In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s ... that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had just been another country and hadn’t been part of a mad project that killed millions of its own people and enslaved its neighbors.
Faulkner's quote points to a reality that was particularly true in the American South, and it is at the heart of its dysfunction. Perhaps the only way of overcoming it is to follow the gospel's admonition to let the dead bury the dead. The dead are always with us, but their misdeeds should not be allowed to foreclose the future. We must find a way to recognize what was fundamentally wrong about the attitudes and practices of our ancestors while at the same time to be inspired by and build upon what's best. This attitude toward a better future is at the heart of Christian spiritual practice which is all about becoming liberated from the mistakes of the past. But there is no moving into a better future unless you acknowledge that past behaviors were wrong, to make amendments to those who were harmed, and resolve as best you can not to do it again.
When I read Nichols' article, it struck me that as the South lost to the North in the American Civil War, as the Germans lost to the Allies in the First World War, as the Soviet Union lost to America in the Cold War, the most important result was to reinforce what was most dysfunctional, delusional, and extreme in the defeated societies precisely because they failed to confront why they were wrong. Instead they chose to stew in their humiliation. And that dysfunction in the South produced the KKK, Jim Crow, and the sense of white grievance that paved the way for Trump in the U.S; it produced Hitler and the Holocaust in Germany, and now Putin in Russia.
In each defeated society factions that sought to aggressively assert its delusions came to dominate the collective imaginary because these societies never faced the fact that they had been wrong. They never made amends. Rather they doubled down. They sought to prove, even if mostly to themselves, that their delusions were true. So they undertook to force, by any means necessary, to defeat those whom they saw as having humiliated them. Anything rather than to face the humiliation of admitting to themselves that they were wrong. Were the North after the Civil War, the Allies after WWI, or the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union without hypocrisy or fault? Of course not. But that's no excuse for failure to recognize your own faults, which in the South and the Soviet Union were egregious.
But why were Germany and Japan after WWII different? I think that it has primarily to do with each having been able to suppress the humiliations of past and to embrace a new national identity that focused on the future. They let the dead bury the dead, or at least pushed to the fringes those who didn't want to. Why some societies are capable of that while others are not is worth thinking about more, but clearly huge, irrepressible factions within American and Russian societies have not been able to do it. But a key factor is that as long as a society has a vital sense of future possibility, it finds a way to push the reactionaries to the fringes, but as soon as that sense of future possibility weakens, there is space for the reactionaries to thrive.
. We see that happening in the UK, in France, and now even in Germany. The growing strength of the Right correlates not with the diminishing strength of the Left, but with a diminishing felt sense of collective future possibility.
The crisis of Liberal Democracies derives from its failure to provide for huge swaths of their populations any robust sense of future possibility, and so nothing is more important for the continued flourishing of Liberal democracies than that they find a robust consensus in their imagination of a possible positive human future that's worth fighting for. This is, whether most people realize it or not, a metaphysical question, and it cannot be adequately answered within the limitations of the rationalist materialist imaginary that is the default because the most energetic shaping influence among the culture's elites. Its failure in this regard has created a spiritual vacuum for passionate reactionaries with a delusional metaphysics to rush in.
So now in the U.S., the problem is acute. American democracy is under threat from a reactionary faction that thinks it is fighting a holy war in defense of Christian values. Of course, their war has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with a defense of a customary culture that was only ever nominally Christian.
Any society that claims to be Christian, even medieval Christendom, is only nominally Christian. It is, of course, better for whatever is genuinely Christian in it. But Christianity in its essence is a religion of the future, of promise, of a looking forward to something better. Its fundamental thrust is to challenge every individual, and the societies in which they live, to be better than they are. That requires that the most mature Christians adopt a subversive attitude toward existing unjust social arrangements, and if not to be actively involved in their subversion at least to be open to any challenges posed to whatever is vestigially barbaric in them.
How that fulfillment is to be effected is a matter for debate, but monotheistic Judaism and Christianity are post-Axial religions, religions whose effect on their societies is to disembed them from traditional practices in the hopes of achieving something higher and better. That this disembedding is difficult because it often feels contrary to 'nature' has always been understood. But the essence of the disembedding dynamic in any post-axial religion is to give up what is comfortable in the hope of obtaining something more deeply real. Any society that claims to be Christian is honest only to the degree that it acknowledges how far it is from what it aspires to become. It is dishonest to the degree that it is complacent in its existing social arrangements. A Christian society is truly Christian not because it fights wars and tortures heretics in the defense of Christian values but because it is has the capacity to be ashamed of such behaviors.
