Democracy Isn't Just a Good Time

or How I Became a Raging Moderate

25-years into the 21st century, so many of the problems I was taught belonged to our benighted forebears have been reborn Mad Max style. With souped up digital engines and terrifying viral mods, authoritarianism, antisemitism, homo/pedophobia, and good old-fashioned misogyny have returned, screaming out of the wasteland like Immortan Joe’s zealot army.

Adding to the confusion, the ancient regime of politically inflected but earnest media institutions have abandoned their common cause with objectivity¹ and joined the melee. NYTimes readers see conservatives and their clown-car rodeo sideshow, featuring Jewish space lasers and deep state super spies dutifully arrayed behind Donald, Elon and the ever-versatile JD Vance. And Fox News watchers see liberals feasting on their harvest of nutty professors, juiced on green subsidies and Soros dollars, stampeding across the US border shoulder-to-shoulder with Antifa and CCP insurgents.

These are sardonic caricatures, I know. But any casual scroll across various media channels (social or legacy) will validate their broad contours, as will the probing Shibboleths we exchange when sizing up our acquaintances. “Are there any tariffs on this meal,” you smirk at lunch with your colleagues. “We done destroying the planet,” you offer the mechanic as he services your F-150.

We all use these short hands, float little signifiers and study the response, playing low-key spies for our own moral order. And look, it’s probably always been this way. The intensity of the behavior that emerges in high school is a stage of life, yes, but it’s also sound fundamentals. In-group, out-group dynamics are primitive, elemental even. They come before reasoning and they never go away, but they do get better at dressing-up in reason’s garments. And they’re also indispensable to survival.

We climbed atop Darwin’s heap because of our unmatched ability to cooperate. But cooperation requires a binding agent, some kind of glue to keep the community together. Dumping on out-groups is a low-cost, reliable way to shore up in-group affections when you don’t have a nobler purpose ready-at-hand.

I have friends and family assembled on both sides of this ideological fray. Each side is fuming and righteous, and rock-solid sure that the world’s political complexities would be, at the very least, simplified if [insert partisan-slag here] were banished to the wilderness. They all sense that our world’s alliances are unspooling faster than they can be darned. They’re scared, alert to the unpredictable nature of our present moment, and anxious of its implications. And that anxiety has created a particularly absurdist form of political theater in the West generally, and in the US in particular. The political schisms in this country are real, of course, but they’re not the point. They are a kind of distraction, light on facts, heavy on drama—probably best understood as an entertainment genre rather than urgent political disputes.

The reality is we don’t live in the world we thought we did, and we’ve never lived in that world. What world do I mean? I mean the gilded world of ascending moral righteousness. Much of our contemporary rectitude is inertial, derived from the herculean tasks of civil rights victories generations ago. Yes, we are materially prosperous, but we’re also as spiritually starved as we’ve ever been. And a spiritually bereft man² is incapable of persistent righteousness. All he has is social triangulation, a critical tool for survival, but a poor guide to principles in the social fray that emerges from competing wants.

I said that we are as spiritually starved as we have ever been, and I meant it. Paradise belongs to the present. It is an ever-renewable yet ever-vanishing resource of any given moment in time. Always here, and always gone. God is as near or far as she has ever been. Enlightenment is right around the corner and it’s flung to the edge of all time and space, just as it has ever been.³

Jesus is gone, yes, but more importantly he was here. The son of God walked the earth, loved lepers’ feet, and rose from the dead. And he’s perched and alert and ready to guide you to heaven.

The Buddha was here. Sure he gets reborn, but there’s a difference between this guy who riddles like the Buddha come again, and the actual dude holding a flower and waxing philosophic to Śāriputra in the palace garden—and yet here he is.

Once, there was a gilded age in China. The Han rode golden chariots, the grand historian understood the Mandate of Heaven, and traditional medicine kept Lao Tzu alive until he was 996. And the Huaxia⁴ shall abide forever.

I’m sure you get the idea.

But don’t mistake my irreverence for spiritual cynicism. I believe in God and Enlightenment—deeply. I may just be an effluvium of egotistical impulses surging up out of the molecular soup, but I do believe in something larger than myself. These myths can be a potent source of compassion and human flourishing. But we shouldn’t forget that they can also be wielded as a cudgel to enforce and shape the status quo, as they are being used now in the United States by both the left and the right to maintain the appearance of a higher purpose, like eradicating racism (impossible) and returning America’s post-WWII demography (also impossible).

We are muddling through a time of intense religious fervor, which is, unfortunately, not the same thing as an intense spiritual fervor.⁵ And one of the ways that fervor manifests is in the expression and spread of secular fundamentalism, which is not altogether different from sacred fundamentalism. Yes, the institutions differ, and the orientations are orthogonal,⁶ but fundamentalist Progressive dogma and fundamentalist Christian dogma have a lot in common. Some people call these dogmas the “woke left” and the “woke right, and we’ll come back to this phenomenon down the line, but for starters I challenge anyone to find a meaningful difference between Ibram Kendi’s question begging and Jerry Falwell’s. No matter who your devil is, stupid is as stupid does.

The United States is prone to these kinds of religious revivals. There was the Revolutionary War, the First and Second Great Awakening’s, Woodstock and now this moment here that we must all suffer through, as participants and observers. But these are also times of tremendous transformation and creativity. New forms are born. Subcultures speciate and hybridize. The husks left behind desiccate and burn. It’s not neat or tidy. It’s not a rational process. It’s a kind of madness, in point of fact. But it is a madness teeming with beauty and possibility. But make no mistake, it is a time of real danger. People will get hurt. You and yours might not make it. Me and mine might not either. I’ll pray for us both.

