Adam's Ideas

I had read Herodotus’s Histories several times in the past, but only excerpts of what is a lengthy and detailed story.  Previous readings had focused on the ‘main event,’ the war between Greeks and Persians. But Herodotus takes his sweet time getting there and regales his readers with lengthy excursions, stories of great wars and campaigns, and lengthy accounts of barbarian religious and sexual customs.  While also describing many actions of the Greeks, he spends less time with them, probably because as a Greek writing in Greek for Greeks, he assumes they are already familiar with their own world.  He wants to inform his audience of things strange and unfamiliar.

This summer I took a seminar at St John’s in which we read the ‘whole thing,’ an adventure that I don’t think anyone in the class, including the tutors, had ever undertaken.  What do we learn from the whole that is perhaps less evident from focusing on the Persian invasion of Greece?

The Histories begins with the famous statement that his book is written “so that the great and wonderful deeds—some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians, not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.”  Herodotus does not distinguish between Greeks and barbarians; both are worthy of respect, and both provide lessons for his readers. 

It ends, some 700 pages later, with a pithy lesson supposedly imparted by Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire—the Persians being the primary ‘barbarian’ discussed in the book.  On hearing a proposal that the Persians should conquer more fertile and better lands, Cyrus warns that if they do so “they should prepare to be rulers no longer, but rather to become subjects under the rule of others.  This was so, he said, because soft places tend to produce soft men; for the same land cannot yield both wonderful crops and men who are noble and courageous in war.  And so the Persians agreed with him and departed, leaving him alone.  They had lost the argument with Cyrus, and chose to dwell in a poor land rather than to be slaves to others and to cultivate the plains.” (9.122)

Now this last sentence of the book is quite astonishing, since a good part of the previous 700 pages has been devoted to detailing how Cyrus and the Persians did indeed conquer the ‘plains’—the immensely wealthy Babylon on the Euphrates, and then the most fruitful land of all, Egypt, where bountiful crops grow just by throwing seed into the fertile Nile mud.  What would make Herodotus say something so obviously untrue? 

The theme of interaction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ peoples is a recurring one in the Histories.  Early on King Croesus, rich ruler of Lydia, a powerful kingdom in Asia Minor, is warned not to start a war with the Persians, who live in a rocky, poor country.  Such people are used to hardships and fighting.  Further, if you defeat them, what do you gain? Croesus doesn’t listen and is beaten, becoming a prisoner—and loyal advisor—of Cyrus.

The Persians themselves do not seem to learn the lesson.  Much of the Histories recounts all the times the Persians mount expeditions against exactly the kind of poor, warlike, unappetizing enemies that it seems you should avoid.  Cyrus himself, after making Persia wealthy via victory in Babylonia, decides to march against the remote Massagetians, a nomadic people living in what is now Central Asia.  Herodotus tells us that by this time Cyrus is convinced of his invincibility.  To conquer them he takes the advice of Croesus, who recommends a strategem in which the Persians lay out a tremendous feast with wine and delicacies, which the poor Massagetians won’t be able to resist.  When they are drunk and distracted, the Persians can easily defeat them. (1.207)

Croesus’s plan works, up to a point, allowing the Persians to destroy one-third of the Massagetian army and capture the queen’s son (who kills himself rather than remain a prisoner). But this only enrages the Massagetians, leading to a great battle—Herodotus calls it the greatest ever held between barbarians—that the Persians lose and in which Cyrus is killed.  New-found Persian wealth and luxuries are not a solid basis for defeating poor, hardened tribesmen.

Cyrus’s more than sightly mad heir, Cambyses, successfully conquers Egypt but then gets it into his head to attack the far-off Ethiopians, a people who pose no threat and about whom he knows nothing. After sending spies ahead who report among other things that the Ethiopians live tremendously long lives, he mounts a huge campaign but, consumed by rage, fails to equip his army for a march through the desert.  When they run out of food they resort to cannibalism and are forced to turn back. 

In the most detailed of his Persian campaign stories, Herodotus describes the assault by Cambyses’s successor Darius against the Scythians, another nomadic people living to the north of the Black Sea.  Darius attacks, supposedly to punish them for an earlier Scythian incursion into Persian territory (which took place well before Persia itself had been formed).  Herodotus tells us that Darius’s decision was shaped by Persia’s flourishing, with many troops and ample revenues.  Darius pulls together an enormous force of 700,000 men from all over the empire and marches them across the Hellespont, around the Black Sea, and deep into the northern steppes in a fruitless attempt to bring the Scythians to battle and win a victory. 

Herodotus foreshadows this failure when he tells us “The Scythians were more clever than any other people in making the most important discovery we know of concerning human affairs, though I do not admire them in other respects.  They have discovered how to prevent any attacker from escaping them and how to make it impossible for anyone to overtake them against their will.  For instead of establishing towns or walls, they are all mounted archers who carry their homes with them and derive their sustenance not from cultivated fields but from their herds. Since they make their homes on carts, how could they not be invincible or impossible even to engage in battle?”  (4.46). In short, the Scythians have no cities, no accumulated wealth, and live only to fight and resist.  Darius is astonishingly blind to the nature of his enemies.

These unsuccessful campaigns provide the backdrop for the most unsuccessful of all, the eventual Persian invasion of Greece, initiated under Darius and continued under Xerxes, his successor.  The Persians are ignominiously beaten not once, but twice.  The Athenians throw back Darius’s forces at Marathon; then the much larger invasion under Xerxes is defeated at sea by the Athenians, at Salamis, and on land, at Plataea, by a Spartan-led Greek army. 

From these prior endeavors we can see that the decision to attack the Greek mainland is consistent with Persia’s history of campaigns against peripheral peoples.  The Greeks are not particularly wealthy; they live in a rocky and poor country, as anyone who has visited Greece can attest.  Darius is moved to attack not out of any serious strategic calculation, but out of annoyance at Athens for instigating a revolt of the Greek states in Asia Minor which results in the destruction of Sardis.   Xerxes is urged to continue by advisors who tell him “it is unreasonable that the Athenians have inflicted great evils on the Persians but have paid no penalty for it.”  (7.5). Herodotus tells us that Xerxes’ uncle Artabanos tries to dissuade him by pointing to the previous failures against the Massagetians, Ethiopians, and Scythians, but is thwarted by divine intervention in the form of dreams sent to Xerxes telling him he must invade.  (7.18)

The Greeks, while they are capable of mustering significant military power, especially at sea, are divided into a multitude of competing city-states, often fighting one another.  They would only be a danger to Persia if they united, which is highly unlikely.  Unless of course they had a common enemy.

In short, the Persian threat creates the threat to Persia. Persia fails to use its most powerful weapon to divide the Greeks, mainly money; the Greeks are highly susceptible to being bought off, and a canny enemy can easily play on their mutual suspicions.   The Persian commander Mardonios is advised by his Theban allies to “Just send some money to the most powerful men in their cities.  You will thus divide Hellas against itself…”.  But Mardonios “out of foolish pride” doesn’t listen.  (9.2)

 Herodotus describes in detail how the Greeks, especially Athens and Sparta, the two greatest powers, can’t get their act together even as the Persians are at the gates.  How many times do the Spartans arrive with too little, too late, because they are waiting for the omens to be favorable; or maybe because they wouldn’t mind that much if the Persians took out the Athenians.  How many bitter arguments over which city should be in the lead and who has the right to the top position on the battlefield. 

The Athenians, at least, are willing to give way to Sparta when necessary to achieve common action, even though in the first invasion they basically fight off Darius on their own, and when Xerxes invades they watch the Spartans retreat to the Peloponnese without any thought for Athens. (8.3)   Greek division is just barely overcome to create a united front against the Persians at key moments. 

Persian self-satisfaction and confidence in their numbers leads them into a series of mistakes, both moral and strategic.  Under Darius they are beaten at Marathon; under Xerxes at Salamis and Plataea.  In one of history’s most famous examples of hubris, Xerxes orders the sea to be whipped after a storm destroys his boat-bridge at the Hellespont.  Hundreds of thousands of troops are lost, and hundreds of ships, and Xerxes has to beat a humiliating retreat that culminates, according to one account given by Herodotus, in ordering senior Persians to leap in the ocean to lighten the ship in a storm.  (8.120)

What have we learned from Herodotus’s detailed accounts of Persia flinging itself into massive attacks against marginal enemies?  Since the same pattern is repeated under Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes we can conclude it comes from something deep in Persia’s strategic position or self-understanding. 

It seems that engaging in unprofitable battles for questionable gains is something Empires frequently do. Once established, frontiers have to be defended, distant allies must not be allowed to lose, and the Imperial Power has a reputation to uphold. Emperors find it easy to imagine that their money, numbers, and superior armament make them invincible.  From Scythia and the Germanic forests to Vietnam and Iraq, the logic is consistent. 

It is also possible that Persia’s Kings see these campaigns as a way to avoid the danger pointed to by Cyrus, the ‘softness’ that accompanies becoming wealthy and successful.  Once Persia becomes rich, it might be wise to make sure Persia’s elite does not lose its original warrior spirit.  Regular campaigning keeps these virtues alive; it also occupies the time and talent of those who might otherwise become disgruntled schemers against the King.  Darius at one point justifies the Scythian campaign as necessary to keep his people occupied. 

Xenophon, writing after Herodotus and with his own extensive knowledge of Persian ways from his service during one of Persia’s internal wars, addresses this issue in his Cyropaedia, or Education of Cyrus.  After Cyrus’s initial victories that create the Empire, Xenophon’s Cyrus considers how to rule, saying “I know that if we turn toward easygoingness and the pleasure seeking of bad human beings, who believe that laboring is misery and living without labor is happiness, I say that quickly we will be but of little worth to ourselves and quickly be deprived of all good things..It is a great work to gain an empire, but it is an even greater work to keep one safe after taking it” (Cyropaedia VII 5).  Cyrus tries to keep his key supporters in trim with regular training and lots of hunting. 

Empires once established can take a long time to die.  Their riches and power cushion them, and they often find a second wind under new rulers who undertake needed reforms.  As Herodotus portrays it, failure, even on a colossal scale, does not seem, at least immediately, to threaten either the empire itself or even the position of its Kings.  Defeat in war on the periphery does not lead to the overrunning of the imperial core, or the revolt of subjugated peoples, or embolden internal enemies to move against the King, at least not successfully.  These are all frequently observed consequences of military failure in other cases.  Xerxes makes it back to Susa, his lieutenants straggle home.  The Empire lasts another 150 years. 

Herodotus of course is not aware of the course of Persian-Greek relations over this period, during which Persia becomes closely involved in the internal politics of Greece.  But he can tell that the aftermath of the wars with Persia will be a test for the Greeks as much as the Persians.  As Darius’s fleet is bearing down on Greece, he tells us that this portends a period when “more evils befell Hellas than in all the other generations prior to Darius.  Some of these evils were caused by the Persians, but others by the leading states of Hellas waging war for political domination among themselves.”  (6.98).

Athens creates its own sea-based empire, building on fear of Persia among the Greek states of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.  Its rising power alarms Sparta, which responds, as Thucydides meticulously describes, by seeking to subdue Athens in a 20-year extended struggle.

Persia, having learned from its defeats, stops trying to conquer the Greeks and adopts an ‘offshore balancing’ strategy of weakening Athens and Sparta by intervening regularly on one side or the other, using money and arms and occasional direct support.  It helps engineer Sparta’s ultimate victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars.  The Empire goes through multiple succession crises, and loses control of Egypt among other setbacks, but stabilizes and has a lengthy period of internal growth under the 45 year reign of Arataxerxes I.  The King’s Peace achieved under Artaxerxes II in 387 BC marks an acknowledgement of Persian dominance over all of Asia Minor.    

In the end, though, the Persian fear of the Greeks proves prophetic.  The Macedonians, a people ironically often allied with Persia, gather strength.  One hundred and fifty years after Salamis, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great conquer and unite the Greek city-states.  Then Alexander, apparently motivated in part by a desire to avenge the Persian invasions, brings down Persia and makes Greek culture and language dominant throughout the Near East, ushering in the Hellenistic Age.  

But Alexander, like the Persians, can’t stop fighting, often against the same kind of peripheral nomads that proved irresistible to Cyrus and Darius.  He and his Greeks become possessors of the great wealth and luxurious habits that have overtaken the Persians; more than once his own followers object to Alexander’s adoption of Persian ways.   When Alexander dies, his Empire breaks apart into warring dynasties.  The Alexandrian successor-states become bywords for corruption and decadence. 

What exactly happens when a poor, hardened, and god-fearing people suddenly achieves great wealth and power?  Is it ever possible not to be corrupted and, eventually, give way to the next round of poorer, harder, more disciplined successors?  Persia, Alexander, Rome, Byzantium, Baghdad, Spain…the list is long.  Ibn Khaldun devoted his great medieval study of politics, the Muqaddimah (much of it drawing on the history of the same lands once occupied by Persia and Alexander), to these same cycles of rise and decline.  The wealthy, organized urban centers generally have the means to fend off the warlike tribes of the desert; but every so often the tribes find a leader, they unite, and the cities fall.  For a time the new rulers hold on to their old ways and stay strong, but inevitably their wealth and security softens them, they lose their edge, and the cycle repeats.   

Is the United States, or the West more generally, subject to the same arc?  Many have thought so and predicted the end of liberal democracy, or of modernity as a whole.  Nietzsche famously described in the late 19th century the despicable “Last Man,” the soulless product of a modern society that prioritizes comfort and security, and called for his replacement.  Influenced by Nietzsche and similar thinkers, fascists and communists alike claimed in the 20th century that the capitalist democracies had become corrupt and weak and ripe for the taking.   

The decadent democracies however somehow rallied to fire-bomb the cities of their fascist enemies in World War II and force them to surrender unconditionally, then out-spent and out-maneuvered their Cold War communist adversaries.   Perhaps fundamentally new developments—industrialization, scientific progress, mass democracy—allow modern powers to resist the seemingly inevitable cycles of the past.  Nevertheless, the same arguments are heard now from Moscow and Beijing.  Your time is up, is their message.

