Ezra Klein and ‘The Demon in Democracy’

    In the best political book of the last ten years, 2006’s The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Polish scholar Ryszard Legutko lays out a sobering case that Western democracies often exist with a “demon” inside them. The demon is the idea that nothing should stand in the way of “progress” – not tradition, not faith, not family or community. This demon can ultimately collapse a culture.

    This is where the United States has been for the past fifty years. The religion of “progress” has meant reverse discrimination, men who think they are women entering female spaces, and the attempted erasure of our culture and history.

    Legutko’s argument is so striking because he is Polish, a country that has endured both Nazism and communism. When he came to the United States after communism collapsed, Legutko was shocked at how easily former communists adapted to American politics and culture. He concluded that there were similarities between the bureaucracies and the cultures of communism and of liberalism. As he writes: 

If democrats are so fond of warning against all sorts of dangers that might undermine their political order, even if these are only suspected and felt rather than actually perceived (xenophobia, nationalism, intolerance, bigotry), one wonders why these same people completely ignore dangers that are easy to spot, namely, the increasing presence of developments similar to those that existed in the communist societies. Why do so few sound the alarm, even a bit prematurely, while trumpeting thousands of other dangers that are indiscernible even to the most trained eye? The simplest answer is that there is some interplay between liberal democracy and communism….Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change reality for the better. They are—to use the current jargon—modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and—so to speak—impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by “modernizing” it.

    Legutko argues that both liberal democracy and communism have a similar concept of time. Both view history as moving inexorably towards a utopia of perfect egalitarianism, health and tolerance, and that it’s the job not just of politicians but of all right-thinking people to facilitate that bright tomorrow: “What the enemy of progress defended was by definition hopelessly parochial, limited to one class, decadent, anachronistic, historically outdated, and degenerate; sooner or later it had to give way to something that was universal, necessary, and inclusive for of the whole of humanity.”

    This move toward utopia has meant greater and greater intrusion into private life and traditional institutions. Thus, elected officials – and Supreme Court justices – get protests at their homes. Schools are places not of traditional learning but social experimentation. Catholic organizations get sued for not providing contraception in their health care plans.

    Legutko explains how, as freedom increases, so does the left’s desire to burrow deeper and deeper into private life, thus destroying freedom:

Not only do [liberals] want to control the mechanisms of the great society but also those of all its parts; not only what is general but also specifics; not only human actions but human thoughts as well. The original message, ‘we will only create a framework of society at large, and you will be able to do what you want within it’ is rapidly turning into [an] increasingly detailed message such as, ‘we will only create frameworks in education (in the family, in community life) and you will be able to do what you want within them later.’ But even this is not enough: ‘We will only create a framework at this school and you will be able to do what you want within it later.’ Then the class follows the school and so on and so forth.

    The demon in democracy puts people in the terrible position of never being satisfied. Liberals love to quote the phrase that America is moving toward “a more perfect union” because it then allows them to claim we have not gotten there. There will always and forevermore be work to be done. Yet there are times in life when we feel sated, satisfied, and even touched by the grace of God. It happens when we fall in love, or get married and have a family. It happens when we are in the presence of a great painting or symphony like Beethoven’s 9th. It happens when we sit down and have a great meal from a skilled chef. 

    In other words, yes, our hearts will not be fully and finally satisfied until we are with God. Yet as the great theologian Dietrich Von Hildebrand noted, there are times in this life when heaven kind of breaks through and we have a feeling, a preview, or heaven. We feel filled up, happy, grateful, in love.

    For liberals, this kind of happiness is not acceptable. Recently on Hot Air, John Sexton explored a recent discussion that took place between Ross Douthat of the New York Times and liberal buzzkill Ezra Klein. Douthat asked a very fundamental question: How does the left define happiness? How do they think we should live, aside from a utopian idea of flying cars and perfect racial harmony? Klein badly booted the answer:

So if you want my version of your cosmic hope, I do think that there’s a story in which America doesn’t just bend toward justice, but it does bend toward a kind of greatness that comes from diversity and inclusion, one might call it, that has fallen out of favor a bit.

My friend, I am a liberal. I actually believe in creating a space for liberal individual flourishing of different kinds. I don’t find it to be some great countercultural thing to say you should have a family. I have two children. I talk about it on my show all the time. I am a left pronatalist. I don’t believe it has been a great advantage of the right’s in politics that some of their people say, “It’s good to be a dad,” and nor do I believe it’s a great advantage of mine…I don’t really want to tell you where you have to drive your flying car. That’s not, in this particular spot, my role.

    What evasive nonsense. It has been an advantage on the right for people to say it’s good to be a father, or that it’s good to devote yourself to one person, or that it’s good to love God, or to go skateboarding, or to listen to A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. There are in fact times in our lives when we feel satiated, when we feel loved by our spouse or by God, when we look at children with joy and love or are stunned by a world of art. When life is good and we don’t need an arc to “bend towards” anything. 

    The demon in democracy says these feelings are a fraud. It is a demon whose war against happiness and push towards communism may cause the collapse of the United States.

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