Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Three Republican Fallacies

Believing crazy things is not the mark of
whether somebody should be rejected.         

J.D. Vance

Where the elite meet.          

Margo Channing

I

“You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” So said J.D. Vance in his bootlicking acceptance speech at the Republican convention last summer. I sat up, because I suspected that an important admission was about to be made, and because I am one of the idea-of-America people whom he was about to assail. He continued: “And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation.” Of course American ideas are not what we mean by the idea of America. We mean an ideal that, for all its abstraction, is sufficiently true and just to serve as the basis of a permanent allegiance, a profound patriotism.

Vance, by contrast, promoted an entirely different foundation for his love of country. “America is not just an idea,” proclaimed the opportunist with the temerity to lecture others about conviction. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And a nation, he went on, is “not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.” 

It did not occur to Vance’s shallow and self-congratulatory mind that a nation is not coterminous with a homeland, because history often forces nations out of homelands. The imagination of exile is too much to ask of the apostle of rootedness. He was preaching a doctrine of hillbilly Heimat, and disguising the most odious form of Western nationalism as the wisdom of Appalachia. Vance, who grew up in Ohio, gave as his proof the moist example of a graveyard in eastern Kentucky that is “near my family’s ancestral home.” 

Like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

The account of this graveyard was designed to fill the hall with pathos. It filled me with alarm, and I want to explain why. I respect the man’s family history but I abhor his inference from it.

For a start, people will most certainly fight for abstractions. Americans will, and Americans have — Americans, the notoriously practical people. The cemeteries of Normandy (pardon the shopworn illustration, but we are in the kingdom of first principles) are filled with Americans who died in the struggle to defend admirable ideals, admirable abstractions. I have no idea if Vance would have supported that war; it was quite inconsistent with the spirit of Milwaukee. Those Americans fought for the homes of other people, because their homes and our homes shared a philosophy about how human beings should live together and distribute power. Vance suffers from a coarse notion about the relationship of the abstract to the concrete. He believes that they are contradictions. Like the universal and the particular, however, the abstract and the concrete are partners, friends, lovers; they need each other, they long for each other. The abstract is instantiated in the concrete, and gives it its reasons; the concrete rescues the abstract from preciosity and irrelevance, and vindicates the abstract (or not, as the case may be) in the means by which it absorbs it into individual and social life. Call it dialectical, except that the interpenetration, the reciprocal impact, is so plain. Even hillbilly life is suffused with concepts!

Vance was propounding one of its imbecilities of our age, which is the worship of the local. It is the pendant to another one of the imbecilities, which is the worship of the global. Historians have abundantly documented the inadequacy of these categories — the simultaneous workings of the local, the regional, the national, and the global in human affairs — the blessings and the curses that the dimensions constantly visit upon each other. The local is never only local. It is never all there is or the sole source of significance. The local is itself always shaped by influences from outside, positively or negatively. Even local sanctities have alien beginnings: “Kentucky” is an Iroquoian or Algonquian word and Jesus never preached in the Bluegrass. Conservatives and reactionaries have always recoiled from the porousness of human boundaries, but it is precisely this unwanted seepage which educates us ethically and makes co-existence possible. What is an education if not an expansion? Tradition needs to be protected, but not in a way that will petrify it and render it unpalatable to the age into which we aim to transmit it. Tradition is not solely a form of time travel. It is almost never  entirely local. And the death of tradition is too high a price to pay for a fanatical loyalty to an early version of it. 

A perfect insularity, which is a dangerous fairy tale, would bespeak not only a great fidelity, as the localists believe, but also a great insecurity; and if the insecurity is felt by the majority in a society, terrible actions against the imaginary threats of the minority may ensue. (Perhaps minorities have a more plausible claim upon the uses of insularity, in the way that some medieval Jews prudently demanded a walled quarter as a condition of their settlement, but for them, too, it was a futile strategy for self-preservation.) If only because of the power of human imagination, if only because of the power of human desire, we never live only where we live. We have migrant minds. In the manner, say, of a young striver in the woods who has heard about a faraway place called Yale. And now the rube has a golden resume.

Consider that cemetery in Kentucky. It represents a touchingly intimate relation to American origins. Good for the Vances! But who cares? Every Americanness begins at some point in time, early or late. When, a century and more ago, only one or two generations of Vances rested in that ground, they were no less American than the older citizens whose prior monuments surrounded them. There is no chronological requirement in the American theory of belonging. To believe otherwise is to promote an inverted aristocratic ideal, a reverse-snobbish Plymouth Rock-like belief in the primacy of the antique and the inherited. In a cemetery in Queens my American family is so far represented by only two graves, which are the graves of my parents, who came to these once-welcoming shores in 1947 as refugees. They are surrounded by Jewish immigrants who came and who died generations before them, and who, like them, and like the Vances, built this country and made things in this country, and there they all rest in a naturalized peace, in an atemporal American equality. 

The whole point of this society is that it should not matter who got here first. Previousness should confer no privilege, at least if we are serious about the moral implications of multi-ethnicity. (Those who think otherwise can find sanctuary in Newport, Rhode Island.) This is true, in my view, even about Native Americans, whose claim on our conscience is not that they preceded those who came later, but that they were brutally treated by the latecomers, whose sin was not their belatedness but their brutality. But we must all enjoy the same rights now. What matters is that we act justly now. There is moral magic in that now: democracy is based on the emboldening fiction of an eternal present, and equality is a triumphant overcoming of the pull of the past. Can a country have an ontological condition? If so, ours is what Irving Howe called “the American newness.” Nothing levels history like human dignity.

Vance is peddling a right-wing version of indigeneity. A scholar of the Heimat movement in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century Germany summed it up this way: “Heimat conveyed the feeling of always having been there.” From the standpoint of a liberal order, however, the indigeneity of the right is no more legitimate than the indigeneity of the left: both introduce a moral hierarchy where hierarchy itself is the moral problem. In a democracy we count cardinally, not ordinally. Indigeneity, moreover, is myopic, a severe narrowing of perspective, another variety of a blinkering originalism. Pity the individual who has not known such warmth, to be sure: it is easy to understand Vance’s devotion to the family burial ground. But his family is only his family and only he has his heart; and this is true for us all. If we are to live peaceably together, it is not because you agree to feel my emotions. 

