Red Pill, Blue Pill

The Crisis in Political Theory

This and all artworks below by Daniel Zvereff

§1. Like so much of what we contend with in everyday life, professional decorum is a mixed blessing. Political theory, like every other academic discipline, cannot proceed without the decorum of shared suppositions. And no academic discipline can sustain itself unless from time to time its practitioners raise awkward first-order questions about what they are doing and why. Both activities are necessary; attending to both simultaneously is difficult. No athlete can compete within the rules of the game and at the same time question the rules of that game. Paralysis sets in. So, too, with the academic athlete. This is an ancient problem, first identified by Plato in the Republic¹. No activity in mortal life, academic or otherwise, is exempt. We get lost in what we are doing, and lose sight of the suppositions that undergird our understanding and our actions. Most of mortal life, Plato thought, consisted of evading the difficult first-order questions about what we are doing and why. Competing in the game, whatever its sometimes immense challenges may be, is less discomforting than asking why we are playing it. Invoking the distinction made famous by the movie, The Matrix—and re-popularized as a meme in recent years—working within the rules of the game involves taking the blue pill, while wondering whether the game is worth playing, and whether some deeper insight is possible, involves ingesting the red pill.

§2. Is political theory stuck in a blue pill rut? Am I raising a problem in the discipline that does not exist? After all, the discipline of political theory, like every other social science and natural science discipline, is humming along, producing more and more “literature” every year. Is that not proof of its health? The honest assessment would be that the literature it produces is useful only to those already playing the academic game, or to the graduate students who will soon join in. Evermore production in the academic world, ever less purchase on the world. A glut in one respect, poverty in another. From the vantage point of the academic consumer, abundance; from the vantage of everyday citizens, scarcity. As political theory simultaneously proliferates and withers, where, in our colleges and universities, is the most necessary first-order question about the enterprise of political theory being raised? The discipline of political theory is humming along. Those outside its guild-network hear only noise, if they listen at all.

§3. Political theory is not now what it was even three decades ago, though the signs of its growing fatigue and impending irrelevance were evident even then. I write this as a teacher and practitioner in a field to which I have formally dedicated over four decades. It is a field that, along with theology, I continue to believe is the most important enterprise in the human sciences. I have, however, avoided the field’s journals and annual conventions for the last two decades. For citizens and the broader reading public, they have become arcane and useless. Thinking that this problem was a grave one, I turned my attention instead to writing political theory for the broader reading public, and to teaching and building universities in the Middle East, in the vain hope that there in distant lands the failures that had become so evident in American colleges and universities might be avoided or delayed. Three decades ago, the capture of the political science journals by hermetically sealed epistemic communities, each with distinct and immiscible political commitments was well underway. The annual and regional meetings of the APSA (American Political Science Association) had become choreographed affairs, purporting to represent conflicting “interest groups” within the field. In fact, however, the vibrant if at times dangerous faction-pluralism of the sort James Madison had observed and written about in Federalist No. 10² had already disappeared from our disciplinary guild. The APSA, like most of our colleges and universities, had become the academic arm of the Democratic National Committee, and tolerated little real dissent. The Claremont Institute, formal gatherings of Straussians, the Voegelin Society—the APSA accommodates these on the margins of its annual meeting. No member of these groups ever seriously entertains the prospect of taking a leadership role in the APSA. It is unthinkable. Their deepest professional fear is that the beautiful gardens they have cultivated will be destroyed by the hostile alien power that the APSA has become. Taxed with annual fees, occasionally harassed, and begrudgingly tolerated; they are the marginalized minority communities of the APSA Ottoman Empire.

