On Political Disenchantment

One of the most pervasive phenomena of our current age is intense political partisanship. This trend has given rise to an understandable countertendency: an exhaustion with partisanship and its toll on public life. Evidence of this sentiment can be seen, for example, in the prevalence of “double haters” and the appeal of third-party candidates. It can also be seen in rising cultural anxieties about the risks of seemingly irresoluble polarization, such as depicted in the March 2024 movie “Civil War.”

This partisanship fatigue is not only an understandable response to the current state of our politics, but historically it has also led to periods of disenchantment. These periods are characterized by a sense of personal powerlessness, acknowledgment that one’s own opinion isn’t always correct, and resistance to the idea that any specific historical moment is particularly unique. Viewed in these terms, disenchantment seems like a negative outcome, akin to apathy; but in fact, a disenchanted mindset can free us from magical thinking and pave the way for more thoughtful discourse—and perhaps even cultural renewal.

Losing the Magic

The word “disenchantment” itself is generally considered to derive from the medieval French word enchanter, which means “to bewitch” or “to place under a spell.” Disenchantment (désenchantement) thus refers to the process of being released from a magical spell. Similarly, the German sociologist Max Weber viewed the premodern world as enchanted, inhabited and influenced by “gods and demons.” He described the “rationalization,” in modern times, of many realms of social life (the economy, the state, religion and so on) and their regulation by increasingly logical criteria as the “disenchantment of the world,” using a German term—Entzauberung—that literally means “de-magic-ation.”

Political partisanship is, of course, firmly grounded in the modern world, with its rational assumptions. Yet partisanship is, at the very least, analogous to the magical worldview: Political partisans operate under a kind of spell, as they behold a world brimming with evidence to support the worldview they take for granted. The gods and demons that, for Weber, populated the age of enchantment play an equally decisive role in the partisan mindset. To be disenchanted is to have broken this spell.

Second, disenchantment is a process that has occurred repeatedly throughout history, typically after periods characterized by fierce partisanship. Disenchantment tends to follow partisanship either because partisanship breaks like a bad fever or because partisan movements are defeated, forcing proponents to reckon with failure. Historically, such failures cleared the way for an intellectual mindset that was suspicious of partisan ideals and inclined toward a more sober, scientific and even cynical—that is, disenchanted—understanding of human affairs.

For example, the violent civil strife that pitted Protestants against Catholics in early modern Europe gave rise to an intellectual culture that was more comfortable with doubt than with the absolute claims of religion. Perhaps the most significant philosophical expression of this outlook was skepticism, whose most eloquent advocate, 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, emphasized the limits of human understanding, encouraged intellectual modesty and prioritized the pursuit of personal virtue over belief in some overarching political ideal. Similarly, the defeat of the revolutions that broke out through much of Europe in 1848 and the triumph, in some instances, of conservative forces helped deflate the hopes that 19th-century revolutionaries placed in utopian ideologies.

Finally, the 1960s were another period that gave birth to fervent and often idealistic political activism and, eventually, to a new wave of disenchantment in Europe. Just a few short years after student riots swept across Western Europe and the United States, disappointed former radicals who had marched in Paris and elsewhere were characterizing the early 1970s as a period of “sobering up,” leading some to reject the political stances they had once taken. Erstwhile radicals undertook a withering critique of Marxism, which had inspired their activism, partly because they now saw it as totalitarian, partly so that they would not—as The Who put it—“get fooled again.” Disenchantment thus has a long history and follows a discernible pattern.

Accepting Powerlessness

In its current form, disenchantment has several distinct characteristics, starting with a perception of powerlessness. In this way, disenchantment runs counter to the main goal of political activism in democratic societies, which is to “empower” people. Empowerment is essential to the partisan mindset. In democratic movements, partisanship seeks to persuade constituencies that they have power and incentivizes them to exercise it through words, actions and votes. This is the goal of most of the foundational texts of democratic revolutions.

