An EZ Guide to Modern Politics

Yes, alas, it’s another election year.  You know what that means.  The free-fire zone, formerly known as our public square, demands that we steal a break from our screens – and think.  We think in order to understand.  And we best understand the character of our times by tracing the lineage of the ideas and actors who have shaped them.  Marx, Nietzsche, and many others are among the usual suspects.  But I’d argue that the pedigree goes much farther back.

The late political activist Saul Alinsky named the founder of the modern revolutionary spirit on the epigraph page of his Rules for Radicals: “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”

Alinsky was an agnostic secular Jew.  He had no belief in a personal devil.  He had far more interest in the power structures of this life than in any imagined next.  His reference to Satan was thus purely ironic and deliberately provocative.

But his epigraph does capture a distinctly modern (if discreet) sympathy for Lucifer as a kind of Prometheus; a wronged hero fighting for his dignity, insisting on his own path, and courageously resisting tyrannical authority.  It’s a view that derives from 19^th-century Romantic-era writers like Blake, Shelley, and Byron, who in turn drew on John Milton’s great epic poem Paradise Lost, recasting Milton’s Lucifer as less a villain and more a tragic figure.

Except they got Milton’s Satan entirely wrong.

For those who haven’t read Paradise Lost or have forgotten it since school, it’s one of the great treasures of Western civilization.  The story is simple.  In Heaven, God exalts His begotten Son and places Him above the angels.  Envy and wounded pride drive Lucifer and his followers to revolt.  Defeated, they’re cast into Hell.  In his torment and futile rage against God, Satan attacks and corrupts God’s innocent creation: Adam and Eve.

Milton’s portrait of Satan is the exact opposite of admiration.  Obsessed with his own swollen pride, refusing to accept the reality of his sin and dependence on his Creator, Satan methodically disintegrates from a spirit of immense grandeur and power to a scheming, loathsome snake.  Locked in unending frustration and fury, he cannot build or create.  He can only posture, seduce, hurt, and destroy.  He becomes the father not only of lies, but of nihilism.

On the cultural front, Roger Scruton described the nihilism in our modern appetite for deconstruction – tearing down old truths, reinterpreting literature and history, upending political structures – in a chapter appropriately titled “The Devil’s Work.” (see here)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the deceit and nihilism of revolutionary politics in Demons (also titled The Possessed or The Devils), his novel of radical agitation and violence in rural 19^th-century Russia.  For Dostoyevsky, the revolutionary temptation was a “fire in the minds of men.”  And that phrase, that fire, later became the title of James Billington’s great study of the roots of revolutionary thought.

For Billington – the late Librarian of Congress, Harvard and Princeton scholar, and CEO of four federal cultural institutions – the modern revolutionary impulse is a kind of elite virus,  the “spiritual thirst of those who think rather than [a] material hunger of those who work.”  Modern revolutionaries “are believers, no less committed and intense than were the Christians or Muslims of an earlier era.”

Revolutionary thought becomes “an object of faith and a source of vocation, a channel of sublimated emotion and sublime ambition. If traditional religion is to be described as ‘the opium of the people,’ the new revolutionary faith might well be called the amphetamine of the intellectuals.”  His chapter on “The Occult Origins of [Early Revolutionary] Organization” has special interest for a Christian reader.

So what’s the point here?  Just this:  If we don’t see the fire in our own back yard, we haven’t been paying attention.

The United States is a republic, not a democracy.  That’s deliberate.  It’s a feature, not a flaw.  The people express their will through elected representatives.  But the checks and balances of the various branches of government exist to preserve ordered liberty and constrain the passing turbulence of popular furies and enthusiasms.  This reflects the character and wisdom of the Founding Fathers: a mix of Enlightenment optimism and Biblical realism.  We were made for glory, beauty, and love.  We can achieve extraordinary things.

We also – all of us – have a little workshop tucked away in our hearts where we perfect our resentments, discontents, and hatreds.  In this world, we’re neither perfect nor perfectible, and no revolution can change that.  When we try to build Heaven on earth, we create a convincing facsimile of Hell instead.  To put it another way:  There’s a saint and a predator in each of us.  The one we feed grows into the person we become.  And that person helps shape the nation and world we share.

American political life has always had rough and ugly edges, and plenty of injustice.  But we’ve nonetheless managed to create a country of decent laws and remarkable liberties; a place of opportunity, material benefits, and security for the great majority of its citizens; a nation where injustice can be named and peacefully redressed.  None of this is guaranteed.  All of it can be lost.  It needs to be sustained by each new generation.

Regrettably, success has the habit of breeding self-absorption and fecklessness.  Both are toxic.  Yet that’s where we find ourselves in 2026.  And the last thing we need – but now must face – is a bitter, delusional politics rooted in ignorance and hatred for our history, culture, public institutions, and even our religious beliefs.

When candidates earnestly suggest dumping and reconstituting the Senate, Supreme Court, Electoral College, and other elements of our public life, we have more than a passing glitch in the system.  The words “democratic” and “progressive” too often today have a lovely taste on the tongue but the rather different scent of somewhere well south of paradise.

John Milton would not be surprised.