§4. It is a forgivable error that other disciplines in the humanities do not grasp the searing twentieth century lesson that when a state is controlled by one faction, things do not go well. But that among political scientists and political theorists this lesson has been ignored or gaslit is unconscionable. Should we not expect that grown men and women, with high priest-like knowledge of politics, would be vigilant defenders of political pluralism, that they would resist one-party control of their very discipline? Yes, we should. We should expect from them a fierce defense of political pluralism in the colleges and universities in which they find their homes. Rare exceptions aside—the AFA from Princeton; courage at the University of Chicago—that has not happened. Far from being a light that shines in the darkness, the discipline of political science and the APSA guild that effectively coordinates it have marched onward into the darkness towards single-party control. Its Democratic Party activist-agenda at the undergraduate level has now swelled the ranks of political science and political theory graduate students and young professors. Little wonder then, that the collective action issue that most consumes its members, aside from “saving our democracy,” is which hotels in which cities have a high enough righteousness score— are they “carbon neutral,” what is their policy on LGBTQIA+ issues, does their state limit abortion, etc. —to merit hosting the annual and regional meetings. When a single party rules, its audacity consists in believing it can control everything it touches, and in insisting that everything it cannot control must be shunned or purged. If I am overly attuned to this perverse arrangement, it is because I contended with this brutality of mind in Kurdistan while building the American University of Iraq from 2008-10. There and elsewhere around the world, politics is a winner-take-all game. The United States, and the colleges and Universities it contains, profess to be different. We have lost that privileged distinction.

§5. I do not conclude from this state of affairs that “scholarship” is the healthy antidote to DNC activism in political science and political theory. Bearing in mind that there is always a kernel of truth in what we oppose, I confess a not-so-secret sympathy with the “activists.” To their credit, they know that something has gone wrong, and seek a way forward in a discipline that displays never-ending motion but no genuine movement. The mind-numbing churn in the secondary and tertiary literature, the low-risk strategy in the academic world of preferring interesting derivative arguments rather than important first order arguments—the activists clearly see these two indicators of disciplinary dis-ease, and they want no part of it. The activists intimate that political theory has become yet another library science that sequesters scholars away from politics even as they write incessantly about it. The activists seek immediacy; they seek the thing itself.

§6. The altered landscape of graduate education over the past four decades is partly to blame for the current state of affairs. First, there is now what could be called the intellectual ecosystem problem, by which I mean the ever-diminishing presence of what makes the “uni” in “university” possible, namely, a rough canon of books with which all of its members must engage, however coarsely. The abolition of the Dead-White-Man-Canon has deprived graduate students of a set of governing questions and provisional answers, and this loss has meant there is no reality-check on scholarship. In a healthy intellectual ecosystem, weeds do not grow. They proliferate only in disturbed habitats. Eventually, it is impossible to discern what the native growth even is. Second, the push to complete a Ph.D. in four or five years and to reduce attrition along the way has effectively ruled out bold and ambitious thinking among graduate students. This would be a less formidable problem if it were understood that they should aim higher later in their career. The unfortunate fact is that once the habit of thinking-writ-small takes hold, it is not easily broken. Moreover, when the announced intention of a graduate program is to get everyone through, scarce faculty time that might have been otherwise devoted to helping a lone super-star advance must be directed in some measure to students who in an earlier age would have been asked to leave the program. Third, there is a growing “ethos” problem. The simple and perhaps overstated way to put this is that courage and risk have been supplanted by an admixture of fear and empathy. Visiting lectures and job talks at our best universities four decades ago were academic versions of Celebrity Death Match. It was expected that one of the two warriors in the arena would be bloodied or slain. Anything akin to that is unthinkable today. Our graduate students are taught, above all else, fear and empathy: fear that they will not get a job if they aim too high, or that they will not get a job no matter where they aim; and empathy for the struggles, obstacles, and suffering they, their fellow-graduate students, and the world’s innocent victims daily endure. The secret that few want to acknowledge is that faculty advising has increasingly drifted into psychological counseling. Those who refuse to transform their offices into intake clinics are seen as callous and insensitive to graduate student “needs.” The solitary scholar of old has been replaced. Because that path today is too lonely, too risky, too frightening, we now have “collaborative learning.” It takes a village. Once faculty told graduate students that the ideas in their essays were wrong; now seminars throughout the academic year are dedicated to helping graduate students improve their writing. Because their ideas are considered to be unassailable, only further clarification of their tender ideas is required. The vicious cycle of cause and effect this pandering and handholding produces is unsurprising: those disposed to the ethos of fear and empathy increasingly populate our graduate programs and faculty rosters; those inclined to courage and risk do not apply, or leave early. Soon, the entire profession is transformed. Fourth, there is the “who says” problem. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America³ that citizens of the future will only trust in the authority of their own experience. A century-and-a-half later, Christopher Lasch saw the pathological culmination of this development in Culture of Narcissism⁴. When we abandon textual deference altogether, we do not get responsible critique and brilliant breakthroughs; instead we get Selfie Political Theory, in which seminal authors from the political theory canon serve as a backdrop for Me-Me-Me. In the 1980s, any job talk that began with, “I want to argue that . . .” would have been met with howls of laughter and derision, because the first task of political theory was understood to be textual exposition, not personal confession. By the early 2000s, that had changed entirely, and theorists were told—and came to believe—that four years of dabbling in a Ph.D. program justified wandering through the grocery aisle of ideas, gathering whatever they found there to make a meal of their own devising, and then forcing others to eat it at no-exit APSA Panels or at mandatory job talks. This short list of formidable impediments is not exhaustive, but it is long enough to prompt sobriety about the current pathway to professional success in political theory. What political theory once was, and what I think it must again be to thrive, I will consider below, in §12. But first, a survey of the crippled and crippling political theory stratagems that have emerged in the aftermath of the loss, ignorance, or renunciation of the true power of political theory.

