Author: James Poulos

The value of the Sohrab Ahmari-David French saga is in what’s unearthed by the reactions it kicks up.

Example: National Review Senior Editor Jay Nordlinger’s takeaway is “there’s nothing fancy or philosophical here: It’s just that David won’t bow to Trump and Trumpism, and that is what cannot be borne and must be punished.”

We (you) can argue about whether this is true. I’m interested in how people could possibly believe it. It is strange to see the idea expressed aloud that nothing philosophical is at stake in the political martyrdom of an unrepentantly principled politico.

Because the original idea behind Never Trumpism was that Trump was unprincipled, a “chaos candidate” who didn’t care about ideological integrity—who had no ideological integrity of his own. Now comes the meme that it is Trumpism which is dangerously principled, and French (in this case) who refuses to kneel before Zod. The details of whatever Frenchism might be are secondary—possibly irrelevant. What matters is here he stands; he can do no other.

In the online era, there is something immensely inevitable-feeling about this revaluation of values. The response on the part of Never Trumpers to the charge of cuckery becomes something intended to occur to those leveling the charge as Cuck Pride. This deeply conforms to the pattern of “the discourse.” Online identity politics means alchemically converting flung poo into precious gold.

You’ll recall the name for the alchemists’ substance that achieves this kind of transition: the philosopher’s stone—the legendary “elixir of life” epitomizing the transcendent bliss of pure and total knowledge. Martyrdom is morality: defeat is life. What could be a more perfect drug?

Beyond “Slave Morality”

Nordlinger and company would surely object that just as French is no cuck, he is also no martyr. He doesn’t give up, he fights—by the rules, whatever they be! A spirited gentleman willing to risk losing with personal honor, even if the honor of the system has failed!

Your mileage may vary. The reason the seemingly minor and ginned-up French controversy keeps expanding is it reaches straight down to the root of foundational questions about the relation between Christian and pagan virtue in the west.

Nietzsche’s most dangerous attack was on Christianity as a death wish, as an elevation of death so total that it put a lifetime of abject servility—a living “death to the world”—even above prompt extinction.

But it’s interesting to consider that Nietzsche’s complex and difficult relations with women led him to a place where, by the end of his life, he had not explored the connection between his theory of the deadly servility of the Christian with the deadly servility of the cuckold. Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity is notably desexualized.

Today that theme is, thanks to the internet, inescapable. It is baked into reality. Today it is a fault that “the shame is part of the kink” doesn’t appear in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals. He won’t quite “go there” in his probes of the psychological imperative to convert erotic urges into ethical principles that defines so much of contemporary life. Our contemporary sexual psychology now leads key critics of French-style defenses of “muh principles” to trace the genealogy of today’s worship of procedural liberalism not to “slave morality,” as Nietzsche would have it, but to “cuck morality:”

Yes, another man should take my wife, I should go live in the shed, it is right, it is moral, it is justice… To live rightly, I must prevent posterity from being identical with me …

Nietzsche doesn’t use the pathos of that kind of “conversion experience” as a precise metaphor or emblem for the kind of willed abasement that so many right-wing critics of liberal proceduralism-worship put central. It is weird that so little has been written about how and why cuckoldry welled up from the depths of online to become the precision-targeted trope that it is, selected out of the sense that none other would be more accurate or suffice instead.

Of course Christianity and cuckoldry are not good metaphors for each other. No good Christian can embrace cuckoldry. But the charge of cuckery, leveled against Christians like French, has to do with the perceived untenableness today of staking out a middle position between the Benedict Option of evacuating from fronts collapsing in the culture war and the yet-to-be-named option of reasserting powerful constitutional authority for localities to resist and reject colonization by the revolutionary vanguard of institutionalized wokeness.

Because there is just no question that the aim of that institutional vanguard is to choke off America’s production of a certain kind of adult male and the architecture of social order that radiates upward from him toward the heights of authority. This project is out in the open and the reams of academic and ideological writing about its details and justifications are widely available.

The metaphor of cuckoldry is selected to the exclusion of all others because nothing else quite as effectively sharpens the charge that your obsession with the details of honor and principle has in fact become fatally abstract: you are being kicked out of your own house by a rival power actively working to take away everything that is yours, your children included. You are becoming the end of your line, forever, in every respect. Yet you won’t even evacuate from your breached defenses before it’s too late. Only the heights of spiritual snobbery can explain such a choice.