Nothing lasts forever, and it may be that this time the enemies of liberal democracy have found a winning formula.  Using new media and technology, they have become adept at deepening fissures of race, inequality, and culture inside their adversaries, and instilling distrust of the institutions—government, the press, the schools, science—that provide the glue for liberal societies.  China in particular has taken aim at what it sees as the West’s source of strength, its advanced technology, and dedicated itself to dominating the new realms of quantum computing, AI, and renewable energy. 

Like the ancient Greeks, winning has allowed latent divisions to surface and become toxic.  Post-Persian War Greece splintered between democracy and autocracy, with external powers regularly boosting their preferred faction to weaken and take over target cities.  Within most democracies there now exist growing movements whose leaders look to the world’s tyrants as models. 

As the title suggests, Francis Fukuyama’s oft-cited 1992 treatise on the victory of liberal democracy and market economics, The End of History and the Last Man, pointed back to Nietzsche.  He warned that success in winning the Cold War could be followed by  profound dissatisfaction with the ensuing era of peace and consensus.   The decades since have confirmed his fears.  Forty years of neoliberalism have created an atomized, individualistic citizenry that is prickly in defense of its rights and has little use for, or understanding of, the common good.  Wealth and technology undergird a highly capable military, but also a joyless consumerism that is bemoaned but seems inescapable.  A sluggish politics mired in factionalism and corruption appears unable to respond to today’s challenges, whether climate change or immigration or inequality. 

In response, many have turned to extreme nationalism or religious zeal or fealty to One Leader, looking for purpose and direction.  This is the modern version of Cyrus’s warning.  If you conquer the plains, be ready to become weak.  Your riches will not save you forever.  Be ready, if you lose your footing, to be enslaved, if not from without, then from within.           

We are at the one year anniversary of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.  Israel’s response has been to effectively destroy the Gaza strip and make it uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.  Just recently it has carried out high-intensity attacks in the north against Hizbollah, including killing Hassan Nazrallah, Hizbollah’s charismatic and influential commander.  Israel is also bulldozing large chunks of the West Bank and has given a green light to settlers to intimidate and displace Palestinians. 

So far Hizbollah and Iran, Hizbollah’s patron, have not responded effectively.  Iran has (twice now) attacked Israel with missiles, but these have mostly been shot down, with US help.  Hizbollah is reeling from the loss of its communication system (Israel detonated thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in a devastating intelligence operation), intense strikes on Hizbollah missile complexes near the border, and the loss of Nazrallah and other top leaders.

Where does this leave us?  Israel has for a long time, since it annexed the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war, had three basic strategic choices. 

1.        Accommodation. Reach some kind of accommodation with Palestinians, either a 2-state solution or even a one-state solution, that gives Palestinians enough autonomy that most give up demands to return or to destroy Israel, and outside supporters, especially Iran, lose influence. 

2.        Apartheid.  Expel or subjugate Palestinians, and make the West Bank and Gaza de facto if not de jure part of Israel; in effect, an apartheid state. 

3.        Mow the Lawn.  Do neither, but depend on tactical, military superiority to ‘mow the lawn’ and keep Palestinians, including Hamas; and Hizbollah and other Iranian proxies, weak and unable to seriously threaten Israel.  

The necessary condition for all these strategies is continued unconditional support from the United States.  While the official US position has been to support Accommodation, US support has been essential for Mow the Lawn, which Israel has largely followed for several decades.  While Apartheid is strongly opposed by Washington, it is unlikely that the US would act to prevent it, provided Israel can cast this as unavoidable, and can pursue it without major repercussions from regional powers. 

In the 30 years since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for over 16 years.  During his tenure Israel has paid lip service to Accommodation, while in practice moving slowly but firmly to implement Apartheid.  This is partly because of Netanyahu’s own convictions, and partly his need to build governing coalitions that rely more and more on extremist parties.  Netanyahu’s worldview is largely adopted from his father, a close associate of Jakob Jabotinsky, the militant founder of Likud who advocated for a powerful Jewish state and defense force able to coerce Arabs into submission. 

Israel is frequently described as ‘tactically proficient, but strategically deficient’.  It pulls off spectacular intelligence and strike operations, assassinating enemy leaders and destroying militant and Iranian bases and facilities.   With less success, it also conducts occasional longer-term invasions and occupations, as in Lebanon in 2006 and now in Gaza.  These are all part of Mow the Lawn, at least in public discourse; that is, designed to keep Israel’s enemies at bay and eliminate their capability to attack Israel.  Israel’s tactical superiority allows it to avoid choosing clearly one strategy over another. 

During the ‘Netanyahu era’ Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank has expanded, to the point that an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank is now hard to imagine.  The response to 10/7 has made Gaza a moonscape with no prospect that Palestinians, even if fighting stops, would be able to restore even the inadequate infrastructure and services they enjoyed before.  Netanyahu’s ruling coalitions have become progressively more extreme and more dominated by religious nationalists determined to achieve the goal of “Greater Israel”. 

Netanyahu himself is preoccupied with political and personal survival and sees continued war as staving off any reckoning for the October 7 catastrophe.  He is also obsessed with the Iranian nuclear threat and sees his legacy, and his chance for redemption, tied to successful strikes that eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.  Killing Nasrallah has already improved his image; a successful strike on Iran would make him a hero at home and divert any criticism about Gaza and the hostages.  It would also make it easier to ramp up pressure on Palestinians and satisfy the demands of his right-wing coalition partners.

Israel’s high-profile attacks on Hizbollah are designed to force Iran to respond, giving Israel an excuse to carry out a direct attack on Iran.  US participation is part of the plan, since Israel’s own capabilities are probably insufficient to cripple Iran’s hardened nuclear sites.  Israeli military leaders have publicly claimed they have unilateral means, but Iran has been moving key facilities deeper underground and Israel lacks the really heavy bombs, and the long-range bombers to carry them, that only the US Air Force owns.

Netanyahu’s strategy is therefore to use escalation with Iran to box the US in, so Washington is forced to participate in a direct attack on Iran which Israel can claim is legitimate self-defense to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.  (Iran is now judged to be able to enrich to weapons-grade uranium within a few weeks, and construct a working nuclear device within a few months to a year; Netanyahu was a fervent opponent of the nuclear agreement negotiated under the Obama Administration, which would have slowed Iran’s nuclear development, and which President Trump abrogated soon after he took office). 

Crippling Hizbollah is the necessary condition for this strategy.  Iran has built up Hizbollah for years largely to deter Israel.  Just as North Korea successfully prevented the US and South Korea from attacking the North’s nuclear facilities by threatening to use artillery and rockets to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire”, Tehran wants to use Hizbollah’s thousands of missiles near Israel’s border to keep Israel and the US at bay. 

It is not clear how much firepower Hizbollah has left, but Israel has already destroyed a lot on the ground, badly hurt its ability to communicate, and killed many top leaders.  Israel may now feel that it has reduced the threat from Hizbollah to a tolerable level, and that the time to attack Iran is now, before Hizbollah can recover. 

The US is now the wildcard.  Participating in attacks on Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge escalation with unpredictable outcomes.  Every major country in the region could be affected, and while most would be happy to see a weakened Iran, there would be deep unease at the prospects for a regional war.  Iran would likely attack or threaten oil facilities in the Gulf as well as tanker traffic, causing oil prices to skyrocket, an unwelcome development just before US elections (though perhaps welcome to Netanyahu, an unabashed Trump supporter).  US personnel and facilities in Iraq and the Gulf would be at risk.  Iran’s allies, Russia and China, would assail the US as a warmonger.

However, a number of US strategists and military experts are calling for the US to take part in an attack on Iran.  President Biden has said he is against Israeli retaliation on Iran’s nuclear sites, but it is unclear what recourse the US has if Israel decides to act.  The unknown is whether Israel has the capability, or thinks it has the capability, to be successful on its own.  Netanyahu may ultimately decide to settle, for now, for a more limited retaliation.  But Netanyahu’s political survival now coincides, in his own eyes, with destroying what he has consistently said is the greatest threat to Israel’s survival, an Iranian bomb.  And Hizbollah’s weakness won’t last forever.  I think it is certain that if Trump is re-elected, Netanyahu will lobby relentlessly for an American green light to attack Iran, sooner and not later.   

Attacking Iran would be Mowing the Lawn on steroids, a tactical move that, if successful, might make Israel safer in the short term but would be likely to worsen its longterm security.  Under a different leadership, a triumphant Israel might feel willing to accommodate Palestinian interests.  But this is not how Netanyahu and his partners would respond—they would feel free to put their weight on the Palestinian neck. 

Netanyahu hopes an Iranian defeat might lead to the overthrow of the ayatollahs, and he recently appealed to Iran’s people to throw off their rule.  But it is more likely that Iranians would rally behind the regime, which would continue its support of surrogates and seek new ways to attack and undermine Israel.  Israel’s horrific punishment of Palestinians is giving Iran’s anti-Israel stance new traction in the region.  Israel’s diplomatic isolation would increase.   And the US would become more deeply identified with the most aggressive and violent Israeli actions. 

A lot has been written about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation project to turn the Federal government inside out and make it subservient to Donald Trump.  Most of Project 2025 consists of detailed critiques of government agencies and suggestions for ‘reform.’  But ProPublica recently got its hands on training videos for Project 2025 that go beyond this to try and offer general principles for conservative activists.  The first two of these in particular are overviews of conservative thought that seem meant to give a veneer of depth and principle to the MAGA movement.  They reveal some important things about the worldview of influential intellectual defenders of MAGA.  Trump himself has no discernible ideology, but a variety of ideas are competing for primacy and these videos give us clues as well as possible avenues of attack.

The first thing one notices is that both lectures are delivered by administrators of Hillsdale College, Matthew Spalding and Christopher Malagisi.  Hillsdale is a private Michigan school that purports to offer a deep education in the Western tradition, but in practice serves as a finishing school for reactionary culture warriors.  Hillsdale has successfully entrenched itself in conservative circles as an educational model; Florida governor DeSantis, for instance, said when he decided to blow up and remake the progressive New School, that he wanted instead to have a ‘little Hillsdale.’ Hillsdale and its supporters see themselves as engaged in a longterm project to change American culture, using higher education as the vehicle to create a cadre of conservative thought leaders and activists.  [1]

Matthew Spalding, who delivers the opening lecture, has a picture perfect resume for his role as articulator of MAGA thought.  He got his education, all three degrees, in the Claremont system.  He is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the reactionary Claremont Review, and was also a Vice-President at the Heritage Foundation.  In short, he has spent his entire adult life ensconced in the Hillsdale-Claremont axis, which is the epicenter of ‘serious’ conservative philosophizing.  Its members see themselves as the defenders of Western culture against the circling hordes of multiculturalists, relativists, and secularists.  (The President of Hillsdale since 2000, Larry Arnn, was previously the President of the Claremont Institute). 

In his presentation, Spalding paints a flattened and selective picture of the ideas and institutions of the American Founding.  It is central to the Hillsdale-Claremont ideology that America’s unchanging essence was, and should still be, adherence to a view of human rights derived from natural law, that is, from permanent and unchanging truths discoverable by reason.  As his co-conspirator Mr. Malagisi tells us, the point of conservatism is to defend ‘American exceptionalism,’ meaning adherence to the truths discovered in 1776. 

Essentially, according to Spalding and Malagisi, all was well in America for its first 125 years as we maintained our devotion to these timeless verities.  The evidence of our faithfulness was that during this time we kept the central government small and weak.  But then we Fell.  For reactionary thinkers there is always a fatal turning point, a moment of eating the apple, that has to be discovered and remedied to put humanity back on the correct path.  

Spalding and Malagisi tell us exactly what caused the United States to fall:  the Progressive Movement.  Starting in the late 1800s American elites abandoned the True Faith and, influenced by foreign ideas (those damn immigrants!), began to have heretical thoughts. They began to imagine that some of America’s wealth should be taxed and used by government to solve social problems.  They began to imagine that women could take part in public life.  They began to imagine that the dominance of the economy and politics by titanic corporations should be challenged. 

Hillsdale’s enemies are Theodore Roosevelt and, especially, Woodrow Wilson.  Wilson is impugned for wanting to expand government and make decisions based on science and expertise.  He was, after all, an academic and a political scientist.  Social scientists are, in the Hillsdale-Claremont vision, the snakes in the garden, the tempters offering knowledge of good and evil. 

In the Hillsdale-Claremont account, the Progressives were not just Americans who advocated for reforms to meet the new challenges of the industrial age.  They were traitors to America’s founding ideas and the Constitution.  They did not believe in unchanging Natural Rights.  Instead, influenced by new scientific approaches to the study of man and society, they embraced a view of human beings as more malleable, shaped in key respects by their upbringing and environment, and hence capable of changing for the better.  But many of the obstacles to a better life were beyond the ability of individuals to deal with.  Rugged individualism was not going to clear the slums, improve factory working conditions, educate the poor, challenge Jim Crow, or do away with corrupt political machines.  Government intervention was needed to help people help themselves.

Hillsdale’s hero is—Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge and his Republican cohorts of the 1920s tried to put the genie back in the bottle.  Less government, and less expectation from the public that government would intervene to help them.  Lower taxes.  High tariffs.  Silent Cal whispering ‘no’ to government programs. 

Unfortunately, a la Spalding and Malagisi, the Depression came along, Franklin Roosevelt got elected, and America went whole-hog down the Progressive path.  The modern conservative movement is largely a noble attempt to undo the New Deal and the assumptions about the role of the state that go with it. 

This view of our history surfaced during the Trump administration, when Trump commissioned a report to counter the 1619 Project.  The 1619 Project was a historical analysis sponsored by the New York Times that placed slavery at the center of the American story.  The Trump response was the “1776 Report”, a historical study executed by a group that didn’t include any actual historians, but did include Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute, and Larry Arnn from Hillsdale.  Their report made similar arguments about Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, who were astonishingly singled out as threats to democracy on a par with fascism and slavery. 