It is Thomas Paine’s point in “Common Sense,” when he remarks that “there is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” as well as political writer Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’ goal, in a pamphlet that inspired the French Revolution, when he asserted that the “third estate”—the prerevolutionary commoner class—was not just one rung on the social ladder but the French nation itself. The “we” that recurs in so many landmark democratic statements—as in “we the people” or “we shall overcome”—has the same function.

Even as democratic movements seek to empower the people, they frequently also coalesce around one charismatic leader who is seen as embodying the popular will. This is a major feature of contemporary populist movements, on both the right and the left. In his 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention, for example, Donald Trump famously said: “I alone can fix [the system],” suggesting that he was the perfect vehicle for his voters’ aspirations.

After his election in 2008, Barack Obama similarly declared: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” This remark implies that Obama was no more than a distillation of the energies unleashed by the movement that elected him. The support for individuals is thus a means through which a collective aspiration for empowerment is often expressed.

By contrast, the disenchanted mindset is profoundly skeptical of the idea that individual dynamic leaders or even large groups can bring decisive change. In this sense, the disenchanted mindset aligns with the insights of those political scientists who argue that voting borders on being an irrational act, given the likelihood, that is, that a single vote will make a difference.

Yet this idea of powerlessness is not only an insight about individual agency, though it is certainly that. The disenchanted mindset is also skeptical of the notion that even governments can really steer societies toward change. Not that change never occurs, or that human action has no consequence. But the disenchanted mindset has a profoundly ironic view of human pretensions to power, believing that efforts to bring about change are likely to fail or become mired in unintended consequences.

The “Tao Te Ching” asks: “Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?” before replying: “I do not believe it can be done.” This is the disenchanted mindset’s retort to partisanship’s relentless appeal to empowerment.

You Are Not Unique

Another feature of the disenchanted mindset is a recognition—and even a conviction—of the ordinariness of one’s opinions. Or, to put it in more positive terms, disenchantment means open-mindedness and the intellectual humility to accept that you might be wrong. This belief is what most distinguishes disenchantment from partisanship. Partisanship consists of believing not simply that one’s own views are correct, but that they are uniquely right—that they are endowed with a special, even transcendent truth.

What is most striking about partisanship as it is currently practiced is the way that partisans, in defending their positions, often try to exclude alternative positions from the realm of possibility. They reject the principle of falsifiability, which is so important to the sciences—the notion that for a statement to be empirically true, it must be possible to imagine the circumstances under which it might be disproven. It is because a statement could be disproven that it can be true. Yet in partisan discourse, the possibility of alternative viewpoints, far from enhancing the truth value of one’s own claims, implicitly threatens them. In logic, tautologies—statements that are always true, like A=A—are trivial. Partisan discourse, however, strives for tautology—that is, for the view that the partisan’s position must be true and can brook no opposition.

By the same token, the belief in the specialness of one’s own positions also implies a dichotomy between one’s own views and those of one’s opponents. It is not simply that one is right and the other is wrong, but that one’s own position is, in a sense, naturally inclined to truth and the other is hardwired to falsehood. It illustrates what in logic is called “special pleading”: the argument that a particular constituency—typically, the one to which the speaker belongs—deserves to be judged by a different standard from others. Consequently, even when partisans adopt ways of thinking that closely resemble their opponents’, their own position’s specialness prevails, shielding it from the imputation of falsehood that applies when a different position is uttered by an opponent.

You know you’re disenchanted when you don’t just say “that’s just my opinion,” but truly believe it. Recognizing the validity of the opinions of others becomes not just a courtesy or a principle of fairness, but part of your world picture—a world that is full of people with strange and varied opinions. The disenchanted mind doesn’t stop having opinions; they just carry a lower voltage in its mental circuitry. Nor does the disenchanted mind abandon its critical faculties. Certain positions are absurd, being tantamount to contradictions in terms—positions, in short, that can never be true.

But such positions are relatively few and far between. More often, the disenchanted mindset reaches the conclusion, “That position isn’t absurd.” Whereas partisanship inhabits a Manichean universe where truth is always threatened by pervasive falsity, disenchantment wrestles with a world populated with an infinite variety of non-absurd attitudes.