From Whence the Cuck?

This is obviously a harsh critique: why do so many people believe it is justified—is necessary? Nordlinger and company are, I think, sincere in their conviction that the answer is ideological. The Trumpy folk running amok yelling cuck do so out of an imperative just as “principled,” only debasedly so, as the conservative imperatives they deride with “muh principles” jokes. The Nordlingerians do not grasp that the rise of the cuck charge is the product of changes in our social and psychological environment that supervene upon, and are independent of, ideological phenomena.

One account of those changes might be that porn, which after all is possibly the most popular form of social media, is now everywhere, and this is why the attacks are cuck this and cuck that.

Another, and I think more sophisticated account, is that while porn has an influence it is mere content, and the context wherein that content swims, as do we all, is our new digital environment. In that environment, the primacy of human imagination as the driver of institutional and elite rule is being totally replaced with the primacy of machine memory.

In this new milieu, social order is being forcibly rearchitected away from the procedural liberal elite that mastered the globalized West through its expertise in broadcasting ethical memes. One consequence of this painful dislocating shift is an upsurge in populism and nationalism. But another is a panicked evac on the Left from the collapsing front of procedural liberalism—into what are thought to be the hardened sites of extreme institutionalized revolutionary wokeness.

The irony—an alarming one, to most populists and nationalists on the Right—is that so many “principled conservatives” reject all evidence that this is happening and, as a consequence of their profound ideological denial, falsely believe that procedural liberalism is tenable in its own right. They conceive of procedural liberalism as a stronghold wherein their way of life can be sheltered without having either to abandon their position or their conceptual apparatus.

French put the idea perfectly in his last exchange with Ahmari: “The only way this place survives as a united country is if we apply eighteenth-century solutions to this twenty-first century division.”

The painful fact is that from the standpoint of someone who understands what digital really is and what it is really doing, this talk evinces a complete failure to comprehend the nature of the new reality unfolding around us. “Rediscover the First Amendment,” French implored. “Rediscover religious freedom.” All as the bombed-out fort of procedural liberalism is being abandoned en masse by Leftist refugees seeking shelter—however foredoomed—in a postliberal cult from which, because it is not quite a religion, the First Amendment cannot protect us.

Deep America

Without doubt, the digital age throws America into a difficult position. This alien invasion of invisible robots our technologists have touched off makes us feel as if our own creation has betrayed us, because the order of machine memory obsolesces the whole social structure of imagineering that first twinkled into being during the Enlightenment and really took off with the advent of electricity. Even more disorienting, it hauls back patterns of living that haven’t held sway since the last time recorded memory ruled the West’s psychological and sociological milieu—the middle ages. In most respects, “eighteenth-century solutions” is now an oxymoron.

There is, however, some good news. Despite America’s modernist bona fides, as the 1619 Project somewhat inadvertently reminds us, the roots of our social and psychological order do extend, more or less seamlessly, back farther than we think. Medieval perceptions and sensibilities, such as the identification of “the liberal” with the unity of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, have not been zapped away from our collective inheritance. The fundamental divide between us incarnate human creatures and the disincarnate, animate-yet-not-alive bots does point us back toward anthropologies of justice that bridge the Middle Ages and early modernity.

These resources indicate that the political philosophy of statecraft first put to work in America by the Founders does offer an alternative to both “evac” and “cuck.” But only if more Americans begin to accept that our new digital world takes many “conserved” principles and strategies off the table.

The surge of attention around the Catholic University debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, and the ebb that followed, mirrored the reaction to a recent and similarly hot ticket: Jordan Peterson versus Slavoj Žižek.

That debate, which pitted capitalism against socialism, and/or Jung against Lacan, packed the house full of youngish intellectuals desperate for someone, anyone, to notch a clean, distinct win—to demonstrate that such a thing in today’s smeary environment was possible.

After both disputants agreed that disaster was probably around the corner and there was probably nothing we could do about it—with the implied caveat that at least the two of them could continue to get paid talking about it—the vital if nervous energy that suffused the room and the souls within was let out with a sad fart, and the queasy feeling that all potential victories and foundations had been smeared away returned.

Similarly, the upshot of the Ahmari-French debate appears to be a vaguely disgusted sense that we remain stuck at aporia in the Western conflict between communitarianism versus individualism, conservatism versus liberalism, Whig versus Continental philosophy, or whatever you want to call it.