§7. Archeology. What lies beneath and behind the world that political science measures? Should we rethink the surface world that numbers reveal in light of what political theorists reveal? This is an interesting question in itself, but in the hands of political theorists who always seem to need to justify what they are doing in political science departments, it offers a way to serve political science without challenging it. An empirical study of the Presidency? Would not an exposition of Tocqueville’s theory of the concentration of legislative power in the democratic age, and his endorsement of Jefferson’s remark that “the tyranny of the executive lies in the future,”⁵ be helpful? An empirical study of political representation? Certainly the strange and provocative passages in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan⁶, which work out the first modern theory of representation, will enrich such a study, to which might be added J.S. Mill’s nineteenth century reflections on the same subject⁷. In these and a myriad of other instances, political theorists satisfy themselves that the quantitative world their empirical political scientist colleagues measure is brought to life and ennobled by the arguments in the books they themselves have mastered. I suspect that most political theorists secretly think that their own investigations are superior to those of their empirically-minded colleagues. Their minority status in political science departments, however, means they must publicly content themselves with making the case that their research is a necessary supplement to empirical political science. That survival strategy—that is what it is—I submit, is a colossal mistake. As computing power accelerates, as Big Data and AI captivate the imagination and inebriate the minds of empirical political scientists, they are finding fewer and fewer reasons to retain the bookish political theory eccentrics in their department whose annoyance consists of reminding them that ideas incapable of being rendered in terms of dependent and independent variables nevertheless matter.

§8. The deep-mining of partisan issues. As the field of political science welcomes evermore left-leaning “activists” into its ranks, not a few political theorists have entered into the fray. Some have done this because they think it the only way to get published; others, because they seek to make a stodgy book-bound subfield relevant, expansive, and timely. Political theory has always been tainted by faction, but the aspiration—sometimes the pretense—has been that theorists somehow rise above it. If they were once baldly partisan, it was episodic and with reservation. That was because notwithstanding the deep political divides that often separated political theorists, a nearly univocal understanding obtained that their differences would be adjudicated using the canonical texts of great authors as proxies. Underneath the academic pyrotechnics, of course, the political differences were personal—but they did not get personal. Academic debate was thus raised to that rarified but necessary elevation where ideological hackery and mean-spirited intolerance was an unwelcome intrusion. In political theory today, these are no longer an unwelcome intrusion, but rather an emerging norm, and this for three reasons. First, without the proxy provided by canonical texts, the attenuating mechanism such texts provide is absent. The academic with a partisan axe to grind, say, about immigration, was once compelled to position that topic within the larger framework of a canonical author’s overarching theory, thus linking it to a contestable theory of how the world works, about which any number of critiques might be offered. In short, attentiveness to canonical authors militated against ideological purity and posturing. It may be argued that the focus on topics—immigration, race, women, representation, sovereignty, etc.—is a legitimate way of doing political theory. I do not doubt this is the case if that enterprise is undertaken as a supplement rather than a substitute for the study of canonical works. That is not what has happened, however, and this directs us to the second reason, namely, that once you step away from the topics lurking in those canonical texts, there is no reason not to replace them entirely with all too contemporary partisan-inspired political topics—diversity, equity, inclusion, unconscious bias, toxic masculinity, etc.—with a view, now, to parsing which texts and which authors are acceptable to the ideologically enlightened partisans in power. These first two reasons why ideological hackery and mean-spirited intolerance have become acceptable in political theory are in some measure a consequence of the truncated education that graduate training now consists in, as I indicated above in §6. Grind graduate students through the Ph.D. mill in four or five years and you will produce scholars who are ill-equipped to engage with canonical texts, and who therefore must lower their sights and investigate a “topic” instead. The third reason is organizational: through omission and commission, academics whose research agenda is, for lack of a better word, “canonical,” are a dying minority, who almost nowhere can put together a three-person dissertation committee suitable for an upcoming generation of graduate students who wish to tend the beautiful cultivated canonical gardens that they, too, have come to love. It is not difficult to imagine that the ideological self-assurance witnessed today at APSA Panels and at job talks would be much more muted if the field of political theory was not dominated by one faction. Confirmation bias is real. Those guilty of it are always the last to know.

