Eugene McCarraher is Associate Professor of Humanities at Villanova University. His book, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, argues that capitalist imperatives have superseded those of Christianity over time. The following was presented as part of a panel on McCarraher at the 2025 Religious Communication Association convention in Denver, Colorado.
On November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election, the Pew Research Center reported that 81 percent of white evangelical voters had cast ballots for Donald Trump. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that this figure would remain remarkably consistent in both the 2020 and 2024 elections as well, and that evangelical Trumpism would normalize and calcify within the conventional wisdom over time. Now a full decade into the Trump epoch in American life, we might pause here to acknowledge that the handwringing on this matter has largely wrung itself out, replaced instead either by resignation or by broader concerns about “Christian Nationalism” and its symptoms.
But back in those sepia days, the political union between America’s most self-consciously moral demographic and her most flagrantly immoral public figure had not yet lost its shock value. It was productive of discussion. In fact, the years 2016-2022 marked the golden age of the Trump-evangelical explainer in both short- and long-form. That partnership was the religio-political development that launched a million tweets, blog posts, op-eds, conference papers, and monographs. I think I read most of these, and as a then-contributor to the web magazines Religion Dispatches and Religion & Politics, I interviewed many of their authors. But it did not bring me much in the way of peace or acceptance.
Since then I have often found myself returning to an essay published in September 2016, in the Atlantic Monthly, in which the journalist Salena Zito first suggested that “the press takes Trump literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” It bounced around in my brain for years as I continued to grapple mulishly with that fundamental question: Why, or how, had the evangelicals learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump? Eventually, I came to consider the possibility that my persistent frustration with the toxic politics of the “white evangelicals” may be attributable to a contradiction in my thinking—not in theirs. Maybe, like all “exvangelicals,” I had become so self-righteous and insufferable in my own right because, like most “exvangelicals,” I had not stayed long enough in the faith to mature beyond my youthful, romantic image of Christ and into a worldly realpolitik that holds him at a pragmatic arm’s length. Because we grew up memorizing verses and competing in sword drills and insisting on fidelity to the literal, plain text of the scriptures, we took it for granted that such commitment would be born out in our lives, our choices, our practice of citizenship—that they would know we were Christians by our love, our humility, our service to the poor, etc.
It is only in adulthood, perhaps, that people come understand the sheer impracticality of such a posture, of its patent inability to get things done or to get one ahead or to ensure that a broad distinction is drawn between those who deserve and those who do not. Living in the United States, in this day and age, with this ballooning economy, this inescapable culture, this zealous nationalism, and so many other influential inputs, few indeed are those who model anything approaching a truly and radically Christlike life. In the Church writ large and perhaps the suburban evangelical megachurch more than most, American Christians have proven themselves consistent in that they also take Jesus seriously but not literally, and so entitle themselves to build identities upon his name while dismissing or minimizing some of his most explicit priorities. With that sort of flexibility, just about anything can happen.
With enough neglect, for example, the red-letter text of the gospel could forfeit its very pronounced critique of avarice and be canonized instead in the scripture of Mammon. Paired with and soon blended within a sacralized capitalism, Christianity might be persuaded to adopt the doctrine that greed is good, actually—that the diligent pursuit of private wealth, undertaken by scores of individuals, in fierce competition with each other, and bound relentlessly toward treasures on earth, would lead indirectly—in effect, accidentally—to the betterment of all. The case for such a revision would be strengthened if capitalism did in fact inaugurate world-historic rates of production and accumulation, if these did in fact contribute to marked reductions in global poverty, and if churches were to benefit from generous tithes calculated at around 10% of the steadily increasing incomes won by congregants in the market, who would then have more than enough left over to live comfortably on a cul-de-sac, to drive a fashionable car, to take enviable vacations, and to live otherwise satisfactory lives amid the material markers of affluence and status, respected by and exerting influence upon their communities, states, and certainly this one nation under God.
The question of precisely how all of that surplus value had been extracted, where exactly those commodities had been assembled, under what sort of labor conditions, and at the cost of which environmental impacts would be easy enough to ignore, especially as the Church and its networks acquired political power befitting God’s agents on Earth. By then, any critique of the Christian-capitalist merger could be dismissed as a sacrilege, and any perceived loss of power would feel like existential risk rising. Maybe then the Christians would turn out en masse to endorse an arch-capitalist for President, on a platform of being rich and making deals and restoring Christianity to vengeful power over its cultured despisers, other considerations be damned.
If you can forgive the liberties taken here by way of insinuation, you can likely also perceive the German sociologist Max Weber peeking between the lines, perhaps alongside the English historian R. H. Tawney, with the contemporary economist Benjamin Friedman and the all-purpose social critic David Bentley Hart in the margins. For his part, Eugene McCarraher has not framed the story in quite this way, at least not in his massive tome that concludes in the latter half of the twentieth century, and that mentions Donald Trump only in the epilogue and then only in passing. McCarraher’s extensive history places Christianity and capitalism on parallel rather than convergent tracks, though conceding in one long chapter that the paragons of post-New-Deal reaction—figures like Hayek, von Mises, Rand, and Milton Friedman—would find common cause with those of that traditional, down-home agrarian sort of faith—figures like Kirk, Weaver, eventually Billy Graham—allowing for the animation of their shared anti-statism with the breath of heaven.
But McCarraher’s over-arching point is that capitalism is an alternative to Christianity—that it is not nearly so secular, so purely rational, so disenchanted as has often been claimed. Rather, he writes, it “is a form of enchantment—perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world. Its animating spirit is money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology have been otherwise known as ‘economics.’ Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies—the material culture of production and consumption,” and on and on (5). Capitalism, in this framing, is not something that can be cleanly blended with Christianity. It is instead something that can replace Christianity, a complex and layered substitute capable of filling the emptiness and instilling the purpose and satisfying the desire for transcendence that is lost with lost faith. To anyone who suggests, as I have here, that these hegemonic Christian and capitalist discourses are by now conjoined in America, McCarraher seems to respond that this is an illusion. It’s not that the two have become one, he replies, it’s that the one has displaced the other.
Whitney Phillips is Associate Professor of Information Politics and Media Ethics at the University of Oregon, and Mark Brockway is Assistant Teaching Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Their book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics considers the persistent demonization of the “liberal” in right-wing discourse.
The most memorable claim in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951) is that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” There is no social force more unifying or mobilizing than shared hostility toward a common enemy, and no social movement that has not rallied in one way or another around such hostility. In some cases, like the Civil Rights movement, moral force is drawn from restraint, as members confront the enemy by submitting to its violence, self-consciously meeting hatred with love and performing citizenship through sacrifice. In others, like the contemporary MAGA movement, hatred courses outward through conspiracy theories, sinister allegations, and official malice, limited only by the bounds of an exceptionally creative group imagination. But if these contrasts mark a wide difference in degree, they do not quite constitute a difference in kind. It’s just a question of how the enemy is envisioned and engaged.
In their book, The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics, Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway provide a religious backstory for this strange political moment, tracing the rhetorical contours of American Christian Rightism back across more than eight formative decades, from the rise of the neo-evangelicals around 1940 to the political resurrection of Donald Trump in 2024. Though we tend to frame our politics in terms of “division” and “polarization,” Phillips and Brockway disclaim these as vagaries. Instead, they argue, the United States is today most clearly defined by the opposition between a powerful cohort of reactionary Christians and the “liberal” demons that they work to defeat at all costs.
If this seems a too-narrow lens through which to view a nationalized culture in one of the world’s largest and most diverse nations, the authors counter that liberal demonology operates now upon a deep tradition and across a broad sphere of influence. Though undeniably marginal at the end of World War II, the evangelicals made rapid in-roads into American culture over the decades that followed, enabled by their uniform whiteness, their self-conscious traditionalism, their obvious media savvy, and the fertile soil of a militant anti-communism that both valorized the evangelical profile and demonized the alleged scores of secret communist agents operating always in our midst. From these wide foundations arose a religious-political movement ostensibly committed to the beauty and truth of the gospel yet always more squarely focused, as a practical matter, on identifying and vilifying liberal demons.
Throughout their histories, organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and Billy Graham’s Youth for Christ were oriented in opposition to the more liberal Christian mainline, casting its non-fundamentalist doctrinal stands alongside the menacing threat of a more liberal politics. (A notoriously slippery term, liberal does not mean exactly one thing in religion and politics, or indeed in politics alone.) Christians—and especially the young—were imagined as persistently vulnerable to worldly temptations like popular music, countercultural trends, sex, drugs, “modern” ideas, and communist influence, all of which served as conduits for Satanic action. The ascendant evangelical organizations of the postwar years were founded to mainstream a conservative Christian message able to counter these secular forces. They sought to practice spiritual warfare from the churches, communities, cities, and power centers of American life.
By the time Jerry Falwell convened the Moral Majority in 1979, the confluence of conservative Christianity with Republican politics was complete, and the new union was animated immediately by a crusading religious zeal. If the one faction had been occupied so far with the defeat of Satan and the other with the defeat of Democrats, the Reagan Revolution inaugurated a stage in which those parallel missions would be conjoined as one. Across his two terms, Reagan’s strong rhetorical condemnation of “godless communism” in the “evil empire” channeled much of that spiritual energy toward the USSR. When the Cold War ended abruptly in 1991, it circled back to the homefront, finding new hosts and targets via another Republican “revolution” in 1994.
From Newt Gingrich forward, the American rightwing would be increasingly defined by an aggressive and accusatory rhetorical posture, carried far and uncritically by an expansive media apparatus. Assisted first by Rush Limbaugh and, later, by Roger Ailes, the sweeping alliance between congressional Republicans and the new Christian Coalition would achieve a media coup with the rise of Fox News and its imitators. Broadcasting the new Gingrich vocabulary—he had instructed his members to describe Democrats with words like sick, selfish, radical, treasonous, and worse—this new religious-political-media union hoisted liberal demonizing to new strata of reach and ferocity. Then Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and the hysteria was cranked to eleven.