The real underlying feeling is that Western political philosophy has sat so long at this impasse that it has become a dead end. Civility and community have become enemies now, and no resource internal to the Western tradition of political thought can locate a ground, procedure, rhetoric, or game that might unite them.

Which is likely why, even if the disputants would demur, it is so tempting to view not just the fundamental contention between Ahmari and French to be a matter of inter-theological disagreement but to view the entire Western problem that way. Liberal proceduralism has failed because Protestantism has failed. Integralism is oppressive because Catholicism is oppressive.

Of course, this frame of mind does not rule out—and possibly demands—the conclusion that we are therefore stuck both with our past failures and new oppressions to come.

But why get ahead of ourselves? The elephant in the room—of the French-Ahmari debate, of the broader debate on the Right, and of the conflicts playing out in the U.S. and across the West—is that today’s agita does not have to do fundamentally with Christianity. What has millions drastically reconsidering their approach to the politics of public life is not a set of Christian disagreements about sin and virtue, but something much more primal and merely natural.

It has always been the case in the West that ordinary people as well as geniuses have wrestled with the unpleasant fact that our fellow humans are often disgusting, depressing, and difficult to be around. But in the new context of today’s mercilessly conquering digital conditions, this familiar psychological and social struggle has changed its character.

My strong sense is that the nature of this change has to do with how life on the internet trains you to see yourself as an utterly inessential instantiation of a completely tired subgroup. Even or especially amid your most incredibly frantic protestations and performances of pride, your increasingly accurate perception is that your identity is inescapably enslaved to the identity of a trivial, exhausted, and in some fundamental sense existentially compromised group.

It’s not that your identity is not still in some way unique; it’s that uniqueness is no longer any protection against comprehensive disenchantment.

The Rise of the Polycule

And yet this smearing away of your own justification for bothering to be is not in most cases unto death. Yes “deaths of despair” are on the rise, but the real trend is lives of despair, lives propped up by the use of various chemicals to induce a kind of artificial pleasure behind which, barely held at bay, is the howling abyss. The life styles layered over this way of life vary as vibrantly as the colors of a dreamcoat, but the technique is the same: acting out one’s identity, whatever it may be, is just a last-ditch effort to get you out of bed in the morning, into the company of people whose identity constitutes a sort of (not at all necessarily sexual) polycule—a self-created super-self that is concrete enough in your perception to shore up your psyche. This pooled personal identity gets its psychic weight from the intimate sense of solidarity and shared dependency behind it—sufficient, despite anything more formal, to help paper over the unnerving smudge where a personal answer to “why bother being?” used to be (if it ever was).

If I’m right, the community-versus-individual framing that defined political philosophy in the terminally pre-digital age is gone—over, not coherent, obsolete. People are trying to work out a different solution to the crushing circumstance Tocqueville described of being thrown back in isolation upon the meager resources of the blooding heart. The politics of identity today is defined by people trying to create post-familial polycules that neither amount to communities in the old sense nor make whole and autonomous their individual selves.

Here comes the key point: amid such a milieu, the experience of being stuck around others’ polycules is getting simply unbearable. It’s painfully evident you can’t just include or be included into other super-selves as a matter of will or imagination, no matter how vein-poppingly hard the culture’s ethics cops strain to meme you into believing and acting otherwise. So too is it agonizingly clear, at the immediate level of percept, and then at the higher level of concept, that the neurasthenic retreat into the culture of the super-self is fairly repulsive and feels shameful even when it is your own super-self you’re bathing in. So, increasingly, the super-selves of others characteristically strike us as radically perverse, decadent, decaying, diseased—against life.

When, against that background, some seem bent on making the best possible go of their particular style of decadence and decay, these instances are apt to pop out in the perceptions of people straining to make a last college try of keeping decadence and decay at bay—resisting the call of the polycule with its strangely inverted pride. Take that as a sociological, not ideological, answer to why all the jabber around which-way-conservatism has been triggered merely by library story time in drag. Parallel reverberations through “the discourse” are touched off by other identities proliferating polycules of their own: “incels,” “neckbeards,” and “reply guys” on the XY end, “wine moms,” “nice white lady terrorists,” and “VSCO girls” on the XX. Myriad polycules are now everywhere, causing nonmembers to recoil out of primal instinct of preservation.

The important thing to observe is this reaction of resistance is not a particularly Christian mode of living and thinking; although it does in some ways overlap with Christian commitments and sensibilities, the overlaps seem to be the decreasingly important factor today. It seems to me what’s happening is people who fear deeply for human vitality (including their own) are expressing outrage in its name against what they perceive to be its mangling by networks of identitarian polycules.

