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From Claire—I have no idea why you just received a newsletter from us titled, “The Dear Abby of Liberal Democracy.” Faithful readers will remember seeing it before, on September 20, 2019. It’s part of a series titled “Is Democracy Doomed.”

I opened it this morning looking for a reference: I couldn’t remember the name of the political scientist who proclaimed the imminent death of democracy. I saw a typo, so I tried to correct it. But when I pressed “update,” it went it out, again, to everyone on our list. Theoretically, this is impossible. You can’t resend a newsletter. You can’t recall one, either, if you realize you’ve sent one you didn’t mean to send.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Pay no mind to that newsletter. It wasn’t from the Cosmopolitan Globalists. It was from my former incarnation as Claire.

If you’re new here, though, and if you just read that for the first time, maybe you liked it? If so, there’s more. What you read was part of a chapter of a book, which I wrote and then serialized, in newsletter format.

I tried to write every entry so that a reader could start with that newsletter, never having read an earlier one and it would still make sense. But I also tried to write it so that someone who read the from beginning to end would see in it a coherent argument.

The coherence of the thing isn’t perfect. I wanted to keep people on the hook through the parts that were trickier to serialize, so I leavened it with commentary on current events and my best skincare tips. In retrospect, maybe that was distracting. But overall, it does hang together, I think.

If you’d like to read the rest, here’s the archive. In fact, here’s a Table of Contents.

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Reflections on the incompetence of citizens

Is Democracy Doomed? Shawn Rosenberg, a political scientist, made a splash when he argued that half a century of social science and cognitive psychology research has proven that humans don’t have the cognitive capacity for democracy. Democracy, he argues, is therefore doomed.

Is Democracy Doomed? Part II Of course human nature is ill-suited to democracy. We’ve managed anyway.

Is Democracy Doomed? Part III (Here I explain here why I’ve serialized this book.) Rosenberg fails ultimately to convince, not least because he has confused, or left undefined, important concepts. Still, his argument is more persuasive than I would want it to be.

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Stitch by Stitch: The rise and rise of illiberal Democracy

New Caesarism: a lexicon, Part I Let us say a bit more about what the New Caesars believe. Their fascist forebears (and their communist ones, and their monarchist ones) disdained elections. The New Caesars do not. To the contrary, they love them.

New Caesarism: a lexicon, Part II  Somehow, we succeeded in making the world safe for democracy—and lethal to liberty.

New Caesarism, a lexicon: Part III

14 rules for destroying a liberal democracy

The game: to amass as much power as much as possible within the formal parameters of a liberal democracy.

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The last happy days of the American Empire

The Sick Man of Europe … the obvious at last became undeniable. Americans had lost faith in liberal democracy, much as the Soviets had lost faith in communism. Of course we were no longer defending liberal democracy abroad. We didn’t even want it at home.

The alternative to hegemony is not peace … Nothing like this level of human well-being had ever existed before. It was our greatest achievement. What compares with the Pax Americana? Walking on the moon? Not even close.

The value of the West … Liberal democracy and prosperity have, for most of history, been a fantasy. The West is the only part of the world where these fantasies have been established, for so long, that we have become bored with it, and wonder if something else—theocracy, maybe, or small-scale anarchist collectives—might be an improvement.

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Manufacturing outrage

Social media and the New Man, Part I So you say you hate the media? I believe I know why.

Social media and the New Man, Part II If you had asked me, when Facebook debuted, “Does the world need a revolution? Because that’s what this product entails,” I would have said, “Strangle it in the cradle.”

Social Media and the New Man, Part III That this is an incipient instrument of authoritarianism or totalitarianism is so obvious it barely needs stating. Our notions of privacy, human dignity, independent thought, and freedom of expression have to varying degrees been rendered obsolete. How can liberalism, with its emphasis on the self-contained individual, survive the eradication of privacy?

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The intellectual emptiness of partisan passion

Partisanship and its Discontents, Part I If you’re an American who believes his mind uniquely free of partisan bigotry, you might ask yourself why you and you alone are resistant to a disease to which everyone about you is succumbing. Might you be of superior intellect and character? Or is there be something a bit too pleasing—and thus implausible—about that hypothesis?