The field of political theory originated as an attempt to decipher the crisis of modernity through a deep reading of canonical texts. That is what distinguished it from the sort of scholarship on politics undertaken in history and in philosophy departments. Today, a large portion of the work in political theory involves the deep-mining of partisan issues, with a view to remaining politically relevant, or for the purpose of cleaning up the canon, or remaking it, so that it passes the ideological purity test. In a word, political theorists are encouraged, but never forced, to accept the categories of the APSA academic uni-Party, whose ideologically vetted, fear-and-empathy driven elites annually alert dues-paying political theory minority community members of the latest cause célèbre—“saving our democracy,” “the authoritarian threat,” “climate change”—over which crumbs they must grovel and undertake “research” so that they may be permitted to climb the tenure ladder. If they refuse, they either consign themselves to the dusty outlands where Claremonsters, Straussians, Voegelinians, and assorted other malcontents live out their days, or else suffer professional oblivion.

§9. Prodigal Son Theorizing. Political theorists do more than try to convince their empirical colleagues of their worth. When they turn away from the method-prison in which their scientific colleagues’ dwell, they engage one another on a number of fronts. One such front is prodigal son theorizing. The prodigal son of biblical fame leaves his father’s house, squanders his inheritance, and returns home only when he is reduced to “feasting on husks of corn.”⁸ In political theory, this mode of thinking—defection, decay, homeward turn—appears in a number of guises: in the defense of “originalism” in legal theory; in the ongoing squabbles about whether the liberalism of John Locke⁹ is coherent without its Christian framing; in certain Roman Catholic critiques of modernity (more on this below, in §10); and in analyses of ancient political theory that compare (high) ancient virtue with (low) modern self-interest, and impugn the latter. However much these arguments differ in their objects and in their conclusions, they all suppose that the task of political theory is to recover seminal ideas that have been lost, obscured, or wrongly rejected. What is at stake, these theorists aver, is whether our polis—or, on a grander scale, our civilization—can be refreshed or renewed. This concern, first coherently raised in the mid-eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “First Discourse,”¹⁰ redounds to the present day. About this, political scientists can and do say nothing, because their method-prison precludes them from posing any grand questions. Many of the members of the ‘marginalized communities of the APSA Ottoman Empire,’ mentioned in §3 above, do this sort of work. It is important work. But it is work that failed to capture the imagination of the undergraduate and graduate students who these scholars teach. The fact that it hasn’t calls out for an explanation.