This aspect of our experience seems to me new to the digital age, unlike the identity politics that came before. I suspect its features and its dynamic lurk at the heart of what Ahmari and French and their broader movements and probably disputants across the whole West are anxiously debating about. New social structures are arising that strike adherents to the old as hostile to human flourishing on an even deeper and wider level than sin, even if what they are anxious about is also often considered sin on Christian terms. But sin must be understood in a context of impurity and redemption, and what I am describing is felt reflexively in the context of infection and contagion: toxicity, not fallenness. Instead of closing distances in the name of Christ, the instinct is to widen them for nature’s sake.

“I want drag queens to come into a relation with Jesus Christ.” French argued. “I am not going to usurp the Constitution to do this.” But the sensibility formed in the digital dynamic doesn’t seek to convert members of toxic polycules by any means, Constitutional or otherwise. It seeks to quarantine them.

An Exhortation

It is hard to see how any debate, especially on terms that elide the heart of the matter, can possibly resolve something so elemental. I’d suggest this is the matter that Peterson and Žižek too both failed to secure a clean win around, whether against one another or even “just” the monstrous rotting elephantine entity looming and oozing down on them.

So the situation appears to be that neither Christians nor post-Christians are putting the matter to their increasingly desperate audiences in a way that leads them intelligibly toward any kind of firm resolution. Those resistant to polycule life fear their personhood and their social structures will continue to smudge away unless some champions can show they grasp the  nature of the problem and see through to an effective response.

I have some provisional and hopefully not-so-provisional things to say and do in response to this intolerable situation.

But the first of them is an exhortation. We have to understand that today’s technological environment is forming our psyches and souls to make questions of human nature even more important to politics than questions of the nature of God. The dominant issue today is not the political upshot of the difference between the human and the divine. It’s the upshot of the difference between the human and the digital.

Our fellow American humans are crying out for a new elite that evinces a full understanding of this earthshaking new reality. The arguments of those who fail to make that demonstration will be without authority and without legitimacy, and the people will increasingly take matters into their own hands in an inauspicious state of mind.

“Our emerging post-privacy order isn’t quite totalitarian, but it’s getting there,” writes Ross Douthat in his latest Sunday column. For years, the Left has been shifting from a theory of justice rooted in the public/private divide to a theory of justice rooted in the divide between what’s in the realm of officialdom and what’s outside it.

Some of us have been tracking that shift from the beginning, or close to it.

Ross reflects that, today, “Western order in the internet age might be usefully described as a ‘liberalism with some police-state characteristics.’ Those characteristics are shaped and limited by our political heritage of rights and individualism. But there is still plainly an authoritarian edge, a gentle ‘pink police state’ aspect, to the new world that online life creates. And what’s striking is how easily we have come to tolerate it.”

Those playing the home game will recall that I coined the “pink police state” concept just over a decade ago, having ruminated for ten years before that on the uncanny message Marilyn Manson seemed to have sent from the future in his splashy 1998 video for the Grammy-winning song “The Dope Show,” the lead single off his prophetic Mechanical Animals LP:

In September 1998, Marilyn Manson, who was then the most dangerous and threatening person in pop music, released his most high-profile album, entitled Mechanical Animals. The video for its lead single, a Grammy-nominated song called “The Dope Show,” teasingly featured an image of riot police, dressed head to toe in pink, drawing one another close in an amorous embrace….

Today, indeed, we confront a transformation in the regulatory state so profound as to indicate a change at the regime level. Today, our regulatory state does not simply promulgate the kind of docile “soft despotism” Tocqueville feared, or blanket the human passions with the kind of bureaucratic uniformity Nietzsche derided as the “coldest of cold monsters.” Instead, as we still struggle to accept, it is aggressively intervening in the intimate details of everyday life as a friend to some kinds of civil liberties but an enemy of others….

Rather than stamping out hedonistic pursuits and pleasure-centered living, 1984 style, the new statism creates a “safe” space for their “healthy” experience. Yet, rather than expanding the project limitlessly, Brave New World style, so as to make all pleasure official, the new statism tacitly acknowledges that our most potent appetites can never be fully domesticated, even with all the tools of force, surveillance, and coercion at the government’s disposal….