This admittedly perfunctory summary account does at least identify the contours of the anti-liberal trajectory, as well as its braiding of the three key spheres of influence imposing demonology on our eyes and ears around the clock today. Understood as a reflexively and emotionally anti-liberal outfit—as opposed to something more consistent with the Beatitudes, for example—the contemporary Christian Rightwing becomes intelligible as MAGA, the cult of Donald Trump. Though many recent books have sought to explain Trump-vangelicalism as a religious, political, and social force, few do so as persuasively as this. Many have asked how such a union is possible. By the end of this book, you wonder how it could possibly have been otherwise.
In my view The Shadow Gospel is somewhat over-written throughout, weighed down with a volume of references and citations that impede a smooth read through a compelling narrative. And because the shadow gospel itself is crowdsourced across many decades and many millions of people, it is often hard to pin down as a clear and cohesive concept. But you don’t really need a simple definition or obvious rhetorical boundaries to process how the liberal devil has come to dominate thought and speech on the American Right—or to assess the irreparable harms it has caused. Though a social movement can clearly function well enough without him, the country would benefit enormously if American evangelicals could find their way back to God.
Edward Bellamy was an American socialist author, activist, and journalistwho wrote six novels in the second half of the nineteenth century. His most famous work, Looking Backward 2000-1887, inspired the formation of “Nationalist Clubs” throughout the country, each dedicated to a better way of life through nationalized industry and civic collaboration rather than competition.
Though quite arguably not a great novel, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-1887 was inarguably a very influential book, inspiring a social movement in its time and warranting subsequent editions for more than a century after its appearance. The story of Julian West, a young, blue-blooded Bostonian who goes to sleep in 1887 and awakens in 2000, Looking Backward offers both a critique of Gilded Age America and a sepia-toned vision of the socialist utopia to come. From the vantage of the 21st century, the story is notable for its ideas, its idealism, its naivete, its foresight, and its execution—for the things it got right, those it got wrong, and its willingness to dream of something better.
Were it not for Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s earlier, also less-than-brilliant effort, Bellamy’s critique of the Gilded Age in the United States might be definitive of the era. It laments the postwar rise and spread of economic inequality, exploitative labor practices, environmental degradation, and pervasive corruption, as well as their moral and spiritual analogues. Early on Bellamy compares late nineteenth century society to a stagecoach, pulled by people, driven by Hunger, and truly beneficial only to those happy few who get to ride on top while the rest suffer. This sorry state of affairs would be intelligible to the enlightened citizens of 2000 only if they understood two misconceptions carried by their predecessors: first, that they truly believed there was no viable alternative; and second, that the affluent people on top of the coach believed themselves cut from finer cloth and so deserving of their leisure at others’ expense. For these reasons, the reigning posture of the wealthy toward the rest was one of profound, unconscionable indifference.
The action begins one evening in May when West, who has trouble sleeping generally, retires to his silent, subterranean bedroom, surrounded by thick concrete walls but ventilated through a pipe to the surface. He sends his servant to retrieve the local mesmerist, who makes a special visit even though he is that very night preparing to move immediately to a distant city. Hours later, deep in hypnotic sleep, West’s home catches fire and burns down above him, presumably killing the servant and confining West within an unbroken and preservative slumber. His friends and family mourn his apparent death in the fire.
When he awakes, in 2000, the Boston that he knew is long gone, replaced by a much larger, but also much cleaner, more peaceful, and more harmonious city. The air is clear, the people are happy, and the social turmoil surrounding the “labor question” has long-since been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. West’s new companion, Dr. Leete, is cheerful but also a little cagey. Understanding West’s unusual situation and vulnerability, he hopes to ease the young man into the new century gradually, revealing the developments little-by-little through conversation. His uncommonly beautiful daughter Edith—who, improbably, has the same name as West’s former fiancé—hovers on the periphery with a mysterious interest in her father’s guest.
Though a lot has changed over the past 113 years, the most significant shift has to do with the organization of the economy itself. Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Dr. Leete explains, the corporate monopolies had become so large and so dominant that they threatened American democracy, so the people had them nationalized.
“Early in the last century,” he says, “the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their caprice and for their profit, were entrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit.”
Nationalization of industry was the key piece of Bellamy’s socialism, which he called “nationalism,” and which prompted the launch of dozens of “nationalist clubs” around the United States in the 1880s and 90s. Much of Dr. Leete’s narration is devoted to explaining how nationalized industry has proven less expensive, more efficient, and much more equally beneficial than private enterprise.
Though West assumes that this enormous change could have been won only through civil war and bloodshed, Dr. Leete assures him that it was an entirely peaceful transition—a move that, by clearly reordering the system of incentives, channeled human motivations in a revised direction and achieved something tantamount to an altered human nature. Not only does everyone in 2000 work together for the common good, but they are able to do so in career paths that they choose for themselves, for a shortened period of time, in pursuit of honor rather than wages. In fact, they live in a world without money entirely—also without poverty, politicians, standing armies, wars, or most other social ills. Instead, the Americans of 2000 have guided the military ethos—with its commitments to teamwork, sacrifice, duty, and honor—toward the maintenance of the state itself. This “industrial army” makes the wheels turn while drawing citizens together as peers in a shared enterprise.
And this, of course, is the point of Bellamy’s book. He uses a simple narrative framework to inject some entertainment value into what would otherwise be a political treatise. It works, but perhaps not so well that you forget what you’re reading. The sharp back-and-forth between West and Leete, crafted to interrogate key questions around Bellamy’s program, is an effective means to explain and analyze his remarkably detailed and thoughtful vision.
Bellamy is also wisely hesitant to describe the physical particulars of futuristic life in detail, quietly assuming instead that dress, speech, transportation, etc. are essentially similar to those of his own day. To me this sleight of hand becomes most obvious in his treatment of Edith, who moves and speaks much more like a 19th century romantic than any of the eighteen-year-old girls that I knew in 2000. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that her name probably would have been Sarah or Jessica or Ashley, she would have been listening to *Nsync, wearing low-rise jeans, driving a Dodge Neon, and probably not falling in love with the dusty relic that her Dad—who she would not call Father—found under the backyard during a home renovation. And yet the story does need a love interest, so we might let these hedges slide.
His narrative suggests that Bellamy believed—maybe hoped—that by 2000 the American people would have gotten their act together, dismissed the fat cats, killed capitalism, and built a truly free and equal nation, recognizing that alternatives do exist. In that regard, unfortunately, Looking Backward reads less like prophecy than satire, and the 21st century continues to feel essentially similar to the 19th.
William Morris was an English socialist author, activist, artist, and designer who wrote his News From Nowhere in reply to Bellamy’s Looking Backward. A leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris countered Bellamy’s vision of mechanized state socialism with one devoted to productive, non-alienated craft labor.
William Morris’s News from Nowhere was authored in reply to Looking Backward. Morris had reviewed Bellamy’s book in the journal Commonweal in 1889, and began serializing his own project there in 1890. Based in London and renowned for this work with the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris offered a British counterpart to Bellamy’s American vision, as well as an alternative form of socialism. In particular, Morris objected to Bellamy’s overtly industrial future.
“The underlying vice in [Looking Backward] is that the author cannot conceive of anything else than the machinery of society,” he wrote. “The result is that though he tells us every man is free to choose his occupation and that work is no burden to anyone, the impression which he produces is that of a huge standing army, tightly drilled, compelled by some mysterious fate to unceasing anxiety for the production of wares to satisfy every caprice, however wasteful and absurd, that may cast up amongst them.”
Dismissive of a factory-powered world in which the workers work as before but control the means of production, Morris imagined an idyllic future in which a few large corporations had been replaced by a host of small artisans; in which assembly line uniformity had been replaced by handicraft. Above all, the citizens of his England would no longer be alienated from their labor.
In News from Nowhere, once again, the protagonist falls asleep in one era and awakens in another, a convention that Morris honors even though he dismissed it as cliché in his review of Bellamy. This time Julian West is William Guest, and Boston is London. The year is not specified, but occasionally the characters reflect on events from the early 21st century. Once again there is no money, no politics, no war, no poverty, and criminality has been essentially vanquished, sporadic crimes of passion notwithstanding. Once again our hero is guided by sensible men and uncommonly beautiful women.
But there are two key differences. First is that, while Bellamy treats work as a necessary evil, reducing each citizen’s obligation to a 24-year period between ages 21 and 45, Morris places work at the core of human purpose, provided each human is free to follow his own creative genius, and slowly. The people of Morris’s utopia work because they want to, because they enjoy it, because they are able to contribute what they want and to be motivated by the contribution they make to their society. No longer driven to long hours at hard labor by incentives like profit accumulation or status competition, they are free to live and work together amicably, equally, and happily.
The second is that, while Bellamy sets his story in an enormous futuristic Boston and remains city-centric, Morris takes Guest on a slow journey from a quaint and modest London to the North of England, traveling first by horse-drawn cart and then rowing up the Thames. (Morris makes no effort to imagine the transportation of the future, as that of the past serves his easy-going purposes.) Along the way, Guest encounters happy people laboring in the fields much as they did in the nineteenth century, but at a more leisurely pace and of their own volition. The setting shift allows News From Nowhere to cut a pastoral contrast to Bellamy’s urbanism.
Though the citizens of 21st century England seem to dress, speak, and act much like those of the nineteenth, they are different in a few important respects. The first is that they are much happier, a development that helps explain a second—they age much more slowly. Though we are told that Guest is 56, the people he meets are constantly mistaking him for a much older man, grizzled as he looks to their youthful eyes. The men of the future are fit and healthy, the women smooth and stunning. The gender roles have remained largely intact, but without any sort of compulsion. The women enjoy a sort of elevated status while continuing to do the things that women have traditionally done.
