Dear Reader (including those of you who want to be informed on election night rather that merely outraged),
I’m feeling ambitious. I’m going to try to do a lot in this, my final “news”letter before the 2024 election is over or “over.” Let’s do it flaneur-style (please don’t say you weren’t warned).
The other day, a friend sent me this amazing story from 2011 which I missed at the time. In fairness, so did 60 Minutes. Here’s the actual headline: “Gordon Ramsay’s dwarf porn double Percy Foster dies in badger den.”
I suggested in a Dispatch Slack channel that we should make this the topic for the “Not Worth Your Time” segment on the Dispatch Podcast. Steve Hayes responded, “What’s a badger den?” on the understandable assumption that it must be slang for the kind of hang-out dwarf porn actors frequent.
That’s understandable, and not just because of Steve’s a midwestern ingénue. I mean I gather that “bear” is—or at least was—slang for hirsute and heavy-set gay dudes, so it kind of makes sense that much smaller dudes might be called “badgers.” But no. Percy Foster was in a literal badger den, discovered by—I defecate you negatory—professional badger gassers. And, according to other news reports, he’d been found “partially gnawed,” which is presumably something that he could charge extra for in his apparently promising professional life.
Anyway, I replied to Steve’s “What’s a badger den?” query with, “It’s not a euphemism!” He shot back, “Oh sure Jonah.” Then, a few moments later, he followed up, “Didn’t you previously make some reference to hedgehogs?”
This sent me down a rabbit hole. I have no memory of writing about hedgehogs, literal or figurative. But what might hedgehogs be in this context? Urban Dictionary, a valuable resource for helping me understand the lingo of the youth, has one sexual definition of hedgehog: “A seductively elusive male, characterized by nocturnal habits and inconsistent contact. His sexual habits are likely promiscuous, as these woodland critter men enjoy uninhibited roaming across many urban lady gardens.” This would have been useful terminology back when I used to write so much about Bill Clinton, but that didn’t seem to fit. Further spelunking in this rabbit hole reminded me that Ron Jeremy, the late straight porn star, went by the industry nickname “the hedgehog,” proving, I suppose, that if you look sufficiently long and hard (get your mind out of the gutter) in even the most figurative animal den, you’ll eventually find porn. It’s like Rule 34, but for metaphors.
Then I thought that maybe Steve was thinking of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which is a pretty no-brainer title for a porn movie starring Jeremy and, well, some figurative fox.
The perils of hedeghogism.
But I have in mind one of Isaiah Berlin’s most famous essays by the same name. Borrowing from a fragment from the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus, Berlin argued there are two kinds of thinkers: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” When you think about it, this could actually be like an epigraph before the title sequence of that imaginary Ron Jeremy movie, given that he was sort of the Arnold Palmer of the industry. But, again, get your head out of the gutter.
Berlin’s touchstone is Tolstoy, who he says was a fox who aspired to be a hedgehog. But his real aim was at hedgehogs as a group: thinkers with monistic or totalizing ideologies. As some of you may know from your Remnant podcast bingo cards, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s monocausality or “one-thingism.” (Tim Walz voice: “See what I did there with the ‘one thing’ bit?”) In politics, reducing the complexity of life to a single cause or idea is a form of utopianism or totalitarianism. (In life, it’s a recipe for misery. If you think money, fame, romance, or whatever is the answer to all your problems and the guarantor of full-spectrum happiness, you’ll eventually end up in a badger den of your own making).
Berlin writes:
If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.
And that brings me to why our politics are so gross.
On Monday morning, a hoax account on Twitter announced the sudden demise of famous political theorist Francis Fukuyama. To which Fukuyama responded, “Last time I checked, I’m still alive.” (For the record, I still call it Twitter, because as John Podhoretz recently argued, calling it X is like calling New York’s Seventh Avenue “Avenue of the Americas”).
Regardless, I’m glad rumors of Fukuyama’s death were greatly exaggerated, and not just because I am a fan. It gives me an opportunity to write about why our politics are so gross without writing about the election, which I’m just not in the mood to do.
I am also a fan of Fukuyama’s influential and hugely misunderstood book The End of History and the Last Man. One reason for this, as my friend Tevi Troy loves to remind me, is I got my first job in Washington by adequately explaining its thesis in a job interview, even though I had barely started reading it. Given that my entire career started there, and without that job I wouldn’t have met my wife, it’s fair to say no book has had a more concrete and lasting impact on my life.