What do we get from this, other than a good laugh at the idea of chiseling out Teddy Roosevelt’s face from Mt. Rushmore and replacing him with Calvin Coolidge?  What we learn is how truly reactionary, how truly at odds with the modern world, the MAGA worldview is—and also how much this vision informs today’s conservative practice. 

The America before progressivism was a country where property rights were king, the businesses and trusts and financial powers of the industrial age dominated public life, and courts and politicians deferred to their interests.  Conservative legal scholars look wistfully back to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts.  Today’s originalist-dominated Supreme Court has been busy doing away with government powers to regulate the economy, while declaring that corporations are people and elevating property rights at the expense of the rights of workers and citizens.

Before progressivism, states in the South, and not just the South, freely and unabashedly denied basic rights to African-Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, and women.  MAGA supporters today are up to their eyeballs in schemes to restrict voting access, criminalize abortion, demonize immigrants, and undermine all forms of affirmative action.

Before progressivism, government jobs were filled by patronage rather than merit.  Today, Trump and his supporters declare proudly they will stack the federal system with political loyalists.

The irony is that conservatives despise progressivism as equivalent to socialism (Trump and his supporters now routinely call even standard-issue liberals ‘communists’), when it was the Progressive movement and its New Deal and Fair Deal successors that saved us from socialism.  The ability of American progressives to recognize and, however imperfectly, remedy some of the injustices of modern capitalism and ‘rugged individualism’ helped convince the majority to support reform rather than revolution.  It fended off the extremism that overwhelmed many European states in the first half of the 20th century.

The Eisenhower-era Republican party seemingly accepted the basic parameters of the New Deal, promising a future of political and economic harmony, or at least civil disagreement.  Government, business, labor, and civil society would work together for the common good.  It is this ‘capitulation’ that Goldwater, Reagan and now Trump reject.  No compromise, they say.  It’s war to the death. 

By rewriting history to declare Progressivism un-American, a threat equivalent to fascism, MAGA’s ideological explainers want to justify sweeping steps to undo 125 years of the expansion of government power, in the name of restoring freedom to American citizens.  Even if this expansion has been broadly popular and resulted in dramatic improvements in people’s lives, including the expansion of the basic human rights the Hillsdale conservatives say they want to protect.  

Since America has strayed so far from its true self, we might need a strongman to make things right.  We might need to intervene to ensure elections don’t give us the wrong result.  We might need to use the military to put down protests.  We might need to fire all the bureaucrats and dismantle government agencies and use the Justice Department to go after our enemies.  Whatever it takes.

Don’t be fooled by the seemingly reasonable presentations by Hillsdale professors in their book-lined studies.  The Hillsdale-Claremont axis is, after all, the home of Michael Anton, the author of the infamous “Flight 93” essay in 2016, which argued that voting for Trump was comparable to passengers choosing to swarm the cockpit against al-Qaida hijackers, even if it meant certain death.  It is the home of John Eastman, the lawyer who masterminded the fake electors scheme designed to overturn Biden’s win in 2020. 

This claim, that the existing liberal order is hopelessly corrupt and failed, is an essential part of the fascist mentality.  It justifies any action in response, however illegal or immoral.  Trump’s drumbeat of pessimism and lies about the terrible state of our country, about how crime and immigration and woke liberals are destroying America, provides the counterpoint to the arguments of Hillsdale’s ideologues.  Never mind that the United States is the richest, most powerful state in human history, a magnet for millions around the world, for 250 years a functioning if flawed democracy, an engine of new jobs and opportunity.  These realities must be ignored to justify dismantling existing institutions and substituting the rule of a Leader who embodies the popular will.   

We should be aware that Hillsdale’s “American Exceptionalism” is not the only set of ideas circling around the MAGAverse.  There are white nationalists and outright fascists; religious zealots who look to Victor Orban’s Hungary as a model for the use of government power to advance a Christian state; and Silicon Valley libertarians who find democracy contemptible and outdated.  Professor Spalding gently rebukes them and tries to claim all these ideas need to be grounded in American natural law principles.  But they are allies, working together against their common liberal enemies.

Project 2025 is, however, not a standard-issue conservative plan to shrink the state.  It is a plan to take over the state and use state power to implement sweeping change in culture and governance.  The relatively moderate professors in these videos who celebrate decentralization and individual rights can be seen as ‘useful idiots’—the Mensheviks to MAGA’s Bolsheviks, destined to be ignored and, come the revolution, sent quickly to the gulag.

[1] I am a graduate of St. John’s College, which really does offer the education in Western thought that Hillsdale pretends to provide.  The Hillsdale approach is a distortion of genuine liberal education—Hillsdale is to St. John’s what the Upside Down in “Stranger Things” is to the real world.  To have a school that purports to defend Western civilization shill for Donald Trump is of course hilarious, but also threatens those who are serious about genuine engagement with our best traditions.  Hillsdale wants to weaponize the study of Western thought by making it seem that it supports one side in today’s political debates.  This is false and a betrayal of the tradition that Hillsdale claims to defend.

I was trained professionally, in graduate school and at work, as a Sovietologist and expert on communist systems.  This was in the 1970s and 1980s.  The USSR seemed to be on the march, building a huge ICBM force and sponsoring revolutions in Africa and the Americas.  Many European countries still had large and influential communist parties. 

More than once during this time I would have discussions with my father, a staunchly anti-communist philosophy professor, who could never understand why anyone would be attracted to communism.  It was theoretically indefensible, and awful in practice.  He would get this puzzled look on his face and ask me, with a kind of anguish, what was going on in the world.  Were people just crazy?

My answer then was that he was right about communism as an ideology, and right about the awfulness of existing Marxist-Leninist states, but he was missing the point.  The point was that millions and millions of people had been and were ardent supporters of the ideology and the regimes that embodied it.  What did they see in it, and what did they dislike so much about capitalism that they could overlook the obvious flaws of communism?  This was the reality we had to respond to.

We should be asking the same question now about Trump and the MAGA movement. Liberals have by and large not figured this out.  They were knocked badly off balance in 2016, but with Biden’s win in 2020 they thought they had swept Trump and his followers into the dustbin of history.  This turned out to be very wrong.  Trump is still with us, and the MAGA movement is much more organized and institutionalized than four years ago.  It’s not just Trump anymore. 

Now in 2024 Democrats have pulled the plane out of its nosedive at the last second and stand a chance in November.  But the wave of enthusiasm for Kamala and Walz has so far only managed to make the race a statistical tie.  I just watched the Democratic Convention and heard many stirring words and lots of jabs at Trump (who is the easiest political joke butt of all time) but I didn’t hear clearly that liberals see and understand the MAGA appeal.  Millions and millions of Americans remain all-in for Trump.  I can hear my father’s anguished puzzlement:  are people just crazy?    

I suspect all of us have run into people who say something like, “Well, I wish Trump would tone it down…” or “I know he says some crazy things…” and then go on to say  “But…” and explain why they plan to vote for him anyway.  Sometimes it’s because the Democrats are going to impose communism, or they think Trump was a great businessman, or they think he’ll lower interest rates.  The point is that they are willing to overlook all manner of flaws because there is something they think MAGA will do, something it stands for, that overcomes his defects.  In fact, many see these defects—the bullying, the threats, the name-calling, the lies and deceptions—as virtues because they show strength and toughness and a willingness to do ‘whatever it takes’ to make things right.

We liberals can bemoan this till the cows come home, but unless we understand and confront the underlying reasons for MAGA enthusiasm I don’t think we’ll get much traction.  The antidote to enthusiasm for communism in Europe and America was ultimately creating robust welfare states that protected individual rights and looked out for the interests of working people and the poor, while curbing the power of big business—not destroying capitalism but showing that liberal democracies were capable of real reforms.   Similarly, the antidote to MAGA will start by understanding and addressing things that have gone wrong with modern society and its economic underpinnings, and offering serious solutions, while vigorously rejecting the flawed and dangerous solutions offered by MAGA.  You can’t beat something with nothing.  Democrats will flounder if all they do is criticize Trump and talk up joy and hope. Americans—and by no means just MAGA enthusiasts—are looking for fundamental, radical change.

What is it then that MAGA enthusiasts want?  What was so great in the American past that they want to restore? Essentially they want two things that MAGA sees as going together, and that liberals must work to pull apart.  The exact time of peak American ‘greatness’ is deliberately kept vague with different things for different people, but is I think centered on the postwar America of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.  During this time the economy boomed and offered growth for all, workers and CEOs alike.  Every generation was assured of living better.  Growth and government support made public schools strong and higher education available and affordable; millions moved for the first time into their own homes, helped by federal loan guarantees; social security and other new government programs bolstered economic security; strong unions helped keep wages high and give American workers a sense of dignity; and America was on top of a new international order that was largely made in the USA.  This made people confident and supported strong families, neighborhoods and communities.  

Importantly, the heartland flourished as much as the coasts.  Blue collar workers flourished as much as professionals.  Small towns flourished as much as big cities.  The country felt unified.

That’s the good side.  But what MAGA associates with this is a whole set of cultural and historic restrictions, some legal but many deeply ingrained in commonly accepted practices, that it believes were inextricable from this socio-economic success.  These include restrictions on women, via limits on abortion and divorce; on equal rights for African-Americans and minorities; on immigration; on any and every type of sexual or gender nonconformity; and on non-Christians and people outside the religious mainstream.  

Essentially, MAGA mistakes correlation for causation.  It argues, sometimes explicitly but usually implicitly, that the expansion of rights to previously repressed or ignored groups destroyed this golden age.  This expansion has come at the expense of the jobs and power and dignity of ‘real Americans’.  It has been deliberately engineered by hostile forces, liberal socialists and coastal elites and Jews and globalized financial interests.  MAGA is convinced that in the name of rectifying past injustices, these interests have raised up new groups and institutionalized new types of discrimination, embodied in affirmative action and DEI, to the disadvantage of Christian white men.  A whole industry of right-wing commentators, media, advocacy groups, and politicians has grown up to relentlessly push this message.  Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance is one of its loudest exponents. 

We can certainly debate and disagree about the ramifications of the great expansion of rights of the past 60 years.  As with all changes, there have been winners and losers.  Adjustments and course corrections may be needed, and liberals have not always been understanding of those who fail to quickly fall in line for the latest shifts in language or behavior.  But the reactionary dreams of the MAGA faithful for some wholesale return to the past are delusional; worse, they have become for many the prelude to a rejection of democracy itself.  If the people don’t back our side, then we have to find a way to win anyway. 

Liberals must find a way to be on the side of restoring the better aspects of the postwar economy, while rejecting any ‘restoration’ of the barriers and discrimination and indignities that were de rigeur for millions of American citizens.  The Biden presidency has put in place the building blocks for this argument.  Biden said he was breaking with the neoliberal  policies of his own party (and of Biden himself).  He was creating industrial policy rather than relying on markets.  He was lifting up unions and bringing back manufacturing.  He was aggressively breaking up monopolies. He was raising taxes on the wealthy.  These are major pieces of an economic model that owes more to the America of the 1950s than the globalized and hyper-financialized economy touted by both parties since Ronald Reagan. This is what it takes to tackle the inequalities in the economy and give opportunity and hope to everyone, not just Ivy League STEM majors.

This must be accompanied by maintaining and expanding opportunity and rights for everyone who has been left out.  The assignment for Kamala and Tim and their followers is to convince the American people that bringing everyone to the table makes the economic and social foundations for families, neighborhoods and communities stronger, not weaker.  It is not a zero-sum game.  We are not looking to create a society of winners and losers.  We want everyone to be a winner. 

This is something many Americans find hard to accept.  The relentlessly fearful messaging of the right has convinced them there isn’t enough to go around—not enough jobs, not enough safety, not enough dignity, not enough patriotism.  Liberals can help by adopting a new framing that stops dwelling incessantly on past injustices, which—rightly or wrongly—feels like an exercise in blaming and shaming.  Americans who want to be proud of their heritage feel condemned and mocked.  They are reacting with a lot of anger. 

The Democratic Party at its 2024 Convention took important steps to put itself on the side of ordinary, middle-class Americans by championing ideas of community, neighborliness, patriotism, and mutual assistance.  That Kamala has the chance to be the first woman President, that she is black and Asian and exemplifies diversity, were frequently acknowledged but not the focus of her message.  Instead, Democrats put Tim Walz forward to demonstrate that liberalism can be at home in small rural towns, not just big rich cities. 

For many MAGA adherents, cultural nostalgia is the feature, not the bug.  They support Trump because of his racism and misogyny and faux religiosity, not despite it.  But many others are troubled by these positions, yet choose Trump because they believe he will restore a prosperous, safe, growing heartland.  During his four years in office he did little to bring this about.  During his four years in office, Biden did a lot.  If Kamala runs on this record and its goals, she can win.

Over the last few months I have conducted a low-key experiment, using the comment section of our local newspaper, The New Mexican.  I have been reading comments posted whenever an article appears on hot-button topics like climate change and political reform, and inserting myself to counter and critique what I think are bad arguments or poor use of facts.  My goals are, first, not to cede the public square to the loudest voices; second, to see if reasonable comments, citing sources and data, have any effect on the discussion; three, to test my own views and see if I can learn from people I disagree with.

One of the most frequent topics has been guns.  The New Mexico legislature just ended its annual short session, and the Governor introduced a number of gun-control bills that received extensive press coverage.  Any article about gun legislation is sure to produce an avalanche of angry responses, mostly from the libertarian right but also from some progressives.  Engaging in this over the last few months has made me think more about our gun problem and what needs to be done.  