The one very notable exception to this traditionalism concerns relationships and family. In Morris’s England there is no legal marriage, and hence no contentious divorce. Guest is introduced early on to a man named Dick, who serves as his guide, and later to a woman named Clara, with whom Dick is in love and has two children. Clara had basically run out on Dick sometime in the past, having fallen in love with another man. But then she came back and the two of them remain in the reconciliation process as the action unfolds. While there are obviously emotional obstacles to overcome, there is nothing in the way of vindictiveness in their relationship. Through this strange bit of character development, Morris seems to suggest that relaxing these institutions somewhat would make everyone more harmonious, even in the messy hardships of love.
Ultimately, the future according to William Morris is formally comparable to that of Edward Bellamy, though with obvious content differences. One writer foresees a brighter world in which the workers have united to overthrow capitalism, the other a world in which the people have withdrawn from it entirely. One future is mechanized, the other decidedly not. One features freedom from work, the other embraces work as art. In both cases, the narrator wakes from the dream in the end, though Bellamy places his man in a dream within a dream, and has him wake from that. As it turns out, neither author was right about where things were headed, but perhaps that does not disqualify their efforts.
In fact, to read these works at this moment in time is to wish for more imaginative thinking about our future, more creative foresight about cultural and institutional changes that might fix the many problems we must negotiate day-to-day. It’s not that no one is thinking about next steps—it’s just that those who are seem to be following them onto inhuman trajectories. In Silicon Valley, the push is for AI that can replace us in many or most ways. In Washington, DC, the focus is on an idealized past that seems to recede ever further into a world of greater inequality, white supremacy, environmental destruction, and the rest. In that regard, the Trump years in the United States have been a prolonged exercise in looking backward, 2025-1887. Ours is a new Gilded Age, in which the enlightened citizens of the 21st century have looked back on a darker past, not with incredulity, but with nostalgia—or at least have entrusted their nation to people who do.
Therefore the time may be right for a new generation of utopian novels, written by human novelists, with a viable vision for a better human future. We need a bit of shaking, some institutional revisionism, a fresh perspective. In many ways we could be doing this thing much better. In some of the most important, we could hardly do worse.
Chris Jennings is an historian and writer living in Northern California. His book, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, documents the experiences of five distinct and but related attempts at American communism around the middle of the nineteenth century. Valuable in themselves, these movements remain instructive for anyone who would work toward a better world.
During the first half of the nineteenth century—after the establishment of the American republic and prior to its dissolution into war—a diversity of homegrown utopians set out to found ideal societies across the land. Some of these were religious and doctrinaire, others secular and libidinous, still others a scandalous mixture of these qualities. But all believed that they could make the world anew, and better, through careful planning.
In his Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, Chris Jennings focuses upon five examples: the Shakers, in New England; the Owenites, at New Harmony, Indiana; the Fourierist Phalanxes, including Brook Farm outside of Boston; the Icarians, of several places, like Illinois and Texas; and the Oneidans, in upstate New York. Though all of these experiments failed to achieve truly lasting success, they remain notable for making the attempt, and so demonstrating a faculty for imagination and will that seems to have died with them.
It is on this point, more than any other, that Jennings’ work resonates. Without detailing each group at length—though the book does so admirably—we can still appreciate the collaborative impulse at work throughout the land in those days. For all the attention fixed upon the self-cultivation and individualism of Jacksonian America, this was also a time of revolutionary creativity, when reformers formed societies and civilians civilized themselves in groups of the like-minded. It was a time before any pervasive will to make a name for oneself only, a time when we were still in this together. Nothing has been quite the same since.
So what happened? Jennings notes at least two formative influences at work. The first is that, prior to the Civil War, the adolescent republic was far less completely governed, and indeed far less governable than it would be afterward. The rapid expansion of the borders and consequent dilution of the population drove a frenetic federal effort to draw up territories, write rules, and establish order, but these goals were necessarily achieved—if achieved—on a delay, meaning that people were largely on their own in the meanwhile. In that kind of an environment, you look around for allies just to stay safe. And since the entire country seemed to be under construction, arising organically out of the state of—stolen— nature, new social organizations and arrangements seemed entirely plausible, especially when compared to alternatives like nothing at all. Further animated with the millenarian forces stirred by the Second Great Awakening, anything was possible.
The Civil War mostly ended this era, bringing that particular species of concerted optimism to a jarring close. Even an especially cheerful population will be chastened by violence and gore at that industrial scale; made to reflect a bit on what exactly dwells within the human heart and whether lion might realistically lay with lamb on any feasible time horizon. (Emancipation notwithstanding, the tribulations of the Reconstruction era and the corruptions of the Gilded Age did little to resuscitate much in the way of fellow feeling.) The utopians also saw their prospects shift beneath the rise of a powerful new Leviathan, a Washington-based central government of enormous new size and reach, now with unprecedented military might and expansive new administrative powers. From that point forward the state would run the show, and the independent, entrepreneurial spirt of the communes would be channeled instead toward politics.
The second influence emerges as a moral of the first, or rather as an interpretation of past practice that forecloses upon options yet to come. Across the board, the utopian movements failed, and so offered cautionary tales to subsequent generations of imitators or heirs. Because these attempts did not work, we have tended to conclude—perhaps blithely—that such attempts cannot work as a rule, and so have acclimated ourselves to the imperfect status quo. But one obvious benefit of Jenning’s detailed storytelling is that he clearly identifies and explains the various and often idiosyncratic causes that led to downfall in each case, demonstrating on the way that failure is not inherent or inevitable when people try to collaborate on better futures. Your odds improve dramatically, for example, if your visionary leaders aren’t more than a little mad, and if you resist the temptation to institute provocative new sexual arrangements. It would also be wise to recruit members with a diversity of valuable skill sets, and make sure you have a sustainable method of paying the bills. In the last analysis, the story of American utopianism might offer a preface to the later emergence of American pragmatism.
Though we tend to scoff at the utopians in hindsight, it seems worth recalling that all of them were successful for a while, and some more than others, and in the window of their success they believed they had it all or mostly figured out. If we can place ourselves in their shoes for a moment, we might see Oneida or New Harmony very much the way we see our own America now—as a not yet perfect but still striving society based in certain ideals and working hard to realize them in practice. In that light we may come to appreciate the modern United States, too, as a product of particular circumstances existing in a specific timeframe, and vulnerable as well to whatever awaits around the corner. Now at the end of the Great Acceleration, it is not difficult to foresee a world in which all of this looks rather utopian—a world in which we did whatever we wanted at whatever cost with little attention to the inequities and none at all to the impacts. A best-of-all-possible worlds, an eternal present, atop the never-breaking swell of progress.
The world was supposed to end in the 1990s—probably during Y2K, but possibly at any moment prior given the run of biblical prophecies fulfilled to that point, at least according to many of the local ministers, televangelists, and popular authors working with this material at the time. By then Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth was old news, but Frank Peretti was in demand, and the first few Left Behind novels were already best-selling. There was a lot of curiosity about the book of Revelation. The falling stars referenced there might be nuclear missiles, the Pope could be the Anti-Christ. I recall hoping that the end would hold off a little longer, so that I could experience a little more of this fascinating, fallen planet. I was thankful for each new sunrise on the blinds. I didn’t realize the predictions had come around so many times before.
Unfortunately, as Carl Sagan once put it, “theories that involve the end of the world are not amenable to experimental verification—or, at least, not more than once.”
Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go surveys the human mania for end-times theorizing from the time of Jeremiah to the time of Trump, albeit with emphasis on the media products of the past century or so. Lynskey is interested in cultural artifacts like books, music, movies, and shows, and we have simply been producing more of these more recently. His range is impressive, inspiring readers, listeners, and viewers to read, listen, and view both more widely and more systematically. It’s also the case that the concerns animating the end times impulse have evolved considerably over time—especially after 1945. Lynskey’s narrative hinges on that shift.
There is something endearing and even reassuring about the first part of the story, which covers all of the forecasting prior to Oppenheimer’s bomb. These concern the William-Miller-types, close-reading the Bible and calculating days as years—or however—to pinpoint the exact moment when the trumpets will sound. Though supposedly no one knows the day or the hour, there is something admirable about a prophet who is willing to set firm deadlines and so accept some measure of accountability. Miller chose October 22, 1844, inaugurating what critics termed the Great Disappointment. On May 11, 2011, Harold Camping reprised this experience for his dutiful followers as well. Camping’s evangelical critics scoffed at the precision of his claim, and rightfully so, but they did this while continuing to utter the exact same type of claim in conveniently less precise terms. We are in the end times, they all proclaim. But the end itself draws on indefinitely, and in the meanwhile they keep on collecting tithes.
What’s attractive about the pre-bomb—or non-bomb—narratives is that they do not implicate human behavior directly, and so do us the courtesy of waiving blame. This is true, for example, of asteroid stories like those en vogue during the 90s. If the world gets whacked by an interstellar rock, we aren’t exactly at fault, and there wasn’t much we could have done. And yet it remains interesting to imagine what we would try to do in such a case. Lynskey notes that this imagining can be done thoughtfully (as in 1998’s Deep Impact) or not (as in 1998’s Armageddon) but either way you can feel what you feel and then leave it in the theater.
That comforting distance closes quickly in the second class of narratives, those focused on post-1945 threats that really are out there and, in some cases, really are on the way. There’s this moment in Oppenheimer when the title character is talking with Niels Bohr, who says that the bomb is “not a new weapon, it’s a new world,” a big statement that looks understated in hindsight. As the launchpad of “the Great Acceleration,” 1945 marked the year that human development took off exponentially, pursuing rapid new growth in fields like weaponry, manufacturing, product development, advertising, computers, etc., all the way up through the internet and artificial intelligence, generating new conveniences and comforts and improving quality of life while also placing profound new stress on the planet, heightening inequalities, expelling mountains of waste, and quietly introducing a host of new potential threats—some of them existential. Since 1945, in other words, human activity on earth has been—at least in part—an exercise in cultivating and sidestepping cumulative risks.