§10. Playing the Aristotle card. We must pause here to consider an important special case. I mentioned above (in §9), that the field of political theory emerged out of the attempt to make sense of the crisis of modernity through the lens of canonical texts. If we were pressed to offer a singular account of the intellectual precondition for the emergence of modernity, it would be the utter rejection of Aristotle, whose ideas had been the foundation stone on which the edifice of the Roman Catholic Middle Ages were built. Whether in the Reformation thought of Martin Luther¹¹, in the proto-liberal thought of Hobbes¹², or in the preliminary scientific ruminations of Francis Bacon¹³, the modern conclusion was univocal: Aristotle had to go; the world was not ordered teleologically, as he had argued. Religion, politics, and science will now take a different path. Not surprisingly, a distinctive vector of the crisis-of-modernity political theory corpus has supposed that the reason modernity is in crisis has been its mistaken rejection of Aristotle. Modernity, in a word, has been a philosophical error. The crisis of modernity can be attributed to the fact that it was built on a faulty foundation—and the corollary: insofar as the modern project has endured at all, it has been because modernity has either secretly incorporated Aristotle into its underpinnings or relied on the residual echoes of Aristotelian thought that could not be expunged to prop it up.

To the outside observer, this detour into Aristotle may seem odd and unnecessary. Cast a wider glance toward American culture since World War II and the broader significance of what I have described comes into view. It would be an understatement to say that Protestant America has not always been welcoming to European Roman Catholics. Since the publication in 1960 of John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths¹⁴, however, Roman Catholics have found an intellectual home in America. With the senescence of the mainline Protestant churches in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, they became America’s fiercest patriots and the staunchest defenders of the U.S. Constitution. (Six of the nine current Justices on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholic). The Reagan-Thatcher-John Paul II Anti-Communist triumvirate in the 1980s presaged the emergent “Catholic Moment” in America in the 1990s, during which time it seemed possible to seamlessly reconcile long-standing Catholic philosophy and doctrine with the innermost logic of the American regime. The notable intellectual contributions of Michael Novak¹⁵ and George Weigel¹⁶ then, and of Daniel Mahoney¹⁷, now, are high-water marks of this important and vibrant intellectual movement. Here, Aristotle and modernity are in tension, but need not be opposed. Writings about both together during the Catholic Moment reflected this conclusion. Two decades of land wars in the Middle East, however, strained the conservative coalition to a breaking point; and in the aftermath of the Trump-induced implosion of the Republic Party in 2016, many Roman Catholic thinkers began to wonder if they had made too cozy of an alliance with conservatism and even with the American Regime itself. This sentiment has produced a flurry of writings intended to undo much of what Murray and his successors accomplished. Patrick Deneen’s work¹⁸, not easy to categorize, is emblematic of this emerging critique. I raise this long-developing post-WWII story of Roman Catholics in America in part to trace the changing landscape of Roman Catholic thought, but more importantly to confirm the thesis I have stated on a number of occasions: political theory is that field in which canonical authors—in this case Aristotle and his Roman Catholic heir, Aquinas—serve as mediating proxies for the great questions of our time. Playing the Aristotle card, as I have called it, is not simply a career strategy within political theory; it provides a proxy for engaging in very real debates about whether we live, still, in a modern world that is sustainable, or whether we have, in fact, left the modern world behind, perhaps without yet fully knowing it.

§11. The identity politics indictment project. Political theory originated to address the crisis of modernity, and quickly divided into one camp that thought it was a sustainable project and another that thought the modern turn was a mistake. Identity politics supposes that neither modernity nor pre-modernity can sustain us: we are now in a post-modern moment, and must cast off the prejudices of all previous ages—hence, its political slogans, “Change,” “Forward,” along with its general prejudice against anything that is not “transformative.” Much of the activism within the field, and much of the political axe-grinding referred to in §8 above, is animated by this disposition. Let us focus on the framework of ideas behind these immediately obvious phenomena. The intellectual figure to whom post-modern thought can be coherently traced is Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that for Europe to renew itself, it had to begin anew, without Christianity and without its “poisons,”¹⁹ as he called them—the idea of equality, the idea of the deliberating subject, the idea that a meta-narrative of freedom inheres in this, the modern age. Although identity politics is committed to “transformation,” as was Nietzsche²⁰, and to the idea that the true self, so to speak, is deeper than what consciousness can articulate (hence, the claim that “identity” is not open to argumentation), it is distinctly American in several key respects. First, it exhibits the American Puritan prejudice and; second, it exhibits the American egalitarian prejudice. Tocqueville thought the Americans would never shake these two prejudices²¹. Nietzsche found both contemptible. The CCP in China declares that its regime is built on “Marxism with Chinese characteristics.” This is incoherent. In America, we might say that identity politics is “Nietzscheanism with American characteristics.” This is also incoherent.

