The Beginning and End of Postmodern America

Editor's Note

The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

Among the unique aspects of the new totalitarianism is the “rejection of our Western cultural inheritance … [and] of the very idea of objective truth” embodied by postmodernism. Joshua Mitchell traces this defining feature of the modern left to a surprising intellectual source: Friedrich Nietzsche. Mitchell argues, however, that the woke left is best understood as “halfway Nietzschean,” in that it rejects the moral framework of the old regime but not the religious impulse that inspired it. This makes our present enemy uniquely dangerous. This is the last in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

Do we live in normal times, times of bounded contestation and turmoil, of chaos and disarray that still operate within the paradigm of normal American politics? Or is that paradigm collapsing, from atrophy or from antipathy? For conservatives living in the post-fusion era, the once-latent cleavages within their ranks have been revealed, contributing to the intimation that everything is falling apart. Old friends have become new enemies. A younger generation revolts against the older. A national election is not far off. A new Republican Party is taking form. Some see poison in the emerging coalition; others see an antidote. 

The reunification of conservatism cannot occur without a clear-headed answer about the question: is America messy but okay, or is it deconstructing before our inattentive eyes — and therefore in need of stronger medicine than normal politics requires? A conservative coalition, if it emerges, is going to have to form around one or the other of these two alternative assessments.

In “Totalitarianism, American Style,” Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards argue that America is, indeed, deconstructing before our eyes, and give as one of the reasons the preeminence of postmodern thinking on the left. Foucault provides the banner — “power is truth” — under which its troops advance. With unwavering conviction, those on the left derogate arguments that allude to convention, tradition, nature, or revelation. Conservatives presuppose these to be foundations on which civilization rests; those on the left presuppose them to be shackles forged to limit, oppress, colonize, and stain. Every idea and institution based on these faux-foundations, it members aver, must go: love, honor, and friendship; family, church, and state.

A few prefatory remarks are in order. First, Ellmers and Richards do not mention him, but the title of their essay bears a resemblance to a large section heading in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Published in 1986, amidst the battle over multiculturalism, Bloom had in his sights Nietzsche, who he claimed was read in America — that most unphilosophical of nations — to have authorized relativism. In the second of three parts, entitled “Nihilism, American Style,” Bloom argued that because the American psyche had “no basement,” no real depth, the darker implications of Nietzsche had not yet settled in. Americans wanted “values,” “meaning,” “creativity;” but the implications of the death of God, or of the disclosure that logo-centrism was (like every artifice) but the will to power, had yet to be grasped. Bloom worried that one day it would be. With a caveat I will introduce below, that day is nearer. 

Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and the American Crisis

Ellmers and Richards cite Foucault rather than Nietzsche. Their decision to focus on his writings is understandable, because much of what passes as “culture studies” in higher education today is more aptly named “Foucault studies.” Foucault is everywhere. He is the proximal source of many of the postmodern ideas that poison minds young and old. But we must have our intellectual genealogy rightly aligned, and understand the relative standing of fathers and sons, so to speak. 

Decades ago, at the University of Chicago, Joseph Cropsey would begin his lectures on Marx by suggesting that Marx was like an ant who carried grains of sand away from the giant sand dune of Hegel’s ideas. No less is true of Foucault, who carried grains of sand away from the sand dune that is Nietzsche’s thought. Neither faculty nor students have the fortitude for heavy lifting these days, however, so they teach and study Foucault. Rather than comment on Foucault, then, I will turn to Nietzsche, to provide an account of the present postmodern moment, such as it is, and its threat to America. 

Yes, our problem is that the left — let us not call them “Progressives” any more — now professes the postmodern dogma that Truth is a fiction. When properly investigated, or “problematized,” leftists claim, so-called Truth is shown to be nothing more than the naked imposition of power by one group over another. (Is this not the singular task of higher education today?) In addition to this claim that the will to power underlies all value assertions, Nietzsche makes an important and disastrous claim about where, psychically, the self resides. This claim is one of the foundations on which the edifice of identity politics rests, and I will treat it fully below. The idea is there in Foucault, but laid out more capaciously — which is to say, without Foucault’s fixation on sex — by Nietzsche. Finally, whatever else we might say about the overall failure of Nietzsche’s thinking, his framework for understanding the decay of the West is immensely helpful because it all but predicts the emergence of identity politics — a development by which he would have been disgusted. Foucault is not the figure to which we must attend if we want to understand postmodern thought and the strange relationship the left has to it. Nietzsche is.

