists drove the point home by positively aligning themselves with Muslims as a class. The terrorists were not to be called Islamists or even religious zealots. Their service to Al-Qaeda must be set down to the economic injustice they were presumed (quite erroneously) to have suffered and to America’s support of repressive regimes in the Mideast. In 2001, the very idea that religious faith remained a potent force in the world was unintelligible to the secularists of the Left. Yet their secularism did not prevent them from crediting followers of Islam with a moral purity unknown in Christendom and insisting on a thoroughly benign interpretation of the Qur’an. (Having read it in its entirety, I can’t go so far.) Fifteen years later, Donald Trump’s antipathy to Muslims set the seal on their standing with progressives. If Trump was against them, progressives would be for them. No questions asked.

This is a replication of the status which progressives accord people with roots in Africa, the place from which white people took black people, enslaved them in what is now the USA, and subjected their descendants to the web of oppression known as Jim Crow. This status is designed to make amends for the dehumanizing practice of slavery by the dehumanizing practice of treating individuals as bumps on a racial monolith. It’s not that white progressives (much less black ones) overlook the individuality of blacks. It’s that they don’t want it to complicate what has become a Marxianesque political project, a game of chess played with gigantic pawns. Blacks in toto are one such pawn. Muslims in toto are another.

Categorically opposing bigotry against a class of people does not entail categorically endorsing the views of its members. Blacks and Muslims, like whites or Christians or Jews, are a mixed lot. Some may be individually bigoted. They may even be bigoted in ways that are endemic to the class.

The meaning of that statement as regards Muslims hardly needs explaining. Historical friction between Muslims and Jews has engendered prejudice on both sides. However, even if the balance of prejudice be equal, the implications for American society today are not. After all, liberal America has chosen to stand foursquare behind Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry is going to meet stout opposition. But Muslim bigotry?

Friction between black Americans and Jews is nearly as well known, though its history is much shorter and largely peculiar to urban life. The prevalence of Jewish shopkeepers, moneylenders, landlords, and financial middlemen in predominantly black working-class neighborhoods has caused economic grievances to take the form of ethnic resentment. (More recently, a similar pattern has appeared between urban blacks and Korean merchants.) Again, liberals’ concern is asymmetrical. Within the scope of the actual conflict, it may be a defensible choice to privilege the views of the black working-class side. However, it is not a defensible choice to endorse ill will toward people who have nothing to do with the conflict on account of a shared ethnicity. That’s adopted bigotry.

When a priori solidarity comes to override ethics in those “seats of liberal thought and influence” – especially the universities and the news organizations -- bigotry will thrive where it once was supremely detested. If the bigot speaks from within an approved race or culture, the bigotry will pass for revealed truth. If the bigot's rhetoric starts from an unexceptionable complaint about, say, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, cooperative listeners will proceed to a shared dislike of Israel – of Israelis – of Jews – under their own steam. Politically engaged students who, in earlier incarnations, might have stood with the Anti-Defamation League will now stand with the eternal antisemite as long as it manifests itself before them without fair hair or blue eyes. Progressive staffers at a major newspaper will make the workplace too hot to hold a Jewish journalist for ideological contrariness compounded by “writing about the Jews again.” A member of Congress whose identity hits the sweet spot with progressives will blithely cycle through antisemitic remarks, professions of innocence, ascents to the high ground, and further descents to provocation while keeping the status of star – or at least star’s best friend – in the cast of Democrats to watch.

Because of uncritical solidarity with entire identity groups, the Democratic Party and the progressive culture with which it is associated have embraced individuals who then function as reactionary provocateurs within them. Surely the eventual outcome will not be another Holocaust. But it can fall well short of that and still be an abomination.

Vigilance against this trend must not be, at bottom, a question of solidarity with Jews. It must be a question of principle, of self-respect, of human feeling, and, most fundamentally, of taste. When you know the kind of world you want to live in, you try to build it out around you as far as your influence will reach. You abhor bigotry because it fouls your world. You have the most enduring motive for opposing it: that it offends you.

