Can individualism survive the new age of mob rule?

If you are expecting a rousing paean to democracy here, perhaps with a little liberal nod in the direction of free speech and general toleration and other liberal-democratic pieties that you may imagine to be central to my theme here, then you are going to be disappointed. I come not to praise democracy but to bury it. And I don’t mean just the vulgar majoritarianism of the Barack Obama “I won” variety. I mean the basic, fundamental thing: the idea that public institutions approach perfection the more closely they approximate the fickle and ignorant demands of the demos, and approach glory in greater degree the more ruthlessly they subject the members of a society to the Rousseauean “general will,” that great fiction that has proved itself such a convenient enabler of savagery, that anybody should give the furry crack of a rat’s patootie what blockheads think just because the blockheads exist and walk around on real estate adjacent to our own.

When libertarians gag on the name Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we cough up that of John Stuart Mill. We libertarians lean pretty heavily on Mill and his “Harm Principle,” which is usually summarized in the cliché: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” The musty ol’ Harm Principle is Libertarianism 101: If you aren’t willing to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the matter, then you probably shouldn’t support passing a law against it, because all that means is that you are deputizing somebody else to stick a gun in somebody’s face over the issue.

But there is more to society, and to the politics of a society, than formal government per se, and there is a great deal of social space to explore between “legally permitted” and “legally prohibited.”

Thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s recent rediscovery of the First Amendment, there is little active governmental censorship in these United States, and relatively little prospect of it. But, as the late Andrew Breitbart famously put it, “politics is downstream from culture.” The explicitly and more robustly democratic organs of government, particularly the presidency and the House of Representatives, respond quickly (and, very often, cravenly) to the tiniest variations in the political currents of the hour. It should be understood as axiomatic in democratic politics that the pond moves the scum, not the other way around. But the unelected and theoretically apolitical organs of government are moved by the culture as well.

Mill was rightly worried about the encroachments of government, about the need for formal limitations on governmental powers, the “tyranny of the majority,” and the other inevitable abuses of democracy. But he, like Friedrich Hayek and Erich Fromm a century later, was also deeply worried about informal illiberalism, the nongovernmental suppression of ideas, discourse, and social experimentation by a ruthlessly if unofficially enforced conformism.

Twenty-first-century politics is dominated by nostalgia for the postwar years, what we might think of as the Eisenhower Settlement. In the postwar years, Democrats retreated a bit from the radicalism of the 1930s and came to focus their domestic agenda on preserving and gradually expanding the New Deal, a position that Republicans grudgingly came around to accept themselves. While there were several postwar recessions, the 1950s and 1960s were a time of significant and steady economic growth, strong employment, security, and optimism. There were relatively broad consensuses on both foreign and domestic affairs. The postwar years were unique in ways that cannot be replicated (U.S. industry was unchallenged at the apex because the other great industrial powers were smoldering ruins, their factories having been repurposed for war or blown to smithereens, their work forces decimated, and their societies turned upside-down) and, even so, our national memory of them is inaccurate and romanticized. Very few Americans in our time would willingly accept a 1957 standard of living if it were offered.

But the myth of the postwar generation, that any man willing to work could go down to the local factory and get a good manufacturing job that would support his family in a comfortable middle-class manner, remains our master political narrative. The longing for a restoration of the Eisenhower Settlement can be heard on Right and Left, from Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren. What they long for is not the median household income (which was in inflation-adjusted terms about half what it is today) or the tax burden (in practice almost exactly what it is today, despite the radical changes in statutory rates) but the certainty that, as the labor historian Frank Tannenbaum describes it, an American could understand himself as “a member of an integrated society” that “protected and raised the dignity of the individual and gave each person his own special role.” The deficit that our populists perceive is a social and spiritual one and not a fiscal one. When they speak of their desire to Make America Great Again or to build “an economy that works for everyone,” what they are speaking to is the longing for solidarity. The Trump movement, like the “welfare chauvinists” in Europe who are its fellow travelers, have made this desire more explicit and presented it in a more dramatic way, and they have successfully connected it to the sense of a unitary national interest, whereas the populists on the Left are somewhat hobbled by their politics of universal particularism: Make Partially Disabled Lesbians of Color Employed in the Public Sector Great Again is a different kind of proposition.