The mindless side of populism, a political phenomenon that should more properly be called emotionalism, is owed in part to that misguided expectation: when emotions are borrowed and passed along, when contagion usurps persuasion, when collective feeling preempts individual feeling, when conformity is confused with empathy, there is the unity of the mob. It is the duty of every citizen of a morally serious society to question the authority of subjective experience, to contest the solipsism that comes naturally to finite creatures. In recent years this has become known as the challenge of “intersubjectivity,” but intersubjectivity is perhaps not best accomplished at the graves of one’s forefathers. Vance is deaf to the nasty implications of his notion of homeland (or maybe not). For the more concrete homeland gets, the more specific it gets, and the more specific it gets, the more it runs the risk of disdaining the specificities of others. Every conception
of authenticity is exclusive. Exclusion, the celebration of impassable boundaries, is its very point. And the bragging rights of authenticity often serve as the grounds of prejudice. 

What distinguishes the abstract idea-of-America school of Americanness from the “homeland” school of Americanness is that membership in the latter is easily limited and easily closed, whereas the former is essentially hospitable. And it owes its hospitality precisely to its abstraction. The only condition for admittance into the dream is that you exist. Since America is an idea, anybody may dream of it. The idea of America, the vision of an American second act, has saved millions of oppressed people all around the world from despair, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. The form that the escape from despair takes is immigration. Who were the Vances who acquired that plot of  Kentucky soil? When did they arrive, and from where? I do not detect even the faintest trace of Commanche in the Republican candidate for vice-president. (Some decades ago the most noisy nativist in Congress was a man named Tedeschi, which is the Italian word for German. Born on the Fourth of July!) 

The Vances who came to America could not have regarded it as a homeland, because they did not yet live here; they can only have come here because they had an idea of it, because of its idea — the notional American promise that they sought to actualize for themselves. Their illustrious descendant’s Blut und Boden-notion of human racination would have discouraged them from the journey. Surely there was a time in early nineteenth-century Kentucky when the mamaws and papaws of Mamaw and Papaw were indigent arrivals, recent and unKentuckyan, greeners, inmigrantes, and potential scapegoats for locals with problems. Did Grandaddy Vance threaten anybody’s job?

It is also worth noting that Vance, by stripping our homeland of its philosophical basis and its universal appeal, is shrinking it, mutilating it. The world is lousy with ethno-states, with countries that are hostile to their minorities, with polities that cling to the disreputable but time-honored distinction between the native and the foreigner, with societies (not least in the enlightened West) that view their own heterogeneity as the problem and not the solution. There are so many nation-states of which nobody will ever dream. What, after all, is the promise of Pakistan? Does the idea of Russia fill anybody with hope? Who, except for a few demented American authoritarians, seeks a second chance along the Danube? The American revolution consists also in this: that the American definition of the nation is a repudiation of the modern, that is, the European, definition of the nation. The American nation is not a political consolidation of similarity. Our national sameness, our sameness as Americans, is not contingent upon a prior sameness, or upon the renunciation of a prior difference. Our commonality is additive, not substractive. Rights are magnificently indifferent to difference, even when we are not. 

From Vance’s callous and primitive construction of American identity it follows pretty quickly that that the “American spirit” — not to be mistaken for the effete over-
educated bicoastal Kambalan “American idea” — is captured for him by the image of an old woman’s house filled with nineteen loaded guns. Suddenly I understand why Vance and his fellow woodsmen are unmoved by climate change: it will destroy the coasts! 

 

II

In January, 13, 1864, Frederick Douglass made a speech in New York. It was written a year earlier and was delivered in cities across the country. Like many Americans in those cataclysmic years, he sometimes searched for God in history, and attributed contemporary events to the workings of a divine plan. In 1861, for example, he had declared that “when all our earthly helps and hopes break down, the soul goes up to the eternal and invisible for help.” Abolitionists in particular liked to invoke heavenly intentions and heavenly outcomes. But Douglass’ sympathy for the glance heavenward was limited. In the address in New York, called “The Mission of the War,” Douglass tired of religious explanation, of all the pious and tendentious interpretations of the war. He had begun to notice that the strident appeal to God can have the effect of diminishing the human sense of responsibility, and of making excuses for human errors and evils. And so he set out to toughen up his audiences. “Speaking in the name of Providence, some men tell me that slavery is already dead, that it expired with the first shot at Sumter. This may be so, but I do not share the confidence with which it is asserted. In a grand crisis like this, we should all prefer to look facts sternly in the face and to accept their verdict whether it bless or blast us. I look for no miraculous destruction of slavery.” He came to the conclusion to which all true emancipators and all true movements of liberation eventually come, that “it is cowardly to shuffle our responsibilities upon the shoulders of Providence.” Just as in 1861, in a similar moment of philosophical severity, he had followed up his remark about the reliance of the hopeless upon heaven with these disabusing words: “The day of miracles is past.” Americans, he said, would have to “answer their own prayers.”

Here is another and more renowned instance of American providentialism and the resistance to it. On March 4, 1865, in his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln spoke what is probably the most spiritually mature reflection in the annals of American religion. It included a providentialist explanation of the war over slavery — except that the language of his American theodicy was so wrenchingly humble. “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?” It is startling to see the certainty of faith become uncertain, and described as a supposition. He followed this with a breathtaking “if”: “If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” 

If! Where are the believers who say if? In my own adventures in the religious life, nothing has disaffected me more than the certainty with which believers speak about occult entities and forces. The clarity is arrogant. But there is not an echo of the intellectual vanity of the devout in Lincoln’s formulation of his faith. He is sure and he is unsure; which is to say, he is, in the most exemplary way, human. Nor does the mention of God fill him with good cheer, or with a complacent assurance of perfect understanding. There is too much that he does not know. He respects the opacity of God even as he affirms the activity of God. The war is theologically obscure to him: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully.” And then, most exquisitely of all: “The Almighty has his
own purposes.” 