One of the most frequent, and most emotional, issues is anything having to do with the AR-15 and similar assault rifles (I will use ‘AR-15’ here as shorthand for all assault rifles).  A huge amount of discussion—probably more than it deserves— is devoted to back and forth on these weapons.  Here in New Mexico, Governor Lujan Grisham has at various times proposed regulations to raise the age for purchasing AR-15s to 21, or to ban them altogether.  New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich has backed a federal law to limit the size of magazines on assault rifles and other semi-automatic weapons.  All of these received extensive comments both pro and con—mostly con.  

I want to offer some of the conclusions I have come to from engaging in these debates, as well as from an excellent recent book, American Gun:  The True Story of the AR-15, by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Ellinson.  I have included page references to American Gun in the text. 

Threat of Political Violence

My first and most important conclusion is that the AR-15 is central to the political threat posed by Donald Trump.  As will be explained in more detail, this is because of the huge number of AR-15s now in circulation, and their close association with right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-government perspectives.  

The United States has for decades had to deal with militia groups, mostly on the right, that have stockpiled AR-15s and other firearms and trained members for defensive and offensive scenarios.  Contemporary groups such as the Boogaloo Boys, 3-Percenters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and many others plan to counter supposed government oppression, or initiate a race war, or confront progressive demonstrators, or prep for the collapse of the country, or defend traditional Christian values, or stop the flow of immigrants, among a range of goals.  Many of these groups target former members of the military or law enforcement for recruitment because of their training and access to weapons.

Until recently these armed groups, though concerning, did not present a serious threat to the country’s stability and political order.  They lacked a common strategy, had no single leader, and often disagreed and fought among themselves.   

But Trump’s rise has changed the nature of the threat.  Now these disparate groups have for the first time a leader who unites them and gives them marching orders.  The January 6 attack on the Capital followed Trump’s call to the Proud Boys to “stand by” and enlisted multiple anti-government militias, conspiracy-theorists, ideologues, racists, anti-Semites, Christian fundamentalists, and other parts of the extreme right under one banner.  According to the ACLED (The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project) “There has been a major realignment of militia movements in the US from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate, thereby generally positioning the militia movement alongside a political party.” The FBI has recently said that white nationalist extremists constitute our most dangerous domestic terrorist threat.  

While the majority of AR-15 owners are law-abiding and responsible citizens, the sheer number of weapons ensures that a significant number are in the hands of dangerous actors.  The AR-15 has been marketed for decades to appeal to people suspicious of government who often identify with the military and are primed to resort to violence.  Many hold extreme anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and racist views.  AR-15 owners are often hardline supporters of gun rights who demonize any politician or activist who supports even the smallest restrictions on firearms as enemies who are conspiring to take their guns away (328).  These are the type of people most likely to join right-wing militias.

Of particular concern is that this demographic overlaps with the approximately 30% of the American population that believes Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election, and would likely favor the use of intimidation or force if directed by Trump.  We have already seen the violent results of Trump’s refusal to accept the results in 2020, and there is every reason to think he and his supporters are planning a much wider and more aggressive response in 2024.  In this response the AR-15 has the potential to play a central and very dangerous role.  

Misleading Arguments 

My second point is that most of the arguments invoked by gun rights supporters against AR-15 restrictions are false or misleading.  Three of these arguments came up frequently in the comments posted in the New Mexican. 

AR-15s Not Significant in Killings.  Probably the most common claim is that AR-15s are used in only a small fraction of murders.  Therefore restrictions that focus on this weapon are not really designed to stop shootings but are pretexts to take away gun rights by liberals who just have an irrational bias against assault rifles.

It is certainly true that the vast majority of the approximately 19,000 firearms murders in the US in 2023 were committed with handguns.  In 2022 only 541 murders were categorized as committed by ‘rifles,’ which includes the AR-15 but also other long-guns.  Almost 8000 were from handguns, with thousands more not categorized, but mostly handguns.  

However, one reason it’s a good talking point to say the AR-15 is only responsible for a small fraction of murders is not that AR-15 related deaths are so few, it’s that the number of murders in the US is so large.  When 19000 people are being killed each year, 500 or so deaths doesn’t look like much.  But in most countries comparable to the US—high income, industrialized democracies—500 deaths isn’t so small.  For instance, in 2021, the total number of firearm related murders in the UK was 28.  Total.  The United States is a huge global outlier in the number of people murdered with firearms. 

AR-15s are not generally used in the run of the mill street shootings, robberies-gone-wrong, domestic quarrels, and gang violence that account for most gun-related murders.  You can’t easily conceal an AR-15 or tuck it in the back of your pants.  But it is the weapon of choice for many mass murderers, for fairly straightforward reasons.  The Buffalo shooter, who killed 8 African-Americans in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, (to avoid giving them any publicity, I will not use the names of mass murderers) tells us the two main reasons:  “ [He] believed that using an AR-15 would enable him to kill more people—and get more attention. ‘The AR-15 and its variants are very deadly when used properly. Which is the reason why I picked one,’ he wrote. ‘Plus, the media loves to hate on the AR-15, which may increase media coverage and public outlash.’ (395)  

As a military weapon designed to rapidly engage multiple targets at close range, with maximum lethality, the AR-15 is perfectly designed for mass murder.   Perpetrators are not trying to conceal the weapon—they want it seen, to instill fear.  And many mass killers are wrapped up in living up to a certain image:  “ [the Aurora, Colorado shooter who killed 12 and injured 70 at a movie theater in 2012] was drawn to the AR-15 in part because it looked scary, said Craig Appel, an Aurora homicide detective who interviewed [him]. “That warrior mentality, that was his big issue,” Appel recalled. “He wanted to look like a badass.” (297)

In addition, the AR-15 intimidates law enforcement.  In the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, where first responders waited almost an hour before directly engaging the shooter, the main reason was fear of the AR-15s firepower.  Officers had their own AR-15s but this did not make them willing to engage. According to the Texas Tribune:  “Once they saw a torrent of bullets tear through a classroom wall and metal door, the first police officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary School concluded they were outgunned. And that they could die.  The gunman had an AR-15, a rifle design used by U.S. soldiers in every conflict since Vietnam. Its bullets flew toward the officers at three times the speed of sound and could have pierced their body armor like a hole punch through paper. They grazed two officers in the head, and the group retreated.”

Many mass murderers are copycats, trying to live up to the example of previous killers.  The more those killers use AR-15s, the more new killers are likely to do the same (362).  In recent years the percentage of mass killings (with four or more people killed) that involve AR-15s has risen sharply.  Over the past ten years almost half of mass shooters have used an AR-15, according to the Violence Project.  (400)

The effect of mass shootings on public life and the lives of those affected is far greater than the numbers would suggest by themselves.  These are acts of terrorism, designed by their perpetrators to inflict not just physical damage, but to damage and shock entire communities and the nation as a whole.  Hate-based attacks such as those targeting the LGBTQ community (Pulse Nightclub 2016, Colorado Springs 2022), African-Americans (Buffalo 2022, Jacksonville 2023), immigrants (El Paso Walmart 2019), or Jews (Pittsburgh 2018) reverberate nationally and even globally, as evidenced by the copycat shooting in New Zealand in 2019 that targeted two mosques. Schoolchildren in every part of the US can now expect to take part in drills to deal with an active shooter.  Schools, churches, nightclubs, concert venues, parades—virtually any public place—must now plan for, and devote resources to try and prevent, a violent assault by someone armed with an AR-15.  

Nothing special about the AR-15.  A second common argument is that the AR-15 is no different than other guns, and people choose to own an AR-15 for the same reasons people own guns in general, for hunting or sport shooting or home defense.  Therefore singling it out for special restrictions is unfair and unlikely to be effective. 

This claim is disingenuous.  Americans now own somewhere between 20 and 30 million AR-15s, so certainly some people have them for these reasons.  But it is obvious that the huge rise in AR-15 sales in the past 20 years is because of its symbolic properties.   As summarized in American Gun, in the period after Sandy Hook, “The image of the AR-15 had become a political and cultural symbol infused with meaning far beyond the gun debate. People put its image on T-shirts, banners, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. To scorn it meant you were a Democrat and a liberal who backed stricter gun-control laws. To embrace it meant you were pro-gun, conservative, likely pro-Trump. It became a tribal emblem, immediately signaling where you stood on the American political spectrum.”  (373)

The AR-15 is not designed for hunting or self-defense or target practice, though of course it can be used for all these things.  It was designed from the beginning for military use, for short to medium range rapid fire against multiple human targets.  It uses high muzzle velocity, two to three times the velocity of a typical handgun, with light-weight, low-calibre ammunition to minimize recoil—important for rapid aiming and shooting.  

The AR-15 was carefully built to produce tremendous damage to human tissue, much greater than from a normal rifle or handgun.  The inventor of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner, experimented to find the combination of velocity and bullet size that caused the most destruction.  American Gun describes the conclusions of Beat Kneubuehl, a Swiss ballistics scientist who authored the definitive work on the subject: “By increasing the velocity of the tiny bullet, Stoner gave it more injury potential. When the bullet hit the human body it slowed down and released its energy. ‘The energy that the projectile loses through deceleration (loss of velocity) is converted into work, i.e., into damage to the tissue,’ Kneubuehl said. The bullets of the AR-15 maximized this effect because they went unstable so quickly. They had less energy than larger rifle rounds but they transferred more of their energy to the human body. A bullet fired from an AR-15 flew nose first through the air. But when it hit the human body it became unstable. Once unstable, the bullet tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones.” (78)

This is why, when trying to describe what had happened to the bodies of the children at Sandy Hook, a policeman involved told a grieving parent “They were in a fucking blender.”

This sort of destruction is not what you want for hunting.  It’s not what you need for self-defense in your home.  It’s what you want on the battlefield when you need to kill with as few shots as possible.  

The real reason for the immense popularity of the AR-15 was captured succinctly by a gun company executive:  “All of a sudden, people are buying guns because they want to own the libs and because people are telling them they can’t have them and because they want to give the world the middle finger,” recalled Ryan Busse, a sales executive at the gunmaker Kimber. “Rationality of the market left the building and this sort of weird emotional, political drive took over.”  (329)

Unsurprisingly, this loss of rationality did not happen spontaneously; it was deliberately fostered by American gun manufacturers and by gun rights organizations heavily funded by industry.  In the mid-90s the firearms industry was facing a declining market.  Hunting was becoming less popular and fewer Americans lived in the rural and small town settings that allowed for regular gun use.  A federal ban on the AR-15 that began in 1994, coupled with general disdain for the weapon in traditional firearms circles—AR-15 enthusiasts were nicknamed “couch commandos”—a drop in crime, and successful lawsuits against gun companies and gunstores, all led to a drop in gun sales.  

This turned around, however, in the 2000s: “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sunset of the federal assault-weapons ban, and the passage of legislation to protect gunmakers from litigation all combined to create a perfect environment for mainstream gunmakers to make, market, and sell large quantities of AR-15s. Sales executives realized that the gun’s appeal was widening beyond military veterans. Bill Silver, head of commercial sales at Sig Sauer, recalled that the tough-looking military-style weapon had what he called the “wannabe factor.” “People want to be a special forces guy,” he explained.  (268)

Politicians during this period became more and more intimidated by the political clout of the well-funded gun lobby.  In 1994 Congress was sufficiently motivated to pass a bipartisan ban on semi-automatic assault rifles, but the NRA and other opponents helped to defeat many of its supporters in the 1994 election cycle.  The ban was poorly written and counterproductive, doing little to actually take guns off the market and providing gun rights supporters with an issue to mobilize around.  AR-15 sales increased.  Instead of strengthening the bill to make it more effective, Congress, frightened by the pro-gun lobby’s ability to turn out single-issue voters, refused to renew it in 2004.  

In 2005 the Bush Administration gave the gun industry a tremendous victory with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms act, which protected firearms manufacturers and gunstores from most legal liability for the use of their product.  In 2004, for instance, Bushmaster and the guilty gunstore had paid a $2.5 million settlement to the families of people killed by the “DC sniper”, using a Bushmaster AR-15.  Now the gun industry no longer faced the threat of lawsuits that had forced the tobacco industry and other producers of dangerous products to pay billions in damages and modify their sales practices. (264)

In 2008 gun rights advocates received another major boost from the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, which interpreted the Second Amendment as granting an absolute right to individual gun ownership.  This decision was the culmination of a lengthy legal campaign, funded by the NRA, to shift the understanding of the Second Amendment.  While Heller did not entirely prevent governments from restricting certain types of weapons, it put gun-control advocates on the defensive and was a tremendous symbolic victory for the forces already vested in promoting the AR-15.  

The marketing campaigns for unrestricted gun rights became more strident and more explicitly militaristic, often deploying the confrontational slogan “Come and Take It” (Molon Labe, a Greek saying attributed to King Leonidas at Thermopylae).  This was designed to appeal to buyers but also to intimidate politicians, who had to worry for their personal safety and the safety of their families from  the reaction of angry and well-armed citizens.

Gun manufacturers loved the AR-15 because the profit margins were much higher than for most other firearms.  The gun was designed to be cheap and easily mass manufactured.  It was made from pre-stamped metal parts with a plastic stock.  And it was highly customizable, which added to profits as customers bought stocks, grips, flashlights and other attachments. 

AR-15 sales went into high gear once big money arrived from Wall Street.  The rising potential in the 2000s attracted Cerberus Capital, which consolidated several manufacturers into the Freedom Group.    By 2007 the Freedom Group was selling half the AR-15s in the country.  With the protection afforded by the 2005 Act, it adopted aggressive marketing practices designed to appeal to new types of consumers. Bushmaster, one of the Freedom Group’s companies, launched an advertising campaign that linked the AR-15 to masculinity, with copy that said “In a world of rapidly depleting testosterone, The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded.” (285)

The Freedom Group cut prices and began selling AR-15s in Walmarts and other mass market outlets.  It also placed AR-15s prominently into video games, trying to develop brand allegiance among young men who spent more time on their screens than at real shooting ranges.

