Mistaking Leviathan for God

We are told from many quarters that something called “our democracy” is in mortal danger. The feeling of dread is pervasive: Google “our democracy in danger” and you get 70 million hits. The headlines have been frightening. Here’s the New York Times: “Will 2024 be the year democracy dies?” NBC: “Election officials say democracy is still at risk in 2024.” The Financial Times: “Can democracy survive 2024?” The putative cause of death is usually Donald Trump—but it also could be the Deep State, social media or Vladimir Putin. One way or another, our beloved democracy seems to be on the verge of annihilation.

I come with good news. We can’t lose our democracy because we never had one.

Our system is called “representative government.” It enjoys brief spasms of democratic involvement—elections, trials by jury—but by and large it glories in being densely and opaquely mediated, and many of its operations are patently undemocratic—appointed judges, for example, or the Electoral College. This is a feature, not a bug, of the system. By making sure the right hand of power seldom knows what the left hand is doing, the Framers sought to prevent various flavors of tyranny—including, in James Madison’s words, “an unjust combination of the majority.” Despite the media drama over a Trump dictatorship, we can safely say that they achieved their objective.

What we are experiencing isn’t the death of democracy but a crisis of representation. According to Pew Research Center, only 22% of Americans trust the federal government. Trust has virtually vanished among Republicans (11%); more startling, to me, is the collapse of trust in government among Democrats (35%). Trust in Congress has dipped into the same territory: 24% in Ballotpedia’s rolling average. Three out of four Americans feel unrepresented by their elected representatives.

To some extent, the cause of the crisis is thunderingly obvious. Representative government requires a strong bond of identity between the public and the political class. That bond has shattered like a mirror under the blows of the digital age. Elected officials are clueless about, and terrified by, the public. More importantly, the lives of politicians have become incomprehensible to ordinary people. Elizabeth Warren had trouble holding a beer bottle. Trump is forever riding that golden escalator into and out of his very own tower. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, once a bartender, now resembles a movie star treading the red carpet. Like a certain type of little dog, these hyperambitious organisms seem overbred to some singular purpose.

And here I have to deliver the bad news. The malady runs much deeper than this. At the heart of the crisis of representation we will discover an impossible longing for meaning and transcendence.

The Abolition of Meaning and the Displacement of Politics

Mediated government is procedural business: As liberalism in action, it explicitly rejects any claims to cosmic significance. Officially, there can be no long march to utopia, no leader-worship, no regimented, “Triumph of the Will”-like torchlight parades. The system wraps the problem of meaning around its novel approach to the problem of freedom. Both are privatized. The citizen is liberated from the burdens of government service and granted a protected sphere of unimpeded activity. That is the realm where the big questions reside. We are free to pine after God—to attend church, synagogue, mosque or Masonic temple—so long as we keep it legal, and, as with all prurient affairs, comport ourselves with the proper discretion.

The arrangement made for an occasional collision and explosion worked surprisingly well for over a century. Catholics put up with Protestants, Christians with atheists, farmers with factory hands, hippies with suits, in that dynamic cluster of American aspiration we call the pursuit of happiness. Religion was only part of it. (I knew a taxi driver who derived his sense of worth from performing as a clown with the Shriners.) In this huge and restless country, the point was to belong somewhere, to be someone, to attain a web of human relations that nourished the spirit and helped make sense of the world.

Then came the fall. For reasons too complex to delve into here, the sources of meaning and spirituality began to wither and die. Attendance at religious services, for example, has tumbled precipitously. So has membership in Masonic organizations and participation in sports leagues for both children and adults. Connection to neighborhood and community has largely disappeared—the loss of trust in government in part reflects our lack of trust in one another. Families are broken or nonexistent. A nation of joiners and volunteers first dissolved into a passive TV audience—and finally blew apart, with a rude noise, among the volatile conflicts of the web.

Human nature hasn’t changed, however. We still crave justification. The loss of shared meaning condemns the individual to a terrible solitude at the edge of the abyss—and we shouldn’t be surprised by the pathological nature of the responses. In “The Anxious Generation,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt speaks of a “surge of suffering,” particularly among the young. Americans are afflicted with increased anxiety, depression, drug addiction and “deaths of despair,” to match a corresponding decline in marriage, childbearing, even sexual activity. The private sphere, formerly the realm of meaning, is now a wasteland haunted by accusing phantoms. The pursuit of happiness has come to feel like a panicked flight to nowhere.

The pathology has spilled over into politics. Hungry for a loftier state of being, many somehow imagine they have found it in bashing the dull machinery of representational government. These seekers have mistaken Leviathan for God, the will to power for the state of grace—and, by exalting political action almost literally to heaven, they have succumbed to what might be called the transcendental temptation. Only politics, they believe, can save the earth. Only politics can establish social justice. Only politics can preserve the “normies” from the pedophiles who run the country.

As it happens, they are demanding personal validation from an institution explicitly designed not to provide it.