Providentialism runs throughout American history, from the sermons of its earliest divines to the “firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence” in the Declaration of Independence to — well, we’ll get to that. It has many sources and many uses. Psychologically, it has provided comfort — “as the clay in the potter’s hands, so are the nations of the earth in the hands of Him, the everlasting JEHOVAH,” instructed William Smith, the provost of the College of Philadelphia, in 1775 in his Sermon on the Present Situation of Americans Affairs — and courage — in 1774 John Hancock exhorted his countrymen “to play the man for our God.” It has also furnished a theory of Divine favor, of American chosenness: “It appears that He gave [the land] to us to inherit, in that Americans from our ancestors downward, ‘till very lately, have had the peculiar smiles of Heaven,” preached William Stearns, a minister in Massachusetts, in 1775, in A View of the Controversy Subsisting between Great Britain and the American Colonies. “This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes!” The war with Britain was portrayed by preachers in the colonies as a central stage in God’s special plan for America. And when the war with Britain was going badly, the Continental Congress legislated fast days. (I gratefully learned about many of these eighteenth-century sources from a marvelous book by Nicholas Guyatt called Providence and The Invention of the United States, 1607-1876.) 

Philosophically, providentialism may be owed to nothing more than a desire to make sense of history, to find order in its inchoateness. Providence is the antithesis of chance, and chance is the enemy of meaning. But it is not only order that is sought: for many people, history does not seem coherent unless its order also is necessary. Necessity is a larger claim than coherence, but it is necessity that they crave, because coherence alone lacks the power to justify, and theories of history are usually designed as justifications for history. (The Greek historians are the exception.) Where there is necessity, there is inevitability, and nothing relieves the perplexed individual more than the discovery that his life as he has lived it is an inevitable outcome — that it has been foreordained. In our time the carapace of inevitability is provided by three sources of certainty: religion, science, and identity. 

For monotheistic believers, providentialism is entailed by their conception of the deity, whose role as the creator of the world and its governor is foundational. Whether or not believers must banish God from all or some the public square of an open society, as many liberals believe, they are certainly under no obligation to banish God from history. How could they? (There are no Deists anymore, which is a pity because Deists leave God out of today’s news and are therefore not inclined to culture wars.) There are many varieties of the idea of Divine interventionism, from lurid apocalyptic ones to suave naturalistic ones. The naturalistic ones pose less of a threat to the order of things and try not to avail themselves of the thrill of miracles, except insofar as natural law is itself regarded as a miracle. There is also the occasionalist view, according to which every incident on earth, no matter how small, is caused by a particular exertion of God’s will: miracles everywhere. In the Christian tradition, to the best of my knowledge, this model of God’s caring causality was established in Matthew 10:29–31: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (In 1880, William James retorted, on behalf of immanent causality: “Not a sparrow falls to the ground but some of the remote conditions of his fall are to be found in the milky way, in our federal constitution, or in the early history of Europe.”) In Islamic philosophy, the classical example is the falling of a leaf, whose every twist and turn on its way to the ground is determined by a series of Divine decisions. In Jewish thought occasionalism appears only rarely, unless one regards petitionary prayer as an appeal to the occasionalist promise, in which case it appears everywhere. 

The occasionalist explanation of everyday life brings one very close to superstition, and sharpens the question that we use to call “the efficacy of prayer.” The more specific the expectation, the greater the likelihood of disappointment; or so my experience has led me to believe. My grandfather, a worldly man and a captain of industry, once traveled by train across Poland to consult with his wonder-working rebbe about a toothache. I assume that the offending tooth was pulled, but I ascribe the resolution of the matter not to the saint but to the dentist. The occasionalist outlook, and more generally the coarser varieties of providentialism, has also this problematic aspect: it makes science impossible, because it denies the regularities of nature, and leaves the natural order — and the human order, where we also depend for our understanding upon regularities, even if they are less apparent and verifiable than the natural ones — essentially unpredictable and forever vulnerable to disruption by the whim or the wisdom of a higher intriguing power. 

This theological excursus is almost done, and we will soon get back to the American crisis. But first it needs to be added that providentialism is not only religious. There are secular doctrines of historical necessity, too. Some scholars regard any theory of historical necessity as religious, so that Marxism-Leninism, for example, is now commonly described as a religion. But a belief is not religious merely because it is intensely held, and we must respect, I think, the reality of the modern rupture. There are absolute beliefs that have nothing to do with God, and we misunderstand them if we picture them merely as the new version of the old. The terms that are most commonly used to capture a godless historical necessity are destiny and fate. 

In the ancient world, individual fate was sometimes imputed to the control of the gods and sometimes not, the other determining causes being environmental and physiological and temperamental. Often the subject was taken up, especially by the Stoics, from the standpoint of ethics: the question of fate was the question of free will and determinism, or whether the gods can be blamed for the behavior of men. Cicero worried that the belief in fate would render us mentally passive and morally sluggish — that we would not go to a doctor, for example, but instead succumb to the seduction of the inevitable. Fate is drift without worry. The defense of the freedom of the mind was a challenge to the doctrine of necessity that fate seemed to represent. But mainly the idea of fate was embraced as an alternative to the unbearable idea of chance. 

What is striking about these discussions is that chance is not rejected in the name of purpose. It was reported of Chryssipus, a prominent Stoic thinker, that he taught this: “Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unravelling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded.” Nothing divine there, and nothing teleological. Here is a later summary of the fatalistic view: “All things which happen by fate occur in a certain order and sequence and have an element of logical consequence in them. They say that fate is a string of causes.”

The problem is that a string of causes is not spiritually nourishing or morally obligating. A logic is not a purpose. A purposeless necessity may be as unbearable as chance. And so causal necessity was promoted into providence and universal meaning was infused into raw events. (I apologize for the pottedness of what follows.) This occurred in the Hebrew Bible, which included, or rather invented, a linear theory of history for which the sequences and the series had a climax and culminated in redemption. In Christianity, the chain of causes was transfigured into Heilsgeschichte by Augustine and Joachim of Fiore. And many centuries later, after the aforesaid rupture, the numinous was for various reasons expelled from historical thinking — it has been suggested that the theology of history was explicitly replaced by the philosophy of history for the first time by Voltaire — and what remained is now conventional intellectual wisdom: non-sacred teleological history, with a rich menu of teloi. (Bacon’s, Condorcet’s, Hegel’s, Marx’s, Darwin’s, Alfred Rosenberg’s, Frederick Jackson Turner’s, Fanon’s, Fukuyama’s, Kurzweil’s, and so on.) We usually call this a “sense of history.” For centuries our culture has been captive to historical and developmental and evolutionary styles of thought — among the great Western thinkers about history only Burckhardt found a path between teleology and meaninglessness — though we can strenuously undertake to be otherwise. 