Each day, as we go quietly about our lives, nuclear missiles are still siloed around the world, ready for launch. Viral diseases are still evolving, perhaps under active development by bad actors. The carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to climb, along with global surface temperatures and more powerful weather events. And tech bros in Silicon Valley continue to push relentlessly ahead in their experiments with AI, driven always by the question of can and pausing only occasionally to consider questions of should. These and other variables, taken as a package, persuade Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord that the likelihood of human extinction this century is about one-in-six, the same probability that one dies in a game of Russian Roulette.
The sheer complexity of 21st century life is certain to confound and likely to overwhelm anyone who tries to form a comprehensive opinion on where it’s all heading. If you want to anticipate our planetary doom, you have options to choose from. Lynskey’s book is comforting—and entertaining—in its faculty for documenting and analyzing the many and varied bad predictions from the past, as well as how these have been represented in popular culture. But it also cautions us that not all threats are created equal, and too much emphasis on the Chicken Littles of old may numb us to wise warnings in our own era. Things don’t have to end entirely to get considerably worse, and there are real opportunities to make things better. Everyone who foresees catastrophe is bound to be wrong until someone is right. If we are inclined to believe that the world will end in our own lifetimes, maybe that’s simply because, for each us, it will.
The success of evangelical youth culture in the 1990s has yielded a soul-searching generation of disillusioned exvangelicals in the first decades of the 21st century. Some of these have written books about their experience, and this paper examines the ways that their exvangelical deconversion narratives necessarily grapple with the conventions of the evangelical conversion narratives they had embraced before.
On her first visit to the Playboy mansion, Brenda Marie Davies met a movie star and got bit by a monkey, a pair of particulars either of which may have dominated the memory of that experience had both not been entirely consumed within the swirling anxiety that Jesus was watching. Having come up in the conservative culture of American evangelicalism and applied its tenets to her own life and choices, Davies floated breathless and tense through hallways, bedrooms, and grotto, among sensuous faces and bare skin, her mind and body engaged all the while with the oppressive conviction that she was a failure. Her invitation had come enveloped in seduction and her acceptance had disclosed her as a fraud. The central figure in a tale about and authored ceaselessly by herself, Davies had by then devoted nineteen years to crafting a storyline with contours, along a trajectory bound clearly for points more righteous than this. Like a plot twist in a bad movie, her arrival at the mansion violated the narrative arc, disrupting the exposition and invalidating her authorial labor. Only after a period of internal deliberation and a frantic call to her mother was Davies finally able to reconcile intentions with events, assuring herself in the end that her decisions had followed a rational—perhaps rationalizing—logic. After all, she reasoned, Christ spent his time with sinners, too.
Though unique in the details, Davies’ account is strikingly typical in the thematics, standing in for an entire genre of what are now colloquially dubbed “exvangelical” memoirs. Her book, On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel, recounts an obediently faithful childhood and a zealous adolescence followed by an early adulthood wracked with doubt, guilt, disillusionment, recrimination, and anger, expressed in rebellion and processed, often, as trauma. Like many other exvangelical memoirists, Davies is left at once embittered and activated by the formative experiences of her younger self, resentful of the narrative that she allowed to shape her understanding and inspired to help others avoid its darker effects. Also like her peers, Davies necessarily performs this introspective work within and upon that same narrative scaffolding, hammering away at the beams and boards without restraint but also without the power to break entirely through the protections they have promised or the limits they have imposed. For better or worse, these mark the durable legacy of a simple and resilient storytelling tradition.
Though less liturgical than its mainline cousins, evangelical Christianity does subscribe to at least one ceremonial speech practice—the sharing of personal testimony. Generative of social connection and communal bonding, testimony provides a clear and coherent storyline that the faithful may employ to order, understand, and narrate their lives. Common practice at church services, youth groups, camps, and conferences, the sharing of testimony is second nature to practicing evangelicals, and a key element of their initiation and training. In every case, it is modeled upon one of two narrative arcs—the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, or the parable of the Prodigal Son—each relaying a tripartite structure of sin, repentance, and redemption. Like many other Bible stories, these provide readers with resources for making sense of human life. But unlike many others, these have been adopted and deployed by countless Christian ministries as rhetorical templates to be studied, learned, and mimicked. I am interested in such narratives as rhetorical scripts from which believers continually read, by which their lives are oriented, and against which they sometimes revolt.
The testimony script is powerful because it is modeled upon a larger three-part narrative that defines the evangelical worldview. For evangelicals, a literal reading of Genesis documents the decline of human nature into sin, creating a rift between man and God. Because of this rift, human beings stand condemned for their rebellion, and doomed to an eternity of separation. However, because of God’s love for humanity, he sends his son to earth in human form, both to minister to the people and to die a sacrificial death on their behalf. By laying down his life, despite his innocence, Christ satisfies the demand for divine justice, paying the penalty incurred by sinful human beings. Finally, an offer of grace is proffered, through which people may be forgiven and redeemed, simply by acknowledging Christ’s sacrifice and believing in his divinity. By confessing their sins, seeking forgiveness, and being born spiritually again, Christian converts model their own life stories on the greater narrative of human history, effectively serving as embodied synecdoche for the human condition.
This is all fine so far as it goes, unless and until the believer loses faith. At that point, the very cohesiveness of the account becomes a serious liability with which the now ex-evangelical must grapple. Because the evangelical youth movement was so wildly successful in the 1990s and early aughts—fueled by its strong emphasis on apologetics and personal purity—and because the graduates of that training came of age and applied its tenets to mixed effect in the years since, there has been an influx of exvangelical memoirs published in the past two decades or so. In preparation for this essay, I read about a dozen of these, looking for common experiences, arguments, and themes, and always attentive to the ways in which they rely upon or respond to the evangelical testimony script. The result is an argument about the exvangelical experience, of which I am also a veteran. In the first part, I situate evangelical testimony and exvangelical memoir within the purview of narrative analysis, explaining how these describe and dictate the experiences of their authors. In the second, I analyze these narratives through the lens of three common themes—apologetics (or the logos of the narrative), purity (the ethos), and trauma (the pathos). Along the way, I demonstrate that the life and the afterlife of an evangelical faith are consciously crafted according to shared narrative conventions, each entirely congruent with the uniquely American desire to begin again (and quite possibly again) when a particular life path has run its disappointing course. As I show, Brenda Marie Davies’ experience is at once unique and not, given the commonplaces on which these narratives are constructed.
Matthew Dallek is Professor of Political Management at George Washington University. In his most recent book, he identifies the John Birch Society as the vanguard of an insurgent right-wing extremism in American politics. Known for their early embrace of conspiracy theories, wild accusations, violent rhetoric, and big donor funding, the Birchers doggedly pursued the future we inhabit today.
The end of World War II rolled a wave of American triumphalism and prosperity, effectively launching an (at least) eighty-year stretch that we now know as the “Great Acceleration” and lifting the United States into global superpower status. At the time, these developments were generative of broad optimism. As Walter Lippmann put it, “What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be for the world of tomorrow.”
And yet, for some on the far right of the nation’s politics, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations warranted only alarm. They were too soft on communism, too indifferent to the free market, too deferential to the nation’s poor and racial minorities. Their investments in national health care, civil rights, the progressive income tax, and education suggested a bipartisan endorsement of the New Deal agenda and a troubling tolerance for collectivism. To the well-heeled right-wing, this was all an American apostasy.
And so, in 1958, candy millionaire Robert Welch set to work organizing a network of rich, white, conservative men—not demographics he specified, necessarily, but those he drew—committed to defying communist infiltration with free market principle. From that initially small circle of wealthy elites, Welch expanded into the grassroots, drawing tens of thousands of “white, upwardly mobile, change-fearing, mostly Christian, often suburban men and women,” who devoted their time, energy, money, and talent to spreading the gospel of what he called the “John Birch Society” (JBS).
(John Birch, incidentally, was not affiliated with the Society—he was an Army intelligence officer and Baptist missionary who had been killed in China immediately following World War II, and who Welch selected as patron saint of the anticommunist cause. There’s no way to know what Birch would have thought about his posthumous immortality, crafted by others using his profile without his consent, but it is interesting to wonder.)
In the early years, the Birchers were mocked and maligned, recognized—when recognized—as a bunch of kooks and crackpots who saw communists in every corner. Perhaps mostly famously, Welch hoisted the disgraced banner of McCarthyism, accusing even Dwight David Eisenhower of being a tool of the communist conspiracy. In the pages of National Review, William F. Buckley dismissed Welch on these grounds, closing the gate on Birchism and so declining to escort American conservatism into the realm of fever-brained conspiracy. By 1964, when the JBS championed Barry Goldwater’s extremism all the way to a landslide defeat, there was good reason to believe—perhaps to hope—that the right’s great experiment in paranoid delusion had run its ignoble course. But the Birchers disagreed.
Matthew Dallek’s Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right tells this story and its aftermath, recounting the JBS in both activity and legacy. The activity was primarily situated in the long 1960s, between the founding of the JBS in 1959 and its supposed decline in the early 70s. Dallek is thorough on these details, providing what is likely the most comprehensive look at the movement in its heyday. Manned by an odd mix of wealthy conspiracy theorists, anti-statist lunatics, avowed racists, and concerned “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” the JBS became a political force of the Cold War era, motivated by a portfolio of distinct but overlapping fears—communism, civil rights, feminism, secularism, etc. The Birchers were dedicated activists, tireless recruiters of new membership, merciless harassers of their foes, and unflappable true believers in the kaleidoscope of conspiracies alleged to have shaped the disordered world in which they lived. A useful foil for the left, they also provided a buffer for the more respectable right, which held them at arm’s length to stake a claim on the center.