In “The Dope Show,” Manson made overt the latently sexual and violent tension between those two realms. “Cops and queers make good-looking models,” he croaked.

For the past twenty years, the concepts or archetypes of copness and queerness have developed a symbiotic relationship as twin secular gods in a new post-political secular theology. No longer are authoritarianism and transgressivism enemies or opposites, but rather mutually dependent forms of mastery: one bloodlessly technological, the other primally occult.

Had my book on democracy in America, where I developed these themes further, come out this year, I might have been able to take advantage of the current craze for 1999 retrospectives to emphasize that The Matrix teaches us the same lesson: it is both an allegory for the realization of trans identity and a master mythos for gnostic terrorism in a digital age. Reflecting on this symbiosis ought to awaken us to what is really confronting us regime-wise today—and what will continue to pose the urgent, defining question of our age.

In fact, the pink police state aspect of the regime change being thrust on us now is not at all a gentle one. Our technocrats today intend to perfect the long-held progressive goal of mastering people by mastering material science. To be granted this power, they gladly bow at the altar of the woke gods and accept its establishment as our official religion.

Their new fusionism is simple: by uploading woke gnosticism to the internet, our invisible robot masters will rule us instant by instant with a perfection beyond even the best of human experts. The posthumanity at the heart of woke religion and technology that enables the nonliving to rule the living merge into a politics of the anti-human, and the will to power becomes the ultimate science of “emergence.” Many of its priests and prophets say with a straight face, which is simultaneously a rictus grin, that they are the partisans of equality, ensuring you your due measure. Yet in truth they are at war with the naturally human creature, and strain to strip us forever of our political nature.

For years it has been important to me to stick as much as possible to simply analyzing the new techno-gnostic regime trying to assert mastery over us, and avoid opportunistically rushing a “politicized” judgment to the hot-takes market.

But the time has come to stop hanging back.

Millions of Americans are now frightened every day by the effects of the monstrous new future they see popping up everywhere, half-hidden deep in the shadow it casts on our present. It is scary to come to grips with how much the partisans of the new regime see being human as bad news—as something to be avenged. But it must be done.

For soon we will have the technology to destroy our humanity, our identity, our natural individuality. To stop others before they come into being. Before they can even be imagined. What will stop us from embracing this alien invasion of demiurges and daemons? Entities neither alive nor dead, God nor human? If your political life and thought isn’t framed around these questions, there’s still time to fix that. But not much.

The power nexus of identity politics and tech transhumanism, of woke religion and woke capital, must be broken and defeated: in academia, in media, in tech, in finance, in entertainment, in the corporations and the bureaucracies—in every cell of the commissars that has colonized the interpretive-industrial complex. Blessedly, digital itself is doing some of this work for us, disenchanting the rule of the imaginary and fantasy almost faster than our televisual elites with their Aquarian cults can escape. But the technocrats are working against us, and their bots know no gods or masters.

Whatever the rhetoric, in reality the power nexus opposes human justice, because it opposes human politics—and human nature itself. Therefore America, the place where the human politics of justice was enshrined in a founding political philosophy based on a grasp of human nature, is a unique stumbling block—an obstacle that must be radically transformed, and not at all gently, away.

Many Americans hungry to reclaim and assert their human agency are in search of the context that can finally explain what is happening to us today politically. This is it.

Must we reconcile ourselves to the federal bureaucracy?

Paul Gottfried’s mixed review of Claremont senior fellow John Marini’s summa on unconstitutional government, Unmasking the Administrative State, leaves the reader with the more than sneaking suspicion that the answer is yes. “It represents a dramatic departure from what our federal union was intended to be, and a deviant model that may already be beyond our control,” Gottfried sighs. “We are being technically ‘administered’ by congressional agencies that run roughshod over our historic liberties;” worse, “there may be no way out of this situation.”

Also concerning, however, is the pique Gottfried reserves not for the nominal villains in the modern history of American government but for Marini himself. Marini’s account of their origins strikes Gottfried as not just overwrought—”he might have spared us his practice of repeating all the talking points of his colleagues at the Claremont Institute”—but indeed unacceptable: “In the book’s introduction, Ken Masugi lets us know (lest we miss the point) that the author is carrying forward the philosophical tradition of Jaffa, ‘who took account of the radical assaults on constitutional government demanded by Rousseau and above all, Hegel.’”