Second, let me say a few words about how Tocqueville’s ideas figure into our question about whether America is on the precipice. No careful reader of Democracy in America can ignore his apprehensions about the impending gentle tyranny he describes in Vol. IV of that magisterial work. Most social scientists dismiss Tocqueville because his ideas cannot be operationalized and rendered in terms of dependent and independent variables, of “testable hypotheses.” It is not surprising, then, that the “America-is-okay” thesis about which Ellmers and Richards bristle arises within the social sciences, whose practitioners are good at predicting past events with their data, but who cannot point to a single non-trivial prediction that has come to pass in the hundred years since the enterprise got underway. The sum total of the wisdom of the social sciences after 100 years of toil in infertile ground is this: if people have done something, and they like it, they will probably do it again.

Tocqueville’s contention, which social science cannot test, is that there is a “secret hidden longing” in the democratic soul that guides America toward a new form of tyranny that is yet without a name. We should note that this observation emerges at least 50 years before Progressive ideas begin to take hold of the American imagination. The central problem faced by democratic America — the gentle drift into tyranny — emerges out of democratic social conditions, and cannot be attributed to the importation of German ideas from abroad. Foreign ideas may have accelerated the fire, but they did not cause it. In Democracy in America, there are at least twenty reasons given for why America may succumb to the gentle tyranny about which Tocqueville worried — and most of those reasons pertain to “habits of mind,” as Tocqueville calls them, rather than to variables that can unambiguously be measured.

There is an additional Tocquevillean insight we need to keep in mind, which conservatives seldom acknowledge, namely, his observation about what, in the social sciences today, is called “path dependency,” and what Tocqueville called “national character.” His remarks about the Puritans at the beginning of Vol. I, and his remarks about slaves and slave-holders, the American Indians, and the Russians at the end of the same, leave no doubt about this. What happens at the beginning, at founding moments, perdures. Indeed, these founding moments establish undercurrents that well up to refresh — and haunt — all subsequent historical moments. Conservatives are disposed to think that everything is always falling apart. That judgment is in Tocqueville’s writings; but part of his genius is to have also grasped that patterns established at the beginning cannot easily be eradicated. 

The point/counterpoint drama within Democracy in America involves two movements that seem antithetical to each other: on the one hand, the seemingly inexorable movement towards gentle tyranny; on the other hand, the beneficent habit, established at the Puritan beginning, of forming mediating institutions, which occasionally seem to falter, but which again and again reemerge. Yes, pace Putnam, there are no more bowling leagues, as there were in the 1950s; but today we have bicycle clubs, of the sort that were unimaginable in the 1950s. How Americans gather together has changed, but that they gather together has not. On the whole, Tocqueville’s warning about decay, generally dismissed by social scientists, must be heeded; but in the same breath, we must recognize that there are sources of renewal within the American body-social that cannot be ignored.

This is not the place to compare what Tocqueville saw, and what Nietzsche saw, when they considered the democratic age. In spite of immense differences, they each saw what I have elsewhere called, “The Great Exhaustion.” Tocqueville’s account of this emergent phenomenon is generally a sociological one: when mediating institutions break down, citizens become isolated and will look up to, and bow down to, the state. Nietzsche’s account, on the other hand, is generally a psychological one, though not in the trivial sense in which the term is understood today. 

Tocqueville sought to understand the transition that we call “modernity” by looking back (as he tells us in the Author’s Introduction) some 700 years to get his bearings. Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought that to understand the Exhaustion of the West, we had to go as far back as Plato, and even as far back as the Hebrews. Each, in different ways, undermined what Nietzsche believed was natural to man: aristocratic cruelty, through which alone great civilizations are built. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates decides in favor of reason, over against Thrasymachus’ defense of power and the unconscious desires that emerge when reason does not govern; and for their part, the Hebrews invert the natural order, according to which strength is strength, and substitute for it the assertion that weakness is strength. This Hebrew idea comes to fruition in the central claim of Christianity, namely, that the “innocent victim” is the very paradigm of true strength.

