About that Samuels Article...

A callback to Machiavelli’s meditation on the problem of “lukewarmness”

David Samuel’s recent Tablet article “Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment” is generating a lot of buzz, and deservedly so. It offers a powerful “field theory” of the subtle grand strategy of the Obama years to divide America and advance the fortunes of the cultural left. He thinks that with the 2024 election, “the fever broke.” He is not the only person who is advancing this hypothesis. As the Wall Street Journal’s news pages reported last week:

“The progressive moment is over—at least for now. This past year showed that the progressive politics that dominated most industrialized countries over the past two decades or more is shifting to the right, fueled by working-class anxieties over the economy and immigration, and growing fatigue with issues from climate change to identity politics.”

Or see Frank Furedi, writing in Compact:

The populist moment of 2024 was a long time coming. Its influence has been growing in Europe since the turn of the century. According to a 2022 study conducted by more than 100 political scientists for the security firm Solace Global, around 32 percent of Europeans had voted for anti-establishment parties. This was a significant increase from 20 percent in the early 2000s and 12 percent in the early 1990s.

But it leaves the question: what caused the fever to spread so quickly in the first place?

I have long embraced the theory that the decisive turning point toward the progressive freak-out (better known by the shorthand “wokeness”) occurred during Obama’s presidency, especially in his second term, and that it was his intent to fan the flames of cultural division as a power-grabbing opportunity. There is empirical support for this proposition: Phil Magness, Zach Goldberg, Musa al-Gharbi, Eric Kaufmann, and others have quantified how suddenly and dramatically the woke vocabulary of racism, oppression, “white supremacy,” “safe spaces,” “intersectionality,” “Latinx,” and related terms exploded into use in both academia and the mainstream media around 2013 or 2014. It was around this time that the radical dogmas behind this vocabulary, long resident on campuses, broke out of the campus boundaries into the mainstream of American life, often settling into corporate HR departments, and, needless to say, DEI bureaucracies everywhere.

As a product of post-1960s education, Obama was fully steeped in leftist post-modernist thought, which champions cultural conflict over class conflict. In other words, Obama wasn’t merely engaged in hyperbole when he said he wanted to “fundamentally transform America.” But he was careful not to leave fingerprints. His methods were subtle, likely because he feared that something like the Trumpian populist backlash might happen.

Samuel’s article lays out a richly layered and detailed explanation of how the confluence of new digital technology that wiped out legacy media, along with powerful new data mining and message targeting tools, enabled Obama and the Democratic Party’s activist cadres to dominate the formation and spread of “acceptable” public opinion. Some key samples:

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which [Walter] Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. . .

At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s—one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.

The result of this onslaught, however, was an inevitable backlash at some point, though it required a disruptive catalyst to take shape:

Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

I won’t try to summarize Samuels’ full account here—interested readers should read the whole thing. There is a lot of deep history in Samuels’ account, but in the climax of the article he settles ultimately on how three people provided that catalyst to disrupt The Machine: Musk, Trump, and . . . Benjamin Netanyahu.

Musk’s role in the turnaround is obvious, as is Trump’s. I still think the best short explanation of the Trump effect comes from my pal Glenn Ellmers, writing in Chronicles a few months ago:

Trump’s bombastic candor is actually a deeper form of truth-telling. The secret of his appeal, which the left finds both baffling and infuriating, is found precisely in those sweeping overstatements that are not only legitimate but necessary in our present circumstances. Trump exaggerates because he needs to overcorrect for, and thereby overcome, the daily barrage of official orthodoxy that suffocates our common sense. Ordinary Americans seem to grasp that he amplifies, simplifies, and clarifies because it’s the only way to pierce the relentless propaganda of the establishment.

As for Netanyahu, Samuels points out that he has redrawn the entire strategic outlook in the Middle East in the blink of an eye, against ferocious American and European opposition:

Netanyahu has provided history with one of the very few examples of an isolated local client redrawing the strategic map of the region against the will of a dominant global power. . .

Regardless of their faults, all three men shared a common trait at a critical moment in history—they trusted their own stubbornness against the mirror world of digitally based conformity. The human future rests on individuals in all walks of life and representing all parties and all currents of opinion being brave and independent-minded enough to make that same choice.

I’m tempted to go a step further and say that we are living in a Churchillian moment. Samuels wonders if it can last. I have already warned here, in “No Time for Complacency,” that the left is irrepressible and will regroup for renewed assault on our civilization. Samuels is right to ask us this question.

In my remarks to Italian students last month in Florence, I took as my theme that “The Era of Lukewarmness Is Over,” that is, voters are not lukewarm about the failure of governments today, and want serious disruption. This does not guarantee success. I took as my text—since I was in Italy after all—the famous passage about the dangers of “new modes and orders” from chapter 6 of Machiavelli’s Prince:

And it should be considered that nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders. For the introducer has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders. This lukewarmness arises partly from fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and party from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have come to have firm experience of them. Consequently, whenever those who are enemies have opportunity to attack, they do so with partisan zeal, and the others defend lukewarmly so that one is in peril along with them.

If I am right that the era of “lukewarmness” is over, then there is a chance that a new order may succeed. Happy new year, though in a larger sense the real new year doesn’t begin until January 20.