A quick refresher: The basic gist of Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the best and final answer to both the “social question” and the “political question” as 19th century thinkers put it (lengthy explainer here). The long dialectal, often bloody, contest over various forms of government—monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, liberal democracy, etc.—has been settled, and liberal democracy won. Fukuyama used the term “history” in a very specialized, Hegel-drenched, way. He didn’t argue that the clock would stop and events would no longer happen. From the Hegelian perspective, the “end of history,” Fukuyama explained, “did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” For Marx—the quintessential hedgehog—history would end with the withering away of the state and everyone living in perfect communism. For Hegel, it would be the liberal state.
I still agree with Fukuyama, for reasons I’ve spelled out many times, including at book length. But I think he was wrong in one crucial respect: that it might take a long time for the consensus about liberal democracy to come under attack. Again, I wrote a book on this, but the TLDR is that the argument over the best way to organize society is never over, because liberal democratic capitalism is constantly threatened by human nature. As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Anyway, one of the great, prescient insights in The End of History is that liberal democracy cultivates a kind of “boredom” that causes people to want to overthrow it. “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,” Fukuyama wrote. “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 the 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.”
And there you have all the explanation you need for the post-liberal, neoreactionary, “Do you know what time it is?” right. Ditto all of the post-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, critical theorists and neo-Marxists of the left. And let’s not forget the deracinated and alienated goobers who signed up to join ISIS or the trustafarian jabroneys and grad students who simp for Hamas. It’s not monocausal, of course. But, you get my point. As I’ve said before, boredom kills.
But where does the boredom come from? “Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them,” Fukuyama wrote. “But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”
The narcissism of small differences is one of the great drivers of human conflict. From college faculty fights to intramural libertarian fights, to the Russia-Ukraine war, groups that are very similar often have the nastiest conflicts. There’s something about people sharing most of the same cultural, religious, and political assumptions that makes the remaining disagreements seem wildly more important than they should be. Huge differences between cultures don’t bother people the same way as small ones because the big differences aren’t threatening. European Catholics weren’t all that outraged by Confucianism, Hinduism, or Shintoism, but man, Protestants got under their skin. Why? Because Protestantism was a threat to the way Catholics defined themselves, and vice versa. You fight enemies, you hate traitors. You try to convert pagans, you punish or exterminate apostates and heretics (vast swaths of antisemitism in various eras can be chalked up to this dynamic). You see this everywhere in politics. The hard left hates “neoliberal” moderates far more than they hate conservatives, even though they agree on so much more. If the Trumpified corners of the Christian right hates anybody more than they hate David French—pro-life, devout, Christian, David French—I don’t know who that person is.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll spare you all the Latin and Greek terms that Fukuyama uses. He focuses on the fact that people have a greater appetite for respect and status than they do for mere material wealth. They like material wealth, of course, but a big part of the satisfaction such things bring is the respect and status they provide.
Having the most expensive car on the block becomes less satisfying when everyone else gets it. The car does the same things, but the bragging rights are gone. Workplace jealousies over who gets the better office or the slightly better title are often more intense than squabbles about salaries.
In a society with lots of healthy institutions and local communities, there are lots of places to find respect and status. If you’re the best bowler on your bowling team, or if you’re merely a member of the best bowling team, you can scratch the itch for respect and status in at least one facet of your life. If you’re a leader in your church, it won’t bother you as much that you’re stuck in middle management at work. If you’re a valued employee at work, or a respected manager, you might not care about being the worst bowler or just a normal parishioner. And, of course, there’s really an enormous amount of crap people can put up with at work if they have a happy and healthy family and a few good friends.
The point is that institutions are ecological niches for people to find their place. The healthier a society, the more vibrant the ecosystem and the more abundant the niches. When those niches dry up, the yearning for belonging and meaning doesn’t go away, it intensifies because there are fewer outlets to satisfy it. Entertainment becomes a narcotic that loses its potency over time. Boredom floods in as men without chests proliferate. “Against boredom,” Nietzsche said, even “gods struggle in vain.”
As people retreat from institutions and live more and more in the world of screens, we lose that crucial habitat for people to find respect and status or, put more simply, meaning.