The only really important question at this moment for Americans is about how they imagine their future. The conservatives are correct that Liberalism, insofar as it imagines the future only in terms of economic development, is inadequate by itself to speak to the deep longings of the spirit that are at the heart of our current crisis. But the answer does not lie in preserving past forms and customs that no longer have vitality. The only real solution comes in reconnecting with the deep vitality that gave these cultural forms--or any healthy, vibrant culture--their shape. Our culture is vibrant in the sense of its being energetically innovative in the entrepreneurial sense, but it is unhealthy because it shares no deep metaphysical consensus about what it means to be human, and so a vulgar, leveling, least common denominator prevails by default. It celebrates energy for energy's sake, no matter how crude or dehumanizing. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have energy, and so both are celebrated in ways that any healthy society would be incapable of.
The problem. of course, is that people who have no sense about what this deep vitality is in their lives are suffering, and that suffering is real. They look for society to alleviate their suffering, and if we had a healthy culture, it would be easier for them to find healthful relief. But we don't, and so unless they find a remedy from within themselves, they will continue to take their cues from whatever groupthink--whether on the Left or the Right--dominates in their proximity. What we need is leadership that is grounded in the inside-out thinking that is the essence of post-Axial spiritual practices promoted by Socrates and Jesus. If we had a healthy society, such people would be recognized and elected. Instead, American society is dominated by an outside-in dynamic that is born of a vestigial pre-Axial form of embeddedness that is the driving force behind the mob and any other kind of groupthink. A 'liberal' education used to be about promoting citizens who had that capacity for inside-out thinking. Now education is mostly about job training, the only thing that makes sense within an imaginary that dominated by a utilitarian ethos.
Nevertheless, Liberal Democracies are a step forward because they are heirs of axial disembedding. As such they allow for flexibility and change in ways that static, top-down hierarchical societies cannot. It's their adaptability that makes them reformable, and so, at least in theory, capable of moral progress. But at this juncture, they have no moral compass, and flail about without any consensus shaping policy decisions except a utilitarianism that is inadequate to confront the challenges posed by developments in AI and biotechnology. So the emergence of Liberal Democracies during the modern era is not in itself the end of the story. We're at the end of a chapter in a much longer story, one that is more likely to move toward a positive fulfillment if Liberal Democracies rather than autocracies prevail in the future.
***
Liberal Democracy is a tool, and like most tools its effective use depends on the skill of the people who use it. The primary challenge for democracies is that they depend on their citizens to act like grownups, to be responsibly informed, to be passionate in their advocacy but civil in their debate, to eschew violence always, and to be willing to accept losses in the short run in the knowledge they can fight another day and perhaps prevail in the future. Such skills are no longer revered in America, especially by the American traditionalist faction that has proved itself deficient in every one of these skills. And so in their deficiency they fail to recognize that they are not soldiers in the service of preserving American democracy but of its destruction.
And essential to the effective use of a tool is to understand what it's good for and what it's not. Liberal democracy is a good tool to provide a political framework that is best suited for grownups to manage their affairs, which in the political sphere should be mostly about about solving practical problems and peaceably resolving conflicts. It is not a good tool to adjudicate metaphysical disagreements. Metaphysical arguments are important, and developing a healthy consensus about them is of central concern for any healthy society, but they should not be resolved in the political sphere. They are matters to be hashed out in the cultural sphere, and they have to be won by persuasion not force. Right now we have two "metaphysical" factions who are dominating American society, and both are duking it out in the political sphere in such a way that they are making it extremely difficult to use Liberal democracy as an effective problem-solving tool.
The first, a rationalist materialism. Its cosmopolitan ethos dominates in American society's cultural establishment--the media, the universities, and corporate board rooms. At its best, it produces a basic decency and desire for fairness; it seeks a balance between freedom and equality; it is intellectually honest and rigorously self critical; and it is open to innovation, exploration, growth, and change. At its worst it is elitist and arrogant; it is sanctimonious in its judgments of people who want simpler, more stable lives; it has no real feel for what is sacred or worthy of reverence, and it regards the inheritance from the past shaped by dead, white men as something to be overcome rather than as something to be cherished and built upon.