The reality is that the presumptions of pleasure, leisure, and easy living that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries have satisfied our appetites but not our aspirations. Capital’s two-and-a-half century growth spurt has transformed human existence in a way that can only be compared to the inventions of farming, advances in metallurgy, and the Industrial Revolution.⁷ Nothing about the titillations of technology or explosions of convenience in the last 50 years should surprise us. Humans have always thrived by making it easier to survive. From the invention of microblades in the Last Glacial Maximum, to fast food drive thrus, making it easier to secure food, shelter, and clothing both satisfies and transforms our desires. But there are consequences.

We are fat but starving. We are safe but terrified. There’s a button or screen to satisfy every appetite but there’s no spigot from which we might satisfy our spiritual thirst. And so, out of this schizophrenia of privation and abundance, our politics is transformed into a gladiatorial-style spectacle, humming with malice and giddy with ill-intent.

Gotcha! Lock her up! Traitor! Snowflake! Racist!

We do not choose the time and place of our birth. It’s beyond our control. We might even call it fate. But we can choose how we engage with the world we’re born into. You can, for example, pick a side. Any side you want. Seriously. Become a partisan. Lob grenades. Own the libs. Banish the fascists. Disdain the spineless. And why not? It’s vital. It’s the very stuff out of which history is made. Plus, so many people are doing it you’re likely to find a lovely group of combatants to spend your life with. People who will help reinforce your moral rectitude while you take vacations, raise your kids, and pay off your mortgage. The dopamine hit you feel dumping on the wretched and the ignorant is real and so is the pain they’ll feel. To each his own. But I’m going a different way.

I’m embracing moderation, political moderation. I am become moderate. But not the formless moderate universally disdained but endlessly courted by political activists. My moderation is a middle way.⁸ My moderation is on fire, alive, active. It sifts, filters, and rejects. It endlessly whittles until the kernel of truth is found. It believes in objectivity as an ideal to endlessly strive for. It believes in Democracy; it is committed, faithful, and loyal to it. My moderation understands that Democracy isn’t just a good time. We cannot inherit our goodness. We have no right to it. It must be solved for each generation, over and over again. And the relationship between the wisdom of the collective (the common good), and the perennial wisdom of our highest virtues (the uncommon good) are in constant tension. One cannot finally be solved with the other. Rule by the elite, and rule by the mob all finally lead to dystopia. Each must check each—forever.

My moderation believes there is a right view, a right intention. There are principles and virtues. We can live by them. We can fight for them. Out of them emerge the ten thousand things. Binary choices are the currency of zealots and millenarians. Democracy is madness just barely cooled by reason, with one rein remaining on the bit, one bender away from chaos. It’s not proper. It doesn’t always make the right choice. But as long as it can be maintained its wildness shades towards the good.

I’m enraptured by all that I don’t understand. I am curious. And I will punch you in the face to prove it. If you want to join my side, I’ll be happy to scrap alongside you.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. Though (mostly) well-intentioned, a cavalcade of continentals have done their best to dismantle the intellectual apparatus that undergirds the subjective commitment to objectivity. This nihilistic project is often called “postmodern” or “Neo-Marxist” but has a much older history that I will write about down the road. What’s relevant here is that this counter-education has addled the brains of an entire generation of intellectuals, so much so that our best newspapers have abandoned objectivity as an ideal.

2. I use “man” here universally for aesthetic purposes. Sometimes I will use “woman” the same way, sometimes “he/his” or “she/her.” My essays are an exploration, both for me and for the reader, an assay to see if we can sound out the truth together. There is a fleeting, winking spark from which aesthetics, ethics, and knowing emerge and a transcendent unity is glimpsed. This is my foolish conceit.

3. One of the ways that fundamentalism works is to choke this vital exchange between the present and the possible. It mythologizes the past in order to catastophize the present. Fundamentalism is widely misunderstood by mainstream pundits. It is not a misreading of a faith, but a too literal reading of a faith. All of these issues are interconnected. I’ll say more about this in the future too.

4. Huáxià is the ancient poetical term for the Chinese Han. This “great flower” or “grand flourishing,” whose origins predates the Spring and Autumn period, connects contemporary Han and their quasi-mythical origins to the banks of the Yellow River, the one place on earth the Mandate of Heaven was made manifest. The term is still used today in such phrases as Huáxià yǒng cún, “the Han shall endure forever.”

5. I’ll talk more about the distinction between (or lack of distinction between) the religious and the spiritual at some point. Here I use it as a shorthand to suggest there’s a difference between a religious impulse and a spiritual impulse, even though the two are not mutually exclusive.

6. The secular and the sacred, this-world and the next-world, state and religion, whatever you want to call it, are not opposites. They are in tension, tethered like a suspension bridge, or space-time, but they are not opposed to one another.

7. Farming is about 12,000 years old, but might be older if you count Natufian agricultural practices a few thousand years before that. The forging of Bronze happened about 5,500 years ago, but was predated by copper in the Chalcolithic Age several centuries before that. And everyone who cares to knows that the Industrial Revolution began about 260 years ago with textile manufacturing, but waterwheel technology had already transformed the economies of the European Middle Ages before that, so which is it?

The boundaries of all leaps forward in human history are fuzzy. Scholars build careers around the inexhaustible details that push the origin of some pivotal moment in human history further into the past. It is the inversion of the Age of Discovery. The further out to sea our vessels wander, the farther away our origins become.

8. For those of you wondering, yes, the Buddhist reference is intentional. Politics cannot be separated from ultimate ends, what are sometimes called “religious” impulses. Rousseau, who was one of the great architects of secular society, understood this. However, these relationships can be clarified and refined. The connections between religion (form) and spirituality (function) can be strengthened. Let’s get to work.