ScreenWorld.
But there’s an added dimension that doesn’t get as much attention or discussion. The world of screens—TVs, smartphones, the internet—is borderless and enormous. When we live in ScreenWorld, we no longer live in places, but in one incorporeal place.
Every teenager wants to be popular. But in ScreenWorld, popularity isn’t just measured by what table you sit at in the lunchroom but by how many followers you have on Instagram or TikTok. I mean this mostly metaphorically, but essentially everyone has been thrown into a kind of national or even global marketplace for attention. Instead of a mosaic of little ponds where you can be a big fish, everyone—or at least the Very Online denizens of ScreenWorld—lives in the same ocean now.
As I’ve discussed before, the economist Fred Hirsch coined the term “positional good.” This is something that confers status that others can’t have. If you own the tallest building in New York, the best car on the block, or the highest grades in your class, by definition nobody else does. This is what Tocqueville and Fukuyama were getting at. In a rich society, you may be far better off materially than your grandparents, but if it feels like your neighbors are richer than you, you still feel poor. Hirsch believed America could “no longer deliver what has long been promised for it—to make everyone middle-class.” The point wasn’t that we couldn’t have materially prosperous people, it was that when you take the prosperity for granted, people look for other signs of status and respect.
It’s revealing that Democrats talk far more about income inequality than they do about poverty. By any historical metric, and despite real struggles and difficulties, our poor people are much better off than in previous generations. But inequality—look at those evil billionaires!—stings the relatively affluent and materially comfortable middle and upper-middle classes, because it’s less about income than it is about status. The journalists and academics who inveigh about income inequality are often quick to define “rich” just slightly above what a successful journalist or academic makes.
What Fukuyama and Tocqueville understandably didn’t foresee is that in ScreenWorld your neighbors can be a thousand miles away. “If one only wished to be happy,” Montesquieu observed, “this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” In ScreenWorld we are bludgeoned with images of happier, higher-status people incessantly. Worse, we see people living the wrong way and being happy, and that really triggers the narcissism of small differences.
The triumph of victimism.
The dysfunction gets even worse because we have a sick understanding of status. For long and complicated reasons, America has become drunk on the idea that being a victim confers moral status. It’s why there are so many hate crime hoaxes—in culture as in economics you get what you subsidize. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of Nietzschean distortion of Christianity: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” shorn of theological and moral context. René Girard observed that in a world purged of other sources of authority, there is still one way of achieving status: “concern for victims.”
“Victimism,” Girard writes, “uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” Listen to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump talk at rallies, or bloviators on Fox or MSNBC, and it boils down to a contest over whose anointed victims should have privileged moral status or which victims don’t deserve the moral status they claim. I am not saying there are no victims in America—I’m saying that using victim status, and championing one set of victims over another, has metastasized.
Rob Henderson’s concept of “luxury beliefs” gets at this. In a world where sufficient material prosperity is a given, having ridiculous views on politics and culture is a way of signaling that your tribe is better and more sophisticated than the other tribe. Being super “woke” or “MAGA” is a kind of positional good. Being recognized as a “protector” or “champion” of chosen victims is a positional good. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Laura Loomer are very different people in myriad ways, but they are both ostentatiously covetous of their respective positional status.
There are relatively poor people in both the “red” and “blue” tribes. But the leaders of both coalitions are pretty much all very prosperous and successful people. The people with “In this house we believe …” signs are doing just fine economically. The revelers in Trump boat parades are probably doing even better, even though many probably describe themselves as “blue-collar.” What makes them hate each other isn’t economics; it’s status. What “faith” will define the elite? Who will decide what is funny and what is tasteless? Who will rule culturally is the real fight now. The politics flow from that. Either side may have the better argument depending on the issue, but the “influencers” leading the charges often care more about defeating them on the other side, than actually winning—never mind finding some cultural compromise. Compromise is surrender to the enemy. Better to lose in the name of purity than find accommodation with the enemy.
This is what makes the appeal of “struggle” so alluring. All of the isms—the good and bad—depend on exploiting the human desire for struggle. Nearly all of the seductive political thinkers lionize and prioritize struggle. “Life is struggle” (Marx, attributed), “Life is one long struggle in the dark” (Lucretius), “Life is the constant struggle of being versus nonbeing” (Kierkegaard), “He who would live must fight. He who doesn’t wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist” (Hitler).