The combination of financial and marketing muscle, coupled with the cultural and political identity fostered by the NRA and other gun rights organizations, caused AR-15 sales to skyrocket.  In the mid 2000s the compounded annual growth rate for traditional rifles and long-guns was 5%; for the AR-15, it was 36%.  As of 2022 at least 20 million AR-15s, and probably many more, were in the hands of private citizens in the United States.

The AR-15 is needed to defend individual rights.   A third argument often used in favor of the AR-15 in fact confirms that it is different from other guns.  This is that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable private citizens to protect themselves from government oppression, or perhaps to overthrow an oppressive state.  Individuals need to own weapons that are on par with those in the hands of the military and law enforcement.  

This purpose is seen as so compelling that it justifies whatever harm comes to society from having these weapons widely available.  It is the “price of freedom”, as Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly opined after hundreds of people were gunned down by AR-15s in Las Vegas in 2017.  

This argument is more honest and closer to the real reasons for AR-15 ownership than the others.  But it is also deeply misguided.  It distorts the Second Amendment, which aimed at strengthening state militias, not individual vigilantes.  It is wildly unrealistic in an era when the United States has a powerful permanent military armed with tanks, heavy artillery, fighter aircraft and cruise missiles.  

Most importantly, it ignores the risk that a heavily armed citizenry imbued with a belief in its own righteousness can just as easily be mobilized by demagogues and cranks as by genuine patriots.  The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened in part because of Shay’s Rebellion, an anti-tax uprising in Western Massachusetts that the weak central government of the time was unable to put down.  Americans concluded that a stronger government was needed to prevent similar threats.

In an American psyche whose DNA is often constructed around suspicion of central authority, small grievances easily morph into conspiracy theories.  In one back and forth in the New Mexican, one angry writer’s frustration with a state agency led quickly to charges of dictatorship, and a call to citizens to keep their guns and buy more.  Instead of relying on the peaceful processes of organizing and persuading and voting, the temptation is always there to short-circuit democracy and reach for your holster instead.

A picture worth a thousand words from January 6 shows insurrectionists waving a Confederate flag with an AR-15 in the middle and Trump signs in the foreground.  Nothing more needs to be said.

“The survival instinct is at the heart of the Stockholm syndrome. Victims live in enforced dependence and interpret rare or small acts of kindness in the midst of horrible conditions as good treatment. They often become hypervigilant to the needs and demands of their captors, making psychological links between the captors’ happiness and their own. Indeed, the syndrome is marked not only by a positive bond between captive and captor but also by a negative attitude on behalf of the captive toward authorities who threaten the captor-captive relationship.”  (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The US Congress has just rejected a bipartisan compromise that would have strengthened border security, and sent vital funding to Ukraine.  This is foolishness of such magnitude that I cannot find adequate words.  Frank Fukuyama says it straight:  “The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities [my emphasis] makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations.”

Of course the first sentence above is not quite right.  It is not the US Congress as such that is rejecting this deal, it is a partisan MAGA minority in thrall to Donald Trump.  

America has for a long time now been a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.  The majority is held hostage at every turn by a relentless, mobilized minority uninterested in policy, only in the power and notoriety that comes from saying ‘no’ and showing up the enemy.  

But there is method in the madness: these political terrorists calculate that not allowing government to function will anger people to the point that they welcome a strongman who promises to ‘get things done.’  Making the trains run on time is a classic authoritarian move.   Meanwhile the victims hang on the terrorists every word, imagining that the occasional sane remark shows they are coming around, and cowering when threatened with blows and abuse.

When Stockholm Syndrome strikes, we are torn between who to blame.  Of course the terrorists are at fault.  They make no secret of their evil intentions, in fact they revel in them and publicize them.  MAGA supporters say openly that they will not address the border or help Ukraine, only because they calculate it might help Joe Biden.  They count on Americans demanding action and turning to Trump to deliver.

But at some point the captives cannot escape responsibility.  They whisper to one another that, well, the terrorists have some good points, maybe we should see their side.  They argue about whether fighting back might make their captors even angrier.  They consider carefully what might happen if the roles were someday reversed; maybe their enemies would try to do the same to them.  And of course the crazy threats the terrorists make are just for show, they would never actually carry them out.  So Senator Marco Rubio can say “I have zero concern” when Trump says he would allow Russia to attack members of NATO. 

In short, they find reasons why being held prisoner is not so bad.  So even when they actually have the power, the filibuster rules in the Senate stay the same.  The Supreme Court goes unreformed, and Clarence Thomas is not forced to recuse himself despite his wife’s immersion in the MAGA agenda.  Like clockwork a few extremists weaponize the debt ceiling and shut down the government to gain headlines and concessions.  Every four years the ridiculous Electoral College is dusted off to embarrass us one more time.  The country subjects itself to another round of dangerous, polarizing single-party primaries.  Oceans of unconstrained billionaire money surge over the electorate. Then Americans go to the polls under rules that make most votes meaningless unless you happen to live in one of the handful of ‘swing states.’  

Stockholm syndrome is widespread among Democrats, but is even stronger among traditional Republicans.  These shell-shocked troglodytes paved the way for today’s hostile takeover by regularly blocking compromise, painting apocalyptic pictures of the enemy, and strengthening every rule that allows the minority to have its way. Now, surprised that these efforts have had their predictable effect, they are surrendering in droves.  With their electoral survival, and often their physical survival, threatened by the MAGA wave, they have fallen over themselves to invent reasons to give in. 

What needs to be understood is that when it comes to exercising power, the MAGA movement has nothing in common with conservatism.  Trump is not in favor of limited government, constrained by tradition and Constitutional checks and balances.  He and his followers make no secret of their plans, once in control, to ignore all those fuddy-duddy obstacles and aggressively use the state to trample on their enemies and consolidate power.  These plans include remaking the civil service, politicizing the Justice Department, and likely invoking the Insurrection Act to in effect declare martial law.  And we already know that election results mean nothing to Trump.  

No wonder Americans feel sour.  Once we took stock of our problems and did something about them.  We amended the Constitution to give women the vote and create an income tax.  We cut the robber barons down to size.  We gave rights to African-Americans.  We out-spent and out-maneuvered the USSR.  Now we can’t pass a budget and are on the brink of unilaterally surrendering to Putin.  Not because we lack money or military power or smart and capable citizens, but because responsible leaders have lost their way and are allowing the loudest and most unreasonable voices to prevail.

Americans need to shake off Stockholm Syndrome.  Continuing to let the minority block action plays into Trump’s hands.  Most Americans don’t buy what MAGA is selling, but the rules of the game have been rigged to hamstring the majority.  This has to change.  

“…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  (Ivan Karamazov)

“Western society is more pragmatic.  Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”  (Vladimir Putin)

My essay is occasioned by a fine St John’s seminar which allowed me to re-read Brothers Karamazov for the first time in decades.  I have been a long-time watcher of Russia in its various modern guises and was grateful for the in-depth discussions.

This is quite a long book and has occasioned its share of equally long commentaries.  This will be short.

Dostoevsky shows us characters who live on the edge, emotionally and psychologically.  The ones he admires are those who suffer, who go through a dark night of the soul, and as a result are able to have  ecstatic experiences of love, God’s presence, and repentance.  The best of the three brothers, Alyosha, has his moment when his faith in his elder, Father Zosima, is shaken after his death by the smell of corruption; Alyosha sulks about, has a dramatic encounter with the town’s loose woman, and ends up face down on the earth overcome by God’s creation.  Zosima himself tells us of his turn to God when, during his military service, he accepts a duel but recoils at killing, throws away his pistol and becomes a monk.  

Dmitry, Alyosha’s often boorish and violent half-brother, turns to the light only after deciding to kill himself when his amour, Grushenka, appears to have left him forever but then unexpectedly accepts his love.  At the end of the novel, Alyosha creates a life-changing moment for a group of young boys who experience the death of a beloved schoolmate.  

A question is, what is the lasting effect of these moments of darkness followed by ecstasy and redemption?  Do they bring about a ‘new man’ who treats his fellows with kindness, who works for justice, who seeks to alleviate human suffering?  That is not clear.  Dmitry in particular continues to lose his temper and fight jealously with Grushenka, and vice versa.  

Dostoevsky’s foil throughout Brothers is modern, European, Enlightenment thinking and mores.  The advances of science and the dream of making the human condition better through planning and reforms and, God help us, socialism are roundly scorned and made fun of.  This way of thinking leads to atheism, the collapse of all morals (“everything is permitted”!), and alienation from our fellow man.

Wanting to better mankind in this way is a fatal temptation.  The famous tale of the “Grand Inquisitor,” where the Inquisitor faces down Christ himself in the name of making ordinary humans happy, shows that this is the work (literally) of the Devil, leading to spiritual death and brutal oppression.  

Dostoyevsky has a penetrating portrayal of Kolya, a promising boy who is at risk of being taken over by these ugly modern forces but is fortunately turned to the light by Alyosha.  Kolya is prone to trying to impress those around him by repeating half-digested bits of modernity, gleaned from journals, overheard conversations, and Rakitin, the town’s village atheist.  During one of these discourses he asserts “Everything is habit with people, everything, even state and political relations.  Habit is the chief motive force.”  This would seem to be a central tenet of our modern, Enlightenment view of human nature; we are bundles of habits, who can be changed for the better by inculcating new, better habits.

Whether Dostoyevsky means us to think of Aristotle or not, this statement brought me up short.  Aristotle famously told us in the Ethics that moral virtue is a matter of habits.  We acquire the moral virtues—courage, prudence, temperance, justice, magnanimity—because we have nurtured and practiced them until they have become a second nature.  The virtues are means between extremes, and a virtuous person would generally display a calm strength and predictability in behavior. 

This is not how Dostoyevsky seems to see a good life.  We need to be open to wild swings of mood and activity by remaining emotionally honest (like children, who Dostoyevsky sees as innocents who can be models to us as we grow up, retaining the memory of our younger selves).  No pain, no gain.  The sign of a good soul does not seem to be the equanimity that comes from well-established habits.  No one in Brothers is an example of such a life.  We are not in it for the long haul, but for the experiences of love and ecstasy that illuminate life like lightning flashes.  

Brothers might be said to have a ‘missing middle’.  There is penetrating attention to individual struggles and psychology, and also to the highest spiritual and religious experiences.  There is little said or portrayed that might be called ordinary life, including public life.  No one gets married and settles down and has a job and raises a family.  No one works hard in the town council to pave the streets and start a fire department.   The main characters are members of Russia’s newly emerging, educated, well-to-do, Western-oriented middle class.  But the Karamazovs at least remain the kind of Russians that Ivan describes to Alyosha when they settle in for a brotherly heart-to-heart:  “…we need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions, that is what concerns us.  All of young Russia is talking only now only about the eternal questions.”  And Alyosha agrees:  “Yes, for real Russians the questions of the existence of God and immortality, or, as you just said, the same questions from the other end, are of course first and foremost, and they should be.”  

It goes without saying that this Russian orientation to the ‘eternal questions’ is in contrast to the self-absorbed pragmatism of non-Russians, in the West.  Dostoyevsky is aware that this Russian trait is already by now something of a caricature, but he defends it nevertheless.  When Alyosha is bantering with young Kolya, he tells a German joke about Russians:  “Show a Russian schoolboy a map of the heavens, of which hitherto he had no idea at all, and the next day he will return it to you with corrections!”  To which Kolya retorts “Bravo, German!  However the Kraut didn’t look at the good side, what do you think?  Conceit—so be it, it comes from youth, it will correct itself…but on the other hand, an independent spirit, almost from childhood, a boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of those sausage-makers groveling before the authorities…”  

Bold-thinking Russians who go straight to the eternal questions, who embrace suffering as the price for a meaningful life, these are Dostoyevsky’s heroes.  By now this image of the ‘real Russian’ has been deeply implanted, both in Russians and non-Russians—in no small part by Dostoyevsky himself.  However much Russians may see themselves outdone in the mundane world by the West, they see themselves as superior in their souls.  Dostoyevsky’s own prescient warnings about where too much ‘socialism’ might lead were on the mark for Russia itself, where Lenin and Stalin took Marx and melded him with Dostoyevskian excess to create a real-world version of the “Grand Inquisitor.”  Russian floundering and brutality have brought untold suffering down on their own heads, and the heads of those around them, but this is waved off as a necessary part of the national character.  

Today unfortunately Russia has again missed the chance to become a normal nation; again there is a ‘missing middle’.  Instead Putin and his minions have appropriated a distorted Dostoyevsky to teach a new generation that Russia has a special mission in the world, a spiritual mission that requires sacrifice,  submission, war, and the conquering of neighbors.  In his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin channels Dostoyevsky:  “Western society is more pragmatic,” he said. “Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values.”

Shortly after reading Brothers I watched a recent Ken Burns documentary on Benjamin Franklin.  If Dostoyevsky provides a lasting model for Russia, so Franklin has done for America.  The differences, of course, could not be greater.  Franklin is among other things the greatest proponent among our Founders for the middle class, for the artisans, small businessmen, immigrant strivers, self-made thinkers and doers who the new nation is made for.  Self-discipline and concern for one’s community are Franklin’s touchstones for a good life.  Franklin creates institutions the way Johnny Appleseed plants trees:  libraries, postal services, schools, fire-departments spring up in his wake wherever he goes.  He was a relentless tinkerer, an improver, a reluctant Revolutionary.  Not for him the Eternal Questions.

American success has come from this focus on the middle.  Creating and nurturing this segment of society has been the true American achievement and our true radicalism.   We have gone astray when we tilt towards the greatly rich, the greatly charismatic, the greatly ambitious, the greatly religious.

Dostoyevskian characters are not missing in America, far from it, but their suffering and spiritual striving has for the most part remained private.  They have been kept far away from the levers of power.  May it remain so.  

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause.  They will struggle for the sake of struggle.  They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle.  And if a greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.  Frank Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. 