The legacy has suffused everything after, from the end of the Vietnam Conflict and Nixon’s resignation through the Reagan Revolution, Newt Gingrich’s 1990s, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Citizens United, and a pair of non-consecutive Trump administrations. Dallek argues that, even in apparent defeat, the Birch Society proliferated and persevered, dispersing into parallel movements and ingraining its postures, assumptions, and methods deeply into the psyche of the American right, such that its unmistakable influence would still be felt for decades to come. Here, too, he is detailed, noting the particulars within a broad set of trends that speak loudly for themselves. One needn’t squint too sharply to see Robert Welch’s spirit moving amid the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, or the Concerned Women for America, to say nothing of the National Rifle Association, the Tea Party, or the Moms for Liberty. It enveloped the Capitol on January 6.
Dallek’s book has many strengths, but perhaps the strongest is his deft way of capturing the devil’s bargain made between the mainstream- and far-right between 1960 and 2025. Even Buckley’s critics have been happy to acknowledge his rejection of the John Birch Society during the Kennedy Administration, citing the move as evidence of some core commitment to moderation or sense. But as Dallek is careful to document, Buckley didn’t reject the JBS as a package—he rejected a politically toxic association with Robert Welch while working to harness the toxic political energy that Welch had unleashed in his legions of call-making, door-knocking, money-donating followers.
In microcosm, this is the story of how Republican elites have interacted with every extremist element that has arisen on their right horizon in the decades since—keep it at bay, withhold official support, and make quietly clear, through nods and dog whistles, that interests might be shared, agreements might be reached. But with time and incentives a flirtation becomes a marriage. By now most of the old elites are gone—dead or primaried, cowed or converted, and the fringe is at the helm. In Trump 2.0 we witness the culmination of six decades, the final triumph of an improbable, marginal, paranoid, right-wing, anti-statist, extremist movement that never gave up.
Joseph Darda is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. The author of several books about race, culture, and politics, Darda is here concerned with how white men responded to the civil rights and feminist movements in the years following the Vietnam War. He argues that the veteran was made to serve as a competing identity category, available to white men whether or not they had served.
And yet, to stress the marginality of any American movement committed to white supremacy, free markets, and small government is perhaps to repeat the mistake of those 20th century liberal historians who wrote these impulses out of the national character without pausing to appreciate their central place within it. The right wing has always tacked a straight line to the center of American politics, its ideas and initiatives enjoying built-in demographic advantages even when they were ugly and bad. Sometimes those advantages have been augmented by events that cast the whole project in a more sympathetic light.
The American triumph in World War II was followed, shortly, by stalemate in Korea, some early losses in the race against Russia, and then by quagmire in Vietnam, the largest and most disastrous of the Cold War proxies. The United States shipped nearly three million soldiers to southeast Asia during the course of that conflict, and nearly 60,000 of these died. Back home, in the meanwhile, a vocal anti-war movement arose alongside the civil rights push already-in-progress, then both were joined by “second wave” feminism and a gay rights movement demanding equality for American women and sexual minorities, respectively.
As the war effort collapsed, the troops—about 90 percent of whom were white men—returned in defeat, disappointment, and often in trauma to a nation undergoing revolutionary social changes that excluded them as a matter of course. According to Joseph Darda, in his How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America, the Vietnam vet and his vocal civilian allies acclimated to this new environment by adopting an identity category of their own—something like the “Veteran-American.” The built-in ethos of this identity allowed white men to reclaim privileged status in the social upheavals of the moment, whether or not they had actually served in Vietnam.
To make this case, Darda observes, first, that the now-pervasive acknowledgement of “trauma” as a formative experience dates to the Vietnam era, when social workers at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital undertook an ambitious program of interviews with returning veterans, paying special attention to the psychological residues of their combat experience. In 1980, this work culminated in the addition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the third edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the formal recognition that soldiers continued to suffer for their service even after their tours had ended.
A significant event in itself, Darda notes that the establishment of PTSD as a diagnosis participated in a revision of the national mindset toward war, such that the returning veteran was admired “not for his valor, but for his suffering.” Because the majority of suffering vets were white men, the resultant white allowance “confused the real suffering of vets, including veterans of color and non-American veterans, with white racial interests that tended to serve white elites who hadn’t served,” like Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, to name a few. By loudly claiming to stand for veterans, these and other non-vet, white public figures bought a service ethos on the cheap.
To support his claim that veteran-ness rose to the level of an identity category around this time, Darda notes, next, that it featured prominently in the art that emerged from the conflict, especially in literature, music, and film. These are engrossing chapters that argue a political point via art criticism. In the work of veteran-novelists like Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, Robert Olen Butler, and Philip Caputo, for example, the combat experience captivated the reading public, which bought their books by the millions and turned each into a literary celebrity. Asked in interviews whether their service had shaped their writing, they bristled. More than once O’Brien drew an explicitly racial analogue. “It’s impossible to answer,” he said. “It’s like asking Toni Morrison, ‘What has being black contributed to your being a writer?’” Later, when Heinemann’s short novel Paco’s Story won the 1987 National Book Award—beating out Toni Morrison’s Beloved—the priority of Veteran- over African-American stories in American literature seemed to have been achieved.
For musicians, the post-war years saw the iconic 1960s Vietnam-era soundtrack give way to an ascendant “heartland rock” driven by up-and-coming non-vets like John Mellencamp, Tom Petty, Pete Seger, and Bruce Springsteen. Their hit songs focused on the rural, small town, hardscrabble, implicitly white experience of the American heartland, to which Vietnam vets had returned and from which the working class struggled to rise. Their work depicted a nation in decline, the white American dream broken by the war across the sea and the concurrent social revolutions at home. At the same time, the hard-driving rhythms and patriotic themes of hits like Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” radiated a defiant nationalism that appealed to both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. In this, Darda suggests that heartland rockers—especially Springsteen—helped initiate a white reunion of sorts, as white citizens divided by the war came together again to commiserate in its aftermath.
In Hollywood, finally, the Vietnam experience was rendered by many famous directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, and Stanley Kubrick. But for most Americans, the Vietnam veteran experience was most famously represented by Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo in First Blood. (Another famous non-vet, Stallone had expatriated to Switzerland to avoid the draft.) Part of a larger re-ethnicization of disparate white identities—Irish, Italian, Pole, Slovak, etc—after the war, Stallone’s concurrent roles as Rambo and Rocky Balboa dominated theaters in the 1980s, establishing a type of tenacious, blue collar, white ethnic hero who would beat the sort of odds faced by African-Americans during civil rights. In First Blood, the veteran Rambo becomes the disenfranchised Black citizen of the south, harassed by belligerent police enforcing an arbitrary vagrancy law and blasting him, at one point, with hoses before escorting him to jail. In Rocky, Balboa fights the good fight against Apollo Creed—a wealthy, cocky, and fully established Black anti-hero—losing in the end but proving the white ethnic capacity to out-suffer those supposedly lower on the American caste ladder.
Darda’s book makes a provocative and thoughtful case, documenting how American white hegemony was challenged, sundered, and ultimately re-established during and after the Vietnam war, focusing on the special role of the Veteran-American within this process. As white Americans focused their attention upon white sacrifice and suffering, that of racial and sexual minorities–as well as all southeast Asians–fell quickly out of focus. Like the determined activism of the John Birchers, the rhetorical deployment of the white veteran ethos—sometimes by veterans but very often not—played a critical role in guiding the late 20th century political and social currents that have brought us here and now in the 21st. They don’t explain everything, but they explain a lot, and in times like these every bit of context helps.
Steven Hahn is Professor of History at New York University. His previous books, The Roots of Southern Populism, A Nation Under Our Feet, and A Nation Without Borders, have won many prestigious awards.In his latest, Hahn shows how American politics have been shaped by antagonism between group identities and communities, rather than individuals in pursuit of liberty.
Following Donald Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016, commentators, pundits, and scholars around the nation set to work on lectures, articles, and books decrying the rise of an illiberal democracy in the United States. Founded upon an extant literature about comparable governments abroad, these writers expressed a concerted concern that the United States had broken with its past and turned instead in a new and dangerous direction. Now that Trump has been elected again, in 2024, these alarms are certain to resume their ring. But even as we listen, we should place Trump’s profile in proper perspective by acknowledging that at least two things can be true at the same time. The first is that, yes, Trump is a different and more aggressively illiberal leader than those we’ve had in the past. The second is that, no, the United States has not been, until now, a paragon of liberal democracy.
This point is cleanly made and thoroughly documented by Steven Hahn in his 2024 book, Illiberal America: A History. The argument is textured, but the gist is that the political culture of the United States has been shaped by a variety of currents, at least one of which was liberal but was washed always among swiftly illiberal others. Though we commonly think of the US as a land in which individual rights and liberties form the political bedrock, this too-easy characterization obscures a few centuries of political-social life defined by group dynamics, when a stratified pyramid of demographics facilitated the subjugation and/or expulsion of those on each successive margin. This is the history that has given us the sinister profile of the white male, the narrowly defined and highly privileged figure who ruled over the rest, especially when wealthy. From that pinnacle, though, the racial, religious, national, gendered, propertied, and related category exclusions have proceeded steadily downward and out, pushing in turn against the American Indians, the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Chinese, the women, the Jews, the Catholics, the Irish, the beer-drinking non-English-speaking eastern and southern European immigrants in general, the poor, the workers, the communists and alleged communists, the Muslims, the gays and lesbians and transgenders, etc.
Throughout American history, in other words, your identification with a particular status group has mattered much more than your political integrity as an individual with rights.
The misconception that the United States was, is, and may yet be the manifest ideal of liberalism is owed primarily to the dedicated work of the post-New-Deal, mid-twentieth-century historians who established the idea in the minds of their influential readers. Important writers like Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Lionel Trilling, and the rest of their cohort emphasized American liberality in their work, effectively recasting the nation in a not-exactly-wrong but still-aspirational light. This effort was widely successful, buttressed and expanded especially by those prominent liberals who saw America always in a state of becoming the land they had always hoped it would be. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, they had come to believe it all so completely that Trump’s election felt like a fracture in the timeline, a narrative infidelity. And yet most of these also knew their history well enough to concede, on second pass, that it wasn’t so unusual after all.