This brings us, naturally, to Donald Trump.

Among the many sinister comedies of the age of Trump has been his elevation to the status of a world-historical, even a meta-historical, figure. A shocking number of Americans, particularly Christian Americans, venerate him and have incorporated him into the salvific saga of the Earthly City. This has taken place not only at the level of folk religion, where it was to be expected of the trivializing notion of a cosseting and constituent-service God, but also in some of the higher reaches of American Christianity. The attempted assassination of Trump last summer played right into the hands of MAGA’s political theology. The talk of martyrdom spread almost as swiftly as the shooter’s bullet, not least because Trump viscerally grasped the theatrics of martyrdom, the political utility of his encounter with his mortality, even before he stood back up at the podium on the bloodied stage. Even as he bled, he cosplayed. His talent is not for deals, but for spectacles. 

Later that day I began to notice on the internet a picture of Trump in the company of Jesus. He sits at the Resolute Desk and behind him, in a vaporous glow, stands the Son of God, in white robes and a smart beard, looking like an extra from Ben Hur. Jesus puts his hands on Trump’s shoulders as Trump moves his right hand to touch His left hand. Behind them is the Stars and Stripes. The picture was the work of one Danny Hahlbom, born in Long Island in 1949, from whose website I was not surprised to learn that his work was “honored for openings in select theaters in Texas for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ,” and also that he never took any art lessons. He calls his masterwork of MAGA iconography You Are Not Alone. He makes Sallman look like Ingres. 

The problem with his image is not that it is kitsch: I have always believed that religious kitsch is a sign of religious life, and that lived religion does not require masterpieces. (Secular spectators, who do not read religious art religiously and often cannot identify the figures in a Biblical scene, are the ones who insist on Rembrandt and Tintoretto.) The offense in Hahlbom’s image is not aesthetic, it is religious. Even to a stiff-necked Jew such as myself, it seems blasphemous. How can anyone who knows the first thing about Jesus and the first thing about Trump imagine such a union? The only error in the picture more insolent than the theological one is Trump’s red tie, which has been given blue stripes. 

Ah, but it is precisely because Trump is a sinner that Jesus loves him! He is a more perfect messenger precisely for the magnitude of his imperfection. This is an old idea, and not only a Christian one. (In the thirteenth-century a German rabbi was asked whether a deformed man is permitted to lead prayers, and he replied: “It is not permitted, it is mandatory, because the King of Kings prefers broken vessels.”) But the loveliness of the idea can be easily exploited by, well, scumbags. There are sinners for whom forgiveness is nothing more than a scam. Call this not moral hazard but metaphysical hazard. At a rally of pastors and ministers in West Palm Beach last summer, Ben Carson made the point explicitly, though I have no doubt that it is made all over the Christian evangelical world: “David was a slimy guy too, in the Bible. I mean, murder, and adultery, and deceit. And yet God said he’s a man after my own heart.” Never mind that David was guided by the Holy Spirit and heard
the voice of God, and Trump is guided by the spirit of Roy Cohn and hears the voice of Steve Bannon. It is true that we are all imperfect, but Trump abuses the privilege. 

The religious justification of Trump is premised on a complete abandonment of ethical standards for the presidency of the United States. It is unperturbed by the president’s — the candidate’s — crimes and convictions, about which it conflates prosecution with persecution. In this tacky partisan exegesis, Trump’s unworthiness is what makes him worthy — that, and the cold fact that he proposes to advance a particular agenda. What won’t these people believe in order to keep their bump stocks? Faith need not be as unintelligent as the church of Trump makes it seem. And so Trump has been inducted into the pantheon of the holy sinner, of redemption through sin. He is the redeemer and Hulk Hogan is his Elijah. 

In America, moreover, providence has often been associated with wealth. God has been good to Trump, hasn’t He? Look at his house! This, too, is an American trope. In 1877, Junius Morgan, who was J.P. Morgan’s father, declared at a fancy dinner that “a kind of providence has been very bountiful to us, and under this guidance the future is our own hands.” Note that this was a version of providence that did not interfere with the satisfactions of the entrepreneurial ego, that was not a deterministic insult to the plutocrat’s vanity. John D. Rockefeller also believed that his success was the Lord’s plan, and bluntly asserted that “God gave me money.” In truth, rich people are not the only ones who interpret success as providence. We all hope for luck, and there are some who take the trouble to make themselves deserving of it. But when luck comes our way, we recoil at calling it luck. Me, an accident? We want our accomplishment to signify more. Luck is indifferent and unflattering. We prefer that our trajectory not be random; that it be, if it is benevolent, our just desert; that it be validated by the highest of authorities. These pious escapes from historical contingency put me in mind of Heine’s joke about a French industrialist: “He is a self-made man, which absolves God of a terrible responsibility.” Providentialism is a reading of luck, a coaxing of necessity out of the demoralizing doctrine of caprice. (In Hebrew, the word for “fate” is the same word for “lottery” — goral, which nicely illustrates the tense proximity of the poles. In English there is a looser relation: lot, lottery.)

Needless to say, there are people for whom the doctrine of cosmic caprice is not at all demoralizing, who are blithely unburdened by the stresses of locating meanings in patterns and experiences. Sometimes I envy them, though I cannot imagine how they live or why they vote. Nor do I intend to suggest that luck is all there is: human outcomes are significantly determined also by human actions, and the self-made man is not at all a complete fiction. (That was Obama’s infamous insult to capitalism.) One should have pride in the work of one’s hands — but not only pride. The factors are always mingled. Human agency and human freedom are compatible with both providence and luck. Yet the doctrine of providence can be a way of raising human achievements to a metaphysical prestige that they do not deserve. The Bible warns against the vainglory of asserting that “my power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth,” but the American theory of success generally does not come with a corollary about humility and complexity. Behold Trump.