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society… So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.  James Madison, Federalist 10

So many right-wing crazies, so little time.  This must be why I had not heard of “Bronze Age Pervert” until recently, courtesy of an Atlantic article by Graeme Wood, “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right.”  Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, is a slightly mysterious Yale-educated political science Ph.D who masquerades online as an unhinged, foul-mouthed purveyor of racism and misogyny, coupled with a love of bodybuilding and ancient Greece.  Yet he seems to have attracted a large and loyal following among young right-wingers.  Unraveling his attraction for today’s new-Right was the thread I tried to follow, leading through the labyrinth of modern right-wing thought.

Old and New Rights

In the United States, to be ‘on the right’ until recently meant that you were a firm supporter of a capitalist, free-enterprise system; limited government with low taxes and regulation; strong protections for individual rights with respect to property, speech, guns, etc.; and a believer in the rule of law.  You were almost always a proud defender of the Constitution, the military and law enforcement, America’s leading role in the world, and the American business community. You endorsed a level playing field because you believed that liberty allowed natural differences in talent, drive, and intelligence to manifest themselves and rise to the top.    

Today however almost none of this is true.  

What we call the right today in America still has some of its classic features.  But that is not where the grassroots energy is, not where the MAGA movement is, not where the intellectual fervor is.  Increasingly it is found in support of formerly fringe positions:  not limited government, but strong government empowered to enforce minority views on religion and morals; not the Constitution but the will of a demagogue; not universal individual rights but the rights of particular voices and groups; not a leader of the ‘free world’ but a selfish defender of national interests; not the military or law enforcement (see Senator Tommy Tuberville’s willingness to block military promotions); not even private businesses who insist on their right to hire and fire and appeal to customers as they see fit (see Governor De Santis’s fight with Disney). 

Donald Trump, and not only him, makes no secret of his admiration for authoritarian tough guys like Putin, Xi, Erdogan and their ilk.  This is largely because politics for Trump has nothing to do with policy, it is entirely about winning and losing—are you for me or against me.  It is struggle for its own sake.  

One way to sum up these changes is to say that the American Right now looks more like the old European Right.  In Europe, the Right, since the terms Right and Left came into general political use with the French Revolution, has stood for hierarchy and the rule of the strong and privileged.  It advocated for the close cooperation of church, state and business.  It promoted a blood and soil nationalism based on affinities of language, race, and faith, and against dangerous mixing with inferior races and peoples.  It fought virulently against advances for women, equal rights for gays, and other challenges to ‘traditional morality.’  It culminated in fascist regimes that glorified violence, struggle and war as ends in themselves.

That version of the Right seemed, after World War II, to be extinguished, never to rise again from the ashes of utter defeat and ignominy.  But it has returned, in almost every European state.  In Russia, Hungary, Poland, and now Italy it has taken power.  In other states it is growing, including here at home.

Hungary in particular has become the model for America’s new right-wingers, who are envious of Victor Orban.  It is nominally democratic but has been rigged by Orban to be a democracy in name only:    The courts, the press, the universities, the legislature are all cowed or bought off.  Xenophobia over a hyped immigration threat, and faux-indignation at having to abide by European human rights standards, help fuel Orban’s continued popularity. Freedom House now considers Hungary to be a ‘partial’ or ‘semi-consolidated’ democracy.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, an epicenter of today’s Right, in 2022 and 2023 held its annual conference in Budapest.  One of its leading lights, Rod Dreher, has said “Right now, the political leader of the conservative resistance in the West is the prime minister of a small central European [country] that most Americans never even think about.”   

Many of Orban’s most committed supporters are Catholic ‘integralist’ thinkers who want the state to explicitly privilege their faith, as is the case in Hungary.  The integralists reject liberal pluralism as dangerous to conservative practice (on abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc.) and contrary to Catholic doctrine, and want to seize control of the state to impose the truth.   Kevin Vallier, author of a recent book critiquing integralism, characterizes it this way:  “’We’re going to take the institutions established by liberalism and socialism and we’re going to turn them to our own ends.’ This is the great danger of the American integralists because they’re bringing the ideas of Viktor Orbán into the Republican Party. They’re one of the ones who are most responsible for it.”

Integralists are not the only ones who dream of capturing state institutions for their own purposes.  Trump has promised that if re-elected he will purge the government bureaucracy and change civil service rules to allow him to put his followers into every federal position.  Trump seeks not the standard conservative goal of less government, but the new-right goal of my government.

In the 1930s during the Great Depression small groups of Americans looked to foreign dictatorships on Right and Left—Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s USSR—as models for a troubled United States.  But there is no precedent for the leader of a major American political party, millions of his followers, and its intellectual spokesmen, to openly prefer explicitly illiberal, foreign, political systems.  

A number of different strands make up today’s right. (I have not found a satisfactory term to characterize today’s right-wing movements and thinkers:  New Right is an old term, ‘alt-right’ refers more narrowly to white nationalists.  The one term that does not fit is ‘conservative’—there is nothing conservative about today’s right, which is both radical and reactionary).  But they increasingly overlap.   

We have people of great wealth who, like the Trumps and Musks, cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  They are convinced that they got rich because they are superior beings, and that this superiority is transferable to other domains.  Many are openly hostile to democracy and see no reason for their inferiors to have an equal say in politics:  billionaire tech-entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, wants to limit voting to those who can pass a civics test.  Today many of the most brazen of these Gilded Age throwbacks live in Silicon Valley and are prey to anti-establishment conspiracy theories: as Paul Krugman wrote recently,  “Arguably, the craziest faction in U.S. politics right now isn’t red-hatted blue-collar guys in diners, it’s technology billionaires living in huge mansions and flying around on private jets.”  

We have conservative nationalists like Steve Bannon, part of the Orban admiration society.  These are people who agree with Putin and Xi and Modi that the world is characterized by a ‘clash of civilizations’; we are divided into distinct religio-cultural spheres, each of which should be allowed to develop its own distinctive way of life.  Liberalism is despised because of its claims to universalism and attempts to criticize and reform non-liberal regimes.  Our sphere (the best of all) is Christian, white, and European.  We should proudly uphold it and keep out people and ideas from all those ‘shithole countries’.  

We have disaffected young men who rightly feel put upon by globalized capitalism, which has ravaged America’s industries and turned the once-proud working class into the precariat.  Their place in the world is unclear, and it is easy to blame feminism and affirmative action for their problems. They yearn for some greater cause to provide meaning and belonging, and often find it in right-wing organizations and leaders like Trump, who tell them liberalism is the arch-enemy, a world-view that looks down on people like them.  Embracing racism, anti-semitism, and misogyny and prepping for violence is exciting and fills the void that has opened up in their lives and communities. 

And we have a small but influential group of intellectuals and ‘thought-leaders’ who find liberalism unsatisfying and yearn for alternatives, sometimes in a resurgence of traditional religion, sometimes in  an anti- or post-liberal political order.  These are people who want a great cause to support, who want a world painted in clear black and white, with enemies to defeat and battles to wage.  Some see themselves as defenders of ‘true’ American values, but many are fascinated with theocracy and fascism.  

The Common Thread:  Hatred of Equality

What do these different strands have in common? The fundamental divide today, as for the last three centuries, is between those who accept and defend the fundamental equality of human beings, and those who do not.  The United States has until now been the nation that most clearly falls in the first camp, at least in its creed and publicly accepted principles.  The (many) deviations from this creed have come to be understood as mistakes that need to be acknowledged and overcome.  But as liberalism has moved more forcefully to identify and rectify these mistakes—racism and sexism, the destruction of indigenous peoples, the piling up of massive fortunes—it has produced a fierce backlash.  This backlash has now morphed from a defense of ‘classic’ American values, to a growing embrace of values that cannot by any stretch be called American. 

The dividing lines between these groups are increasingly blurred as what they have in common, their hatred of modern liberalism and egalitarianism, pulls them together.  This is aided by a powerful network of right-wing think tanks, institutes, and media outlets built up over decades and funded by wealthy patrons and businesses.  These wealthy interests want above all to reverse the modern liberal project, understood as empowering government to use some of the wealth generated by the private sector to provide welfare and opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged.  Even small steps to reduce inequality and check the power of the rich are characterized as socialism or communism.  

(While wealthy liberals tend to fund foundations that do ‘good works’ and create detailed policy proposals, conservatives tend to fund politically-oriented organizations that aim directly at influencing elected officials.  In Washington, the moderately-liberal Brookings Institution is a storehouse of broad-ranging policy expertise; its conservative counterpart, the Heritage Foundation, creates talking points for the House Freedom Caucus.)    

Claremont’s Turn to BAPism

One notable part of this right-wing network has been the Claremont Institute.  Claremont began as a vigorous defender of the Constitution, understood as embodying natural rights, that is, rights ascertainable by reason and hence true for all time.  Its teachings reached influential conservatives, notably Justice Clarence Thomas, a convert to the natural rights doctrine.  In this vein Claremont has long opposed critiques from the left that question America’s principles, as well as most forms of affirmative action.  It grounded itself in the ideas of Leo Strauss and his followers and often published interesting political and cultural analysis.  

But Claremont’s mainstreaming of “Bronze Age Pervert (BAP)” reveals how this supposedly patriotic and intellectually sophisticated effort has lost its way.  BAP has gained a cult following among some of today’s reactionary youth, reportedly including young staffers in the Trump White House.  His writings, including a 2018 book, Bronze Age Mindset, are a melange of (often crude) meanderings that glorify eugenics, manliness, classical Greece, bodybuilding, and violence, while tearing into feminism, Christianity, the bureaucratic state, democracy, non-white peoples, etc. 

In short, BAP is a Nietzschean.  The essential Nietzschean assertion is that human equality is a myth, foisted on modern man by Christianity, abetted by Greek philosophy.  This myth is destructive of all human excellence, a soul-sucking mistake that produces a world of joyless “Last Men.”  Just as BAP is romantically attached to Bronze Age Greece, the time of the Iliad, when men were men who kidnapped women and then fought to the death over them, Nietzsche admired ancient Rome for its unabashed love of violence, conquest, and the right of the strong to do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.  BAP vilifies his contemporaries as ‘bugmen’ and dreams, vividly, of their violent demise.

Now there have always been American adolescents sitting palely in libraries, enamored of Nietzsche and his modern epigones, like the capitalism-worshipping Ayn Rand.  Via Rand, Nietzsche has had considerable influence in promoting a hard-edged libertarianism.  But his ideas have otherwise had little broader support in the United States.  Until now.

In 2019 Claremont published a review of BAP’s book by Michael Anton (the author of a hysterical Claremont piece in 2016, “The Flight 93 Election,” explaining why voting for Donald Trump was the equivalent of the hijacked passengers on Flight 93 fighting back against their al-Qaida hijackers.  Anton leveraged his article into a position on the Trump National Security Council.)  Anton acknowledged BAP’s outrageous views but basically defended him, saying BAP “speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, leveling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence…”.

Anton implies—more than implies—that BAP’s exhortation to his followers to infiltrate the military and security institutions and await instructions is an understandable move; it is certainly consistent with the message of “Flight 93.” It is also consistent with Claremont Board President and main donor Thomas Klingenstein’s claim that America is in the midst of a ‘cold civil war’ and that America is a de facto ‘totalitarian regime’ under the thumb of liberals and ‘woke communists.’  Anton purports to be concerned that young right-wingers are being drawn to BAP rather than Claremont’s Americanism, but this is gaslighting.  Like many half-baked Straussians, Anton inserts numerous winks and nods to show that his surface reasonableness is just a facade, and what is really needed is an all-out war to overthrow liberal dominance.

Anton’s and Klingenstein’s dislike of liberalism is so great that anything is preferable, whether Trump, or an unhinged fascist like BAP.  This mirrors the overall corruption of Claremont, as outlined in detail in Katherine Stewart’s September New Republic article, “The Anti-Democracy Think Tank.”  

In Graeme Wood’s  “How Bronze Age Pervert Charmed the Far Right,” he tells us that according to the political philosopher Bryan Garsten, BAPism is increasingly the choice of many of his top graduate students:  “Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to enlightenment liberalism.”  

The key point is that to these young thinkers, liberalism is no longer seen as a viable choice.  It is felt to be exhausted, done in by a wearisome and gridlocked politics, pointless overseas adventures, and the triumph of special interests.  Contemporary ‘wokism,’ which tries to shame infractions against progressive orthodoxy, is intolerable, on a par with the Gulag and concentration camps.  Reform is not possible.  The whole thing needs to be blown up.

This is perhaps the essence of the fascist mentality.  A violent cleansing is needed, via war or revolution, to clear away the dreck of the existing order and create the intense national, spiritual, and racial unity that gives meaning to life.  Various alien and subhuman enemies—the ‘bugmen’—must be identified and done away with.  Accomplishing this requires a Leader before whom one can kneel.  

Liberalism and its Discontents

This is not the first moment in modern times in which dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, and life under advanced capitalism, has been used to justify violence or tyranny.  It in fact appears to be a regular and inevitable accompaniment to life in a liberal democracy.  It has often been pointed out that liberalism is thin gruel, prioritizing as it does compromise, toleration, negotiation, and peaceful conflict resolution.  Liberalism teaches that no one has a monopoly on truth and we must live with ambiguity.  Those who yearn for moral intensity, great deeds, the triumph of good over evil, find this deeply unsatisfying.  

In Europe the period at the end of the 19^th century and up to WWI was a time of such dissatisfaction.  Europe had largely been at peace for 100 years.  The bourgeoisie—smug, narrow-minded, and materialistic—were triumphant.  The great critics of the bourgeoisie, Nietzsche and Marx, disagreed on everything except their disgust at complacent modern European man. 

Partly as a result, a generation welcomed war as a catharsis, a romantic escape from boredom and pettiness.  What they got, however, was a catastrophe that (for a time) discredited all such romantic notions.  While all existing regimes were damaged by the Great War, the biggest losers were the most reactionary and un-democratic.  Great oppressive Empires collapsed:  Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans.  America rose. 

The interwar period saw another surge in anti-liberal sentiments.  Liberal democracy in the 1930s seemed to be on the ropes.  The Depression caused many to question whether it was up to the task of creating prosperity and national unity.  Fascism, communism, and militarism seemed to be the wave of the future, offering meaning and purpose.  