The shift from partisanship to disenchantment recalls the (regrettably) apocryphal quote attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” Without suggesting that disenchantment necessarily implies maturity, its experience is similar to the one the quote describes: When one abandons the partisan mindset, many opinions suddenly seem less foolish.

Rethinking Radical Change

A final characteristic of the disenchanted mindset is its attitude toward time—specifically, a reluctance to see the flow of events as punctuated by dramatic turning points and moments of world-historical significance. In this respect, it once again runs counter to partisanship’s visceral instincts. In many ways, modern political ideologies were founded on distinct—and opposed—attitudes toward temporality. The left (ranging from liberalism to socialism) originated with the revolutions of the 18th century, which saw history as a series of ruptures that allow humans to radically reimagine their social and political existence. Revolutionaries embraced the possibility of a “new order of the ages,” as Hannah Arendt observed.

At the same time, conservatism emerged in overt hostility to the revolutionary attitude, with the goal of preserving the best of the past—or, at minimum, arresting the reckless pace of change. Edmund Burke famously regretted that “the age of chivalry is gone” but also that revolutionaries were too eager to dismiss the wisdom of the ages distilled in tradition. More recently, William F. Buckley Jr. defined conservatism as a movement that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” In short, the left imagines a moment in time when history flips, inaugurating a better world, while the right imagines a historical juncture when everything goes wrong, necessitating ever more urgent appeals to stop the clock before it’s too late.

Contemporary partisanship amplifies these historical trends. The cultural politics of the contemporary left—“woke” or otherwise—is based on the prospect of a “new order of the ages” in which the legacy of a benighted, intolerant and oppressive past is jettisoned once and for all. Progressive policies seeking to increase diversity and expand the meaning of gender identity undeniably represent a wager on a more enlightened and inclusive future. The right, meanwhile, is obsessed with returning to an idealized past, as the slogan “Make America Great Again” makes clear. These different temporal attitudes feed off each other: The left waxes apocalyptic about the dangers of reverting to the dark ages, while the right prophesies doom in contemplating the dystopian future plotted by liberals.

The disenchanted mindset differs from the partisan mentality because it refrains from seeing history as shaped by an overarching narrative. It is reticent to describe contemporary events as high-stakes showdowns upon which the fate of a nation or even humanity depends. It is skeptical, for instance, about the claims partisans make about the significance of particular elections: that an election will be “the most important in our country’s history,” that the future of democracy hangs in the balance, or that an election can be compared to a hijacked flight in which you must “charge the cockpit or you die.”

The disenchanted mind is impressed by the deep, unchanging rhythms in human life that are often overlooked by partisans obsessed with the frenetic pace of political conflict. It sees wisdom in the view that history is, in many ways, “one damn thing after another.” In “The True and Only Heaven,” Christopher Lasch writes that according to the “populist or petty-bourgeois” sensibility, the “idea that history, like science, records a cumulative unfolding of human capacities” runs “counter to common sense—that is, to the experience of loss and defeat that makes up so much of the texture of daily life.” The disenchanted mind concurs.

To many, the ideas discussed in this essay—and even the term “disenchantment” itself—will sound depressing. Given how contrary the disenchanted mindset is to the values proclaimed by our culture, this is hardly surprising. To be disenchanted means to believe that you are not powerful, that your views don’t really matter and that the historical moment in which you happen to be living is not particularly important.

But disenchantment’s strength lies precisely in its distance from the principles underpinning our politics. Rather than remaining under partisanship’s spell, the disenchanted mindset releases itself from the magical thinking that drives our politics. History also suggests that disenchantment contributes more to the thought of an age than partisan gloominess. Disenchantment with early modern religious conflict renewed the skeptical tradition in philosophy and gave us Montaigne; disenchantment with the political ideologies of the early 19th century paved the way for literary realism; and disenchantment with the politics of the ’60s resulted, in France, in a new wave of critical reflection on democracy.

In addition to freeing minds from partisanship’s narrow horizons, disenchantment in our own age may yield its own intellectual fruits, such as greater insight into partisanship’s motives and a clearer sense of its impact on democratic politics. Perhaps we should all be a little more disenchanted.