The Modern Left as ‘Halfway Nietzschean’

I have set before us three aspects of Nietzsche’s postmodern thought, which together help us understand the gravity of the threat to the American regime. They are, first, the claim that there is no substantive truth, that truth is power; second, that the self is not what we moderns understand it to be; and third, that the emergence of identity politics is something that Nietzsche would have predicted, and by which he would have been disgusted. In preparation for what is to follow, here I will add that he would have been repelled because its current attack on the West is based on ideas that emerge only in the West after it became ill. Identity politics doubles down on the sickness of the West; its recommendations cannot cure the West of its illness, which is deeper than the identity politics left imagines. More on that matter shortly.

With respect to the claim, put forth mytho-poetically by Plato, in the Republic, that unwavering Truth exists, Nietzsche asks, ‘what kind of soul would need this kind of truth’? His answer: ‘a weak soul, unable to endure a world forever in flux, a soul that longs for, but can never really find, a stable resting place or frame of reference.’ Those who defend convention, tradition, nature, or revelation, as conservatives do in differing degrees, betray weakness the moment their arguments commence. That is why they fall on deaf ears. The postmodern leftist asks, ‘why do conservatives need convention, tradition, nature, or revelation’? Their argument is not what the leftist attends to; he attends to the apparent psychological weakness of the speaker. The healthy man welcomes a world forever in motion, as a sign of his super-abundant strength. The healthy man invites “change.”

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes his version of the noble man, the paradigm of health, who spends himself “overcoming,” and never rests. The man of resentment, on the other hand, is weak; he fortifies himself with the illusion that his task consists in establishing, to his own satisfaction, and through law, an immovable foundation on which a stable civilization can rest. The task set for the strong, noble, man of the future is to reveal that the only-apparent foundations offered by convention, tradition, nature or revelation are, in fact, obstacles to the renewal of Western civilization which, since Plato and the Hebrews, have covered over the ancient wisdom that ‘all is strife.’ That knowledge must now be recovered — hence Nietzsche’s fascination with the pre-Socratic Greeks, the echo of which today takes the form of the anti-rational, anti-biblical habits of mind on the contemporary left. 

This is only half of the story, however. The contemporary left has none of Nietzsche’s fortitude. Its members are better characterized as halfway Nietzscheans. Although they wish to repudiate everything based on convention, tradition, nature or revelation, they do not undertake that project with a view to living with overflowing joy in a world forever in flux. Rather, they have clear opinions about the arrangements they think they want, namely, ones in which the exceptions to the rule that convention, tradition, nature, and revelation often recognize become the rule, and permanently. Hence, the “equity” inversion, according to which women must permanently ascend and men descend; the “transgender” inversion, according to which “heteronormativity” becomes a permanent thought-crime; and even the “green” inversion, according to which so-called clean energy sources must permanently replace fossil fuels, notwithstanding the fact that no nation on the planet will be able to sustain its people at the current standard of living if they undertake that inversion (as Germany has recently discovered). 

The left today is half-way postmodern. It accepts Nietzsche’s critique of rationality and of biblical religion, and uses it to tear down every existing idea and arrangement. It is nevertheless unwilling — perhaps it lacks strength of soul — to carry postmodernism to its full conclusion, which would entail repudiating its own various inversions as well. If there is no stable resting place, why is identity politics fixed on instantiating its inversions? Should not those inversions, too, be inverted? I will say more about this below.

Identity Politics and Pre-Socratic Man

With respect to the question of where the self resides, we must keep in mind Nietzsche’s diagnosis of The Great Exhaustion of the West. I mentioned above that Nietzsche distinguished between the noble soul and the soul animated by resentment — the former, exemplified by Dionysus, the pre-Socratic, ecstatic barbarian; the latter, a figure who might be called “Socratic man,” or even “biblical man.” The former acts without reflection. For him, the other is an afterthought, as is the suffering that the other endures at the hands of the noble barbarian. The noble barbarian’s “values” emerge, like those of the artist, from within himself, from a source that is underneath consciousness, “man’s weakest and most fallible organ.”