Partisanship and its Discontents, Part II We hate each other, but why?

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What’s the payoff?

Polarization and Foreign Policy, Part I Our political polarization is turning us into mental cripples. Domestic politics are now the prism through which we understand everything, even whole nations and cultures to whom the words “Democrat” and “Republican” are meaningless.

Polarization and Foreign Policy, Part II We busily project half of our incompatible desires onto the other political party, rather than acknowledging that our own desires are in conflict. Meanwhile, no one mentions that we have no recognizable strategy for anything and haven’t had one since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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This could go badly

America First means nuclear war. If the American nuclear umbrella is in doubt—and it is—then it is a matter of time, and not much of it, until every nation insists upon an independent nuclear deterrent. 

The world is about to end. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently announced that the hands of the doomsday clock now rest at 100 seconds to midnight.

Incompetence and Doomsday There has been a broad breakdown in competence in the United States. No one quite understands why. But American history, roughly since the turn of the century, has been one of staggering incompetence.

Doomsday ahead Behold the least prescient words I’ve ever written: “The world around, publics are devoting their anxious energies to worrying about the Wuhan coronavirus, which is frankly nuts.”

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Our sanity, what’s left of it

Do postmodernism and critical theory explain anything?

An interview with my Great old Pop. “I didn’t do it. Trump may well merit the endless geschrei he has provoked; but what strikes me most about Trump is his perfect eagerness to say that he didn’t do it when he did it and that he did it when he didn’t. This is the narcissistic mark, the connection to a childhood—our own, of course—in which narcissism is the only governing force. The American people elected one of their own. Both sides are now saddled with symmetrical albatrosses, the Republicans because they gave us Trump and the Democrats because they ensured his election.”  

Rapmail, Blackmail, Snitches, Snivelers, & White Stooges “I don’t think any theory goes any distance toward explaining what it happening in the States right now. What was it that Goethe said? Grau ist alle Theorie. You have to have a hot bubble of the authentic American berserk in your veins even to appreciate what’s going on. Explaining it is out of the question.”

Our national sanity: There had to have been a deep sickness—a psychological sickness—in our society for so many people to have been susceptible to a near-psychotic break, at scale. What made us so vulnerable?

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Populism and the Pandemic

The pandemic began just as I was finishing the serial. It upended my conclusion. But reality provided a conclusion of its own.

Partisanship, Prisons, and Pandemics In the First Book of Kings we learn of two mothers, living in the same house, who come to Solomon because each claim the same infant child as her own. Watching Americans bicker is putting me in mind of that story—except that both parties seem content to kill the baby.

A preventable catastrophe A reasonable government would have prepared for pandemics in accordance with the plan and executed the plan in a timely fashion.

I would have liked to lose. “It’s too soon to say, but if I had to bet, I’d predict, a priori, that countries led by populists—or with a large populist presence in their government—will fare worse in this pandemic than those led by bland, sober technocrats who graduated from elite universities. We’ll see. Or some of us will.”

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Cancel me now

The years of living hysterically: Reflections on Joe Biden, Tara Reade, #MeToo, and our Hysterical Culture

If you’re new here, you may have missed this six-part series. It wasn’t part of the book, though it’s obviously related. It’s in fact a short book of its own. It’s relevant yet again, with Governor Cuomo’s purported indiscretions—he asked a grown woman, at a wedding, if he could kiss her—on the front page of The New York Times.

Postscript: You fools! You scoundrels!

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The International News Translation Superhighway

This five-part series wasn’t part of the book, either, but it’s one of my favorites. The Cosmopolitan Globalists will be turning this idea into something gorgeous. Stay tuned; it’s in the works.

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I remain your faithful host, Claire Berlinski. (If you enjoyed this, perhaps you might like to become my Patron?)

We return now to our regularly scheduled newsletter. Please ignore the unfortunate incident. We assume it probably won’t happen again. Stay tuned for an important letter to the editor from my first cousin, once removed.