My favorite example of capitalist providentialism — no, not Max Weber — was produced in the Reagan euphoria. In 1981, the American Enterprise Institute published an imperishable pamphlet by Michael Novak called “Toward a Theology of the Corporation.” It included this passage: 

In thinking about the corporation in history and its theological significance, I begin with a general theological principle. George Bernanos once said that grace is everywhere. Wherever we look in the world, there are signs of God’s presence: in the mountains, in a grain of sand, in a human person, in the poor and the hungry. The earth is charged with the grandeur of God. So is human history.

If we look for signs of grace in the corporation, we may discern seven of them — a suitably sacramental number.

The Creator locked great riches in nature, riches to be discovered only gradually by human effort. The agency through which inventions and discoveries are made productive for the human race is the corporation. Its creativity makes available to mass markets the riches long hidden in creation. Its creativity mirrors God’s.

Novak went on to speculate about the spiritual message in the name of the W. R. Grace Corporation.

Donald Trump would like us to regard him as a businessman, when in truth he came to American politics from the sewers of reality television, professional wrestling, beauty pageants, fixers and shell companies, and the thuggish ethos of twentieth-century Queens. His profanity extends to his business practices, as court records now show. On the other hand, Trump’s wealth, his very solvency, is indisputably a miracle. 

A friend of mine was present at that Christian celebration of Trump in West Palm Beach. He sent me some notes. “What can I tell you? Trump was in full-on martyr mode and the televangelist-like speakers were talking about his ear as though it were some magical Christ-like thing. ‘You guys ready to worship?’ one speaker began. ‘Maybe God spared Trump,’ at the two-minute mark of Charlie Kirk speaking.” But then he noticed an interesting complication in the swooning crowd. They were not all eschatological idiots. “In my interviews,” he continued, “people openly admitted that they do not love Trump, calling him a necessary evil and hateful, and they wish they had someone else. He’s an imperfect vessel, but hell, what can they do…” Some of them suggested that it would be more historically appropriate — which is to say, less religiously embarrassing — to compare Trump to Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian empire. The Cyrus comparison was often invoked by supportive Christians in the early years of Trump’s rise. It was a nice attempt at a Scriptural precedent for Trump, except that Cyrus was the splendid opposite of Trump: he was perhaps the most tolerant king in history, a legendary respecter of difference, an ancient pluralist. He was kind even to the Jews — as a child I was taught to revere him: he had fans in Flatbush — by bringing their Babylonian captivity to an end and supporting them in their return to Zion and in the rebuilding of their Temple in Jerusalem. I guess this means that, like Trump, Cyrus was in construction, but there is no record of any royal demand that the Temple bear his name.

The Cyrus analogy is a way of retaining the claim for Trump’s gigantic status without wrapping him in holiness — a softer providentialism. There are many ways of being duped. In the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania, Ross Douthat provided one of them. “The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania,” he wrote breathlessly in the New York Times, “was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.” (He really should not cast stones at verbosity.) He then proceeded to a little lesson about Hegel, linking to Hegel-by-Hypertext. “In Hegel’s work, the great man of history is understood as a figure ‘whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.’ Hegel’s paradigm was Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer whose quest for personal power and military glory spread the ideas of the French Revolution, shattered the old regimes of Europe and ushered in the modern age.” Douthat did not cite Carlyle, but here is a taste of what reminded him of Donald Trump: 

I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever-worse distress toward final ruin; — all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God’s own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in.

Trump to a tee, no?

But Douthat’s epiphany was not over. “What if progress isn’t linear, and the World Spirit’s purposes are a bit more complicated than an optimistic form of liberal Protestantism expects? What if an era is decadent rather than vital? What if there is no obvious next political stage for a civilization’s development? What if stagnation and repetition rule the day? What does a man of destiny look like then? I think we have to say it looks like Donald Trump.” Go ahead and gasp. But it gets better, or rather worse. The reason for Trump’s anointment
by destiny is that he, unlike the other authoritarians of our time, has no fixed beliefs. Unlike philosophical and political conviction, you see, “actual populist sentiment is more protean, more flexible and opportunistic, more certain of its enemies than its policy commitments.” This is another version of the unworthiness-as-a-source-of-worthiness argument. All hail the man who believes nothing, who has the genius to pick enemies over policies! 

Trump’s greatness, says Douthat, is “vibes-based,” rather like Douthat’s analysis. But Trump’s greatness may be the biggest lie of all. Who can doubt that history will show him to have been the most puny of all American presidents? Then Douthat seems to pull back, sort of. He is wary of sounding downright religious about the felonious monster. There appears this slippery remark: “He’s a man graced, this past weekend especially but always, with incredible, preternatural good luck.” Well, which is it, grace or luck? I thought that grace is the antithesis of luck — that grace is luck doctrinally interpreted. Isn’t the characterization by a Christian of grace as luck a colossal mistake? Douthat continues, pretending to sober up: “That last quality is understood by some of Trump’s religious supporters as proof of divine favor and a reason to support him absolutely. But this is a presumptuous interpretation. (Some notably sinister historical figures have enjoyed miraculous-seeming escapes from assassination.)” So have a lot of ordinary people who were out walking in the evening on the wrong street in the wrong neighborhood. Note also that Trump is exempted from the company of “notably sinister historical figures.” 

The providentialist standpoint, and hero worship generally, prefers to dwell on the successes and leaves the failures to the philosophers and the historians, who must answer to standards of objectivity and honesty about the entirety of the picture. Tucked away inside the commonplace notion of providence is an optimistic attitude to human affairs, which will eventually work out owing to the high quality of the supervision. A cruel providence, by contrast, a malevolent God, would put too much pressure on the belief system, which might smash on the rocks of theodicy. Come to think of it, theodicy would be a pretty good framework in which to set the ascendancy of Trump — at least the problem would be factually stated. So cling to your providentialism, if you will – but acknowledge, please, that Trump may be not our reward but our punishment. In his essay on fate, Emerson insisted that “the way of Providence is a little rude. Providence has a wild, rough incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge missed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity.” 