For some people, struggle means joining a cause, becoming a hedgehog. For others, it means constantly improving or recreating yourself. The point isn’t that struggle is bad or good—it can be either or both depending on what you’re struggling for and how much you are willing to sacrifice for your chosen cause. The point is that struggle is the spiritual exertion that provides meaning, the way that exercise produces endorphins. “Happiness was never important,” Slavoj Žižek writes. “The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.” I don’t really agree with that framing—it’s Žižek, after all—but for many people it has the ring of deep truth.
The answer isn’t to remove struggle. The removal of struggle is the problem, not the solution. Again, I think Fukuyama was right about liberal democratic capitalism being the answer to the questions mooted by Marx, Hegel, Hitler, Tocqueville, and everyone else. And he was right about the problems created by liberalism’s victory. The solution to those problems is not to overthrow liberalism, but to restore the ecosystems of meaning that sustain it.
The answer for the individual is to be a fox, with many struggles, many sources of meaning to struggle for—family, faith, friends, work, community, art, education (formal or informal). The hedgehog puts all of his eggs in one basket of one struggle, one cause. The fox maneuvers between struggles, never fully succeeding but also never fully failing. And in that portfolio of struggles is found the stuff of a well-lived life. The answer for society is to create fox dens for as far as the eye can see.
In his original “End of History” essay, which was expanded into the book, Fukuyama wrote: “The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
It’s good news that Fukuyama was wrong. We do not face centuries of technocrat-driven, boring, prosperity. History is the story of human nature playing itself out over the canvas of time. History can’t end because human nature has no history. The struggle for meaning starts fresh when we are born. And that means the time to struggle for liberty is now—and always will be.
Various and Sundry
Canine Update: Halloween is not really the girls’ favorite holiday. There are no special meals they can benefit from. There’s lots of talk about treats, but not of the canine or feline variety, which is a let-down. We put scary things in the front yard that Zoë considers a security violation and Pippa is scared of. When our daughter was younger, we got dressed up in various forms of zombie—zombie flight crew, zombie clowns, zombie prisoners, football player and cheerleaders, etc.—and then disappeared from the house for a while. Oh, and they despise wearing costumes (though Gracie rocks them). But the worst for them are the waves of puppy humans, pounding on our door or ringing the intruder proximity alarm and grabbing our property. I will say that Pippa handles it better. After some pro forma barking, she regularly tries to leave with the kids, because she loves them, and they love her. Anyway, they got through it just fine. Otherwise, the girls are good. They don’t love the unseasonably warm weather or the tick-checks they require, but they do love romping in leaves with friends.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Katy Fassett
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I needed a more nuanced, fair, and educated perspective of the news, politics, and essential topics in today’s media landscape.
Personal Details: I’m the proud mom of Aliza Fassett, Jonah’s research assistant. I have been a Dispatch member for many years and am a faithful listener of The Remnant. I love politics, dogs, literature, cooking, traveling, and history (not in that order).
Pet’s Name: Wyatt
Pet’s Breed: Wirehaired Pointing Griffon
Pet’s Age: 4
Gotcha Story: We had to say goodbye to one of our dogs; our other didn’t have long to live. To top it off, we were faced with our only child packing up and going away to college. An empty nest is one thing, but no dogs in the house seemed unbearable. We quickly found Wyatt, who happened to be born out of state and was ready for pickup on the same weekend we dropped our daughter off at college. We flew to Boise, met the breeder on the side of the road near the airport, and all our sadness turned to joy. Since that day, Wyatt has been both a dog and a child; he helped heal our hearts from the loss of our dogs and filled our empty nest with his boundless energy and adorable personality.
Pet’s Likes: Wyatt loves to hunt. He started with grasshoppers, but his favorite thing to hunt is pheasants. He also loves ice cream.
Pet’s Dislikes: Water, unless it involves a hard streaming hose that he can chase, or if he’s hot.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: Every time he tracks down a bird. He finds dozens each year.
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: He got in a scuffle with another dog, and the owner was angry and upset. I get it; it’s very unpleasant, but dogs sometimes have a bad moment here and there. Sometimes, they don’t like each other. Neither were injured, and I just wished she had understood that Wyatt wasn’t a bad dog, he just didn’t like her dog.
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