Cavorting at Eventide

We were brought together in the most casual manner by friends. The sexual revolution had left behind two outposts of the ancien régime, and these friends wisely judged that some unsolicited matchmaking was in order. So, with quite a fine hand, they put us in each other's way at a Christmas party.

Within several months, we were married. Within several years, we'd been favored by the stork several times and thought it best to revisit the question of careless abandon. How far we had come.

Time passed. Now we, the two of us once more, live in a sturdy three-room cottage. Inside, we have a warm bed and a well-stocked refrigerator. Outside, we have a garden that produces a few fruits and vegetables and a larger number of flowers. Butterflies and sparrows seem to like it. So do crows, centipedes, ill-bred cats, and the odd snake. They never promised us a rose garden. But we‘ve got that, too, thanks to my wife’s exertions. In the spring, our cottage is substantially rose-covered.

It’s all ours. We can at least starve under our own roof, should we outlive our means. However, that seems unlikely now. Though we started raising a family late, unsure how we’d fare afterwards, the danger of hardship has receded over the years in a way that seems almost miraculous. On closer examination, we see that the help of others played a part again and again. Even a cottage is the work of many hands. Today we’re also secure in the knowledge that our children are not going to let us dry up and blow away.

Poverty has not come in at the door, but mortality has sidled in on crab’s legs. It was bound to happen in one way or another. At length it happened in roughly the same way to both of us. Oh, there’s no telling how our lives will actually end. It’s just that we’ve each been given something specific to think about.

Here two questions arise, one personal and the other social. The personal question is how to think. The social one is how to act. The first question simply unlocks a mental vault where the answer is kept: a treasury of nature and experience, the sum of which makes you feel either rich or poor in life’s blessings. From that instant, you know how to think. To the extent that you value your life, you can be a good sport about your death. This has nothing to do with courage in the face of suffering. It just means you feel a proper gratitude for what has gone before and a proper recognition that whatever lives must die. Suffering is going to be a drag, certainly.

The social question, how to act, is the one that calls for some thought. If you show sunny gratitude and suave acceptance from the outset, aren’t you setting yourself up for a fall? People may think, “That’s all very well now, my fine friend, but just you wait. Laugh and sing? Why, the time will come when you can barely gasp and groan. Won’t you look silly then! Better to show that you have no illusions about the gravity of the situation.” Then, too, there’s the chance to play tragedy. Tears to be wrung.

But that line of thought is mocked by the adage that defines a miser (sometimes “a fool”) as one who lives poor in order to die rich. Even if I thought the last act of my illness would gain splendor from an air of wisdom cultivated in prior austerity, why should I care? Splendor will have no value for me then. Society will be a departing circus train. Memories of silliness avoided won’t be the ones I cherish.

Of course, suffering is not confined to the last throes; but neither is it necessarily a constant companion. An incurable blood disease can, I assure you, be an absolute walk in the park for years on end as far as the disease itself is concerned. The medical tests along the way are another matter. Chief among them is the bone marrow aspiration: the drawing of marrow from a hip bone with a long needle. It’s notoriously painful, and yet it’s the sort of thing that, when you’ve had the experience, makes you want to say, “Well, yes and no.” Definitely yes, but with a surprising admixture of no. Depending on your turn of mind, you may even feel called upon to spread the good word about bone marrow aspirations.

In our cottage, mortality has announced itself by name (barring unforeseen substitutions). Though I describe only my particular case, I can report that both of us are among those to whom high spirits come easily and persist comfortably at no cost in realism. As long as we can laugh, we’ll laugh. As long as we can play like children at the dawn of life, we’ll play. When suffering comes, we’ll see if we can’t shake it off like wet dogs and romp again. Why not? More’s the fun for all. At last, between labored gasps and groans, we’ll try to glimpse the beauty of a darkling world.

So comedic an approach to death may not suit everyone, but it seems we two are inclined that way. Our matchmakers had us pegged.