Perhaps catching himself in the philosophical inflation of a crook, Douthat next asks: “Why talk about Trump in these sweeping terms, the anti-Trump reader might say, bringing in God and history and building him up to be something more than just a charlatan and demagogue?” An excellent question, but do not mistake it for a saving moment of skepticism. Douthat has an answer at the ready: “Because otherwise you’re just not dealing in reality.” There’s the tell. Sooner or later every defense or extenuation of Trump must turn the epistemological trick and assert that criticism of the titan is owed to another definition of reality. There is no way for the case for Trump to survive even the most perfunctory scrutiny except by pleading alternative facts and running for the hills. Douthat’s enthusiasm for reality is surprising. It is a betrayal of faith, I think, to allow reality the last word. Religion does not exist to be complicit with reality or to affirm it. Hegel and Carlyle were history’s flacks. But religion must be supremely counter-cultural, so as to rain critique upon history, upon reality. And what is this “reality” which we despisers of Trump fail to recognize but must honor? Is Trump not a charlatan and a demagogue? 

This is what fellow-traveling with the fanatics looks like. But luck is not destiny and destiny is not luck. If Trump is lucky, then he is not destined. Luck is not intentional or legible. But Douthat’s hero-worship, his on-deadline divination, is based on a specious assumption about the legibility of history, which is transparent to Douthat in a way that it was not, say, to Lincoln. Rising to prophetic decibels, he warns that “in a struggle with a man of destiny, there is no normalcy to be restored.” Douthat is just another post-liberal pyromaniac. If “normalcy” includes truth, reason, decency, respect, patience, argument, evidence, care, compromise, science, and social peace, then its restoration is nothing less than a sacred civic obligation, along with the resounding rejection of the titillating abnormalcy of the man of destiny. 

It was only a matter of days before the clean-shirted Douthat was himself forced to deal in reality. What happened was that Trump opened his mouth. He gave his acceptance speech at the Republican convention and it was a world-historical dud. All of the man’s meanness and narcissism, all of his intellectual and cognitive limitations, all of his cynicism and opportunism, were grindingly on display. The nimbus of Butler County was gone. This was not the performance of a great man of history. Hegel and Carlyle would have switched to TCM. But there was poor Douthat, the bringer of good tidings, trapped in the rubble of his own absurdities. The headline on his next piece was “How Trump Sabotaged His Own Apotheosis.” When I saw it I permitted myself a historiosophical chuckle. “After the assassination attempt,” he began, “I called Trump a ‘man of destiny’ and nothing about his rambling speech changes that assessment.” The apologetics here entered the realm of desperation, as apologetics often do. Distinctions would have to be swiftly fabricated. “But it’s crucial to understand,” he went on, “that the nature of his destiny, most likely, is not to fully rule. He cannot bestride American politics the way F.D.R. or even Ronald Reagan did, or for that matter in the way of contemporary nationalist leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban or India’s Narendra Modi. In part that’s because he doesn’t have their kind of disciplined agenda, but in part it’s just that he can never be other than himself.” An excess of authenticity is what hobbles the supreme American leader. And here was Douthat’s final revision of his providentialist punditry: “The Republican nominee dominates our politics not by winning all the time or getting everything he wants (he may not even be sure of what he wants from day to day) but by making everything else exist perpetually in relationship to him — even when he’s losing, out of office or suffering policy defeats — and refusing to allow any order separate from himself to be established so long as he’s alive and kicking.” 

Ponder what he is praising in those words and join me in a round of patriotic revulsion. Perhaps Congress should legislate another fast day. Or should it be left to the states? 

 

III

As I was crossing the road the other day, I kept bumping into elites. Or rather, they kept bumping into me. They were everywhere. They seemed to know each other, though they were too refined to wink. They kept getting in my way. Their sense of entitlement about getting to the other side of the road — and before the light changed! — was obnoxious. I reached the pavement in a fit of egalitarian pique. When I looked behind me, I observed the elites walking haughtily to their destinations, as if their destinations were better than mine. When one of the elites entered a dry-cleaning store, a guy next to me mumbled something about how they were too good for washers and driers. When a member of the Council on Foreign Relations entered the vegetarian market, the experience of status degradation was too much. I needed a drink. I headed straight for my bartender at the Four Seasons and ordered an herbed butter–infused Michter’s Bourbon with black pepper honey and orange bitters. The people’s drink. 

Another of the sinister comedies of the age of Trump is its frenzied anti-elitism. Sometimes I think that anybody who uses the word “elites” is ipso facto a member of the elites. We are awash in gold-card populists. The campaign of 2024 is often depicted as a contest between right-wing populists and left-wing populists, but it could just as accurately be described as an internecine war between anti-elitist elitists. This is not new. The tribunes of the people — Marxist intellectuals and Knightsbridge socialists, not to mention the Joe Sixpack who lives in Palm Beach and Bedminster — have often emerged from more privileged classes; Marx himself, a bourgeois thinker consecrated to the proletariat, went to great pains to explain how people such as himself were possible. The most sterling example of the crossover was certainly Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the traitor to his class. These defections and paradoxes are all edifying, because they defy the tyranny of origins. (Sometimes they are phony, as when Tom Joad — I mean Bruce Springsteen — returns from a concert about hot soup on a campfire under a bridge to his estate in New Jersey.) 

They also refute the sociology of knowledge that is at the root of many aspects of our crisis — the idea that we are all merely spokespeople for our groups, that our outlooks are socially determined, that intellectual independence is impossible and even undesirable. On the left they call this doctrine “standpoint epistemology,” in the same spirit in which Richard Rorty used “ethnocentrism” as a term of praise. If you add to this a preference for one group over the others,
so that the members of that group are (as Marx claimed about the proletariat and we claim for all our favorite victims) epistemologically privileged, wiser, deeper, sagaciously scarred, more acquainted with what is really real, then debate is destroyed by deference. So much of our culture consists in nervous exercises in deference, which is why the heat is high but the light is low, and why many views are not heard, and why epistemological treason is evidence of freedom of thought. Not everything that disadvantaged people say is right and not everything that advantaged people say is wrong. In ancient days, when Americans still cared about truth, we understood that the merit of an opinion is not established by the social position of the individual who espouses it. 