The Thunberg Syndrome and Our New Spirit of Inquisition

Let me suggest a medical name for this cognitive disorder: “Greta Thunberg Syndrome.” Young Thunberg was one of Haidt’s sufferers, healed by the miracle of environmental activism.

“Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat at home, with an eating disorder,” she tweeted. “All that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.”

Thunberg is a fairly typical specimen of those who confuse politics with redemption. With an almost gnostic fervor, she hates the society in which she lives quite comfortably, and keeps breathlessly anticipating its doom. She’s wholly focused on personal theater—not surprisingly, her father is an actor, her mother an opera singer—with few, if any, perceptible consequences. She’s sustained by the absolute certainty that she embodies Truth in the eternal war against Falsehood. Above all, she needs the fuel of rage to lift her spirit above this meaningless world—the angrier she gets, the happier she is.

This is how she began her speech to the assembled heads of state at the United Nations, delivered when she was all of 16: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words ... People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

As Thunberg admits, the temple of activism is often erected on a foundation of psychopathology. There appears to be more than a hint of self-loathing, even self-destructiveness, among those who vandalize ancient works of art or prevent commuters from reaching their jobs, so they can earn their brief instant in front of the cameras. These are not sturdy yeomen. If industrial society were to vanish in a flash, the activist class would go extinct soon after. The self-nullifying contradictions bubble up so close to the surface that one wonders how the people involved can remain unaware of them. The rank and file of Queers for Palestine, for instance, would be exterminated if transported to Gaza.

William James once wrote of the “divided self,” a personality prone to sudden shifts and conversions. Ours are fractured times. The religious impulse in politics should be understood as a fevered grab at wholeness—that is, at purity, simplicity, honesty, everything an evil age has denied the parched hearts of the rebels. The spirit of inquisition is strong. The enemy must be identified and silenced. Because the stakes are apocalyptic, villains can’t be allowed to shelter behind empty proceduralism. According to one poll, a majority of Americans believes the First Amendment, which protects free speech, goes “too far.” A similar majority favors government control of “false information.” Lies have no place in a purified celestial order. False opinion endures, not by right, but on sufferance.

“Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” stated a leader in the anti-Israel student protests at Columbia University. This was personal theater with genocidal intent.

Curiously, the progressive political class, long isolated and afraid, has found in this desperate hunger a link back to the public. It has no clue about meaning—but it has a talent for faking it. It’s able to strike heroic and uncompromising poses. For so small a price, progressive politicians have gained a potent weapon of control.

I find it very easy to imagine a government dominated by true believers in perpetual protest mode, mediated by more disciplined nongovernmental zealots, and administered, in the usual bungling manner, by the ruling elites. The media and academia will applaud, movies will be full of righteous vehemence, corporations will make commercials advertising their virtuous support. Representation, in that case, will be a transparent fiction, and Madison’s mechanisms against tyranny will fall into serious disrepair.

Unbundling the Government and Grappling With Fanaticism

Where do we go from here? To begin with, we must think clearly about the crisis of representation. Part of it is structural. Mediation is intentional and no doubt necessary, but bloated paralysis was never the desired endpoint. Too many layers of mediation have accumulated between the ordinary citizen and elected officials. This not only alienates the citizen, who feels shunted to a vast antechamber crowded with frustrated petitioners—it also promotes the kind of hidden incompetence and lack of accountability we recently witnessed in the Secret Service.

The disruption of the digital must be let loose on representational government. I find it astounding that I’m writing these words in the year 2024—yet here we are. Digital communication is all about unbundling, connection and that ugly word, “disintermediation.” There is an indefinite number of ways in which our representatives can make themselves available to us online. There is no reason, in the digital age, why power should be geographically aggregated in a place called “the capital.” If more democracy is wanted, we can use digital platforms to imitate Switzerland and hold referendums at every level of government. Conceptually, these things are easy. All it takes is the will to get there.

Part of the crisis is social, and that’s a tough one to fix. Good people are rightly repelled by the idea of running for office. It’s like jumping into a meat-grinder—not much of the original person emerges on the other side. As a result, we are stuck with animatronic zombies like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris or loudmouth mutants like Trump. Allow me to make a modest proposal. If we’re looking for admirable qualities among politicians, the only way to get there is by a Darwinian process—call it unnatural selection. Let’s keep throwing out the bums we have in office, until we cycle to a class of person that can authentically represent us. If it takes years or decades, so be it.

But what are we to do with the fanatics who wish to turn government into a church and the private sphere into a puritanical zone of control? That, I think, is much more straightforward. We should recall that the activists are our fellow citizens, not Nazi stormtroopers or aliens from space. They are responding to an ancient existential need. As human beings, they should be treated with compassion. As political actors, however, they must be confronted and defeated. There’s no middle ground: Either we are equal and equally free or we’re nothing. The cosmic can have no truck with the transactional. As a cursory glance at 20th-century history should teach us, the transcendental temptation is indistinguishable from the totalitarian one.