❖
Reconciled but Hungry
On Bone Marrow Aspirations
Scrooge and Shelley

All in the Mind

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States gave American leftists a thrilling idea. Now, by "leftists" I don't mean people like me who merely favor a slew of progressive policies, but people for whom the policies are sacraments on an ideological altar.

The thrilling idea was that Trump, in his unprecedented awfulness, had at last opened a window of opportunity for revolution. Never had the Left been able to sell itself to many voters as an improvement on what they had. Even in the time of George W. Bush, who was pretty bad, there was no market to speak of for anything beyond center-left. The True Left had by then put down roots in the wilderness, where it ran a sort of alternative Christmas shop offering jeremiads year-round. Now, suddenly, jeremiads were in. This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.

Each new low in Trump's behavior heightened the illusion of opportunity, not to say destiny. For illusion is what it was. America was in a fine political ferment, but it didn't follow that the status of the Left had changed. As we continue to see, widespread loathing of a figure like Donald Trump does not entail a newfound affinity with Marx-adjacent intellectuals. Discontent with a deepening Gilded Age does not entail a proletarian spirit of revolution. The popularity of policy ideas found on the leftist agenda does not entail openness to the agenda as packaged and sold by people better known for niche preoccupations, tone-deaf slogans, social vigilantism, and a dim view of America.

Meanwhile, more than four in ten Americans were being drawn into the vortex of a competing illusion: that hallucinatory world to which Trump's mountebank show was the entrance. It resembled nothing so much as a carnival midway, where coarse spiels and insistent tunes can excite you against your better judgement even in daylight. When night falls and garish lights come on, better judgement recedes as into a past life.

In the beginning was the Lie. There was Donald Trump's master-businessman persona, crafted with his father's connivance to disguise a career of blundering and irresponsibility; an imposture that Trump rehearsed in New York City before dinning it into the nationwide audience of a television show. Next came his brazen falsity as a political actor. He promoted the canard that Barack Obama was not a US citizen by birth. In his own run for president, he kept up a deceitful patter that dovetailed with lies purveyed by internet trolls (including agents of a Russian disinformation campaign). From the moment of his inauguration, he turned the presidency into a theater of make-believe. The common politician's laxity with truth paled beside Trump's assault on the fabric of reality. He apparently knew, in spite of himself, that reality at such an altitude of public life was a medium in which a man like him could save face only by constant disruption. Surrounded by people far more intelligent, competent, and disciplined than he, Trump had to show that intelligence, competence, and discipline counted for nothing against a charmed life.

And then there was QAnon. It was by no means the genesis of crackpot conspiracy theories, but it became their apotheosis for millions. No pot was ever so intriguingly cracked as the cranium of Q. No witch's brew was ever so turbid and thus so satisfactory to the imagination. You could go on for the rest of your life grappling with its riddles, teasing out its possibilities, burrowing through its dead ends, and savoring the freemasonry with its other believers. Where does the movement stand now? On May 27, 2021, The New York Times reported that a poll released on that day showed QAnon to be as popular among Americans as some major religions. Less than two weeks later, the Forbes article "'Q' Hasn't Posted In Six Months – But Some QAnon Followers Still Keep the Faith" stated,

Many QAnon believers lost faith after January 20, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated and their big day, predictably, never came. Since then, some have proposed new dates for when Trump will be reinstated, a conspiracy the former president reportedly has embraced.

The person known only as Q and claiming to be a "government insider" is, or was, what amounts to the high priest of a cult. Q fell silent soon after the US election of 2020. The reports cited here leave it unclear whether the cult is fading away or settling in, especially in view of the Forbes writer's observation that

Most Q activity has moved underground after social media companies cracked down on the conspiracy in January following the Capitol riot. A report published by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab last month concluded that QAnon content is "evaporating" from the mainstream Web.

The author of a book on QAnon interviewed for the Forbes article, Mike Rothschild, said he thought the latest "drop" (message) from Q, posted on December 8, 2020, would be the last, "since the Q movement has outgrown the need for new drops." That sounds more like settling in than fading away.