The second, a traditionalist American Christian imaginary, is a vestige of 19th century American ethos of the frontier. At its best, it embraces an unpretentious decency and down-to-earthness; it values human dignity as found in a balance between neighborliness and self-reliance; it professes a heartfelt simple, Christian piety; and it feels a deep connection to the land and to the natural world. At its worst, it's xenophobic and racist, it's resistant to and so poorly adapted to complexity and change; it's intellectually lazy or dishonest and so prone to delusional, crackpot conspiratorial thinking.
There are lots of people who don't fit comfortably in either of these influential camps, me included, but they are for the most part culturally and politically irrelevant.
Those most influenced by the traditionalist imaginary feel they are forced to live in a world shaped by the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary, and they don't like it. For them, American society feels soulless and perverse. It goes against every good thing they were taught as children, and they don't see why they should have to live in such a world, a world that from their pov has lost its soul.
I sympathize, and I, like they, would like to live in a society where I felt more at home, where there were broadly shared vital customs and traditions, where there was a broadly shared sense of the sacred, and a shared sense of what is truly most worthy of our deepest aspirations. That's not the society any of us lives in. But the difference between most American traditionalists and me is that I don't think Rationalist-Materialists are evil; I just see them as mistaken. I see them as in need of persuasion, and in order to do that I need to make the case that there is something better available that they don't have.
In the meanwhile, I make my peace with the broader culture, and live as best I can according to my own lights. Politics for me is not an arena for philosophical persuasion, but as I said above, it's the arena for solving shared practical problems--like infrastructure, managing pandemics, dealing with climate change, and income inequality. My positions on these issues are obviously affected by my metaphysics, but that doesn't mean I will only work with people who share it.
The problem with so many American traditionalists is that, unlike other traditionalist groups--Mennonites, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others--it's not enough for them to be left alone to freely practice what they believe. They want to assert control over the entire society. But you can't force your metaphysics on others, especially when it is so poorly adapted to the world as it is. People have every right to choose for themselves to live in communities that are simple and isolated from the corruptions and complexity of modern consumer capitalism, but they are not competent to govern in such a complex world. And if they elect people who share their desire to live in a simpler world, people like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al., they put people in critical decision-making positions who simply haven't the competence to do the job that is required of them.
And the problem for honest, simple people is that they often haven't the sophistication to understand how cynical politicians tell them what they want to hear so they can achieve their own ego-driven agendas. I know that sounds condescending, but it's the hard truth. This is a faction within the U.S. that needs a 12-Step program to be developed for conspiracy theory believers. Healing can only start once you admit you have a problem, and then you need to make amends.
I fear that the worst for which they will have to make amends still lies ahead. Even if this American traditionalist faction wins in the short run by electing a demagogue, it will lose in the long run. It might seem for a while that they have the winning hand, but ultimately they will lose. Putin will inevitably lose. All the suffering and destruction they cause has been and will be for naught because it's always based on a fundamentally delusional relationship with reality. History keeps moving on, and one way or the other, sooner or later, societies have to adapt to the changing reality history produces. Clinging to the dead past leads to a delusional relationship with reality. This kind of traditionalist imaginary produces a politics that is ill-adapted to the world as it really works.
In a rapidly changing, complex world with so many billions of people, there are no simple solutions. We have to be nimble in the way we adapt, and we have to elect the people who are most competent into decision-making positions. We need people who are both sophisticated and profound to emerge as leaders, and that means that we need a society that produces an electorate capable of recognizing them and choosing them. Ideally, in coming decades a new consensus will develop that is not shaped by the limitations of the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates now, but by a new consensus that emerges that is grounded in a renewed connection to the Living Real.
We'll see, but clearly we're at the end of something. And because our collective imagination of the future is largely shaped by the vertigo we experience as cultural and political forms crumble around us, we tend to embrace cataclysmic scenarios for the future. It's understandable, but I live in hope that as disruptive as things will continue to be, those disruptions are clearing the way for the human spirit to take a step forward. The question is to what extent in the meanwhile people will grab onto whatever fool thing they find to stabilize themselves in their vertigo.