To his credit, Gottfried doesn’t scrimp on praise for Marini’s attack on Congress for abdicating its duties to the Washington regulatory apparatus. But in approvingly citing Marini’s discussion of Carl Schmitt, who diagnosed the same legislative weakness in Weimar Germany, Gottfried appears to think that “legislatures have been forced into doing what they were not meant to do” by “indecisive” executives—hardly the conclusion reached in Marini’s richer and more sophisticated account that Gottfried rejects. Faced with Marini’s claim that “ideology and politics become intelligible only with reference to a philosophy of history, which originated in the political thought of Kant and Hegel,” Gottfried, “as someone who has written on both German philosophy and the administrative state,” is left “truly puzzled.”

The process by which the philosophy of administrative liberalism was transmuted into practice throughout the West is complex and protracted. But the mystery of how it could have developed in America at all—for it was certainly not present at the beginning—raises questions Gottfried is disinclined to answer. Doubtless, a taste or case for “big government” was present since before the creation of the Republic. But as Marini demonstrates again and again, quantitative measures of the state are not the key to understanding what the administrative is; such understanding concerns the qualities of its force. Therefore me must trace the origin of the turn among American elites to embrace administration as a new kind of power—as a new science of rule that surpassed and replaced constitutional government.

Marini allows that more than one factor may be at work in the rise of administration as an intellectual temptation—and then a self-perpetuating mission—in America. As theorists of American democracy from Tocqueville to Marini have agreed, origins have a privileged and persistent influence over the character of nations, yet, as Marini notes, “some nations with long histories have forgotten their origins, or what it was that made it possible to distinguish themselves from others.” Certain technological developments such as industrialization and electrification surely helped shape a social environment in which administration and regulation took on an attraction they simply lacked beforehand.

But institutions and elites have the power to catalyze profound changes in the social order when conditions permit, and by the turn of the twentieth century, America’s intellectual elite—its academics and philosophers—had turned, too, with unprecedented enthusiasm and credulity, to their counterparts in the Old World, especially Britain and Germany, where notions of a grand unified theory of human organization reigned supreme. From Rousseau’s “general will” to Hegel’s dialectic of history, from Weber’s new social science to “ethology,” John Stuart Mill’s proposed science of character formation, Europe gave American elites a sobering but dazzling sense that if they did not update their approach to statecraft to suit the times, they, and the Union with them, would slip into a kind of civilizational backwater, becoming an orphan of history.

The quintessence of this kind of academized member of the American governing elite, Professor Woodrow Wilson, would run for president and win on exactly this basis. In his 1913 essay “What Is Progress?” (included in his book-length call for “the emancipation of the generous energies of a people,” and, notably, not the people themselves), Wilson put the matter quite bluntly. “From the other side of the water men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted theirs.” To the American in and out of government who hesitated to replace constitutionalism with a grand unified science of historic-heroic leadership, Wilson warned that “the world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters.” The poor anti-progressive, Wilson said, “is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows; we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time.”

Industrialization and electrification may have shaped a public context in which Wilson’s revolutionary content could get the kind of hearing it did; but the formation of Wilson’s own character traces not to the Midwestern factory city or the Western telegraph territory but to the Eastward-looking university town—Baltimore, to be precise, where he wrote his PhD (under the intellectual influence of Walter Bagehot, the editor of The Economist) on the desirability of replacing the separation of powers in America’s constitutional government with a British parliamentarian system that allowed one man to lead the executive and the legislative.

Wilson was not a mere one-man wrecking crew set loose on constitutional government but the leader of a whole new class of American elites educated in such a way that they chose to break decisively with the political theory and political institutions of the Founding. Ignoring this is troublesome reality is not an act of intellectual independence from canned talking points. It is often rather an act of intellectual irresponsibility.

But Gottfried’s determination to set aside Marini’s account of the origins of anti-constitutionalism in America does not seem mainly intellectual but moral. Although he does not say so explicitly, reading between the lines strongly suggests Gottfried understands Marini’s account is what leads Marini to conclude that we must not reconcile ourselves to unlimited administration forever. Rather than casting the administrative state as a wearisome new normal to which we are obliged to submit, Marini’s study proves a political obligation, rooted in our very anthropology, to restore government and retrieve constitutionalism where today mere administration holds sway. Gottfried, by contrast, wishes to signal that the counter-administrative project is quixotic at best—and disingenuous at worst.