Hahn’s book is comprehensive, moving longitudinally and supporting his thesis with candid evidence at all points between the colonies and the present. In his careful telling, the land that became America was defined all along by sequential waves of vilification and exclusion, shaped by a shifting matrix of identity politics that targeted each ascendant group the very moment its ascent was recognized. The natives were to be conquered, converted, enslaved, or expelled, and replaced, then, by endless shiploads of shackled migrants. These indentured servants and slaves provided the labor force to realize a new feudal dream, usually losing their health and their lives long before anything like freedom arose on the other end. The nation they built with their backs and their hands grew and complex-ified and stratified, acquiring new land and building new institutions while swelling with new arrivals and pushing ever westward toward the Pacific. At one point, it split in two and the citizens fought each other in an exceedingly bloody war over whether or the not its peculiar institutions could persist. Afterward, this chaotic, contentious, and very often violent exercise in nation-building rolled on in patchwork, tribal fashion, through segregation and discrimination and Jim Crow and ethnic neighborhoods and all the rest, driven by suspicion, recrimination, and division, and culminating here and now in what Hahn calls, ominously, an “era of illiberal darkness.”
But in acknowledging the danger, he disavows the surprise. Illiberalism has never been peripheral to American life. On the contrary, he writes, “It is usually nourished by the ‘community’ and expressed by the community’s ‘will,’ however the ‘community’ may be understood.” In that sense, America can’t be great again. It can only hold itself to a higher, as yet unmet standard.
Isabel Wilkerson is the author, previously, of The Warmth of Other Suns, an award-winning account of the Great Migration between World War I and 1970.In Caste, she examines social distinctions in several different caste societies, arguing ultimately that, in many ways, the United States, Nazi Germany, and contemporary India were shaped by comparable beliefs, assumptions, and systemic social forces.
Or, in other words, the stratified, group orientation informing American history amounts to a caste system. In her 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson makes this case in language consistent with Hahn, and starts from precisely the same place, looking incredulously back on those disillusioned Americans who greeted Trump’s first election with shock and disbelief. “‘This is not America,’ or ‘I don’t recognize my country,’ or ‘This is not who we are,’” they said. Actually, Wilkerson replies, “This was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.”
From there, her book relays a discomfiting history that roundly exposes the liberties taken by Hartz and Hofstadter and the rest in their focus on American individuality, a privilege reserved, she writes, for select members of the dominant caste. If you were Black in the nineteenth century—or, in many venues, if you are Black today—the particular texture of your individuality is likely to be concealed behind the simple fact of your blackness in the judgments and assumptions of those who pass through your orbit. You are, to them, first and foremost a type, and beholden to the traits and constraints with which the type is associated. The same is true if your people come from some East or South Asian nation, or from Latin America, or if you’re Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, or if you’re part of the white working class, or otherwise likely to be lumped quickly into a category.
“A caste system,” she writes, “is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.” The system “uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart,” and it “endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through generations.”
This is an accurate description of the Black experience in America, certainly the Native-American experience, and has applied in different ways to different others along the way, depending on when and where they made their entrance into the ranks.
Though the arrangements she describes are familiar, some readers may recoil when Wilkerson characterizes them as castes, a primitive and dehumanizing concept unbecoming in the land of the free. Certainly the recent enthusiasm for “patriotic” histories of the United States would not be comfortable with this. But one of the great virtues of the book is that Wilkerson brings so many receipts, noting that many others have made this association before.
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner characterized racial segregation as a caste system in the nineteenth century, noting that “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.” In 1916, eugenicist Madison Grant wrote approvingly of the caste system in India, identifying it as the means by which the upper classes “preserve the purity of their blood,” and adding that “In our Southern states, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.” In 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote that, “When we speak of the race problem in America, what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.” In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, in his An American Dilemma, that the effort “to maintain the color line has, to the ordinary white man, the function of upholding that caste system itself, of keeping the ‘Negro in his place.’” And on and on.
To suggest that the United States of America has been built upon and stratified around an elaborate system of castes is to invite comparisons to Nazi Germany and contemporary India, neither of which is bound to flatter the American self-concept. And yet Wilkerson explores these analogues very deliberately and finds them compelling.
In the first case, she provides the contemporary documentation that, not only did the Nazis look to the US for examples of how to codify their racial hierarchy in law, they puzzled over how the US had managed to implement such strict racial boundaries—more rigid, even, than Australia or South Africa—and yet still “to retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage.” Some Nazi intellectuals, like the writer Herbert Kier, “thought American law went overboard,” and tried initially to settle on a more moderate approach.
To Indians, the parallels are obvious. In 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited India, hoping to learn more about the tradition of resistance to colonialism and caste. When his host introduced him to a group of dalit high school students as “a fellow untouchable from America,” King felt “a bit shocked and peeved” that he would be characterized in this way. Upon some reflection, though, he had to concede the similarities. “Yes,” he told the group, “I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”
Caste is a very focused and thorough book that weaves history, sociology, psychology, and the author’s personal experiences together in defense of a very exacting thesis. It pairs well with Illiberal America to challenge the misty national nostalgia embraced by so many on the political right and some still on the center-left.
Charles King is Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University. The author of eight books, King is here concerned with the circle of anthropologists around Columbia University Professor Franz Boas in the 1920s, who challenged the popular belief that categories like race, sex, and nationality were determinitive of intelligence, ability, and potential.
The pervasiveness of that nostalgia should demonstrate that, to a considerable extent, the misremembering of history is less a partisan project than a general human tendency. We all make our contributions, and one of the unsung benefits of living in a time of such prolific historical scholarship, networked libraries, and affordable paperback editions is that we have an unprecedented opportunity to get the story right or, at minimum, less wrong in our own minds. And yet, as Mark Twain said, the man who does not read books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them, and between you and me sometimes the state of our discourse and the trend in our politics makes me wonder how far and in which directions the benefit of nearly universal literacy is being pressed today.
It’s a bit of a digression except that, as Charles King explains in his Gods of the Upper Air,the more accurate take on the human condition is generally a minority view and often radically at odds with the prevailing consensus. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Franz Boas was emerging as one of the world’s most provocative thinkers and building a circle of admirers at Columbia University, the “standard view of human society was that differences of belief and practice were matters of development and deviance.” A “more or less straight line ran from primitive societies to advanced ones,” and you could rank those societies from most advanced (white, western European and America) all the way down through the most primitive (Black, African, Native American, outlying Pacific Islanders) as though viewing human evolution and development from the side, like a hominid chart. This thinking was instrumental in guiding our social institutions and political economy as recently as the second World War, a cataclysmic event that was itself largely produced by such thinking.
A German immigrant to the United States, Boas published and lectured widely on the concept of culture, arguing persistently that cultural ideas shape our thinking, action, and lifestyles far more than mere genetics or any natural tendency toward racial progress. “The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial,” he argued, “the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society.” Though widely resisted in academia and beyond, these claims were appealing to some precocious—eventually famous—young researchers, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, who became his protégés.
They called their work “cultural anthropology,” and set off into the world to study human cultures in their own settings, on their own terms, without imposing any of the top-down assumptions standard to the hierarchical thinking of the day. Boas had made his name among the Inuit, Mead went famously to the South Pacific, Hurston to the southern states. Benedict stayed mostly in New York, but wrote brilliantly while holding them all together in her correspondence. They wrote each other, competed with each other, sometimes fell in love with each other and had affairs with others along the way, each eventually garnering biographers and so turning the study of human life into a human life worthy of study.
Their great insight, King writes, was that “no society, including our own, is the endpoint of human social evolution. We aren’t even a distinct stage in human development. History moves in loops and circles, not in straight lines, and toward no particular end. Our own vices and blind spots are as readily apparent as those of any society anywhere.” They were “dismissed from jobs, monitored by the FBI, and hounded in the press, all for making the simple suggestion that the only scientific way to study human societies was to treat them all as parts of one undivided humanity.”
King’s book offers a fitting capstone to a read through Hahn and Wilkerson because of his comparatively narrow focus. After reading through those large and sweeping histories, Gods of the Upper Air focuses us specifically at one important moment, if stretched across decades and traveling ‘round the world. In that moment, between the wars, we witness a new and compelling worldview being born and immediately challenged by a cranky status quo. This was the era of eugenics, remember, in which these old ideas about racial stratification and genetic inferiority were operationalized in state-sponsored sterilization programs and used to justify a host of toxic laws and Supreme Court rulings. They perpetuated colonialism and Jim Crow and the successive lives of the Ku Klux. Like Wilkerson, King dwells at length on the various ways that American racism served as inspiration and policy model for Nazi-brand anti-Semitism. And so any concern that these writers paint with a brush too broad evaporates here amid the many fascinating and granular details. It’s an awesome book.
Reading these three titles in this order is liable to reorient and certain to clarify your thinking about some of the (still!) most provocative matters around race, gender, and history dividing the American people today. To me, they make our moment very intelligible, and for that reason all the more disappointing. But to be clear these are not downer books, and they are not anti-American in the sense so often alleged. They demonstrate that, as James Baldwin once put it, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” And after nearly four centuries on these shores, we really should be learning from all of this. Going forward, in our lives, our work, and our politics, we might aspire to make America great for everyone, for the first time.
Benjamin E. Park is Associate Professor of History at Sam Houston State University. His books, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier and American Zion, provide a comprehensive view of Mormonism from the first revelations of Joseph Smith through the presidential ambitions of Mitt Romney. Together, they provide an introductory course in an American original.