"Superstition is the religion of feeble minds," declared Edmund Burke. He didn't live to see QAnon, a farrago of sick imaginings that makes superstition look like the caprice of hale and hearty minds. Nor could he have foreseen the crowd of madnesses that now vie for pride of place in our forum. The selection is wide in itself. Compared with the belief that there's a Satanist cabal of elite liberal pedophiliac cannibals running the world, the mere belief that Donald Trump can fix things or that America is due for a socialist awakening is nothing to be ashamed of. But that's faint praise. Americans need healthier alternatives; at least the examples of sane liberals with the self-assurance to brush off bad company and sane conservatives who can harry their captors effectively.

Our forum is also crowded with great problems. Some, such as climate change or infectious disease, exist in a separate dimension from belief. We must meet them there. Social problems test our ability to reason together conscientiously. When problem-solving entails moral choices, we're obliged to consult a moral compass. All of this presupposes that we operate on principles more common and constant — and humbling — than our passions or our visions. It presupposes that we're not only in touch with reality but working with it, trying to make things thrive in it.

In our time, bodies of illusion have become like cloud banks that stretch across the American sky until they meet, overcasting the reality on the ground and charging the air with static. Reality remains, and wise people continue to work with it, but the clouds impose a sickening atmosphere and a distorting light on everything. The aggregations of people that embody the illusions form an arbitrary political elite.

The label rightist hardly suits an aggregation so crudely partisan that political content becomes secondary. However, it will do. The main opposing aggregation is leftist enough but similarly tribalistic beneath its veneer of intellectuality. Rightists immerse themselves in fluid certitude. Leftists jump jerkily between modes of self-justification: they know the will of the people; if you fault their unpopular ways, you're a defender of the status quo; progressive advocacy is a higher calling than electoral politics; mind you, the electorate is progressive at heart and only awaits more stirring advocacy. As a last resort, or even a first, there’s always the what-about dodge. ("You object to anti-Semitism at Southern Cal? What about settler colonialism in Palestine?")

White-nationalist rightists don't care whether they have a majority of Americans with them or not (having been led to believe that a majority juggernaut of Others is coming to run them down). The nascent effort to understand non-white conservatives and moderates, which could help us view the political scene realistically, runs up against the pat leftist response that such people don't know what's good for them. Theorists and activists for far-left movements long ago acquired a mental mechanism that accounts for any diversity of opinion among their intended constituents as the product of an enemy's divide-and-conquer strategy. Today that mechanism meshes with other cogs of a similar stamp to keep a new history always in the making in leftist minds. Rightists have their mental maelstrom. Leftists have their mental clockwork.

Seldom has America needed the best efforts of clear, free minds as it does now. Never have clear, free minds been overshadowed by bodies of illusion as they are now. Up among the cloud banks, the defense of Valhalla contends with the epoch of social revolution. Down in reality, tillers of the fields work in wintry darkness but also record-breaking heat. And no relief in sight.

Bad Company

One night in the tropics, I was riding in the back of a jeep with another American. The jeep was a public conveyance, and the driver was a taciturn local man we didn’t know. In those days, the country was in a state which some members of the American community likened to our own Wild West. Another faction likened it to Prohibition-era Chicago. Attitudes toward Americans ran the gamut, and a pottering but homicidal insurgency complicated things. In short, this was not the juncture of place and time that one would choose for hurtling through the night in a jeep with a stranger at the wheel. A taciturn one, too. I focused my mind as never before on wishing myself home in bed.

The other passenger was a man known to all his acquaintance (but not to the driver) for a perverse brand of humor. Placed in a position requiring tact and circumspection, he’d turn garrulous and insouciant. Now he genially declared that we were CIA agents. He claimed – genially, again – that he had a gun. I don’t remember what else he said; only that he said it all with mortifying plausibility. The man was glibness itself. I looked daggers at him in silence, unsure whether it would help or hurt to admit that we were not really CIA agents. As it turned out, silence at least did no harm. The driver delivered us to our destination without incident, never having let on how much of my companion’s prattle he believed.