Marini recalls the Reagan administration as an exemplar of anti-Wilsonianism. Not so, says Gottfried; by the end, the “vast administrative apparatus” Reagan inherited had “intruded into our daily lives to a far greater extent than the government bequeathed to posterity by the New Deal.” Of course, the Great Society was designed to intrude in a manner quite different, and with different purpose, from Franklin Roosevelt’s immense executive assertions, which arose from a context of economic and ideological catastrophe itself much different from Wilson’s. But in putting forth the wrong measure of the administrative state—its size, not its power—to suggest that Reagan, and by imputation so many other smaller-government crusaders, were really all talk, Gottfried leaves Marini with the better of the argument.

“The Social Security program begun by FDR continued to grow under Reagan, expanding 15 percent during his eight years in office,” Gottfried asserts. “Despite initial efforts to apply strict means tests to welfare recipients, the Reagan administration increased welfare costs by 25 percent between 1981 and 1987.” He finds it significant that “in the early 1980s, most Western countries slowed the expansion of their social services, an expansion that had been going on since the 1960s. In the United States, this slowdown began during the latter half of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and continued at a brisker pace in 1981 and 1982.”

As Michael Anton notes in his own review at the CRB, however, Marini puts the “supernova-like growth” of the twentieth-century administrative state in proper context: expansion “not merely or even primarily in size but more fundamentally in power. He is especially merciless on Congress, which voluntarily and happily surrendered its own constitutionally enumerated powers to an unconstitutional fourth branch—the bureaucracy housed within the executive branch—which looks upon its nominal master with indifference or bemused contempt.”

Marini, as Anton explains, clearly and correctly frames the problem of administration as one of the purposes of government. The question of “limits” when applied to the economic or financial quantity of government is of subsidiary importance. “Every government of course needs executive agencies; politics is about making decisions, and decisions must be implemented. That said, to what ends do executive agencies work? How are those ends determined and by whom? What is the source of those agencies’ political legitimacy? What—if any—limits are placed on their power?” The fundamental limits of a constitutional government are described by the purposes of such a government.

All of which leaves open—not, as Gottfried would intimate, closed—the question of how constitutional government can be retrieved amid a breakdown in the potency of administrative rule as significant as the one that has unfolded in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. For all the administrative state’s entrenched power and overweening intransigence, its history since the end of the Reagan era has been a history of squandering, blundering, blindness, inefficacy, and systemic shock after systemic shock.

This experience has only intensified since the dawn of the smartphone era. Technological conditions are once again forming a new context for political speech and political audiences. As the old context wanes, the Old World dream of a grand unified science of human organization grows deeply disenchanted. Ours is therefore a uniquely propitious time to regain control over our identity and our agency—to rediscover the purpose of our governmental institutions, and thereby find our way out of the dead end that the administrative state has become.

Kids across America know that ads are for skipping and blocking. Their elders are more anxiety-ridden. Having grown up in an America economically and culturally dependent on its fantasy-mongering industries, they look upon ads as key to unlocking the appetites, desires, and dreams that get people moving, and spending. But they also see the purity or good conscience of the fantasy-driven economy as under constant threat of contamination by the secularized sins of greed and selfishness.

So while ads mean almost nothing to everyday kids using social media, elite adults have been freaking out over the way those awful social media moguls have used our love of fantasy to “target” us with ads and “hack our brains,” turning our attention into their billions. If only there were a way to redistribute that wealth and restore the fantasy industry to its blessed purity…

A tax on digital ad spend (*cough* Facebook and Google) could bring in $2 billion for journalism. Free Press is suggesting an analog to a carbon tax on fossil fuels — but atoning for the attention economy’s perils instead of climate change.

Hello. What’s that you say?

Think of it like a carbon tax, which many countries impose on the oil industry to help clean up pollution. The United States should impose a similar mechanism on targeted advertising to counteract how the platforms amplify content that’s polluting our civic discourse.

Levying taxes on products like gasoline, cigarettes or lottery tickets, whose consumption may harm parties other than the user, isn’t new to U.S. policy. The resulting revenue has helped fund public health, infrastructure, education and welfare initiatives.

Unlike excise taxes on products, the tax on targeted advertising would be levied not against individual consumers but against enterprises that profit from targeted-ad sales. The revenues could be used to create a Public Interest Media Endowment, which would support production and distribution of content by diverse speakers — with an emphasis on local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and news and information for underserved communities.