Of all the novel American social-sexual arrangements in the antebellum years, from the strenuous celibacy of the Shakers to the untethered free love of Berlin Heights, perhaps no experiment has proven so durable to fame as Joseph Smith’s venture into plural marriage. A radical innovation that came to define the Latter-Day Saints and to delay Utah statehood for a period of decades, Mormon polygamy began as yet another accord between Smith and God, a secret covenant that granted the prophet rights to do things that he had wanted to do anyway, and at the very moment it first seemed plausible to do them without consequence. In both his Kingdom of Nauvoo and his more recent American Zion, Benjamin Park does an admirable job of recounting these events with candor, somehow threading a narrative needle between credulity and cynicism.
Though American Zion is the obvious choice for readers in need of a sweeping Mormon history, Kingdom of Nauvoo is the more granular and—in my view—more captivating take. Probably most readers don’t know that much about the saga of Nauvoo, so practically every page is a revelation. And yet I keep returning to one detail in particular, a representative anecdote that captures Smith’s psychology, his brazenness, and the remarkable influence he must have wielded over those in his orbit. It explains how he was able to generalize plural marriage, moving it beyond the confines of his own private practice and making the case for its adoption by others in the community.
That story centers upon Sarah Ann Whitney, one of more than two dozen women Smith married in secret before his first wife, Emma, found out. Whitney was 17-years-old in July of 1842; Smith was 36. By accounts an exceptionally attractive girl, she was also the daughter of prominent Mormon parents. When Smith approached Newel Whitney to ask for his daughter’s hand, he came with a written proclamation—written, that is, in the voice of God—promising an eternity of honor and immortality to the entire Whitney household once the couple was sealed. Whatever reservations they may have felt about gifting their daughter to an already—in fact, many times over—married man, the offer was too good to refuse.
But though the marriage itself raises a host of questions and red flags, the situation became much more interesting the following spring, when Smith was confronted by a seemingly foreseeable problem. Sarah Ann Whitney was, in the eyes of Nauvoo’s young gentlemen, a very eligible bachelorette. No one knew that she was married to Smith, so she had both many callers to reject and no obvious reason to reject them all. Smith realized quickly that he needed a way to remove her from the dating pool without drawing any unwelcome attention to himself. He found that way in the sympathetic figure of a grieving widower, Sarah Ann’s uncle-by-marriage, Joseph Kingsbury.
Caroline Whitney Kingsbury had died the previous October, leaving her husband alone to raise their infant child. He was still very much in mourning when Smith came to him with a novel proposal. If Kingsbury would agree to be joined to Whitney in a “civil union”—not actually a marriage but something that looked to the residents of Nauvoo exactly like one—then Smith would seal him to his beloved Caroline for all eternity. When Kingsbury agreed to the scheme, he helped inaugurate a theological advance. If men and women could be united in civil bonds til death do they part, they might also be united spiritually in ways that death could not break, and this process might be formalized whether the spouse was living or dead.
Before long, a growing number of Mormon men were pursuing eternal seals with their lost wives, even in cases where they had already remarried and established such seals with their new brides as well. Though one wife was living and one (or more) dead, the man who secured these seals could already consider himself to have multiple wives, in a spiritual if not a physical sense. Looking ahead to the endless span of eternity, when all would be joined together forevermore, the matter of whether one or two or none of these wives were dead on earth seemed to matter less and less. Introduced and expanded gradually, starting with those—like the prophet’s moralistic brother Hyrum—who had loved and lost, it helped make polygamy palatable to many who might otherwise have rejected it out of hand. And it took off from there.
Polygamy was still noxious to just about everyone else, though, and the already swirling rumors help explain why the Mormons were run out of New York and then Ohio and then Missouri before Joseph and Hyrum Smith were lynched in Illinois, and why Brigham Young then bade America adieu entirely and started his people on the long western march to the Great Salt Lake, where polygamy persisted for most—but not all—of the rest of the century. From one vantage, the doctrine of plural marriage appears little more than a patriarchal swindle that permitted prominent men to have sex with several—even dozens—of women without violating social-religious standards of propriety or compromising their status as pillars of the community. Considered more generously, it was a complex social arrangement that empowered the prophet to bind his people tightly together in a cohesive matrix of interlocking and overlapping relations that would persist into infinity. My own judgment leans decidedly closer to the first of these interpretations. But the intricacy of the thing makes you wonder.
Ellen Wayland-Smith is Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California. Her book, Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table, documents the strange evolution of John Humphrey Noyes’ religious sect, from a collection of avowed Christian communists practicing “complex marriage” in the nineteenth century to a straight-laced, middle-class silverware company in the twentieth.
If Joseph Smith was perhaps the most audacious of the 19th century’s religious-political-sexual innovators, he did not run unopposed. The perfectionist minister and self-proclaimed prophet John Humphrey Noyes also warrants consideration, and his contemporaneous Oneida Community rivals Nauvoo in a number of significant ways. Ellen Wayland-Smith’s Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table offers the most recent—and most comprehensive—account. Though the Latter-Day Saints appear here only in passing, the parallels between the Mormons and Wayland-Smith’s Oneidans are uncanny.
Like Smith, for example, Noyes declared a direct connection to God that justified both his critique of the prevalent social norms and his exploration of alternative arrangements. Also like Smith, Noyes’ revelations authorized him to have sex with lots and lots of women without forfeiting his claim to decency. And here again, Noyes founded his enterprise upon an apparatus of high-toned theological concepts that persuaded a bunch of perfectly respectable people to join in. If you end up thinking that Noyes did all this mostly just for the sex—as I mostly do—you still have to grapple with the complex theological reasoning that he used to validate his behavior.
Here’s the background: Starting in the 1830s, when upstate New York and New England were still much in the throes of the Second Great Awakening and its attendant millennialism, the young minister Noyes came to believe himself a special representative of God on Earth. (In this, he was not so dissimilar to Charles Grandison Finney, William Miller, or Lyman Beecher, to say nothing of Joseph Smith. If not in the water, special election seems to have been in the air.) Like many of the reformer class, Noyes condemned a pronounced selfishness in American society and sought means to correct it. He did so at the level of the family, through which individuals claimed ownership of their partners and children, and from which they laid claim to other people, properties, and assets. If this impulse were to be overcome, Noyes argued, Christians needed to become communists.
The Christian communism Noyes envisioned was realized finally in the 1840s and founded upon an institution that he called “complex marriage,” an arrangement by which all exclusivity was dissolved and every man in the community was in a sense married to every woman, and might therefore enjoy the conjugal benefits of each and all. No individual person could stake a claim on the life of any other, nor entertain feelings of jealousy in any justifiable way. To prevent rampant pregnancies, the men in the community practiced “male continence,” stopping somewhat short of full consummation. When babies were born, they were raised by the community in communal settings, denying parents any exclusive claim to their children. If any particular couple wished to have a child together, they had to apply to the community leadership for approval, which was granted or not based on the spiritual quality of the child that the couple seemed likely to produce. Sometimes those applications were approved. Otherwise, pairings were assigned. In either case, Noyes pioneered a form of spiritual eugenics not entirely dissimilar to the physical variety that would arise in the early 20th century.
By 1845, when the new reforms were up and running and his Oneida community first beginning to flourish, Noyes had developed a theory of sexuality that drew on the early science of electricity, culminating in a theory of “electric sex.” The gist is that human beings are endowed with a life force traceable to Christ himself, and that this force can be transferred from person to person, growing in intensity with each transmission. A community of Christians bound by diverse connections would thus function as a spiritual battery, generating and containing enough electric potential to nurture health, ward off disease, and raise its members ever closer to true immortality. This sort of spiritual-physical growth took priority at Oneida, set against the compulsive, selfish, money-making obsession of the outside world. That was the appeal.
Unsurprisingly, though, Noyes’ sexual theory and practice found their way eventually into some extremely creepy places. Most disturbingly, Noyes took it upon himself to initiate all of the community’s girls into sexual experience immediately upon completion of puberty, around the average age of thirteen. There is also evidence that Noyes hoped to begin approving brother-sister sexual unions, and eventually to father a child with his own daughter. “Avuncular unions,” between uncles and nieces were already commonplace at Oneida. Eventually, the in-bred condition of the community would inspire Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
By the end of the 1870s, the Oneida Community had collapsed under the weight of Mormon-inspired anti-bigamy legislation and Noyes had expatriated to Canada. Thus began the second life of the community, in which a group of avowed communist non-conformists began a transition to perfectly normal, bourgeois respectability by dropping the weird sexuality and leaning instead into the production of fine and affordable silverware.
Ultimately, both the Mormons and Oneidans buckled under political pressure and abandoned key elements of their belief systems. In hindsight, though, those key elements look a lot like the lecherous predilections of their all-too-human god-complex founders. That’s not to say that their social critiques were entirely wrong, or that middle class normalcy is necessarily right. But these parallel trajectories remain engrossing in themselves. They disclose a foundational libido at the base of very high-minded systems.
Perhaps the foremost philosophical and literary figure in all of American history, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a challenging and sometimes mystifying writer. The books on this list are arranged in hope of making his life and work more accessible, and his insights somewhat more applicable to contemporary life.
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.
In this refulgent summer, I’m reading back through the Emerson catalog, especially the early works, including the sermons, and attentive to the evolution, culminating in his “Address” to the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. There are many angles from which to approach such a read, but I remain primarily focused on that Transcendental intuition, the foundational idea that God still lives and moves in nature, through the blowing clover and the falling rain and through our interior lives as well. When Emerson gave his famous commencement speech, he emphasized to the audience that Unitarian Christianity had grown terribly musty, and that it was up to a new generation of preachers to breathe fresh life into a stale tradition. Since many in that audience were the venerated caretakers of that tradition, the speech was provocative. The students had invited Emerson to speak; the faculty ensured that he would not do so again for almost three decades.