Today, liberal-minded Americans are journeying through dark, dangerous historical territory with companions who seem bent on stacking the odds against safe arrival. Unlike my companion in the jeep, however, these have no sense of humor at all. Whereas he was an irrepressible menace, they are repressive ones. Whereas he waltzed across boundaries, they labor to carve intricate patterns of them in our minds. Their prattle is not impromptu nonsense, but scripted cant: the language of the radical left.

Before proceeding, it’s necessary to take a stand on two questions:

First, does the most leftist element in American politics lie outside the Democratic Party? No. It ought to. Illiberal people ought to do what they can with a party of their own, and not try to operate through the main liberal party. However, everything left of center as far as the eye can see has become the implicit responsibility of the Democrats. Voters tend to think so. Republicans help them think so. Many Democrats confirm it by striving to “sanewash” radical positions instead of rebutting or ridiculing them. Radical leftists are going to be seen as our companions (for I am a Democrat) as long as we don’t energetically dissociate ourselves from them. We need to care what trouble they court, because we’re going to be in it with them.

Second, are extreme progressives -- misandrous feminists, prejudiced “antiracists” – in fact Marxists? Leninists? Marxist-Leninists? Yes, that sort of thing if only in a generic way. They’ve imbibed red ideology, assimilated it, and adapted its forms to their own purposes. Old Bolsheviks may dislike the substitution of biological class for economic class within the red political strategy, but to these activists the strategy is the thing of value. They understand how credit accrues to people situated as members of an oppressed group and how one can discredit innocent others by submerging them in the notion of an oppressor group. Then there’s the value of the Marxian mise-en-scène with its conceptual scale and its True Left vocabulary. The extremists like it for itself, no doubt, but also for the way it sells them to insecure progressives. And they share Lenin’s appreciation of agitprop.

Race warriors of the left are using the word antiracism the way old-fashioned communists use peace: as a fossilized name for their own line of offerings, not as a living lexeme. They could bring their language within the bounds of honesty by using counterracism instead, but that would be hinting that their project is one of racist competition. As it is, they’re being called out as neoracists. That the label antiracism is common currency even among critics of the movement shows that it lacks the force of anything more than a brand.

Hard-left strategists have made other dubious investments in agitprop. In their determination to remake society so as to cut out formidable rivals for power or position, they’re dismissing more and more values, behaviors, and even intellectual resources as relics of an oppressive culture. Their most conspicuous flourish (so far), a push to rework mathematics instruction on sociopolitical principles, is part of a larger defeatist response to inequality in education: bringing claims against difficult subjects, schools, and tests instead of preparing children for achievement. Meanwhile, other countries continue to pursue global standards unfettered. Most American voters will grasp this picture in full, and many will penalize the Democratic Party for the perversity of its far-left cohort.

That was once a reasonable prediction. It then became an importunate specter. Now, within the past two months and with increasing frequency, The New York Times has run multiple items that, taken together, signal an institutional shift from a preponderance of sympathy with radical advocates to a preponderance of concern about Democrats’ keeping such company. Their unifying theme is the question, sometimes made roughly explicit, “Can the left wing face facts?” The principal facts are that demographic change does not look like delivering power to the left as expected; that hard-left activists’ recent signature issue, defunding the police, lacks a grassroots constituency; that people who make signature issues of such unpopular things pose an electoral liability to their party; and that winning elections is more conducive to progress than walking over hot coals.

Here’s a more fundamental question: Can the Democratic Party stop fearing its left wing? When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib won primary elections in 2018, the US news media — hungry as always for sensations and in some cases for progressive energy — began treating them as rising stars of the Democratic Party. That treatment not only tended strongly to self-fulfilling prophecy, but also ignored the fact that radicals can rise within a party and thereby make the party less relevant to the country. Though American public opinion had been growing more liberal for years, it didn’t follow that democratic-socialist firebrands represented the future.