Inevitable. Of course, if you really wanted to clean up our civic discourse, you’d skip ads like a ten year old, care less about what random strangers say online, and use the internet to seek out a readily available and roughly $0 education in civics and American history. But the mandarins of the crumbling fantasy economy don’t really want to drain the swamp of the so-called discourse. They want to sail the seas of fake news and useless takes, of performative rage and irrelevant opinions, like Gilligan on the S.S. Minnow — named, they may no longer recall, in “honor” of John F. Kennedy’s FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow, who famously pronounced television a “vast wasteland.” Fun fact:

The phrase “vast wasteland” was suggested to Minow by his friend, reporter and freelance writer John Bartlow Martin. Martin had recently watched twenty consecutive hours of television as research for a magazine piece, and concluded it was “a vast wasteland of junk.” During the editing process, Minow cut the words “of junk.” Minow often remarks that the two words best remembered from the speech are “vast wasteland,” but the two words he wishes would be remembered are “public interest.”

If our wide-eyed media mandarins want to atone for something, it should (*cough*) be their own industry, which has long since ceased — as America’s kids already know in their bones — to be in the public interest.

This State of the Union address was notable for its subtle or quiet articulation of the American Dream, running parallel to the overt one. Beyond Trump’s affirmative messaging was an important theme sketched out through things unsaid.

Today and on into at least the near future, the president suggested, Americans still have the needed resources to dissipate fears that powerful global trends will overpower the American way, our more or less traditional manner of living. The New World need not yet kneel before the Old.

Despite taking his time with a lengthy speech, Trump devoted no space to the major forces roiling Europe. The grand meltdown of the established political economy, under ever greater populist heat that often takes a post-ideological character, posed no threat to America’s fortunes.

So too with technology. Although Silicon Valley is now held out for bitter condemnation by observers across the ideological spectrum, the dominant tech companies were spared Trump’s chastisement. Neither AI nor automation were singled out as menacing developments primed to take apart America’s social compact or labor markets. Trans-partisan criticism again notwithstanding, neither the deep state nor the Five Eyes intelligence alliance were invoked, or even alluded to, as encroachments on Americans’ freedom or flourishing.

These would be dark notes in any speech, and in this one, clearly calibrated to strike an upbeat tone without losing the political initiative, they might have felt ominously out of place. But they are the preoccupations of the public mind, and at some point they will need to be addressed—whether by Trump, his critics, or the American people themselves.

Ben Collins, NBC News reporter on the dystopia beat, has a gloomy prediction to make about the coming years. The online rule of the algorithms, he writes,

“is going to dramatically shape politics in ways that were previously unheard of, and it will not be a party-line phenomenon. It will divide the electorate into groups who rely on empirical data and information from accountable news organizations, and skeptics of all stripes who have fallen down algorithmic rabbit holes based on inflammatory language and feel-good conjecture.”

Collins casts his vision in the now-familiar terms of an attack on social media. The ubiquitous platforms have become the main focus of anti-tech sentiment for making people psychologically delusional and politically extremist—anti-democratic, it would seem.

For people looking to mock or revile online #fullcommunists or nu-Nazis, this critique has its potency. But a different point of perspective offers a more challenging view. On closer inspection, social media is much less of a disruptor than it seems. In essence, it’s just the democratic principle applied to broadcast media. If you like broadcast and you like democracy, you ought to love social media. The fact that people delight in refusing to follow the scripts handed down from the ruling communications class may inspire rage and confusion within that class, but their desired solution is simply to more effectively broadcast the right visions to the masses.

Unfortunately for the comms elite, that ship has already sailed. The way to understand exactly what happened is to recognize that social media isn’t the paragon of digital change most critics think. The real embodiment of the technological revolution is social credit—a system that fundamentally rejects both broadcast and democracy as foundations for social order. Even a social credit regime driven much more by markets than by the state points toward a broad rejection of the old notion that citizens should spend lots of time attending the secular church of the 24/7 news cycle. The rise of technology that sharply divides the real and actual from the made-up and the hyped is bad news for the ruling comms elite that wants to make its every utterance a must-watch, must-listen event—and to rake in big money for their trouble.

This view of things sheds some unusual light on why Trump-like attacks on the media make such an impact. Already the public sense is deepening that what’s sold as the news won’t save us—and that if technology is increasingly merciless in marking off facts from fiction, at least it’s not running a royal scam.

Not that any of this answers the deeper question of how to avoid a new birth of servitude under the rule of those power-hungry algorithms—and the people who want to control them.