The Divinity School Address marks an entry in the record of American Antinomianism, a concept that dates back to Martin Luther, but is here most commonly traced to the 1630s, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and to Anne Hutchinson, who challenged the Puritan leadership on a number of doctrinal points and who claimed direct revelation from God as the source of her authority. In that context, the rejection of particular moral strictures as evidence of sanctification is linked intimately to the matter of direct revelation—a pair of ideas that have made and continue to make religious establishments nervous. In America, and especially in the nineteenth century, the idea that God speaketh rather than spake, and that he might be dissenting from the reputable clergy, would inspire a host of enthusiastic prophets and religious movements, notably including the young Joseph Smith and his Latter-Day Saints. It would then be up to the people, in early republican fashion, to determine whether or not the revelation was credible in each case.
Emerson’s challenge to the Unitarian establishment at Harvard proposed that individuals may listen for the voice of God in their private minds, trusting their feelings and inclinations to guide them toward the truth. Though subject to caveats, the idea here is that the interior life of each human being is governed by the same system of laws that govern nature itself, and overseen in turn by the same divinity that created it. Each mind is host to its own genius that speaks in the voice of God, and may give us wisdom if we are willing to listen. (Religious establishments, like the Unitarian gatekeepers in Boston, have been understandably hesitant to cede this much influence to all comers, and recognize real opportunities for abuse.) Perhaps Emerson’s greatest contribution to Transcendentalist thought was his insistence that the intuition is real and can be trusted, empowering each of us to be truly self-reliant. That idea has since been incorporated cleanly into American common sense, yielding, among other benefits, one of my favorite Seinfeld bits.
The Divinity School Address marked the end of Emerson’s thirteen-year ministerial career, as well as the beginning of his life as an essayist and lecturer. In a sense, his professional transformation embodied the sort of change one must undergo when making the formal shift from orthodox believer to individual thinker. This is not to say, of course, that one cannot subscribe to a faith statement and be an individual with a brain. But that subscription does place some pretty rigid limits one what one is allowed to think and believe while remaining within that faith. For most religious practitioners, then and now, fidelity to the creeds was an important indicator of right thought, belief, and behavior. For Emerson, such fidelity marked deficits of courage and imagination. Over the next forty years, he pressed this idea into a variety of new venues, formalizing his thoughts and his flights into a new American literature, philosophy, and theology, while inspiring many others in and after his own generation. For that reason, if for no others, Emerson is worth engaging and trying to understand.
This list identifies a series of works and proposes an order to help readers acquire a foundation in one of the great men of American letters. Here again, the primary and secondary sources are interlaced, establishing Emerson’s biography before considering Nature and the early lectures, some takes on his preaching, the First and Second Series of essays, his self-reliance, selections from English Traits and Representative Men, his significance to the history of democracy and of rhetoric, and all the way up to “Conduct of Life” and some orations, including his eulogies for John Brown, Henry Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln. Emerson’s works are all classics, as are most of the scholarly treatments included here. The most recent, James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear, will be shortly. Perhaps not featured on a great many “summer reading” schedules, these books would make welcome additions to yours.
David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University. His book, Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution, documents the political influence of military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic during the 18th- and early 19th centuries, and defines them as a type.
The “Age of Revolutions,” a fifty-year stretch roughly spanning 1775-1825, was an era defined by the charismatic leadership of great men. More than that, as David Bell frames the period, it was a time when ordinary people could participate in the historic dismantling of old institutions, the fresh construction of new ones, and the broad expansion of human freedom on the way, all beneath the oversight of a few exceptional figures. Bell’s exemplars, including George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Loverture, and Simón Bolívar, hold several important qualities in common. Each was a military leader renowned for his talent, strength, and courage; each was hailed as a savior or redeemer of his country; and each was subsequently recognized as a founder of something new, a father to his people, who ultimately made the transition from military to political leadership. Bell travels with each figure as his reputation is built, identifying the pivotal events and helpful embellishments that lent themselves to an immortal reputation in every case.
Consider Washington, for example, who was the first of the era proper, and his revolution its inaugural. The glorious year of 1776 was anything but for the American general, whose frequent defeats and retreats were eventually formalized into a “war of posts” intended to annoy the redcoats without subjecting the Continental Army to any one final and decisive collapse. Observing this regress in October, John Adams complained to his wife that “in general, our generals were out-generaled.” There was bitterness and intrigue within the chain of command as well, as some of these generals—like Joseph Reed and Charles Lee—questioned and conspired against their chief. Later, when great victories were finally won, it would be others—like Horatio Gates at Saratoga and Nathanael Greene in the South—on the field. But none of this mattered to the American people, who consistently celebrated Washington via parades marched, songs composed, and towns named in his honor. He was a new type of leader for a new era and a new form of government—not a divine monarch, but an ordinary man, elevated by extraordinary virtues and crowned by acclamation.
For the American people, Washington’s bravery, honor, and commitment made him the perfect avatar of a republican admiration that they were already enthusiastic to confer. In such a context, the hero’s heroism is largely a product of his audience’s fawning attention, radiated by them upon him rather than the opposite, and so susceptible to abuse. As early as 1777, with the cult of Washington already at fever pitch, Adams expressed concern and probably more than a little jealousy. “I have been distressed to see some of our members disposed to idolize an image which their own hands have molten,” he said to his colleagues in Congress. “I speak here of the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington.” When the war was won—very largely thanks to the French—Washington declined the opportunity to rule as dictator, an astonishing relinquishment of power that he would reprise with flourish later, after his second term as president. (Garry Wills has thus referred to Washington as “a virtuoso of resignations.”) Though his countrymen would immediately cite his humility and grace as yet further reasons to adore him, their adoration might just as easily have conceded him the presidency for life if he had claimed it.
In broad outline, then, Washington is representative of Bell’s men on horseback. Compelling in themselves, they are all the more so for the cults of personality that their leadership inspired. Each affected a sort of manly charisma, each commanded men in battle, and each was rewarded in turn with expansive political power—in the newly united states, in France, in Haiti, and from Gran Colombia to Upper Peru. In many ways, these careers were products of a particular time, formed by Enlightenment values and republican ambitions, captured in portraiture and popularized by an emergent press. Each man was made by his admirers to be larger than life, and each has since been re-humanized under the careful examination of history. But importantly, all of them earned their accolades in the thrill and danger of action. We remember them now less for who they were or for how they spoke than for what they did in the world.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. Her book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present documents the political influence (primarily) of non-military leaders who have claimed power around the world during the 20th and early 21st centuries. These, too, offer us a particular genre of leader, but of a weaker vintage.
In that regard, Bell’s men on horsebackoffer a strange and perplexing contrast to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, the latter of whom rose to power within the past hundred years or so. Individually, each of these books analyzes charismatic leadership of a sort. Read together, they document a stark depreciation in the quality of political charisma worldwide. Founded and formed by revolutionary heroes, much of the globe would be inherited later by small and hackish functionaries, few with any military experience and fewer still with any real achievement in that theater. Having witnessed the glorious conquests of Napoleon and Bolívar, the world would soon have to settle for the blustering demagoguery of Mussolini and Hitler, the indolent brutality of Franco, the absurdist violence of Pinochet and Gaddafi, the sleazy corruption of Berlusconi, the frowning kleptocracy of Putin, and the cartoonish incompetence of Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump. A focused consideration of this cohort necessarily asks us to think a bit about how and why we have managed to maintain our fervor for strong leaders while so dramatically lowering our standard for what qualifies as strength.
Here again, let’s consider the example from the United States, former (and maybe future) President Donald Trump. Unlike Washington, Trump did not build his reputation on bravery and selflessness in service to his country. He has never stood on principle or virtue or the cultivation and defense of his sacred honor. He certainly has never relinquished power gracefully, even when the nation’s established electoral processes dictated that he must.
Instead, Trump is—and always has been—known for his extravagant greed, lust, selfishness, and shamelessness. He was an icon of the 1980s precisely because his flamboyant excesses epitomized that era. Later, when his public profile began to flag, he regained attention as host of a reality television show on which he insulted a cast of made-for-reality-TV characters. When he took his political turn, he did so as a conspiracy theorist. And as president, he transformed the Oval Office into a daily circus, defined by bombastic press conferences, unhinged Tweets, bizarre speeches, and the signature of exactly one major bill—a generous tax cut for the wealthy. All along, he was developing a cult of personality that would cast his rallies in an explicitly authoritarian light. When he lost the 2020 election, by wide margins in both the popular and Electoral College votes, his hordes stormed the Capitol at his direction.
And yet, unlike Washington in so many ways, Trump has likewise claimed the fawning adoration of very many Americans, despite (in part because of) a much more assertive chorus of critics. He has secured, again, his party’s nomination to the presidency, and the contest was never close. The Republican base, who pride themselves on unshakeable patriotism and on their veneration of the Founding Fathers, do not hesitate to deify Trump on signs, banners, and ubiquitous flags, depicting him sometimes as the musclebound, gun-toting action hero that he has never approximated in real life. This is perhaps the one and only notable similarity—John Adams could grouse about Washington’s defeats, and today’s liberals can rant and rave about Trump’s indiscretions, lies, and crimes, but a great many of the people in either case simply do not care. The image has been molten by their own hands, and they are defensive of their creation.
Like the rest of Ben-Ghiat’s strongmen, then, Trump’s success is traceable to a charisma that has been granted by his admirers rather than produced by his initiative. As president, he seduced the people with a tale of lost greatness, effectively wielded propaganda, demonized the free press, claimed a special brand of masculine virility, used his office to enrich himself and his family, threatened his critics with retribution and violence, and sought to retain power to the detriment of democratic institutions, a playbook that Ben-Ghiat documents with care and disconcerting uniformity across all of her subjects.
They’re all basically the same. Different in degree, perhaps, but not substantially in kind—each self-styled strongman another brash and mediocre leader who will be remembered for who he was and how he spoke rather than for any good he did in the world.
Recommended Reading 