None of the four newcomers contributed to the Democrats’ net congressional gain that year. All took over safe seats. Ocasio-Cortez ran her primary race against a complacent, long-sitting white male incumbent, attributes that were salient liabilities in a progressive New York City district in 2018. The candidates who flipped seats for the Democrats were — of necessity — more moderate, pragmatic ones capable of appealing to people who might vote either Democratic or Republican. There was no cause to mistake the Blue Wave of 2018 for a progressive wave, other than intra-progressive boosterism aggravated by faith in a deus ex machina: the mobilization of new voters on an epic scale.

The media-made stars of 2018 grew so big in the imagination that within two years even the dean of progressives, Bernie Sanders, coveted their support. Ocasio-Cortez, particularly, was accorded the status of kingmaker to those in need of young, leftist new voters. Sanders’s need was great. When Ocasio-Cortez endorsed him, his joy was almost palpable. However, as the campaign wore on he lamented the difficulty of getting those young leftists, who undoubtedly liked him, to become voters. Unable to do so sufficiently, he was up against a divergence reported by Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy in the Times in April of 2020: that while progressive Democrats predominated on social media, most Democratic voters were more moderate. Sanders’s army was too much like the one Shakespeare provided to Henry V: a mighty host of “youth on fire” somewhere offstage.

Americans now in their youth may get to be dependable voters. They may at the same time remain markedly more progressive than past generations. However, it’s probably a safe bet that the majority will apply themselves to promising ends and means more than to ideological affirmation. No doubt they are the future; but the nature of their future politics remains to be seen. At any rate, they are not now entitled to deference within the Democratic Party. It’s not as if they’d done somebody a favor by supporting Joe Biden against the abominable Donald Trump.

But it’s not progressive youth that makes bad company for the Democratic Party. It’s the class of ideology merchants, the competitively avant-garde academics and activists for whom progressives of all ages comprise a market. No major American political party should be guided by dogma, much less by fashions in dogma. It should be guided by noble instincts that find their way forward through sound political transactions. The Republican Party has dropped all pretense of being such a party, and yet it can successfully appeal to moderate voters when abetted by a Democratic Party that allows itself to be associated with dumbfounding slogans or with a dark vision of the national character. Despite appearances to the contrary, jovial politicians are mentally superior to saturnine activists.

Politically competent Democrats must break up the ideology merchants’ game without further delay. The mid-term elections of 2022 could isolate President Biden in the seat of executive authority, which is not an adequate position from which to consolidate the public’s trust in Democratic stewardship. The presidential election of 2024 could then bring anything.

Earnestly sanewashing crackpot rhetoric and making excuses for campaigns against intellectual freedom is not the answer. The response that we Democrats must make to our odious companions is the one we were often urged to make to Donald Trump: ridicule. Open contempt. If we are genuine progressives, we should take a back seat to nobody in mocking the ham-handed revolutionism of the ideology merchants. Let us do all we can to differentiate them from the Democratic Party in the public consciousness. Republicans may be in thrall to Trump and Trumpists, but we needn’t accept thralldom to radical leftists. Trumpists have got the votes to ruin most of their co-partisans. Radical leftists have not. They’re merely messing with progressive minds.

Democrats needn’t worry whether they can in good conscience break with people who portray themselves as struggling for social justice. The things for which the ideology merchants are struggling include, on the one hand, individual advancement in careers as academics or activists and, on the other, the suppression of individual agency in the rest of us. (Anti-cognitivism has long been integral to Marxist-Leninist work with the intelligentsia.) The merchants’ stock in trade includes neoracism and other forms of biological bigotry. The effect of their spiel on the electorate is to hinder the establishment of a sustainable liberal regime. They’re always throwing a lifeline to the Republicans, as Lindsey Graham puts it in Bob Woodward’s Rage. Democrats owe them nothing.

Imagine, instead, a political scene in which the Republican Party remains as thoroughly outlandish as it is now and the Democratic Party has precipitated its outlandish element into a crank faction without influence. The legitimate Democratic Party will be a hospitable environment, and the only one, for all those voters, donors, and operatives who can live with some degree of compromise. For purposes of actual progress, that kind of company will do.