Once again, however, the supposedly decadent and divided democracies rose to the challenge.  In WWII they reduced the cities of Germany and Japan to smoking ruins, then occupied them and, in a final twist of the knife, transformed them into liberal democracies.  Then in a burst of creativity they birthed  modern welfare states, built powerful militaries, and held on doggedly to outlast communism too.

After the collapse of the USSR it seemed that the last word had been written on the seeming flabbiness of liberal democracy and the superiority of various forms of authoritarianism.  In the contest to see which regime could best mobilize and harness the energies of its people to produce prosperity and national power, the democracies with their combination of individual freedoms, competitive politics, and private enterprise had clearly triumphed.  

But apparently not forever.  As we have seen before, liberal success contains seeds of discontent.  For guidance we can look to the ur-text of modern liberal triumphalism.  Frank Fukuyama became famous in the early 1990s for describing the “end of history,” where major conflicts would cease, drowned in a wave of success as democracy and capitalism joined hands and the world’s great powers converged in agreement on the path to prosperity and stability.  Major conflicts between and within states would diminish as all people gained ‘recognition’, the equal rights as citizens that would satisfy them and do away with the primary cause of war and rebellion.

The Perennial Right-Wing Challenge

But the millions who read and praised (and and have since largely turned on) Fukuyama’s thesis, failed to read his text to the end.  Remember, the title of the book was:  The End of History and the Last Man [emphasis mine].  The Last Man was Nietzsche’s sarcastic term for the bourgeois, pleasure-loving, pain-avoiding human being spreading rapidly over modern Europe.  

Fukuyama saw, at the moment of its apparent victory, that the combination of liberal democracy, capitalism, and scientific/technological progress could still be challenged.  From the Left it was vulnerable to ever-increasing demands for equality.  These would bump up against natural human differences—we are not equal in looks, in talents, in basketball-enabling height, in emotional stability, in mathematical intuition, and all manner of other characteristics.  The most important of these differences, as Madison understood, relate to the acquisition of wealth or ‘property’:  “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.”

Ameliorating the resulting inequalities via the modern welfare state is one thing. But eradicating them requires a monstrous tyranny, as we saw in the Soviet Union.  Short of tyranny, constantly harping on every instance of inequality quickly arouses irritation and anger and becomes counter-productive.  Fukuyama correctly foresaw the dangers from the always-woke, finger-pointing, micro-aggression-cataloguing vigilantism that is damaging life on college campuses, and beyond.  

But Fukuyama also correctly foresaw that the greater danger would come from the Right.  “Liberal democracy could, in the long run, be subverted either by an excess of megalothymia, or by an excess of isothymia—that is, the fanatical desire for equal recognition.  It is my intuition that it is the former that will constitute the greater danger to democracy in the end.”   (Last Man, p. 314).  Megalothymia is the desire to be better than others, to gain not equal but greater recognition—status, fame, glory, wealth, power.  It is impossible and undesirable to eliminate this desire, which exists to some degree in everyone, and to a very large degree in some.  Wanting to excel and be recognized for excellence is the great motor of progress and innovation. 

However, any stable society, and especially a liberal one, must check megalothymia.  Modern liberal democracies can divert this drive towards productive or harmless activities, like business or science or sports or Tik-Tok influencer, or even democratic politics, properly constrained.  But if they are to survive they must put limits on certain kinds of ambition, in politics or military affairs, and must insist on equality in ways certain to rankle those who want more than equality.

Especially important are limits on the acquisition of wealth and how wealth can be used politically—limits that America today has failed to enforce.  As we see every day, the Trumps and Musks and Klingensteins cannot resist the temptation to meddle in politics and public affairs.  Above all they want to consolidate their positions by shaping public policy to protect and grow their riches, thereby entrenching inequality.  (Hence actions like the recent $1.5 billion bequest to Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo—the largest ‘charitable’ transfer in US history—from an Islamophobic, climate-denying Chicago businessman who was able to engineer a $400 million tax break from his blatantly political donation.)    

Once these ‘malefactors of great wealth’ (to quote Theodore Roosevelt) have unleashed their resources to defend their interests, the cat is very much out of the bag.  The money spreads into unforeseen nooks and corners, activating more and more extreme views, drawing in equality-hating ideologues,  conspiracy-theorists, opportunists, and madmen.

It is difficult to put limits on the ambitions of people in the grip of the Nietzschean, BAP mindset.  They are motivated largely by resentment at what they see as the failure of society to give them the rewards and recognition that their moral or intellectual or racial superiority deserves.  No one who feels the clouds have parted after reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Atlas Shrugged, or listening to a Steve Bannon podcast, ever feels that they are not one of the elect (this is the real meaning of the right-wing meme ‘to be red-pilled’).  If they haven’t gotten their due, it can’t be their fault—someone else must be to blame. Today a young white man with limited education (or with an advanced degree but no job; see historian Peter Turchin’s increasingly fashionable theory of elite overproduction), will quickly find all manner of tempters—talk radio, FOX News, the Claremont Institute—eager to persuade him that his problems are all due to feminism, anti-racism, immigrants and progressive ideology.  

This resentment rarely issues in any productive or serious policy proposals. The energy, the focus, is entirely negative.

To some extent we must tolerate youthful exuberance and try to tame it for better ends.  But liberalism became intellectually complacent after the Cold War.  It is now on the defensive.  It doesn’t matter that what makes the modern right apocalyptic is, in the scheme of things, trivial and overblown.  We aren’t at each other’s throats in America over real issues like slavery or Vietnam, but over same-sex restrooms and elementary-school textbooks.  But this reveals the actual challenge, which is not policy differences but the drive for respect and recognition, for a life of meaning and challenge—or for raw power. 

Liberals are frustrated when Americans vote ‘against their self-interest,’ meaning against all manner of benefits they could get from good liberal policies.  But they underestimate how much people see their life in terms of values and identity.  Backing Trump is exciting, it makes your enemies furious, it gives you a reason to get up in the morning.  You feel seen.  If you are an intellectual you see opportunity to be one of the shapers of a new order after MAGA victory sweeps away the flabby elites in academia and government.  (Hint to intellectuals: No, you won’t.  You’ll end up in the gulag.)

Whether liberalism can get its mojo back is one of the key questions of our time.  Joe Biden has done excellent things in terms of policy:  inflation is down, job growth is strong, support for Ukraine has been solid and effective, long-term investment in manufacturing and sustainable energy is through the roof.  But his popularity remains low.  Enthusiasm is lacking, and not just because he is old.  Donations to progressive groups have fallen sharply.  Perhaps this will change as the reality of good times sinks in.  But man does not live by bread alone.  

The best case is that the brazenness of the attack on liberal values will rouse its defenders.  Openly embracing racism, violence, Christian nationalism, and obeisance to the superior man, is astonishing.  The task of defending liberal democracy and the Constitution in the face of January 6 and the Trump takeover of the Republican Party should bring excitement and unity back to American liberals who have become mired in minutiae and infighting.

Abroad, foreign leaders like Putin and Xi are openly contemptuous of liberalism and democracy and expect to ride a wave of tyranny that ousts the US and its allies from global leadership.  They claim their versions of efficient one-man rule are superior to liberal democracy’s messy collective decisionmaking.  

We have seen this movie; Hitler and Stalin made identical claims.  Supporters of democracy have rallied before and can do so again.  Already Putin and Xi have committed the predictable error of authoritarian over-reach, Putin in Ukraine, Xi in fighting Covid.  But it seems every generation has to learn these lessons anew.                               

Imagine that, after the Civil War, an American poet had written a great work purporting to embrace the history of the world—not a history exactly but a compilation of the myths and stories that have shaped the American soul—culminating with the triumphant Presidency of the great General Grant, who has ushered in a period of peace and prosperity after decades of strife and war.  Then suppose that in reading the poem, you discovered that most of it was a recounting of the legends about King Arthur and his knights, with a few stanzas dealing perhaps with Richard the Lionhearted or Robin Hood.  Then some chapters about the American founding, focused on the Mayflower, a long digression about Isaac Newton, a bit of concluding praise for Lincoln and Grant, and voila.

If this sounds a bit odd, then you can share my disorientation after spending several weeks with the Latin poet Ovid’s (Publius Ovidius Naso) masterpiece, the Metamorphoses.  This involved reading the whole work (which is very long, over 600 pages in the Penguin translation by David Raeburn^[1]) then re-reading it in stages for a week-long seminar at St John’s College, where students and tutors (none of us experts on Ovid) met every day for 5 days and discussed the text. 

Ovid flourished, and wrote Metamorphoses, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  Rome was recovering from a century of civil strife and Augustus was creating what would become an imperial system of one-man rule, while pretending to preserve Rome’s republican institutions.  Ovid had achieved fame with earlier poems, in particular the Ars Amatoria, a sequence of lyric poems about love and more particularly about seduction, including rather detailed instructions for seducing married women (he also discussed how women might seduce men, a sign of his flexibility with regard to Roman norms).  You can get a taste of his approach from these lines in Ars Amatoria Book I:

But hunt for them, especially, at the tiered theatre:

that place is the most fruitful for your needs.

There you’ll find one to love, or one you can play with,

one to be with just once, or one you might wish to keep.^[2]

Just as he was finishing his poem, Ovid was exiled in AD 8 by Augustus to a remote village on the Black Sea in what is today Romania; he spent the last 10 years of his life there.  Despite desperate pleas for clemency, neither Augustus or his successor Tiberius allowed Ovid to return to Rome.  Scholars are not sure exactly why Augustus had it in for Ovid, with some speculating he was involved in anti-Augustan plotting and others arguing that Augustus disliked Ovid’s morality, or lack of it, especially with regard to sex.  (A fine modern novel about Ovid’s exile is An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf, which I highly recommend.  We’ll come back to it later).  

Metamorphoses is written in epic verse, like Homer and Virgil, signaling a different and presumably loftier intent. But it is unlike these other epics; it lacks a central hero or a recognizable story. Instead, Ovid tells us he intends to explore a particular theme, metamorphosis or transformation.  

The stories in Metamorphoses are loosely (very loosely) linked by this theme of ‘change’ or transformation.  ‘Transformation’ is not a metaphor or some internal psychological realignment, it is literal transforming, with people turning regularly into trees or birds or streams.  This happens commonly in the myths that compose much of Metamorphoses.  Typically a god, maybe Jupiter or Apollo, lusts after a pretty nymph or human girl, seduces and rapes her, then he (or some other deity) turns her into an oak tree or a seagull or a lion—sometimes as a kind of redemption, sometimes as punishment.  There are poignant descriptions of people losing their ability to speak and move as the transformation occurs, while remaining human on the inside.  These transformations are at first surprising but, repeated in hundreds of short vignettes, also repetitive.   

The stories of Metamorphoses (a Greek, not a Latin word) are almost entirely, for the first 80-90 percent of the book, Greek stories.  Ovid has sources lost to us but for the most part they are familiar from Homer, Hesiod, the Greek playwrights and other writings.  The settings are Greek, the cities where they occur are Greek, the gods and kings and queens and heroes are familiar Greeks though sometimes with Latin names:  Jupiter and Hera, Apollo and Bacchus, Jason, Theseus, Hercules, Perseus, Medea, etc.  Ovid to be sure puts his own spin on them, carefully describing some particularly outlandish changes, drawing out aspects of character, occasionally dwelling on the internal struggle a character faces when trying to decide what to do.  But the stories are part of the tradition, not invented by Ovid.

It is difficult to convey the often bewildering experience of reading Metamorphoses, especially for a modern reader not steeped in these old tales.  Many of the stories are short, while some go on for 10-15 pages; sometimes different stories are linked together by their narrator (Orpheus has a long string of tales), or nested confusingly (a primary story, then a character digresses with another story, which reminds someone of yet another, and so on).  Ovid is a master of many moods and styles. He can be lyrical, terse, playful, earthy, or grand; he can imitate the goriest battle scenes of the Iliad; he can appear pious or irreverent.

There is a sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying stream of consciousness as you read, enjoying the variety but then asking yourself ‘what is the point here; why am I reading about Venus seducing Adonis one minute, and the flaying of Marsyas the next?’  The book is a kind of labryinth in which it is almost impossible not to get lost.

Two Key Themes: Sex and Honor

However, some themes do reoccur.  One of them is sex.  We are not for the most part talking about love here: when a guy—often a god (sometimes a goddess)—sees a girl he is often inflamed with desire which can’t be resisted, pursues/seduces/rapes her, then for the most part takes off while the lady lives with the consequences:  maybe a baby, maybe disgrace, maybe revenge from the guys wife (Hera is a particularly nasty revenge-seeker) or an outraged parent.  In any case, for the most part eros causes people/gods to damage one another, with the excuse being that they couldn’t help themselves.  

Ovid’s landscape is littered with the offspring of these liaisons, to the point that most characters have some deity or other as a parent or grandparent or uncle.  There is a quite literal intermingling of human and divine.

Another theme is lack of respect—the gods are endlessly upset when humans don’t acknowledge them properly or forget to offer sacrifices or trespass on their domains.  This leads to horrible payback, like when Actaeon accidentally spies Diana bathing and the outraged goddess turns him into a stag who is torn apart by his own dogs.  Ovid blithely notes afterwards that “Comments varied: some felt the goddess had overdone her violent revenge; while others commended it—worthy they said of her strict virginity.”  ^[3]But outside judgment seems beside the point.  Gods are gonna do what gods are gonna do.    

The transformations that Ovid delights in are often enjoyable for their own sake, but also can be seen as attempts to repair or restore cracks in the order of things.  When terrible rapes or violent vengeance occurs, the perpetrators are not usually punished—there is no moral reckoning—but there is recognition that the fabric of the world has been torn and should somehow be set right.  When the gods change victims into trees or flowers or birds or springs, some kind of harmony has been restored.