The thinking, speaking, conscious man — the man of reason, or the man who “loves his neighbor” — comes after the barbarian-artist violates and forms; and like a parasite on its host, the man of reason slowly draws down and dissipates the vitality of what was formed. In the beginning was violence. And its corollary: for the West to regenerate itself, it must plumb the depths that the conscious self has covered over, repressed, denied. The true self is not man’s conscious self, it is the pre-conscious, pre-linguistic self, the self that is, whose “identity” cannot be contained or captured by what words can say. The “I AM” of the Hebrew Bible is here transposed, so that it no longer pertains to the God who exceeds what words can disclose, but rather to the pre-linguistic self whose identity cannot be doubted, persuaded, or argued out of. 

Hence, the common locutions within identity politics, “I knew I was gay before I had words for it,” “I have known since childhood that I inhabit the wrong body,” “I identify as X (and you had better not utter a judgmental word about it),” etc. Identity politics rests on the assertion that the self is incontestably given and unassailable by words, because it is not something consciously decided. In such a world, anyone who doubts someone’s identity claim is cruel, heartless, and does not understand that the only respectable thing to do is to “affirm,” “celebrate,” and encourage the “pride” of the so-called identity bearer. 

Nietzsche believed that only through the re-activation of the violent, creative, unconscious self, could Western man shake himself out of his exhaustion. Cruelty would be one of its necessary consequences. “New Tablets cannot be written,” he writes, “unless the old ones are broken.” Only the release of the violent, creative, unconscious self can revitalize the West. The postmodern left, halfway Nietzschean in this regard as well, endorses Nietzsche’s understanding of where the real self resides — and then insists that so fragile are the emergent identities that logo-centric and biblical man have long repressed, that they can only grow and thrive if provided safe spaces and legal protections from so-called “hate speech.” So much for the super-abundant strength Nietzsche thought postmodern man would need to unleash for the West to be renewed.

With respect to what Nietzsche’s probable assessment of identity politics might have been, we need only more fully develop the two ideas we have already considered. In both cases, I have suggested that the left is more aptly described as halfway Nietzschean, and therefore only halfway postmodern. Step back for a minute. Contemporary commentators have not been sufficiently attentive to the dystopian counterpoint developed in many of the great works we read. Plato’s Republic gives us the city set up in the heavens at the end of Bk. IX; its dystopian counterpoint is the tyrannical city described at the end of Bk. VIII. Hobbes’s Leviathan gives us the nation-state personified by one man; its dystopian counterpoint is the twin peril of global government and the self that wishes that it alone be sovereign. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America gives us equality in liberty; its counterpoint is equality in servitude. Marx’s Communist Manifesto gives us communism; its counterpoint is bourgeois socialism — what we today would call “social justice.” 

What of Nietzsche? Nietzsche’s hope was that the West would overcome its exhaustion, which he attributed to Plato’s logo-centrism, to be sure; but let us not forget that he also had biblical religion in his sights. His dystopian counterpoint involved that macabre intermediary the West has increasingly witnessed as Christendom has perished, namely, the invocation of Christian categories within ideological frameworks that have purported to supersede Christian religion: the French Revolution, Marxism, and now, I submit, identity politics.

“It is the Church and not its poison that repels us,” Nietzsche wrote in The Genealogy of Morals. In each of these blood-thirsty ideological frameworks, so-called innocent victims are distinguished from purportedly stained, impure transgressors. In turn, the simple-minded moral scheme set before the True Believer — the Jacobin, the Revolutionary, the radical in the current Democratic Party — guides adherents toward a course of political action: uphold and shift resources to the innocent victims, for their suffering demands unending compensation; and, at the same time, scapegoat the transgressors. 

In the contemporary case of identity politics, we know the schema: white, heterosexual men are the transgressors who must be scapegoated; everyone else is declared an innocent victim. Check your intersectional scorecard to establish just how many innocent victim-points you deserve. If you deserve none, then you must become morally visible, by announcing on your social media platform that you are, say, transgender, or that you are a victim of climate change, etc. The entire Last Man edifice, Nietzsche would point out, is incoherent without the central Christian insight that the regeneration of the world hinges on our recognition of the innocent victim, who is without spot or blemish. George Floyd, anyone?

