By Fred Bauer
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Do you know what time it is? It is the best of times, it
is the worst of times, it is a new golden age, it is an era of American
carnage, the radical left threatens the Constitution, the MAGA right endangers
Our Democracy, right-wing misinformation should be suppressed, left-wing hate
speech should face consequences.
Even as they battle with each other, elements of both the
“woke” and the “based” vanguards exhibit a disenchantment, bordering on
disgust, with the American regime. One side is allegedly awake to the
pervasiveness of systemic racism, Christian nationalism, and national ignominy.
The other claims to see the rotten basis of modern liberalism (whether the
infernal creator is William of Ockham, Martin Luther, or John Locke) and to
glimpse the brutal truths that bourgeois politics obscure.
Slighting the United States Constitution has become a
boutique industry for the legal left. The dean of the UC Berkeley School of
Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, opens his recent book No Democracy Lasts Forever with
the declaration that the Constitution “now itself threatens American
democracy.” In 2022, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks complained that “we
are essentially slaves to a document that was written more than 230 years ago
by a tiny group of white slave-owning men.” From vandalizing statues of Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to alleging that the United States was founded to
protect slavery, radicals on the left have tried to portray the United States
as fundamentally tainted.
But this thoroughgoing critique of the American project
has not been confined to one side of the ideological spectrum. One of the
leading “neoreactionary” theorists, Curtis Yarvin, appeared in New York not
long ago to defend the proposition that the United States “should be ruled by a
CEO dictator.” Online, battalions of Greek-statue avatars dismiss “All men are
created equal” as one of the originating heresies of American life, sneering at
the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
A revulsion at other Americans reinforces these radicals’
alienation from the American political order while also provoking refracted
apologia for political violence. Parts of the left moon over the alleged
hotness of the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and, as
Maya Sulkin documented for the Free Press in summer 2025, the murder of
Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner thrilled the downwardly mobile
intellectual lumpenproletariat. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination,
TikTok was clogged with celebratory dances, and there was something curious
about the excuse-making of the anti-anti-assassination crowd. Kirk’s death
should not be mourned, they said, because he was against affirmative action. Or
abortion. Or gun control. By the same logic, this segment of the left would
also presumably shrug at, say, the wholesale slaughter of tens of millions of
Americans who share Kirk’s views. A Gallup poll taken a few months after the
2023 Supreme Court ruling that struck down the use of racial preferences in
college admissions found that 68 percent of respondents approved of the
decision. That’s a lot of supposed hatemongers.
Kirk’s murder tempted some on the right with a different
variant of apocalypticism. “We can’t live with these people,” anons and
influencers crowed on X and elsewhere — “these people” being the other
political tribe. Their proposal of a “national divorce” from progressives is
more clickbait than serious politics. Not only was the last attempted “national
divorce,” between 1860 and 1865, a blood-soaked catastrophe, but that kind of
division is even less plausible now. Today’s political controversies lack any
dividing line as bright as the Mason–Dixon. “These people” are our neighbors,
family members, and co-workers. The lives of voters on the right and on the
left are as enmeshed as the red and blue threads of an American flag — and the
only way of separating them would be to destroy the flag.
This radical mood insists on the need for urgent action
to hack at the roots of American life (and maybe even modernity itself). Under
conditions of revolutionary struggle, neutrality is a myth — all that exist are
virtue and power. Maximilien Robespierre declared during the French Revolution:
“Subdue liberty’s enemies by terror, and you will be right, as founders of the
Republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against
tyranny.” The inconveniences of law and the chaff of personal freedoms must,
according to this worldview, be sacrificed for the despotism of the good over
the bad.
In this setting, the conservative might seem like the
most untimely figure. From the revolutionary perspective, the conservative’s
emphasis on process, restraint, and moderation might seem either hopelessly
naïve or complacently sinister. The American Constitution’s aim of tempering
political conflict is perhaps another reason for the revolutionaries’
frustration with it. However, it is as important as ever to recover some of
that conservative skepticism about a politics of vicious principle. Another contest
might now be even more urgent than the fierce clash between left and right: the
struggle between coherence and diffusion. Abetted by the incentive structures
of the internet, contemporary politics risks becoming a centrifuge of enmity in
which we cultivate boutique hatreds stylized as eternal principle.