With regard to the first American prejudice, identity politics fixes, though in a profoundly distorted way, on the Puritan category of the innocent victim, and eagerly asks who is saved and who is damned. For the Puritan, Christ is the only innocent victim, and God alone knows who is saved and who is damned. In the world identity politics constructs, certain identity groups are innocent victims, while others are victimizers; and everything the victimizers have built must be purged in order to redeem a world blotted by their activities and their ongoing presence. Your intersectional scorecard reveals whether you are saved or damned, a victim or a victimizer. This sort of thinking, Nietzsche argued, was emblematic of a purportedly post-Christian world that can neither return to, nor let go of, its Christian categories. That is why the West cannot be reinvigorated; anything less than a complete repudiation of Christian categories, he thought, only contributes to the slow death of the West. With regard to the second American prejudice about equality, identity politics declares that all Truth claims are merely the will-to-power, and that group privilege based on Truth claims must be exposed and destroyed to achieve equality. Nietzsche, too, declared that all Truth claims are the will-to-power—but in order to repudiate the Western prejudice in favor of equality, which he thought had been justified on the basis of the Christian metanarrative. This prejudice, he thought, had to be overturned in order that a life-affirming aristocracy might arise and renew Europe²². These two Americanisms in identity politics together generate an incoherent half-way Nietzscheanism. In political theory, identity politics has taken the form of never-ending whack-a-mole research whose purpose is to undermine any effort to establish the goodness, the privilege, of what the so-called victimizers have done or are doing—representative government, market commerce, the settling of America, the Constitution and protections it offers, the “traditional” generative family, the historic understandings of the churches, and the physical monuments to all of them. In the Identitarian cosmos, all of these have conscience against them. Political theory, which began as an attempt to salvage life-sustaining ideas from the ashes of two World Wars, ends with the identity politics heirs to that grand undertaking burning down whatever remains. There is much work to do, and there can be no rest until it is done. That is why “activism” must now take the place of mere scholarship.

§12. Red pill, blue pill: the crisis in political theory. How might the enterprise of political theory be renewed? Activism will not save it. We can begin to wrestle with this question by returning to the first great canonical work of political theory, Plato’s Republic, and asking, what, really, has caused generation after generation to read and attempt to decipher it, for 2,400 years? What yearning did it address; to what intuition did it give voice? The movie, The Matrix, mentioned at the outset, and more recently, the red pill, blue pill meme on social media, provide watered-down, but still salutary renditions of the first great insight of political theory: the ordinary world of ever-changing opinion does not provide us with what we need to live well; it is but a shadow of reality itself. Beyond the empty comforts of our blue pill world lies the difficult truth, without which our spell of illusions cannot be broken. In Plato’s Republic, this red pill alternative is portrayed in ‘The Allegory of the Cave,’²³ the most formative fiction in Western Civilization. We return to the Republic because it gives us the red pill, blue pill distinction we need in order to live life well—with difficulty, but well. In this formulation and in others that have followed, we learn that the world is so much more than it appears to be.