Our nostalgia has precedent. Fromm believed that the wrenching transition from the stable and predictable (if poor and miserable) economic life of the Middle Ages to the first grasping Renaissance attempts at constructing something that we might recognize as modern capitalism caused a spiritual and political crisis in Europe, as the economic status (and, probably more important, the social status) of everybody from serfs to the bourgeoisie to the secular and ecclesiastic aristocracy was suddenly up for renegotiation. The newly liberated people of Europe were in reality terrified by their new liberty, because it caused them to be disconnected from their familiar modes of life and introduced them to new kinds of economic and status anxiety. Fromm concluded in Escape From Freedom: “The individual was left alone and isolated. He was free.”

Those lonely and isolated, involuntary pioneers of modernity sought new life-defining values from alternative sources, and new kinds of community in which to dissolve their individualism and relieve themselves of its burdens. In Fromm’s view, the Reformation was as much a reaction against the Renaissance as it was an indictment of deficiencies in Catholic doctrine and practice. The Protestant emphasis on submission to God in His complete sovereignty offered a new kind of lordship, a new North Star by which to navigate the mysteries of a newly cosmopolitan world. “Protestantism was the answer to the human needs of the frightened, uprooted, and isolated individual who had to orient and to relate himself to a new world,” Fromm wrote, noting that Protestantism, especially its more fanatical expression, found its strongest purchase in the urban bourgeoisie, the most thoroughly deracinated Europeans of the time.

Hayek picks up the ball a few centuries later, faced not with the birth of capitalism but with its evolution into its 20th-century form, dominated by large, complex Organizations: big corporations in the private sector, big bureaucracies in the public and semi-public sectors. The critical change in Hayek’s view was the displacement of small-proprietorship and other forms of self-employment by the rise of salaried corporate employment as the norm. (William Whyte would explore this phenomenon at great length in The Organization Man.) Hayek, with his characteristic astringency and intelligent antimajoritarianism, argues that the vast masses of salaried workers need the independently wealthy propertied classes in ways that they do not understand.

Hayek’s conception of society is the opposite of the cartoon version of libertarianism often put forward by opponents of the philosophy. Hayek’s society is not a cloud of hermetically sealed-off individuals who interact with one another only when they need something. It is a complex network of delicate relationships, many of which have benefits that are not immediately apparent to their beneficiaries. Hayekian society is an organic whole in which the constituents need one another and benefit from one another, and go terribly wrong when they ignore or misunderstand this arrangement.

The American founders understood what democracy really is, which is why they feared and loathed that blind idiot god. The Founding Fathers understood the dangers of democracy from the Roman example, among others. They were well-read in the Greek and Roman classical literature, in which many of them no doubt encountered the concept of “ochlocracy,” (ὀχλοκρατία), or what we call today “mob rule.”

One of the important lessons of the Roman example is that the formal arrangements of government do not matter greatly compared to the political norms and cultural habits of the time. Constitutions come and go, statutes may be overturned or flouted, but the mob is eternal. Ochlocracy is ochlocracy, whether it arises from an Athenian democracy, a Roman republic, a Roman empire, a French revolutionary regime, or the avuncular mass-murder/mass-psychosis rape junta of Chairman Mao and his wild bunch. Ochlocracy sometimes comprises illegal and nongovernmental actions (e.g., lynch mobs) or using threats or violence to intimidate private parties into compliance with the mob’s political demands, but it often consists in nongovernmental actors’ bullying or intimidating the official organs of government or public institutions into following some particular course of action, frequently murderous throughout history, though it generally stops well short of that in the tepid times in which we live. Its main efforts in the early years of the 21st century have been focused on the corporate employment and institutionalist mindset that so concerned Hayek and Fromm.

As Whyte argues in The Organization Man, the prime directive of the Organization, be it a corporation or a church, is to avoid internal conflict. Conflict interferes with the smooth functioning of the Organization in pursuit of its secular aims, but it also inhibits the Organization’s metaphysical purpose, providing meaning and belonging in an uncertain world, acting in effect as a society in miniature in which the deracinated individual may strive after a life that is integrated economically, intellectually, socially, and, inevitably, politically. In that sense, the corporation becomes an analog for what the church was and what the state, especially the totalitarian state, has been: a welder of wills, an aggregator and deputy of the general will, an Organization that is dedicated not only to the pursuit of particular secular business goals but to a transcendent and all-encompassing mode of life.

The Organization incorporates the reconciled individual and conforms him to itself to remove conflict — sanctification by bureaucracy. Whyte notes that the same quasi-religious striving after belonging has characterized Organizations ranging from labor unions to churches to corporations.