We do not need to go back to the late 1700s to find
parallels to today or to illustrate the dangers of a politics of revolutionary
conflict. While the Baby Boom generation may have hit retirement age, the
hangover from the central moment of Boomer consciousness formation — the great
binge of the Sixties, when the supreme indulgence was not Mary Jane but moral
urgency — still lingers.
***
In his posthumous 1975 essay collection The Morality
of Consent, the legal scholar Alexander M. Bickel offered a probing
examination of the underlying logic of revolutionary conflict and turned to the
thinking of Edmund Burke to defend a more restrained politics. A stinging
critic of the revolutionary jurisprudence of the Warren Court, Bickel was a
heterodox proponent of judicial caution and an inspirational figure to some
legal conservatives. A young Samuel Alito even opted to go to Yale Law School
in part in the hope of studying with Bickel.
Bickel warned that the legal order had “heaved and
groaned for years under a prodigality of moral causes.” The “continuous assault
of moral imperatives” risked overwhelming that order. In his time and our own,
the whetstone of moral imperative — what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the
fierce urgency of now” — has sharpened social disagreement into culture war.
Bickel’s narrative of the Sixties is not a story of Aquarian idealism curdling
into Nixonian backlash. No, for Bickel, the Sixties liberals laid the groundwork
for Watergate by undermining confidence in the legal order. In his view,
Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren fixated above all on the criteria of
abstract justice: “Is it right? Is it good?” That abiding concern
with theoretical absolutes made the Warren Court an engine for social
revolution and architect of future political conflict. The “right to privacy”
formalized in Griswold v. Connecticut, for instance, not only overturned
many restrictions on birth control: it also made the courts ground zero for
discussions of sexual ethics over the next five decades. In turning the courts
into the ultimate arbiter of social policy, the Warren Court also transformed
the judicial-confirmation process. The scorched-earth 1987 campaign by
Democrats against the Supreme Court nomination of Bickel’s friend, Robert Bork,
injected a toxin into judicial-confirmation debates, but Warren had mixed the
poison decades earlier.
In Bickel’s diagnosis, the Nixon administration extended
and perfected the “populist” logic of Warren Court liberals:
It was utterly inevitable that
such a populist fixation should tend toward the concentration of power in that
single institution which has the most immediate link to the largest
constituency. Naturally the consequence was a Gaullist presidency, making war,
making peace, spending, saving, being secret, being open, doing what is
necessary, and needing no excuse for aggregating power to itself besides the
excuse that it could do more effectively what other institutions, particularly
Congress, did not do very rapidly or very well.
The swelling assertions on behalf of the presidency in
the 21st century have essentially been supplements to this creed. As Barack
Obama said, “Where Congress won’t act, I will.”
Revolutionary politics tend toward the centralization of
power, and various factions have seen in the presidency a powerful vehicle for
imposing top-down changes. But presidentialism is not the only mode of
extraordinary coercion. Bickel saw Watergate as the extension of the Sixties’
attack on institutions: it was “the latest assault in an age of assaultive
politics.” The unfolding of history has deepened but also complicated his
diagnosis. We now know that the “Deep Throat” of Watergate legend was not some
meek secretary or low-level staffer but W. Mark Felt, the second-in-command at
the FBI, whom Nixon had passed over for leadership of the bureau. Succeeded by
a collapse in public faith in American institutions and by retrenchment abroad,
Watergate might represent not the victory of the virtuous “system” over some
unique malefactor as much as an instance of the norm-busting struggle for power
between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.
No political bureaucracy, no matter how professionalized,
can ever be fully above or beyond politics. The age of populism has only
increased the salience of the bureaucracy as a political actor — both as a
punching bag for populists on the stump and as a technocratic rival for power.