Yet the Trump-Vance anti-elitism is guilty of worse sins than hypocrisy. Their manipulation of resentment is a betrayal of the hurting people whom they purport to save. There is a basis in reality, after all, for those resentments. The economic inequality in our country is incontrovertibly obscene. But what do we do when legitimate grievances turn poisonous? It is the central perplexity of our politics. And the Trump-Vance strategy is precisely to make them poisonous, and thereby distract the poor and the dispossessed from the search for solutions. (Daniel Bell once remarked that the opposite of anti-elitism is fairness.) They offer them policy nostrums that pander to the poor but benefit the rich, and an endorsement of malice, and a terror of the future. Gullibility is often the child of unhappiness. When Trump and Vance concur in their wounded electorate’s disinclination to change, they condemn them, the MAGA millions, to more of the circumstances that have been responsible for their wounds — to more coal. Economically speaking, they want their votes in return for nothing. For all their populist rhetoric, they lag behind the groupuscule of Republican thinkers and activists who seem to have sincerely discovered the actual American working-class and befriended organized labor — I am tempted to call them the Democratic wing of the Republican Party, except that the Democratic Party is itself struggling to establish its own relationship with American workers, whose struggles are not adequately personified by George Clooney. 

The trouble with anti-elitism is not that elites do not exist. It is that they exist everywhere, in every movement and party, on all sides. A mere revolt against elites makes a politics stupid. The important question is what the respective elites stand for. Talking truth to power makes no sense if power happens to be acting rightly. It similarly makes no sense if power happens to know what it is talking about. For this reason, populists should have more respect for technocracy, and for their indebtedness to technocrats. One of the most serious obstacles in American politics is the arcane character of some of the most urgent issues facing it. Who really grasps the particulars of health care and climate change and financial regulation? (Not me.) There are policy questions that are not just moral matters, which we are all more or less qualified to evaluate. And even some moral matters must await the clarifications of social science. This means that the vast majority of American voters are regularly asked to make decisions about things that they do understand. They are democratically enfranchised, but they are democratically incompetent. They vote in ignorance, as if a vote is nothing more exigent than an expression of emotion and not of informed reasoning, as if the right to vote is all that matters about the vote. But along with the right to vote comes the duty to vote intelligently. Knowledge should not be an amenity in a society that governs itself by its opinions, nor should it be maligned as a badge of eliteness. When Trump says that he “loves the poorly educated,” a love that in his case is also a self-love, he slanders the democratic promise; and the collapse in recent years of the prestige of a college education bodes ill for the quality of our social order. 

In order to vote intelligently, therefore, we often require the assistance of the archetypal villain of populist politics: the mustache-twirling expert. But do not be afraid. Expertise is simply an earned authority about a small piece of the world. It may be exasperatingly technical, but its specialization is its strength; and it is not a conspiracy or a mask for power, unless of course you disagree with it, or, more fundamentally, with its faith in the possibility of expanding objectivity. Expertise is the inexorable consequence of the complexity of life, and certainly of the administration of public policy. I am aware that there are experts on both sides of every issue, and I have no answer to the question of how to adjudicate between them, because if we could adjudicate between them we would have no need of them in the first place. (There are also experts on expertise.) Anti-elitism, insofar as it enshrines a hostility toward the intellect and proposes to acquit us of our citizenly responsibilities without sufficient knowledge, is precisely what it says elitism is: a technique for keeping people down. 

And who are “the people”? They are a myth invented by the populists, who in their selective and self-regarding empathy always expel people from “the people.” “The people” are never the people. Hillbilly standpoint epistemology is as intolerant as woke standpoint epistemology. It, too, is in the business of choosing a community of the elect, of giving out halos. Cognitive equality — the ability to see all people equally — turns out to be as elusive as political equality. The populists’ “people” is the very contradiction of the Constitution’s “People.” Both are fictive, but the latter is at least a generous and bettering fiction, which is why its own principles could be effectively deployed against its racist stain. The former is a surly and inward-looking crowd, a wrathful mass, a mob waiting to form, or rather to fuse. It seeks recognition more ardently than it seeks relief. The psychology of unfairly treated people, of humiliated people, must be respected, but it plays into the hands of unscrupulous politicians to prize affirmations over solutions. Even if it is always awkward to counsel patience for people in pain, to preach to them about letting the system work when it has not worked before, still there is no wisdom in impatience if one is serious about change. The time that it takes to remedy an injustice is itself a part of the injustice. 

“The people,” moreover, are always accompanied by a partner. He is “the leader.” The leader incarnates the people and charismatically intuits their needs and speaks for them more powerfully than they could speak for themselves. “The people” can almost be defined as that segment of the population who are in thrall to “the leader.” The compatibility of populism with authoritarianism is one of the saddest stories in political history. MAGA is the contemporary American chapter of that history.

Lest Professor Moyn accuse me of a lack of sunniness, I should note that the gloomy view of “the people” was developed as a response to the long historical experience of “the people.” In the nineteenth century, in the early decades of mass politics, sunniness about the mobilization of citizens in the streets was plausible, since the causes for which the early crowds agitated were (mostly) emancipatory and political participation was a cherished value of the emerging liberal order. Jules Michelet could write Le Peuple, for example, a rapturous paean to the people that now reads like a liberal hallucination. By the end of the century, however, when mass politics had shown its ugly face (or faces), the enthusiasm for the streets was getting harder to justify, even if the Nietzschean neo-aristocratic contempt for the canaille, according to which the poor are animated not by need but by envy, was contemptible; and by the middle of the twentieth century anybody who had no misgivings about uprisings and insurrections was a fool. Hitler’s crowds, and Lenin’s, and Mao’s, were also “the people,” and their rebellions were more the result of remorseless top-down manipulation than sentimental bottom-up spontaneity. (“Never play with insurrection,” Lenin instructed, “you must go to the end.”) The rebellions of the 1960s were supposed to restore the good reputation of mass politics and let the sunshine back in, but they had the opposite effect, as the mobes become mobs. 

Many of the epochal leaps in social progress in those decades were undeniably a result of that turbulence — but not of its progressive extremes and its populist excesses, which jeopardized the prospects of reform. Would Lyndon Johnson and his political elite have signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act if not for the pressures from below? We may sunnily conclude, then, that sometimes elites can be moved. And we may also conclude with a smile that elites are not omnipotent: they sometimes fail, as when billionaires sometimes fail to elect their bought-and-paid-for candidates.