All the truly canonical authors offer red pill, blue pill distinctions; that is why we return to them generation after generation, and why we will do so into the indefinite future. We are born with translucent vision, and long to see clearly. Aristotle, the Macedonian, followed Plato part-way, but offered a different red pill: the world was ordered teleologically²⁴, which is to say, the lower things point to, and unfold into, the higher things; they are completed by them, and are understandable only through them. That is a red pill breakthrough on the basis of which 2,000 years of thinking about religion, politics, and science was undertaken—and which, for any number of thinkers concerned with the current problems within each of these domains, is a red pill to which we must return. Take the teleology red pill, and it is difficult to un-see the underlying order that it reveals in the otherwise chaotic world. St. Augustine, the Algerian, dwelling in the faltering Roman world 800 years later, offered a red pill that outlined God’s providential plan of history, the malignancy of human pride, and the manner by which rebellious man achieves salvation in a fallen world after the Incarnation²⁵. Absolution for sin, not the search for wisdom: that is a red pill breakthrough on the basis of which the Christian and even the ostensibly post-Christian world has long been sustained—the latest confirmation of which is the postmodern pathology of identity politics, which also searches for absolution. Thomas Aquinas, the Italian, another 800 years later, in the thirteenth-century, offered the red pill through²⁶ which the resolution of faith and reason, Christianity and Aristotle, was and is conceivable. That is a red pill breakthrough for which adherents to the three Abrahamic faiths have perennially longed. Martin Luther, the Prussian, offered a sixteenth-century red pill²⁷ that provided a theological basis for understanding God, His Creation, and man not analogically, as Aquinas had, but rather historically, thus upending medieval Europe and laying the foundation for the development of the German Idealism of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel, and the subsequent searing critiques of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche that exploded nineteenth-century Europe. That is a red pill without which Protestantism would never have emerged. John Calvin, the Genevan, and Luther’s near-contemporary, also departed from Aquinas, and offered a sixteenth-century red pill²⁸ that by many accounts is the Reformation high-water mark of covenantal thinking. If the Christian heir to Plato is the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Christian heir to Aristotle is the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian heir to the Hebrew cosmological vision is Calvinism, the regime form of which is Puritan America. That is a red pill breakthrough without which the inner workings of the American psyche then, and perhaps now, cannot be understood. Thomas Hobbes, the Englishman, offered a seventeenth-century red pill²⁹ that revealed the temptation of global governance and the hard truth that we live, always, in a world of nations. That is a red pill breakthrough, a warning that no universal society can be made by mortal hands, tempting though it will always be. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman, offered an eighteenth-century red pill that pushes Christianity aside, reveals the natural goodness of man, and the difficulty of achieving transparency in a social world driven by envy³⁰. That is a red pill that so many of our fellow-citizens feel in their bones, even if they have never read Rousseau. Tocqueville, the Frenchman, offered a nineteenth-century red pill he feared must be taken if we were to save liberty in the democratic age: without our full engagement in our mediating institutions, we would be condemned to oscillate between lonely individualism and a euphoric cosmopolitanism that can never deliver happiness. That red pill may be one of the few antidotes to the time-less, location-less digital world that is now upon us.

§13. These authors and many more—Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and C.S. Lewis, to name a few from recent history—all offer red pill, blue pill distinctions. Authors who provide these distinctions have, for much of the last hundred years, been purveyed to students and citizens alike as writers of “Great Books.” This has been a mistake. Tocqueville reminds us that in the democratic age, the idea that citizens should defer to authority is a hard sell³¹. I indicated at the end of §9 above, that prodigal son theorizing has been good at reminding us about the important ideas contained in what have come to be called the Great Books, but that that enterprise has failed to enkindle the imagination of our fellow citizens, especially the youth. Tell people that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and all the rest wrote books that are authoritative, and their eyes glaze over. It is direct human experience, not the authority of a name, that now compels us. And the most compelling experience of all is the red pill breakthrough that brings clarity to an otherwise mind- and heart-numbing world. If political theory is to be revitalized, it cannot do so on the basis of the crippled and crippling political theory stratagems I have chronicled above (in §§7-11). Political theory can only be revitalized if it is seen as that enterprise, along with theology, which proffers red pill breakthroughs that uncover a hidden world which, once seen, cannot be easily unseen. I do not say that every red pill breakthrough is, speaking theologically, divine. Some may, in fact, be demonic and lead, after a long sojourn, to a disastrous end. “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.”³² Which red pill is the one and which red pill is the other is no small part of what political theory should be concerned to determine. That is no easy task.