Jupiter in particular is both a constant source of disorder, and the one who keeps the world within certain bounds.  It’s Jupiter who has to take down Phaeton with a thunderbolt when he carries the sun too close to the world and threatens to burn it to ashes, and who periodically drowns mankind, like a basket of unwanted kittens, when we get overly nasty and disrespectful—taking care however to preserve a select few to carry on the race.

Poetic Troublemakers

Within this dizzying merry-go-round, Ovid draws our attention to a few characters who stand out for their independence and creative powers; people who rival the gods and who we can arguably identify with Ovid himself.  One is the woman-weaver Arachne, who claims to be the equal of Minerva and is challenged by the goddess to prove it.  People who challenge the gods do not generally come out well in Ovid, and Arachne is no exception, but she claims our respect.  Unlike most of Ovid’s protagonists, Arachne is not high-born:  “Arachne’s distinction lay not in her birth or the place that she hailed from, but solely her art.”^[4]  She doesn’t back down when Minerva warns her, and her work is fully the equal of the goddess’s: “Not Pallas, not even the goddess of Envy could criticize weaving like that.”^[5]   But while Minerva weaves pictures showing the gods and goddesses at their most majestic and benevolent, Arachne details all the crimes against women of Jupiter, Neptune, Apollo and the rest, all the rapes and deceptions and abandonments.  

Typically, the goddess when thwarted decides to overturn the board:  “The fair-haired warrior goddess resented Arachne’s success and ripped up the picture portraying the god’s misdemeanours.”^[6]  Then she turns Arachne into a spider. But Arachne/Ovid is the real winner.  The tapestry is destroyed but Ovid preserves for us the image of this strong young woman using her artistic talent to tell truth to power.   Ovid—who himself came from a well-off but not particularly prominent family—is in the midst of raining down on us thousands of carefully-crafted words showing in detail the lusts, jealousies, and multiple shortcomings of the gods.  It doesn’t take a great deal of extrapolation to see the gods as stand-ins for the rich and powerful of Rome (and elsewhere), who do as they please and punish anyone who takes exception.  

Another independent craftsman is Daedalus, the famous inventor responsible for the Labryinth that imprisons the Minotaur; the wings that allow him to escape from Crete; and other marvels.  When Daedalus begins to work on his wings, Ovid says he “put his mind to techniques unexplored before and altered the laws of nature.”^[7]  He has no help from the gods.  Of course his marvelous work proves fatal to his son, Icarus, who flies too high.  Challenging established ways is risky and possibly impious; the observers of the flying Daedalus and Icarus say “They certainly must be gods to fly through the air!”^[8]  Ovid is perhaps another Daedalus, using his fabulous technique to create a new kind of epic poetry but with the risk of coming too close to the sun, endangering those he loves and affronting the powerful.

A third heroic artist is Orpheus, the extraordinary musician who famously travels to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, succeeds in charming even grim Pluto with his song, then loses Eurydice again when he looks around on their way back to the upper world. Orpheus’s power extends to nature as much as the gods; he is described as able to charm even the rocks and trees and animals to come to him when he plays.  

After losing Eurydice, Ovid says that Orpheus would “have nothing to do with the love of women” and instead turns to young boys: “Orpheus even started the practice among the Thracian tribes of turning for love to immature males.”^[9]  Ovid’s Orpheus becomes in fact a celebrator of strange and unnatural loves; after praising Jupiter, he says “Now there is call for a lighter note.  Let my song be of boys whom the gods have loved and of girls who have been inspired to a frenzy of lawless passion and paid the price for their lustful desires.”^[10]  This is followed by a series of stories, told by Orpheus, that include Jupiter’s infatuation with the beautiful boy Ganymede; Apollo’s similar love for the young Hyacinthus; the origin of prostitution; Pygmalion’s twisted desire for his own statue; a long and detailed account of the young girl Myrrha who pursues her own father; and the doomed love of Venus for Adonis.   

Orpheus ends up being torn to pieces by wild Thracian ‘bacchanals’, who resent his disdain for women.  Orpheus’s music deflects their attacks for a while, but finally Ovid says “cacophony won.  The hideous screech of the Phrygian pipe…the clapping of hands and the bacchanals shrieking drowned the sound of the lyre…”.^[11]  All of nature mourns his passing, the birds and beasts, rocks and rivers and trees.

Although the ‘bacchanals’ seem to act along typical Bacchic lines, Ovid tells us that the god Bacchus takes revenge on them because Orpheus has been a ‘priest of his mysteries’.  Bacchus is prominent throughout the Metamorphoses—he is a ‘new god,’ a celebrator of disorder and female empowerment, who has to win his place against the opposition of the Olympians.  Ovid likewise loves to tell stories about the breakdown of good order, with a number of them highlighting strong women who succeed in enacting vengeance or getting their man:  Medea the powerful witch who revenges herself on Jason; Arachne; Salmacis the abnormal nymph (“The only naiad not to belong to the train of Diana”) who desires, attacks, and is joined permanently with young Hermaphroditus; Procne, wife of the evil Tereus, who plots successfully to have him torn apart in Bacchic ritual after he brutally rapes her sister and cuts out her tongue.   

Ovid as a great poet I think identifies with Orpheus, and with Bacchus, who reverses the rules and turns the world topsy-turvy.  Augustus is busy building a conservative movement to “Make Rome Great Again,” restoring religious practices, building temples, and, controversially, trying to clamp down on adultery.  He makes an example of his own daughter Julia, who he sends into exile for playing around.   These efforts to restore ‘traditional’ morality are controversial.  The Roman historian Suetonius writes in The Twelve Caesars that the new laws Augustus introduced “dealt, among other matters, with extravagance, adultery, unchastity, bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian orders.  His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses.”^[12]

The Ovid who in earlier works described at length how to commit adultery, and in Metamorphoses is often preoccupied with sexual misconduct and out-of-control desires, is not likely to have found Augustus’s reforms congenial.  At the end of the poem, after comparing Augustus explicitly to Jupiter, Ovid throws down his own challenge to the gods: “Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy—not Jupiter’s wrath, nor fire or sword, nor devouring time…My name shall never be forgotten.”^[13]

Bringing Greece and Rome Together

Those are some themes I think one can make out in the often bewildering labryinth of Metamorphoses.  But what about the work as a whole?  Can one stand back and make out an overarching theme or story?

Here is where the question of Metamorphoses’s “Greekness” is worth pursuing.  We take it for granted that the Greek and Roman worlds are one, that Zeus equals Jupiter, that Rome is the natural extension and follow-on to Greece.  When Ovid calls on the gods at the beginning to “spin me a thread from the world’s beginning down to my own lifetime,” and at once launches on an account of creation borrowed from Homer and Hesiod, it takes an effort to ask whether this is just how it has to be, or whether the interweaving of these two cultures is something problematic.  

Ovid like many generations of educated Romans before him was steeped in Greek poetry and philosophy.  He studied in Athens for a year.  Rome had interacted with Greek colonies in southern Italy for centuries, conquered Greece in the 2^nd century BC, and then gone on by Ovid’s time to rule all of the Eastern Mediterranean, a world that had previously been conquered and Hellenized by Alexander the Great.  The Greek language, Greek literature and philosophy, and Greek institutions were the norm from Egypt (where Alexander was buried, in the great Greek city of Alexandria) through the Levant and Asia Minor.  This had a profound effect on many Romans, who were putting together an Empire on the back of an invincible military, but had little to offer of what we today call ‘soft power.’ They were awed by Greek accomplishments and quickly adopted them for themselves.    

Many, but not all.  Plenty of Romans thought of the Greeks as effete chatterboxes, and sources of decadence and decline.  Tough, virtuous Romans are sent off to rule Egypt and Syria and Macedon, and end up like Marc Antony; corrupted by the riches and temptations of the East, they lose themselves and forget their duty to Rome.  (There are parallels here to the way Thucydides tells us Spartans, similar to Romans in their single-minded focus on martial virtues, are prone to fall prey to greed when they leave Sparta to rule other parts of Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars).

Cato the Elder in the early 2^nd century is strongly opposed to growing Greek influence, as is the later Augustan-era historian Livy.  Livy is particularly critical of the cult of Bacchus, which he describes as a Greek import, for encouraging the unregulated mixing of sexes and classes.  (The Roman analogue to Bacchus is Liber Pater, identified with freedom and the rights of the plebeian class, according to modern scholars^[14]; Ovid often refers to Bacchus as Liber).   Livy, a conservative who sees Rome as threatened by moral decline, was close to Augustus.  He is suspicious of all so-called ‘mystery religions,’ such as the worship of Bacchus, and describes approvingly how in the early 2^nd century the authorities violently suppressed the growing Bacchus cult.  Rome’s expansion has allowed all manner of foreign customs and gods to infiltrate Rome itself, weakening the state.  

In this back and forth one can say that ultimately, Greece wins.  Under Constantine the Empire is divided, with the center of gravity moving to the new Eastern Capital at Byzantium.  Its language is Greek, not Latin.  The Empire in the West eventually collapses and Rome itself falls to barbarians, but the Greek, Christian version of Rome in the East carries on for another thousand years.  (Whether the Greek East, in the form of another new cult, Christianity, was the cause of Rome’s downfall has been debated for 2000 years).  

This is far in the future for Ovid.  What he sees in his time is a challenge to this more sophisticated, more open-minded Greek-Roman future.  Augustus is trying to restore the old Roman morality, arguably to make his radical usurpation of power look like a return to tradition.  Ovid’s poem asserts the oneness of the two cultures.  In this he follows Virgil, who in the Aeneid ties Rome’s founding directly to the fall of Troy.  Rome’s story comes straight out of the Iliad.  It doesn’t get any more Greek than that.

Ovid’s view of what is at stake may perhaps be hinted at towards the end of Metamorphoses, where he describes at length the views of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras.  Pythagoras comes to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, fleeing from political oppression on his home island of Samos.  Ovid’s Pythagoras, (who seems to be a composite of Greek thinkers rather than the real Pythagoras) teaches that all things are permanently changing and in flux, always metamorphosing, coming and going—including great kings and cities.  Recognizing and embracing this is the key to wisdom.  

Ovid tells us that at one point Numa, one of Rome’s first kings who takes the throne after Romulus, travels to Croton to meet Pythagoras.  Ovid singles out Numa as “a capable thinker…His restless, ambitious mind led him on to explore the mysteries of nature itself.”^[15] After being taught by Pythagoras, Numa returns to Rome, where he “converted a nation practiced in brutal war to follow the arts of peace.”^[16] Ovid may be suggesting that Augustus, who promises Romans peace after over a century of civil war, should also learn from the Greeks; he should embrace a changing world rather than resist it.  Here is Ovid’s own point of view, from Part III of Ars Amatoria:

Others may delight in ancient times: I congratulate myself

on having been born just now: this age suits my nature.

Not because stubborn gold’s mined now from the earth,

or choice shells come to us from farthest shores…

but because civilisation’s here, and no crudity remains,

in our age, that survives from our ancient ancestors.^[17]

Whatever Ovid’s intent, Augustus does not appreciate it.  Just as Ovid was finishing Metamorphoses, Augustus banishes him.  

Ovid In Exile

David Malouf’s 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life, invents a trajectory for Ovid in his exile.^[18]  It is told as though written by Ovid himself (though Malouf acknowledges his story is based on almost no evidence).  After an initial period of extreme disorientation, Ovid comes to terms with his fate; he learns the local language, and starts to appreciate the beauty of the bleak landscape.  He plants a garden of flowers, something that surprises and confuses the locals, who do nothing that is not entirely practical:  “My little flowerpots are as subversive here as my poems were in Rome.” 

He has an epiphany about the meaning of metamorphosis:  “I have stopped trying to find fault with creation and have learned to accept it.  We have some power in us that knows its own ends…This is the true meaning of transformation.  This is the real metamorphosis.  Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree…”   

Malouf’s Ovid becomes fascinated with a local ‘wild child’, a young boy who roams the woods with the wolves and is eventually caught.  Ovid takes it on himself to teach him to speak.  The boy for his part shows Ovid what it means to genuinely transform into another being:  “In imitating the birds…He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man.”  Through speech, especially perhaps poetic speech, we enable ourselves to become another person, perhaps the person we imagine ourselves to be.  Exercising this power, which is a kind of love, cracks us open, softens us.  Ovid dies happily in communion with the natural world.  

America and Rome

I started by imagining an American version of Ovid.  The Romans cultivated an image as a practical and pious people.  Many Americans too think of themselves as especially pragmatic and God-fearing; a people who should beware an ‘Old World’ seen as a den of corruption and godlessness.  But others have thought our character needed deepening and widening via engagement with the arts and traditions of Europe and the West. Waves of American poets and thinkers made pilgrimages abroad in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, exiling themselves from what they saw as American narrow-mindedness.  Many are among the first rank of American writers: Henry James, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin.  It would be hard to imagine today’s America without them. 

In 2017 the City Council of Rome officially revoked Ovid’s banishment.^[19]

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^[1] Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. David Raeburn, Penguin Books, 2004.

^[2] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkI.php#anchor_Toc521049262, Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[3] Metamorphoses, Book III, lines 253-255.

^[4] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 7-8.

^[5] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 128-129.

^[6] Metamorphoses, Book VI, lines 130-132.  

^[7] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 186-187.

^[8] Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 218-219.

^[9] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 79-85.

^[10] Metamorphoses, Book X, lines 152-155.

^[11] Metamorphoses, Book XI, lines 15-17.

^[12] Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, pp. 73-74.

^[13] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 871-876.

^[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber

^[15] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 3-6.

^[16] Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 483-484.  

^[17] https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkIII.php, The Art of Love, transl. A.S. Kline, 2001

^[18] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, Vintage Books, 1978.  

^[19] The Guardian, “Ovid’s Exile to the Remotest Margins of the Roman Empire Revoked,” Dec. 16 2017  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/16/ovids-exile-to-the-remotest-margins-of-the-roman-empire-revoked