A particularly fruitful point of comparison here is the university, with its ancient imperative to educate the “whole man.” Universities are hothouses of ochlocracy not only because they are the antechambers to power and influence but because of the nature of the institution itself, which is dedicated to the cultivation of holistic flourishing, and the goal holistic flourishing provides the pretext for holistic discipline. Hence the arrogation of quasi-police powers to various campus inspectors and committees of inquiry. Moral and intellectual homogeneity is a precondition of the comprehensively holistic communion with the Organization, the cultivation and ensuring of which is the Organization’s transcendent purpose.

The individual, the smallest minority, is a constant source of conflict. The individual cannot be assimilated into the Organization entirely because resisting such assimilation is in the individual’s nature.

And that gets up the noses of certain people.

Among people who are morally and (to the modest extent that they are capable) intellectually committed to seeking after belonging and forging “a society unified and purged of conflict,” the individual will always, necessarily, be the sabot in the Jacquard loom, the sand in the gears, the pebble in the big social shoe. People who dedicate their lives to finding idols before which they may abase themselves — the cult of intersectionality, identity politics, the Make America Great Again jihad, race and/or sex and other demographic features, nationalism, socialism, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, organized homosexuality, the Bernie Sanders movement, animal rights, veganism, Crossfit, whatever — cannot abide the presence of those who decline to abase themselves before that idol or, short of that, any idol. The parallel case here is that of the relatively orthodox and observant Catholics and Jews who have in the early 21st century discovered that they have far more in common with one another than they do with casual secularists, agnostics, or atheists. True believers believe truly, and what they hold in common isn’t that which they believe but that they believe.

Fanaticism in politics does not come from a deep and abiding belief in the idol. It comes from the deep and abiding need to submit to something. The shame the political idolaters rightly feel at this is reconstituted, through the wondrous interaction of rage and stupidity, as the takfiri impulse which is the puritanical obsession with identifying infidels, hunting them down, and punishing them. The takfiri tendency currently dominates conservative-oriented broadcasting, which is a kind of endless and repetitive radio drama with a single storyline: “They betrayed us!” Sometimes this infidel-hunting is done online, through social-media mobs, and sometimes it is done with fire and blood, as in the case of the literal mobs of blackshirts who enforce political conformity through political violence while declaring themselves — they are absolutely immune to irony — “anti-fascists.”

Democracy, properly understood and properly deployed, is an exclusively procedural consideration. It is in the Kingdom of Means. It has procedural value not because we believe in equality — the American concept of “equality before the law” describes the functioning of American institutions, not the character of the American people — and not because we believe that everyone deserves to have his say, that all voices must be heard.

We rely on procedural democracy as a substitute for violence. It is how we ensure a minimum of accountability in our government: If we do not like how our lawmakers and representatives are behaving, we can relieve them of their duties and choose new ones. Procedural democracy is a convenience. It pacifies the chimps in the electorate and gives us an alternative to ritual combat for the chimps in office.

Democracy as a social ethic is something else entirely. The implicit proposal that human beings have more value in corporation, that masses grow more valuable and more legitimate the larger they are and the more demanding they grow, and that the individual must always in the end be answerable to the collective is pure barbarism — it is might-makes-right thinking metastasized from authoritarian political principle to authoritarian cult. It is a virtual guarantee of social and cultural stagnation, ugliness, stupidity, repression, bigotry, illiberalism, narrow-mindedness and, inevitably, violence. It is the cult of the modern primitive, whose object of veneration is the modern primitive himself.

The violence, such as it is, is almost a relief. There is a certain bracing honesty and directness in a black-masked goon firebombing a campus building in Berkeley in order to keep a celebrity-hungry Kentish homosexual from giving a speech. That violence will grow less refreshing and more dreary as it becomes more common, but, for the moment, the authentic mob is marginally less obnoxious than the sniveling one the festers on social media and simpers in corporate offices. A riot is honest.

Foreseeing our current culture, ritually disfigured and lobotomized by everything from social media to the kangaroo courts that mete out “social justice” on college campuses to the intellectual and moral non-entities who run the corporate human-resources departments, Whyte wrote: “Hell is no less hell for being antiseptic.”

Kevin D. Williamson is the roving correspondent for National Review and author of The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in an Age of Mob Politics, from which this is adapted.