During Donald Trump’s first term, elements of the federal bureaucracy engaged
in unprecedented efforts to undermine his presidency. The total war on Trump
culminated in a series of civilly radioactive and politically suicidal prosecutions
of the former (and future) president. Far from reinforcing our constitutional
institutions, the bureaucratic and legal wars against Trump have dramatically
widened the aperture of political combat.
Amid revolutionary struggle, Bickel’s proposition that
“the business of politics is not with theory and ideology but with
accommodation” seems like the most untimely of teachings. But necessary things
can seem untimely in that they stand aloof from the torrents of fashion.
Ideological revolutions continually betray their aims. The French Jacobins
trampled on the “Rights of Man,” and the Soviet bureaucracy crushed the dignity
of workers beneath its red heel. That record of betrayal might be surprising, yet
revolutionary combat often prioritizes harming “the enemy” over realizing its
supposed ideals. Perhaps the presiding rhetorical twitch of our own
annihilatory politics is the insistence on norms. Each side lays claim to the
same norms in prosecuting its war on the other. Both sides insist on the need
to pull out all the stops to protect “freedom of speech” or to resist the
“weaponization” of the justice system or to fight back against “stolen”
elections. A politics of moral imperative might therefore at times grow
indistinguishable from a nightmarish war of all against all, and cynicism may
be the natural ruler of the land characterized by the fierce urgency of now.
As a political order cannot entirely avoid the question
of the good, politics cannot be absolutely neutral. But it also cannot
simply be about ethical imperatives. Politics recognizes our need to live with
other human beings while also attending to the demands of the good. In the Politics,
Aristotle called human beings “political animals” in part because we deliberate
with one another about what is good or bad. Discourse with others — and not
just the friend/enemy distinction — is at the core of the political enterprise.
Echoing Aristotle 2,000 years later, the Jesuit political theorist John
Courtney Murray claimed that “the distinctive bond of the civil multitude is
reason.” But other loyalties play a role as well: “Every particular society is
a creature of the soil; it springs from the physical soil of earth and from the
more formative soil of history. Its existence is sustained by loyalties that
are not logical.” This is politics not simply as coercion but as living
together in the hope of human flourishing.
The ascent of populism underlines how rationality alone
cannot be a basis for a political order; the demands of culture and place
matter, too, in part by fostering those “loyalties that are not logical.”
However, a certain civic infrastructure can be an important vehicle for that
shared life. Political institutions, legal processes, and personal liberties
are among the inheritances to which we can feel a sense of loyalty, and they
can help manage conflict in a country as vast and quarrelsome as the United States.
The favored agents for revolutionary change today — the
CEO dictator or the faceless bureaucracy — seem ill-suited for American life
and for the preservation of human dignity. The Constitution’s layers of
institutions may be a better fit for the country as we find it, and prudent
policymakers may be better off reinforcing the Constitution rather than junking
it. The clunkiness of the federal system encourages a political
decentralization that can, in fact, discipline our political conflicts. The
multivariate elections of the American regime channel our bitter disagreements
while also making it very hard for any single faction to gain total power. The
liberties that frustrate ideologues and idolaters of strength afford a common
ground for Americans. Contrary to proponents of maximal political conflict,
finding ways of living together is not a betrayal of politics but a fulfillment
of one of its highest duties.
On a practical level, the politics of revolutionary
struggle has often proven self-defeating, too. Time and time again, temporary
majorities have sabotaged themselves by accelerating what they see as the
urgent arc of history; that urgency licenses wild divergences from the
mainstream of American politics and sets those majorities up for an electoral
reckoning. Joe Biden’s battle for the “soul of the nation” caused his White
House to embrace toxic positions on identity politics and immigration — and paved
the way for the Democratic defeat in 2024. If, as revolutionaries claim, the
stakes are really so high, then prudence and broad coalition-building might in
fact be the order of the day.
In his letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport,
R.I., George Washington glimpsed the potential of a nation that realized the
promise of e pluribus unum. While “diversity is our strength” has become the
rhetorical equivalent of empty calories, Washington’s vision of the United
States as a country that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no
assistance” retains an electric charge.
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