It is not all rigged. Or is it? Anti-elitism is a crusade of the American left as well as the American right, and recently it produced an impressive manifesto, called Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò, who is the C. Wright Mills of our day. The book is smart and — always a good sign — ringingly critical about its author’s own congregation. (I owe the idea of the deleterious effect of “deference politics” to Táíwò, who introduces it in a brilliant criticism of woke commonplaces such as “listen to the most affected” and “center the most marginalized.”) Táíwò offers a definition of what he deplores: “Elite capture happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.” Nothing controversial there, though he would do well to note the many counterexamples, most conspicuously the Ford Foundation. 

Like many investigations into elites and elitism, Taiwo’s book is at bottom another attempt to find an explanation for the perennial failure of radical politics. Yet the explanation is not far to find. In fact it is his right under his nose. The “everything else” in his title is the giveaway. He ought to consider the totalistic mentality that his own book exemplifies. For example: “It’s not just that wokeness is too white. It’s that everything is.” Beware those italics. You cannot properly understand the possibilities for change unless you recognize that there are exhilarating holes in “everything,” unconquered spaces, respites from domination, incomplete captures — or to put it differently, that there is no such thing as “everything.” Ordinary experience, poor and rich, black and white, female and male, does not substantiate such an airless and seamless picture of society, such a perfectly dystopian monolithic prison. The reliance of radicalism upon the systemic standpoint has always been its undoing, not least because “everything” is never going to change. 

“Systemic” denotes more than pervasiveness and ubiquity, which is horrific enough when speaking of oppression; “systemic” is a sociological euphemism for a condition of doom, and also for a warrant for hopelessness. (Perhaps “systemic” is more kindly understood as an emotive term for the amount of distress that motivates a social analysis: misery often feels like everything.) I do not see how the social action that Táíwò prescribes is possible in the social world that he describes. He cites approvingly a bright idea called “pragmatic utopianism,” but that is a glib oxymoron, a bumper sticker, and in practice not at all an advance on the incremental liberal reform that radicals detest, which still remains the most reliable and least damaging pursuit of justice. A pragmatic utopian, who works with institutions of power and takes his victories where he can find them, in progress that is not epic but stubborn and steady, is a person who behaves like a liberal while dining out on his hatred of anti-perfectionist liberals. 

Who’s afraid of Vilfredo Pareto? He was once a towering figure in Western intellectual life and his picture was on the cover of Saturday Review. In 1901, fifteen years before he produced his vast Treatise on General Sociology, Pareto published a paper in an Italian journal of sociology in which he contended that “the history of man is the history of the continuous replacement of elites: as one ascends, the other declines.” A replacement theory! Elites change. Later he called this “the law of the circulation of elites.” Those were the days when laws of history were still being codified. Pareto did not idealize elites: “The new elite which seeks to supersede the old one does not admit to such an intention frankly and openly. Instead it assumes the leadership of all the oppressed, declares that it will pursue not its own good but the good of the many; and it goes to battle not for the rights of a restricted class but for the rights of almost the entire citizenry. Of course, once victory is won, it subjugates its erstwhile allies, or, at best, offers them some formal concessions.” He regarded socialism as a means for the creation of “a working-class elite” — a wise irony. 

Those were also the days when the problem of elites vexed many social thinkers. In 1896, Gaetano Mosca published Elements of Political Science, now known as The Ruling Class, in which he explored the mystery that in every society a majority is ruled by a minority. He, too, was a realist about the perdurability of hierarchy. “There can be no human organization without rankings and subordinations. Any sort of hierarchy necessarily requires that some should command and others obey. And since it is in the nature of the human being that many men should love to command and that almost all men can be brought to obey, an institution that gives those who are at the top a way of justifying their authority and at the same time helps to persuade those at the bottom to submit is likely to be a useful institution.” In 1911, Robert Michels, another Italian but born in Germany, and a close friend of Max Weber, published Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Recognizing “the impossibility of a complete practical application of the principle of mass-sovereignty,” Michels famously coined “the iron law of oligarchy.” He declared that “society cannot exist without a ‘dominant’ or ‘political’ class, and the ruling class, while its elements are subject to a frequent partial renewal, nevertheless constitutes the only factor of sufficiently durable efficacy in the history of human development.” (Even Táíwò concedes that “we may not be able to entirely eliminate elite capture from the world.”)

None of these thinkers were democrats. They all believed that the permanence of elites, and their indispensability for the functioning of a society, rendered democracy impracticable. This is Michels: “In all the affairs of management for whose decisions there is requisite specialized knowledge, and for whose performance a certain degree of authority is necessary, a measure of despotism must be allowed, and thereby a deviation from the principles of pure democracy.” He started out in the Italian socialist party and eventually joined the fascists, because — fellow countrymen, take note — he was struck by the rapport between the leader and the workers, and fell for the illusion that the fascist was therefore the likeliest instrument of justice. And this is Mosca, who was “opposed to pure democracy because I am a liberal” and bravely denounced Mussolini and thwarted his bills in the Italian senate: “The term ‘democratic’ seems more suitable for the tendency which aims to replenish the ruling class with elements deriving from the lower classes.” His democratic ideal was nothing more ambitious than a heterogeneous elite — diversity at the top. 

What is strange about all these theories of the elites is that they contrast themselves only with “pure” democracy. Their unspoken subject is their disappointment in the Rousseauist reverie of a general will, of a society completely reconciled with itself. They write as if Madison never lived, and they seem to regard the permanence of social distinction and political conflict as a significant discovery. The American political tradition already knew this. It inculcates a certain unsurprisability about the roughness of living together — an unsurprisability that is nonetheless not immune to outrage. When Madison and his colleagues established representative democracy over direct democracy, they invented a political elite, and in perpetuity. A mediated relationship with the people and their passions seemed more conducive to calm and fair governing, but it introduced a vector of verticality that now haunts our politics and diverts its attention from what actually ails us. We are squandering ourselves in a prime-time soap opera of superiority complexes and inferiority complexes, which is perhaps unavoidable in a society in which an apartment sells for two hundred and fifty million dollars. But the problem before us is not that we have elites. The problem is that some of our elites may be wrong, and mendacious, and cruel. The choice between the Trump-Vance elite and the Harris-Walz elite is a genuine choice, even if they are both elites. They all seek power, but they will use power differently. The powerful can help either the powerful or the powerless, and sometimes both. But comparing ourselves incessantly to each other will teach us less than comparing ourselves to the future.