Nearly all observers today agree that politics in the United States is in a dire, poisoned state. For this they generally blame “polarization” — and the other political camp. In fact, the reasons are both more complicated and more distressing, and cannot be blamed on any single political grouping. In his pre-pandemic best-seller Enlightenment Now, the psychologist Steven Pinker hailed the worldwide spread of democracy, but not in the glowing terms one might have expected from such a zealous celebrant of modernity. Democracy, he allowed, was preferable to tyranny, and offered people “the freedom to complain.” But Pinker cautioned against what he called “a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.” And he continued: “By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future.” The statement was obviously true on one level, as even a glance at the “deliberation” in our media will show; but it is appallingly superficial on others. Of course, ideal democracy has never existed on the planet, and probably never will. If a key element of democracy is a universal adult right to vote, then the United States has approached democratic status only since the 1960’s. But recognizing the fact that reality always falls grievously short of the ideal hardly invalidates the ideal. Pinker, having dismissed the ideal as impossible to realize, and having taken a condescending swipe at “the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs,” argued instead for a “minimalist conception of democracy” that leaves public policy, as much as possible, in the hands of trained experts. “To make public discourse more rational,” he insisted, “issues should be depoliticized as much as is feasible…” In other words, circumscribe democracy through technocracy. The problem with this vision is that the most important problems in public life cannot be depoliticized, because most of them do not have a single correct solution that “rational” analysis alone can determine. Men and women see different solutions, depending on their political principles and moral values, which they hold in good faith. The fact that many of them do not approach the subject in the way an Ivy League professor such as Pinker (or I) would do hardly invalidates those principles and values. Would the creation of a national healthcare system in the United States represent a step towards improving the public good or an intrusion upon individual freedoms? Should we tolerate enormous inequalities of wealth so long as the poorest among us see their incomes rise? How do we balance the right to defend our homes against the dangers posed by the easy availability of deadly weapons? I have strong opinions on all these issues, and will vote for politicians who share my opinions and promise to act on them. But I recognize that others have different opinions, not because they are mistaken or ignorant or evil, but because they bring different principles and values to bear on the problems. I recognize that however strongly I feel about these issues, they do not belong beyond the bounds of political debate, with only one point of view about them permissible. Throughout modern history, the greatest threat to democracy has come precisely from the rejection of these assumptions — indeed, of politics itself — and the consequent denial of political legitimacy to those who fail to share one’s own views on key issues. Historians have devoted intensive study to the long and painful process by which the notion of a “legitimate opposition” gained acceptance in the United States and other democratic societies and the way in which it has frequently threatened to erode. Democratic politics, tending as it so often does towards hyperbole and demagoguery, all too easily generates claims about the wanton stupidity, immorality, or just plain evil of one’s political opponents. But it is not casual hyperbole, insincerely employed and quickly forgotten, that most seriously threatens democratic societies. It is when the denial of legitimate difference congeals into a system of thought, into an ideology which admits only one permissible point of view on key issues, and judges all who fail to share this point of view as ipso facto beyond the pale. Such systems of thought, reinforced through constant repetition in media and by political party organizations, have led again and again not only to the erosion of democratic societies, but to their destruction. If politics has reached such a dire state in America today, the reason is not simply “polarization,” but the toxic growth of several distinct and distinctly contemporary patterns of thought that all tend to undermine the idea that citizens with different political principles and moral values can collectively deliberate on the public good. They span the political spectrum, and can be labeled, in turn, technocracy, market fundamentalism, Trumpian populism, and wokeness. Each seeks to place key issues in American life beyond the bounds of political debate, subject to only one permissible point of view, and they can, for this reason, be called antipolitical. They represent not so much a contribution to politics as a contribution to its destruction. They all have historical roots but have all evolved into new and powerful forms in recent years. Partly this is because the contemporary media environment groups like-minded people into hermetic “silos” with such dreadful efficiency, making it far more difficult to submit extreme and insistently repeated claims to even the most elementary forms of objective verification. Partly it is because these different patterns of thought have shown a surprising capacity to influence and interact with each other. Over the past few years, this shriveling of politics has principally spurred attention among left intellectuals broadly associated with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. It has been a leitmotif in the work of the influential legal scholar and historian Samuel Moyn, who has done much to popularize the concept of
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