“Man does not live by blue pill alone.”³³ Political theory was invented to give voice to that intuition. If any number of thinkers from Rousseau to Rene Girard³⁴ are to be believed, the closure of the mind that blue pill thinking produces seems to be an especially acute problem in the democratic age. Yet counterpoised to this unsettling development is the palpable longing in our age to find a deeper account than what the monochrome blue pill world we inhabit offers. The political war between left and right in America is far from over, and the latest battle over identity politics confirms this longing. A charitable account of the Democratic Party over the past dozen years would be that “wokeness” was the red pill it offered. Take it, and the entire world now appears to involve a cast of characters who are, in varying degrees, innocent victims or transgressors, each illuminated in a revealing light that must determine their political fate. The numbers will never be known, but perhaps seventy million Americans took that red pill. Many still have it in their system. A charitable account of the Republican Party in that same period would be that its members increasingly came to believe that liberation from the blue pill that “wokeness” really was required ingesting the MAGA red pill, which revealed that “wokeness” does not build a civilization, but rather destroys it. My views on this matter are published elsewhere, and I will not rehearse them here³⁵. What I will say is that from the very beginning of political theorizing, in Plato’s Republic, it has been understood that we may either sit still, enchained by the mere opinions we have been given, or take the red pill and see the breath-taking whole, the final ground of coherence. The political battle in America is over which red pill liberates and which red pill enchains. Political theory can reclaim its glory, as the red pill science of politics. Alternatively, it can maintain its present course and shine its light on what Plato called “swarms of irrelevancies,”³⁶ while fading into oblivion, in the shadow of what it truly is.

1. See Plato, Republic, G.M.A. Grube trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), Bk. VI, 510b, p. 200.

2. See Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, George Carey and James McClellan ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), No. 10, pp. 42-49.

3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), Vol. II, Part II, Ch. 2, p. 508.

4. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), Ch. VI, pp. 125-153.

5. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part II, Ch. 7, pp. 260-61.

6. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edward Curley ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1994), Part I, Ch. XVI, pp. 101-05.

7. See J.S. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government,” in Essays, John Gray ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), On Liberty, pp. 203-467.

8. See Luke 15:11-32.

9. See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

10. See, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,” in The Major Political Writings, John Scott trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 1-36.

11. See Martin Luther, “A Letter to the Christian Nobility,” in Luther’s Works, Helmut T. Lehmann ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), Vol. 44, p. 201: “This dead heathen [Aristotle] has conquered, obstructed, and almost succeeded in suppressing the books of the living God. I can only believe that the devil has introduced this study.”

12. See Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Ch. I, §5, p. 7.

13. See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

14. See John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed & Ward, 2005).

15. Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York, Madison Books, 1990).

16. See George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).

17. See Daniel Mahoney, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now (New York, Encounter Books, 2025).

18. See Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

19. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann trans. (New York: Random House, 1967), “First Essay,” §9, p. 36: “It is the church, and not its poison, that offends us.”

20. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann trans. (New York: Modern Library, 1995), Prologue, §3, pp. 12-14.

21. With regard to the first, see Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part I, Ch. 2, pp. 31-49. With regard to the second, see Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Ch. 1, pp. 503-06.

22. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Walter Kaufmann trans. (New York: Random House, 1966), Part IX, §257, p. 201.

23. See Plato, Republic, Bk. VII, 514a-520d, pp. 209-14.

24. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

25. See Augustine, City of God, Henry Bettenson trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004).

26. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Fathers of the English Dominican Province trans. (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics 1981).

27. See Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 31,

28. See John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, John T. McNiell trans (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Know Press, 1960).

29. See Hobbes, Leviathan, Part III, Ch. xxxix, §5, p. 316.

30. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse of the Origins of Inequality,” in The Major Political Writings, pp. 61-151.

31. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part I, Ch. 2, pp. 433-36.

32. Matt. 7:13.

33. Matt. 4:4.

34. Rene Girard, I See Satan Falling Like Lightening, James G. Williams trans. (MaryKnoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).

35. See Joshua Mitchell, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (New York: Encounter Books, 2022).

36. See Plato, Republic, Bk. VI, 484b. This, from the more poetic Richard Sterling and William Scott translation (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985). The literally translation might be, “many and of all sorts of kinds of things” {pollois kai patoiōs}. The Allan Bloom translation (New York: Basic Book, 1968) renders this as “what is many and varies in all ways.”