Identity politics, Nietzsche would tell us, has the appearance of being anti-Christian, in that it opposes the historical teachings of the Churches about personal comportment, family relations, government, and ecclesial organization. It is, however, stuck in the biblical world that Nietzsche thought necessary to overcome. It is halfway postmodern in that it undermines the conventions, traditions, understandings of nature, and of revelation that Christianity has established in the course of the last 2,000 years. But, in accordance with Nietzsche’s dystopian vision, it invokes the category of the innocent victim to do so, and is therefore but a dystopian resting place on the way to the postmodern world Nietzsche thought could alone regenerate Western Civilization. 

Identity Politics Is Regime Change

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom claimed that Americans did not grasp the full depth of Nietzsche because the American psyche had “no basement.” The American flirtation with Nietzsche in the 1960s, as I noted earlier, amounted to a desire for “values,” “meaning,” and “creativity.” Today in America, we are closer to what Nietzsche actually had in mind. Closer — but by no means there yet. The Nietzschean left of a half-century ago did not want to destroy America; it wanted breathing room within America, however naïve that longing may have been. The Exhaustion of the West was not its frame of reference; the pointless life of Willy Loman, anti-hero of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, was what it was responding to.

The Nietzschean left today, the identity politics left, is a threat to the American regime. Identity politics is the battering ram that smashes through the gates of convention, tradition, inherited ideas about nature, and revelation — in the name of purging the transgressors and elevating the innocent victims. Without those gates in place, the American regime as it was founded and as we can still recognize it will come to an end. Identity politics is regime change. We should have no illusions to the contrary. 

I have claimed here, however, that the identity politics left is only halfway Nietzschean, and therefore halfway postmodern. It goes deeper into the basement, but not all the way. Full-on Nietzscheanism, so to speak, would mock identity politics for its invocation of the Christian category of the innocent victim, even if used for anti-Christian purposes. “It is the church, and not its poison” that offends it. We should not be comforted about the halfway postmodernism of the identity politics left, however. It sets its sights on the destruction of the world as we have known it. And we should be clear why it has been as successful as it has been. 

In 1955, Louis Hartz famously argued in The Liberal Tradition in America, that America would never become enthralled by Marxism because the central category of that ideological framework — class — had no purchase on the American mind. America has rich and poor, but no class in the old-world sense. Identity politics is a far more pernicious threat. Why? Because the central category of its ideological framework is one that has a complete hold on still nominally Christian America, namely, the innocent victim. Because America is halfway Christian, the halfway postmodernism of identity politics is on the verge of completely destroying America. 

I conclude with an observation of the gravity of the threat before us. There is a growing confidence among conservatives that identity politics is on the verge of being beaten back. DEI programs are being dismantled in many corporations (though not yet in many of our universities); the transgender mania now has medical science against it; the New Right and the Republican Party now representing it has a growing legion of smart and courageous defenders; the Democratic Party seems unable to pull out of the tailspin into which identity politics has cast it. 

Do not be deceived. We are at the beginning, not at the end, of a very long battle. Marxism took 150 years to be vanquished. Millions of people died. Identity politics does not emerge out of Marxism; it is not an extension of “cultural Marxism,” as so many conservatives think. It is of Nietzschean, postmodern, origin, as Ellmers and Richards aver. In the halfway postmodern form that identity politics has now taken hold it will: profile groups according to the intersectional score, and purge them if they are not sufficiently pure; repudiate the mediating institutions of family and church, so necessary for a self-governing people, because of their “white,” “European,” “patriarchal,” Christian origin; repudiate national history, because of the stain of slavery; repudiate “dirty” fossil fuels and plunge us into the condition of Green Scarcity; flirt with the elimination of man himself because of his “dirty” carbon footprint.

I repeat: we are at the beginning, not at the end, of a very long war against those who wish to purify the world. The American regime set forth by the founders starts from a different hypothesis: man and his institutions are impure, and always will be. Our regime seeks to ameliorate that condition, not repudiate it altogether.